It Was All True

THE SEA YEARS by Jerry Allen. 368 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

"I never could invent an effective lie," Novelist Joseph Conrad once confessed. In this richly documented study, Author Jerry Allen demonstrates--with details assembled over a period of ten years from the four corners of the world --that most of Conrad's novels are scene-for-scene, character-for-character transmutations of the extravagant adventures of his youth.

The adventures began when Conrad (real name: Teodor Joozef Konrad Korzeniowski), the orphaned son of Polish intellectuals, defied his guardian and went to sea at the age of 16. Nostromo, for instance, describes with photographic precision a revolution he witnessed in Central America while serving as an apprentice aboard a French barque carrying guns to the insurgents. The Nigger of the Narcissus narrates, day by day, a stormy voyage that Conrad once took around the Cape of Good Hope; the "nigger" was an old black seaman born a slave in Georgia who died at sea as he does in the book.

The most spectacular of Conrad's adventures is related in The Arrow of Gold. The adventure began when Conrad, then only 19, was running guns off the Spanish coast for the Carlist Pretender to the Spanish throne. Pursued by a Spanish warship, the captain ran the ship on the rocks. All aboard swam safely to shore, hid in a cellar until the way to France was clear.

In Marseille, Conrad met and fell madly in love with the Pretender's beautiful young mistress, a luscious Hungarian named Paula de Somogyi. They ran off together and spent several idyllic weeks in a rose-covered cottage on an Alp. The idyl ended when a jealous admirer provoked a quarrel. Conrad challenged him to a duel, but then chivalrously fired at the fellow's pistol hand. His opponent, who was Francis Scott Key's grandson but obviously no gentleman, calmly transferred the pistol to his other hand and shot Conrad through the chest. For days Conrad lay near death, but Paula, who never left his side, pulled him through. In the end, reality blighted romance. Conrad ran out of money, Paula ran back to her prince; she later married an opera singer and lived luxuriously ever after.

It all sounds like a bad novel--and it is. But of all his books, The Arrow of Gold was the one that moved Conrad most. To the end of his life, Conrad admitted that he could not read it without "a little shrinking of the heart."

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