The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff

Author:Maya Jasanoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

The news shocked everyone who knew him. He explained more to a cousin in Poland. “I announce solemnly . . . that I am getting married. No one can be more surprised at it than myself. However, I am not frightened at all, for as you know, I am accustomed to an adventurous life and to facing terrible dangers.” Still more astonishing was the person that he’d chosen. “Jessie is her name; George her surname. She is a small, not at all striking-looking person (to tell the truth alas—rather plain!) who nevertheless is very dear to me. When I met her a year and a half ago she was earning her living in the City as a ‘Typewriter’ in an American business office of the ‘Caligraph’ company.” After their wedding, which was scheduled for two weeks hence, he intended to move to Brittany and “start working on my third opus, for one has to write in order to live. A few days ago I was offered the command of a sailing vessel—the idea had pleased my Jessie (who likes the sea) but the terms were so unsatisfactory that in the end I refused. The literary profession is therefore my sole means of support.”44

On March 24, 1896, Joseph Conrad and Jessie George went to the registry office at St. George Hanover Square to “join our two humble fortunes and face together the heat and dust of the road.”45 He was Catholic and she was Protestant, so a civil wedding tidied up the difference. Conrad had no relatives, and was manned only by his old friends Phil Krieger and G. F. W. Hope. Jessie’s sprawling family—she had eight siblings—attended en masse. The new Mrs. Conrad puzzled all day over her husband’s peculiar behavior. He was standoffish with her family, and when they were alone that night, he sat up late writing letters, which he insisted on going out to post at two A.M. The next day, the newlyweds withdrew (in his words) “from the sights and sounds of civilization and into the wilds of Brittany.”46 As the train hurtled through a tunnel, Jessie was startled by a flash of light. With a jolt of terror she thought her strange new husband had hurled a bomb—like the terrifying anarchists from the Continent.47

Who actually was this man to whom Jessie George was now suddenly bound? Conrad (as she called him) was utterly unlike anybody she’d ever met, not merely the first foreigner she knew well, but “the first grown man who appeared to take a particular interest in me.” He was “complex,” “hyper-sensitive and broodingly reserved,” and she didn’t expect she would ever really understand him. His strangeness could be disconcerting. For instance, when he proposed. They’d spent the morning at the National Gallery. As they left, he turned to her and said, look. I don’t have very long to live, and I don’t plan to have children. But for whatever it’s worth, he shrugged, I think we could spend a few happy years together? She agreed.

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