Global Conrad
You don’t hear very much about gout any more. None of the meat-eating drinkers I know seems to suffer from it, you don’t read about it in the papers, and, unlike consumption or the pox, it doesn’t now appear under another name. You might almost think it vanished along with the rubicund gentleman in knee-breeches whom we imagine as its principal victims, and it therefore comes as a shock, in reading The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, to learn of the degree to which it afflicted that lean and grizzled figure. His attacks were frequent and severe, and though he didn’t have a diagnosis until 1898, when “gout or some other devil” so inflated his wrist that he was unable to write, his legs first began to swell soon after his return from the Congo in 1890. It punctuated book after book, it broke his rhythm and kept him in bed, incapable – or so it seemed to him – of writing anything but one letter of complaint after another. There were other illnesses too. He never fully shook off the malaria he caught in Africa; its recurrent fevers would leave him shouting in Polish. There was dysentery, influenza, angina eventually, and some form of depression almost always, with a full breakdown in 1910 after the completion of Under Western Eyes (published in 1911).
From the opening of Michael Gorra’s recent review-essay in the TLS.
Our spring break is here. I have been celebrating by reading Michael Gorra’s introduction to the new Portable Conrad. (The revised edition includes “The Secret Agent,” “Heart of Darkness,” and “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’” as well as shorter pieces like “Amy Forster” and “The Secret Sharer,” a selection of Conrad’s letters, and his observations on the sinking of the Titanic.) Gorra’s introduction was published some months ago in Hudson Review and is very much worth reading. Michael is someone I have learned from a lot, and he has been a mentor to me. There is immense style in his writing, each review a little gem, intelligently weaving apt quotations and clever insight without breaking into a sweat. Crucially, he is attentive to difficulty, and finds his balance in charting a less easily identifiable area of politics as well as aesthetics. In the introduction to the Penguin volume, for example, he places Chinua Achebe at the center of the new approach to Conrad, and at the same time, attends to more ambiguous and plural strains in the writer’s oeuvre. You can see the same sophistication, and I’d even say freshness, in play in this review of Coetzee’s latest. And here, in the more conventional role of the critic as the well-informed and discriminating reader, is Gorra on Henry James.
In related news, on Friday, April 11, at 7:00 p.m., Bard College will host “Revisiting Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Fiftieth-Year Retrospective,” a panel discussion moderated by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (Dartmouth College) with panelists Chinua Achebe (Bard College), Jesse Weaver Shipley (Bard College), Ifi Amadiume (Dartmouth College), Simon Gikandi (Princeton University), and Christine Griffin (Red Hook High School). Free and open to the public, it will be held in the Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. For more information call 845-758-7900 or go to www.fishercenter.bard.edu.
