Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives

by Frederick R. Karl

Book by Karl, Frederick Robert

Genres: Biography, Literary Criticism, 20th Century

1008 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Along with his biographies, Frederick Karl wrote several volumes of literary criticism, among them American Fictions: 1940-1980. He also was general editor and volume co-editor of the Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, five volumes of which have appeared. He taught at City College of New York, Columbia, and NYU. Karl died in 2004.

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frederick R. Karl's "Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives" is comprised of 913 large pages of dense text that is badly written and painful to read. Despite the author's extensive research, the book is a tremendous disappointment. Something better might have emerged. Karl claims to have been the first biographer to have had access to Conrad's complete correspondence including the letters written in Polish that Conrad exchanged with his family members.
Indeed, the best part of the book is devoted to Konrad's youth. Karl offers much insight on Conrad's father Apollo Korzeniowski who was a writer and an insurrectionary in the Russian portion of Poland. Karl situates Apollo in a literary movement that he refers to as Polish Messianism (which includes works such as "Dziady" by Adam Michiewicz, "Nie-Boska komedia" by Zygmunt Krasiński and "Kordian" by Julius Slowacki) . In 1862 Apollo was arrested. He and his family were then exiled to a remote area in Russia where the unhealthy conditions contributed to death by tuberculosis of his mother in 1865 and of Apollo, his father in 1869. Conrad would then be raised by his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski who for the rest of his life would remind Conrad that his father had been overly idealistic and highly irresponsible.
While Conrad definitely had a nightmarish childhood and adolescence, Karl devotes far too much space throughout the entire book speculating on the nature of Conrad's psychological trauma. Karl's text often seems far removed from Conrad and his work. One example of this dreadful tendency reads as follows:
"Of interest to us is Jung's analysis of two basic artistic types in 'Psychology and Literature,' for we can find in Jung's distinctions a way of dealing with Conrad and his careers. Jung speaks of the 'personalistic' or psychological artist who attempts to describe human destiny and fate in fairly straightforward terms of experience and emotions. ... The second type Jung discusses is the visionary artist (the category to which Conrad belongs). Essentially, the second type, the visionary artist, must confront intense anarchic elements in himself." (pp. 193-194)
Beyond the bizarre psychological theorizing, it can be said that Karl's book is filled with the most appalling purple prose to wit: "These comments are more than fin de siècle weariness or Weltschmerz; they are more than the traditionally gloomy Slavic soul. ... Conrad was undergoing an internal upheaval." (p. 314-351)
Karl writes at excessive length about Conrad's relations with his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski and his agent John Pinter. Conrad's correspondence with both men appears to have contained primarily pleas for money.
Although Karl gives his reader too many pages about the personal weaknesses of his subject, he occasionally makes some worthwhile points . He notes that Conrad felt himself keenly to be a Polish Nobleman. It as an article of faith that Poland was part of Western Europe (by virtue of its Roman Catholicism and education system which emphasized the Latin authors.) As such Conrad did not have to write in Polish to be a Polish patriot, he needed rather to write in the classic western tradition.
Karl identifies Conrad was a symbolist and argues that his great achievement was to bring the sensitivity of French symbolism (Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Baudelaire) to English culture. Karl presents Conrad as a contemporary of John Galsworthy, Henry James, Ford Maddox Ford, and H.G. Wells; and as a precursor of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
Karl also reveals the unique and penetrating nature of Joseph Conrad on British imperialism. On page 493, he quotes a letter that Conrad sent on October 26, 1899 to Edward Sanderson a prominent anti-war activist opposed to the Boer War: "I hope that the British victory will be crushing from the first - on the same principle that if a murder is being done in the next room and you can't stop it you wish the head of the victim to be bashed in forthwith and the whole thing over for the sake of your own feelings."
There are some good passages in " Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives" but the reader has to sift through much chaff to find the wheat.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

If it's any indication as the depth of this work, Conrad doesn't get on a goddamn boat until page 150.
This highlights the main unattraction of this work for me: its sheer voluminousness. I'm sure this is considered the 'weightiest' work on Conrad, and it bears parallels to Frank's masterful multi-volume work on Dostoevsky, but whereas Frank shifts easily and nicely between life and work, Karl tends to get ensconced in too much psychology, interpretation, and intensive in-readings throughout. The work would've been more nicely balanced if the works were taken as Conrad produced them and then linked back to relevant portions of his biography, but Karl takes the weird route of leaping into those works from the get-go, so there is a lot of confusing chronological back-and-forth before Conrad is even born!
The sheer level of detail boggles the mind and is intimidating and overwhelming. Perhaps the Conrad fanatic (Conradicals?) will find this more entertaining and engrossing, but if you're simply interested in the facts of Conrad's life and even some succinct into how his life at sea, his depression and, most engagingly here, his Polishness, influenced his work, you might want to find something of more brevity.

[Sigo Paolini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book was filled with one disappointment after another, and not from Karl but from Conrad himself. The myths about Conrad are large, larger than I realized, and going through this heavy tome 998 pages including the bibliography and index is a tremendous job of reading and learning about one petty man. If you are a Conradophile and believe the legends and rubbish about his writing, you will be disappointed and angry. How dare he? Well that's an honest biographer's job -- to demythologize.
We learn that Chance was his most popular work — I had never read this one though had many other "great works" so I got it from archive. The now famous stories, Lord Jim, Darkness barely got on the public radar and here's a dizzy -- he was furious he could not make more money from stories that did not sell. Hey Joe, aren't we all?
Karl spends a lot of time building up his case, documenting the myths and where they stem from, and then destroys them. Frank Coppola, who does a lot of his own mythologizing did a great job with Joe as did John Ford with Typhoon, but the legend is not the man and Apocalypse Now is a ponderous 4 hour movie that meanders and never gets to a point. Karl documents each book and their reception -- a major reason for the 1000 page tome. If you are interested in how a writers mind works, the book does an excellent job. If all you want is the bare facts of Conrad's life, read Wikipedia.
Lots of photos and discussion of how his literary compatriots are all but forgotten, too. Ford Madoxx Ford? If Angelina hadn't named one of her kids after him, he wouldn't be in the press at all.
It is rather saddening to learn, Conrad was not a great Polish patriot, did not care a fig about his homeland, was not a religious Catholic but identified with the Slavic race, and not Poland in particular, though he does call himself a "Pole", but remember he was born in the Ukraine and not Poland so he has a more pan-Slavic view of people. Why did the run away to the sea? So he could get away from Poland: he has no great love of the sea, just a massive escape where he met a lot of people, many who show up time and again in his works and he enjoyed.
Why writing? He had no other trade and needed money. No great search for the truth, no stirring desire to write, at least in the beginning. As time went on, the Modern Age get him speculating of what was happening and these dovetails in with his father the Polish Patriot and his work against the Russian Invasion. This is where the bio really gets interesting, because it is SECRET AGENT, the best thing he wrote and the inspiration for the Unabomber and most terrorists as well, where he comes into his own -- previously he was copying Dana & Melville and doing a lousy job. So if you don't know a Secret Agent, read it's a great book. Hitchcock btw, flubbed the movie.

[Paul Leonard]

Another one of my dad's books. This has really old newspaper clippings stuck inside, presumably by Pat Leonard the first.

[Kate]

Mentioned by James Atlas in The Shadow in the Garden: a Biographers tale