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Bernard Meyer's Joseph Conrad, A Psychoanalytic Biography is a labor of intense and miscroscopic scrutiny, closely followed and argued, of the life and work of the renowned Polish English writer. The courage alone that is demanded of any biographer commands great respect, for a reputable biography is always the product of immense, persevering work, and Meyer's is no exception. He appears to have combed all the existing scholarly and critical writings about his subject, as well as Conrad's entire artistic output and, in his early pages in particular, attempts to untangle, correct, reconcile, and integrate several versions of Conrad's history, from birth to death. Meyer is both helped and hampered in this task by virtue of the now apparent fact that much of Conrad's output is semi-autobiographical, but only partly so. Thankfully, the author does not, for the most part, see himself as a literary critic or judge of taste, and we are spared an amateur's view of the merits of an artist, at least part of whose output lies in the domain of acknowledged genius. The occasional literary judgments that Meyer does make seem perfectly fair.
It is on Conrad's writing career that Meyer focuses greatest attention. Proceeding by the familiar method of studying Conrad's fiction and trying to intercorrelate life history data with the themes, contents, recurrent images and outcomes in the stories, Meyer seeks to provide us reconstructively with a “vision of a [creative] personality” and a deeper understanding of Conrad's art. It happens as a result of this method that this is much less a biography, even in the traditional, non-analytic sense, than a psychodynamic exegesis and chronological catalogue raisonné of Conrad's fiction. Given the relative poverty of extant and agreed-upon biographical data, the writings come to constitute Meyer's major “evidence.” Almost from the first, one senses how naturally a psychoanalyst might