Joseph Conrad by Jeffrey Meyers

Author:Jeffrey Meyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 1991-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

III

In mid-January 1904 the Conrads rented rooms for two months in 17 Gordon Place, Kensington, close to Ford and his family, shared their household expenses and took meals with them. During this period Conrad continued to work on Nostromo; wrote One Day More; and discovered, he told the fluent Wells, that he could dictate his sea sketches to Ford at the astonishing rate of 3,000 words in four hours. In Return to Yesterday Ford described his dual role as prompter and recorder:

The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record were mostly written by my hand from Conrad’s dictation. Whilst he was dictating them, I would recall incidents to him—I mean incidents of his past life which he had told me but which did not come freely back to his mind because at the time he was mentally ill [i.e., depressed], in desperate need of money, and, above all, skeptical as to the merits of the reminiscential form which I had suggested to him. The fact is I could make Conrad write at periods when his despair and fatigue were such that in no other way would it have been possible to him. He would be lying on the sofa or pacing the room, railing at life and literature as practised in England, and I would get a writing pad and pencil and, whilst he was still raving, would interject: “Now, then, what was it you were saying about coming up the Channel and nearly running over a fishing boat that suddenly appeared under your bows?” and gradually there would come “Landfalls and Departures.”

By April 15 Conrad told George Harvey, president of Harper’s publishers: “I have a book which is nearly ready, a volume of Sea-sketches, something in the spirit of Turgeniev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, but concerned with ships and sea with a distinct autobiographical and anecdotal note running through what is mainly meant for a record of remembered feelings. . . . For title I thought of: A Seaman’s Sketches or if a more general effect is desired Mirror of the Sea.”11 Serialized during 1904–5 and published as a book in October 1906, The Mirror of the Sea is a somewhat wordy, sententious and rambling memoir (not surprising, considering its mode of composition). It describes, in random, achronological order, several illuminating episodes on Conrad’s ships: the Tilkhurst, Loch Etive, Highland Forest, Duke of Sutherland, Otago and Mont-Blanc. The central metaphor is that ships are alive and have their own personal qualities. The main interest of the book lies in the final chapters on Conrad’s Marseilles hero, Dominic Cervoni, and the destruction of their ship, the Tremolino.

A few days after he arrived in London an accident occurred that affected Conrad for the rest of his life. Coming out of John Barker’s department store on High Street, Kensington, Jessie “slipped the cartilage” of both knees, fell onto the pavement and badly injured the knee that had been previously dislocated and damaged by a skating accident in 1889. Partially crippled by this fall, during the next thirty years Jessie endured a dozen expensive but unsuccessful operations.

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