Joseph Conrad

THE WORLDS OF JOSEPH CONRAD - The 2019 Cundill Lecture in History
In a lecture based on the book that won the 2018 Cundill History Prize, "The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World", Professor Maya Jasanoff (Harvard University) presents Conrad as a prophet of globalization. Jasanoff explores how Conrad was deeply influenced by the dawn of the twentieth century — the tensions of global capitalism, encroaching imperialism and unprecedented migration which still characterize our global world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XWP7OtLKkc

Images:
1. Joseph Conrad's parents - Apollo Korzeniowski and his wife Ewa, nee Bobrowska
2. Joseph Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski as a child, ca. 1863
3. Nowy Świat 47, Warsaw, where three-year-old Conrad lived with his parents in 1861. In front, a 'Chopin's Warsaw' bench
4. Handwritten and typed letter from Joseph Conrad to Ford Madox Ford

Background from {[https://culture.pl/en/article/11-reasons-to-think-of-joseph-conrad-as-a-polish-writer-after-all]}
The author of The Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Lord Jim was born and grew up in partitioned Poland. Yet his literary work is ostensibly devoid of almost any traces of his background. So where should one look for Conrad’s Polishness?
Today Joseph Conrad comes across as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, a classic of British modernist literature and the English language. Yet only a few people remember that he was born and raised in Poland, and considered himself Polish throughout his sea career and later during his years in exile. Interested in the Polish national cause, he engaged in political activities. His influence on Polish culture goes far beyond his literary appeal, reverberating particularly strongly during the Warsaw Rising and throughout the communist regime. Just how much of Conrad, as we know him, is actually Polish? And how 'Conradian' are Poles today?

1. Konrad – Polishness inscribed in a name
Joseph Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski as a child, ca. 1863, and his namesake Konrad Wallenrod, an illustration by Michał Elwiro Andriolli
Popular Polish author Jacek Dukaj has rewritten Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the 21st-century reader. Intriguingly, amongst the many questions Dukaj brings to the table, the biggest question he asks is: in what way is Heart of Darkness a VR experience, AD 1899?

The future classic of British literature was born as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 in what is today Ukraine, in the area which, since the so-called partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, had been part of the Russian Empire. This political status quo was something Conrad’s parents, both harking from Polish families with patriotic traditions, could hardly come to terms with. As ardent Polish patriots, they both engaged in underground activities aimed at reviving the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in its borders from before the partitions.
This strong patriotism is actually preserved in the name they chose for their only son. The name Konrad, which was how the family referred to the boy, was actually a political reference to the two preeminent works of Polish Romantic literature, namely Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod and his Forefather’s Eve. In the latter, the protagonist undergoes an existential transformation from Gustaw into Konrad, a man dedicated to the cause of his nation and that of humanity.
It’s surely no coincidence that when in 1895 Józef Korzeniowski debuted as an English writer, he chose his Polish first name Conrad as his pen-name.

2. First memories
When Conrad was 4 years old, his father Apollo Korzeniowski was arrested on the charges of engaging in the Polish underground movement and locked up in the Warsaw Citadel. As the writer later remarked, it was in the courtyard of that prison where ‘so characteristic of our nation – my earliest childhood memories begin.’
Among those earliest memories of Conrad’s were also scenes of strange gatherings (no doubt meetings of the resistance movement) at his parents’ Warsaw apartment, as well as the image of his mother Ewa dressed in black dress of national mourning, a clear manifestation of the patriotic protest, forbidden by the Tsarist authorities in early 1860s Poland.
Only a couple months after the arrest, Apollo along with his wife Ewa and their son were deported to Northern Russia. The deportation meant the family was far away from Poland when the January Uprising of 1863 erupted. It also proved devastating for Ewa, who died from tuberculosis when Konrad was just eight years old.
After her death, Apollo continued to take care of his beloved son, homeschooling him. In a letter to a friend, Apollo stated that his ‘chief concern, if not the only one, is to make little Conrad neither a Democrat, nor an aristocrat, a demagogue, nor a republican, neither a monarchist – nor a servant or lackey of any of these – but a good Pole.’ Although Conrad’s father died when the boy was 12 years old, he remained a key influence in the life of his son (see point 9).

