In an irony of the sort that is characteristic of his own fiction, however, Conrad’s newfound popularity coincided with a dramatic and permanent diminution in his powers as a writer. Indeed, the fact that Henry James, whom Conrad viewed as the greatest authority on the art of the novel form, had been sharply critical of Chance made painfully clear to him that the work’s fame and its artistic quality were not proportional to each other. The decline that had begun with Chance steepened with his next novel, Victory (1915), and his subsequent fiction, with the notable exception of the novella The Shadow-Line (1917), is inferior still. Some critics identify this process as having begun with his nervous collapse in 1910 after completing Under Western Eyes. So torturous was the writing of this book that even for Conrad, for whom completion of a novel was often the occasion for physical and emotional breakdown, it was extreme: he collapsed with fever, raved, and spent three months in bed recuperating. Yet regardless of whether one can identify the deterioration in the quality of his fiction with a particular event, it is apparent that his mode of creativity was not sustainable either physically or psychologically.
Other circumstances no doubt contributed as well to his decline. The fact that he began writing at a relatively advanced age meant that the duration of his career would be correspondingly short, and his creative difficulties later in life were surely exacerbated by various burdens, such as the chronically poor health of his wife and the long-term effects of shell shock experienced by his son Borys in the trenches of World War I. It is also important to recognize that the tendency to dismiss Conrad’s later work may not altogether do justice to it, and critics have begun to reassess that work and to challenge the assumption that it is wholly substandard. Yet despite how one judges the quality of Conrad’s output during his last decade, what is clear is that the popularity of that work led to belated appreciation of his earlier books as well as numerous reprintings of them, most notably in the form of a pair of prematurely titled “collected editions” that were published in Britain and America in 1920 and 1921. Riding the crest of his popular success, in 1923 he embarked on a reading tour in the United States, where for the first time he found himself a center of public interest. In the following year, his mounting accolades in Britain culminated in the offer of a knighthood, although, in keeping with his propensity for turning down public honors, he declined to accept it. He died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, at the age of sixty-six, and was buried near his home in a Roman Catholic cemetery in Canterbury. Although his reputation ebbed slightly in the years after his death, by the 1940s he was generally acknowledged to be among a handful of the greatest writers of his era, an estimation that has never faltered since.
“Youth,” “Amy Foster,” and “The Secret Sharer”
For both practical and artistic reasons, the short story form was important to Conrad. On the practical side, before he became a popular success, it provided the chronically debt-ridden author with a more dependable source of income than did the novel form; both in Britain and America, magazines during this era tended to pay well for short fiction, whereas selling a novel was always a dicey proposition. Yet he was also deeply invested in the short story as an aesthetic form, as was the case with several of the authors whom he most admired, such as Guy de Maupassant. Unlike Maupassant’s compact, elliptical stories, however—and despite his own assertion that “[i]t takes a small-scale narrative (short story) to show the master’s hand” (Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 124)—Conrad’s stories tend to be long and richly detailed, and, as his creative imagination was constantly at work reshaping and augmenting his material, they invariably threatened to evolve into novellas and even full-scale novels. In fact, nearly all of his novels were initially envisioned as short stories. In his entire career, to the consternation of his publishers and his literary agent, he brought only one work of fiction in at the length he had projected (the 1897 short story “The Lagoon”), and he completed very few works by the times to which he had agreed. Writing either to a set length or to a deadline was anathema to this temperamental artist.
The three short stories included in this volume are generally recognized to be among Conrad’s finest examples of the genre. As is the case with much of his fiction, all three stories deal with the theme of the dangers of sea travel, a preoccupation that stems from his first career as a seaman. Further, all three stories demonstrate Conrad’s proclivity for transmitting information through the refracting lenses of specific subjectivities—in the case of “Youth” and “Amy Foster” (each of which is a frame-tale narrative, or a story within a story), multiple subjectivities. Yet despite these thematic and formal similarities, they also present Conrad in three different modes, and each displays different of his skills. While reading any one of these stories on its own is illuminating, for reasons that are detailed below, when read together they yield considerably more than the sum of their parts.
