Conrad and Neil Munro: Notes on a Literary Acquaintance

THE SCOTTISHNOVELIST and journalist Neil Munro (1863-1930) was an early and perceptive enthusiast of Conrad's writing, and frequently praised Conrad's in Views and Reviews, his influential weekly literary column in the Glasgow Evening Nem. For example, he observed that Nigger of the Narcissus was unquestionably one of the best halfdozen novels written in England in the present (19 January 1899:2), and shortly before their first meeting had written in the same column:A generation hence, or perhaps sooner, we shall waken up to find that Joseph has been the most wonderful writer of the sea English literature has produced ... for the first time a seaman with the brain of genius lets us share the beauty and the dread, picks out from his own experiences of the sea not a mere vocabulary of sailmaker's terms and boatswain's terms, but poignant emotions that he lives over again with us. (1 September 1898: 2)The two men first met when Conrad, despairing of commercial success in his literary career, travelled to Glasgow on 27 September 1898 in search of a command. He described the visit to R. B. Cunninghame Graham on 9 November 1898 in the following terms: had a most enjoyable trip to Glasgow. I saw Neil Munro and heaps of shipowners and that's all I can say. fact is from novel writing to skippering il y a trop de tirage (CL2 116). and Munro were guests for dinner at the of Dr John Macintyre, an ear, nose and throat surgeon, pioneer radiologist, and, like Munro, a friend of Cunninghame Graham. Much later Munro recalled the meeting of the three men:After leaving Macintyre's house in the early hours of the morning, and Munro walked Glasgow's streets deep in a discussion of their art. As Munro was to write much later; Conrad had found an almost fanatical admirer of himself and his and was prepared to talk to him till the cows came home (Keating 1929: 288). On the evening was to leave Glasgow there was another convivial gathering of Munro and fellow enthusiasts at the Glasgow Art Club. (Keating 1929: 291)Conrad had enjoyed Munro's first collection of short stories Lost Pibroch (1896) and his first novel John Splendid (1897) both of which had first appeared in serial form in Rlackwood's Magazine, the latter's opening chapters appearing concurrently with Conrad's Karain: A Memory. Their admiration for each other's writing provided the foundation for a lasting relationship, although the two met only a few times. In 1905, wrote to Munro: read and take delight in you (CL3 223). Perhaps their swiftly forged friendship owed something to Macintyre's conviviality and whisky and also something to the link forged by the fact that and Munro each wrote in a language that was not his mother tongue and about topics far removed from the common currency of English language fiction. Brought up in a Gaelic-speaking household in Argyllshire, Munro, though educated exclusively in English and writing for publication only in that language, was fluently bilingual and profoundly rooted in Gaelic culture. His evocation of a vanished Highland community in his collection Lost Pibroch was perhaps as strange and exotic to most of the British reading public as Conrad's depictions of the Far East.Munro's genuine appreciation of Conrad's did not prevent him from including a parody of Conrad's style, alongside parodies of J. M. Barrie, R.. B. Cunninghame Graham, Rudyard Kipling, George Meredith, Henry Newbolt, and his own ~Lost Pibroch style in his The Looker-On column in the Glasgow Evening Nem in November 1898 (see Appendix).Munro and continued to correspond and their appreciation of each other's is documented in their letters. For example, wrote to Munro with New Year's greetings at the end of 1898: let my best wishes go to and all yours for this New Year and for the years to come. May every one of them be marked by success and remembered as a year of good work (Stape, ed. …

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