Joseph Conrad

Abstract

On an evening in 1895 I was dining alone at the Restaurant d’Italie in Old Compton Street, when from another table Edward Garnett beckoned to me, and when I joined him, introduced a friend who was with him as Mr Conrad, a ship’s captain who had written a novel. The stranger was slight and foreign-looking, dark, bearded, with brilliant eyes and restless hands, and manners so punctilious, even ceremonious, that they made one’s own seem like rudeness. On the table was a roll of galley proofs of his first book, Almayer’s Folly,¹ then going through the press for Fisher Unwin, and I was told how his life at sea had been ameliorated and diversified first by the study of English and then by the effort to write it and to write romance. Conrad was very much the modest young author in demeanour, full of a charming self-depreciation (which he never lost, but which latterly was not always to be taken at its face value and, indeed, could be almost a weapon), and responding with almost embarrassing gratitude to wishes for his success. He spoke with a strong foreign accent, in sentences not too well constructed, so that when I came to read Almayer’s Folly I was amazed. To the end his accent remained exotic, although his vocabulary of English words was more precise, if not richer, I suppose, than that of any English-born novelist now writing, and more sensitively managed.

From ‘Joseph Conrad’, English Life, vol. III, no. 4 (Sept. 1924) pp. 247–8.