“Youth” (1898) consists of the reminiscences of the English seaman Charlie Marlow, Conrad’s most famous narrator, to a group of his friends, one of whom subsequently passes the story on to the reader. The outlook Marlow here recalls—in sharp contrast to that of the next of Conrad’s tales he will narrate, the broodingly pessimistic Heart of Darkness —is unencumbered by introspection and psychological conflict. Yet this is not to say that the story runs no deeper than the insights of its reckless, twenty-year-old protagonist (whose limited outlook the wistful, now forty-two-year-old Marlow scrupulously reproduces); on the contrary, “Youth” contains much more than its boy‘s-adventure-tale surface immediately discloses. The story Marlow recounts is of his ill-fated first voyage as second mate on an aged, poorly maintained ship that is supposed to deliver a load of coal from England to Siam (modern Thailand). After several months of false starts, crew changes, and long periods of waiting for repairs to be done, the barely seaworthy craft finally sets off. The comedy of errors that is the voyage culminates when, en route in the Indian Ocean, the cargo of coal catches fire. The crewmen make futile attempts to put out the fire and then are nearly killed in an explosion that compels them finally to abandon the now-sinking ship. Marlow is put in charge of one of the lifeboats with two other men, and, proud to assume his first “command,” he successfully leads his boat ashore, having had a memorable adventure and an initiation of sorts into manhood.
Although the story draws heavily on Conrad’s own experiences from 1881 to 1883 as second mate on the Palestine (here renamed the Judea), which would conclude with his first voyage to southeast Asia, his claims in the 1917 author’s note that the tale constitutes “a feat of memory” and “a record of experience” (p. 4) are decidedly inaccurate. For example, Marlow’s account of the acts of recklessness committed by those in charge is heavily embellished from the facts: Captain Beard’s decision to keep his crew on the clearly doomed Judea, Captain Nash’s decision to deliver mail rather than rescue Captain Beard and his crew, and Marlow’s own decision to place the lives of the two men in his lifeboat in jeopardy by remaining silent about a ship that could potentially rescue them simply so he can continue his romantic adventure—any of these actions would have been sufficient to lead to charges that would have stripped the perpetrator of his officer’s certificate. (A court of inquiry was convened in Singapore to investigate the loss of the Palestine, and no such findings were made.) Actually, the Palestine sank not far from shore, so even to the extent that those three decisions may correspond to the facts, the perils associated with them in the fictional version do not reflect the real circumstances. Rather attached to the myths he had created of his maritime career, as well as to his honor, Conrad was not pleased when, in 1922, this fact was unearthed and publicized.
What is perhaps the story’s most interesting departure from the facts, however, was hardly a secret: the recasting of the Polish Conrad as the Englishman Marlow. Further, it is not only the author who is reinvented as an Englishman. Whereas the group with whom Conrad actually served on the Palestine could hardly have been of more in
ternational composition—although the captain and several of the crew were English, there were also men from Australia, Norway, Ireland, and the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts—the courageous, dutiful seamen of the Judea are all English; they are Liverpool men who, Marlow affirms, have “the right stuff” (p. 24). In fact, the story’s chief thematic preoccupation is with what is represented, in highly traditional terms, as a uniquely English sort of virtue that seafaring provides the opportunity for actualizing. This tendency is epitomized in Marlow’s explanation for why the crew have conducted themselves with exemplary honor and steadfastness under the most trying of circumstances:
[I]t was something in them, something inborn and subtle and everlasting. I don’t say positively that the crew of a French or German merchantman wouldn’t have done it, but I doubt whether it would have been done in the same way. There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful like an instinct—a disclosure of something secret—of that hidden something, that gift of good or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations (p. 26).
