Joseph
Conrad (born Józef
Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was a Polish-British writer regarded
as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined
the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British citizenship in
1886.
Though he did
not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist
who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories
and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human
spirit in the midst of an impassive, inscrutable universe.
Conrad is
considered an early modernist, though his works still contain elements of
19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters
have influenced numerous authors, and many films have been adapted from,
or inspired by, his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that
Conrad's fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th
century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing in the
heyday of the British
Empire, Conrad drew on, among other
things, his native Poland's national experiences and his own
experiences in the French and British merchant
navies, to create short stories and
novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.
LIFE
Early years
Conrad was born
on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian
Empire; the region had once been part of
the Kingdom of Poland. He was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski – a writer,
translator, political activist, and would-be revolutionary – and his wife Ewa
Bobrowska. He was christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski after
his maternal grandfather Józef, his paternal grandfather Teodor, and the heroes
(both named "Konrad") of two poems by Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady and Konrad Wallenrod,
and was known to his family as "Konrad", rather than
"Józef".
Because of the
father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved
repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the
resistance against the Russian Empire. This led to his imprisonment in Pavilion
X of the Warsaw
Citadel.
Conrad would
write: "[I]n the courtyard of this Citadel – characteristically for
our nation – my childhood memories begin." On 9 May 1862 Apollo and
his family were exiled to Vologda, 500 kilometres (310 mi ) north of Moscow Ukraine
Apollo did his
best to home-school Conrad. 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
In December
1867, Apollo took his son to the Austrian-held
part of Poland, which for two years had been
enjoying considerable internal freedom and a degree of self-government. On 1869
they moved to Kraków (till 1596 the capital
of Poland
Conrad was not a
good student; despite tutoring, he excelled only in geography. 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; his uncle saw him
as a sailor-cum-businessman who would combine maritime skills with commercial
activities. In fact, in the autumn of 1871, thirteen-year-old Conrad 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. He also recalled having read books by the American James Fenimore Cooper and the English
Captain Frederick Marryat. A playmate of his
adolescence recalled that Conrad spun fantastic yarns, always set at sea,
presented so realistically that listeners thought the action was happening
before their eyes.
In August 1873
Bobrowski sent fifteen-year-old Conrad to Lwów to a cousin who ran a small
boarding house for boys orphaned by the 1863 Uprising;
group conversation there was in French. The owner's daughter recalled:
He stayed with us ten months...
Intellectually he was extremely advanced but [he] 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...
On 13 October
1874 Bobrowski sent the sixteen-year-old to Marseilles,
France , for a planned career
at sea. Though Conrad had not completed secondary school, his
accomplishments included fluency in French (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 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
Citizenship
Conrad was a
Russian subject, having been born in the Russian
part of what had once been the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In December 1867, with the Russian government's
permission, his father Apollo had taken him to the Austrian part of the former
Commonwealth, which enjoyed considerable internal freedom and a degree of
self-government. After the father's death, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski had
attempted to secure Austrian citizenship for him – to no avail, probably
because Conrad had not received permission from Russian authorities to remain
abroad permanently and had not been released from being a Russian subject.
Eventually
Conrad would make his home in England London
Merchant marine
In 1874 Conrad
left Poland France
Most of Conrad's
stories and novels, and many of their characters, were drawn from his seafaring
career and persons whom he had met or heard about. For his fictional characters
he often borrowed the authentic names of actual persons. The historic trader
William Charles Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on four short visits to Berau
in Borneo, appears as "Almayer" in Conrad's first
novel, Almayer's Folly. Other authentic names
include those of Captain McWhirr (in Typhoon),
Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon (Youth), Captain Lingard (Almayer's
Folly and elsewhere), and Captain Ellis (The Shadow Line).
Conrad also preserves, in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', the
authentic name of the Narcissus, a ship in which he sailed in 1884.
Polish syntax and phraseology. More importantly, the letters show a marked change in
views from those implied in his earlier correspondence of 1881–83. He had
departed from "hope for the future" and from the conceit of
"sailing [ever] toward Poland
Conrad's three-year association with a
Belgian trading company included service as captain of a steamer on the Congo River, an episode that would inspire his novella, Heart of Darkness..
In 1894, aged
36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly
due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become so fascinated
with writing that he had 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.
While Conrad had
only limited personal acquaintance with the peoples of Maritime Southeast Asia, the region looms
large in his early work. According to Najder, Conrad, the exile and wanderer,
was aware of a difficulty that he confessed more than once: the lack of a
common cultural background with his Anglophone readers meant he could not compete with
English-language authors writing about the English-speaking
world.
At the
same time, the choice of a non-English colonial setting freed him from an
embarrassing division of loyalty: Almayer's Folly, and later "An Outpost of
Progress" (1897, set in a Congo exploited by King Leopold II of Belgium)
and Heart of Darkness (1899,
likewise set in the Congo), contain bitter reflections on colonialism.
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.
Almost all of
Conrad's writings were first published in newspapers and magazines: influential
reviews.
Financial
success long eluded Conrad, who often asked magazine and book publishers for
advances, and acquaintances (notably John Galsworthy) for loans.
Edward Said describes
three phases to Conrad's literary career. In the first and longest, from the
1890s to World War I, Conrad wrote most of his great novels, including The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), Heart of
Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907)
and Under Western Eyes (1911). The
second phase, spanning the war and following the popular success of Chance (1913), is marked by the advent of
Conrad's public persona as "great writer". In the third
and final phase, from the end of World War I to Conrad's death (1924), he at
last finds an uneasy peace; it is, as C. McCarthy writes, as though
"the War has allowed Conrad's psyche to purge itself of terror and
anxiety."
