Joseph Conrad

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Conrad did not speak English fluently until his twenties, and even then he spoke it with a strong foreign accent for the rest of his life. He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on the 3rd of December 1857, in Berdychiv, then part of the Russian Empire, in a Poland that had been divided among Prussia, Austria and Russia in 1795. He died on the 3rd of August 1924 at his house in Bishopsbourne, Kent, and was buried under a misspelled version of his Polish name. Between those dates he spent roughly eight years at sea and rose to captain's rank under the Red Ensign. Then he gave up the ocean and became one of the greatest writers in the English language. How did an orphaned son of a Polish revolutionary, who attempted suicide at twenty and lived with debt, gout and depression, build sentences that T. E. Lawrence said went on sounding in waves like the note of a tenor bell? How did a man who called himself a bloody foreigner write novels that critics felt seemed to anticipate later world events? The answers run through the Congo, through a fictional silver mine, and through letters that filled eight published volumes.

• 2. The Orphaned Patriot

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  Apollo Korzeniowski, Conrad's father, was a writer, translator and would-be revolutionary who belonged to the Red political faction, which wanted to restore Poland's pre-partition boundaries and abolish serfdom. In May 1861 the family moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire and was imprisoned in the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. Conrad later wrote that in the courtyard of this Citadel, characteristically for our nation, his childhood memories begin. On the 9th of May 1862 the family was exiled to Vologda, 500 km north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. On the 18th of April 1865 his mother Ewa died of tuberculosis. Apollo, gravely ill with the same disease, taught the boy at home and read him Polish Romantic poetry. Half a century later Conrad explained that the Polishness in his works came from Mickiewicz and Slowacki, recalling how his father read Pan Tadeusz aloud and made him read it aloud. On the 23rd of May 1869 Apollo died, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven. The boy was placed in the care of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, whose financial outlay and worry over Conrad's nervous ill health would continue for years. Conrad was not a good student and excelled only in geography. His later refusal to follow Apollo's path, choosing exile over resistance, became a source of lifelong guilt.

• 3. Under The Red Ensign

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  In the autumn of 1871 thirteen-year-old Conrad announced his intention to become a sailor, having read in French translation accounts of Arctic searches for Sir John Franklin's lost ships, along with books by James Fenimore Cooper and Captain Frederick Marryat. On the 13th of October 1874 Bobrowski sent the sixteen-year-old to Marseille for a planned merchant-marine career on French ships, with a monthly stipend of 150 francs. In Marseille Conrad befriended a Corsican seaman, Dominique Cervoni, who later inspired the title character of the 1904 novel Nostromo. After the Russian consul refused the documents he needed to continue, Conrad fell into debt and in March 1878 attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest. He survived. In April 1878 he joined the British merchant marine, having most likely started learning English shortly before. For the next fifteen years he served under the Red Ensign, working as steward, apprentice, able seaman, then third, second and first mate. His sole captaincy came in 1888 to 1889, when he commanded the barque Otago from Sydney to Mauritius. In June 1885, at Cardiff, he befriended a Pole named Joseph Spiridion, to whom he later sent his first preserved texts in English, letters whose syntax still ran along Polish lines.

• 4. The Congo And After

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  The year 1890 brought Conrad's first return to Poland, a visit made while he waited to proceed to the Congo Free State, having been hired by Albert Thys of the Societe Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. His work on the Congo River would inspire the novella Heart of Darkness. During this period he befriended Roger Casement, who operated a trading station at Matadi. In 1903, as British Consul to Boma, Casement was commissioned to investigate abuses in the Congo, was knighted in 1911 for his human-rights advocacy, and later became active in Irish Republicanism. Conrad left Africa at the end of December 1890. When he sailed from London on the 25th of October 1892 aboard the clipper Torrens, one passenger was a consumptive Cambridge graduate, William Henry Jacques, who according to A Personal Record was the first reader of the unfinished manuscript of Almayer's Folly and encouraged Conrad to continue. When the Torrens had left Adelaide on the 13th of March 1893, its passengers included the twenty-five-year-old lawyer and future novelist John Galsworthy, who became a lifelong friend and frequent benefactor. Conrad completed his last long-distance voyage on the 26th of July 1893, when the certificate of discharge recorded the debarking of J. Conrad Korzemowin.

