Impressions and Beginnings

Abstract

I first met Joseph Conrad in November 1894, some months after I, as Mr Fisher Unwin’s reader, had written one of my hasty reports and had advised the acceptance of Almayer’s Folly. My friend Mr W. H. Chesson, whose duty it was to take charge of the manuscripts, tells me that he called my particular attention to the manuscript.¹ My wife recollects that I showed her the manuscript, told her it was the work of a foreigner and asked her opinion of his style. What particularly captivated me was the figure of Babalatchi, the aged one-eyed statesman and the night scene at the river’s edge between Mrs Almayer and her daughter. The strangeness of the tropical atmosphere, and the poetic realism of this romantic narrative excited my curiosity about the author, who I fancied might have Eastern blood in his veins. I was told however that he was a Pole, and this increased my interest since my Nihilist friends, Stepniak and Volkhovsky,² had always subtly decried the Poles when one sympathised with their position as ‘under dog’.

‘Joseph Conrad. I: Impressions and Beginnings’, Century Magazine, vol. CXV (Feb. 1928) pp. 385–92.