Joseph Conrad

THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD
By John Stape
Pantheon, 369 pages, $30

Asked by Ford Maddox Ford to contribute to a memorial supplement to the Transatlantic Review in honor of the recently deceased Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway groused about friends who disparaged Conrad; he complained that most of the people he knew thought Conrad a bad writer and T. S. Eliot a good one. Papa disagreed: “If I knew that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Mr. Conrad’s grave, Mr. Conrad would shortly appear … and commence writing, I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder.”  read more »

Chris Matthews' line on Zarqawi's death yesterday—"he's dead as Julius Caesar"—was ten times as poetic as President Bush's: "Zarqawi has met his end." And Bush's writers had more advance warning than Matthews's.

I gather the line comes from Malone on The Untouchables. Or did they steal it from Joseph Conrad's Victory, in which two character argue over the coal mine one is holding on to:

"`But all this is as dead as Julius Caesar,' I cried. `In fact, you have nothing worth holding on to, Heyst.'

Uh-oh. Just did a Google book-search on it and found it in Hawthorne, H.G. Wells, Simeon Baldwin. Oh well—good line, no matter who said it first.

So you think you know your Hitchcock?  read more »

" There are many things in this incident … which have remained obscure.  read more »