Contemporaries and Others: Sightings by and of Conrad

In Chap. 3 , “Contemporaries and Others,” sightings are of some ante-contemporaries and contemporaries in both literature and life who influenced Conrad, and in turn were influenced by him, or whose concerns and identities were merely congruent with his: Matthew Arnold and his way of “seeing” in Culture and Anarchy; in The Other Conrad, the Légion Étrangère’s Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Conrad; Molière’ George Dandin, the source of Teodor Bobrowski’s exasperated eponymous epithet for his nephew Conrad; his quondam collaborator Ford Madox Ford seen in his self-inflated glory, edited by Michael Killigrew in Your Mirror on My Times; Barbara Belford’s account of Violet Hunt’s personal experience of Conrad and Ford in The Flurried Years & Violet; Ed Caesar in his The Moth and the Mountain, sensing the essence of lone dreamers Conrad and adventurer Maurice Wilson; and Conrad’s writerly influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald made clear in The Last Tycoon. Concluding the chapter, Derek Lundy’s The Way of a Ship recreates Conrad’s age of sail. Profoundly influenced by Conrad, this remarkable work sheds a light of historical maritime practice, lore and usage on our understanding of Conrad’s tales of the sea.