39 Facts About Richard Curle

Richard Curle was a Scottish author, critic, and journalist.

Richard Curle was a friend of the novelist Joseph Conrad, who was the subject of several of his critical works.

Conrad and Curle became friends in the 1910s, becoming especially close in Conrad's last years, and following Conrad's death in 1924 Curle was an executor of his estate.

Richard Henry Parnell Curle was born in Melrose, Scotland in 1883, the third of eleven children.

Richard Curle attended Wellington College and subsequently worked as a columnist for the Daily Mail.

Richard Curle worked for the publisher Kegan Paul from 1905, and published several essays on George Meredith.

Richard Curle had written an article on Conrad's work, focusing in particular on Nostromo, for that month's issue of Rhythm, which was shown to Conrad by Edward Garnett.

Richard Curle had, the previous year, reviewed Conrad's Under Western Eyes for The Manchester Guardian, querying Conrad's turn to modernism and noting similarities with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Alongside Walpole and Jean-Aubry, Richard Curle was one of a number of younger men who wrote favourably about their friend Conrad.

Richard Curle would become a constant companion to Conrad in his later years.

Conrad ridiculed Richard Curle's book collecting, but nonetheless indulged him by providing him with signed first editions.

Conrad's son John Conrad describes his father's growing closeness with Richard Curle as occurring simultaneously with the decline of his friendship with Garnett, and argues that Richard Curle was not simply a reader and advisor to Conrad but was valued for his observations on his travels and "his ability to create a word-picture of a place or situation".

Richard Curle was not a frequent presence in Adam's childhood; Adam did not meet his father until he was three years old.

Richard Curle returned to the Daily Mail in the late 1910s as an assistant editor and columnist, and lived with Cordelia and Adam, then travelled to Burma in 1920 to take up the editorship of The Rangoon Times.

Richard Curle would spend much of 1920 in Burma and the Malay States.

Richard Curle played the role of a go-between in negotiations with newspapers for the publication of Conrad's work.

Richard Curle was involved in the collation of Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters.

Richard Curle played a greater role in Conrad's business affairs from 1922.

Richard Curle spent time with Conrad in the days immediately before the latter's death.

On 2 August 1924 they discussed Conrad's unfinished novel Suspense and visited a house he was considering renting; when Conrad experienced chest pains Richard Curle called him a doctor.

Shortly after Conrad's death Richard Curle, who was then working for the Daily Mail, arranged for short works by Conrad to appear in that newspaper, as well as in The Times, The Forum, The Blue Peter and The Yale Review.

Richard Curle edited and introduced Conrad's Last Essays, a posthumous collection of articles.

Richard Curle viewed Last Essays as a companion piece to Notes on Life and Letters.

Richard Curle assisted Jessie Conrad with the sale of her late husband's library; most of his own Conrad collection was sold at auction in 1927.

Richard Curle later grew apart from Jessie and saw her as extravagant, but remained close to John Conrad and corresponded with him extensively.

Richard Curle encouraged the writing of Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered, an account by the author's son John Conrad, and the younger Conrad dedicated the book to Richard Curle.

Later in life, his son recalled, Richard Curle was haunted by a sense of failure and the fact that his work on topics other than Conrad was little-known.

Adam Richard Curle remembered his father as a compulsive traveller, "certainly not made for family life," and suffering from occasional fits of melancholy, guilt and bad temper, but loyal, courteous and possessed of a "ribald sense of the ludicrous".

Richard Curle attributed his father's closeness to Conrad to their shared "sense of the inwardness of things, of mystery, of the strange hidden behind the banal".

Richard Curle described him as closer to "a delightful uncle who would periodically descend and whisk me off" than a father in his early life, but noted that they became closer in his adulthood.

Richard Curle considered the book more accurate than Ford Madox Ford's Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance.

Between 1922 and 1927 Richard Curle wrote a number of pieces about Conrad for the travel magazine The Blue Peter.

The essay "Joseph Conrad in the East", which examined the extent to which the representations of Asia in Conrad's work were based on his personal experiences, was met initially with hostility from Conrad, who told Richard Curle he had deliberately avoided foregrounding the autobiographical elements of his works.

In 1923 they again corresponded over an article Richard Curle was writing for The Times Literary Supplement on the Uniform Edition of Conrad's novels, in which, Conrad thought, Richard Curle failed to give a sense of the atmosphere of the works, focusing instead on historical details.

Richard Curle reviewed Conrad's The Rover in the Daily Mail.

Richard Curle wrote an introduction for Conrad's posthumous novel Suspense, the publication of which he oversaw.

Richard Curle supplied an introduction for Jessie Conrad's Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him, and probably assisted her in writing the book.

Richard Curle sold the rights to the correspondence to the Broadway producer and eccentric Crosby Gaige, who he met on board the RMS Majestic in 1926.

Richard Curle edited a volume of the correspondence of Robert Browning and Frances Julia Wedgwood, and compiled a bibliography of publications by the Ray Society.