Joseph Conrad

 

For other uses, see Joseph Conrad (disambiguation).

Joseph Conrad
1904
Born	Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1857-12-03)3 December 1857 Berdychiv, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	3 August 1924(1924-08-03) (aged 66) Bishopsbourne, England
Resting place	Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury
Occupation	Novelist
Language	English
Period	1895–1923
Genres	Psychological realism, Modernism
Notable work(s)	Nostromo Heart of Darkness Lord Jim The Secret Agent
Spouse(s)	Jessie George
Children	Borys, John
Influences[show] Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, Henry James, H.G. Wells, Ivan Turgenev, H. Rider Haggard, Agustus Montrose

Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857  – 3 August 1924) was a Polish novelist who wrote in English, after settling in England.

Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature.

While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, V.S. Naipaul, Hunter S. Thompson and J.M. Coetzee.

Films have been adapted from or inspired by Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover.

Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while also plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Early life

Joseph Conrad, a major novelist in the English language, did not spring full-blown, out of the British merchant navy, without a rich earlier personal history. By the time he left Poland, aged sixteen, for the wider world to become a sailor, he had absorbed enough of the history, culture and literature of his native land to be able eventually to develop a distinctive world view and make unique contributions to the literature of his adoptive Britain. It was tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and grew in his adulthood abroad that would give rise to Conrad's greatest literary achievements.

Conrad was born on 3 December 1857, in the Russian Empire at Berdichev (Polish: Berdyczów; now Berdychiv, Ukraine), in Podolia, a part of Ukraine that had belonged to Poland until the Second Partition of Poland, of 1793. (What had remained of Poland was expunged from the map of Europe in the Third Partition, in 1795.) The great majority of the area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, but most of the land was owned by a Polish upper class of szlachta (nobility). Both of Conrad's parents, Apollo Korzeniowski, of Nałęcz coat-of-arms, and Ewa (Polish for "Eve") née Bobrowska, belonged to that nobility, which, in the virtual absence of a higher bourgeoisie, was the sole repository of polite culture. Literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem.

The 123 years of Poland's occupation by the three partitioning powers, Russia, Austria and Prussia (later, Germany), until the restoration of the country's independence in 1918 courtesy of World War I, were broken at least once in each generation by an uprising, directed mainly against the severest oppressor, Russia. "The Polish tradition of patriotic conspiracies," writes Najder, "was almost uninterrupted, and it strengthened the social and cultural role of the heroic virtues of duty, fidelity, and honor." Polish literature took over the functions of suppressed national institutions, and works of literature were circulated, often in handwritten copies, reminding readers of the past glory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — in the 16th century, the largest political entity in Europe — and of Poles' duty to restore their country's independence. In the first half of the 19th century, many Polish leaders, virtually all of noble origin, coupled demands for national independence with advocacy of democratic political reforms (Najder 2007, p. 4).

Konrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, dressed as country squire

Apollo Korzeniowski's father Teodor, a landowner, had served as a lieutenant in the army of the Duchy of Warsaw which defeated Austrian forces at the Battle of Raszyn (1809), part of the War of the Fifth Coalition during the Napoleonic Wars. In the Polish 1830 Uprising against Russia, he formed his own cavalry squadron, was promoted to colonel, and was decorated for valor. His second son of four children, Apollo, was born in 1820 and was eleven when Teodor lost his inherited estate in the wake of the 1830 Uprising. Subsequently Teodor accepted a post as an estate manager (Najder 2007, p. 5).

Apollo's education took him to various towns in Ukraine; Russian educational authorities harassed him continually for his freethinking. He completed his secondary education in 1840 at Żytomierz and enrolled at St. Petersburg University, where he spent a year studying Oriental languages, and five years — law and literature. He read widely and cultivated his long-standing interest in literature and the theater (Najder 2007, pp. 5–6).

In 1846 Apollo returned to his home province and for several years helped his father Teodor manage successive leaseholds, though — following an inauspicious poetic debut in 1844 and the translation of Victor Hugo's Les Burgraves in 1846 — he devoted ever more time to literary endeavors. About 1847 he met Ewa (then fashionably called Ewelina, "Eveline") Bobrowska (born 1831), the adolescent sister of an acquaintance from Żytomierz, Tadeusz Bobrowski (born 1829). Apollo was immediately smitten with Ewa, but faced opposition from her family — not so much due to the difference in their ages as because of a basic difference in outlook between the two families (Najder 2007, p. 6). While Apollo Korzeniowski's father Teodor wasted his money and health fighting for Poland, Ewa's father Józef Bobrowski increased his wealth and held himself aloof from freedom movements; however, possibly due to his wife's patriotism, he succeeded fully in inculcating only one of his eight children with "sensible," "realistic" views: Ewa's brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski (Najder 2007, pp. 6–7).

Nowy Świat 47, Warsaw, where three-year-old Konrad lived with his parents in 1861

Apollo continued giving himself over to literature and increasingly, with time, to active politics. His literary work shows a conventionally derivative poetic imagination, but also lively, often original social and political perceptions. His earliest play, Komedia (A Comedy, 1854), condemned the hypocrisy and egoism of newly-rich landowners and presented a nucleus of the radical social program that would be advocated by the Polish "Reds" in the 1860s. The play caused something of a scandal and earned Apollo the reputation of a radical (Najder 2007, pp. 8–9).

During the Crimean War (1854–56) Apollo supported the idea of insurgent action in Ukraine, in cooperation with the allied armies, to cut Russian supply lines — an insurrection which Apollo, who championed the rights of the region's Ukrainian majority, characteristically wanted to base on a peasant revolt. Due to British and French indifference, the plan fell through (Najder 2007, p. 9).

In July 1855, their father Józef now being dead, Tadeusz Bobrowski gave his sister Ewa permission to become engaged to Apollo Korzeniowski. Nearly a year later, on 4 May 1856, the couple were married at the Bobrowski family estate. On 3 December 1857 their only child was born, and was named Józef Teodor Konrad for his grandfathers Józef and Teodor and for Konrad, the hero of Adam Mickiewicz's dramatic poem Dziady (Forefathers' Eve, 1832). "Thus," writes Najder, "three traditions were united...: those of the two families, so different from each other, and the great tradition of Polish Romantic poetry (Najder 2007, pp. 10-12).

Apollo's efforts to operate rural estates failed, even as he produced his best translation, of Alfred de Vigny's 1835 drama, Chatterton, and the family moved to Żytomierz (Najder 2007, pp. 10-14). His satirical comedy, Dla miłego grosza (For the Love of Money), attacking nouveau riche landowners and opportunists, was successfully staged in several major ciites; he wrote for several newspapers, and he translated his favorite author, Victor Hugo. In Ukraine he became a leading patriotic activist, demanding the abolition of serfdom, education in the national language, and equal rights for the Ruthenians (i.e., Ukrainians) (Najder 2007, p. 15).

Before 1862, Apollo was the leading Red activist, though a moderate one. As Russification efforts intensified, in May 1861 Apollo moved to Warsaw to participate in the resistance movement. In early October, shortly before a state of emergency was declared in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Ewa Korzeniowska and their son Konrad — as he was called by family and friends — joined Apollo. On 17 October the underground Committee of the Movement — the kernel of the future Central Committee and National Government — was formed in their apartment on ulica Nowy Świat. Three days later, on 21 October 1861, Apollo was imprisoned by Russian authorities in historic Pavilion X ("Ten") of the Warsaw Citadel. Conrad would later write: "in the courtyard of this Citadel — characteristically for our nation — my childhood memories begin" (Najder 2007, pp. 17–19).

Exile

The Russian military tribunal did not know the actual nature of Apollo's underground activities, accused him of things he had not done, and on 9 May 1862 sentenced Apollo and Ewa "to be sent to settle in the town of Perm under strict police supervision." In the event, they and four-year-old Konrad were diverted to Vologda, known for its unhealthy climate (Najder 2007, pp. 19–20). In January 1863 the family was transferred to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where the conditions and climate were much better, but here news reached them of the outbreak of the Polish January 1863 Uprising against Russia and the uprising's first defeats. Here Apollo, obliged to work hard for his living, completed Polish translations of Charles Dickens' Hard Times, Victor Hugo's Les Travailleurs de la mer (Toilers of the Sea), Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. On 18 April 1865, amid the privations of their life in exile, Ewa died of tuberculosis (Najder 2007, pp. 19–25).

His wife's death was devastating to Apollo, himself gravely ill with tuberculosis. He wrote a friend: "My deepest beliefs are shaken; doubts consume all my thoughts. When... all I dream about is to see her again... doubts overwhelm me and call out: [what] if my faith is but deluded imagination?... If death does end everything?" (Najder 2007, p. 26) Apollo, given to fits of melancholy like his son later, (Najder 2007, p. 27) initiated a journey into skepticism that would be completed by his novelist son.

Apollo did his best to home-school Konrad. The boy's early reading introduced him to the two elements that later dominated his life: in Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea he encountered the sphere of activity to which he would devote his youth; Shakespeare brought him into the orbit of English literature. Most of all, though, he read Polish Romantic poetry. Half a century later he explained that "The Polishness in my works comes from Mickiewicz and Słowacki. My father read [Mickiewicz's] Pan Tadeusz aloud to me and made me read it aloud.... I used to prefer [Mickiewicz's] Konrad Wallenrod [and] Grażyna. Later I preferred Słowacki. You know why Słowacki?... [He is the soul of all Poland]" (Najder 2007, p. 27).

In December 1867, thanks to his family's efforts, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs gave Apollo permission to leave Russia with Konrad. The mortally ill man took his son to Austrian-held Poland, which for two years had been enjoying considerable internal freedom and a degree of self-government. After sojourns in Lwów and several smaller localities, on 20 February 1869 they moved to Kraków, likewise in Austrian Poland, where Apollo could work with the recently founded democratic daily, Kraj (Homeland). In Kraków, on 23 May 1869, Apollo Korzeniowski died, leaving Konrad orphaned at age eleven (Najder 2007, pp. 31–34).

Conrad's Nałęcz coat-of-arms

Orphan

Young Konrad was placed in the care of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski — a more cautious person than Konrad's parents. Over the next quarter-century, as Bobrowski supported Konrad and then heavily subsidized his efforts to establish himself in the French and British merchant marines, he exhorted his nephew in long missives to be practical, to stick to a single occupational resolve, not to be profligate in his expenditures (which Konrad was prone to be), and to be like his maternal Bobrowski, rather than his romantic, impractical Korzeniowski, relatives. Contrasting Konrad's hot-headed "Nałęcz" clan with the sensible Bobrowskis, he forgot that all his own brothers were hotheads, and that his brothers Kazimierz and Stefan had held political views similar to Apollo's; and in evoking the memory of Konrad's mother, Bobrowski's sister, he consistently effaced her patriotic ardor.

Attempts to secure Austrian citizenship for Konrad were to no avail — probably because Konrad had no permission from Russian authorities to remain abroad permanently and had not been released from Russian subjection. The possibility of his returning to Ukraine was never considered; the son of political exiles would have been liable to harassment and to many years' military service.

In the autumn of 1871, thirteen-year-old Konrad announced his intention to become a sailor. He later recalled that as a child he had read (apparently in French translation) Leopold McClintock's book about his 1857-59 expeditions in the Fox, in search of Sir John Franklin's lost ships Erebus and Terror. It was still an age of exploration, in which Poles participated: Paweł Edmund Strzelecki mapped the Australian interior; the writer Sygurd Wiśniowski, having sailed twice around the world, described his experiences in Australia, Oceania and the United States; Jan Kubary, a veteran of the 1863 Uprising, explored the Pacific islands. Conrad later recalled having read books by the American James Fenimore Cooper and the English Captain Frederick Marryat.

