The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (Vintage) [Paperback]

John Stape (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2009 | Series: Vintage

In this authoritative, insightful biography, we see the modernist master Joseph Conrad as a man who consistently reinvented himself. Born in 1857 in the Ukraine, he left home early and worked as a sailor, traveling to the Far East and Africa, and eventually settled in England, beginning a precarious existence as a novelist. John Stape describes a man with a deep sense of otherness, a writer who wrote in his third language and whose fiction became the cornerstone of modernism. With his exceptional understanding of Conrad, Stape succeeds in casting a new light on the life of a man who remains one of the greatest writers of his, and our, time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Joseph Conrad's lasting reputation has been built on his acclaimed books, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and The Secret Agent, but Stape, drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, shows how Conrad's life can be sharply divided into three parts: his youth, dominated by the concerns of disenfranchised Polish relatives; his travels as a working seaman; and finally, his long career as a writer and family man. And while Stape, editor of The Oxford Companion to Joseph Conrad, admits to the difficulty of painting a portrait of a man who was inclined to bend the truth about his own life, he has done an exacting job tracking down the people and places Conrad encountered in his life. Unfortunately, this biography values detail over insight. We read about lunches with people who will never reappear in Conrad's life, but are left wanting over questions of literary import. For example, Conrad began writing about unhappy romantic affiliations long before he embarked on his uneventful if not impassioned marriage to Jessie George, but Stape barely touches upon previous romantic involvements that may have influenced Conrad's thinking. Readers are left with a great deal about Conrad's life, but little insight into how it shaped his work.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* One of the world’s most captivating writers, Conrad led a demanding life long obscured by myth. Conrad expert Stape seeks to nail down the facts in a strict accounting of the wrenching ups and downs of Conrad’s struggle to survive and get words on the page. Writing with an eye to irony and paradox and evincing a love of description—qualities prominent in Conrad’s work––Stape lays the foundation with a sensitive rendering of Conrad’s traumatic childhood as the only child of exiled Polish dissidents. A sickly boy versed in the art of displacement, he was orphaned at 11, went to sea at 16, and was marked by all that he witnessed in far-flung places, from the Caribbean to Bangkok, Borneo, and the Congo. As Stape vividly portrays this seen-it-all “ardent Francophile” and feckless charmer resistant to authority, Stape admits that Conrad’s metamorphosis into a writer “remains an intractable mystery.” He then keeps diligent track of Conrad’s punishing cycles of creativity and despair within a marriage further burdened by financial worries and relentless bouts of ill health. Stape’s painstaking portrait clarifies many aspects of Conrad’s life, and reveals just how grueling it was for him to create his glorious and harrowing fiction. --Donna Seaman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (March 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400095867
• ISBN-13: 978-1400095865
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,200,439 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A solid biography, but not wholly satisfactory, December 17, 2008

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R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (Hardcover)

As might be expected from a distinguished Conrad scholar -- among other things, author John Stape is co-editor of Conrad's published letters -- THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD is a sober, responsible biography of one of the great novelists of the 20th Century. But it is not wholly satisfactory. It certainly is not the definitive or the ideal biography of Conrad.

Noting that "biographies of late have tended to bloat" (how true!), Stape states in his Preface that his objective is "brevity." In a sense, he succeeds: THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD comes in at 272 pages of text. (Additional pages contain photos, maps, family trees, biographical profiles of people of note who interacted with Conrad, and extensive footnotes and bibliography -- all of which are welcome.) But the last two-thirds of the book, dealing with Conrad's career as a writer, bogs down in the details of a seemingly endless cycle of gout and depression, financial irresponsibility followed by scuffling and cadging for funds, visits with assorted literary and cultural figures, and Conrad's continuous bemoaning of the toil of the writing life. All in all, as relatively short as it is, the book is too much biographical fact and too little biographical essence.

Stape, in his Preface, also disavows any effort to pursue "literary criticism," and indeed THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD contains only the barest and briefest discussion of the literary aspects of Conrad's works. That is unfortunate because what little Stape does offer in the way of literary analysis is worthwhile. For example: "Although incontestably a great writer, having contributed to shaping the way his own and the generations after him 'see', [Conrad] is, perhaps, in the scheme of things, not quite a 'great' novelist, missing -- just -- the glacial perfection, of a Stendhal or Flaubert, and in this perhaps more closely resembling the achievement of a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky."

On the plus side, THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD is tolerably well-written and I believe one can trust what it says about the facts of Conrad's life. On balance, I prefer it slightly over the one other biography I have read of Conrad, "Joseph Conrad" by Jeffrey Meyers. But, as noted, it is not a fully satisfactory biography. To be sure, Conrad -- to indulge in a gross understatement -- was an exceedingly complex person. And his fiction reflects again and again his dismissal as futile and delusory any effort to fully comprehend any human being, even oneself. Perhaps, then, it is too much to expect any biographer to fully capture the essence of Joseph Conrad. Still, knowledgeable Conrad scholar that Stape undoubtedly is, he is not supremely skilled in the art and craft of biography. So I maintain hope that some day we will get a thoroughly responsible biography of Joseph Conrad that, if not definitive or ideal, does bring us much closer to this elusive, and great, writer.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Homo multiplex, January 6, 2009

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H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (Hardcover)

This is definitively not the definitive Conrad biography.

