The Secret History of Costaguana

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Let’s just come right out and say it: the man has died. No, that won’t do. I’ll be more precise: the Novelist (with a capital N) has died. You all know who I mean. Don’t you? Well, I’ll try again: the Great English Novelist has died. The Great English Novelist — Polish by birth, sailor before he became a writer — has died. The Great English-language Novelist — Polish by birth, sailor before he became a writer, who went from failed suicide to living classic, from common gunrunner to Jewel of the British Crown — has died. Ladies and gentlemen: Joseph Conrad has died. I receive the news familiarly, as one might receive an old friend, then realize, not without some sadness, that I’ve spent my whole life waiting for it.

I begin writing this with all the London broadsheets (their microscopic print, their uneven, narrow columns) spread out over my green leather desktop. Through the press, which has played such diverse roles over the course of my life — threatening to ruin it at times, and at others granting what little luster it has — I am informed of the heart attack and its circumstances: the visit from Nurse Vinten, the shout heard from downstairs, the body falling out of the chair. Through enterprising journalism I attend the funeral in Canterbury; through the impertinences of reporters I watch them lower the body and place the stone, that headstone beset with errors (a K out of place, a vowel wrong in one of the names). Today, August 7, 1924, while in my distant Colombia they are celebrating one hundred and five years since the Battle of Boyacá, here in England they mourn, without pomp and ceremony, the passing of the Great Novelist.

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