Autobiography and cultural territories
It should also be noted that in A Personal Record, as in Heart of Darkness, different cultural or national territories are locatable in a kind of chronological order; the spatial difference is often represented as the temporal difference. Poland and England are the two, most important cultural-national territories that appear in A Personal Record, although the boundaries of these territories are equally blurred and ambiguous (Poland is overlapped by the Ukraine and Russia, and England is often synonymous with Britain and the British Empire). Poland represents the past, whereas England indicates the future; between the two lies the vast and seemingly all-inclusive territory of Europe, where both Poland and England are on the margins.
Concerning Poland, Conrad himself tries to dig up not only his personal memories but also memories of the other people and generations – 'Every generation has its memories' (PR 56) as he puts it – as if to reconstruct a trans-historical narrative of the nation through these collective memories. Certainly Poland is a privileged place to which Conrad attaches a great significance; the letter K of the signature J.C.K., affixed to 'A Familiar Preface' to the 1911 version of A Personal Record, can be considered evidence of his suppressed identification with the nation and his patriotic father, Apollo Korzeniowski (GoGwilt 111).
Nevertheless, the Polish episodes in A Personal Record, especially the stories of the legendary patriot 'Nicholas B', Conrad's grand-uncle, reveal the difficulties to define what Poland really is. Nicholas, lieutenant for the French (or 'European') Army during the Napoleonic Wars, suffering from an extreme hunger, has eaten a dog in the Lithuanian forest – notably, it was this last bit of the story, rather than his heroism, that have had the strongest impact on Conrad as an imaginative child. The 'Polish myth' as Avron Fleishman has put it, or the myth of Conrad's homeland which is 'Poland, or more precisely Ukraine' (PR 19), is most effectively disclosed by the last episode about Nicholas B (Fleishman 4-5). On the occasion of the insurrection of 1863, the indifferent or hostile Ukrainians loot his house in his absence. These episodes add further complication and difficulty to Conrad's negotiation with Poland, which turns out to be an ambiguous, heterogeneous, and decentred concept.
Conrad's Poland is also intertwined with the idea of Europe, although the reference to Europe and things European in the main text of A Personal Record is less burdened with the emotional attachment and patriotic sentiment which is so manifest in the 'Author's Note' written in 1919 for the collected edition. In the main text, the adjective 'European' appears, for example, in the description of the uninspiring appearance of a hotel in the Valley of the Reuss which Conrad visited with his tutor in 1873: the hotel 'resembled the house which surmounts the unseaworthy-looking hulls of the toy Noah's Arks, the universal possession of European childhood' (PR 38; emphasis added); Europe's celebrated cultural heritage is here diminished into the toy of Noah's Arks.
In the 'Author's Note', however, Europe clearly embodies positive values. Conrad emphasises there the strong cultural tie between Poland and (Western) Europe: 'Nothing is more foreign than what in the literary world is called Sclavonism, to the Polish temperament' whereas 'the whole Polish mentality, Western in complexion, had received its training from Italy and France and, historically, had always remained, even in religious matters, in sympathy with the most liberal currents of European thought' (PR vi-vii).
This unconditional affirmation of Poland's Western-ness and European-ness (the two terms are used almost synonymously here) is also a gesture by which Conrad tries to exclude 'Sclavonism', or Russia, from the territory of Europe. He famously declares in 'An Autocracy and War' that Russia is 'a yawning chasm open between East and West' (NNL 100). Again in this 'Author's Note', Russia is nominated as the other that should be excluded from Europe. Still, it is impossible to categorise Russia as 'East' and, indeed, the 'yawning chasm' returns inside Europe through the very gesture of exclusion. Also in Under Western Eyes, Conrad struggles to draw a clear boundary between West and non-West, even though the novel inadvertently reveals that Russia is an outside within the West itself.
England as ending
Whereas A Personal Record has multiple beginnings, it may seem to have a definite ending at least. Chapter VII, the last instalment of Reminiscences supplied for the Review's June 1909 issue, closes with the memories of the first English ship he touched, of the first English speech addressed to him, and the most impressive sight of the Red Ensign: 'The Red Ensign – the symbolic, protecting warm bit of bunting flung wide upon the seas, and destined for so many years to be the only roof over my head' (PR 138). The Ensign appears as a dramatic and decisive closure upon the otherwise inconclusive story of one's life.
However, the autobiography was not planned to end as it is. The serialisation for the English Review was interrupted due to Conrad's illness, and afterwards he stopped contributing to the Review because of his disagreements with Ford (see JCC 349). He was thinking of extending the autobiography for a future publication (CL4 308); as a matter of fact, he did not write any more of it apart from two prefaces. In a letter to Ford (dated 31 July 1909), Conrad tries to justify the ending, insisting that it fits his overall design of the text (then called Some Reminiscences): 'It expresses perfectly my purpose of treating the literary life and the sea-life on parallel lines with a running reference to my early years'; moreover, 'It begins practically with the first words of appreciation of my writing I ever heard and ends with the first words ever addressed to me personally in the English tongue' (CL4 263).
Thus Conrad suggests that for him becoming a writer amounts to becoming a writer of the English language; the autobiography of a writer which constitutes the 'first volume' of the Reminiscences, is deliberately linked to that of an 'English' sailor, the 'second volume'. The forced and forceful ending allows us to read the entire text as the celebration of England and its language.
The English language, as well as England, is a recurrent and obviously important topic in Conrad's autobiography. Special (if slightly ironical) emphasis is put on his first contact with the language, spoken by the two British engineers he meets in Switzerland during the 1873 tour: 'I could listen my fill to the sounds of the English language as far as it is used at a breakfast-table by men who do not believe in wasting many words on the mere amenities of life' although one of the engineers speaks 'with a strong Scotch accent' (PR 39).
