John Bayley was Warton Professor of English at Oxford from 1974 to 1992.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
7 February 1980
Homage to Marginality
2 April 1981
JC’s Call
3 May 1984
Where did he get it?
5 March 1981
A Human Kafka
5 October 1995
The firm went bankrupt
4 June 1987
Rosa with Mimi
3 January 2002
On Italo Svevo
RELATED CATEGORIES
Biography and memoirs, Biography, Conrad, Joseph, 1800-1899, 1880-1899, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1900-1909, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1910-1919, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1920-1929, Literature and literary criticism, Europe, Eastern Europe, Poland
Vol. 13 No. 18 · 26 September 1991
pages 12-13 | 3133 words
What will you do to keep the ship from foundering?
John Bayley
- Joseph Conrad: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers
Murray, 320 pp, £20.00, July 1991, ISBN 0 7195 4910 8
- Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
Oxford, 218 pp, £30.00, August 1991, ISBN 0 19 811785 X
In one of George Eliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life a lady addicted to reading tracts skims rapidly over references to Zion or the River of Life, but has her attention immediately caught by any mention of ‘pony’ or ‘boots and shoes’. A reader of modern biographies can see why. The best things in them are usually the facts, the objects, the unexplained and inexplicable things that cluttered up the lives of the august and famous, as they do everybody else’s, and now find a place in the story. The greasy trilby hat Ford Madox Ford put to dry in Jessie Conrad’s oven, provoking the only outburst of wrath ever seen on the part of that placid lady; the ‘good sandwiches’ which the soon-to-be-cast-off Hadley Hemingway promised to make for her husband’s outing to the races at Longchamps; ‘black-eyed Susan’, the New Mexican cow beloved by D.H. Lawrence: these are the things that stay in the mind when diagnoses and depreciations are forgotten.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 13 No. 22 · 21 November 1991
From Robert Hampson
In his review of Jeffrey Meyer’s Joseph Conrad: A Biography (LRB, 26 September), John Bayley asserts that ‘Conrad – no admirer of modern art – compared’ Paul Gachet’s ‘flat full of paintings’ (by implication, his collection of works by the Impressionists) to ‘the lunatic asylum at Charenton’. This interpretation of Conrad’s letter to Marguerite Poradowska of 2 July 1891 is well-established – even the annotations to the Collected Letters suggest that ‘Conrad is probably referring contemptuously to the so-called “crazy” paintings of the Impressionists’ (Collected Letters, Vol. I, 84). Unfortunately, as Gene Moore has recently demonstrated (‘Conrad and the “School of Charenton” ’, the Joseph Conrad Society 17th Annual International Conference), it is also incorrect. Dr Gachet’s Impressionist paintings were not kept at his Paris flat but in his house in the country, and Conrad’s reference to ‘paintings of the Charenton school’ is not a figurative allusion to the Impressionists, but a quite literal description of the very different kind of painting that decorated the walls of the doctor’s apartment.
Moore’s research not only provides the correct reference for this allusion in Conrad’s letter, but also, of course, re-opens the question of Conrad’s attitude towards Impressionist painting.
Robert Hampson
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College,
