Conrad’s unique circumstances as an individual were complemented by the fact that he occupied a singularly opportune moment in the history of British literature. His period of artistic fertility occurred precisely on the cusp between a Victorianism that was rapidly becoming antiquated and a modernism that would not be fully developed until after World War I. Dramatic changes in the reading public and the publishing industry, along with technological and geopolitical developments that challenged the traditional insularity of British culture, made the era ripe for both formal and thematic literary innovations. Yet while the particulars both of Conrad’s individual life and his historical moment no doubt provided him with special opportunities and capabilities, it was a combination of raw talent and uncompromising dedication to his artistic vision that enabled him so fully to actualize their potential. It is through understanding the remarkable circumstances of his life that one may see how it paradoxically came to be the case that this Polish-born, Francophile mariner was uniquely equipped to exploit the aesthetic and ideological instabilities of his era and thereby become a vital force in the development of British literary modernism.
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who published under the Anglicized pseudonym Joseph Conrad, was born on December 3, 1857, in southeastern Russian-occupied Poland—specifically, in or near Berdichev, a Polish province in the Ukraine. His family were Catholic members of the Polish hereditary nobility, the szlachta, which Conrad unassumingly characterized as “the land-tilling gentry” in order to make clear that this group (which comprised about ten percent of the population and for whom there was no distinction between aristocracy and gentry) was not comparable to the small minority of superwealthy families that constituted the aristocracy of his adoptive country. A formidable power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Poland had gone into decline and then been systematically dismantled by its more powerful neighbors, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, in a series of partitions in the late eighteenth century. In 1795, in the last of these partitions, the remnants of Polish territory were taken, and the nation would not be reconstituted until after World War I. Poland’s subjugation was a profound influence on Poles of Conrad’s generation in general and for Conrad in particular, given that many members of his family were deeply committed to the cause of autonomy for their homeland. The extent to which his father, Apollo Korzeniowski, a prominent playwright, poet, and translator, embraced the nationalist cause is indicated in the title of a poem he composed that marked Conrad’s birth in relation to the first Polish partition of 1772: “To My Son Born in the 85th Year of Muscovite Oppression, a Song for the Day of His Christening.” For his political activism, Apollo was imprisoned by the Russian authorities in the fall of 1861 and then, upon his release the following spring, was exiled with his wife, Ewa, and their only child to Vologda, a cold city northeast of Moscow. The harsh circumstances of their exile took a toll on the health of both parents. Ewa died of tuberculosis in 1865, when Conrad was seven years old. In 1867 the ailing Apollo and his son were permitted to return to Poland, where Apollo died, also of tuberculosis, in 1869. His funeral procession, in Cracow, inspired a major nationalist demonstration.
As Conrad was thus orphaned at the age of eleven, his upbringing now fell to his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who was to prove a formative influence. Whereas Conrad’s father had been a passionate idealist, his uncle was eminently practical and conservative, and the opposition between these influences may be viewed as yet another of the dichotomies that shaped the author’s life. As Zdzislaw Najder, Conrad’s finest biographer, observes, “Almost all Conrad’s inner tensions—the painful, uncomfortable, wearisome wealth of his mind—can be associated with this basic contrast between his [father‘s] and his uncle’s personalities” (Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, p. 166). In 1872, at the age of fourteen, Conrad declared his intention of becoming a sailor, a plan that was initially opposed by his uncle. The idealistic adolescent was fixed on the idea, though, and his aspiration actually served a practical necessity, since it was clear that emigration would be necessary: as a Russian subject and the son of a convict, he would have been liable for up to twenty-five years of compulsory duty in the Russian Army had he remained in Poland. So in October 1874, two months before his seventeenth birthday, he left Poland for the port city of Marseilles, where he entered the French merchant marine as a trainee seaman and a steward.
His budding career, however, was temporarily brought to a halt when, in December 1877, he was informed that, as a Russian subject, he could no longer serve on French vessels. Without a livelihood, he remained in Marseilles, where he lived beyond his means and then tried to recoup his losses by gambling. The ensuing financial crisis led him to attempt suicide. (Conrad himself always insisted that the scar on his left breast was from a gunshot wound received in a duel, a claim perpetuated in his pseudo-autobiographical novel The Arrow of Gold [1919], which consists of heavily embellished memories of his Marseilles period, including romantic stories of gun running for the Spanish Carlist cause and a torrid love affair. His uncle, who rushed to Marseilles, helped him recuperate, and paid off his debts, publicly affirmed this myth—presumably because suicide is a mortal sin for Catholics whereas dueling was viewed as honorable—but in a confidential letter he acknowledged the truth.) After his recovery, no longer eligible to serve on French ships, Conrad joined the British merchant marine and first arrived on British shores in June 1878. Over the next several years he rose through the ranks, passing his exams for second mate in 1880, first mate in 1884, and captain in 1886, the same year in which he was naturalized as a Briton.
