Everything about Joseph Conrad totally explained
Joseph Conrad (born
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski;
3 December 1857 –
3 August 1924) was a
Polish novelist. Many critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in the English language—a fact that's remarkable as he didn't learn to speak English fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a Polish accent).
Conrad is recognized as a master
prose stylist. Some of his works have a strain of
romanticism, but more importantly he's recognized as an important forerunner of
modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including
Ernest Hemingway,
D. H. Lawrence,
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Graham Greene,
William S. Burroughs,
Joseph Heller,
V.S. Naipaul and
John Maxwell Coetzee.
Conrad's novels and stories have also inspired such films as
Sabotage (1936, directed by
Alfred Hitchcock, adapted from Conrad's
The Secret Agent);
Apocalypse Now (1979, adapted from Conrad's
Heart of Darkness);
The Duellists (a 1977
Ridley Scott adaptation of Conrad's
The Duel, from
A Set of Six); and a 1996 film inspired by
The Secret Agent, starring
Bob Hoskins,
Patricia Arquette and
Gérard Depardieu.
Writing during the apex of the
British Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences serving in the French and later the
British Merchant Navy to create novels and short stories that reflected aspects of a world-wide empire while also plumbing the depths of the human soul. Conrad became a naturalized
British citizen in 1886.
Early life
Conrad was born in Berdyczów (
Berdychiv) into a highly patriotic, impoverished Polish
noble family bearing the
Nałęcz coat-of-arms. His father
Apollo Korzeniowski was a writer of politically themed plays, and a
translator of
Alfred de Vigny,
Victor Hugo,
Charles Dickens and
Shakespeare from the French and English. He encouraged his son Konrad to read widely in Polish and French.
In 1861 the elder Korzeniowski was arrested by
Imperial Russian authorities in
Warsaw for helping organize what would become the
January Uprising of 1863–64, and was exiled to
Vologda, a city with a very harsh climate, approximately north of Moscow. His wife, Ewelina Korzeniowska (
née Bobrowska), and four-year-old son followed him into exile. Due to Ewelina's weak health,
Apollo Korzeniowski was allowed in 1865 to move to
Chernihiv, Ukraine, where wıthin a few weeks Conrad's mother died of
tuberculosis. Conrad's father died four years later in
Kraków, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven.
In Kraków, young Conrad was placed in the care of his maternal uncle,
Tadeusz Bobrowski—a more cautious figure than his parents. Bobrowski nevertheless allowed Conrad to travel to
Marseille and begin a career as a seaman at the age of 16. This came after Conrad was rejected for
Austro-Hungarian citizenship, leaving him liable to 25-year conscription into the
Russian Army.
Voyages
Conrad lived an adventurous life, becoming involved in
gunrunning and political conspiracy, which he later fictionalized in his novel
The Arrow of Gold, and apparently had a disastrous love affair, which plunged him into despair. His voyage down the coast of Venezuela would provide material for Nostromo. The first mate of Conrad's vessel became the model for Nostromo's hero.
In 1878, after a failed suicide attempt in
Marseilles by shooting himself in the chest, Conrad took service on his first
British ship bound for
Constantinople, before its return to
Lowestoft, his first landing in Britain.
Barely a month after reaching England, Conrad had signed on for the first of six voyages between July and September 1878, from Lowestoft to Newcastle on a coaster misleadingly named
Skimmer of the Sea. Crucially for his future career, he 'began to learn English from East Coast chaps, each built to last for ever and coloured like a Christmas card.'
In London on 21 September 1881, Conrad set sail for
Newcastle as second mate on the small vessel
Palestine (13 hands) to pick up a cargo of 557 tons of 'West Hartley' coal bound for Bangkok. From the outset things went wrong. A gale hampered progress (sixteen days to the Tyne), then the
Palestine had to wait a month for a berth - and was finally rammed by a steam vessel. The captain's wife, Mrs Beard, looked after Conrad and sewed his buttons on while he lived on board, moored in the Tyne not far from Percy Main.
