Tony Tanner

This book – which aims at monumentality and certainly achieves size – deserves to be examined with care. There has been no biography of Conrad since 1960, when Jocelyn Baines published the result of many years of painstaking research. But a considerable amount of biographical material has emerged since then: the indispensable Conrad’s Polish Background, edited and introduced by Zdzislaw Najder (to which I think Professor Karl is indebted for much of his Polish material); the minute and meticulous tracings of Conrad’s every movement by Norman Sherry, who not only told us when Conrad was in, say, Bangkok, but on which side of which streets he walked along; the more contentious but informative work of Jerry Allen; the Jungian account of Conrad by Gustav Morf; the psychoanalytic biography by Bernard Meyer; the impeccable edition of Conrad’s letters to Cunninghame Graham by C.T. Watts; certain key articles by Ian Watt – and this is not to mention the many critical works which incorporated biographical material, such as Eloise Knapp Hay’s The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, and Edward Said’s Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, nor to list the various collections of Conrad’s letters which have been published since Jean-Aubry’s Life and Letters. Professor Karl is aware of all this work and he has made extensive use of it – not always acknowledging the source of his information. He also draws heavily on Conrad’s A Personal Record, The Mirror of the Sea, and other pieces, often quoting at length. The result, for the most part, is a somewhat elephantine summary of the work of many scholars. One could fairly say that all the main known material is here, in one form or another, in one book, for the first time. But what, really, is new?

Of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?

‘I take up my pen once more after this long interval to converse with my in many ways twin bro.’ Thus William James to Henry in 1873. We might put against this comments from earlier letters. ‘Our ways are so far apart that I doubt if we ever really get intimate’ (1867). But then again, a year later: ‘I feel as if you were one of the 2 or 3 sole intellectual & moral companions I have.’ Leon Edel, in his majestic biography of Henry James, stressed what he saw as a deep unconscious rivalry between the brothers, which pulled against their more consciously maintained fraternal affection. If there is a fault in that magisterial biography it is that Edel rides that particular Freudian horse too hard.

Was Huckleberry Finn black? Of course he wasn’t. By today’s accredited categories he was poor, male, white trash. So what – besides a desire to be arresting – lies behind Professor Fishkin’s clearly tendentious title? Mark Twain, Clifton Fadiman wrote, is ‘our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Virgil, because Huckleberry Finn is the nearest thing we have to a national epic. Just as the Declaration of Independence … contains in embryo our whole future history as a nation, so the language of Huckleberry Finn (another Declaration of Independence) expresses our popular character, our humour, our slant.’ ‘All modern American literature,’ Hemingway famously announced, ‘comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.’ So if, in one sense or another, Huck was black, then it has to follow that American literature, American literature, is, in one sense or another, also black.’