“Tall, handsome, bearded” Ted Sanderson, wrote biographer Jeffrey Meyers, served as a “prototype” for the titular character in Conrad’s Lord Jim. If Conrad absorbed some of Stevenson’s attributes into Kurtz, it would be just one literary development to come out of the passage of the Torrens. Readers, myself included, tend to wonder about the sources for characters the likes of Kurtz, Sherlock Holmes, and Jay Gatsby-larger-than-life, mysterious, existing on a kind of separate plane-and in doing so we are continuing the quests of the narrators who tried first (Marlow, Watson, and Carraway). Why not consider whether Stevenson’s grandiose island life influenced Conrad’s masterpiece? Since the middle of the 20 th century, the academy has conditioned us to stay grounded within texts and steer clear of writers’ biographies for insights while biographers are often timid about the kind of playful speculation that we can undertake here in Slate. To my knowledge, however, no one has connected the next set of dots, not just from Stevenson’s writing to Conrad’s, but from Stevenson’s Samoan persona to Kurtz. We know that Conrad was an admirer of Stevenson’s work, and in fact that he thought more highly of Stevenson’s South Seas nonfiction writings than of his novels, at least according to Colvin, who knew both men. Meanwhile, scholars have long studied Stevenson’s literary influence on Conrad, in part because both wrote seafaring stories and a torch seemed passed. As early as 1950, Stevenson biographers took notice of Galsworthy and Sanderson’s attempted sojourn to Samoa and their subsequent voyage with Conrad.
0 kommentar(er)