3. Did Conrad speak English?
Despite leaving Poland at the age of sixteen (1874), Conrad maintained contact with the Polish language. During his many years spent at sea, his main link with Poland was the correspondence with his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, his legal guardian and mentor after the death of his parents. According to his Polish friends and acquaintances, Conrad’s spoken Polish remained clear and accent-free, unlike his English, which was thick with a foreign accent even after many decades spent in England. It was reported, that whenever forced to speak on topics of morality or philosophy Conrad would naturally switch to French which was the language in which he felt most comfortable.
Despite becoming a great artist of the English language, which was only his third language, Conrad’s English writing reveals traces of his continental linguistic background: most importantly French (he even considered writing in French) and Polish, his native tongue. Traces of Polish syntax as well as occasional Gallicisms are the most obvious symptoms of this, as Virginia Woolf put it, ‘obligation to a strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather than its Saxon.’
Despite leaving Poland at the age of sixteen (1874), Conrad maintained contact with the Polish language. During his many years spent at sea, his main link with Poland was the correspondence with his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, his legal guardian and mentor after the death of his parents. According to his Polish friends and acquaintances, Conrad’s spoken Polish remained clear and accent-free, unlike his English, which was thick with a foreign accent even after many decades spent in England. It was reported, that whenever forced to speak on topics of morality or philosophy Conrad would naturally switch to French which was the language in which he felt most comfortable.
Despite becoming a great artist of the English language, which was only his third language, Conrad’s English writing reveals traces of his continental linguistic background: most importantly French (he even considered writing in French) and Polish, his native tongue. Traces of Polish syntax as well as occasional Gallicisms are the most obvious symptoms of this, as Virginia Woolf put it, ‘obligation to a strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather than its Saxon.’

4. The reader of Polish Romantic literature
My father read Pan Tadeusz to me and made me read it out loud on many occasions. But I preferred Konrad Wallenrod and Grażyna.
Friends of the family remembered that the little boy could recite excerpts from Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (Sir Thaddeus) and his ballads at a very young age, surely part of the patriotic curriculum created by the boy’s father. In later life, one of the few things which reportedly survived through his sea career was an old, battered copy of Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, which Conrad supposedly ‘never tired of reading.’
Critics – Polish critics in particular – have pointed to the links between Conrad’s reading Polish Romantic poetry and his later English writing. Parallels have been drawn between the plot of Mickiewicz’s ballad Czaty and Conrad’s short story Karain, and verbal echoes from Konrad Wallenrod are allegedly present in Conrad’s debut novel Almayer’s Folly. Also, his narrative technique is sometimes seen as influenced by the Polish epic literary tradition of gawęda.
Adam Mickiewicz, national Polish poet of the 19th century, is also the quintessential migrating poet. Mickiewicz who had become for Poles the poet-prophet, was also a professor, politician, and journalist, before eventually dropping poetry altogether. He wrote and wandered through most of Europe and eventually beyond...

5. Conrad’s Polish works: stories of exile & deportation
Curiously, despite of all his Polish background, Conrad’s literary output is ostensibly devoid of almost any Polish motifs and topics. While this can ultimately be connected with Conrad’s need to forge his literary voice as that of a British writer, it is also quite curious, if not paradoxical, just as is the fact of a writer from Poland became the classic of maritime literature. As it turns out, throughout his long and varied career, Conrad openly addressed Polish topics only twice. Yet both of these examples are telling in regard to how Conrad saw the key issues of the Polish national experience.
In Amy Foster, Conrad tells the story of Yanko Gooral, a Polish immigrant on his way to America who then becomes the only survivor of a shipwreck off the coast of England.
After he is initially abused and imprisoned by the Britons, he falls in love with a local woman whom he eventually marries. But, since this is not a happy love story, their relationship is marked by conflict, part of which is caused by Yanko’s unwillingness to surrender his Catholicism and language (which he also plans to bequeath to his son). In the final scenes of the story, Yanko’s terrified wife leaves her husband who, now delirious with illness, mumbles incomprehensible words – a perfect case of estrangement.
As Thomas Maclean claims, Conrad’s story is a nightmare of exile and perhaps also a critique of the British response to refugees. But it can also be seen as a metaphor of Conrad’s own predicament as a foreigner in a strange country.
Conrad addressed the Polish issue – and Polish stereotypes – once again in Prince Roman. This time he touches upon the story of a member of the Polish aristocracy (modelled on the real-life figure of Roman Sanguszko) who takes part in the national uprising and as a result is deported to remote regions of Russia, only to return to his homeland many years later. The ultimate topic of Conrad’s story is about the limits of one’s commitment to their country. As Thomas MacLean notes, this a story where ‘for once Conrad’s hero makes honourable choices, and for once Conrad’s hero is Polish.’
It was in Prince Roman that Conrad gave one of the most curious definitions of Poland, describing it is as 'That country which demands to be loved as no other country has ever been loved, with the mournful affection one bears to the unforgotten dead and with the unextinguishable fire of a hopeless passion which only a living, breathing, warm ideal can kindle in our breasts for our pride, for our weariness, for our exultation, for our undoing.

