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Nine years ago the writer had occasion to make a hasty will. Since one of the provisions of this document appointed Conrad the writer’s literary executor we fell to discussing the question of literary biographies in general and our own in particular. We hit, as we generally did, very quickly upon a formula, both having a very great aversion from the usual official biography for men of letters whose lives are generally uneventful. But we agreed that should a writer’s life have interests beyond the mere writing upon which he had employed himself this life might well be the subject of a monograph. It should then be written by an artist and be a work of art. To write: “Joseph Conrad Kurzeniowski was born on such a day of such a year in the town of ‘So and So’ in the Government of Kieff” and so to continue would not conduce to such a rendering as this great man desired. So, here, to the measure of the ability vouchsafed, you have a projection of Joseph Conrad as, little by little, he revealed himself to a human being during many years of close intimacy. It is so that, by degrees, Lord Jim appeared to Marlowe, or that every human soul by degrees appears to every other human soul. For, according to our view of the thing, a novel should be the biography of a man or of an affair, and a biography whether of a man or of an affair should be a novel, both being, if they are efficiently performed, renderings of such affairs as are our human lives.

This then is a novel, not a monograph; a portrait, not a narration: for what it shall prove to be worth, a work of art, not a compilation. It is conducted exactly along the lines laid down by us, both for the novel which is biography and for the biography which is a novel. It is the rendering of an affair intended first of all to make you see the subject in his scenery. It contains no documentation at all; for it no dates have been looked up, even all the quotations but two have been left unverified, coming from the writer’s memory. It is the writer’s impression of a writer who avowed himself impressionist. Where the writer’s memory has proved to be at fault over a detail afterwards out of curiosity looked up, the writer has allowed the fault to remain on the page; but as to the truth of the impression as a whole the writer believes that no man would care—or dare—to impugn it. It was that that Joseph Conrad asked for: the task has been accomplished with the most pious scrupulosity. For something human was to him dearer than the wealth of the Indies.

Guermantes, Seine et Marne, August. Bruges, October 5th, 1924.