Writing style
Themes and style
Despite the
opinions even of some who knew Conrad personally, such as fellow-novelist Henry James
Conrad – even when only
writing elegantly crafted letters to his uncle and acquaintances – was
always at heart a writer who sailed, rather than a sailor who wrote.
Nevertheless,
Conrad found much sympathetic reading, especially in the United States
An October 1923
visitor to Oswalds, Conrad's home at the time – Cyril Clemens, a cousin
of Mark Twain –
quoted Conrad as saying: "In everything I have written there is always one
invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention."
Conrad
the artist 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,
and what to music was the age of impressionist music, 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."
Many of Conrad's
characters were inspired by actual persons he met, including, in his first
novel, Almayer's Folly (completed 1894),
William Charles Olmeijer, the spelling of whose surname Conrad probably altered
to "Almayer" inadvertently. The historic trader Olmeijer, whom
Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo,
subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination. Conrad often borrowed the
authentic names of actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr (Typhoon),
Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon ("Youth"), Captain Lingard (Almayer's Folly and
elsewhere), Captain Ellis (The Shadow Line).
"Conrad", writes J. I. M. Stewart,
"appears to have attached some mysterious significance to such links
with actuality." Equally curious is "a great deal of namelessness
in Conrad, requiring some minor virtuosity to maintain." Thus we
never learn the surname of the protagonist of Lord Jim.
Conrad also preserves, in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', the
authentic name of the ship, the Narcissus, in which he sailed in
1884.
Apart from
Conrad's own experiences, a number of episodes in his fiction were suggested by
past or contemporary publicly known events or literary works. The first half of
the 1900 novel Lord Jim (the Patnaepisode) was inspired
by the real-life 1880 story of the SS Jeddah.
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 novel's
political strand, according to Maya Jasanoff, is related to the creation
of the Panama Canal.
"In January 1903", she writes, "just as Conrad started
writing Nostromo, the US and Colombian secretaries of state signed
a treaty granting the United States a one-hundred-year renewable lease on a
six-mile strip flanking the canal... While the [news]papers murmured about
revolution in Colombia port of Sulaco
that mirrored the real-life secessionist movement brewing in Panama
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. 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 plot of Under Western Eyes (completed
1910) is kicked off by the assassination of a brutal Russian government
minister, modelled after the real-life 1904 assassination of Russian Minister
of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. 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.
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 fictional 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).
In keeping with
his scepticism and melancholy Conrad almost invariably gives lethal
fates to the characters in his principal novels and stories. 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 words, "The horror!
The horror!"; 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; in
Conrad's 1901 short story, "Amy Foster",
a Pole transplanted to England, Yanko Goorall 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; Captain
Whalley (The End of the Tether, 1902), betrayed by failing eyesight and
an unscrupulous partner, drowns himself; 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.
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 centre 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, Richard Curle published a heavily
modified version of Conrad's diaries describing his experiences in the Congo; in 1978 a more complete version
was published as The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces.
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.
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.
[Conrad's]
treatment of knowledge as contingent and provisional commands a range of
comparisons, from Rashomon to [the views of philosopher] Richard Rorty;
reference points for Conrad's fragmentary method [of presenting information
about characters and events] include Picasso and T.S. Eliot—who
took the epigraph of "The Hollow Men"
from Heart of Darkness.... Even Henry James's
late period, that other harbinger of the modernist novel,
had not yet begun when Conrad invented Marlow,
and James's earlier experiments in perspective (The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew)
don't go nearly as far as Lord Jim.
In San Francisco 1979, a small triangular
square at Columbus Avenue Beach Street
Legacy
After the
publication of Chance in 1913, Conrad was the subject
of more discussion and praise than any other English writer of the time. He had
a genius for companionship, and his circle of friends, which he had begun
assembling even prior to his first publications, 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.
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 in Literature. Interestingly,
it was apparently the French and Swedes – not the English – who favoured
Conrad's candidacy.
Conrad's
narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors,
including T. S. Eliot, Maria Dąbrowska, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gerald Basil Edwards, Ernest Hemingway,
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, André Malraux,
George Orwell,
Graham Greene, William Golding,
William Burroughs, Saul Bellow,
Gabriel García Márquez, Peter
Matthiessen, John le Carré,
V. S. Naipaul,
Philip Roth,
Joan Didion Thomas PynchonJ. M. Coetzee,
and Salman Rushdie.
Many films have
been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's works.
Novels
·
The End of the Tether (written in 1902; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two
Other Stories, 1902)
ADAPTATIONS TO CINEMA
A number of
works in various genres and media have been based on, or inspired by, Conrad's
writings, including:
·
The Rover (1967), adaptation of the novel The Rover (1923),
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
·
Un reietto delle isole (1980), by Giorgio Moser, an Italian adaptation of An
Outcast of the Islands, starring Maria Carta
·
Gabrielle (2005) directed by Patrice Chéreau. Adaptation of the short story
"The Return" (1898), starring Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory.
·
An Outpost of
Progress (2016),
an adaptation of the short story "An Outpost of Progress", directed by Hugo Vieira da Silva
Television
·
Nostromo (1997), a BBC TV adaptation,
co-produced with Italian and Spanish TV networks and WGBH Boston
·
The Secret Agent (2016), a short TV series adapted
from the novel The Secret Agent, starring Toby Jones, Vicky McClure,
and Stephen Graham
Operas
·
Heart of Darkness (2011), a chamber opera in
one act by Tarik O'Regan, with an English-language libretto by artist Tom Phillips.
Orchestral works
·
Suite from Heart of Darkness (2013) for orchestra and narrator
by Tarik O'Regan, extrapolated from the 2011 opera of the same name.
Video games
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