In espousing the notion of the superiority of Anglo-Saxons over other imperial “races,” the story, which was written during the ascendancy of competition among imperial powers, participates in fairly common place rhetoric for the era. Yet given how skeptical Conrad tended to be about such matters, this apparent endorsement of a vision of Englishness that borders on jingoism is puzzling. To some extent we can make sense of such pronouncements by recognizing that he wrote the story for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, knowing that its readers were predominantly pro-imperial Tory-Conservatives. It is also possible that, as a naturalized Briton, he felt obliged to affirm publicly the chauvinistic assumptions of his compatriots—that is, to present himself, as the American-turned-Briton T. S. Eliot subsequently would do a generation later, as more English than the English.
These strategic considerations aside, Conrad’s idealistic depiction of English virtue in “Youth” appears to a limited extent to reflect his own convictions, and, insofar as this is the case, it represents only one side of a complex ambivalence toward his adoptive country, the other side of which would be displayed three years later in the poignant short story “Amy Foster” (1901). Actually, Conrad never wrote a more Anglophilic story than “Youth” or a more Anglophobic one than “Amy Foster.” On the one hand, “Youth” is a tale of imaginary belonging written by someone who acutely felt himself to be an outsider in the British merchant marine: as Najder observes, “there is no evidence to suggest that [a] sense of professional solidarity and comradeship in dangerous work was indeed part of Korzeniowski’s personal experience. It seems more probable that he felt lonely and alienated throughout his service” (p. 163). The fact that he was referred to by some of his shipmates, ironically, as “the Russian Count” reinforces this contention. On the other hand, in “Amy Foster” the experiences of the protagonist, an abused immigrant in Britain, clearly reflect Conrad’s own sentiments of being an unwelcome outsider.
The tale is narrated by Kennedy, a doctor whose thoughtful, cosmopolitan outlook sharply differs from that of the story’s provincial, rural Britons. Kennedy befriends the protagonist, Yanko, the sole survivor of a shipwreck off the Kentish coast, and gradually comes to learn the stranger’s story. Having washed ashore after the America-bound ship loaded with European émigrés on which he was a passenger has foundered, the long-haired Slavic stranger who speaks no English is immediately subjected by xenophobic Britons to both verbal and physical abuse. Mistaken for a madman or a criminal, he is treated in a manner comparable to that of the pathetically misunderstood monster in Mary Shel ley’s Frankenstein: he is lashed with a whip, stoned, and hit over the head with an umbrella before finally being locked up in a woodshed. During his imprisonment, Amy Foster, a plain-looking, unintelligent country girl, offers him bread, and they subsequently fall in love and marry. Yet as time progresses the cultural disparity between them becomes increasingly evident. Amy’s growing fear of her passionate, impulsive, and decidedly un-English husband’s strangeness reaches a climax when, during his bout of fever, what she mistakes for ravings (in fact, he is merely requesting water in his own language) frighten her to the point where she takes their infant son and flees their home. The abandoned Yanko dies the next day, Dr. Kennedy determines with evident symbolism, of “heart-failure” (p. 151), and the story concludes with the doctor reflecting on the irony that Yanko has been spared the fate of his drowned companions only to suffer and die for lack of human community in England: he has been “cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair” (p. 152).
Conrad was careful not to make the parallels between himself and his unfortunate protagonist excessively transparent. Unlike the devout Catholic peasant Yanko, Conrad was descended from Polish nobility and had long since lapsed from the faith. Yet while the tale is only obliquely autobiographical, its personal resonances are unmistakable. It is never explicitly stated that Yanko is Polish, but we are supplied with ample clues to make this determination. For example, we are informed that he has been a mountaineer, the term for which, “in the dialect of his country,” sounds “like Goorall” (p. 146), which bears a close resemblance to the Polish term for mountaineer, góral. And it is no coincidence that he washes up on the Kentish coast, the very part of southeast England where Conrad himself lived at the time he was writing the story. It is also important to recognize that Conrad believed himself to be an object of English xenophobia. For example, in an effort to account for the disappointing sales of his 1907 novel The Secret Agent, he wrote, “I suppose there is something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public.... Foreignness I suppose” (Collected Letters, vol. 4, pp. 9-10); and he consistently declined to give public readings of his work in Britain, explaining that “I am not very anxious to display my accent before a large gathering of people. It might affect them disagreeably” (Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, p. 283). Further, the story expresses Conrad’s sense of alienation not only from Britons generally, but from his English wife specifically. Notably, one of the titles he had considered before settling on “Amy Foster” was the distinctly autobiographical “A Husband,” and those aspects of the story that concern the incompatibility between Yanko and his provincial English wife are especially consonant with the circumstances of Conrad’s marriage. (The endnotes in this volume may be consulted for further information about the story’s autobiographical content.) Ultimately, of course, the tale cannot be reduced to mere veiled autobiography, but it does provide a revealing glimpse into the sentiments Conrad harbored toward his adoptive country that profoundly affected his fiction as a whole.
