Culture

Giuseppe Garibaldi must be among the most commemorated secular figures in history. Italian towns invariably have a square or a street named after him, and many contain statues, stations and other sites as well. In Genoa Garibaldi is represented not only by a vast equestrian bronze in front of the Opera but also, in diverse and equally inappropriate ways, by a Via Garibaldi (a street of Renaissance palaces), a Piazza Garibaldi (a tiny space with a shop selling motorbikes), a Vico Garibaldi (a dingy cul-de-sac) and the Galleria Garibaldi (not an art gallery in this instance but a tunnel for motorcars — useful in a city which tried to solve its traffic problems by erecting a motorway on stilts that separates the old town from the port).

One day in July 1945, a public schoolboy with a straw hat on stood with his trunk on Bishop’s Stortford station, and called out ‘My man’ to the porter. ‘No,’ the porter said, ‘that sort of thing is all over now.’ Whether it was or not, the Attlee period, 1945-51, is the most decisive and dramatic of our peacetime history. Society had utterly changed, and a government of extraordinary ambition set an agenda which was to go unchallenged until 1979. It was a period of great deprivation — rationing not only continued, but tightened after the war — and memory tended for decades afterwards to dredge up the horrible occasion of the hard winter of 1947 as a sort of macabre centrepiece to the whole experience.

Some years ago, I went to visit the offices of a small Moscow newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.   Novaya Gazeta has always led a precarious existence — it is one of the few publications that has consistently opposed the Kremlin — and that day the editor was particularly distracted. While I was talking to him, the telephone kept ringing: one of his reporters had been arrested in Chechnya. Since another Novaya Gazeta reporter had recently died in mysterious circumstances, and since yet another had been beaten up quite badly, he was worried. The Russian authorities, he said, were capable of anything. That reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, was later released. But as it turned out, her editor was right to be worried.

What a peculiar life it was: born in Poland, exiled to Russia, orphan- ed at 11, and sent to sea at 16. A decade and a half of salt water and solitude in the merchant marine. Then the rest of it spent as an English gent, writing literary novels in his third language (English) under the strong influence of the writers of his second (French). And yet, there he is, slap-bang in the Great Tradition. This biography, first published here in 1983 and now updated and expanded for the 150th anniversary of Joseph Conrad’s birth, has quite some heft to it. Coming to it as an enthusiast, rather than a scholar, of Conrad, I consulted a friend whom I knew to be a Conrad nut to ask roughly where Najder’s book stands in the Conradian conversation.