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Notes on Life and Letters
Twenty-six essays in Notes on Life and Letters (1921) present a kaleidoscopic view of Joseph Conrad's literary views and interest in the events of his day, including the Titanic disaster and First World War. The introduction traces the pre-publication history of the essays, and the book's reception, offering new perspectives on the work's relationship to Conrad's other writings.
504 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1921
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167 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Conrad
2,877 books4,811 followersJoseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable, and amoral world.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 3, 2021
An Author's Ocean of Experience
A deeply contemplative work on the issues—literary, political and nautical—covering the first twenty years of the twentieth century, told with verbosity and passion, from a great novelist who wrote literary masterpieces in a language he learned only in adulthood.
On the literary issues, mostly written as book reviews, Conrad discusses the works of well-known authors and lesser-known ones of his day. I captured some one-liners that summarises his views on them:
Alphonse Daudet: “He may not be an artist, but he comes near the truth as some of the greatest.”
Guy De Maupassant: “He forgets to strew paper roses over the tombs, making him cruel, cynical and hard.”
Anatole France: “He perceived that political institutions are incapable of securing the happiness of mankind.”
Ivan Turgenev: “All his creations, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions.”
Stephen Crane: “He knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in words, whenever he took a pen into his hand.”
Marryat and James Fenimore Cooper: “Champion writers of the sea.”
Overall, Conrad is complimentary of his peers and extols the virtues of the novel and the novelist: “Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error. But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life. Where a novelist has an advantage over the workers in other fields of thought is in his privilege of freedom—the freedom of expression and the freedom of confessing his innermost beliefs—which should console him for the hard slavery of the pen.”
On the political front, Conrad captures the swirling sentiments in Europe that led to WWI. He laments the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-05 as an example of Russian posturing – Japan ultimately won that war. He mourns the splintering of his native Poland into three, under German, Austrian and Russian sectors, and implores the West to restore the country back to its whole after boundaries are re-drawn at the end of WWI. He has special sanction for Russia and its Tsarist regime, foretelling the revolution that was to come, and declaring that this huge country did not belong to either Europe or Asia. Departing from merely political views, he details a trip he took back to Poland from his domicile in England, just as Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, triggering WWI; the Conrad family had to take a lengthy detour over several months, via Austria and Italy, before catching a Dutch freighter enroute from Java to London.
The last third of the book is where Conrad returns to the sea, where he spent twenty years of his life and picked up the material for his fiction. He has strong opinions on well-known naval accidents involving vessels like Titanic, Aquitania, Empress of Ireland and Storstadt. He berates ship owners for taking short cuts (“Less life boats? How about selling less tickets?”), praises seamen for their courage under pressure, and advances technical solutions like stuffed rope fenders to reduce the severity of collisions. A staunch supporter of the British Empire and the Merchant Navy, he pays tributes to ships and sailors: “The ship we serve, is the moral symbol of our life. A ship has to be respected, actually and ideally; her merit, her innocence, are sacred things. Of all the creations of man she is the closest partner of his toil and courage. I venture to affirm that the main characteristic of the British men spread all over the world, is not the spirit of adventure so much as the spirit of service.”
This is an odd assembly of material for a single book, but it covers the areas that Conrad played in, and under his erudite and penetrating observations, brings to life the obscure first generation that led to the greatest cataclysms and upheavals of the last century.
A deeply contemplative work on the issues—literary, political and nautical—covering the first twenty years of the twentieth century, told with verbosity and passion, from a great novelist who wrote literary masterpieces in a language he learned only in adulthood.
On the literary issues, mostly written as book reviews, Conrad discusses the works of well-known authors and lesser-known ones of his day. I captured some one-liners that summarises his views on them:
Alphonse Daudet: “He may not be an artist, but he comes near the truth as some of the greatest.”
Guy De Maupassant: “He forgets to strew paper roses over the tombs, making him cruel, cynical and hard.”
Anatole France: “He perceived that political institutions are incapable of securing the happiness of mankind.”
Ivan Turgenev: “All his creations, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions.”
Stephen Crane: “He knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in words, whenever he took a pen into his hand.”