A playmate of his adolescence recalled that Konrad spun fantastic yarns, always set at sea, presented so realistically that listeners thought the action was happening before their eyes. Konrad was not a good student; despite tutoring, he excelled only in geography.

In August 1873 Bobrowski sent fifteen-year-old Konrad to Lwów to a cousin who ran a small boarding house for boys orphaned by the 1863 Uprising. Conversation at the establishment was in French. The owner's daughter recalled:

He stayed with us ten months... Intellectually he was extremely advanced but disliked school routine, which he found tiring and dull; he used to say... he... planned to become a great writer.... He disliked all restrictions. At home, at school, or in the living room he would sprawl unceremoniously. He... suffer[ed] from severe headaches and nervous attacks...

Émigré

For uncertain reasons, in September 1874 Bobrowski removed Conrad from school in Lwów, and they returned to Kraków. On 13 October the sixteen-year-old set off for Marseilles, for the sea and a life of adventure. His health was poor, his schoolwork unsatisfactory, his upbringing caused his uncle constant problems and no end of financial outlays; Konrad could not return to Ukraine; and a principal goal that Bobrowski set for him was to obtain the passport of another country. Since the boy's illness was clearly of nervous origin, the physicians supposed that fresh air and physical work would harden him; his uncle hoped that well defined duties and the rigors of work would teach him discipline. Since he showed little inclination to study, it was essential that he learn a trade; Bobrowski saw him as a sailor-cum-businessman who would combine his maritime skills with commercial activities.

When Konrad left Poland, he had not completed secondary school. His accomplishments included fluency in French (spoken with a correct accent), some knowledge of Latin, German and Greek, probably a good knowledge of history, some geography, and probably already an interest in physics. He was well read, particularly in Polish Romantic literature. He belonged to only the second generation in his family that had to earn a living outside the family estates: he was a member of the second generation of the intelligentsia, a social class that was starting to play an important role in Central and Eastern Europe.

Najder, himself an emigrant from Poland, observes:

Living away from one's natural environment — family, friends, social group, language — even if it results from a conscious decision, usually gives rise to... internal tensions, because it tends to make people less sure of themselves, more vulnerable, less certain of their... position and... value... The Polish szlachta and... intelligentsia were social strata in which reputation... was felt... very important... for a feeling of self-worth. Men strove... to find confirmation of their... self-regard... in the eyes of others... Such a psychological heritage forms both a spur to ambition and a source of constant stress, especially if [one has been inculcated with] the idea of [one]'s public duty...

Voyages

French

In Marseilles, Konrad was to have been looked after by a Pole who sailed in French ships; but the sailor was temporarily away, and ship pilots became Konrad's first instructors in sailing. He grew to love the Mediterranean, "the cradle of sailing."

After two months at Marseilles, on 15 December 1874 Konrad, who had just turned seventeen, began his first sea voyage — as a passenger in a small barque, the Mont-Blanc, which reached Saint-Pierre, Martinique, in the Caribbean, on 6 February 1875. During the ship's return passage to Marseilles (31 March — 23 May) he may have been a crew member. His objectives for this maiden voyage were probably to promote his health and give him a closer look at sailors' work. A month later, on 25 June, he again left in the Mont-Blanc, now as an apprentice, arriving at Saint-Pierre on 31 July. After visiting several other Caribbean ports, the ship returned to France, arriving on 23 December at Le Havre.

In 1875 Konrad spent seven months at sea. This did not seem to have stirred his enthusiasm for the seaman's profession; he gave himself six months' rest from the sea, socializing and spending in excess of the generous allowance that he received from his uncle. Bobrowski indulged his nephew's financial demands but sent him lengthy letters of reproof that included his usual criticisms of Konrad's improvident paternal line.

On 10 July 1876 Konrad finally sailed for the West Indies as a steward (at a salary of 35 francs, equivalent to one-fifth the allowance he received from his uncle) in the barque Saint-Antoine, making Saint-Pierre on 18 August. The first mate was a 42-year-old Corsican, Dominique Cervoni, who would become a prototype for the title character of Conrad's Nostromo: "In his eyes lurked a look of perfectly remorseless irony, as though he had been provided with an extremely experienced soul; and the slightest distension of his nostrils would give to his bronzed face a look of extraordinary boldness. This was the only play of feature of which he seemed capable, being a Southerner of a concentrated, deliberate type." The Saint-Antoine, after visiting Martinique, St. Thomas and Haiti, returned on 15 February 1877 to Marseilles.

In his novel The Arrow of Gold, Conrad alludes to smuggling "by sea of arms and ammunition to the Carlist detachments in the South [of Spain]." This apparently involved Dominique Cervoni. Conrad's first biographer, Georges Jean-Aubry, built on this allusion a tale about Cervoni and Conrad smuggling arms to a Central American republic. Najder is skeptical about the story and surmises that Conrad "might have heard... stories [about gun-running] from the experienced Cervoni."

In a letter of 9 August 1877, uncle Bobrowski broached two important subjects: the desirability of Konrad's naturalization abroad, tantamount to release from Russian subjection, and Konrad's plans to join the British merchant marine. "[D]o you speak English?... I never wished you to become naturalized in France, mainly because of the compulsory military service... I thought, however, of your getting naturalized in Switzerland..." In his next letter, Bobrowski supported Konrad's idea of seeking citizenship of the United States or of "one of the more important Southern Republics."

In December 1877 it transpired that, as a foreigner and Russian subject, Konrad could not serve on French ships without permission from the Russian consul. And since Konrad was liable for military service in Russia, there was no chance of obtaining the consul's consent.

At the beginning of March 1878, while Bobrowski attended the Kiev trade fair, he received a request from Marseilles to meet a bill of exchange for 1,000 francs. This was followed by a telegram, sent by Konrad's German friend Richard Fecht, with news of Konrad's having been wounded, money needed, and Bobrowski's arrival requested. Bobrowski left Kiev on 8 March, arriving in Marseilles on 11 March. He found that his nephew had attempted suicide but was already almost totally recovered. Bobrowski paid Konrad's debts (3,000 francs) and stayed two weeks, "studying" his nephew and the whole affair.

Conrad later described, in his essay collection The Mirror of the Sea (1906) and his novel The Arrow of Gold (1919), having, during his stay in Marseilles, smuggled arms to Spain for the Carlist supporters of Carlos de Borbón y de Austria-Este, pretender to the Spanish throne. Najder finds this, for a variety of reasons, virtually impossible. If Konrad did participate in running contraband to Spain, it likely would have involved something other than weapons. But in the two books written three and four decades later, he embellished his memories, probably borrowing from past adventures of Marseilles friends. To admit that his illicit activities had been conducted for profit would have conflicted with the position that he wished to occupy in literature. And attempts to track down the reality behind his accounts are complicated by Conrad's habit of using some external characteristics, and often the names, of actual people but of furnishing them with different life histories (as in the cases of Almayer, Lingard, Jim, and Kurtz). Najder writes:

A careful reading of "The Tremolino" and The Arrow of Gold reveals that the whole Carlist plot is a sideline, an ornament that does not affect the course of action; its only function seems to be to glamorize and idealize smuggling. Two elements overlap in these books: the author's own recollections, modified in many respects, of the years 1877 and 1878, and his knowledge of Carlist activities and supporters in 1874 through 1876; they may prove more authentic taken separately than taken together.

Another Marseilles legend concerns Konrad's great love affair. The story is described only in The Arrow of Gold, a pseudo-autobiographical novel whose chronology is at odds with the documented dates in Konrad's life.

Bobrowski, on arriving in Marseilles in March 1878, learned about Konrad's suicide attempt from him and from Richard Fecht. Bobrowski, responding to an inquiry, described his findings in an extensive letter to Stefan Buszczyński, his own ideological opponent and a friend of Konrad's late father Apollo:

... Although Konrad had been absolutely certain of accompanying Captain Escarras on his next voyage, the Bureau de l'Inscription forbade him to go on the grounds of his being a 21-year-old alien who was under the obligation of... military service in his own country. Then it was discovered... he had never had a permit from his [c]onsul — the ex-Inspector of the Port of Marseilles was summoned who... had [certified] the existence of such a permit — he was... reprimanded and nearly lost his job — which was undoubtedly very unpleasant for Konrad. The whole affair became... widely known, and all endeavors by... Captain [Escarras] and the ship-owner [Jean-Baptiste Delestang] proved fruitless... and Konrad was forced to stay behind with no hope of serving on French vessels. However, before all this happened another catastrophe — this time financial — befell him. While still in possession of the 3,000 fr[ancs] sent to him for the voyage, he met his former captain, Mr. Duteil, who persuaded him to participate in some enterprise on the coasts of Spain — some kind of contraband! He invested 1,000 fr[ancs] in it and made over 400, which pleased them greatly, so... on the second occasion he put in all he had — and lost the lot. ... Duteil... then went off to Buenos Aires. ... Konrad was left behind, unable to sign on for a ship — poor as a church mouse and, moreover, heavily in debt — for while speculating he had lived on credit... [H]e borrows 800 fr[ancs] from his friend Fecht and sets off for... Villefranche, where an American squadron was anchored,... inten[ding to] join... the American service. He achieves nothing there and, wishing to improve his finances, tries his luck in Monte Carlo and loses the 800 fr[ancs] he had borrowed. Having managed his affairs so excellently, he returns to Marseilles and one fine evening invites his friend the creditor [Fecht] to tea, for an appointed hour, and before his arrival attempts to take his life with a revolver. (Let this detail remain between us, as I have been telling everyone that he was wounded in a duel....) The bullet goes... through... near his heart without damaging any vital organ. Luckily, all his addresses were left on top of his things so that this worthy Mr. Fecht could instantly let me know...

... Apart from the 3,000 fr[ancs] which [Konrad] had lost, I had to pay as much again to settle his debts. Had he been my own son, I wouldn't have done it, but... in the case of my beloved sister's son, I had the weakness to act against [my] principles... Nevertheless, I swore that even if I knew that he would shoot himself a second time — there would be no repetition of the same weakness on my part. To some extent, also, I was influenced by considerations of our national honor, so that it should not be said that one of us had exploited the affection, which Konrad undoubtedly enjoyed, of all those with whom he came into contact....

My study of the Individual has convinced me that he is not a bad boy, only one who is extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved, and... excitable. In short, I found in him all the defects of the Nałęcz family. He is able and eloquent — he has forgotten nothing of his Polish although, since he left [Kraków], I was the first person he conversed with in his native tongue. He appears to know his profession well and to like it. [He declined Bobrowski's suggestion that he return to Poland, maintaining that he loved his profession.]...

[I]t was decided that he should join the English Merchant Marine, where there are no such formalities as in France.

British

On 10 June 1878 Konrad Korzeniowski set foot on English soil for the first time, at Lowestoft, having arrived on the small British steamer Mavis, which he had boarded on 24 April 1878 at Marseilles. He had probably joined the ship not as a crew member but as an unofficial apprentice. It is not clear whether he had been on board during the Russian leg of its itinerary, which would have been hazardous for the Tsar's Polish subject. He still planned to return to France and enlist in the French navy. A conflict with Captain Samuel William Pipe prompted Konrad to leave the ship. He departed for London, where he quickly went through half his ready cash. Appealing to his uncle, he received additional funds, along with a long letter exhorting him to "think for yourself and fend for yourself... don't idle; learn, and don't pretend to be a rich young gentleman.... If you have not secured yourself a position by the age of 24, do not count on the allowance... I have no money for drones and I have no intention of working so that someone else may enjoy himself at my expense..."