Zdzisław Najder argues that although outwardly he maintained that the idea of writing an autobiography came from Ford, Conrad had a strong motivation to write an account of his life. Najder suggests that Conrad wanted to counter-attack Robert Lynd's review published in the Daily News in August 1908. Lynd criticised his 'choice' to write in English instead of Polish, insisting that a writer 'who ceases to see the world coloured by his own language – for language gives colour to thoughts and things in a way that few people understand – is apt to lose the concentration and intensity of vision without which the greatest literature cannot be made' (JCC 341). Indeed, Chapter VI, the second chapter of the Review version's 'second volume', opens with an allusion to Robert Lynd as 'that robust man' who 'leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden' (PR 107).
Throughout the autobiography Conrad somehow attempts to prove that English is the language of his destiny. Ironically, in order to refute Lynd's linguistic nationalism, Conrad resorts to similar mythologising of the English language. At the end of the second examination for the British Merchant Service, recounted in the latter half of Chapter VI, he declares to the examiner: 'I had thought to myself that if I was to be a seaman then I would be a British seaman and no other' (119).
This is followed by a lengthy recollection of his initiation into the sea, where he declares: 'what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly true. Already the determined resolve, that 'if a seaman, then an English seaman', was formulated in my head though, of course, in the Polish language' – this is because 'I did not know six words of English' (122). In the 'Author's Note' Conrad goes as far as to insist: 'my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born' (v), trying to discard the legendary story, spread by Hugh Clifford, that as for his literary medium he made a deliberate choice between French and English.6
The nationalist sentiment for England and its language may also be considered the last resort from the danger of total disintegration of his self into 'all sorts of places'. Books maybe written in all sorts of places, but from now on he must write his own books in England; England thus becomes the metaphor of his unified 'European' and 'Western' self. England as ending can be seen as the moment of a wish-fulfilment.
Most importantly, however, the entire text of A Personal Record defies all the expectations of this happy ending; the text tells us that England as ending is still a temporary arrangement and is not the definitive meaning of Conrad's life. Things English are not all as awe-inspiring as the Ensign; another emblematic figure of England, appearing in the middle of the text, is the 'unforgettable Englishman' he meets in Switzerland in 1873, who is 'clad in a knickerbocker suit' and 'wore short socks under his laced boots' (40). Despite his inadequate appearance this English man is thought to be 'the ambassador of my future' (41).
Also, there is a sequence of episodes, which concerns Conrad's first encounter with English literature, in which the 'future' England indeed meets the past Poland. Those episodes appear in Chapter IV. He tries to recollect what he was reading on the evening before he began to write Almayer's Folly, and thinks it might have been one of Anthony Trollope's novels. Trollope is 'one of the English novelists whose works I read for the first time in English' (PR 71).
Yet this is by far not his first contact with English literature since he had also read the works of 'men of European reputation' in translation before he could read them in English. He then claims that his first introduction to English literature was Nicholas Nickleby, which amazed him by the novel's near-perfect translatability into Polish, that 'how well Mrs. Nickleby could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in that language'.
However, immediately after this remark he admits he is wrong, and reveals that the very first work of English literature he read was actually the manuscript of The Two Gentlemen of Verona translated by his father. According to the information given by Conrad himself, the incident happens during the family's exile in Russia, less than a year after his mother's death, when he is eight years old and is living 'on the outskirts of the Town of T - ' (PR 71). One afternoon he is caught by his father while sitting at his writing-table and reading the manuscript; however, his father does not reprimand him but tells him simply to read the page aloud. Through this incident he earns 'the right to some latitude in my relations with his writing-table' (72).
The episode, albeit evasively, reveals the irony that Conrad's introduction to English literature might possibly trace back to its Polish translation, and finally to his father Apollo, whose writing-table could signify another beginning of Conrad's own literary career. In this last episode, Conrad significantly rediscovers Polish literature symbolised by his father's writing-table through his acquaintance with English literature; the ending is now self-declaredly pointing to the beginning. We may consider that for Conrad, Europe, or the West, amounts to the vastly open, and yet infinitely closed space created by this temporal circularity between past and future, the space called 'all sorts of places' that may contain Russia, the African continent, and Asia, where it is still possible that books are written.
Conclusion
As we have been observing so far, Conrad's autobiographical writing utilises the trope of 'Europe as autobiography' or 'the West as autobiography' as late twentieth-century theories of autobiography do. However, 'Europe' in A Personal Record, unlike in Gusdorf's and Olney's theories, does not necessarily connote unity and autonomy. Rather, the autobiography explores ambivalence and self-contradiction within the trope itself – the ambivalence repressed but inherently present in Gusdorf's 'colonialist' metaphor, and only partially revealed in Olney's fusionist argument.
It is true that the (western) European identity may to some extent serve to unify his multiple self-images by defining and excluding what is not Europe (e.g., Russia). And yet, none of those metaphors of the self – 'Europe', 'West', 'Poland', or 'England' – can finally constitute a singular, linear narrative, or a narrative with a singular beginning and a definite ending. Instead they overlap, conflict, and intersect with each other; the most convincing image of Conrad is evoked only through such plural and inconclusive narratives, the image described by Said as follows: 'an overwhelmingly untidy existence as a French-speaking, self-exiled, extremely articulate Pole, who had been a sailor and was now, for reasons not quite clear to him, a writer of so-called adventure stories' (JCFA 4).