| Jozef
Konrad Korzeniowski was a unique figure in English
literature, not only because of his genius as a writer
of novels, short stories, and essays but also because
of the variety of his experience, Joseph Conrad (original
name Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) born in Berdyczow,
Poland, on December 3, 1857, died in 1924, came from
the nobility of Russian-dominated Poland.
During
his lifetime Conrad was admired for the richness of
his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at
sea and in exotic places. But his initial reputation
as a masterful teller of colourful adventures of the
sea masked his fascination with the individual when
faced with nature's invariable unconcern, man's frequent
malevolence, and his inner battles with good and evil.
To Conrad, the sea meant above all the tragedy of
loneliness. A writer of complex skill and striking
insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision,
he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest
English novelists.
Conrad's
father, Apollo Nalecz Korzeniowski, a poet and an
ardent Polish patriot, was one of the organizers of
the committee that went on in 1863 to direct the Polish
insurrection against Russian rule. He was arrested
in late 1861 and was sent into exile at Vologda in
northern Russia. His wife and four-year-old son followed
him there, and the harsh climate hastened his wife's
death from tuberculosis in 1865. In A Personal Record
Conrad relates that his first introduction to the
English language was at the age of eight, when his
father was translating the works of Shakespeare and
Victor Hugo in order to support the household. In
those solitary years with his father he read the works
of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles
Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray in Polish
and French. Apollo was ill with tuberculosis and died
in Krakow in 1869. Responsibility
for the boy was assumed by his maternal uncle, Tadeusz
Bobrowski, a lawyer, who provided his nephew with
advice, admonition, financial help, and love. His
practical benign nature was to have a strong influence
on him. He sent Conrad to school at Krakow, Poland
and then to Switzerland, but the boy was bored by
school and yearned to go to sea. In 1874 Conrad left
for Marseille with the intention of going to sea.
Bobrowski
made him an allowance of 2,000 francs a year and put
him in touch with a merchant named Delestang, in whose
ships Conrad sailed in the French merchant service.
His first voyage, on the Mont-Blanc to Martinique,
was as a passenger; on her next voyage he sailed as
an apprentice. In July 1876 he again sailed to the
West Indies, as a steward on the "Saint-Antoine."
On this voyage Conrad seems to have taken part in
some unlawful enterprise, probably gunrunning, and
to have sailed along the coast of Venezuela, memories
of which were to find a place in "Nostromo."
The first mate of the vessel, a Corsican named Dominic
Cervoni, was the model for the hero of that novel
and was to play a picturesque role in Conrad's life
and work.
Conrad
became heavily enmeshed in debt upon returning to
Marseille and apparently unsuccessfully attempted
to commit suicide. As a sailor in the French merchant
navy he was liable to conscription when he came of
age, so after his recovery he signed on in April 1878
as a deckhand on a British freighter bound for Constantinople
with a cargo of coal. After the return journey his
ship landed him at Lowestoft, Eng., in June 1878.
It was Conrad's first English landfall, and he spoke,
as he said, only six words of English, the language
of which he was to become a recognized master. Conrad
remained in England, and in the following October
he shipped as an ordinary seaman aboard a wool clipper
on the London-Sydney run.
Conrad was to
serve 16 years in the British merchant navy. In June
1880 he passed his examination as second mate, and
in April 1881 he joined the "Palestine,"
a bark of 425 tons. This move proved to be an important
event in his life; it took him to the Far East for
the first time, and it was also a continuously troubled
voyage, which provided him with literary material
that he would use later. Beset by gales, accidentally
rammed by a steamer, and deserted by a sizable portion
of her crew, the "Palestine" nevertheless
had made it as far as the East Indies when her cargo
of coal caught fire and the crew had to take to the
lifeboats; Conrad's initial landing in the East, on
an island off Sumatra, took place only after a 13
1/2-hour voyage in an open boat. In 1898 Conrad published
his account of his experiences on the "Palestine,"
with only slight alterations, as the short story Youth,
a remarkable tale of a young officer's first command.
|
|
He
returned to London by passenger steamer, and in September
1883 he shipped as mate on the "Riversdale,"
leaving her at Madras to join the "Narcissus"
at Bombay. This voyage gave him material for his novel
The Nigger of the "Narcissus," the
story of an egocentric black sailor's deterioration
and death aboard ship. At about this time Conrad began
writing his earliest known letters in the English
language. In between subsequent voyages Conrad studied
for his first mate's certificate, and in 1886 two
notable events occurred: he became a British subject
in August, and three months later he obtained his
master mariner's certificate.