Konrad returned to Lowestoft and on 11 July 1878 signed on to a coastal coal schooner, the Skimmer of the Sea. He won popularity with the crew by bearing the cost of entertainment and treats, not paid out of his shilling-a-month ordinary seaman's earnings (the lowest permissible) but out of his uncle's allowance, 160 times higher. "In that craft I began to learn English from East Coast chaps, each built as though to last for ever, and coloured like a Christmas card." Having made three voyages to Newcastle upon Tyne and back in the Skimmer, after only 73 days, on 23 September, Konrad left the schooner.

On 15 October 1878, in his first genuine service at sea, Konrad sailed in the clipper ship Duke of Sutherland on his longest voyage till then, around the Cape of Good Hope to Australia, arriving on 31 January 1879 at Sydney Harbour. He gained some knowledge of local conditions and even of the slang, revealed later in his short story "To-morrow". It was then, too, that he became acquainted with Gustave Flaubert, through Salammbô, and plowed laboriously through a one-volume edition of Shakespeare. At Sydney — Bobrowski wrote Buszczyński — Konrad met a captain famous for his knowledge of the Malay Archipelago. The unnamed captain may have become a partial prototype of Tom Lingard in Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands and The Rescue, whose namesake Konrad never met. The Duke of Sutherland left Sydney on 6 July 1879 on its homeward voyage, and Konrad arrived in London on 19 October.

Having evidently lost desire for long-distance voyages, on 11 December 1879 Konrad enlisted as an able-bodied seaman in the iron steamer Europa. Next day the ship departed for Genoa, Naples, Patras and Palermo, returning to London on 29 January 1880. Soon after, Konrad met George Fountaine Weare Hope, an ex-merchant service officer, then director of a London commercial firm. This — apparently Konrad's first close contact in England — developed into a long-lasting friendship.

Urged on by his uncle, Konrad applied to take the examination for second mate in the British Merchant Marine. Applicants were required to document at least four years' service at sea. In reality, he had served only seventeen months — less than a year and a half. But, armed with a document from Delestang that amplified his period in French service, and giving augmented figures for his British service, he signed a declaration of his statements and of the enclosed documents, risking indictment in the event that the fraud were discovered. He attended a cram course for the examination and passed it on 28 May 1880, aged 22.

Second mate

Finding a suitable berth was not easy. Only on 21 August 1880 did Konrad finally enlist as third mate on an iron clipper ship, the Loch Etive. Next day the ship left London, arriving at Sydney on 24 November. The return voyage began on 11 January 1881. In The Mirror of the Sea (1906) Conrad would give a story, of uncertain basis, relating to this voyage — the rescue of the crew of a Danish sailing ship. The Loch Etive arrived in London on 25 April 1881. There Konrad's allowance from his uncle awaited him: 46 pounds for six months — over twice his earnings on the Loch Etive.

While waiting to enlist for another voyage, Konrad again engaged in some kind of disastrous speculation, which cost him at least his entire half-yearly allowance. This probably gave rise to a fantastic story, with which he regaled his uncle in a letter of 10 August 1881, about an accident aboard the clipper Annie Frost (with which Konrad had no link), loss of luggage, and several days spent in hospital.

Bobrowski's letters to Konrad in this period (Konrad's letters to his uncle were destroyed in World War I) show Konrad apparently hoping for an improvement in Poland's situation not through a liberation movement but by establishing an alliance with neighboring Slavic nations. This was accompanied by a faith in the Panslavic ideology — "surprising," Najder writes, "in a man who was later to emphasize his hostility towards Russia, a conviction that... Poland's [superior] civilization and... historic... traditions would [let] her play a leading role... in the Panslavic community, [and] doubts about Poland's chances of becoming a fully sovereign nation-state."

Konrad had trouble finding a berth as second mate. Eventually he signed on to a small, rickety old barque, the Palestine, for a voyage to Bangkok at pay of 4 pounds a month. From 15 October 1881 uncle Bobrowski was to send him only half the previous allowance, rounded up to 50 pounds a year — slightly over his new, highest salary to date. The Palestine was manned by three officers and ten hands and commanded by 57-year-old Captain Elijah Beard. Konrad was not too pleased with his new appointment. The Palestine left London on 21 September 1881 and, after a stop at Gravesend, sailed north on 28 September. Due to gales, the passage to Newcastle upon Tyne took 22 days.

Conrad later described his adventures on the Palestine, renamed Judea, in his short story "Youth" (1898). Though he preserved the names of the captain and first officer, and though the general course of events and many details correspond with the facts, as usual a number of things are creations of Conrad's imagination. Thus, there is no documentary evidence of a collision with a steamship at Newcastle; the story's hero is four years younger than Konrad; there was only one attempt, not several, to leave Falmouth, Cornwall, as the ship was continuously under repair; and there are other, more striking discrepancies.

The Palestine, carrying a cargo of coal, left Newcastle for Bangkok on 29 November 1881. Crossing the English Channel, she met strong gales, lost a mast, and started to leak. On 24 December she returned to Falmouth, Cornwall, for repairs. Konrad nevertheless decided to keep his berth, probably in order to obtain the certificate of service as second officer.

Finally after nine months, on 17 September 1882, after leaving London, the Palestine sailed from Falmouth for Bangkok, Siam (Thailand). Konrad was, for the first time, fully in charge of a four-man watch — an important step forward in an officer's advancement. The ambiguous status of a novice second mate on a small barque such as the Palestine required him to be tough and strong-minded, especially in front of the sailors. The passage was slow, uneventful, monotonous, until 11 March 1883, when, in the Bangka Strait between Sumatra and Bangka Island, a smell resembling paraffin oil was noted. Next day, smoke was discovered issuing from the coals; water was thrown on them. On 13 March, four tons of coals were thrown overboard and more water poured down the hold. On 14 March, the hatches not being battened down, the decks blew up fore and aft. The vessel headed for the Sumatra shore, and the S.S. Somerset took it in tow. The fire increased rapidly, and the Somerset declined to tow the barque on shore. The vessel became a mass of fire, and the crew got off into three boats, which remained by the vessel until the morning of 15 March 1883. That evening the boats arrived at Muntok.

In his story "Youth", Conrad dramatized the accident, stretching it out in time and space and giving a different reason for parting with the towing steamer. In the story, the parting seems very risky; in reality, the disaster took place near shore. And the boats did not steer for Java, to the east of Sumatra, but toward the port of Muntok on Bangka Island, off the east coast of Sumatra. Indeed, Richard Curle's 1922 identification of Muntok as the port where the story's hero experienced his first fascinating encounter with the exotic East revealed the story's greatest exaggeration: the boats could reach shore in some dozen hours, with no need to "knock about in an open boat" for "nights and days". Conrad had also forgotten, after all those years, that he had three, not two, sailors with him in his boat. But the most interesting discrepancy between story and reality consisted in Conrad's extolling the crew as "Liverpool hard cases", whereas in fact there was not a single Liverpudlian in the crew, and half were non-Britons.

Konrad had acquitted himself well on the Palestine. The barque's Irish first officer, H. Mahon, described him to Konrad's friend Hope as "'a capital chap,' a good Officer, the best Second Mate he had ever shipped with."

Konrad officially signed off the Palestine on 3 April 1883. While he looked in vain for a job that would enable him to sail back to Europe, he explored Singapore's harbor district, which would be the scene for many of his pages. Eventually he returned to England as a passenger on a steamer, reaching London by the end of May.

The 25-year-old Konrad and his uncle Bobrowski looked forward to a repeatedly-postponed meeting, to take place in Kraków; nevertheless, Bobrowski again emphasized in a letter that it was important for Konrad to obtain his British naturalization: "I should prefer to see your face a little later... as that of a free citizen of a free country, rather than earlier... as that of citizen of the world!... It is really a matter of your looking after your own best interests." In any case, the plans had to be changed due to the uncle's stomach troubles and rheumatism. They finally met — for the first time in the five years since Konrad's 1878 suicide attempt in Marseilles — in July 1883 at Marienbad in Bohemia; then on 12 August they left for Teplice, likewise in Bohemia, where Konrad stayed two more weeks. Their meeting appears to have been pleasant. Bobrowski's correspondence became more affectionate and friendly, with fewer admonitions; the prevailing mood became one of intimate understanding. Konrad's own letters from the period, to his uncle and to Stefan Buszczyński, in Najder's words, "allow... one to dispense with an occasionally advanced hypothesis that when [Konrad] left [Poland] he wanted to break once and for all with his Polish past."

On 10 September 1883 Konrad signed on as second mate on the mainly Scandinavian-crewed British clipper Riversdale. The ship sailed from London on 13 September 1883, arriving on 6 April 1884 at Madras, India. There Captain McDonald, a Scot who kept the ship's officers at a distance and treated them "as machines, to be worked by himself when and as he pleased," suffered some kind of "attack" which Konrad described to the physician whom he fetched, as alcoholic inebriation. After Captain McDonald learned from a friend, a steamer captain, how Konrad had represented his condition, on 15 April McDonald dismissed Konrad, with a less than satisfactory certificate, issued on 17 April. A court of inquiry later judged McDonald responsible for the subsequent stranding of the Riversdale. The court's finding would eventually enable Konrad to take his examination for first mate (initially, the Marine Board delayed accepting his application, put off by McDonald's certificate).

Leaving the Riversdale, Konrad took a train to Bombay, where on 28 April he signed on as second mate of the clipper Narcissus, immortalized 13 years later in the title of his first sea novel, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897). The ship sailed for London on 5 June 1884. Thought to have been the original of the title Negro was Joseph Barron, aged 35, who died three weeks before the ship reached Dunkirk. Considering that Captain Archibald Duncan had had trouble with his crew only during the southbound passage — the return voyage was uneventful — Conrad seems to have incorporated into his novel the story of crew trouble heard from Duncan. The Narcissus entered Dunkirk on 16 October 1884, and next day Konrad signed off.

Having at last completed the required length of service, Konrad prepared for his first officer's examination. He failed it on 17 November 1884 (he would give no hint of this in A Personal Record, 1912) but, perhaps after coaching by a crammer, passed it on 3 December 1884 — over four years after his examination for second mate.

First mate

The years 1885-88 were marked by a fall in demand for new vessels, as the tonnage of individual ships grew; berths for officers fell with the number of ships. The challenge for foreign officers was increased by Britons' resentment of the "invasion" of foreigners. "The fact that Conrad always presented his relationship with his English superiors and employers as free of national conflict is no proof," writes Najder, "since he often smoothed out and retouched his past to render it more consistently positive..."

Konrad searched nearly five months before, on 24 April 1885, in Hull, England, finding a berth as second officer aboard the clipper Tilkhurst, the largest sailing ship in which he served. On 10 June the ship, with a cargo of coal, sailed from Penarth, reaching Singapore on 22 September. The crew once again was largely Scandinavian, and, exceptionally, only one crew member left the ship there. Of the captain, Edwin John Blake, a physician's son, Conrad had the most positive recollections of all his commanders — "a singularly well-informed mind, the least sailor-like in outward aspect, but certainly one of the best seamen... it has been my good luck to serve under." The unloading in Singapore ended on 19 October. The Tilkhurst sailed to Calcutta, arriving on 21 November. After taking on a load of jute, the ship began its homeward passage on 9 January 1886.

