“I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day – and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours, I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you. …
I assure you – speaking soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking that baby and alarming my wife. It’s no joking matter. After such crises of despair I doze for hours half conscious that there is that story I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again – and at last go to bed completely done-up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with the horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts.
I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted, mercilessly haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can’t write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read. I haven’t read for days. You know how bad it is when one feels one’s liver, or lungs. Well I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid – in an evading shape. I can’t get hold of it. It is all there – to bursting, yet I can’t get hold of it no more than you can grasp a handful of water. “
Joseph Conrad in a letter to Edward Garnett (husband to Constance).
P424-5 of Joseph Conrad: Three Lives by Frederick Karl, FSG 1979
According to Karl, in the days after his first child had been born, before he started writing "Youth" and The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Conrad struggled to make progress in his novel, The Rescuer, and "began to split into pieces." "One result," Karl writes, "was the emergence of Marlow... Conrad’s route toward the discovery of Marlow is mysterious; we really do not know precisely how or why he came to depend on this figure. Nevertheless, his next three works all used Marlow in varying degrees of dependency."