Yet employment opportunities for captains were scarce during this era, for the demand for sea officers was steadily declining as steamships were supplanting smaller sailing vessels (a historical shift Conrad wistfully treated in his 1906 memoir The Mirror of the Sea, in which he makes clear his belief in the dignity of sail over steam). So over the next several years he accepted positions as first mate and second mate, and in January 1894 he completed his last voyage. His two-decade-long career as a seaman had taken him all over the world—to southeast Asia, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, India, and throughout Europe—and would provide him with much of the material for his second profession, as a writer. The year 1894, in fact, constitutes a watershed in Conrad’s life, as the end of his period as a seaman was followed rapidly by the death, the next month, of his beloved uncle Tadeusz and the completion of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, which he had begun writing five years earlier. The novel was published in 1895 under the name Joseph Conrad (the inaugural use of this pseudonym), and, although it did not sell well, it received generally good reviews. With this modest success, the thirty-seven-year-old Conrad embarked on a literary career that from this point on would be the consuming passion of his life.
Conrad settled permanently in England in 1896 and (to the surprise of some of his friends) after a brief courtship married Jessie George, an intellectually unimpressive lower-middle-class Englishwoman nearly sixteen years younger than he. They would remain married for the rest of his life, and she appears to have provided the domestic support and stability that the irascible, high-strung author found necessary in order to work. In the same year his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, was published, followed in 1897 by The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” whose preface may be viewed as his aesthetic manifesto: he defined “art” as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect” (Kimbrough edition, p. 145). He was well aware that his rather elevated artistic vision of fiction was not typical of English assumptions of the period. On the contrary, as Ian Watt points out, “Conrad’s basic conception of the novel was not of English origin. Nor was it derived from Polish sources, if only because the novel developed rather late in Poland, compared to poetry and drama. For Conrad the exemplary novelists were French, and, in particular, Flaubert and Maupassant” (Conr
ad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 48). As Conrad forged ahead with his literary career, his domestic life continued to develop. In 1898 the first of his two children, Borys, was born, and his first volume of short stories, Tales of Unrest, was published. In the fall of that year the family moved into Pent Farm, a home near the Kentish coast that Conrad had subleased from a new friend of his, the writer Ford Madox Huef fer (later, Ford Madox Ford). The relationship with Ford would prove to be important, as the two would go on to collaborate on several projects, most notably the novels The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), before a quarrel would effectively end their friendship. It was also during this period that Conrad began to cultivate relationships with some of the most important writers of the era, several of whom—H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, and Henry James—were now his neighbors. His second son, John, born in 1906, would in fact be named after his friend, the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Galsworthy.
The family lived at Pent Farm until 1907, and it was here that Conrad wrote most of his finest and most enduring fiction, beginning with Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900). Although his output was prodigious during his years at Pent Farm—and he remained steadily prolific throughout his career as a writer, with not only novellas and novels but short stories and essays as well—he suffered chronically from delibi tating bouts of depression and writer’s block. In a letter to the literary critic Edward Garnett, written shortly before he began full-time work on Lord Jim, he dramatically conveyed his anguish and sense of paralysis:
The more I write the less substance do I see in my work. The scales are falling off my eyes. It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself—and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep. I am alone with it in a chasm with perpendicular sides of black basalt. Never were sides so perpendicular and smooth, and high (Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 177).
To make matters worse, as he was racked with escalating debts (and proudly refused to lower his fairly high standard of living) he often spent large advances on work that he had hardly begun, which led him to request still greater advances; he was, therefore, more or less constantly under pressure to produce. Further, his difficulties with writing were exacerbated by a deep metaphysical pessimism that presupposed the ultimate futility of all human endeavors. In a letter to the idealistic Scottish socialist politician Cunninghame Graham, he summed up his view of the human condition, which was extrapolated from popularized accounts of the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy):
The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men (Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 16-17).
What has been termed the Conradian ethic is based, paradoxically, on acknowledging this darkly existential condition while nonetheless remaining faithful to one’s human commitments.
