Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad — born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian-ruled Ukraine — spent twenty years as a sailor in the French and British merchant navies, rising to captain, and then, in his late thirties, began writing fiction in English, a language he had learned as an adult. His novels and stories — Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1899), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911) — are among the most important in the language: dark, ironic, morally searching tales of men tested by isolation, temptation and failure, often at sea or on the frontiers of empire, told in complex, indirect narratives that made him a forerunner of modernism. He was the first great English novelist to examine European colonialism from the inside, and the first to be accused of sharing its prejudices.

Life

A Polish childhood

Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv, in the part of Poland annexed by the Russian Empire, the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski, a poet, translator of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, and fervent Polish nationalist, and Ewa Bobrowska. When he was four, his father was arrested for conspiracy against Russian rule and exiled with his family to Vologda in northern Russia, where the harsh climate destroyed his mother’s health; she died of tuberculosis when Conrad was seven. His father died, also of tuberculosis, when he was eleven, and the boy was raised by his practical, affectionate maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, in Kraków. He read his father’s translations and dreamed of the sea from books like Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea and maps of Africa: “When I grow up I shall go there,” he said, pointing at the blank centre of the continent.

At sea

At sixteen, in 1874, he went to Marseilles to become a sailor, serving on French ships to the West Indies, perhaps running guns to Spanish Carlist rebels. In 1878, deep in gambling debt, he shot himself in the chest; he survived. He joined the British merchant navy, where he served for sixteen years, learned English from sailors and newspapers, passed his examinations as mate and master, and became a British subject in 1886. He sailed to Australia, Singapore, Borneo, the Malay Archipelago, Bangkok and Mauritius — the settings of much of his later fiction.

In 1890 he took command of a river steamboat for a Belgian company in the Congo Free State, the private colony of King Leopold II, notorious for the brutal exploitation of its people in the ivory and rubber trades. He travelled up the Congo River to Stanley Falls, saw atrocities, sickness and death, fell gravely ill with fever and dysentery, and returned to Europe after six months, his health permanently damaged. “Before the Congo I was just a mere animal,” he told a friend. The experience became Heart of Darkness.

Writer

He had been working for years on a novel set in Borneo, Almayer’s Folly, which was published in 1895 under the name Joseph Conrad. He gave up the sea, married Jessie George, an English typist, in 1896, settled in Kent, and lived a precarious life of debt, illness (gout, depression) and endless, agonised struggle with composition. His preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) stated his artistic credo: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.”

His friends included Henry James, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy (a passenger on one of his ships) and Ford Madox Ford, with whom he collaborated. In a few years he wrote his greatest works: Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim — the story of a young romantic mate who, in a moment of panic, jumps from a ship full of Muslim pilgrims that he believes is sinking, and spends his life trying to redeem his lost honour, finally finding it, and death, as “Tuan Jim”, lord of a remote Malay settlement; Typhoon; Nostromo (1904), a vast political novel of revolution, silver and corruption in an imaginary South American republic, Costaguana; The Secret Agent (1907), a darkly ironic tale of anarchists and police in London, based on a real attempt to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, in which a double agent, Verloc, uses his simple-minded brother-in-law, Stevie, to carry the bomb, with tragic results; and Under Western Eyes (1911), a Russian story of betrayal and conscience, answering Dostoevsky, whom he disliked. Commercial success came only with Chance (1913). He died of a heart attack on 3 August 1924 at his home in Kent.

Art

Marlow. Conrad’s most famous narrator, Charles Marlow — an experienced, reflective, ironic seaman who tells stories to a group of listeners — appears in Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Chance. Through him Conrad dramatises the act of trying to understand: the stories are told retrospectively, with digressions and doubts, and their meaning lies in Marlow’s struggle to grasp it. “To him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.”

Technique. Conrad pioneered delayed decoding (presenting an impression before its cause is understood), shifting chronology, multiple narrators and limited perspectives — techniques that modernists like Woolf, Faulkner and Fitzgerald developed.

Themes. His central subjects are isolation (men alone on ships, in jungles, in their own consciences), fidelity and its betrayal, the testing of character by circumstance, and the thinness of civilisation. He is sceptical of grand ideals — revolutionary, imperial, romantic — and sees them as masks for egoism, greed or illusion. His vision is ironic and often pessimistic, yet he honours the “few very simple ideas” — fidelity, duty, solidarity — that hold men together.

Empire. Conrad saw the brutality and hypocrisy of European imperialism at first hand, and Heart of Darkness is one of its most powerful indictments. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in his 1975 lecture “An Image of Africa”, called Conrad “a thoroughgoing racist” who used Africa as a backdrop for the disintegration of a European mind, denying Africans language and humanity. The debate Achebe opened remains central to how Conrad is read.

Legacy

Conrad influenced T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul and many others. F. R. Leavis included him in The Great Tradition. Heart of Darkness became the basis of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), set in the Vietnam War. His prose — in a language learned as an adult — remains a wonder.

In conversation

• “The horror! The horror!” — Kurtz’s last words; the recognition of absolute evil or despair.
• The heart of darkness — the savagery hidden beneath civilisation.
• A Lord Jim — a man seeking to redeem a single act of cowardice.