Mrs Conrad

I mentioned the fact that Orwell did not care for the memoir of Conrad written after his death by his wife on 16th June, subsequently acquired a copy of its November 1926 impression, old enough for the paper to bear the marks of the mesh on which it was laid, and now read.

Conrad married in middle life, roughly at the time he gave up the sea for the life of a landlubbing writer, a girl much younger than himself, described in his Wikipedia entry as an 'unsophisticated, working-class girl, 16 years younger than Conrad'. Their marriage seems to have been happy enough, producing, inter alia, two sons, but I dare say his literary friends rather looked down on her and were probably rather condescending to her face. She also, like others before her, served as secretary before her husband could afford to employ one, serving some of her time with a typewriter sufficiently old & primitive that the letters would fall out of it if you tipped it over. Not individually mounted on cunning bars activated by keys. I imagine that she wanted to assert herself a bit after his death, to get some recognition for her rôle in his oeuvre. She wanted more than the scant recognition afforded, for example, in my otherwise excellent Everyman edition of 'Heart of Darkness', which survived the cull in favour of Amazon and where she rates just two short lines in the chronology, one for when she met and one for when she married him.

The book serves well enough as a peep into Conrad's family life. I learn, for example, that Conrad could be difficult and was not very well a lot of the time. Decent in the sense that it tells no tales and there are no lurid secrets, this is no kiss-and-tell. But I can see why it might have irritated Orwell; he did not want to be portrayed in such a wifely way, to be seen in the way that a wife sees her man, warts, foibles, sickness and all. With her man and his work being very much, in some sense at least, her work. Which was perhaps a bit off the mark seeing that he had only married Sonia on his deathbed and she never served as a wifely wife and would not have had the sort of knowledge of him which would have come from such service. And also because the wife has a point; the husband writer did not and does not stand alone. His work, to some extent at least, is a joint product.

One result of all this is that I think I am shifting my ground a bit. While I still don't care for, for example, the collecting and publishing of letters never intended for public consumption, I think I now allow that the public, having paid for an author to live well, might reasonably take an interest in the life behind the letters. A writer cannot expect to be known by his works alone, still less by the works that he (or she) marks as fit to stand monument. {Perhaps lady writers are not so monument inclined}. This new ground has the merit of being more consistent with my position on, for example, the royals whom I hold to be disqualified from having much of a private life having been well paid, as it were, to be public. But is also true that my own interest in the lives of writers is of relatively recent date; for much the larger part of my reading life I took little interest in the lives behind what I was reading. Is the shift a product of age? A shift into a life of gossip & tittle-tattle, no longer wanting anything of greater substance?

All that aside, there are some engaging anecdotes from their times. From the time, for example, when the Conrads were caught in what I suppose was the Austrian bit of Poland at the start of the First World War and how they were able to escape via Vienna and Italy back to England. I imagine that by the time of the Second World War they would have been interned for the duration, on the spot.

There is also quite a lot more on the ford mentioned on September 25th 2012 in the other place.