In February 1887
he sailed as first mate on the "Highland Forest,"
bound for Semarang, Java. Her captain was John McWhirr,
whom he later immortalized under the same name as
the heroic, unimaginative captain of the steamer "Nan
Shan" in Typhoon. He then joined the "Vidar,"
a locally owned steamship trading among the islands
of the southeast Asian archipelago. During the five
or six voyages he made in four and a half months,
Conrad was discovering and exploring the world he
was to re-create in his first novels, Almayer's
Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and Lord
Jim, as well as several short stories.
After
leaving the "Vidar" Conrad unexpectedly
obtained his first command, on the "Otago,"
sailing from Bangkok, an experience out of which he
was to make his stories The Shadow-Line and
Falk. He took over the "Otago" in
unpropitious circumstances. The captain Conrad replaced
had died at sea, and by the time the ship reached
Singapore, a voyage of 800 miles (1,300 km) that took
three weeks because of lack of wind, the whole ship's
company, except Conrad and the cook, was down with
fever. Conrad then discovered to his dismay that his
predecessor had sold almost all the ship's supply
of quinine.
Back
in London in the summer of 1889, Conrad took rooms
near the Thames and, while waiting for a command,
began to write Almayer's Folly. The task was
interrupted by the strangest and probably the most
important of his adventures. As a child in Poland,
he had stuck his finger on the center of the map of
Africa and said, "When I grow up I shall go there."
In 1889 the Congo Free State was four years old as
a political entity and already notorious as a sphere
of imperialistic exploitation. Conrad's childhood
dream took positive shape in the ambition to command
a Congo River steamboat. Using what influence he could,
he went to Brussels and secured an appointment. What
he saw, did, and felt in the Congo are largely recorded
in Heart of Darkness, his most famous, finest,
and most enigmatic story, the title of which signifies
not only the heart of Africa, the dark continent,
but also the heart of evil - everything that is corrupt,
nihilistic, malign - and perhaps the heart of man.
The story is central to Conrad's work and vision,
and it is difficult not to think of his Congo experiences
as traumatic. He may have exaggerated when he said,
"Before the Congo I was a mere animal,"
but in a real sense the dying Kurtz's cry, "The
horror! The horror!" was Conrad's. He suffered
psychological, spiritual, even metaphysical shock
in the Congo, and his physical health was also damaged;
for the rest of his life, he was racked by recurrent
fever and gout.
Conrad
was in the Congo for four months, returning to England
in January 1891. He made several more voyages as a
first mate, but by 1894, when his guardian Tadeusz
Bobrowski died, his sea life was over. In the spring
of 1894 Conrad sent Almayer's Folly to the
London publisher Fisher Unwin, and the book was published
in April 1895. It was as the author of this novel
that Conrad adopted the name by which he is known:
he had learned from long experience that the name
Korzeniowski was impossible on British lips.
Unwin's manuscript
reader, the critic Edward Garnett, urged Conrad to
begin a second novel, and so Almayer's Folly
was followed in 1896 by An Outcast of the Islands,
which repeats the theme of a foolish and blindly superficial
character meeting the tragic consequences of his own
failings in a tropical region far from the company
of his fellow Europeans. These two novels provoked
a misunderstanding of Conrad's talents and purpose
which dogged him the rest of his life. Set in the
Malayan archipelago, they caused him to be labeled
a writer of exotic tales, a reputation which a series
of novels and short stories about the sea - The
Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897), Lord
Jim (1900), Youth (1902), Typhoon
(1902), and others - seemed only to confirm. But words
of his own about the "Narcissus" give the
real reason for his choice of settings: "the
problem . . . is not a problem of the sea, it is merely
a problem that has risen on board a ship where the
conditions of complete isolation from all land entanglements
make it stand out with a particular force and colouring."
This is equally true of his other works; the latter
part of Lord Jim takes place in a jungle village
not because the emotional and moral problems that
interest Conrad are those peculiar to jungle villages,
but because there Jim's feelings of guilt, responsibility,
and insecurity - feelings common to mankind - work
themselves out with a logic and inevitability that
are enforced by his isolation. It is this purpose,
rather than a taste for the outlandish, that distinguishes
Conrad's work from that of many novelists of the 19th
and early 20th centuries. They, for the most part,
were concerned to widen the scope of the novel, to
act, in Balzac's phrase, as the natural historians
of society; Conrad instead aimed at the isolation
and concentration of tragedy.