Palestine sailed from the Tyne at the turn of the year. Then the ship sprang a leak in the Channel and was stuck in
Falmouth for a further nine months. After all these misfortunes, Conrad writes: 'Poor old Captain Beard looked like a ghost of a Geordie skipper.' The ship set sail from Falmouth on 17 September 1882 and reached the Sunda Strait in March 1883. Finally, off Java Head, the cargo ignited and fire engulfed the ship. The crew, including Conrad, reached shore safely in open boats. The ship is re-named
Judaea in Conrad's famous story 'Youth', which covers all these events. This voyage from the Tyne was Conrad's first fateful contact with the exotic East, the setting for many of his later works.
In 1886 he gained both his
Master Mariner's certificate and British citizenship, officially changing his name to "Joseph Conrad." Prior to his retirement from the sea in 1894, Conrad served a total of sixteen years in the merchant navy. In 1883 he joined the
Narcissus in
Bombay, a voyage that inspired his 1897 novel
The Nigger of the Narcissus.
A childhood ambition to visit central
Africa was realised in 1889, when Conrad 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 crystalise his vision of human nature — and his beliefs about himself. These were in some measure affected by the emotional trauma and lifelong illness he contracted there. During his stay, he became acquainted with
Roger Casement, whose 1904
Congo Report detailed the abuses suffered by the indigenous population.
The description of Conrad's protagonist Marlow's journey upriver 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 to be found running through much of his work. Conrad's own sense of loneliness throughout his exile's life would find memorable expression in the 1901 short story, "
Amy Foster."
In 1891, Conrad stepped down in rank to sail as first mate on the
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. In her record-breaking run to Adelaide, she covered 16,000 miles 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, but in 1894 he'd parted from the sea for ever and embarked upon his literary career - having begun writing his first novel
Almayer's Folly on board the
Torrens.
In March 1896 Conrad married an Englishwoman, Jessie George, and together they moved into a small semi-detached villa in Victoria Road, Stanford le Hope and later to a medieval
lath-and-plaster farmhouse, "Ivy Walls," in Billet Lane. He subsequently lived in
London and near
Canterbury,
Kent. The couple had two sons, John and Borys.
Notwithstanding the undoubted sufferings that Conrad endured on many of his voyages, he contrived to put up at the best lodgings at many of his destinations.
Hotels across the
Far East still lay claim to him as an honoured guest, often naming the rooms he stayed in after him: in the case of
Singapore's
Raffles Hotel, the wrong suite has been named in his honour, apparently for marketing reasons. His visits to
Bangkok are also lodged in that city's collective memory, and are recorded in the official history of the
Oriental Hotel, 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. Later literary admirers, notably
Graham Greene, followed closely in his footsteps, sometimes requesting the same room. No
Caribbean resort is yet known to have claimed Conrad's patronage, although he's 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.
As the quality of his work declined, he grew increasingly comfortable in his wealth and status. Conrad had a true genius for companionship, and his circle of friends included talented authors such as Stephen Crane and Henry James.
Emotional development
A further insight into Conrad's emotional life is provided by an episode which inspired one of his strangest and least known stories, "
A Smile of Fortune." In September 1888 he put into
Mauritius, as captain of the sailing barque
Otago. His story likewise recounts the arrival of an unnamed English sea captain in a sailing vessel, come for sugar. He encounters “the old French families, descendants of the old colonists; all noble, all impoverished, and living a narrow domestic life in dull, dignified decay. . . . The girls are almost always pretty, ignorant of the world, kind and agreeable and generally bilingual. The emptiness of their existence passes belief.”
The tale describes Jacobus, an affable gentleman chandler beset by hidden shame. Extramarital passion for the bareback rider of a visiting circus had resulted in a child and scandal. For eighteen years this daughter, Alice, has been confined to Jacobus’s house, seeing no one but a governess. When Conrad’s captain is invited to the house of Jacobus, he's irresistibly drawn to the wild, beautiful Alice. "For quite a time she didn't stir, staring straight before her as if watching the vision of some pageant passing through the garden in the deep, rich glow of light and the splendour of flowers."