During his stay in India, 28-year-old Konrad had sent five letters to Joseph Spiridion, a Pole eight years his senior whom he had befriended at Cardiff in June 1885 just before the Tilkhurt sailed for Singapore. These letters are Konrad's first preserved texts in English. His English is generally correct but stiff to the point of artificiality; many fragments suggest that his thoughts ran along the lines of Polish syntax and phraseology. More importantly, the letters show a marked change in views from those implied in the correspondence of 1881-83. He had departed from "hope for the future" and from the conceit of "sailing [ever] toward Poland", and from his Panslavic ideas. He was left with a painful sense of the hopelessness of the Polish question and an acceptance of England as a possible refuge. While he often adjusted his statements to accord to some extent with the views of his addressees, the theme of hopelessness concerning the prospects for Polish independence, authentically occurs often in his correspondence and works before 1914.

Feeling "sick and tired of sailing about for little money and less consideration," Konrad sought Spiridion's advice about the feasibility of engaging in the whaling business — perhaps he hoped to obtain a loan for that purpose from Spiridion and his father. Spiridion later told Jean-Aubry that he dissuaded his young friend from the enterprise.

The Tilkhurst arrived in Dundee on 16 June 1886. Konrad signed off the same day. Two letters from uncle Bobrowski awaited him in London. In one, the uncle wrote: "I deduce from your and [Konrad's business associate Adolf] Krieger's letters [that] you intend to devote yourself to trade and stay in London." He urged Konrad to first pass his ship master's examination and obtain British naturalization.

On 28 July 1886 Konrad failed in his first attempt to pass the master mariner's examination; he again never acknowledged this, to his uncle or to the reading public of his A Personal Record. Meanwhile, on 2 July he had applied for, and on 19 August was granted, British citizenship. On 10 November, on the second attempt, he passed the master mariner's examination.

Master

Having become a subject of Queen Victoria, Konrad had not ceased to be a subject of Tsar Alexander III. To achieve the latter, he had to make many visits to the Russian Embassy in London and politely reiterate his request. He would later recall the Embassy's home at Belgrave Square, in his novel, The Secret Agent.

On 16 February 1887 he signed on as first mate of an iron barque, the Highland Forest, lying in port at Amsterdam. The ship had a crew of 18, including as many as 14 foreigners. The captain was a 34-year-old Irishman, John McWhir (Conrad gave the same name, with an additional r, to the much older master of the Nan-Shan in the 1902 novel Typhoon). The Highland Forest left Amsterdam on 18 February and ran into strong gales. By Conrad's account, some spars were carried away, and a piece of one struck and injured him. On 20 June the ship reached Semarang, Java, and Conrad signed off on 1 July. Next day he boarded the steamship Celestial, disembarking on 6 July at Singapore, where he went for treatment to the European Hospital; Conrad would describe it in his 1900 novel Lord Jim, whose hero had likewise been injured by a falling spar.

The first mate of the S.S. Celestial, which had brought Conrad to Singapore, was Frederick Havelock Brooksbank, son-in-law of the then well-known merchant and sailor William Lingard, prototype of Tom Lingard in Almayer's Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896) and The Rescue (1920). Conrad never met William Lingard but heard much about him, mainly from Lingard's nephews, James and Joshua Lingard. It was probably through Brooksbank that Conrad met James Craig, master of the small steamer Vidar, which made voyages between Sinapore and small ports on Borneo and Celebes (now Sulawesi). James (Jim) Lingard had been living for some years as a trading agent on Borneo, at Berau, on the Berau River. On 22 August 1887 Conrad sailed from Singapore in the Vidar as first mate; he made four voyages in her: 22 August – 26 September; 30 September – 31 October; 4 November – 1 December 1887; and the last, ending 2 January 1888.

Apart from the six days at Muntok in 1883, this was Conrad's first opportunity to see the East up close. The Vidar penetrated deep inland, steaming up the rivers. Of the six ports of call, four lay in the country's interior, two as much as 30 miles from the sea.

Against the primeval natural background of lush, insatiable, and putrefying vegetation [writes Najder] the trading posts must have appeared either as foolish challenges to the invincible forces of the tropics, or as pathetic proof of the vanity of human endeavor. [P]articularly grotesque must have been the impression made by white men, who, cut off from their own civilizations, often became alcoholics or hopeless cranks. [F]our such men lived at Tanjung Redeb [on the Berau River, including the Englishman] James Lingard... and a Eurasian Dutchman, Charles William Olmeijer (or Ohlmeijer), who had lived there for seventeen years.

Olmeijer, his name transcribed phonetically as "Almayer", became the protagonist of Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895) and a hero of the second, An Outcast of the Islands (1896); he also appears in the autobiographical volume, A Personal Record (1912), where Conrad writes: "If I had not got to know Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there would never have been a line of mine in print." But as Jocelyn Baines observes, "This was paying Almayer too big a compliment because when someone is ready to write there will always be an Almayer to hand." In reality, Conrad did not get to know Olmeijer well at all. As he was to write in March 1917, "[W]e had no social shore connections. [I]t isn't very practicable for a seaman." A few days earlier, he had written his publisher: "... I knew very little of and about shore-people. I was chief mate of the S.S. Vidar and very busy whenever in harbour." Neither the pathetic Almayer of A Personal Record nor the tragic Almayer of Almayer's Folly have much in common with the real Olmeijer. Conrad used the names of people he met, and occasionally their external appearances, in his writings only as aids in creating a fictional world from his reminiscences, books that he had read, and his own imagination.

Given Conrad's negligible personal acquaintance with the peoples of the Malay Archipelago, why does this area loom so large in his early work? (Leaving aside The Rescue, whose completion was repeatedly deferred till 1920, the last of the Malay novels was Lord Jim, published in 1900.) Najder argues that Conrad, the exile and wanderer, was painfully aware of a difficulty that he confessed more than once: the lack of a common cultural background with his Anglophone readers; he could not compete with English-language authors writing about the Anglosphere. The choice of a non-English setting suggested itself the more because it freed him from an embarrassing division of loyalty: Almayer's Folly, and later "An Outpost of Progress" (1897, set in a Congo savagely exploited by King Leopold II of Belgium) and "Heart of Darkness" (1899, likewise set in the Congo), contain many bitter reflections on colonialism. The Malay states came theoretically under the suzerainty of the Dutch government; Conrad did not write about the area's British dependencies, which he never visited. He "was apparently intrigued by... struggles aimed at preserving national independence. The prolific and destructive richness of tropical nature and the dreariness of human life within it accorded well with the pessimistic mood of his early works."

On 4 January 1888 "J. Korzeniowski," just turned 30, signed off the Vidar at Singapore. For two weeks, while waiting for a ship to Europe, he stayed at the Sailors' Home (for officers only), where he quarreled with the steward, a certain Phillips, a professional do-gooder. Three decades later, Conrad described his stay in The Shadow Line (1917), a novel he termed "not a story really but exact autobiography" — a misleading description, as usual with Conrad's "autobiographical" pieces.

On 19 January 1888 he was appointed captain of the barque Otago and left by steamer for Bangkok, Siam (Thailand), where on 24 January he took up his first command. The Otago, the smallest vessel he had sailed in except for the coaster Vidar, left Bangkok on 9 February. After a three-day stop at Singapore, on 3 March it headed for Sydney, Australia, arriving on 7 May. On 22 May it left for Melbourne; arriving after a difficult and stormy passage, it stayed at anchor in the Melbourne roadstead till 8 June. After taking on a load of wheat, it left for Sydney on 7 July. Arriving five days later, it stayed until 7 August.

The Otago's next voyage, with a cargo of fertilizer, soap and tallow, was to Mauritius, then a British possession east of Madagascar in the southwest Indian Ocean. The ship reached Port Louis on 30 September 1888. During an almost two-month-long stay caused by difficulties with loading, Conrad developed a couple of romantic interests. One of these would be described in his 1910 story "A Smile of Fortune", which contains autobiographical elements (e.g., one of the characters is the same Chief Mate Burns who appears in The Shadow Line). The narrator, a young captain, flirts ambiguously and surreptitiously with Alice Jacobus, daughter of a local merchant living in a house surrounded by a magnificent rose garden. Research has confirmed that in Port Louis at the time there was a 17-year-old Alice Shaw, whose father, a shipping agent, owned the only rose garden in town.

More is known about Conrad's other, more open flirtation. An old friend, Captain Gabriel Renouf of the French merchant marine, introduced him to the family of his brother-in-law. Renouf's eldest sister was the wife of Louis Edward Schmidt, a senior official in the colony; with them lived two other sisters and two brothers. Though the island had been taken over in 1810 by Britain, many of the inhabitants were descendants of the original French colonists, and Conrad's excellent French and perfect manners opened all local salons to him. He became a frequent guest at the Schmidts', where he often met the Misses Renouf. A couple of days before leaving Port Louis, Conrad asked one of the Renouf brothers for the hand of his 26-year-old sister Eugenie. She was already, however, engaged to marry her pharmacist cousin. After the rebuff, Conrad did not pay a farewell visit but sent a polite letter to Gabriel Renouf, saying he would never return to Mauritius and adding that on the day of the wedding his thoughts would be with them. The Otago left Port Louis for Melbourne on 21 November 1888 with a cargo of sugar, arriving on 5 January 1889.

The Otago stayed close to the Australian coast. After being towed to Port Phillip Bay and visiting Port Minlacowie in Spencer Gulf, the Otago sailed around the Yorke Peninsula, arriving at Port Adelaide on 26 March 1889. Soon after, Captain Korzeniowski gave up his command. He was, Najder explains, "not a typical seaman... [H]e did not regard his work at sea as permanent... [A]bove all... he had exceptionally wide-ranging interests and cultural needs. Once the first charm of commanding a ship faded, the future writer must have felt the dreariness of sailing in the Antipodes... He must have been oppressed by a sense of being cut off from Europe, deprived of newspapers, books and current news. Even the chances of improving his English were slight: one of his officers in the Otago was a German and the other a Finn. [T]he command of a small barque with a crew of nine could satisfy neither [Conrad's] ambitions nor his needs."

On 2 April 1889 the Russian Ministry of Home Affairs released "the son of a Polish man of letters, captain of the British merchant marine" from the status of Russian subject.

Korzeniowski left Port Adelaide on 3 April as a passenger on the German steamer Nürnberg (listed as "Captain Conrad") and, passing through the Suez Canal, disembarked on 14 May at Southampton, England.

Conrad's success in the British Merchant Navy so far had been modest. He had not been captain or first mate in a large vessel, nor had he worked for a firm of importance. "His foreign origin and looks," writes Najder, "were no help to him." Nor had he reached the highest rank in seamanship at the time (discontinued in the 1990s), that of Extra Master, which required an additional examination. For the time being, he lived on his savings and a modest income from his share in the firm of Baar, Moering & Company.

By the autumn of 1889 he found an occupation that could compensate for his disappointments and help him cope with his inner perplexities: he began writing Almayer's Folly.

[T]he son of a writer, praised by his [maternal] uncle [Tadeusz Bobrowski] for the beautiful style of his letters, the man who from the very first page showed a serious, professional approach to his work, presented his start on Almayer's Folly as a casual and non-binding incident... [Y]et he must have felt a pronounced need to write. Every page right from th[e] first one testifies that writing was not something he took up for amusement or to pass time. Just the contrary: it was a serious undertaking, supported by careful, diligent reading of the masters and aimed at shaping his own attitude to art and to reality.... [W]e do not know the sources of his artistic impulses and creative gifts.