6. Is Conrad's idea of honour 'Polish'?
The lack of overtly Polish tropes in the work of this Polish-born writer made some critics dig deeper in search of Polish motifs buried in his work. Some have pointed out the peculiar character of the most fundamental ethical issues at the core of Conrad’s worldview, like honour, fidelity and persistence in the face of adversity. Conrad’s idea of honour, in particular, was often seen in connection to the chivalric, feudal in its origin, the concept of honour present in the ethos of the Polish nobility, an elite part of Polish society with which Conrad identified.
Zdzisław Najder, one of the most accomplished scholars in the field of ‘Conradology’ went even further in attempting to delineate the scope of basic ethical problems and concepts found in Conrad’s work related to his Polish background, as epitomisedin Polish literary tradition, ‘probably the one most obsessed with the idea of honour.’ For Najder, this list of potentially Polish-tinged concepts includes such ideas as:
honour, fidelity and duty as essential moral values; a Romantic literary tradition – with its striking imagery and characteristic problems of moral responsibility and of the individual and his relations with society; the idea of nation as spiritual unity; the importance of friendship...
Nationalist Identities in Writing: Nations & Narration in Conrad's Works
Joseph Conrad's exploration of European national identities included relations between the English and the French. Culture.pl presents an academic paper by Fiona Tomkinson which analyses the ways in which Conrad approaches national stereotypes in The Rover and Suspense.
This problem was – at least to some extent – also noted by Conrad’s non-Polish acquaintances already in the early 20th century. Both Ford Madox Ford and Bertrand Russell considered ‘Polishness’ a key to understanding his thinking and his attitude towards life.
This is something Conrad himself also conceded. In a late interview given to a Polish journalist he stated:
English critics [...] whenever they discuss my work, always add that there’s something incomprehensible, unfathomable and elusive about it. Only you can capture this elusiveness, fathom the unfathomable. It’s Polishness.

7. Conrad’s National Betrayal, or is Patna Poland?
Conrad’s Polish links have made him a writer particularly interesting to Polish readers. A novel which has perhaps garnered the most attention in this respect was Lord Jim. In fact, many Polish critics saw the overall subject of the novel – its obsession with betrayal and desertion and almost fanatical insistence on duty and fidelity – in the light of Conrad’s Polish background, in particular as a reflection of a debate (the so-called Emigration of Talents debate), which swept across the Polish literary scene at the turn of the century.
The most vital voice in the debate came from a writer Eliza Orzeszkowa, who criticised Conrad on the grounds of his alleged ‘abandonment of the country’ (Orzeszkowa wrongly considered Conrad a post-January Uprising emigrant), which she saw as contributing to the lethal draining of the nation of talent and resources. Conrad was undoubtedly aware of the discussion – and the writing of Lord Jim seems to coincide with that dispute.
European Character Construction in Heart of Darkness & Lord Jim
How can we speak of European identity in Joseph Conrad's signature novels? Culture.pl presents an academic paper by Jakob Lothe which argues how the narrative structure of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim construct the identity of its characters.

As a result many Polish critics have subsequently seen Lord Jim as a perhaps subconscious response to these accusations. In the light of the Polish reading of the novel, the sinking ship which the protagonist of the novel untimely abandons – and for which he later feels remorse which he feels compelled to expatiate – becomes an awkward allegory of Conrad (supposedly) abandoning Poland in its time of need. Even the name of the ship, Patna, looks from a distance like the word Patria, the word a synonym for which Conrad had struggled to find in the English language.
But while this allegorical reading suggests that Conrad jumped ship (his homeland) and later was compensating for this by proving his worth in an alien setting as a writer, it is perhaps more telling of how a Polish audience reads Conrad: much in the fashion of Polish Aesopian speech, they saw in his writings things nobody else could see.