Having spent much of his early career as a writer using his own experiences and observations as grist for his art (most of his early tales are set at sea or in parts of the world to which he had traveled during his years as a seaman), Conrad now, after completing Typhoon (1903), began to treat subjects that were remote from his own experiences. This was in part a strategic shift of gears: he did not like the idea of being thought of as a writer whose sole subject matter was seafaring. The great political novels Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) were his primary achievements during this period. His political interests found expression at this time in nonfiction writings as well, most notably the 1905 essay “Autocracy and War,” which he wrote on the occasion of the defeat of Russia in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. In this essay, Conrad astutely analyzes the increasingly bellicose climate of Europe generally, asserting that it has become “an armed and trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for life and death, and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions” and presciently warning of the growing danger of German militarism (The Works of Joseph Conrad: Notes on Life and Letters, p. 112). He also used the piece on behalf of his homeland with the assertion that “[t]he common guilt of the two [that is, German and Russian] Empires is defined precisely by their frontier line running through the Polish provinces” (p. 95). He would in later years take up this issue at greater length in the polemical essays “A Note on the Polish Problem” (1916) and “The Crime of Partition” (1919), in which he would represent the Poles as “Western” rather than “Slavonic” and would appeal to the “Western Powers” to protect Poland from the twin evils of “Russian Slavonism” and “Prussian Ger manism” based on “the moral and intellectual kinship of that distant outpost of their own type of civilisation” (pp. 131, 135).
Public affirmations of loyalty to Poland appear to have been very important for Conrad, particularly following a debate that had transpired at the turn of the century in the Polish press over the emigration of talent. During this debate he was publicly denounced by one of Poland’s most famous novelists for alleged disloyalty for having emigrated to Britain and chosen to write in the English language. So acutely sensitive was he to such charges that he contended in a 1901 letter to a fellow Pole (who happened to share the name Józef Korzeniowski), on the matter of his adoption of an Anglicized pseudonym,
I have in no way disavowed either my nationality or the name we share for the sake of success. It is widely known that I am a Pole and that Józef [and] Konrad are my two Christian names, the latter being used by me as a surname so that foreign mouths should not distort my real surname.... It does not seem to me that I have been unfaithful to my country by having proved to the English that a gentleman from the Ukraine can be as good a sailor as they, and has something to tell them in their own language (Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 322-323).
Although the claims of some critics that Conrad’s fiction may be viewed primarily as displaced expressions of his own sense of guilt over having abandoned Poland have been taken beyond plausibility, there is no doubt that this issue played a prominent role in his psychology and in the development of his fiction, which pursues with a relentlessness bordering on obsession the themes of conflicted loyalties and betrayal. In fact, his 1912 autobiography, A Personal Record, is particularly interesting as a rhetorical effort to represent himself as faithful to his native homeland yet nonetheless as a natural fit for his adoptive country. The latter tendency is epitomized in the author’s note he wrote for a new edition of the volume in 1919 that includes a rather mysterious account of his relationship to the English language, which, it bears recalling in this context, he always spoke with a thick Polish accent:
The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption—well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms I truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character (The Works of Joseph, Conrad: A Personal Record, p. vii).
He even went so far as to deny the formative influence on him of French writers in order, as Najder characterizes it, “to erase from his literary biography any elements which might detract from his reputation as a class
ic of the English literary tradition” (p. 433).
In addition to the conflict over his dual national allegiances, Conrad was faced with the dilemma of how to negotiate the conflicting exigencies of two distinct audiences for his fiction. Subsequent to the education reform movement of the 1870s (a series of acts passed by Parliament had made elementary education compulsory for all British children), the British reading public had increasingly divided into a new mass readership and a highbrow readership. Although Conrad’s loyalties were with the latter, he was financially dependent on the former, and, despite his begrudging efforts to appeal to a popular readership, his books simply would not sell well. Unsuccessful in attracting a popular readership, he attempted to make his writing more lucrative by adapting his fiction for the stage, but the results of this endeavor were disappointing as well. Although he blithely claimed of his 1905 adaptation of his short story “To-morrow” (under the title One Day More) that he was content to have “an exceptionally intelligent audience stare... it coldly off the boards” (“The Censor of Plays” in The Works of Joseph Conrad: Notes on Life and Letters, p. 77), privately he had made clear that he had been hoping it would make him solvent in a way that his fiction had not yet done for him: “my little play.... may lead to the end of all my financial troubles,” he had optimistically speculated (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 237). The first substantial sign of a change in this situation was the 1912 publication of ‘Twixt Land and Sea (including the fine short story “The Secret Sharer”), which garnered unprecedentedly high sales for him. Yet it would not be until the publication of the novel Chance, in 1914, that he would have an actual best-seller and a measure of relief from his financial burdens. From this point on, Conrad was marketable.