‘The phonetics of English is indeed a dismal thing’

Abstract

Once we were safely ensconced in our chairs in that deserted lounge, Conrad charmingly invalidated his own objections to giving an admirer a personal interview. Remembering his essay ‘Poland Revisited’ in Notes on Life and Letters,¹ I asked him first what he had got out of his schooldays in Cracow. In the Notes he tells how, walking the streets of the old city with his son at night, ‘it seemed to me that if I remained longer there in that narrow street I should become the helpless prey of the Shadows I had called up. They were crowding upon me, enigmatic and insistent, in their clinging air of the grave that tasted of dust and of the bitter vanity of old hopes.’²

From Joseph Conrad’s Mind and Method: A Study of Personality in Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1931) pp. 28–31, 31–4.