8. ...and how about ‘home’?
For Najder, also many other of the potential intricacies of Lord Jim can be best explained when interpreted within the conceptual framework of Polish traditions. One example is Lord Jim’s relationship with ‘home’ to which he feels he cannot return. Najder writes:
For a Polish expatriate, his home country, his ojczyzna, his patria (English does not even possess the word for this concept; in Polish we do not have the exact equivalent of ‘home’) is the locus of his obligations and of his ethical ideals. In the case of an Englishman for whom living and working overseas did not present any moral problems, Jim’s obsessive insistence on the breaking all ties (even with his father), the whole psychological tension connected with the issue of a possible return, the very elevation of ‘home’ to to the status of a quasi-mystical supreme moral authority, would seem to me excessive and contrived.
This assertion finds partial corroboration in the words of Conrad himself. In the Author’s Note for Lord Jim, he implies that the essential subject of his novel, ‘the acute consciousness of lost honour,’ should be perfectly understandable at least to the ‘Latin temperament’.

9. The son of his father
Conrad’s political views were to a great extent shaped by the legacy of his patriotic father. Some of Conrad writings, particularly on Russia, echo Apollo’s opinion. Much like his father, Conrad regarded Russia as an antithesis of Western European civilisation and a threat to humanity. Conrad’s unyielding criticism of Russia returned in his ‘European’ novels The Secret Agent and Under the Western Eyes, even today the latter is sometimes seen as ‘one of the most powerful anti-Russian books ever written.’
In fact, some Polish critics saw Conrad’s whole worldview as an extrapolation of his father’s political opinions. According to one of them, namely Stefan Zabierowski:
For Apollo their only homeland was Poland, their enemy – partitioning powers. For Conrad – and what a leap it is – his homeland was the whole world, his greatest enemy – fate.

10. Conrad & the Polish national cause
Conrad’s attitude to the Polish national cause changed over time. While always remaining a supporter of Polish national cause, he for a long time remained quite disillusioned about the very possibility of bringing the country back on the map. It was actually only in 1914 during his stay in Poland, which coincided with the outbreak of World War I, that the hope returned. Shortly afterwards, Conrad wrote a Note on the Polish Problem, in which he argued in favour of the the resurrected Polish state, postulating the necessity for moral support from France and England. In 1919, Conrad published The Crime of Partition, which turned out to be his most daring foray into political discourse:
Thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and the course of history. Progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is only a great adventure as its leaders and chiefs know very well in their hearts. It is a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an enterprise the victims do not count.

11. Conrad in the Warsaw Uprising & beyond
Conrad was avidly read in Poland and remained a huge influence on generations of Polish readers after his death in 1924. Immediately after World War II, his role and impact on generations of Poles became the topic of a large and hugely important discussion that swept through the Polish post-war press. The debate centred on issues of the appraisal of the Warsaw Uprising and the role of Conrad’s ethics of several ‘simple truths’ about the generation of Poles who took part in the uprising and died for its cause. The ethics based on the idea of the necessity of defending your honour even at the cost of losing one’s life and serving the obligations of fidelity in the face of hopelessness, derived from Conrad’s books, was a moral guideline for many of those who participated in the rising which cost so many their lives.
Under the communist regime, Conrad was read but was also censored. His ‘anti-Russian’ books were not published until the 1980s. And yet, as Zdzisław Najder suggests, the tradition of the chivalrous ethos, so inherently present in Conrad, ‘spoke powerfully from the confines of the communist regime. It is after all this tradition that produced the Envoy of Mr Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert’, concludes Najder.
Author: Mikołaj Gliński, 27 March 2017. Bibliography: Zdzisław Najder, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity, Cambridge University Press 2005; Roman Kopkowski, Polskie dziedzictwo Conrada, Warsaw 2014"

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The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World
A visionary exploration of the life and times of Joseph Conrad, his turbulent age of globalisation and our own, from one of the most exciting young historians writing today, Maya Jasanoff, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard. Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism and a communications revolution: these forces shaped Conrad’s destiny at the dawn of the 20th century. As an immigrant from Poland to England and in travels from Malaya to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad navigated an interconnected world and captured it in a literary oeuvre of extraordinary depth. His life story delivers a history of globalisation from the inside out and reflects powerfully on the aspirations and challenges of the modern world. In The Dawn Watch, a compelling blend of history, biography, and travelogue, Jasanoff follows Conrad’s routes and the stories of his four greatest works — The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and Nostromo — revealing him as a prophet of globalisation. In conversation with William Dalrymple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_hcw2NEGDE