Conrad's later letters to literary friends show the attention that he devoted to analysis of style, to individual words and expressions, to the emotional tone of phrases, to the atmosphere created by language. In this, Conrad in his own way followed the example of Gustave Flaubert, notorious for searching days on end for le mot juste — for the right word to render the "essence of the matter." Najder opines: "[W]riting in a foreign language admits a greater temerity in tackling personally sensitive problems, for it leaves uncommitted the most spontaneous, deeper reaches of the psyche, and allows a greater distance in treating matters we would hardly dare approach in the language of our childhood. As a rule it is easier both to swear and to analyze dispassionately in an acquired language." Years later Conrad, when asked why he did not write in French, which he spoke fluently, would reply (puckishly?): "Ah... to write French you have to know it. English is so plastic — if you haven't got the word you can make it."

Roi des Belges, which Conrad sailed up Congo River (1889)

A childhood ambition of Conrad's to visit central Africa was realised in 1889, when he contrived to reach the Congo Free State. He became captain of a Congo steamboat, and the atrocities he witnessed and his experiences there not only informed his most acclaimed and ambiguous work, Heart of Darkness, but served to crystallise his vision of human nature – and his beliefs about himself. These were in some measure affected by the emotional trauma and lifelong illness that he had contracted there. During his stay, he became acquainted with Roger Casement, whose 1904 Casement Report detailed the abuses suffered by the indigenous population.

The journey upriver made by the narrator of Heart of Darkness, Charles Marlow, closely follows Conrad's own, and he appears to have experienced a disturbing insight into the nature of evil. Conrad's experience of loneliness at sea, of corruption, and of the pitilessness of nature converged to form a coherent, if bleak, vision of the world. Isolation, self-deception, and the remorseless working out of the consequences of character flaws are threads running through much of his work.

In 1891, Conrad stepped down in rank to sail as first mate on the clipper ship Torrens, quite possibly the finest ship ever launched from a Sunderland yard (James Laing's Deptford Yard, 1875). For fifteen years (1875–90), no ship approached her speed for the outward passage to Australia. On her record-breaking run to Adelaide, she covered 16,000 miles (26,000 km) in 64 days. Conrad writes of her:

A ship of brilliant qualities – the way the ship had of letting big seas slip under her did one's heart good to watch. It resembled so much an exhibition of intelligent grace and unerring skill that it could fascinate even the least seamanlike of our passengers.

Conrad made two voyages to Australia aboard her as chief officer under Captain Cope from November 1891 to June 1893.

On 17 January 1894, at London, 36-year-old "J. Conrad" disembarked from the Adowa, unknowingly ending his last service at sea.

Six months later, as one of 176 witnesses, he testified before the Board of Trade's Departmental Committee on the Manning of Merchant Ships. He stated that the Adowa was not sufficiently manned, but considered the manning of the Skimmer of the Seas, the Otago and the Torrens satisfactory. Conrad departed from the truth in reporting the length of his service and posts held. He maintained that he had spent 18 months on the Congo River "in command of a steamer," when in fact he had spent only six weeks on the Congo; he also added three months to his command of the Otago, and claimed that he had made two voyages to Mauritius and two passages through Torres Strait; he lengthened his service in the Torrens by three months; and he alleged that he had made a transatlantic voyage in the Adowa. He was silent about his service in French ships, and about all his Continental European connections generally.

In fact, during the 19 years from the time that Conrad had left Kraków in October 1874 until he signed off the Adowa in January 1894, he had worked in ships, including long periods in ports, for 10 years and almost 8 months. He had spent just over 8 years at sea — 9 months of this as a passenger.

He had served as a crew member (steward, apprentice, able-bodied seaman) for over two and a half years (21 months of that at sea); as third mate, 8 months; as second mate (his longest service), almost 4 years (only two and a half years of that at sea); as first mate, two years and three months (two years of that at sea); as captain, one year and two months (half of that at sea). Of his nearly 11 years at sea, 9 months were in steamers.

A bequest from Conrad's uncle and mentor, Tadeusz Bobrowski (who had died on 1 January 1894) — which bequest Conrad, typically, would soon manage to lose — for the moment made it easier for him to retire from the sea and devote himself to a literary career. (Najder 2007, p. 203.)

The man

A striking portrait of Conrad, aged about 46, was drawn by the historian and poet Henry Newbolt, who met him about 1903:

One thing struck me at once—the extraordinary difference between his expression in profile and when looked at full face. [W]hile the profile was aquiline and commanding, in the front view the broad brow, wide-apart eyes and full lips produced the effect of an intellectual calm and even at times of a dreaming philosophy. Then [a]s we sat in our little half-circle round the fire, and talked on anything and everything, I saw a third Conrad emerge—an artistic self, sensitive and restless to the last degree. The more he talked the more quickly he consumed his cigarettes... And presently, when I asked him why he was leaving London after... only two days, he replied that... the crowd in the streets... terrified him. "Terrified? By that dull stream of obliterated faces?" He leaned forward with both hands raised and clenched. "Yes, terrified: I see their personalities all leaping out at me like tigers!" He acted the tiger well enough almost to terrify his hearers: but the moment after he was talking again wisely and soberly as if he were an average Englishman with not an irritable nerve in his body. (Najder 2007, p. 331.)

On 12 October 1912, American music critic James Huneker visited Conrad and later recalled being received by "a man of the world, neither sailor nor novelist, just a simple-mannered gentleman, whose welcome was sincere, whose glance was veiled, at times far-away, whose ways were French, Polish, anything but 'literary,' bluff or English."

After respective separate visits to Conrad in August and September 1913, two British aristocrats, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell and the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell — who were lovers at the time — recorded their impressions of the novelist. In her diary, Morrell wrote:

I found Conrad himself standing at the door of the house ready to receive me. How different from the [disparaging] picture Henry James had evoked [in conversation with Morrell], for Conrad's appearance was really that of a Polish nobleman. His manner was perfect, almost too elaborate; so nervous and sympathetic that every fibre of him seemed electric... He talked English with a strong accent, as if he tasted his words in his mouth before pronouncing them; but he talked extremely well, though he had always the talk and manner of a foreigner... He was dressed very carefully in a blue double-breasted jacket. He talked... apparently with great freedom about his life — more ease and freedom indeed than an Englishman would have allowed himself. He spoke of the horrors of the Congo, from the moral and physical shock of which he said he had never recovered... [His wife Jessie] seemed a nice and good-looking fat creature, an excellent cook, as Henry James [had] said, and was indeed a good and reposeful mattress for this hypersensitive, nerve-wracked man, who did not ask from his wife high intelligence, only an assuagement of life's vibrations.... He made me feel so natural and very much myself, that I was almost afraid of losing the thrill and wonder of being there, although I was vibrating with intense excitement inside; and even now, as I write this, I feel almost the same excitement, the same thrill of having been in the presence of one of the most remarkable men I have known. His eyes under their pent-house lids revealed the suffering and the intensity of his experiences; when he spoke of his work, there came over them a sort of misty, sensuous, dreamy look, but they seemed to hold deep down the ghosts of old adventures and experiences — once or twice there was something in them one almost suspected of being wicked.... But then I believe whatever strange wickedness would tempt this super-subtle Pole, he would be held in restraint by an equally delicate sense of honour.... In his talk he led me along many paths of his life, but I felt that he did not wish to explore the jungle of emotions that lay dense on either side, and that his apparent frankness had a great reserve. This may perhaps be characteristic of Poles as it is of the Irish. (Najder 2007, p. 447.)

A month later, Bertrand Russell visited Conrad at Capel House, and the same day on the train wrote down his impressions:

Bertrand Russell

It was wonderful — I loved him & I think he liked me. He talked a great deal about his work & life & aims, & about other writers.... I got him on to Henry James... Then we went for a little walk, & somehow grew very intimate. I plucked up courage to tell him what I find in his work — the boring down into things to get to the very bottom below the apparent facts. He seemed to feel I had understood him; then I stopped & we just looked into each other's eyes for some time, & then he said he had grown to wish he could live on the surface and write differently, that he had grown frightened. His eyes at the moment expressed the inward pain & terror that one feels him always fighting.... Then he talked a lot about Poland, & showed me an album of family photographs of the [18]60's — spoke about how dream-like all that seems, & how he sometimes feels he ought not to have had any children, because they have no roots or traditions or relations. (Najder 2007, p. 448.)

Russell's insights, so resonant with Morrell's, reveal the profundity of Conrad's existential loneliness. Russell's Autobiography, published over half a century later in 1968, vividly confirms his original experience:

My first impression was one of surprise. He spoke English with a very strong foreign accent, and nothing in his demeanour in any way suggested the sea. He was an aristocratic Polish gentleman to his fingertips.... At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other... I have known. We looked into each other's eyes, half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs. (Najder 2007, pp. 448-49.)

The two men's subsequent friendship and correspondence lasted, with long intervals, to the end of Conrad's life. In one letter, Conrad avowed his "deep admiring affection, which, if you were never to see me again and forget my existence tomorrow will be unalterably yours usque ad finem." (Najder 2007, p. 449.) Conrad in his correspondence often used the Latin expression meaning "to the end," which he seems to have adopted from his faithful guardian, mentor and benefactor, his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski.

Conrad looked with less optimism than Russell on the possibilities of scientific and philosophic knowledge. (Najder 2007, p. 449.) In a 1913 letter to acquaintances who had invited Conrad to join their society, he reiterated his belief that it was impossible to understand the essence of either reality or life: both science and art penetrate no further than the outer shapes. (Najder 2007, p. 446.)

Najder describes Conrad as "[a]n alienated émigré... haunted by a sense of the unreality of other people — a feeling natural to someone living outside the established structures of family, social milieu, and country." (Najder 2007, p. 576.)

Throughout almost his entire life Conrad was an outsider and felt himself to be one. An outsider in exile; an outsider during his visits to his family in... Ukraine; an outsider — because of his experiences and bereavement — in [Kraków] and Lwów; an outsider in Marseilles; an outsider, nationally and culturally, on British ships; an outsider as an English writer. (Najder 2007, p. 576.)

Conrad's sense of loneliness throughout his exile's life found memorable expression in the 1901 short story, "Amy Foster".

Politics

Next to literature, politics was Conrad's greatest intellectual passion.

Antidemocratic gibes [of Conrad's, writes Najder] have won him the reputation of a conservative among the majority of Conrad scholars. I consider this an oversimplification: his opposition to democracy was not political but sprang from theoretical, philosophical and psychological misgivings. It was not an opposition in the name of autocracy, aristocracy, monarchy, oligarchy or other forms of government. In deriding contemporary democracy, Conrad was not setting something better against it — in this respect he was not unlike the early Anatole France. And in his distrust of all political doctrines and general theories, he... resembled his own father.

Conrad's distrust of democracy sprang from his doubts whether the propagation of democracy as an aim in itself could solve any problems. He thought that, in view of the weakness of human nature and of the "criminal" character of society, democracy offered boundless opportunities for demagogues and charlatans.

