Conrad Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 77200

Conrad most resists our understanding. There is sense in this. His largest theme is mystery, and the heart of all his greatest work is dark. He understood this early. "Marlow was not typical," we read of the surrogate who narrates the first and most celebrated of his major works; "to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze." An empty center, then, surrounded by mist. I have studied Conrad for years, yet I perpetually feel, as I don't with any other writer, that I am only just scratching the surface. Perhaps my mistake, as Conrad's image suggests, is that I still believe that there is a hard or steady surface to scratch.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

And what is true of the work, as E.M. Forster was the first to point out, is true of the man who made it. "Behind the smoke screen of his reticence there may be another obscurity," Forster wrote, "preceding from ... the central chasm of his tremendous genius." Another enveloping mist, another absent center. Conrad, who lived three lives--Pole, mariner, and writer--devoted the third to writing about the second and erasing the first. But he knew himself too well to believe in self-knowledge. "One's own personality," he wrote, "is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown." His own memoirs are anti-confessional: evasively genial, suspiciously neat, not to be trusted. Conrad did not understand himself, and did not pretend to understand himself, and did not expect to be understood. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire