feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and
with my first contact with the sea.

In the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend here
and there will perhaps detect a subtle accord.

J. C. K.




A PERSONAL RECORD

I

Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may
enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in
the middle of a town; and since saints are supposed to look benignantly
on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade
of old Flaubert--who imagined himself to be (among other things) a
descendant of Vikings--might have hovered with amused interest over
the docks of a 2,000-ton steamer called the Adowa, on board of which,
gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth
chapter of "Almayer's Folly" was begun. With interest, I say, for was
not the kind Norman giant with enormous mustaches and a thundering voice
the last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost ascetic,
devotion to his art, a sort of literary, saint-like hermit?

"'It has set at last,' said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills
behind which the sun had sunk." . . . These words of Almayer's romantic