In
1895, Conrad married the 22-year-old Jessie George,
by whom he had two sons. He thereafter resided mainly
in the southeast corner of England, where his life
as an author was plagued by poor health, near poverty,
and difficulties of temperament. Although he was tormented
by the difficulties of creation and lack of money,
his work did bring him critical recognition and the
friendship of many fellow writers, including Ford
Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Henry James, and H. G.
Wells. It was not until 1910, after he had written
what are now considered his finest novels - Lord
Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret
Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911),
the last being three novels of political intrigue
and romance - that his financial situation became
relatively secure. He was awarded a Civil List pension
of 100, and the American collector John Quinn began
to buy his manuscripts - for what now seem ludicrously
low prices. His novel Chance was successfully
serialized in the New York Herald in 1912,
and his novel Victory, published in 1915, was
no less successful. Though hampered by rheumatism,
Conrad continued to write for the remaining years
of his life. In April 1924 he refused an offer of
knighthood from Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, and
he died shortly thereafter.
In his own time
Conrad was praised for his power to depict life at
sea and in the tropics and for his works' qualities
of "romance" - a word used basically to
denote his power of using an elaborate prose style
to cast a film of illusory splendour over somewhat
sordid events. His reputation diminished after his
death, and a revival of interest in his work later
directed attention to different qualities and to different
books than his contemporaries had emphasized.
An
account of the themes of some of these books should
indicate where modern critics lay emphasis. Nostromo
(1904), a story of revolution, politics, and financial
manipulation in a South American republic, centers,
for all its close-packed incidents, upon one idea
- the corruption of the characters by the ambitions
that they set before themselves, ambitions concerned
with silver, which forms the republic's wealth and
which is the central symbol around which the novel
is organized. The ambitions range from simple greed
to idealistic desires for reform and justice. All
lead to moral
|
|
disaster, and the nobler
the ambition the greater its possessor's self-disgust
as he realizes his plight. Heart
of Darkness, which follows closely the actual events
of Conrad's Congo journey, tells of the narrator'sfascination
by a mysterious white man, Kurtz, who, by his eloquence
and hypnotic personality, dominates the brutal tribesmen
around him. Full of contempt for the greedy traders
who exploit the natives, the narrator cannot deny the
power of this figure of evil who calls forth from him
something approaching reluctant loyalty. Francis Coppola
made his movie Apocalypse Now (which received
many awards including Academy Awards, Cannes Film Festival
and Golden Globe) based on Joseph Conrad's Heart
of Darkness. The ties between Joseph Conrad's book
and Francis Coppola's movie are unmistakable. Apocalypse
Now's accuracy in following the story line of Heart
of Darkness is amazing even though the settings
of each story are from completely different time periods.
From the Congo in Africa to the Nung river in Vietnam,
Joseph Conrad's ideals are not lost. In both the book
and the movie, the ideas of good and evil, whiteness
and darkness, and racism are apparent.
The
Secret Agent (1907), a sustained essay in the
ironic and one of Conrad's finest works, deals with
the equivocal world of anarchists, police, politicians,
and agents provocateurs in London. Victory describes
the unsuccessful attempts of a detached, nihilistic
observer of life to protect himself and his hapless
female companion from the murderous machinations of
a trio of rogues on an isolated island.
Conrad's
view of life is indeed deeply pessimistic. In every
idealism are the seeds of corruption, and the most
honourable men find their unquestioned standards totally
inadequate to defend themselves against the assaults
of evil. It is significant that Conrad repeats again
and again situations in which such men are obliged
to admit emotional kinship with those whom they have
expected only to despise. This well-nigh despairing
vision gains much of its force from the feeling that
Conrad accepted it reluctantly, rather than with morbid
enjoyment.
Conrad's
influence on later novelists has been profound both
because of his masterly technical innovations and
because of the vision of humanity expressed through
them. He is the novelist of man in extreme situations.
"Those who read me," he wrote in his preface
to A Personal Record, "know my conviction
that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few
very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as
old as the hills. It rests, notably, among others,
on the idea of Fidelity." For Conrad fidelity
is the barrier man erects against nothingness, against
corruption, against the evil that is all about him,
insidious, waiting to engulf him, and that in some
sense is within him unacknowledged. But what happens
when fidelity is submerged, the barrier broken down,
and the evil without is acknowledged by the evil within?
At his greatest, that is Conrad's theme.
|
