'He Took to Learning for It Own Sake'

Almost half a century ago, in a small town in Northwestern Ohio, I knew a man who read Joseph Conrad the way some people read their Bible – out of love, not obligation. He was not otherwise a literary man. He was about seventy, a lifelong bachelor who retired from a big insurance company a few years earlier. He had lived in a succession of small Ohio towns, surrounded by vast fields of corn, soybeans and sugar beets. I was editor of the town's weekly newspaper and visited him at home to interview him about some utterly unliterary matter, but saw on a table in his living room the twenty-four-volume Canterbury edition of Conrad’s Complete Works. He told me he was never much of a reader but had discovered Conrad as a teenager and recognized his sole literary affinity. He claimed to have read little else besides the great Pole. I had a copy of Ian Watt’s recently published Conrad in the Nineteenth Century and offered to loan it to him but he wasn’t interested. He had no curiosity about…