Books, Arts & Manners: Depression

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume II: 1898-1902, edited by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge, 483 pp., $44.50)

D.H. Lawrence criticized Conrad’s pessimism, his belief that “in this world—as I have known it—we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause, or of a guilt.” When I asked a Polish scholar if he thought it true, as Conrad said in Heart of Darkness, that “We live, as we dream—alone,” he bitterly replied: “For Poles, it is true!” Conrad lamented that “the strain of national worry has weakened the moral fiber” of the Poles, and that his typically “ineradicable tendency to quarrel with fate” condemned him “always to struggle with a moral horror of some sort.”

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume II: 1898-1902, edited by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge, 483 pp., $44.50)

D.H. Lawrence criticized Conrad’s pessimism, his belief that “in this world—as I have known it—we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause, or of a guilt.” When I asked a Polish scholar if he thought it true, as Conrad said in Heart of Darkness, that “We live, as we dream—alone,” he bitterly replied: “For Poles, it is true!” Conrad lamented that “the strain of national worry has weakened the moral fiber” of the Poles, and that his typically “ineradicable tendency to quarrel with fate” condemned him “always to struggle with a moral horror of some sort.”