Like “Amy Foster,” “The Secret Sharer” (1910) makes an interesting companion piece to “Youth,” as it is also a tale of youthful initiation at sea recounted by an English seaman many years after the fact. Yet unlike in “Youth,” where passing the test is a fairly straightforward matter of keeping up one’s physical courage in the face of potentially deadly perils, in “The Secret Sharer” the emphasis is on the psychological tests of character that are associated with command. In the latter story, Conrad revisited the topic of seafaring after a long hiatus while writing political fiction, and the return to familiar subject matter appears to have made the writing process uncharacteristically smooth. The story, which draws on his own feelings and experiences as a first-time captain in 1888, was written in late 1909 with what was for him remarkable speed and ease, and he was quite pleased with it. As he affirmed in a rare self-congratulatory moment, “Every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note” (Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 128). Most critics have agreed with this assessment; it has long been the most widely admired of Conrad’s short stories.
The story begins with the narrator wondering at the outset of his first voyage as a captain whether he “should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly” (p. 1
55). As it happens, the ensuing circumstances will provide the opportunity for an investigation of that very question, although the terms of the investigation will be considerably more complex and ambiguous than he can anticipate. The plot that subsequently unfolds is loosely based on the circumstances surrounding a famous episode of violence at sea. In 1880, on a sailing vessel off the coast of South Africa, a white first mate racially taunted and then killed a black crewman during an altercation between them. Several days later the captain secretly allowed the mate to escape, leading the crew nearly to a state of mutiny. The anguished captain subsequently committed suicide, by drowning himself, and the mate was eventually caught and convicted of man-slaughter. In Conrad’s version of the story, which is set in the Gulf of Siam and elides the race issue, it is without the complicity of his captain that the mate (here named Leggatt) escapes imprisonment on his ship. He swims to a nearby vessel, where he is taken in by the narrator, and much of the story is occupied with detailing the uncomfortable, and often comic, circumstances surrounding the latter’s efforts to keep the presence of his stowaway secret. Having successfully hidden Leggatt not only from his own crew but also from the captain and crew of the ship from which the errant mate has escaped, the narrator concludes his tale by describing how he has taken his ship on a dangerous nighttime maneuver in order to bring it close to shore in an effort to enable Leggatt to swim to safety.
Although “The Secret Sharer” has inspired a wide variety of interpretations, including political, sociological, and historical ones, by far the greatest interest in the story has been in its rich suggestiveness as a psychological tale. It has, accordingly, been subjected to a barrage of psychoanalytic interpretations. While Conrad maintained that he had no interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, he was nonetheless intrigued by the complex duality of human consciousness, and this tale clearly reflects that interest. Throughout the story the narrator emphasizes his uncanny sense of identity with Leggatt—he characterizes the fugitive as his “other self,” his “double,” and his “secret sharer”; and he goes on to say of the duplicity necessitated by his efforts to keep Leggatt hidden, “the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly watching myself, my secret self.... It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it” (p. 170). In this respect the story, which Conrad had considered titling “The Second Self,” “The Secret Self,” and “The Other Self,” participates in the motifs of the Doppelgänger literary tradition, of which Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a particularly influential example.