He accused social democrats of his time of acting to weaken "the national sentiment, the preservation of which [was his] concern" — of attempting to dissolve national identities in an impersonal melting-pot. "I look at the future from the depth of a very black past and I find that nothing is left for me except fidelity to a cause lost, to an idea without future." It was Conrad's hopeless fidelity to the memory of Poland that prevented him from believing in the idea of "international fraternity," which he considered, under the circumstances, just a verbal exercise. He resented some socialists' talk of freedom and world brotherhood while keeping silent about his own partitioned and oppressed Poland.

Conrad's alienation from partisan politics went together with an émigrė's psychological alienation, reflected in his story "Amy Foster," and with an abiding sense of the thinking man's burden imposed by his personality, as described in his letter of 12 July 1894 to a relative-by-marriage and fellow author, Marguerite Poradowska (née Gachet, and cousin of Vincent van Gogh's physician, Paul Gachet) of Brussels:

We must drag the chain and ball of our personality to the end. This is the price one pays for the infernal and divine privilege of thought; so in this life it is only the chosen who are convicts — a glorious band which understands and groans but which treads the earth amidst a multitude of phantoms with maniacal gestures and idiotic grimaces. Which would you rather be: idiot or convict?

The most extensive and ambitious political statement that Conrad ever made was his 1905 essay, "Autocracy and War", whose starting point was the Russo-Japanese War (he finished the article a month before the Battle of Tsushima Strait). The essay begins with a statement about Russia's incurable weakness and ends with warnings against Prussia, the dangerous aggressor in a future European war. For Russia he predicted a violent outburst in the near future, but Russia's lack of democratic traditions and the backwardness of her masses made it impossible for the revolution to have a salutary effect. Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship. He saw western Europe as torn by antagonisms engendered by economic rivalry and commercial selfishness. In vain might a Russian revolution seek advice or help from a materialistic and egoistic western Europe that armed itself in preparation for wars far more brutal than those of the past.

Conrad's "Autocracy and War", Najder points out, showed a historical awareness "exceptional in the Western European literature of his time" — an awareness that Conrad had drawn from his membership in a very politically active family of a country that had for over a century been daily reminded of the consequences of neglecting the broad enlightened interests of the national polity.

Writer

In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he decided on a literary career. His first novel, Almayer's Folly, set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895. Its appearance marked his first use of the pen name "Joseph Conrad"; "Konrad" was, of course, the third of his Polish given names, but his use of it – in the anglicised version, "Conrad" – may also have been an homage to the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz's patriotic narrative poem, Konrad Wallenrod.

Edward Garnett, a young publisher's reader and literary critic who would play one of the chief supporting roles in Conrad's literary career, had — like Unwin's first reader of Almayer's Folly, Wilfrid Hugh Chesson — been impressed by the manuscript, but Garnett had been "uncertain whether the English was good enough for publication." Garnett had shown the novel to his wife, Constance Garnett, later a well-known translator of Russian literature. She had thought Conrad's foreignness a positive merit.

Almayer's Folly, together with its successor, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), laid the foundation for Conrad's reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales – a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate him for the rest of his career.

In March 1896 Conrad married an Englishwoman, Jessie George. They rented a long series of successive homes, occasionally in France, sometimes briefly in London, but mostly in the English countryside, sometimes from friends — in order to be close to friends, in order to enjoy the peace of the countryside, but above all because it was more affordable. The couple had two sons, Borys and John. The elder, Borys, whom Conrad named under the misapprehension that the Russian name Boris was a Polish name, proved a disappointment in scholarship and integrity.

Except for several vacations in France and Italy, a 1914 vacation in his native Poland, and a 1923 visit to the United States, Conrad lived out the rest of his life in England.

In 1914, Conrad stayed at the Zakopane pension Konstantynówka, operated by his cousin Aniela Zagórska, mother of his future Polish translator of the same name (Najder 2007, pp. 462-63).

Conrad; Aniela Zagórska (left), Karola Zagórska, Conrad's nieces. Aniela translated Conrad into Polish.

The 1914 vacation with his wife and sons in Poland, at the urging of Józef Retinger, coincided with the outbreak of World War I. On 28 July 1914, the day war broke out between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, Conrad and the Retingers arrived in Kraków (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), where Conrad visited childhood haunts. As the city lay only a few miles from the Russian border, there was a risk of getting stranded in a battle zone. With wife Jessie and younger son John ill, Conrad decided to take refuge in the mountain resort town of Zakopane. They left Kraków on 2 August. A few days after arrival in Zakopane, they moved to the Konstantynówka pension operated by Conrad's cousin Aniela Zagórska; it had been frequented by celebrities including the statesman Józef Piłsudski and Conrad's acquaintance, the young concert pianist Artur Rubinstein (Najder 2007, pp. 458–63).

Zagórska introduced Conrad to Polish writers, intellectuals and artists who had also taken refuge in Zakopane, including novelist Stefan Żeromski and Tadeusz Nalepiński, a writer friend of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Conrad roused interest among the Poles as a famous writer and an exotic compatriot from abroad. He charmed new acquaintances, especially women. However, the double Nobel laureate Maria Skłodowska-Curie's physician sister, Bronisława Dłuska, scolded him for having used his great talent for purposes other than bettering the future of his native land (Najder 2007, pp. 463–64) But thirty-three-year-old Aniela Zagórska, Conrad's niece and future Polish translator, idolized him, kept him company, and provided him with books. He particularly delighted in the stories and novels of the ten-years-older, recently deceased Bolesław Prus (Najder 2007, p. 463), read everything by his fellow victim of Poland's 1863 Uprising — "my beloved Prus" — that he could get his hands on, and pronounced him "better than Dickens" — a favorite English novelist of Conrad's.

Conrad, who was noted by his Polish acquaintances to be fluent in his native tongue, participated in their impassioned political discussions. He declared presciently, as Piłsudski had earlier in 1914 in Paris, that in the war, for Poland to regain independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires), and the latter must in turn be beaten by France and Britain (Najder 2007, p. 464).

After many travails and vicissitudes, at the beginning of November 1914 Conrad managed to bring his family back to England. On his return, he was determined to work on swaying British opinion in favor of restoring Poland's sovereignty (Najder 2007, pp. 464–68).

Jessie Conrad would later write in her memoirs: "I understood my husband so much better after those months in Poland. So many characteristics that had been strange and unfathomable to me before, took, as it were, their right proportions. I understood that his temperament was that of his countrymen" (Najder 2007, p. 466).

Financial success long eluded Conrad, who often asked magazine and book publishers for advances, and acquaintances for loans. Eventually a permanent government grant ("Civil List pension") of £100 per annum, awarded on 9 August 1910, somewhat relieved his financial worries, and in time collectors began purchasing his manuscripts. Though his talent was early on recognized by the English intellectual elite, popular success eluded him until the 1913 publication of Chance—paradoxically so, as that novel is not now considered one of his better ones.

Thereafter, for the remaining years of his life, Conrad was the subject of more discussion and praise than any other English writer of the time. He enjoyed increasing wealth and status. He had a true genius for companionship, and his circle of friends included authors and other leading lights in the arts, such as Henry James, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, John Galsworthy, Edward Garnett, Garnett's wife Constance Garnett (translator of Russian literature), Stephen Crane, Hugh Walpole, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Norman Douglas, Jacob Epstein, T.E. Lawrence, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Maurice Ravel, Valery Larbaud, Saint-John Perse, Edith Wharton, James Huneker, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, Józef Retinger (later a founder of the European Movement, which led to the European Union, and author of Conrad and His Contemporaries). Conrad encouraged and mentored younger writers. In the early 1900s he composed a short series of novels in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford.

In 1919 and 1922 Conrad's growing renown and prestige among writers and critics in continental Europe fostered his hopes for a Nobel Prize for literature. Interestingly, it was apparently the French and Swedes — not the English — who favored Conrad's candidacy.

In April 1924 Conrad, who possessed a hereditary Polish status of nobility and coat-of-arms (Nałęcz), declined a (non-hereditary) British knighthood offered by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (Najder 2007, p. 570)

Shortly after, on 3 August 1924, Conrad died of a heart attack. He was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, England, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name, as "Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski" (Najder 2007, p. 573). Inscribed on his gravestone are the lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene which he had chosen as the epigraph to his last complete novel, The Rover:

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, doth greatly please (Najder 2007, p. 574).

Style

Conrad, 1916

Conrad, an emotional man subject to fits of depression, self-doubt, and pessimism, disciplined his romantic temperament with an unsparing moral judgment. Despite the opinions even of some who knew him personally, such as fellow novelist Henry James, Conrad — even when he was only writing elegantly crafted letters to his uncle and acquaintances — was always at heart a writer who sailed, rather than a sailor who wrote. He used his sailor's experiences as a backdrop for many of his works, but he also produced works of similar world view, without the nautical motifs. The failure of many critics in his time to appreciate this, caused him much frustration.

As an artist, he famously aspired, in the words of his preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand – and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."

Writing in what to the visual arts was the age of Impressionism, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order. For instance, in the evocative Patna and courtroom scenes of Lord Jim; in the scenes of the "melancholy-mad elephant" and the "French gunboat firing into a continent", in Heart of Darkness; in the doubled protagonists of The Secret Sharer; and in the verbal and conceptual resonances of Nostromo and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'.

Conrad used his own memories as literary material so often that readers are tempted to treat his life and work as a single whole. His "view of the world", or elements of it, are often described by citing at once both his private and public statements, passages from his letters, and citations from his books. Najder warns that this approach produces an incoherent and misleading picture. "An... uncritical linking of the two spheres, literature and private life, distorts each. Conrad used his own experiences as raw material, but the finished product should not be confused with the experiences themselves" (Najder 2007, p. 576-77).

Many of Conrad's characters were inspired by actual persons he had met, including, in his first novel, Almayer's Folly (completed 1894), William Charles Olmeijer, the spelling of whose name Conrad, probably inadvertently, altered to "Almayer." The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo, subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination.

Apart from Conrad's own experiences, a number of episodes in his fiction were suggested by past or contemporary publicly-known events. The first half of the 1900 novel Lord Jim (the Patna episode) was inspired by the real-life 1880 story of the S.S. Jeddah; the second part, to some extent by the life of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. In Nostromo (completed 1904), the theft of a massive consignment of silver was suggested to Conrad by a story he had heard in the Gulf of Mexico and later read about in a "volume picked up outside a second-hand bookshop." The Secret Agent (completed 1906) was inspired by the French anarchist Martial Bourdin's 1894 death while apparently attempting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The plot of Under Western Eyes (completed 1910) is kicked off by the assassination of a brutal Russian government minister, modeled after the real-life 1904 assassination of Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. Conrad's story "The Secret Sharer" (completed 1909) was inspired by an 1880 incident when Sydney Smith, first mate of the Cutty Sark, had killed a seaman and fled from justice, aided by the ship's captain. The near-novella "Freya of the Seven Isles" (completed in March 1911) was inspired by a story told to Conrad by a Malaya old hand and fan of Conrad's, Captain Carlos M. Marris.

The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad's novels, especially compared to those of near-contemporaries like his friend and frequent benefactor John Galsworthy, is such as to open him to criticism similar to that later applied to Graham Greene. But where "Greeneland" has been characterised as a recurring and recognisable atmosphere independent of setting, Conrad is at pains to create a sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village. Often he chose to have his characters play out their destinies in isolated or confined circumstances.

