Joseph Conrad Life And Letters

Notes on Life and Letters is a collection of twenty-six essays by Joseph Conrad. These essays present a fluctuating outlook of his literary views and concerns about the events of his time such as the Titanic Disaster and the First World War. Engrossing and insightful!In 1894, at age 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health and partly because he had decided on a literary career.

The twenty-six essays collected in Notes on Life and Letters (first published 1921) offer a kaleidoscopic view of Joseph Conrad's literary views and interest in the events of his day, including the Titanic disaster, First World War, and the re-emergence of his native Poland as a nation state. The introduction gives the history of the gathering of these diverse pieces into a single volume, traces the book's reception, and offers new perspectives on its relationship to Conrad's other writings. His essays underwent multiple layers of unauthorized intervention by typists, compositors and editors: this history is set out in the essay on the text and in the apparatus. The notes explain literary and historical references, identify places mentioned, and gloss foreign terms. Two maps supplement the explanatory material. This edition, first published in 2004 and established through modern textual scholarship, presents Conrad's essays and reviews in an authoritative form.

This penultimate volume of Conrad's collected letters ends soon after his 65th birthday. Over the previous three years, Conrad wrote The Rover, struggled with Suspense, translated The Book of Job (a Polish comedy), collaborated with J. B. Pinker on a cinematic treatment of 'Gaspar Ruiz', and worked by himself on adapting The Secret Agent for the London stage. He saw the publication of The Rescue, Notes on Life and Letters, and the Doubleday/Heinemann collected edition, most of whose volumes had new Author's Notes. Especially in North America, the collected edition strengthened his reputation as the leading English-language novelist of his day. This recognition could not always console him for his worries about his health, his family, and the state of post-war Europe, but he had not lost his sense of irony. These letters, the majority new to scholarship, abound in striking turns of phrase and unexpected insights.

I don't know whether I ought to offer an apology for this collection which has more to do with life than with letters. Its appeal is made to orderly minds. This, to be frank about it, is a process of tidying up, which, from the nature of things, cannot be regarded as premature. The fact is that I wanted to do it myself because of a feeling that had nothing to do with the considerations of worthiness or unworthiness of the small (but unbroken) pieces collected within the covers of this volume. Of course it may be said that I might have taken up a broom and used it without saying anything about it. That, certainly, is one way of tidying up. But it would have been too much to have expected me to treat all this matter as removable rubbish. All those things had a place in my life. Whether any of them deserve to have been picked up and ranged on the shelf-this shelf-I cannot say, and, frankly, I have not allowed my mind to dwell on the question. I was afraid of thinking myself into a mood that would hurt my feelings; for those pieces of writing, whatever may be the comment on their display, appertain to the character of the man. And so here they are, dusted, which was but a decent thing to do, but in no way polished, extending from the year '98 to the year '20, a thin array (for such a stretch of time) of really innocent attitudes: Conrad literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad controversial. Well, yes! A one-man show-or is it merely the show of one man? The only thing that will not be found amongst those Figures and Things that have passed away, will be Conrad en pantoufles. It is a constitutional inability. Schlafrock und pantoffeln! Not that! Never! . . .

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1922 Edition.