JOSEPH CONRAD
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Although my own sea-going years coincided almost exactly with Joseph Conrad's, I never had the good luck to meet him in any foreign or home port. Nor have I in later years come across any old shipmate of his who might have told me how he shaped as an officer in big sailing ships in the 'eighties and early 'nineties, when crews were mixed and rowdy.
I could easily envisage him as master, standing on the weather side of his poop, aloof and quietly observant ; but not as one of the mates, knocking about the decks and keeping watch. Mrs. Conrad has expressed a similar disability. In her Joseph Conrad as I knew him she writes :— "It was always difficylt for me to reconcile the highly sensitive, fastidious man with the rough life he must have led in his seagoing days." (Page 18.) And so it was with keen interest that I saw—and read with close attention—the letter in last week's Spectator from a correspondent who was medical officer in the Torrens ' (I give the ship's name : there can be no reason for veiling it) when Conrad was chief mate of her. He himself has told us in A Personal Record how, on the passage out to Australia in that ship he formed a friendship with a " young Cambridge man," a passenger for his health ; and one evening, in the " second dogwatch," in Conrad's cabin, after discussing Gibbon's History, he said to Jacques, the passenger : " Would it bore you very much reading a MS. in a handwriting like mine ? . . . It is a sort of tale. . . It is not even finished yet. . . Nevertheless I would like to know what you think of it. . . . " This was the half-completed MS. of Almayer's Polly. When the sheets were returned Conrad asked, " Is it worth finishing " The answer was in one word : " Distinctly."
There is not the remotest evidence here that Conrad asked for, or even desired, more than a reading and a critical opinion of his work ; yet we are now told that during the same voyage —Conrad made only one voyage in the ` Torrens '—he invited the ship's doctor " to correct his writings." It appears that the doctor " tried to explain the differences of meaning in various wordings and class phraseology," and that Conrad " took corrections without question " ; but " he seemed puzzled." . . . Seemed ! He doubtless was puzzled.
After a lapse of approximately thirty-six years the doctor's memory on this matter may be—and quite excusably so— not quite accurate. It is highly probable that Conrad did consult him about his orthoepical trouble, and the good doctor did try to cure that. For, to the last day of his life, Conrad's tongue never altogether lost its exotic accent. But to teach him how to write, after twelve years of hard study, reading and practice of English composition, added to great gifts of natural perception, assimilation and expression— well ! if I may without offence adopt the reply of the Carpenter to the Walrus on the question of tidying-up the seashore : " I doubt it."
Those who have read A Personal Record, and who remember Conrad's generous and even affectionate recognition of the young Cambridge man's " encouragement " (Conrad's own word) may well be " puzzled " that nowhere in the pages of that modest, that beautifully written retrospect, does Conrad refer to his early debt to the old medical shipmate who " corrected his writings."—I am, Sir, &c.,
Kensal Rise, N.W. 10. TEI031AS CARR.
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