Teofila Bobrowska Prophesied that her grandson would grow up to be “a man of great heart.” Conrad certainly was one. He scorned sentimentality and effusiveness; his manner of portraying emotion in his works was full of restraint; skepticism and irony are far more characteristic of his writing than tenderness, enthusiasm, or passion. And yet he was a deeply emotional man.

In what I think is the most revealing fragment of his memoirs, Conrad’s younger son John tells how his father liked to play with him in the garden— for instance at sailing toy boats on a pond—but as soon as anyone else turned up in the vicinity, Conrad would quickly disappear or pretend to be busy with something else. Ian Watt has rightly observed that Conrad wanted to love and be loved. But the conditions in which he grew up—his dramatic and gloomy childhood, unsettled youth, long years spent among tough seamen, and later his life among the English, well known for their reserve (“underdeveloped hearts” in E. M. Forster’s famous diagnosis)— taught him to be wary of showing his emotions or even his need of them. He opened up rarely and only to his closest friends.

One might think that his strongest and most permanent feelings were directed not toward people but toward ideas. His letters become most passionate when he writes about the tragedy of existence, the weakness of human nature, political violence, fidelity to lost causes, human dignity, the weight of moral responsibility, and the rigid demands of Art. Yet St.-John Perse’s remark that among all the writers he knew Conrad was “the most human” was not unfounded. In private life he could be quite warmhearted, although he never waxed sentimental; and a genuine compassion and deep involvement in the fate not of mankind as a whole but of particular human beings showed through the layers of irony and grotesque. “Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning.” Obviously, the “one meaning” refers to the Anglo-Polish duality. But perhaps it was not the most important one.