Marryat and James Fenimore Cooper: “Champion writers of the sea.”
Overall, Conrad is complimentary of his peers and extols the virtues of the novel and the novelist: “Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error. But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life. Where a novelist has an advantage over the workers in other fields of thought is in his privilege of freedom—the freedom of expression and the freedom of confessing his innermost beliefs—which should console him for the hard slavery of the pen.”
On the political front, Conrad captures the swirling sentiments in Europe that led to WWI. He laments the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-05 as an example of Russian posturing – Japan ultimately won that war. He mourns the splintering of his native Poland into three, under German, Austrian and Russian sectors, and implores the West to restore the country back to its whole after boundaries are re-drawn at the end of WWI. He has special sanction for Russia and its Tsarist regime, foretelling the revolution that was to come, and declaring that this huge country did not belong to either Europe or Asia. Departing from merely political views, he details a trip he took back to Poland from his domicile in England, just as Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, triggering WWI; the Conrad family had to take a lengthy detour over several months, via Austria and Italy, before catching a Dutch freighter enroute from Java to London.
The last third of the book is where Conrad returns to the sea, where he spent twenty years of his life and picked up the material for his fiction. He has strong opinions on well-known naval accidents involving vessels like Titanic, Aquitania, Empress of Ireland and Storstadt. He berates ship owners for taking short cuts (“Less life boats? How about selling less tickets?”), praises seamen for their courage under pressure, and advances technical solutions like stuffed rope fenders to reduce the severity of collisions. A staunch supporter of the British Empire and the Merchant Navy, he pays tributes to ships and sailors: “The ship we serve, is the moral symbol of our life. A ship has to be respected, actually and ideally; her merit, her innocence, are sacred things. Of all the creations of man she is the closest partner of his toil and courage. I venture to affirm that the main characteristic of the British men spread all over the world, is not the spirit of adventure so much as the spirit of service.”
This is an odd assembly of material for a single book, but it covers the areas that Conrad played in, and under his erudite and penetrating observations, brings to life the obscure first generation that led to the greatest cataclysms and upheavals of the last century.
April 25, 2018
To wydanie jest szczególnie istotne, ponieważ odnosi się również do pamiętników wuja Josepha Conrada. Poniżej załączam moją recenzję po angielsku.
This is not a chronological autobiography – Conrad doesn’t go through all the events of his life. Instead, he focuses on what one might call turning points: when he decided to join the navy, when he wrote his first novel, when he revisited his hometown after 20 years absence. The whole is a carefully crafted meditation on what it means for him to be a writer.
" I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. A historian of hearts is not a historian of emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. They are worthy of respect, too." (This quote is taken from the Gutenberg Edition of the book, which is publically available online)
It’s really hard to describe this book in any way objectively for me. The account of a life of a writer of Polish heritage and the story of how he ultimately decided to write in English is something that has deep personal resonance for me. Again and again, I would lift up my head to process what I’ve read, occasionally shouting out random facts at my poor companions such as “Conrad loved Bleak House!” Or “Conrad went to Mount Riggi in Switzerland- I went to Mount Riggi too!”. So yes, if you are fond of Joseph Conrad (and especially if you are fond of pondering the problem of his Polish heritage), do please read this book. The rest of the world will just have to put up with the likes of us being very, very excited. I definitely want to read it again.
This is not a chronological autobiography – Conrad doesn’t go through all the events of his life. Instead, he focuses on what one might call turning points: when he decided to join the navy, when he wrote his first novel, when he revisited his hometown after 20 years absence. The whole is a carefully crafted meditation on what it means for him to be a writer.
" I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. A historian of hearts is not a historian of emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. They are worthy of respect, too." (This quote is taken from the Gutenberg Edition of the book, which is publically available online)
It’s really hard to describe this book in any way objectively for me. The account of a life of a writer of Polish heritage and the story of how he ultimately decided to write in English is something that has deep personal resonance for me. Again and again, I would lift up my head to process what I’ve read, occasionally shouting out random facts at my poor companions such as “Conrad loved Bleak House!” Or “Conrad went to Mount Riggi in Switzerland- I went to Mount Riggi too!”. So yes, if you are fond of Joseph Conrad (and especially if you are fond of pondering the problem of his Polish heritage), do please read this book. The rest of the world will just have to put up with the likes of us being very, very excited. I definitely want to read it again.
