Pole with British Tar

THE SEA DREAMER (321 pp.)--Gerard Jean-Aubry--Doubleday ($4.50).

While academic critics have been busy for a generation flensing Melville's whale and rendering it into midnight oil, they have neglected another great writer who made the sea his theater and the deck of a ship his stage. Joseph Conrad--monocled, with salt-rimed beard, at the wheel of a clipper--is too romantic a figure for modern fashion in literary heroes. Yet in his work, Conrad was not a romantic any more than Melville was a mere spinner of "sea yarns" or Shakespeare only a writer of historical pageants. His themes were the classic themes of character and fate, and his genius made the ships on which he sailed as tight as the "wooden O" of the Globe Theater.

In this full-dress biography, the late French Critic Gerard Jean-Aubry, editor of Conrad's letters, has taken soundings along the well-charted course of the Conrad legend. The legend is well known-- the young Polish exile who began to learn English from Lowestoft sailors at 21, became a ship's master at 29, voyaged to the Caribbean and the China Seas, and who, at 36, took to the shore and, despite poverty, neglect and illness, made himself a master novelist. It is all true. Jean- Aubry, who spent 20 years writing this book, fills in the blank spaces in the legend and makes the incredible seem necessary and inevitable. Although stiffly translated from the French, the book succeeds in spelling out the alphabet of an artist's language from his first to last sentence.

Private Worm. Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski was born 100 years ago in eastern Poland, which then, as now, was under Russian domination. The church was harassed; even the language was under attack. Conrad left Poland at 16. At Marseilles, he became a bit of a heller on a -L-3OO-a-year allowance from an indulgent uncle. Still in his teens, he ran guns for the Carlist forces in Spain, ran into debt, had an affair with a mysterious femme fatale called Rita. An absurd expatriate from North Carolina named Captain Blunt shot and wounded Conrad in a duel over that lady's honor. For no better reason than that he liked the cut of an English jib, Conrad took off for life with the British merchant service.

He was a dandy at sea and ashore, with his monocle and checked pants and exquisite conversation making him as rare as an albatross among the lumbering illiterates who chose to go to sea. Through a fierce exercise of will and pride he made himself a ship's master, but older preoccupations deep in his nature would not be denied. He spoke of the "private gnawing worm" which ate at his childhood. The worm was an unshakable sense of doom that haunted him, as did the stern themes of duty and responsibility. At the end of the world, on Borneo, he ran across a half-caste called Almayer who belonged to no world. Thus with Almayer's Folly began his great work. Almost compulsively, Conrad wrote between watches in his cabin aboard the Torrens, a crack Aus tralian-run clipper. The book was accepted, and he never sailed again.

He kept on writing. An Outcast of the Islands was a tale of progressive moral ruin, told with a ruthless Dostoevskian logic up to a point of no return. Lord Jim, which read like a boy's story, was actually a painful parable of the penance a man must do to reclaim honor lost in one moment of cowardice. In Heart of Darkness, the most enigmatic of his novels, Conrad used as background his dismal experiences in the Belgian Congo. Its protagonist Kurtz is a portrait of a man whose pure will-to-power has squandered itself hopelessly. In the epigraph to The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot saluted this defeat: "Mistah Kurtz--he dead," quoted Eliot, recognizing that no man is more hollow than the defeated egotist.

Voice of Tragedy. Conrad wrote at a time when class distinctions between men were becoming blurred. It was to his advantage as a writer, for he saw men dressed for their roles in the sharp hierarchy of a ship's company. Writing was agony to him, and he was paid only -L-20 for his first book. He was immobilized by gout, but the fancy cooking of his wife, plain Jessie George, says Author Jean-Aubry in a very French aside, made things bearable. Isolated in his cottage in Kent, where he could sniff the sea, Conrad sometimes despaired of his writing (he thought of becoming a pearl fisherman or a Suez Canal pilot), but in the end his work was recognized for what it was--amid the sentimental afterglow of the Victorian Age, only he and Thomas Hardy spoke with the cold, severe voice of tragedy. In 1923 he traveled to the U.S. to see his publisher, whom he called Doubleday Effendi, was lavishly feted, but remained withdrawn. He died one year later, "a Polish gentleman soaked in British tar." Conrad himself best summed up his attitude toward his work in a letter:

"The earth is a temple where there is going on a mystery play, childish and poignant, ridiculous and awful enough, in all conscience ... If I have been amused or indignant, I've neither grinned nor gnashed my teeth. In other words, I've tried to write with dignity, not out of regard for myself, but for the sake of the spectacle, the play with an obscure beginning and an unfathomable denouement."

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