BIOGRAPHY

which coloured almost everything he did in maturity. His wife later complained of his disorganisation in domestic matters, and he was inclined to fretfulness and hypochondria, but in the important affairs of life Conrad chose wisely. His decision to write in English rather than Polish or even French, sometimes supposed to be a more natural medium for éémigréé Poles, reflects inter alia practical good sense. Like any good sailor, Conrad had a feeling for prevailing weather. Britain was the only superpower in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its language and literature reached round the world like no other. Were Conrad alive today, he might well choose to become an American for similar reasons. Nevertheless, Conrad’s exotic background, his experience at sea (so far removed from the solitude and safety of a writer’s desk), the curious trajectory of his career, and the faint but persistent air of foreign-ness which hangs about him and his work, can together make him seem at times as mysterious and unfathomable as figures in his own fiction. Unfriendly critics put this mystery down to nothing more than Conrad’s opulent – they would say portentous, unidiomatic and opaque – prose style, so neatly skewered in Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland parody. Biographers naturally focus instead on their subject’s personal elusiveness; and it is true that contemporaries as diverse as James, Stevenson, Maugham, Bennett, Wells, Kipling, Galsworthy, Woolf, Joyce, Ford and Lawrence have for us now the sharp edges of caricature compared with Conrad’s misty outline, the sense he gives, despite several published memoirs and many biographies, of unrevealed depths and unspoken knowledge as worrying as Kurtz’s unnameable horror inHeart of Darkness. Perhaps such elusiveness should not surprise. Circumspection is what we might expect from someone with Conrad’s difficult past. His troubles started early. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that his parents died for their beliefs: Joseph was barely out of infancy when they were imprisoned and exiled for participation in a Polish uprising against the Russians. They soon declined into ill health and died. Well might their orphaned offspring – eight when his mother died, twelve when his father followed her – have the oppressive sense we find in his novels that life is complex, delusive, difficult, unjust and precarious, hope turning easily to defeat, enterprise to tragedy. He may also have taken from the example of his

parents the supremely ambiguous lesson that without principles there is no life worth living; with them, possibly no life at all. Despite fluctuations in popularity and critical esteem, Conrad has been the subject of many serious studies since his own time. Most have been English or American, which is perhaps why Zdzislaw Najder’s biography made such an impact when it first appeared in 1983. Here was someone looking at Conrad from the inside. Professor Najder hails from the sort of Polish intelligentsia that Conrad’s parents might have recognised. Having experienced persecution and exile at the hands of a Russian autocrat, he understands tyranny and the moral obliquity it entails at every level, how it enters into the souls of victims and tyrants alike, shaping their vision of themselves, their sense of history and their understanding of necessity. In this respect he identifies with his subject and the identification is fruitful. Though Najder specifically forswears literary criticism, the way his account of Conrad bears on the novels is clear enough. English by adoption, French by inclination, in Najder’s portrait Conrad remains to the end not just a Pole but a child of the tragic 1860s. We are invited to read the novels in the light of that time and the acute sense their author took away from it of the chaos which lies just below the surface of things. Aware, perhaps, that in the wake of critics such as Leavis and Zaubel, Anglophone readers think of Conrad primarily as moralist and intellectual, Najder is at pains to emphasise other qualities, quoting the novelist’s grandmother at the beginning and end of his book to the effect that the boy would grow up to be ‘a man of great heart’. The framing of the text with these words is apposite, ‘heart’ here signifying not only feeling but breadth of character. This biography is not so much a ‘Life and Works’ as the portrait of a remarkable human being in his native milieu and the story of how he adapted to a very different environment. Najder’s Conrad is a man of deep emotions under a mask of circumspection – a mask which the adopted manners of a cool English gentleman supplied to perfection. In fact, as friends noted, Conrad was sometimes far from cool, relapsing in private into the manner Englishmen associate with excitable foreigners, even waving his arms and jabbering. But the mask was essential. Like the sea’s surface and its depths, mask and reality coexisted in a dynamic tensile relationship which bore fruit in the novels. The Conrads: poles apart

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007 BIOGRAPHY

Where Najder concentrates on building up a detailed portrait of Conrad using every scrap of available information, the new biography by John Stape is a much slighter affair. At only a third of the length of Najder’s, his book abjures thoroughness in favour of brisk narrative. That said, what he loses in scope and detail he gains in accessibility. The Mittel-Europa seriousness of Najder gives way in Stape to a lighter touch which allows him to cover the inevitable longueurs of a writer’s life more fleetly than Najder, though it diminishes Conrad’s stature by making us feel that, after all, he was just another novelist with the usual worries about sales and

houses and fallow periods and troublesome children. Najder’s Conrad is a grander figure altogether: he looms, as James might have said. Stape’s is more recognisably the workaday man of letters. Both have their truth. Najder’s book has been extensively revised since its original appearance to accommodate new research, but only Conrad specialists are likely to notice the differences. Anyone wanting a good brief introduction will be happy with Stape’s life. Both biographers have avoided commentary on the novels, so for detailed critical discussion you will have to look elsewhere. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

A C GRAYLING LOCKE’S LAUNDRY

LOCKE: A BIOGRAPHY

★By Roger Woolhouse (Cambridge University Press 528pp £25)

JOHNLOCKEIS one of the great figures of the modern philosophical pantheon. No study of the history of thought since the seventeenth century can ignore him. In the close confines of university philosophy departments his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is read (in parts), or read about, by students instructed to examine his criticism of the doctrine of innate ideas, or his theory of perception and the correlative distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or his famous discussion of the problem of personal identity. But in the real world Locke’s writings have been even more significant. His Two Treatises of Government was quoted extensively and verbatim in the documents of the American and French revolutions, and they, together with the Essayand his writings on religious toleration, made him one of the two heroes invoked by the philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the other being his friend Isaac Newton. Roger Woolhouse’s thorough, detailed and very readable biography of Locke gives an account of these works, in lucid expositions annexed to the occasions in Locke’s life that prompted him to write them. This is especially interesting given that Locke lived through, and indeed played a part in, the fraught history of the Glorious Revolution in England, and his

Lustrous Locke

political writings are justifications of the new order of 1688, overturning the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings and laying the foundations of a constitutional dispensation which served as a model in the subsequent history of Europe and America. Locke was born in Wrington, Somerset, in 1632 to a lawyer father who was on Parliament’s side in the Civil War. Educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was subsequently a Student (a Fellow) for many years, Locke’s early interest was medicine and science. He privately and intermittently practised as a physician, but circumstances called his main energies to political life as the secretary of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who was increasingly drawn to oppose the Catholicising tendencies of Charles II and, even more, the Duke of York, who became James II in 1685. Shaftesbury died before the serious matter of open rebellion against James came to a head, but Locke had to flee into exile in the Netherlands, where he remained until William and Mary replaced James. In increasing ill-health thereafter, Locke lived mainly in retirement, apart from a spell as a Commissioner for Trade in the new government, nursing his asthma and bronchitis in the relatively breathable air of Essex. He died in 1704, aged seventy-two. Woolhouse tells this story in careful and copious detail. Locke’s encounters with other leading lights of the day, Newton and Boyle chief among them, fall into their due place in the story, and Woolhouse describes with exemplary clarity each stage in the development of Locke’s thought by detailing successive drafts of his writings. The tumultuous history of the time glimmers through the refracting lens of Locke’s activities; Woolhouse does not step aside to provide a full context, but – since his business is with one man – honours the reader with the assumption

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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