• 5. A Sailor Who Wrote

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  Almayer's Folly, set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895 and marked Conrad's first use of his pen name. The choice may also have been an homage to Adam Mickiewicz's poem Konrad Wallenrod. Edward Garnett, a young publisher's reader who would become a chief supporter of Conrad's career, admired the manuscript but was uncertain whether the English was good enough for publication; his wife Constance thought Conrad's foreignness a positive merit. In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly for poor health and partly because writing had captured him. Najder noted that writing in a foreign language admits a greater temerity in tackling personally sensitive problems. Conrad followed the example of Gustave Flaubert, who searched days on end for le mot juste, the right word to render the essence of the matter. Almost all his work first appeared in newspapers and magazines, from The Fortnightly Review to The Saturday Evening Post, and he wrote for the imperialist weekly The Outlook between 1898 and 1906. Financial success long eluded him; a civil-list pension of 100 pounds a year, awarded on the 9th of August 1910, eased his worries. Popular success arrived only with the 1913 publication of Chance, often counted among his weaker novels.

• 6. Debt, Gout And Marriage

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  A newspaper review once suggested a Conrad biography could have been subtitled Thirty Years of Debt, Gout, Depression and Angst. In 1891 he was hospitalised for several months with gout, neuralgic pains in his right arm and recurrent malaria, and complained of swollen hands that made writing difficult. He had a phobia of dentistry and remarked in one letter that every novel he wrote had cost him a tooth. In 1888, during a stop on Mauritius, he asked one of the Renouf brothers for the hand of his twenty-six-year-old sister Eugenie, only to learn she was engaged to a cousin; he sent a polite letter saying he would never return to Mauritius. On the 24th of March 1896 Conrad married an Englishwoman, Jessie George, sixteen years his junior, and the couple had two sons, Borys and John. To his friends she was an inexplicable choice, yet the biographer Frederick Karl judged her a straightforward, devoted, competent companion who sustained his career. Between 1910 and 1919 the family lived at Capel House in Orlestone, Kent, where Conrad wrote The Rescue, Victory and The Arrow of Gold. His frequent moves were usually signs of a search for psychological regeneration. In 1923 Jessie published A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House, with a preface from her husband praising the simple food of everyday life.

• 7. The Convict Of Thought

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  Norman Douglas summed Conrad up as first and foremost a Pole and, like many Poles, a politician and moralist in spite of himself. His Polish experience let him see political problems as a continuous struggle between law and violence, anarchy and order, freedom and autocracy. His most ambitious political statement was the 1905 essay Autocracy and War, finished a month before the Battle of Tsushima Strait, which warned of Prussia as the dangerous aggressor in a future European war. Conrad kept his distance from partisan politics and never voted in British national elections. He distrusted democracy, fearing it offered boundless opportunities for demagogues and charlatans, and he resented socialists who spoke of world brotherhood while staying silent about his own partitioned Poland. In an 1894 letter to Marguerite Poradowska he wrote that we must drag the chain and ball of our personality to the end, the price of the infernal and divine privilege of thought. To Bertrand Russell, in a letter of the 23rd of October 1922, he said the only remedy for the world was a change of hearts, which the history of the last 2000 years gave little reason to expect. In 1914, urged by Jozef Retinger, Conrad took his family to Poland just as war broke out, and he declared, as Pilsudski had, that Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers and they in turn by France and Britain.

• 8. The Note Of A Tenor Bell

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  Conrad aspired, in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus in 1897, by the power of the written word to make the reader hear, to make him feel, and before all to make him see. He almost invariably gave lethal fates to his principal characters: Mr. Kurtz expires in Heart of Darkness uttering the words The horror! The horror!, and Tuan Jim in Lord Jim walks deliberately to his death. Many of his characters drew on real people, including the historic Borneo trader William Charles Olmeijer, whose surname Conrad probably altered to Almayer inadvertently. Many plots came from real events: The Secret Agent was inspired by the French anarchist Martial Bourdin's 1894 death while apparently attempting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. Conrad objected near the end of his life to being called a tragedian, complaining that the reputation had deprived him of innumerable readers. American writers from William Faulkner to Joan Didion and Thomas Pynchon acknowledged their debts to him. T. E. Lawrence wrote that Conrad was the most haunting thing in prose that ever was, his paragraphs sounding in waves after they stop. On his gravestone in Canterbury are the lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene that he chose 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.