Joseph Conrad’s A Personal Record, one hundred years old last month, is out of copyright and out of print. The autobiography of a great modernist, the book exists in a digital version on Amazon and Project Gutenberg but its status otherwise bears out what Conrad himself feared while writing it, that nobody would read his memoirs. “I was told severely that the public would view with displeasure the informal character of my recollections,” he wrote in the book’s hackneyed opening. But the informal character of the book may be what is most appealing for us today: a digressive autobiography about language and writing. Reading it a century after it appeared leaves one with the story not just of the author’s life, but of the hardships that accompany writing in English.
The title may ring familiar. Almost all Conrad’s most famous books, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, mention A Personal Record in their introductions, some in extensive detail. The devoted Conrad reader finds passages that shed light on how his best work was conceived and how he made the remarkable decision, in his thirty second year, to become an English novelist.
