A Second Mencken Chrestomathy [1995, 2013] by H. L. Mencken

Author:H. L. Mencken [Mencken, H. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vintage [ebook, kindle]
Published: 2013-03-20T03:00:00+00:00

Freudian Autopsy upon a Genius

From the American Mercury, June, 1931, pp. 251–52.

A review of THE POLISH HERITAGE OF JOSEPH CONRAD, By Gustaf Morf (Richard R. Smith); New York, 1931

Years ago, in the course of a review of one of the late Joseph Conrad’s books, I permitted myself the observation that all of his characters, in the last analysis, were Poles. Sometimes he called them Germans, Frenchmen, Latin-Americans, Chinamen or Malays, and very often he called them Englishmen, but always they remained Poles like himself. This observation somewhat exercised Conrad, but his argument, when it reached me, convinced me only that a great artist is often a bad observer of his own psychological processes. This conviction is now heavily reënforced by Dr. Morf, for his book is devoted to proving, not only that practically all of the characters in the Conrad gallery are Poles, but also that the transactions in which they engage are largely echoes from Conrad’s own life, or the lives of his relatives. The whole canon of his works, in fact, is moved over from English literature to Polish literature, and the circumstance that they are written in English becomes a trivial accident, like the circumstance that Frederick the Great’s highly Prussian memoranda were written in French.

Whether or not Dr. Morf is a Pole himself I don’t know, but he is quite at home in the Polish language, and so brings forward a great deal of material hitherto unknown to English critics. Part of it is to be found in the autobiography of Conrad’s uncle and guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski, part comes from the writings of Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, and part is in other family papers. Dr. Morf says that, both as boy and as man, Conrad was almost the archetypical Pole—full of grand projects, an incurable romantic, an ardent patriot, and, with it all, the victim of chronic repinings and despairs. He went to sea as a young man simply because he craved heroic adventure, and the Russians had the lid down so tightly in his part of Poland that there was no chance for it at home. Had the times been happier he would have taken to the field against the oppressor, as his forebears had done before him. But in the Poland of the early ’70s a Polish patriot was as hopelessly hobbled as a biologist in Mississippi, and so young Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski herbu Nalecz (thus Dr. Morf gives his name) had to content himself with dreams of the Congo and Cathay.

In his career as a sailor there was something touchingly ludicrous, though he himself seems to have been unaware of it. He was as ill-fitted for the sordid routine of a British merchant skipper as he would have been for the life of a ballet dancer. He was apparently resented as a foreigner and distrusted as a romantic. He took his ship too near to dangerous coasts, and proposed voyages that were far more glamorous than profitable. Finally, as every one knows, he abandoned deep water for the infernal Congo river trade, and there came near losing his life.

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