These days I get most of my social interactions from listening to other people's medical histories while sitting in doctors' or dentists' waiting rooms. Today was no different as I sat amongst a pretty sorry-looking lot waiting for my favourite phlebotomist to draw some blood, and later only half-listened to other people's teething problems in the up-market reception lounge of the Tidy Tooth dental surgery.
I only half-listened because, before entering the surgery, I had spied a "Street Library" across the road which, amongst the usual forgettable trash, housed a copy of Maya Jasanoff's "The Dawn Watch - Joseph Conrad in a Global". As a lifelong Joseph Conrad fan, I have read all of his books as well as several of his biographies, and had for some time considered ordering a copy of Maya Jasonoff's book. And here it was!
"The Dawn Watch”" is the most vivid and suggestive biography of Conrad I have ever read. Yet it covers only a part of his life. Or maybe I should say that it skips over a lot, that it barely touches many of the things that fill most other biographies. Maya Jasanoff finds little to note in the daily course of Conrad’s work as a writer, little to say about his perpetual wrestle with English, his third language; and little reason to speculate about his poor sales. We learn nothing, as well, about the nervous breakdowns that followed the completion of such masterpieces as “Under Western Eyes” (1911). There’s not much on his wife and children, his friendships or his gout. What remains is what makes him matter: the experiences that made it possible for Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, the refugee son of a Polish political prisoner, to become first an English sea captain, and then a novelist called Joseph Conrad.
I don't remember all that much of what happened while I sat in that dentist's chair, but he does want me back on Wednesday, 22nd January.
