[In A Personal Record, which relates how Conrad became a novelist, he mentons his praise of Stephen Crane, who gave a dog to Conrad's son. The following excerpt comes from the Project Gutenberg version [EBook #687] created by Judith Boss and David Widger and released on January 9, 2006. — George P. Landow]
he dog was the gift to the child [his son]
from a man for whom words had anything but an Ollendorffian value, a man
almost childlike in the impulsive movements of his untutored genius, the
most single-minded of verbal impressionists, using his great gifts of
straight feeling and right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong
if, perhaps, not fully conscious conviction. His art did not obtain,
I fear, all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved. I am
alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the author of "The Red Badge
of Courage," a work of imagination which found its short moment of
celebrity in the last decade of the departed century. Other books
followed. Not many. He had not the time. It was an individual and
complete talent which obtained but a grudging, somewhat supercilious
recognition from the world at large. For himself one hesitates to regret
his early death. Like one of the men in his "Open Boat," one felt that
he was of those whom fate seldom allows to make a safe landing after
much toil and bitterness at the oar. I confess to an abiding affection
for that energetic, slight, fragile, intensely living and transient
figure. He liked me, even before we met, on the strength of a page or
two of my writing, and after we had met I am glad to think he liked me
still. He used to point out to me with great earnestness, and even with
some severity, that "a boy ought to have a dog." I suspect that he was
shocked at my neglect of parental duties.
Last modified 8 December 2011