The suffering of Alice Jacobus was true enough. A copy of the
Dictionary of Mauritian Biography unearthed by the scholar
Zdzisław Najder reveals that her character was a fictionalised version of seventeen-year-old Alice Shaw, whose father was a shipping agent and owned the only rose garden in the town. While it's evident that Conrad too fell in love while in Mauritius, it wasn't with Alice. His proposal to young Eugénie Renouf was declined, the lady being already engaged. Conrad left broken-hearted, vowing never to return.
Something of his feelings is considered to permeate the recollections of the captain. "I was seduced by the moody expression of her face, by her obstinate silences, her rare, scornful words; by the perpetual pout of her closed lips, the black depths of her fixed gaze turned slowly upon me as if in contemptuous provocation."
Later Life and Death
In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health and partly because he'd 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. Together with its successor,
An Outcast of the Islands (1896), it laid the foundation for its author's reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales, a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate Conrad for the rest of his career.
Except for several vacations in France and Italy, a 1914 journey to Poland, and a 1923 visit to the United States, he lived in England.
Financial success evaded Conrad, though a
Civil List pension of £100 per annum stabilised his affairs, and collectors began to purchase his
manuscripts. Though his talent was recognized by the English intellectual elite, popular success eluded him until the 1913 publication of
Chance — paradoxically so, as it isn't now regarded as one of his better novels. 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.
In 1923, the year before his death, Conrad, who possessed a hereditary Polish
coat-of-arms, declined the offer of a (non-hereditary) British
knighthood.
Joseph Conrad died
3 August,
1924, of a
heart attack, and was interred at Canterbury Cemetery,
Canterbury,
England, under the name of Korzeniowski.
Legacy
Of Conrad's novels,
Lord Jim and
Nostromo continue to be widely read, as set texts and for pleasure.
The Secret Agent and
Under Western Eyes are also considered to be among his finest books. He also, over a period of a few years, composed a short series of novels in collaboration with
Ford Madox Ford, writing on these at the same time that he was working independently on other publications.
Chapter 2 of
The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' opens with a description of a ship as
"a detached fragment," a small planet traveling the void.
Lord Jim is a subtle book about character flaws, the nature of existence, and the search for meaning.
Chapter 8 of
The Secret Agent speaks of the pathos of poverty, giving the reader a look through Stevie's eyes at a repugnant cabbie and his horse.
The main character of the conspiracy novel
Under Western Eyes is Razumov, which not oddly, perhaps, echoes the future books/movie by another author about trying to manipulate thinking robots into crime and murder.
Arguably Conrad's most influential work remains
Heart of Darkness, to which many have been introduced by
Francis Ford Coppola's film,
Apocalypse Now, inspired by Conrad's novella and set during the
Vietnam War. The themes of
Heart of Darkness, and the depiction of a journey into the darkness of the human
psyche, still resonate with modern readers.
Style
Conrad, an emotional man subject to fits of depression, self-doubt and pessimism, disciplined his
romantic temperament with an unsparing
moral judgment.
As an artist, he famously aspired, in 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's everything. If I succeed, you'll find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you've 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: thus, for instance, in the evocative
Patna and courtroom scenes of
Lord Jim; in the "melancholy-mad elephant" and gunboat scenes of
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'.
The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad's novels, especially compared to those of near-contemporaries like
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.
In the view of
Evelyn Waugh and
Kingsley Amis, it wasn't 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 present-day 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. It was perhaps from Polish and French
prose styles that he adopted a fondness for triple
parallelism, especially in his early works ("all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men"), as well as for
rhetorical
abstraction ("It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention").
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're 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's 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 favourably on his works, often remarked that his
exotic style,
complex narration,
profound themes and
pessimistic ideas put many readers off. Yet as Conrad's ideas were borne out by 20th-century events, in due course he came to be admired for beliefs that seemed to accord with subsequent times more closely than with his own.
Conrad's was, indeed, 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 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've known it — we're 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's only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a
world that... is always but a vain and floating 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.
