Going About: Conrad's Progress in A Personal Record

Abstract

This essay considers Conrad’s attempt in A Personal Record to tell his own story – and particularly the transition from sailing to fiction-writing – in such a way as to emphasise the continuities of a life that could well be seen as a series of radical evasions, if not downright denials and betrayals. Early life in Poland, service at sea around the world, and the career of a writer of fiction in England (and English) – it is a polytropic life, of dramatic swerves, yet it mattered a good deal to Conrad to assert that the sailor had not in a true sense abandoned his Polish self, and that the writer of fiction kept his fidelity to the strong values he had found in maritime service. A Personal Record is an apology: it repudiates confession, but does so with a kind of narrative stammer. Far more digressive than progressive, it looks shifty. It seems incapable of being straightforward: it proceeds in a series of fantastic indirections. But this is not simply evasion. There is more than one kind of faithfulness, and sometimes to get from there to here, it is necessary for a vessel to “go about”. This essay argues that, in the uses of indirection and digression and even prevarication, Conrad’s method of going about makes a virtue of necessity, and that the form of A Personal Record can be seen as a comic enactment of a principle of Conrad’s modernism.