Struggles of the Writer, 1

"I never mean to be slow," Joseph Conrad wrote to David Meldurm of the Blackwood publishing house in 1899, but "The stuff comes out at its own rate [and] too often -- alas! -- I've to wait for the sentence -- for the word." The process of writing involved long hours of incapacitating doubt that left him caught like a ship in a calm, an unrestful paralysis in which his mind remained "extremely active," producing "descriptions, dialogue, reflexion -- everything -- everything but the belief, the conviction, the only thing neeeded to make me put pen to paper." Days would pass without his writing a line, and Conrad would take to his bed, sick of a labor so great that it should have given "birth to masterpieces" instead of what he termed the "ridiculous mouse" his struggles would sometimes produce. ...Conrad also had a history of nervous collapse at the end of most of his major books. Under Western Eyes (1911) in particular, a novel that involved a prolonged psychic immersion in the Russia he both hated and feared. Few of his letters are without some plaintive or even desperate note. "My brain reduced to the size of a pea seems to rattle about in my head," he wrote to R. B. Cunninghame Graham in 1900, and if it wasn't the fight with words then it was his worries about money or housing, the illnesses of his wife and children, or the crippling attacks of gout with which his working life was spiked.

--The Portable Conrad, introduction by Michael Gorra