September 17, 2021
The title might mislead some since it sounds like one of those thick “Life and Letters” biographies that were fashionable a century ago. Instead, this book is a miscellany, collecting some of Conrad’s book reviews and essays. A such, it is a mixed bag.
The collection is divided into two parts, with the “Letters” sections, his reviews, coming first. The first writer treated, after an essay on books, is Henry James. I enjoyed reading what one great writer appreciated about another. Among the keen insights was one I fond particularly apt: James refuses to fulfill the desire for finality that readers want from writers. Some of the other authors he expresses his admiration for are Turgenev, Maupassant, and Stephen Crane. Less interesting were some lukewarm and ironic reviews of books now forgotten.
The second section is entitled “Life,” but that’s only true in a limited sense. It contains Conrad’s views on some topical political issues of the day. These range from the Russo-Japanese war and the question of Polish independence to the sinking of the Titanic. Particularly the latter still makes for great reading because of Conrad’s mourning for the lost passengers and seamen mixed with his white-hot scorn for the irresponsible “bigger is better” marketing of the commercial interests.
Conrad is a great writer, but very much of his time. This is not only evident in his elaborate, century-old prose, but also in his attitudes toward people of color and women. Toward the first, he displays a benign colonial superiority, toward the latter, a chivalrous patronization. Admittedly, there were indeed worse ways to think back then, and still are. And it's a futile wish that our favorite writers should be politically correct according to our standards.
He is less charitable toward Russians and Germans (“There was little to choose between the methods of Russian barbarism, which were both crude and rotten, and the cultivated brutality tinged with contempt of Germany’s superficial, grinding civilisation”). His feeling is understandable, given the fate of his native land, Poland, at their hands. As I read the first few essays in the section, my interest waned. But then I was pulled up by a lengthy account of his fatefully-timed visit back to Cracow, arriving just before the guns of August, and kept there by the changed circumstance longer than planned, narrowly escaping being held by the Habsburg empire as an enemy alien. This essay alone made the book worth reading. Five stars for it and the Henry James and first of the Titanic essays, three stars overall.
The collection is divided into two parts, with the “Letters” sections, his reviews, coming first. The first writer treated, after an essay on books, is Henry James. I enjoyed reading what one great writer appreciated about another. Among the keen insights was one I fond particularly apt: James refuses to fulfill the desire for finality that readers want from writers. Some of the other authors he expresses his admiration for are Turgenev, Maupassant, and Stephen Crane. Less interesting were some lukewarm and ironic reviews of books now forgotten.
The second section is entitled “Life,” but that’s only true in a limited sense. It contains Conrad’s views on some topical political issues of the day. These range from the Russo-Japanese war and the question of Polish independence to the sinking of the Titanic. Particularly the latter still makes for great reading because of Conrad’s mourning for the lost passengers and seamen mixed with his white-hot scorn for the irresponsible “bigger is better” marketing of the commercial interests.
Conrad is a great writer, but very much of his time. This is not only evident in his elaborate, century-old prose, but also in his attitudes toward people of color and women. Toward the first, he displays a benign colonial superiority, toward the latter, a chivalrous patronization. Admittedly, there were indeed worse ways to think back then, and still are. And it's a futile wish that our favorite writers should be politically correct according to our standards.
He is less charitable toward Russians and Germans (“There was little to choose between the methods of Russian barbarism, which were both crude and rotten, and the cultivated brutality tinged with contempt of Germany’s superficial, grinding civilisation”). His feeling is understandable, given the fate of his native land, Poland, at their hands. As I read the first few essays in the section, my interest waned. But then I was pulled up by a lengthy account of his fatefully-timed visit back to Cracow, arriving just before the guns of August, and kept there by the changed circumstance longer than planned, narrowly escaping being held by the Habsburg empire as an enemy alien. This essay alone made the book worth reading. Five stars for it and the Henry James and first of the Titanic essays, three stars overall.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews