Conrad and the Royal Bounty Fund

Abstract

I first met Joseph Conrad at the Savile Club — then housed in Piccadilly. There on Saturday afternoons a small symposium of half a dozen writers and artists was often held after lunch in the second drawing-room and lasted perhaps for one, two, or even three hours. It was on one of these occasions that someone introduced me to Conrad. I had for some time read both long and short stories by him and I looked at him with fascinated interest — he had repelled me by The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ but not so much as he had attracted me by Lord Jim. In this last work I saw a modern writer instinctively reproducing patterns of the Greek world — not one but two at once, for the book begins with the sombre religious feeling of an Orestean tragedy, and then sails away into an Odyssey of the Far East.

From My World as in My Time: Memoirs of Sir Henry Newbolt, 1862–1932 (London: Faber & Faber, 1932) pp. 300–6.