Images:
1. Joseph Conrad with son in front of his English mansion
2. Roman Sanguszko, a Polish aristocrat and the model for Prince Roman figure in one of the few Polish short stories written by Conrad
3. Joseph Conrad, around 1874.
4. Joseph Conrad's grave at Canterbury Cemetery, near Harbledown, Kent

Background from {[https://www.enotes.com/topics/joseph-conrad]}
Background from {[https://www.enotes.com/topics/joseph-conrad]}
Joseph Conrad Biography
Joseph Conrad is considered one of the best English novelists (not to mention one of the most famous), but he did not actually learn to speak English until he was twenty-one. Conrad was born in Poland and orphaned at the age of eleven. He joined the French merchant navy at sixteen and spent much of his early years on the high seas. At many points in his life, he became involved in illegal activities (such as gunrunning) and was often embroiled in political intrigue. His many adventures led him to write novels such as Lord Jim, Nostromo, and his most celebrated book, Heart of Darkness. In almost all of his work, he explored loneliness, despair, and self-loathing—themes that ran through much of his own life.
Facts and Trivia
• The Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now was inspired by and loosely based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
• In 1923, Conrad was offered a British knighthood, but he declined it.
• Despite being an atheist throughout most of his life, he accepted last rites and was buried as a Roman Catholic.
• Although he spent most of his life in England and was fluent in English, Conrad always spoke with a heavy accent.
• In a 1975 essay, Chinua Achebe called Conrad a “thoroughgoing racist,” mostly due to his depiction of black Africans in Heart of Darkness. Since then, there has been an ongoing debate as to whether Conrad was racist or whether twentieth-century scholars have ignored the historical context of his work.
Biography
Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 3337
Article abstract: Although best known as an adventure novelist, Conrad raised the form to new heights, dealing with the issues of human isolation in the face of an overwhelming natural universe, with a psychological realism that revealed the depths of his characters’ consciousness and perceptions.
Early Life
Born December 3, 1857, in Podolia, Poland, to Catholic parents of the landowning class, Joseph Conrad was originally named Jósef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz Korzeniowski (he officially changed his name when he became a naturalized British citizen in 1886). His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, had been educated at St. Petersburg University before going on to become a published poet, dramatist, and translator; it was, furthermore, because of Apollo’s political activities and outspokenness against Russian imperialism in Poland that he, with his wife, Ewa (née Bobrowska), and his four-year-old son Jósef, were exiled to Vologda, Russia, in 1862. As a result of the harsh living conditions, Conrad’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven, and his father died of the same disease when the boy was eleven. Thereafter, until he was seventeen, Conrad was reared by a number of guardians (all of them literary, writers or aspiring writers), the most notable a matrilineal uncle who insisted upon the value of education and responsibility. Although Conrad’s schooling came mostly from private tutors after his father’s death, by the time he left Poland at seventeen he was fluent not only in his native Polish but also in French (he knew some German and Russian as well), and he was familiar with the works of such writers as Homer, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Friedrich Schiller, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Alfred de Vigny.
When Conrad left Poland in 1874, his destination being Marseilles, France, he left not to become a writer but—against his uncle’s wishes—to become a seaman. He had always been a lover of geography and travel books and had always been attracted to travel; for example, he had predicted, when he was ten or eleven and looking at a map of Africa, “When I grow up I shall go there.” (He did indeed, and the journey almost killed him.) Leaving his homeland for France and, more specifically, the sea was therefore not so much a teenager’s impulsive move as it was a departure the young Conrad had been growing toward for years. Arriving in Marseilles in October, 1874, he was to remain in France ostensibly for several years, during which time he secured berths on board French ships: first, two months after he arrived in France, as a passenger on the Mont Blanc for five months; on the same ship, as an apprentice seaman for six months; and then, on the Saint Antoine, as a steward for seven months. On these sailing vessels he traveled throughout the Caribbean area, and there is some reason to believe that he was involved in smuggling weapons to revolutionaries in Spain sometime during his residence in France, twenty-four months of which he spent pursuing shore activities. As a result of one of those activities, gambling, Conrad incurred large debts and, suffering deep depression over these debts and his more or less reckless life-style while on shore, he attempted suicide early in 1878 by shooting himself in the chest. The bullet passed through his body and out his back without touching any organs. Two months later, he began his English sea career, taking a berth on the Mavis, an English ship sailing for Constantinople.
Unromantic and demanding much hard work, Conrad’s English sea career involved him in several near-wrecks, and it situated him among men who had been shipwrecked. Apparent in much of the fiction he was to write is the ability he had to assimilate his shipmates’ stories and integrate them with his own hazardous experiences—as well as with the famous shipwrecks or near-wrecks he probably read about in the maritime histories of the day. Eight years would pass, however, after he signed on with the Mavis, before Conrad would write his first story in English, the language he struggled to learn after sailing from France. Two years after taking his berth on the English ship, furthermore, Conrad passed his examination as a second mate, and he would go on to pass two more examinations to become a captain in the English merchant service. He sailed three times to Australia (each trip taking a little more than a year), twice to Singapore, twice to India, and at least once to Java—all before sailing to the Congo in May of 1889. This latter journey was important to Conrad, who had become an English citizen in 1886, because he would be the captain of the ship, and throughout his career as an officer he had been forced to accept berths that were below what he had attained by examination (at least one biographer suggests that this must have been a blow to Conrad’s pride and sense of accomplishment, and that it may have contributed to his decision to leave the sea in favor of a writing career).
