Citation

Steven Brodsky GW. Conradiana 2019; 51(1-2): 1-30.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019)

DOI

10.1353/cnd.2019.0011

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

On the evening of Friday, March 2, 1878, or thereabouts, Joseph Conrad, aged twenty, arguably tried to end his life. His attempt (if even actually made) was almost certainly feigned. Conrad's friend Richard Fecht imputedly came to tea with him and found him wounded. Biographers have marshalled or embellished the few already suspect facts, have made some tendentious conjectures and drawn some provisional conclusions; yet, a corpus of supposition and hearsay has remained unexamined forensically in Conrad scholarship. We may accept Conrad's uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski's word that Fecht sent him a telegram, and that Tadeusz travelled to Marseilles, saw Conrad recuperating and settled his debts. We know this because Tadeusz sent a letter to a friend, Stefan Buszczyński, inventing a fiction that his nephew had been wounded in a duel, to scotch an unspecified rumor; and we know of the letter, because Zdzisław Najder saw and published it in 1957. That is all we know for sure; even Tadeusz's description of the event is provisional. We cannot know if he saw an actual wound, nor if his assessment of Richard Fecht was accurate. Nothing corroborates his belief that anything happened at all. Using information about Conrad's character, circumstances, contextual cultural factors, and modern historiographical, medical, and ballistic forensics, we shall scrutinize the evidence, ending where we began; but en route we may jettison illusion and unwarranted assumptions. © Texas Tech University Press.

Language: en

Keywords

suicide; wound; ballistics; biography; Joseph Conrad; forensics; Marseilles