Public Conqueror

CONRAD AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES--J. H. Retinger--Roy ($2.50).

As a young man, Joseph Retinger knew his great compatriot Theodor Joseph Konrad Korzeniowski intimately, especially from 1909 to the outbreak of World War I. Now a member of the Polish Government in London, Retinger writes of those days in the sharp, graceful dialect of an old-fashioned boulevardier of letters. His book is illustrated by the brilliant Polish draftsman Feliks Topolski (TIME, Jan. 4). All of which makes for no mean addition to Conradiana.

Potatoes Collect Poison. When Retinger first went to Kent to visit Conrad, the rosy literary agent J. B. Pinker was still keeping the novelist just one jump ahead of starvation. Conrad, then a little over 50, "even to the old-fashioned sort of brown greatcoat . . . seemed, indeed, a typical Polish landowner from the Ukraine." In Conrad's decaying Cadillac, Retinger got his first taste of the driving which horrified Conrad's family.

Conrad's lame English wife Jessie "was without exception the best and most perfect woman I have ever had the good fortune to know. . . . She was not intellectual, but hers was that wisdom of quiet, unassumed, penetrating judgment of people and situations, the well-balanced poise of mind, which is found among old and very honorable people." To Conrad, "she was wife, mother and guardian, besides being his secretary and assistant in his work." During Conrad's frequent bouts with acute malaria and gout, he could endure no nursing except hers (though, with a desperate man's hunger for any conceivable "cure," he for a long time carried "raw potatoes on his person, with the idea that they would collect all the poisonous fluid accumulated in his body").

Soda Hardens Arteries. "Conrad had no use for small talk, but always saw to it that a definite theme qualified the conversation. He cared little for politics, and slightly despised politicians. . . . He was an opponent of British Imperialism. . . . He did not like Socialism--I suppose because sailors were not Socialists in his time." In foreign politics, "he had one horror--of Russia; and no definite idea, unless good wishes for the independence of Poland." He shared Retinger's "myopia to music," and liked to listen to stories of personal adventure, though he rarely spoke of his own.

Conrad liked best to talk about people. "I do not mean gossip . . . he liked to probe the psychology of people, known or even unknown to him, just as he liked best to read diaries and memoirs, infinitely more than fiction or history." He had "the Slav love for long, intimate talk." They used to sit by the fire "until 2 or 3 in the morning, sipping whiskey, which he always took with plain water, advising me never to take soda, as it hardens arteries. . . ."

Emotions Horrify Englishmen. Conrad "was not easy to get on with. . . . He never had been a misanthrope, but one could hardly call him a very sociable person." His closest and best friend was a neighbor, A. Marwood, "a retired business or professional man," who, under various aliases, is often the narrator in Conrad's novels. Brilliant Norman Douglas was another friend until he became "involved in emotional entanglements rarely forgiven in England." Conrad himself, a strict domestic man, also apparently found them unforgivable.

Until he visited the U.S., Conrad used to say that "the gulf dividing Americans and Europeans is more impassable than that between Europeans and Chinese." He admired the French as much as he disliked Americans. In 1912 Andre Gide came to England "for the sole purpose of meeting him" and gave Conrad's little son John "a magnificent Meccano set . . . which for a long time was the joy of father and son. However, Conrad, touched as he was by Gide's attention, did not take to him" --thought him too precious.

Hergesheimer, et al. Writing, for Conrad, was a hard "subsidiary business." He was far prouder of his hard-earned rise from seaman to master. Conrad never told the same story twice about how he started to write, but Retinger is persuasively convinced that he began out of pure boredom on the high seas, "as other people play chess or solve crossword puzzles." He wrote in English not by choice but merely "because it was the language he had spoken for many years." From Poland, quite unconsciously, he drew such magnificent expressions as "civic valor" and his genius for describing nature not, in the English manner, as a still life, but "in the act of changing from one mood into another."

Unlike most of the great writers of his time, Conrad believed in and worked for a great number of readers. He considered that "the first and foremost aim of an author consists in conquering the public and keeping it." His literary preferences were, accordingly, a mixture of keen independence with semi-Philistine myopia. He liked Smollett, Richardson, Stevenson, Whitman, the Russian giants, Joseph Hergesheimer, Balzac. He disliked Wuthering Heights, Dickens' structural weakness, G. B. Shaw, Kipling, his friend Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga ("too matter-of-fact"), Mark Twain, Paul Valery ("too strong medicine").

Among nations, Conrad best loved England, admiring the English "most tremendously as: 1) untamable adventurers; 2) men of the highest civilization; 3) because of their phlegmatic appearance." But by Jove, how he loved to complain about the English and their mannerisms, obtuseness and lack of sense of humor. He then, looked pleased, like a mother superficially upbraiding her child, on whom she is doting."

During World War I and after, Retinger saw little of Conrad. Not long before Conrad's death, "the shadow of a woman stood between us, a distance of six years of fulfillment on one side and disappointment on the other." It is the last of many ambiguous references in these pages to a ravishing U.S. newspaper woman--"Miss A."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.