The firm that hired Conrad to sail its vessel to Africa expected him to remain in their service, in the Congo region, for three years. Besides the depressing and murderous signs of British imperialism that he witnessed while he was in the Congo, as well as the squalid living conditions of the natives he encountered, Conrad suffered nearly fatal attacks of dysentery and fever, and he left Africa in December, 1890, arriving back in England in January, 1891. He carried with him out of Africa six chapters of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), which he had begun writing in 1889 while still in England; thus, as his twenty-year-long sea career was nearing its end (he sailed only twice after his Congo journey), he was launching himself into his greater—and in many ways more difficult—writing career. He would be thirty-seven when his first novel was published, and a year later he would marry Jesse George, fifteen years his junior, with whom he would have two sons, Borys and John, born in 1898 and 1906, respectively.
Life’s Work
After the publication of Almayer’s Folly, his first novel, in 1895, Joseph Conrad’s life was devoted mainly to the writing of his short stories and novels, an endeavor seldom easy for him, with a growing family, a frequent shortage of money, an inexact knowledge of the English language, and the unyieldingly high artistic standards to which he devoted himself. When he was not writing he suffered bouts of deep depression, and when he was writing it was a painfully slow process (he confessed on several occasions, in his letters, to sitting before a blank sheet of paper for days sometimes before he could begin writing). In addition to these difficulties, throughout his adult life he suffered from hereditary gout, attacks of nerves, neuralgia, and fevers, and periods of desperate anxiety.
The odds against Conrad’s ever being able to support himself and his family as a writer were great; after all, when he began writing seriously he was a middle-aged Pole and retired sailor who had not begun learning the English language until he was in his twenties, had married and begun rearing a family in his thirties, had developed no friendships with others in the literary world, and had had his first novel accepted for publication primarily because of John Galsworthy’s influence. (A writer himself, and to be winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932, Galsworthy had met Conrad for the first time on board a ship for which the latter was chief mate, and had agreed to read—and was favorably impressed by—the manuscript of Almayer’s Folly.) Still, Conrad’s father and several relatives had themselves been published writers, so the profession was not completely foreign to Conrad when he began writing. In any case, it is a testament to Galsworthy’s insight, as well as to Conrad’s genius, that Conrad went beyond his first novel to become one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. The first twenty years of his thirty-year writing career were, nevertheless, a series of painful and frustrating tests in survival for Conrad and his family, as he chartered an original course through the artistic realm of exile and cunning.
Perhaps another testament to, if not Conrad’s genius, his dedication to his newly chosen writing career is that he began composing An Outcast of the Islands (1896), his second novel, even before Almayer’s Folly had been accepted for publication. Yet the financial returns to Conrad for both novels would be disappointingly slight, and it was not until 1897, with the publication of The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” that he began receiving significant critical acclaim, and instead of being compared by reviewers to Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, as he had been by reviewers of his first two novels, he was now being favorably compared to Stephen Crane. Nevertheless, even though he was exhibiting an impressive prolificacy, Conrad—now married and his wife, Jesse, pregnant with their first child—was still barely able to survive financially. Thus he began writing short stories for magazines, since the financial returns for his stories could be realized much faster than those for his novels, and as it turned out the payments he received for his short stories proved to be essential to the family’s support for the twenty years that Conrad struggled to become a “popular” writer while remaining loyal to his aesthetic ideals. Between 1896 and 1917, for example, he wrote and saw published twenty-nine short stories; noteworthy, also, is that during this same period he wrote eleven novels, two book-length reminiscences, and a one-act play.
Especially painful and frustrating to Conrad was that, even though he received high praise for his fiction (from such writers as Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, W. H. Hudson, Edward Garnett, Ford Madox Ford, André Gide, and Henry James), and even though his fiction was being translated from English into French and being published in both Great Britain and the United States, public recognition—and the income therefrom—eluded Conrad for the first twenty years of his writing career. It was not until the publication of Chance, in 1913, that the tide began to turn in his favor, as this novel brought him both popularity and financial comfort in the last decade of his life. Ironically, by the time he became a “popular” writer, he had already written his greatest fiction, and his final decade represents a marked and progressive waning of his artistic powers. Nevertheless, from 1914 onward, Conrad’s fame spread with increasing rapidity: Frank N. Doubleday undertook to publish the writer’s collected works in America, H. L. Mencken proclaimed him one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, at the height of his fame in 1923 he visited the United States by invitation, and collectors were paying more for his manuscripts than had been paid for any manuscripts ever. Then, in 1924, in his sixty-seventh year, he died suddenly at his home in Oswalds, England, a short distance from Canterbury, where he is buried.