For one, Stape explicitely focuses on the life, or 'several lives', and nearly ignores the work, usually just mentioning titles and extremely briefly what they were about and how they fared in the market place.

Second, there are still so many gaps in the life story. That seems to be largely due to the fact that the man moved about a lot and much documentation got lost. This problem gets more and more difficult to solve with time.

Which 'several lives' are we looking at?

The Catholic- Polish 'gentleman' (not quite aristocrat), who never lived in Poland (because that country was not a political entity at his time; rather, born in the Ukraine in the Russian empire, then moved to the Polish part of the Austrian/Hungarian empire); not a good Catholic either, Conrad never was a religious man, God bless him.

Then seaman in France and England, travelling the world, but not quite making a success out of his chosen career.

Then, out of nowhere, he becomes a writer in his third language, quits the sea, becomes a family man and a literary professional with literary friends. Conrad produces a string of masterpieces, but never has enough money and never seems to be able to handle money well when he has some.

Then a good English patriot with proper anti-Russian, anti-German, and also anti-American sentiments. Not anti-French, that he couldn't do.

In his last years financial sanity, but dwindling artistic power, and terrible health trouble, as well as great sorrows with a failing son.

Many of his books were praised by the critics, but ignored by the public. In his own words:his books dropped into the past like stones in water. Henry James, a friendly colleague, said: being serious and subtle isn't one of the paths to fortune. Many of Conrad's books achieved lasting fame in later times. The man was too modern for his world.

I had read most of Conrad's books in the 70s and 80s and am now re-visiting him. I realize that I underestimated him in the past. I saw him as some kind of older Graham Greene. I did not realize the full extent of his importance. And I had some struggles with his language, which I found often unnecessarily compact and slow. I realize now that was largely my own fault.

Stape's biography is useful, but too much is missing, and not all in it is necessary. It gets a little repetitious with all the gout attacks and the wife's knee operations and Walpole coming for lunch etc etc.

Most bios of writers have the habit of placing the target in a social context of other writers. That is also one of the strong sides of Stape's book too. I never knew that Conrad was close to Stephen Crane; SC died while JC was writing the ending of Lord Jim. The death may have influenced the tone of the book. What I find a little irritating is Stape's habit of hinting vaguely at Conrad's friendships with younger men, somehow not quite saying that he suspects an underlying unspoken motive. (The Melville bio that I read recently did the same, ie hint at hidden homosexual streaks in the pattern of the man.)

Other friends and good colleagues: Galsworthy, Henry James, H.G.Wells, Ford Maddox Ford (the target of much scorn from Stape), Hugh Walpole, J.M.Barrie, Hardy, Russell, Gide... It seems Conrad was seriously hoping for the Nobel, and he was a giant in his world.

As we know, he wasn't the only giant who was not en-Nobled by Stockholm. A smaller move from Britain's royalty was rejected by him, in line with his some of his peers.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The many lives of the same fascinating man, March 12, 2008

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Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (Hardcover)

When you hear Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, or The Secret Agent, does "Joseph Conrad" come to mind? Reading about Conrad's jinxed life turned those books more intimate and all the more tragic.

John Stape opens his Conrad biography with notes and appendices as you into Conrad's life. Without these pieces, any Conrad non-professional would most likely be lost, as Conrad's world was so vastly different from anything imaginable.

Born to Polish parents, he was exiled to northern Russia before he could read. His father, a Polish Revolutionary, was forced to flee after defying the Tzar. His mother had died in Siberia when he was 7; then at 11 he became an official orphan. At 16 he moved to France and then moved onto England, where he became a sailor with the Merchant Marines. This job fuelled his writing power, though he led such a brilliant life in solitude.

Conrad quickly married working-class, Jessie. As with the sailing voyages, his fragile marriage also gave birth to plots and the passion put into his earlier short stories. Fears that his wife may leave him should he become delusional was one main plot, and in another a wife killed her husband due to his sexual advances-which he wrote on his honeymoon.

Conrad who seemed to attract bad luck. As he was finishing a lengthy novel, a tipped oil lamp destroyed the manuscript, as another was being shipped on the Titanic. Enough said. Misfortune and scarring events gave him material to write fictional portrayals of his own experiences. On a voyage through the Belgian Congo, he produced Heart of Darkness, even though his health and morale were shattered by the experience.

Stape writes an eloquent portrait of Conrad's life. Overall, the book was so intensely in tune with what one could imagine Conrad's experiences to be, that I had to balance out the depressing read with something lighthearted.

Clearly Stape is a Conrad expert. Despite the absence of good fortune during Conrad's life, the literary community was blessed with a writer no less than a genius.

Armchair Interviews says: If you love biographies that paint vivid and realistic pictures of a famous writer, this is for you.