Craftsman and Seer

Abstract

Conrad has for a long time occupied a no-man’s land within English Literature. His Polish origins and his late acquisition of English would alone accord him an extraordinary place among British writers. Coupled with this, though, there is his curious apprenticeship to man of letters, his early years in the merchant service before he began to write at the age of thirty-eight. Not surprisingly his place historically has seemed equally odd; he seems awkwardly poised between the nineteenth and twentieth century, more dramatically and clearly than any of his contemporaries straddling the contradictions between alienation, the loss of context and continuity for his writing, and the resolute affirmation that certain values could continue to exist. Critically his reputation suffered a decline in the years following his death in 1924 just as Bennett’s and Wells’s did. He did not fit into the 1920s and 1930s, into an era of more conscious experimentation and literary élitism. Both Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence failed to see in Conrad any precedent for their own‘newness’. For Lawrence Conrad was one of the ‘Writers among the Ruins’ who had ‘given-in’ to hopelessness. It was a charge he also brought against Arnold Bennett and the whole realist tradition of acceptance.‘Tragedy’, he wrote‘ought to be a great kick of misery’, a kick which he was going to go on to administer.¹ Virginia Woolf, surveying the literary scene for models, also thought that Conrad ‘however admirable’ was ‘not very helpful’.²