For the natural surroundings of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago and South America, which Conrad described so vividly, he could rely on his own observations. What his brief landfalls could not provide was a thorough understanding of exotic cultures. For this he resorted, like other writers, to literary sources. When writing his Malayan stories, he consulted Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869), James Brooke's journals, and books with titles like Perak and the Malays, My Journal in Malayan Waters, and Life in the Forests of the Far East. When he set about writing his novel Nostromo, set in the fictitious South American country of Costaguana, he turned to The War between Peru and Chile; Edward Eastwick, Venezuela: or, Sketches of Life in a South American Republic (1868); and George Frederick Masterman, Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay (1869). As a result of relying on literary sources, in Lord Jim, as J.I.M. Stewart writes, Conrad's "need to work to some extent from second-hand" led to "a certain thinness in Jim's relations with the... peoples... of Patusan..." This prompted Conrad at some points to alter the nature of Charles Marlow's narrative in order to "distanc[e] an uncertain command of the detail of Tuan Jim's empire."

Nevertheless, in the view of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, it was not until the first volumes of Anthony Powell's sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, were published in the 1950s, that an English novelist achieved the same command of atmosphere and precision of language with consistency, a view supported by later critics like A. N. Wilson. This is the more remarkable, given that English was Conrad's third language. Powell acknowledged his debt to Conrad.

Conrad's third language remained inescapably under the influence of his first two – Polish and French. This makes his English seem unusual.

Zdzisław Najder observes:

[H]e was a man of three cultures: Polish, French, and English. Brought up in a Polish family and cultural environment... he learned French as a child, and at the age of less than seventeen went to France, to serve... four years in the French merchant marine. At school he must have learned German, but French remained the language he spoke with greatest fluency (and no foreign accent) until the end of his life. He was well versed in French history and literature, and French novelists were his artistic models. But he wrote all his books in English—the tongue he started to learn at the age of twenty. He was thus an English writer who grew up in other linguistic and cultural environments. His work can be seen as located in the borderland of auto-translation [emphasis added by Wikipedia] (Najder 2007, p. IX).

Inevitably for a trilingual Polish-French-English-speaker, Conrad's writings occasionally show examples of "Franglais" and "Poglish" — of the inadvertent use of French or Polish vocabulary, grammar or syntax in his English compositions. In one instance, Najder uses "several slips in vocabulary, typical for Conrad (Gallicisms) and grammar (usually Polonisms)" as part of internal evidence against Conrad's sometime literary collaborator Ford Madox Ford's claim to have written a certain instalment of Conrad's novel Nostromo, for serialized publication in T.P.'s Weekly, on behalf of an ill Conrad.

T. E. Lawrence, one of many writers whom Conrad befriended, offered some perceptive observations about Conrad's writing:

He's absolutely the most haunting thing in prose that ever was: I wish I knew how every paragraph he writes (...they are all paragraphs: he seldom writes a single sentence...) goes on sounding in waves, like the note of a tenor bell, after it stops. It's not built in the rhythm of ordinary prose, but on something existing only in his head, and as he can never say what it is he wants to say, all his things end in a kind of hunger, a suggestion of something he can't say or do or think. So his books always look bigger than they are. He's as much a giant of the subjective as Kipling is of the objective. Do they hate one another?

In Conrad's time, literary critics, while usually commenting favorably on his works, often remarked that many readers were put off by his exotic style, complex narration, profound themes, and pessimistic ideas. Yet as his ideas were borne out by ensuing 20th-century events, in due course he came to be admired for beliefs that seemed to accord more closely with subsequent times than with his own.

In keeping with his skepticism and melancholy, Conrad almost invariably gives to characters in his principal novels and stories, lethal fates. Almayer (Almayer's Folly, 1894), abandoned by his beloved daughter, takes to opium and dies; Peter Willems (An Outcast of the Islands, 1895) is killed by his jealous lover Aïssa; the ineffectual "Nigger," James Wait (The Nigger of the Narcissus, 1897), dies aboard ship and is buried at sea; Mr. Kurtz (Heart of Darkness, 1899) expires, uttering the enigmatic words, "The horror!"; Captain Whalley (The End of the Tether, 1902), betrayed by failing eyesight and an unscrupulous partner, drowns himself; Tuan Jim (Lord Jim, 1900), having inadvertently precipitated a massacre of his adoptive community, deliberately walks to his death at the hands of the community's leader; Gian' Battista Fidanza, the eponymous respected Italian-immigrant Nostromo (Italian: "Our Man") of the novel Nostromo (1904), illicitly obtains a treasure of silver mined in the South American country of "Costaguana" and is shot dead due to mistaken identity; Mr. Verloc, The Secret Agent (1906) of divided loyalties, attempts a bombing, to be blamed on terrorists, that accidentally kills his mentally-defective brother-in-law Stevie, and Verloc himself is killed by his distraught wife, who drowns herself by jumping overboard from a channel steamer. in Chance (1913), Roderick Anthony, a sailing-ship captain, and benefactor and husband of Flora de Barral, becomes the target of a poisoning attempt by her jealous disgraced financier father who, when detected, swallows the poison himself and dies (some years later, Captain Anthony drowns at sea); in Victory (1915), Lena is shot dead by Jones, who had meant to kill his accomplice Ricardo and later succeeds in doing so, then himself perishes along with another accomplice, after which Lena's protector Axel Heyst sets fire to his bungalow and dies beside Lena's body. In Conrad's 1901 short story, "Amy Foster," a Pole transplanted to England, Yanko Goorall (an English transliteration of the Polish Janko Góral, "Johnny Highlander"), falls ill and, suffering from a fever, raves in his native language, frightening his wife Amy, who flees; next morning Yanko dies of heart failure, and it transpires that he had simply been asking in Polish for water.

When a principal character of Conrad's does escape with his life, he sometimes does not fare much better. In Under Western Eyes (1911), Razumov betrays a fellow University of St. Petersburg student, the revolutionist Victor Haldin, who has assassinated a savagely repressive Russian government minister. Haldin is tortured and hanged by the authorities. Later Razumov, sent as a government spy to Geneva, a center of anti-tsarist intrigue, meets the mother and sister of Haldin, who share Haldin's liberal convictions. Razumov falls in love with the sister and confesses his betrayal of her brother; later he makes the same avowal to assembled revolutionists, and their professional executioner bursts his eardrums, making him deaf for life. Razumov staggers away, is knocked down by a streetcar, and finally returns as a cripple to Russia.

Conrad claimed that he "never kept a diary and never owned a notebook." John Galsworthy, who knew him well, described this as "a statement which surprised no one who knew the resources of his memory and the brooding nature of his creative spirit." Nevertheless, after Conrad's death, his Scottish friend Richard Curle published a heavily modified version of Conrad's diaries describing his experiences in Congo; in 1978 a more complete version was published as The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces.

Conrad, like other artists, faced constraints arising from the need to propitiate his audience and confirm its own favorable self-regard. This may account for his describing the admirable crew of the Judea in his 1898 story "Youth" as "Liverpool hard cases", whereas the crew of the Judea's actual 1882 prototype, the Palestine, had included not a single Liverpudlian, and half the crew had been non-Britons; and for Conrad's turning the real-life 1880 criminally-negligent British Captain J.L. Clark, of the S.S. Jeddah, in his 1900 novel Lord Jim, into the captain of the fictitious Patna — "a sort of renegade New South Wales German" so monstrous in physical appearance as to suggest "a trained baby elephant." Similarly, in his letters Conrad — during most of his literary career, struggling for sheer financial survival — often adjusted his views to the predilections of his correspondents. And when he wished to criticize the conduct of European imperialism in what would later be termed the "Third World," he turned his gaze upon the Dutch and Belgian colonies, not upon the British Empire.

Conrad's was a starkly lucid view of the human condition – a vision similar to that which had been offered in two micro-stories by his ten-years-older Polish compatriot, Bolesław Prus (whose work Conrad greatly admired): "Mold of the Earth" (1884) and "Shades" (1885). Conrad wrote:

Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow....

In this world – as I have known it – we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt....

There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain and fleeting appearance....

A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains – but a clot of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.

Conrad is the novelist of man in extreme situations. "Those who read me," he wrote in the preface to A Personal Record, "know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity."

For Conrad fidelity is the barrier man erects against nothingness, against corruption, against the evil that is all about him, insidious, waiting to engulf him, and that in some sense is within him unacknowledged. But what happens when fidelity is submerged, the barrier broken down, and the evil without is acknowledged by the evil within? At his greatest, that is Conrad's theme.

What is the essence of Conrad's art? It surely is not the plot, which he — like Shakespeare — often borrows from public sources and which could be duplicated by lesser authors; the plot serves merely as the vehicle for what the author has to say. A focus on plot leads to the absurdity of Charles and Mary Lamb's 1807 Tales from Shakespeare. Rather, Conrad's essence is to be sought in his depiction of the world open to our senses, and in the world view that he has evolved in the course of experiencing that outer, and his own inner, world. An evocative part of that view is expressed in an August 1901 letter that Conrad wrote to the editor of The New York Times Saturday Book Review:

Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.

Of Conrad's novels, Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904) continue to be widely read, as set texts and for pleasure. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911) are also considered among his finest novels. Arguably Conrad's most influential work remains Heart of Darkness (1899), to which many have been introduced by Francis Ford Coppola's film, Apocalypse Now, inspired by Conrad's novel and set during the Vietnam War. The novel's depiction of a journey into the darkness of the human psyche still resonates with modern readers.

Achebe

In 1975 the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe published an essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'", which provoked controversy by calling Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist". Achebe's view was that Heart of Darkness cannot be considered a great work of art because it is "a novel which celebrates... dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race." Referring to Conrad as a "talented, tormented man," Achebe notes that Conrad (via the protagonist, Charles Marlow) reduces and degrades Africans to "limbs," "angles," "glistening white eyeballs," etc. while simultaneously (and fearfully) suspecting a common kinship between himself and these natives—leading Marlow to sneer the word "ugly." Achebe also cited Conrad's description of an encounter with an African: "A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days." The essay, a landmark in postcolonial discourse, provoked an ongoing debate, and the issues it raised have been addressed in most subsequent literary criticism of Conrad.

According to some critics, Achebe fails to distinguish Marlow's view from Conrad's, which results in very clumsy interpretations of the novella. In their view, Conrad portrays blacks very sympathetically and their plight tragically, and refers sarcastically to, and outright condemns, the supposedly noble aims of European colonists, thereby demonstrating his scepticism about the moral superiority of white men. This, indeed, is a central theme of the novel; Marlow's experiences in Africa expose the brutality of colonialism and its rationales. Ending a passage that describes the condition of chained, emaciated slave workers, the novelist remarks: "After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings." Some observers assert that Conrad, whose own native country had been conquered by imperial powers, empathized by default with other subjugated peoples.

Conrad scholar Peter Firchow points out that "nowhere in the novel does Conrad or any of his narrators, personified or otherwise, claim superiority on the part of Europeans on the grounds of alleged genetic or biological difference". If Conrad or his novel is racist, Firchow argues, it is only in a weak sense, since Heart of Darkness acknowledges racial distinctions "but does not suggest an essential superiority" of any particular group. Furthermore, some younger scholars, such as Masood Ashraf Raja, suggest that if we read Conrad beyond Heart of Darkness, especially his Malay novels, the issue of racism can be further complicated by foregrounding Conrad's positive representation of Muslims.

Memorials

Anchor-shaped Conrad monument at Gdynia, on Poland's Baltic Seacoast

An anchor-shaped monument to Conrad at Gdynia, on Poland's Baltic Seacoast, features a quotation from him in Polish: "Nic tak nie nęci, nie rozczarowuje i nie zniewala, jak życie na morzu" ("[T]here is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea" -- Lord Jim, chapter 2, paragraph 1).

In Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia, a plaque in a "writers walk" commemorates Conrad's brief visits to Australia between 1879 and 1892. The plaque notes that "Many of his works reflect his 'affection for that young continent.'"

In San Francisco in 1979, a small triangular square at Columbus Avenue and Beach Street, near Fisherman's Wharf, was dedicated as "Joseph Conrad Square" after Conrad. The square's dedication was timed to coincide with release of Francis Ford Coppola's Heart of Darkness-inspired film, Apocalypse Now.

In the latter part of World War II, the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Danae was rechristened ORP Conrad and served as part of the Polish Navy.

Notwithstanding the undoubted sufferings that Conrad endured on many of his voyages, sentimentality and canny marketing place him at the best lodgings in several of his destinations. Hotels across the Far East still lay claim to him as an honoured guest, with, however, no evidence to back their claims: Singapore's Raffles Hotel continues to claim he stayed there though he lodged, in fact, at the Sailors' Home nearby. His visit to Bangkok also remains in that city's collective memory, and is recorded in the official history of The Oriental Hotel (where he never, in fact, stayed, lodging aboard his ship, the Otago) along with that of a less well-behaved guest, Somerset Maugham, who pilloried the hotel in a short story in revenge for attempts to eject him.

Conrad is also reported to have stayed at Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel-- a port that, in fact, he never visited. Later literary admirers, notably Graham Greene, followed closely in his footsteps, sometimes requesting the same room and perpetuating myths that have no basis in fact. No Caribbean resort is yet known to have claimed Conrad's patronage, although he is believed to have stayed at a Fort-de-France pension upon arrival in Martinique on his first voyage, in 1875, when he travelled as a passenger on the Mont Blanc.

Bibliography

Main article: Joseph Conrad bibliography

Novels

• Almayer's Folly (1895)
• An Outcast of the Islands (1896)
• The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897)
• Heart of Darkness (1899)
• Lord Jim (1900)
• The Inheritors (with Ford Madox Ford) (1901)
• Typhoon (1902, begun 1899)
• The End of the Tether (written in 1902; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902)
• Romance (with Ford Madox Ford, 1903)
• Nostromo (1904)
• The Secret Agent (1907)
• Under Western Eyes (1911)
• Chance (1913)
• Victory (1915)
• The Shadow Line (1917)
• The Arrow of Gold (1919)
• The Rescue (1920)
• The Nature of a Crime (1923, with Ford Madox Ford)
• The Rover (1923)
• Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel (1925; unfinished, published posthumously)

Stories

Epstein's bust of Conrad (1924), Birmingham Art Gallery. A copy is at San Francisco's Maritime Museum. Epstein, wrote Conrad, "has produced a wonderful piece of work of a somewhat monumental dignity, and yet—everybody agrees—the likeness is striking" (Najder 2007, p. 568).

• "The Black Mate": written, according to Conrad, in 1886; may be counted as his opus double zero; published 1908; posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925.
• "The Idiots": Conrad's truly first short story, which may be counted as his opus zero; written during his honeymoon (3.1896), published in The Savoy periodical, 1896, and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898.
• "The Lagoon": composed 1896; published in Cornhill Magazine, 1897; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898: "It is the first short story I ever wrote."
• "An Outpost of Progress": written 1896; published in Cosmopolis, 1897, and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898: "My next [second] effort in short-story writing"; it shows numerous thematic affinities with Heart of Darkness; in 1906, Conrad described it as his "best story".
• "The Return": completed early 1897, while writing "Karain"; never published in magazine form; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898: "[A]ny kind word about 'The Return' (and there have been such words said at different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for I know how much the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper, and in disillusion." Conrad, who suffered while writing this psychological chef-d'oeuvre of introspection, once remarked: "I hate it."
• "Karain: A Memory": written February–April 1897; published November 1897 in Blackwood's Magazine and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898: "my third short story in... order of time".
• "Youth": written 1898; collected in Youth, a Narrative, and Two Other Stories, 1902
• "Falk": novella / story, written early 1901; collected only in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903
• "Amy Foster": composed 1901; published in the Illustrated London News, December 1901, and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903.
• "To-morrow": written early 1902; serialized in Pall Mall Magazine, 1902, and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903
• "Gaspar Ruiz": written after Nostromo in 1904–5; published in The Strand Magazine, 1906, and collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US). This story was the only piece of Conrad's fiction ever adapted by the author for cinema, as Gaspar the Strong Man, 1920.
• "An Anarchist": written late 1905; serialized in Harper's Magazine, 1906; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US)
• "The Informer": written before January 1906; published, December 1906, in Harper's Magazine, and collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US)
• "The Brute": written early 1906; published in The Daily Chronicle, December 1906; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US)
• "The Duel: A Military Story": serialized in the UK in Pall Mall Magazine, early 1908, and later that year in the US as "The Point of Honor", in the periodical Forum; collected in A Set of Six in 1908 and published by Garden City Publishing in 1924. Joseph Fouché makes a cameo appearance.
• "Il Conde" (i.e., "Conte" [count]): appeared in Cassell's Magazine (UK), 1908, and Hampton's (US), 1909; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US)
• "The Secret Sharer": written December 1909; published in Harper's Magazine, 1910, and collected in ’Twixt Land and Sea, 1912
• "Prince Roman": written 1910, published 1911 in the Oxford and Cambridge Review; posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925; based on the story of Prince Roman Sanguszko of Poland (1800–81)
• "A Smile of Fortune": a long story, almost a novella, written in mid-1910; published in London Magazine, February 1911; collected in ’Twixt Land and Sea, 1912
• "Freya of the Seven Isles": a near-novella, written late 1910–early 1911; published in Metropolitan Magazine and London Magazine, early 1912 and July 1912, respectively; collected in ’Twixt Land and Sea 1912)
• "The Partner": written 1911; published in Within the Tides, 1915
• "The Inn of the Two Witches": written 1913; published in Within the Tides, 1915
• "Because of the Dollars": written 1914; published in Within the Tides, 1915
• "The Planter of Malata": written 1914; published in Within the Tides, 1915
• "The Warrior's Soul": written late 1915–early 1916; published in Land and Water, March 1917; collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925
• "The Tale": Conrad's only story about World War I; written 1916, first published 1917 in The Strand Magazine; posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925

Essays

Joseph Conrad Square, San Francisco

• The Mirror of the Sea (collection of autobiographical essays first published in various magazines 1904–6), 1906
• A Personal Record (also published as Some Reminiscences), 1912
• The First News, 1918
• The Lesson of the Collision: A monograph upon the loss of the "Empress of Ireland", 1919
• The Polish Question, 1919
• The Shock of War, 1919
• Notes on Life and Letters, 1921
• Notes on My Books, 1921
• Last Essays, edited by Richard Curle, 1926
• The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, edited by Zdzisław Najder, 1978, ISBN 978-0-385-00771-9

Adaptations

A number of works in various genres have been based on, or inspired by, Conrad's writings, including:

Films

• Victory (1919), directed by Maurice Tourneur
• Lord Jim (1925), directed by Victor Fleming
• Niebezpieczny raj (Dangerous Paradise, 1930), a Polish adaptation of Victory
• Dangerous Paradise (1930), an adaptation of Victory directed by William Wellman
• Sabotage (1936), adapted from Conrad's The Secret Agent, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
• Victory (1940), featuring Frederic March
• An Outcast of the Islands (1952), featuring Trevor Howard
• Lord Jim (1965), starring Peter O'Toole
• L'avventuriero (The Rover, 1967), directed by Terence Young, featuring Anthony Quinn
• Smuga cienia (The Shadow Line, 1976), a Polish-British adaptation of The Shadow Line, directed by Andrzej Wajda
• The Duellists, a 1977 adaptation of The Duel by Ridley Scott
• Apocalypse Now (1979), by Francis Ford Coppola, adapted from Heart of Darkness
• Victory (1995), adapted by director Mark Peploe from the novel
• The Secret Agent (1996), starring Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette and Gérard Depardieu
• Nostromo (1997), a BBC TV adaptation, co-produced with Italian and Spanish TV networks and WGBH Boston
• Gabrielle (2005) directed by Patrice Chéreau. Adaptation of the short story "The Return" (1898), starring Isabelle Hupert and Pascal Greggory.
• Hanyut (2011), a Malaysian adaptation of Almayer's Folly
• Almayer's Folly (2011), directed by Chantal Akerman

Operas

ORP Conrad—World War II Polish Navy cruiser

• Heart of Darkness (opera) (2011), a chamber opera in one act by Tarik O'Regan, with an English-language libretto by artist Tom Phillips.

See also

• Bolesław Prus
• King Leopold's Ghost
• Alice Sarah Kinkead
• List of Poles
• List of people on the cover of Time Magazine: 1920s – 7 Apr. 1923
• ORP Conrad – a World War II Polish Navy cruiser named after Joseph Conrad.
• Politics in fiction

Further reading

• Gérard Jean-Aubry, Vie de Conrad (Life of Conrad — the authorized biography), Gallimard, 1947, translated by Helen Sebba as The Sea Dreamer: A Definitive Biography of Joseph Conrad, New York, Doubleday & Co., 1957.Magill, Frank (1968). Masterplots. 11. Salem Press. p. 236. http://books.google.com/books?q=Joseph+Conrad+authorised+biography&btnG=Search+Books. 
• Peter Edgerly Firchow, Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
• Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: a Biography, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991.
• Zdzisław Najder, Conrad under Familial Eyes, Cambridge University Press, 1984, ISBN 0-521-25082-X.
• Zdzisław Najder, Joseph Conrad: a Life, translated by Halina Najder, Rochester, Camden House, 2007, ISBN 1-57113-347-X.
• Joseph Retinger, Conrad and His Contemporaries, London, Minerva, 1941; New York, Roy, 1942.
• T. Scovel, A Time to Speak: a Psycholinguistic Inquiry into the Critical Period for Human Speech, Cambridge, MA, Newbury House, 1988.
• J.H. Stape, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Pantheon, 2008, ISBN 1-4000-4449-9.
• J.I.M. Stewart, Joseph Conrad, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1968.
• Olivier Weber, Conrad, Arthaud-Flammarion, 2011.
• Wise, T.J. (1920) A Bibliography of the Writings of Joseph Conrad (1895–1920). London: Printed for Private Circulation Only By Richard Clay & Sons, Ltd.
• Morton Dauwen Zabel, "Conrad, Joseph," Encyclopedia Americana, 1986 ed., ISBN 0-7172-0117-1, vol. 7, pp. 606–7.

External links

Sources

• Works by or about Joseph Conrad at Internet Archive and Google Books (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Works by Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Works by Joseph Conrad at The Online Books Page (various)
• Works by or about Joseph Conrad in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by Joseph Conrad at LibriVox (audio books)
• Works by Joseph Conrad at Conrad First, an archive of every newspaper and magazine in which the work of Joseph Conrad was first published.

Portals and biographies

• The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
• Joseph Conrad Society of America
• Biography of Joseph Conrad, at The Joseph Conrad Centre of Poland
• Biography of Joseph Conrad, at The Literature Network

Literary criticism

• Conrad's page at Literary Journal.com, a number of research articles on Conrad's work
• Chinua Achebe: The Lecture Heard Around The World

Misc

• Find-A-Grave profile for Joseph Conrad
• Archival material relating to Joseph Conrad listed at the UK National Archives