Sea Changes

By Peter Stoler

JOSEPH CONRAD

by Roger Tennant

Atheneum;276 pages; $16.95

Most writers sail the oceans of their imaginations. Joseph Conrad navigated real oceans and lived a life full of adventure, conflict and drama. Perhaps that is the reason why his characters continue to haunt contemporary fiction and film, and scholars keep expanding the Conrad industry. Frederick Karl's monumental but plodding 1979 biography now holds the record for sheer size at 1,008 pages. A new book by the novelist's son John, Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered (Cambridge University Press), offers filial recollections and depicts the writer as a martinet, trying mightily to overcome his natural reserve, able to show his family little open affection, and perpetually striving for a financial security that was always just beyond reach.

But none of the recent Conrad books is more manageable--or readable--than Roger Tennant's new study. Tennant examines both the work and the self-manufactured legend, carefully separating rumor, romance and fact. The result is a concise work that offers a new understanding of the Pole, born Josef Konrad Korzeniowski, who became a great writer in a language he had difficulty speaking.

The novelist, who saw himself as "Pole, Catholic and Gentleman," left his native country at age 16. Between then and the age of 40, he voyaged all over the world, soaking up South American background for stories like Nostromo and Caspar Ruiz, working on sailing ships, where his experiences served as the basis for The Nigger of the Narcissus. He joined a steamship expedition up the Congo, which became the setting for Heart of Darkness. The circumstances of his life would seem to require little exaggeration, but Conrad loved to romanticize everything, including himself. As Tennant shows, he probably never ran guns to Spain's Carlist rebels, as he later claimed.

But Conrad, who rarely dealt with women or love in his books, did manage to have a great and unfulfilled passion for at least one woman, Janina Taube, the first love of his Cracow schooldays. "To the end of his life," writes Tennant, "Conrad would record no other occasion on which his heart leaped or his breath was taken away, and indeed it may be that in a sense this was his deepest sexual experience." Conrad was cooler and more practical in his feelings toward Jessie George, the Englishwoman he married in 1896 and used as a servant for most of her life. Nor did he manage to make and keep many friends. Only Ford Madox Ford, with whom he collaborated, and the sickly Stephen Crane became more than colleagues. But the absence of intimacy bothered Conrad far less than the lack of success. His letters to friends, editors and agents speak constantly of his ambition, his frustration and his need for additional advances. The letters also attest to Conrad's unbounded faith in his talent. "I too hope to find my place in the rear of my betters," Conrad wrote, echoing Rostand's Cyrano. "But still my place."

Conrad did eventually find his liter ary place, but never the financial security to which he aspired. Critical successes like Almayer's Folly and Lord Jim produced little money. Like most authors, Conrad was bitter about writers whose books were inferior but sold better.

Biographer Tennant, 62, is an Australian who grew up within sight of the wreckage of Conrad's ship the Otago and is now vicar of a parish in the English village of Bitteswell. He confesses a lifelong affinity for his subject. But he is not blind to Conrad's flaws: his permanent adoles cence, the convoluted prose, the simple plots that made Vladimir Nabokov condemn the oeuvre as "boys' books." Yet Tennant also recognizes that Conrad's ob session with moral dilemmas had a profound influence on such later novelists as George Orwell and Graham Greene.

Even Ernest Hemingway, not noted for generosity to his literary forebears, recognized his debt to Conrad shortly after the master's death in 1924. "If I knew that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Mr. Conrad's grave Mr. Conrad would shortly appear, looking very annoyed at the forced return, and commence writing, I would leave for London early tomorrow with a sausage grinder." Tennant brings Conrad back to life--without the sausage grinder. --By Peter Staler

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