"Conrad, Joseph - An Outcast Of The Islands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

must have been growing a little tired of them) he pointed out
that there was no need to determine my future absolutely. Then
he added: "You have the style, you have the temperament; why not
write another?" I believe that as far as one man may wish to
influence another man's life Edward Garnett had a great desire
that I should go on writing. At that time, and I may say, ever
afterwards, he was always very patient and gentle with me. What
strikes me most however in the phrase quoted above which was
offered to me in a tone of detachment is not its gentleness but
its effective wisdom. Had he said, "Why not go on writing," it
is very probable he would have scared me away from pen and ink
for ever; but there was nothing either to frighten one or arouse
one's antagonism in the mere suggestion to "write another." And
thus a dead point in the revolution of my affairs was insidiously
got over. The word "another" did it. At about eleven o'clock of
a nice London night, Edward and I walked along interminable
streets talking of many things, and I remember that on getting
home I sat down and wrote about half a page of "An Outcast of the
Islands" before I slept. This was committing myself definitely,
I won't say to another life, but to another book. There is
apparently something in my character which will not allow me to
abandon for good any piece of work I have begun. I have laid
aside many beginnings. I have laid them aside with sorrow, with
disgust, with rage, with melancholy and even with self-contempt;
but even at the worst I had an uneasy consciousness that I would
have to go back to them.

"An Outcast of the Islands" belongs to those novels of mine that
were never laid aside; and though it brought me the qualification
of "exotic writer" I don't think the charge was at all justified.

For the life of me I don't see that there is the slightest exotic
spirit in the conception or style of that novel. It is certainly
the most TROPICAL of my eastern tales. The mere scenery got a
great hold on me as I went on, perhaps because (I may just as
well confess that) the story itself was never very near my heart.

It engaged my imagination much more than my affection. As to my
feeling for Willems it was but the regard one cannot help having
for one's own creation. Obviously I could not be indifferent to
a man on whose head I had brought so much evil simply by
imagining him such as he appears in the novel--and that, too, on
a very slight foundation.

The man who suggested Willems to me was not particularly
interesting in himself. My interest was aroused by his dependent
position, his strange, dubious status of a mistrusted, disliked,
worn-out European living on the reluctant toleration of that
Settlement hidden in the heart of the forest-land, up that sombre
stream which our ship was the only white men's ship to visit.