Citario. Derived from the Latin citāre (to quote) plus the suffix -ārium (repository), similar to bestiary. A 21st-century neologism, it emerged among the Spanish-speaking scholars of Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval books of commonplaces (such as those by Erasmus) and proto-examples from the 19th century, such as “Familiar Quotations”. This “Citario Conrad” celebrates the 168th birthday of the Polish-British author with these observations, judgements and critical readings that orbit his work, functioning as a small cabinet of resonances: each quotation opens a passageway to the moral shadow, the inner journey and the tragic lucidity that marked his writing.
A work of divine power, supreme wisdom and, curiously, first love, Dante’s Inferno, the most famous in literature, is a penal establishment in the shape of an inverted pyramid, populated by ghosts from Italy and unforgettable hendecasyllables. Far more terrifying is that of Heart of Darkness, the African river that Captain Marlow travels up, between banks of ruins and jungles, which may well be a projection of the abominable Kurtz, who is the goal. In 1889, Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski travelled up the Congo to Stanley Falls; in 1902, Joseph Conrad, now famous, published Heart of Darkness in London, perhaps the most intense of the stories that human imagination has ever crafted. This story is the first in this volume. The second, The End of the Tether, is no less tragic.
The key to the story is a fact that we will not reveal and that the reader will gradually discover. There are already clues in the first few pages.
H.L. Mencken, who is certainly not one to lavish praise, claims that The End of the Tether is one of the most splendid narratives, long or short, new or old, in English literature. He compares the two texts in this book to the musical compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach.
According to H.G. Wells, Conrad’s spoken English was very clumsy. His writing, which is what matters, is admirable and flows with delicate mastery.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness with the noose around his neck’
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I think many of us have been drawn to Conrad by a recurring love of adventure writers, but not only adventure writers: those for whom adventure serves to say new things about men, and for whom vicissitudes and extraordinary countries serve to give more evidence to their relationship with the world. In my ideal library, Conrad has his place alongside the ethereal Stevenson, who is nevertheless almost his opposite, in terms of both life and style. And yet more than once I have been tempted to move him to another shelf — less within reach — that of the analytical, psychological novelists, the Jameses, the Prousts, the tireless recoverers of any crumb of forgotten sensation; or even to that of the more or less damned aesthetes, in the manner of Poe, pregnant with transposed loves, if their dark concerns in the face of an absurd universe do not destine them to the shelf—still unsorted and unsorted—of the “writers of crisis”.
On the other hand, I have always had him there, within reach, with Stendhal, who is so unlike him, with Nievo, who has nothing to do with him. Because although I have never believed in many of his ideas, I have always believed that he was a good captain and that he put into his stories something that is so difficult to write: the sense of integration into the world conquered in practical life, the sense of a man who fulfils himself in what he does, in the morality implicit in his work, the ideal of knowing how to rise to the occasion, both on the deck of a sailing ship and on the page.
Italo Calvino, ‘Conrad’s Captains’ (Why Read the Classics)
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Conrad was living in Kent at the time, in Capel House, a small country house on the outskirts of Ashford; it was there that he welcomed us. I stayed with him for a few days; I returned to Capel House the following year and a warm and lively friendship soon developed between us.
Conrad did not willingly talk about his past life; a kind of modesty, a loss of interest in himself, held him back and prevented him from confiding. His memories as a sailor had no meaning for him other than as material to be manipulated, and as this was mixed with a certain artistic requirement, forcing him to transpose, depersonalise and distance himself, through fiction, from everything that touched him closely, both in his books and in his conversation, he was particularly awkward at direct storytelling; only in fiction did he feel at ease.
The sea was to him like an old abandoned lover, of whom only an engraving or the image of a magnificent sailing ship evoked a nostalgic memory in the antechamber of Capel House.
‘Don’t look at that,’ he said, dragging me into the living room while I contemplated that symbol of his first loves. ‘Let’s talk about literature.’
Conrad had married, “behaved himself”; he lived with his wife and children, for books and for books. How well he knew our authors! He admired Flaubert and Maupassant, whom he willingly defended.
He especially appreciated our critics, and among them all, Jules Lemaître. He hardly considered Barrès; it is easy to imagine what this perfect uprooted man might think of theories of uprootedness. As he did not express an opinion on any subject without absolute competence, his judgements were very categorical; but, as they coincided with mine, the conversation continued without hindrance. There was only one point on which we could not agree: the mere mention of Dostoevsky made him turn pale. I believe that some journalists, through clumsy comparisons, ignited his Polish irritation against the great Russian; with whom he nevertheless bore secret similarities, but whom he cordially detested and about whom it was impossible to speak in his presence without rekindling his vehement indignation. I would have liked to know what he reproached in his books, but I could never get more than vague imprecations out of him.
