Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson G. W. Stephen Brodsky (bio) Robert Hampson. Joseph Conrad. London: Reaktion Books, 2020. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781789143071. Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson adds lustre to a collection of ninety-eight critical works at its date of publication (2020) in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives Series, devoted to “the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period” (pre-title page). This highly readable volume accomplishes an interpretive feat in just over two hundred pages that much larger critical biographies, such as Frederick Karl’s formidable Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979), accomplish in over a thousand. This enviable gift of Hampson’s is no less than we have come to expect from his pen. From the outset, elements of Conrad’s life and literature in their historical settings are integrated in ways imparting to the reader a common-sense wholeness. Early in chapter 2, about Conrad’s maritime career, for instance, Hampson approaches Heart of Darkness by way of noting poignantly that Henry Morton Stanley returned from Africa via Marseilles in 1877, in Conrad’s [End Page 95] “murkiest period,” thus inferentially drawing a line from Conrad’s boyhood romance with Burton and Speke’s accounts of African exploration through his despondency leading to his purportedly deliberate botching of a suicide attempt the following year (Hampson 37),1 and on to his disillusion and depression in the Congo a dozen years later. We find these and other kinds of linkages—international affairs and publishing history—throughout this exceptional critical biography. THE AUTHOR The authorship of Joseph Conrad is signal enough that it is both required reading for Conrad specialists and an intriguing entry-level text for the Conradian tyro: Professor Robert Hampson, FEA, FRSA,2 Professor Emeritus, Royal Holloway, University of London, and currently Research Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, is author of three previous works of similar merit: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Macmillan, 1992); Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Palgrave, 2000); and Conrad’s Secrets (Palgrave, 2013). His work has been described in acclaimed critical sources as “striking and inventive” and “an indispensable resource for specialists and enthusiasts alike.”3 Through the 1990s until the present Robert Hampson has become, as it were, a household name among Conrad specialists. He has edited and co-edited works by Conrad, was editor of Conradiana for seven years, and in 2017 was awarded the Ian P. Watt Prize for Excellence for his lifetime’s work on Conrad. THE VISUALS Our first encounter with the paperback version of Joseph Conrad is the cover’s photo-portrait of Conrad, familiar to Conradians as originating in 1904 in his forty-seventh year, still dark-bearded and with the eyes of the sea dreamer late come from his true home afloat. Not yet a decade from the seas, he remained largely unsung and undiscovered by the popular readership.4 A frontispiece shows Conrad nine years later in 1913, the grey-bearded mature artist, posed self-assuredly at his desk as if interrupted in writing a line of Chance, the book published that year which ended his obscurity and thrust him into the forefront of British novelists with Henry James and H. G. Wells. Most of the other visuals are known to Conrad scholars, but whereas they commonly appear in glossy pages bunged into the center of biographies, Hampson has judiciously had them placed appropriately where they unobtrusively illuminate the particular subject of the moment. [End Page 96] THE STRUCTURE As to the external mechanical aspects of the book, presumably the editors of the Reaktion series impose house protocols. Thus, for instance, Joseph Conrad contains a Select Bibliography of Conrad’s works at the end (202), but no chronology and, regrettably, no index. Oddly, the Acknowledgements are at the last. But assuredly these lacunae and eccentricities are not by the author’s design. More important, though, is the internal structure of Joseph Conrad, unique among critical biographies, that imparts coherence of meaning to Conrad’s life and work.5 Hampson’s structural apparatus throughout matches Conrad’s life experience to the literature, to “make us see,” so to speak, how...