Jeremy Treglown

Sticking close to his desk . . .

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad<br /> by John Stape

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad
by John Stape

Why did he do it? In his late thirties, Joseph Conrad abandoned the modestly successful career as a seaman which he had steadily built up. Though the job involved tiresome exams and increasing responsibilities, it had been his ‘great passion’, he wrote a dozen years later. ‘I call it great because it was great to me. Others may call it a foolish infatuation. Those words have been applied to every love story. But whatever it may be the fact remains that it was something too great for words.’ Yet he gave it up, opting instead for writing, marriage and a family, all of which made him miserable.

Writing, in particular, was agony to him. He could spend days facing a blank page, and postponed the ordeal as often as he could. Once he had got going, he could never tell how long a story was going to turn out, let alone how successfully. What he wrote, as well as how it was received and remunerated, dissatisfied him deeply. Eventually he stopped trying so hard, wrote correspondingly worse, was much better paid but remained unhappy about it. He was often incapacitated by depression, gout, and other more intermittent ailments. His wife Jessie followed suit, putting on weight and suffering chronic pain in the knees. Repeated treatments in expensive hospitals didn’t save her from a wheelchair. Meanwhile, together and separately, Joseph and Jessie were more often than not in debt, which made both of them still iller. All this was compounded when their first son, Borys, also proved both sickly and, later, hopeless with money. Never inclined to make the best of anything, by the time he was 60 Conrad described himself as a ‘crocky, groggy, tottery, staggery, shuddery, shivery, seedy, gouty, sorry’ wretch.

Almost two decades earlier, his friend and perpetual ally William Rothenstein had pronounced that he was ‘a pathetic person, & he seems to me, like so many artists, to have muddled his life quite unnecessarily’.

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