The record of Conrad’s last thirty years, during which he and his family were plagued by both financial and seemingly endless health problems as he struggled for public recognition, is therefore essentially a record of the titles and dates of his books. After Almayer’s Folly, The Outcast of the Islands, and The Nigger of the “Narcissus” were published, between 1895 and 1897, his first book of short stories, Tales of Unrest, appeared in 1898, followed by the publication of Lord Jim in 1900. He collaborated with Ford on three novels: The first two, The Inheritors and Romance, were published in 1901 and 1903, respectively; the third, The Nature of a Crime, would not be published until 1924. Meanwhile, Typhoon and Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories were published in 1902; Typhoon, and Other Stories, in 1903; Nostromo (which Conrad considered his best novel), in 1904; and The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions, in 1906. While many critics agree with Conrad’s assessment of Nostromo, it is generally regarded as only one of his five best, the other four being The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1910), Chance, and Victory (1915). During the periods between these novels, Conrad also produced A Set of Six (1908), A Personal Record (serial 1908-1909, book 1912), and ’Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (1912), and published his 1905 play, One Day More: A Play in One Act (1913). Thereafter, he wrote another collection of short stories, Within the Tides (1915), The Shadow-Line: A Confession (1917), The Arrow of Gold (1919), The Rescue (1920), Notes on Life and Letters (1921), The Secret Agent, Drama in Four Acts (1921), The Rover (1923), and Laughing Anne: A Play (1923). At the time of his death, he was engaged in writing his final book, Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel, which was published in its unfinished form in 1925. Also published after his death were Tales of Hearsay (1925), Last Essays (1926), and The Sisters (1928).
Summary
Early in his writing career, Conrad was a devotee of some of the formalist ideas of the French Symbolists, as well as of Gustave Flaubert (he told one friend, for example, that it was Madame Bovary that had prompted him to begin writing fiction; in fact, he began writing Almayer’s Folly on the flyleaves and inside the front and back covers of his copy of Flaubert’s novel). Certainly in Conrad’s early fiction (such as Almayer’s Folly, The Outcast of the Islands, and The Nigger of the “Narcissus”), the reader can sense his striving after symbolic sensory expression, tone, and color. Yet as a prose stylist, Conrad was to go beyond his early influences by creating his own impressionistic fictional method, an essential characteristic of which is the communication of synesthesiacal sensations. “My task,” he said, “is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.” His artistic aim was, then, to “reach the spring of responsive emotions” in his readers through sensory appeal.
At least one critic has suggested that it was probably from studying the work of Flaubert that Conrad learned that action in fiction should be rendered in terms of situation and scene, instead of being expressed from the author’s point of view. Yet, in this regard too, Conrad moved well beyond derivation and mastered such a rendering of action through his characteristic use of the voice and felt presence of a narrator—one often the agent, sometimes the victim, or sometimes the humanly fallible judge of a given drama. In such early stories as “Karain,” “The Idiots,” “The Lagoon,” “Youth,” Heart of Darkness (1902), and “Falk,” Conrad uses the first-person narrative strategy; there is the definite presence of an “I” in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”; Marlow narrates Lord Jim (just as he does “Youth” and Heart of Darkness); “Amy Foster” is told to the reader by Doctor Kennedy; both “Il Conde” and “The Secret Sharer” are told by their central characters; Under Western Eyes is told by a professor of languages who translates the “text” from Russian and interprets it for the reader; the character of Davidson and his narrative contribution shade Victory; and the omniscient narrative voice of Nostromo frequently gives way to certain characters’ personal reflections. In short, while Conrad’s use of first-person narration serves to create a sense of immediacy in a given story’s action (because that same sense of immediacy has been injected into a given situation and scene), it also serves as one of the most salient features of Conrad’s unique kind of storytelling; that is, he repeatedly dramatizes the act of sympathetic identification with tormented, confused, and alienated individuals, most of whom seem acutely conscious of their personal limitations and losses.
It may seem paradoxical that Conrad—in whose fiction individuality, set against the homogeneity and complacency imposed upon humans by societies advocating behavioral relativism, is the sine qua non—would populate his fictional gallery with individuals who are outcasts because of various emotional, psychological, and/or moral flaws, and then invite his readers into the gallery and demand that they identify sympathetically with the denizens imprisoned there. Yet, one needs only to read The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” “The Secret Sharer,” Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, or Under Western Eyes to see that Conrad believed that the success of any political idea, any society, depends upon the individual—especially upon the one who is conscious of his will to power, control, and domination, yet cautious about succumbing to their allure. In a sense, then, Conrad demands that his readers participate in the struggles germane to individuality, and that they see each of his flawed characters as Marlow came to see Jim, in Lord Jim: as “one of us.”