Criticism
In 1975,
Chinua Achebe published an essay, ',' wherein he labeled Joseph Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist." This essay has since sparked a storm of controversy regarding Conrad's legacy. Achebe's point of view, now the single most famous piece of criticism on Joseph Conrad, is that
Heart of Darkness can't be considered "a great work of art" because it's "a novel which celebrates... dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race."
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Referring to Conrad as a "talented, tormented man", Achebe drew on several instances of racism in the writings of Conrad, in which the author derided "niggers" as variously "unreasoning", "savage", and "inscrutable".
(External Link) Conrad, for his part, has had many passionate defenders since the publication of Achebe's criticism; often, Achebe has been criticized for disregarding the "historical context" of Conrad's work, in defense of Conrad's reputation, or in defending the extant value of his work.
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Memorials
Poland's
Baltic Sea coast at
Gdynia features an
anchor-shaped monument to Conrad.
In
San Francisco,
California, near
Fisherman's Wharf, there's a small triangular
Joseph Conrad Square, named after Conrad in the late 20th century.
Works
Novels
Novellas and short stories
- "The Idiots" (Conrad's first short story; written during his honeymoon, published in Savo 1896 and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898).
- "The Black Mate" (written, according to Conrad, in 1886; published 1908; posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925).
- "The Lagoon" (composed 1896; published in Cornhill Magazine 1897; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898).
- "An Outpost of Progress" (written 1896 and named in 1906 by Conrad himself, long after the publication of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, as his 'best story'; published in Cosmopolis 1897 and collected in Tales of Unrest 1898; often compared to Heart of Darkness, with which it has numerous thematic affinities).
- "The Return" (written circa early 1897; never published in magazine form; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898; Conrad, presaging the sentiments of most readers, once remarked, "I hate it").
- "Karain: A Memory" (written February–April 1897; published Nov. 1897 in Blackwood's and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898).
- "Youth" (written in 1898; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902)
- "Falk" (novella/story, written in early 1901; collected only in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903).
- "Amy Foster" (composed in 1901; published the Illustrated London News, Dec. 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).
- "The End of the Tether" (written in 1902; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902)
- "Gaspar Ruiz" (written after "Nostromo" in 1904–05; published in Strand Magazine in 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 in late 1905; serialized in Harper's in 1906; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
- "The Informer" (written before January 1906; published in December 1906 in Harper's and collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
- "The Brute" (written in early 1906; published in The Daily Chronicle in December 1906; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
- "The Duel" (aka "The Point of Honor": serialized in the UK in Pall Mall Magazine in early 1908 and in the US periodical Forum later that year; collected in A Set of Six in 1908 and published by Garden City Publishing in 1924. Joseph Fouché makes a cameo appearance)
- "Il Conde" (for example, 'Conte' [count]: appeared in Cassell's [UK] 1908 and Hampton's [US] in 1909; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
- "Prince Roman" (written 1910, published in 1911 in the Oxford and Cambridge Review; based upon the story of Prince Roman Sanguszko of Poland 1800–1881)
- "A Smile of Fortune" (a long story, almost a novella, written in mid-1910; published in London Magazine in Feb. 1911; collected in Twixt Land and Sea 1912)
- "Freya of the Seven Isles" (another near-novella, written late 1910–early 1911; published in Metropolitan Magazine and London Magazine in early 1912 and July 1912, respectively; collected in Twixt Land and Sea 1912)
- "The Partner" (written in 1911; published in Within the Tides, 1915)
- "The Inn of the Two Witches" (written in 1913; published in Within the Tides, 1915)
- "Because of the Dollars" (written in 1914; published in Within the Tides, 1915)
- "The Planter of Malata" (written in 1914; published in Within the Tides, 1915)
- "The Warrior's Soul" (written late 1915–early 1916; published in Land and Water, in March 1917; collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925)
- "The Tale" (Conrad's only story about World War I; written 1916 and first published 1917 in Strand Magazine)
Memoirs and essays
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
Notes on Life and Letters, 1921
Last Essays, 1926Further Information
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