Joseph Conrad

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 925, 3 May 1957, Page 14

Joseph Conrad

N 1857, at Berdyczew, near Molihow, in the southern provinces of Poland, one of England’s greatest writers was born. "If I was to be a seaman," wrote Joseph Conrad in A Personal Record, "IT would be a British seaman and no other. . . If I had not written in English I would not have written at all." Because of these early decisions, some three-quarters of Conrad’s sea life was spent under the Red Duster ("the only roof over my head"), and England gained one of the best craftsmen of her language and perhaps her greatest writer on the sea. To mark the centenary of Conrad’s birth, Alan Mulgan has written a programme around the writer’s life and work, The Voluntary Englishman, which will be heard from 2YC at 8.0 p.m. on Thursday, May 9. In the portrait above (from an etching by Walter Tittle in the National Portrait Gallery) something may be seen of Conrad’s character; here is the slightly tilted head, the keen eye of a man who knew both storms and his own strength to face them. "He was a man of the highest integrity," says Mr Mulgan, "and integrity-or as he put it, fidelity--was what he valued most in others. . . Conrad thought the world a hard and cruel taskmaster, and that man’s duty was to stand up to its ills and buffets." In The Voluntary Englishman, selections will be read from four of Conrad’s works: The Nigger of the Narcissus, Heart of Darkness, Typhoon and The Mirror of the Sea. Although the first three of these works are framed as fiction they are all based on actual episodes in the writer’s life. The Nigger derives from a voyage Conrad made in the 1300-ton Narcissus from Bombay to Dunkirk, not long after he had passed his Chief Mate’s examination; Heart of Darkness from a trip in the Belgian Congo when he left his first command the Otago; and Typhoon (although in the story the vessel becomes a steamer) came from his experiences as Chief Mate of the sailing ship Highland Forest.