André Gide, ‘Joseph Conrad’
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A few weeks ago, I received a pamphlet from 1932 published by the International Mark Twain Society and written by Joseph Conrad’s widow from a second-hand bookseller. Conrad had married her late in life, at the age of thirty-eight, when Jessie had just turned twenty-three. That surely explains (along with his stern beard) why, during their honeymoon on the French coast, a young guest at the hotel where they were staying, who sat next to the newlywed at the long communal dining table, was overly attentive to her day after day, arousing the writer’s suspicion and his wife’s discomfort. Until finally the Frenchman decided to approach Conrad and, after bowing, asked him: ‘Sir, would you grant me the honour of courting your daughter?’ It was the first time Jessie Conrad had to restrain her husband from immediately challenging him to a duel. From the two books she wrote about him after his death, it is clear that she was a sensible woman with a sense of humour, and that she had loved him very much.
In this rare pamphlet, she explains that her admiration for Conan Doyle was enormous, but that it would have been complete if the creator of Sherlock Holmes had not bothered her with a letter in 1929. It is well known, and it is a pity, that such a great writer, in the last years of his life — he died in 1930 — became interested in the occult and spiritualism and, from what follows, must have become a nuisance. Without having had any previous contact, Conan Doyle wrote to her to say that he was sure that her late husband—Conrad had died in 1924—wanted to get in touch with her, adding that this was not easy for the dead without the help of the living, as they were still subject to the same laws as us. According to him, Conrad had seen ‘his opportunity at Mrs Dean’s house’ (presumably a medium) and ‘put his face on the tray’, which, incidentally, is a little gruesome. Later, Sir Arthur continued, he had held a séance “with Van Reuter and his mother”, who knew nothing about Conrad. Through the medium (it is not clear whether it was Van Reuter or the mother), Conrad had expressed his wish that Conan Doyle finish a book “on French history” that he had left unfinished. ‘None of us knew of the existence of such a book. After some investigation, I discovered that it did exist, but that it had apparently already been finished by someone else. So I did no more.” According to Jessie, Sir Arthur was very misinformed: not only would Conrad never have been tempted by such a vague subject, but above all, he would never have asked anyone, not even a distinguished colleague, to finish a work of his for him. The end of the letter was the worst: ‘You have an obligation to go to a good medium and give him the opportunity,’ he said, and enclosed the addresses of a few well-gifted ones.
Conrad’s widow added that three other people had tried to pass on ‘messages’ from her husband later on, which she had flatly refused to receive.
Javier Marías, ‘The Haunted Spirit of Conrad’
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Joseph Conrad is, it must be said right away, a brilliant novelist, one of the highest peaks of English literature, and at the same time an uncomfortable writer in that privileged Olympus. He is different from his contemporaries, and also from his predecessors, because of the tonal opulence of his language, his treatment of his themes, and the way he looks at the world and at men. He is a moralist who is repulsed by sermons and moralising. He is the author of extraordinary works of adventure in which these adventures ultimately become inner experiences, journeys into the depths of the night, exploits that take place in the most secret recesses of the soul. He is a profound connoisseur of the immense map formed by the British Empire, and a witness whose gaze lays bare any colonising enterprise. He is a ‘rare’ in the most radical sense of the word. A novelist outside any school, he enriched English literature with a handful of exceptional novels, including Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, Victoria, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Shadow Line, and this Heart of Darkness, which some consider his masterpiece.
Coming to Conrad marks one of the unforgettable moments that a reader can experience. Returning to him is certainly an even more resonant experience. It means setting foot once again on an unstable land of wonders, losing oneself in the various layers of meaning that these pages offer, prostrating oneself before a language constructed by superb rhetoric, agitated, when the author sees fit, by bursts of corrosive irony. Above all, it means encountering once again the Great Themes, those found in the Greek tragedies, in Dante, in the Elizabethan playwrights, in Cervantes, Milton and Tolstoy. Conrad’s work presents itself to us as monumental, conclusive and all-encompassing, and the reader will reach the last lines of each of his novels breathlessly, only to discover that what seemed to be a solid mausoleum is rather a fabric that can be made and unmade, that its character is conjectural, that nothing has been conclusive, that the story he has just read can be deciphered in many different ways, all of them, admittedly, bleak.
Sergio Pitol, ‘Conrad, Marlow, Kurz’