Bibliography
Allen, Jerry. The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad. New York: Doubleday Publishing Co., 1965. Though weak in his interpretations and conclusions about Conrad’s fiction, Allen has done an admirable job investigating Conrad’s sea career. Compare this book to Norman Sherry’s, cited below.
Berman, Jeffrey. Joseph Conrad: Writing as Rescue. New York: Astra Books, 1977. An analysis of Conrad’s imagination insofar as it, Berman argues, derived from his attempt at suicide in Marseilles, France, in 1878. While narrower in its focus, this book owes a large debt to Bernard Meyer’s biography.
Fleishman, Avrom. Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. This study attempts to place Conrad in the English tradition of Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill. Compare Fleishman’s discussion to Irving Howe’s chapter on Conrad in his Politics and the Novel.
Gillon, Adam. Conrad and Shakespeare. New York: Astra Books, 1976. A somewhat illuminating study of Shakespearean influence and language apparent within Conrad’s stories, with an especially informative chapter, “Conrad and Poland.”
Gillon, Adam. The Eternal Solitary: A Study of Joseph Conrad. New York: Bookman, 1960. Also an excellent study of the theme of isolation in Conrad’s fiction.
Gordon, John Dozier. Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940. The discussion of Conrad’s early novels is excellent, in this classic of Conrad scholarship. Serious Conrad scholarship began with this work, which was especially important in the revival of interest in Conrad’s work in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
Howe, Irving. “Conrad: Order and Anarchy.” In Politics and the Novel. New York: Horizon Press, 1957.
Jean-Aubry, Gerard. Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. New York: Doubleday Publishing Co., 1927. The first thorough, well-documented account of Conrad’s life.
Karl, Frederick R. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. This book is, and will remain, the definitive Conrad biography, elucidating as it does Conrad’s life in Poland, on the seas, and in England. The well-documented study is also replete with generously thorough analyses of Conrad’s major works, as well as of his artistic development and political orientation. Karl tends at times to be stiltedly (and quite needlessly) insistent upon where and how his views differ from those of other interpreters of Conrad’s life and work, especially with regard to Gerard Jean-Aubry’s biography.
Meyer, Bernard. Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967. An important and indispensable reading of Conrad’s life and work, giving special attention to the writer’s mother worship, illnesses, and fetishes.
Morf, Gustav. The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1930. The forerunner in an area of Conrad scholarship that has become increasingly important to critical discussions of the writer’s life and work, this study attempts to delineate the extent to which Conrad’s fiction is tied to his Polish background. See also Morf’s The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad (New York: Astra Books, 1976).
Sherry, Norman. Conrad’s Eastern World. Cambridge, England: At the University Press, 1966. A good discussion of the influence Conrad’s sea career had on his fiction.

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So did I, Jack! I still reread the Heart of Darkness. I see something different and profound on each rereading. Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen