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اوسمتي

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افتراضي
Temperament and health

Conrad was a reserved man, wary of showing emotion. He scorned sentimentality, and his manner of portraying emotion in his books was full of restraint, skepticism and irony; yet he was a deeply emotional man.[1]:575 In the words of his uncle Bobrowski, as a young man Conrad was "extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved, and in addition excitable. In short [...] all the defects of the Nałęcz family."[1]:65
Conrad suffered throughout life from ill health, physical and mental. A newspaper review of a Conrad biography suggested that the book could have been subtitled "Thirty Years of Debt, Gout, Depression and Angst".[37] In 1891 he was hospitalized for several months, suffering from gout, neuralgic pains in his right arm, and recurrent attacks of malaria. He also complained of swollen hands "which made writing difficult". Taking his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski's advice, he convalesced at a spa in Switzerland.[1]:169-70
Conrad had a phobia of dentistry, neglecting his teeth till they had to be extracted. In one letter he remarked that every novel he had written had cost him a tooth.[6]:258
Conrad's physical afflictions were, if anything, less vexatious than his mental ones. In letters, he often described symptoms of depression; "the evidence," writes Najder, "is so strong that it is nearly impossible to doubt it."[1]:167
[ Attempted suicide

In March 1878, at the end of his Marseilles period, 20-year-old Conrad attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver. According to his uncle, who was summoned by a friend of Conrad's, Conrad had gotten himself badly into debt. Bobrowski described his subsequent "study" of his nephew in an extensive letter to Stefan Buszczyński, his own ideological opponent and a friend of Conrad's late father Apollo.[note 29] To what extent the suicide attempt had been made in earnest, likely will never be known, but it is suggestive of a situational depression.[1]:65-7



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Death

On 3 August 1924 Conrad died, probably of a heart attack. He was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, England, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name, as "Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski".[1]:573 Inscribed on his gravestone are the lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene which he had chosen as the epigraph to his last complete novel, The Rover:

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, doth greatly please [1]:574


Conrad's modest funeral took place amid great crowds. His old friend Edward Garnett recalled bitterly:

To those who attended Conrad's funeral in Canterbury during the Cricket Festival of 1924, and drove through the crowded streets festooned with flags, there was something symbolical in England's hospitality and in the crowd's ignorance of even the existence of this great writer. A few old friends, acquaintances and pressmen stood by his grave.[1]:573

Another old friend of Conrad's, Cunninghame Graham, wrote Garnett: "Aubry was saying to me... that had Anatole France died, all Paris would have been at his funeral."[1]:573
Twelve years later, Conrad's wife Jessie died on 6 December 1936 and was interred with him.