CONRAD AND ENGLISH

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 22, 26 January 1924, Page 17

CONRAD AND ENGLISH

AN AUTHOR'S CHOICE OF LAN- ■■-.• - GUAGE. '

The Conrad manuscripts sold in November for. 110,000 dollars are in English, because Mr. Conrad fell m love with our language, writes a correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian." It has been said that when he first determined to write a novel he hesitated between French and English as his medium.' In "A Personal Record" Mr. Conrad declares that the story of his hesitation is based on his remark to Sir Hugh Clifford that "had I been under the necessity of making a choice between the two I would have. been afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly crystalised ,a's French, though I knew French fairly well ,and was familiar with it from infancy. ■.. .The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption—well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of" the stammering stage _ made me its own so completely that its very idioms, I truly believe, had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character •. • • - if I had not written in English I would not have written at all;" When, as a 1 boy born in a country with no ships and no sea coast, Mr. Conrad made his way to the^sea, he was quite consciously: journeying to England : "In the mystic ordering of common^ events the ambassador of my future" was an Englishman encountered in Switzerland. "He was clad in a Knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore short socks under his laceo. boots, for reasons which, whether hygienic or conscientious, were surely imaginative, his calves, exposed to the public gaze ■ and to the tonic air of high altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the splendour of their marble-like condition ,and the rich tone of youne ivory. . . . The light of a head-

long, exalted satisfaction with the world of men-and the scenery of mountains illuminated, his clean-cut, very red face his short, silver-white whiskers, hi 3 in-nocently-eager and triumphant eyes " This tourist, with his bare calves impressed the Polish boy as an epitome of the England of his dreams. Before he knew six words of Engl^h he. resolved that "if a seaman, then an English seaman." He still thrills with the memory of how, while going out with the pilot-boat from Marseilles, he first touched the side of an English ship.