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CHAPTER # 1
CHAPTER # 1
Joseph
Conrad
A
Biographical Note
Conrad’s Popularity
The popularity
of a great writer during his lifetime does not, as a rule, last after him, but
declines rapidly. At length, it returns, slowly, in a modified form. Such a the phenomenon is evident in the case of Joseph Conrad - the most remarkable, if
not the very greatest, of those great writers who lived and died and were
forgotten in recent times - and the cycle is near completion.
At least, it
would appear so "by all concurrence of signs"; second-hand bookshops are being
ransacked for copies of Conrad's works; his novels are being rendered on
the radio and screen; his the name comes up in the press with increasing frequency.
Conrad’s Birth and Parentage
Joseph Conrad
was born on 3rd December 1857 at Berdicev, in the Polish province of Podolia. His
real name was ‘Teodora Josef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski. Although a
Pole by birth, he was a Russian national. Poland, in those days,
was partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and
Conrad's birthplace was under Russian rule. That rule was oppressive,
and as a consequence of the insurrection of the Poles, it was shortly
to be aggravated into absolute tyranny.
These tragic
circumstances cast the darkest shadow over Conrad's young life, more especially
because of the leader of the insun rection was his own father, Apollo
Nalecz Korzeniowski, a Polish writer and nationalist, action, and
above all, a spirit possessing French authors. In order to make these
authors have better known among his fellow countrymen, he
translated into Polish Shakespeare
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Othello,
and As You Like It), Victor Hugo, Fenimore Cooper, Marryat, and the
poems of De Vigny and Heine; besides he himself being a poet.
His father, for his political activities, was exiled in February 1863.
His mother,
Evelina was a noble personality belonging to the noble family of the Bobrowskis. She
suffered much at the hands of the Russians and ultimately died on the
6th April 1865, at the age of 36. His father died four years later
in 1969, but not without leaving an indelible imprint on the mind of his son.
A Great Reader
One immediate result of this sombre
childhood was that he became a great reader. During his long,
lonely and unoccupied hours he turned to his father's library. At the age of
five, he began reading in Polish and in French,
history, voyages and novels. If his own memory is to be trusted, he had
tackled Hugo, Cervantes, Dickens, Scott and Thackeray by the time
he was ten.
Conrad's longing to become a Sailor
He now came under the guardianship of
Tadeusz Brobowski, an uncle on his mother's side, and after
a year or so at school, expressed a wish to go to sea. When
Tadeusz first heard of his nephew's extraordinary longing to become
a sailor, he was astonished and bewildered. He tried to dissuade him by saying,
"Think well what it all means in the larger issues, my boy."
At the end of
the school term Conrad took a good place in the yearly examination and in consequence,
probably, of the special efforts that he made to attain such a
position, his health broke down, and in the following year, May 1873, he
was sent upon medical advice on a tour through Germany and Switzerland. Mr.
Pulman, Conrad's young tutor, accompanied him; he had already been asked to dissuade
the boy from his crazy design. The tutor argued with him vehemently and just
when he was at the verge of success, a sturdy Englishman, clad in
knickerbockers and short socks, strode past. The effect of this sight on Conrad
was that of a vision: the English man illustrated in realistic guise Conrad's
intuition of the freedom and abounding vigour of the sea. This enabled him to
renew his defence. Quite "suddenly the tutor rose, saying: You are an incorrigible Don Quixote. That is what you
are." The tutor put his hand on the boy's shoulder, remarking: “Well!
That's enough. We will have no more of it."
His Friendship and Love
Conrad had his
way, and one September day in 1874, still not quite seventeen and "like a man in
a dream," he left Vienna for Marseilles. For several months he did
not undertake serious seamanship. Then he made a trip to the West Indies. It
was on this voyage that he met Dominic, who
greatly influenced him in his attitude to sailing and to life. For
eighteen months he and Conrad were inseparable. They supplied
contraband arms to rebel troops in both the West Indies and Spain. Then
Dominic left Conrad, apparently after their betrayal by
Dominic's nephew. Conrad, meantime, had lost his heart to a
wealthy young woman much implicated in the activities of the
Carlist Pretender to the Spanish throne. For a short time, they lived
together in the Maritime Alps, an affair brought to a sudden end by her leaving
him, possibly after he had fought a duel on her behalf. Dona
Rita, as he called her, provided Conrad with an idyll which
greatly influenced his art. son as the affair with her was over,
Conrad embarked on an English steamer bound for Constantinople. It
brought him back from there to Lowest ft.
Becomes a Sailor
After four
unsettled years, including gun-running and attempt - ted suicide, he joined as
a British sailor for several years in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere,
eventually gaining his Master's Certificate in 1886, the year he became a
naturalized British subject.
A number of
Conard's essays record his estimate of the effect him of the Merchant Service. In general,
he was rarely seduced into a romantic attitude towards it. Early in his career
as a sailor, he took a boat to rescue nine Danes stranded in mid-Atlantic, an
experience which enabled him to look "coolly at the life of my choice. Its
illusions were gone, but its fascination remained."
It is not clear
why Conrad gave up his captaincy of a ship plying between Sydney and Mauritius.
It has been suggested that a young lady in that island, refused his offer of
marriage.
In 1890 he went to the Belgian Congo to
command a river steamer, an experience which was crucial in his personal development
and which was to provide much of the substance of The Heart of Darkness (1902).
He himself said that until he visited Africa in 1890, he was "just a mere
animal." After Africa he made only two more voyages, both colourless and
both to Australia, as First Officer on a modern Vessal; and, finally, his
health broke down. He thus found time hanging heavy on his hands, and he also
needed money to support himself. It was here that he began to write.
He began his
literary career with his first novel Almayer's
Folly. In 1894 Conrad completed
Almayer's Folly, on which he
had been working for some years, and it
was published in 1895. He now devoted himself to writing.
Conrad's Married Life
In 1896 Conrad married Jessie George. Conrad's
married life was often highly odd. Jessie George found herself faced with regular
removals; faced, too, with endless debts (for even after he had achieved fame and good money he
squandered his wealth), and with such idiosyncrasies as his
sudden decision to work at his books nowhere save in the bathroom. The full account of all this domestic strangeness can be read in the
two books which Jessie Conrad wrote about him.
Conrad's Literary Career
Marriage and the birth of two
sons-Borys, born, 1898, and
John Alexander, born 1906-necessarily
meant more responsibility, and it became increasingly urgent for Conrad
to make more money by his writing. harder; his books became
longer and more ambitious, and the writing of them ever more laborious. From
1900 to the outbreak of the 1914-18 war, Conrad's life was almost entirely
given over to his writing. And all the time he sought both recognition and
literary excellence.
Conrad pinned
his faith in Nostromo (14), his most complicated and in many ways his most impressive
novel, when it went unacclaimed, he was bitterly disappointed. To the reviewers
Nostromo was no different from the much slighter, earlier works, while Typhoon
was just a short sea-tale, interesting for a few vivid descriptions.
Nevertheless, by
1911 there were clear signs that Conrad's work was making its way into the world.
An essay appeared in French on Conrad's art; an American paid
£30 for the script of An Outcast; in the summer of 1911, Conrad
was granted a yearly pension of £100 on the Civil List for
Services to Literature; and there was a contract for a serial with the New
York Herald. Then in 1913 Chance became a best-seller.
Then came the
Great War. Conrad was invited by the Admiralty at the age of sixty to visit
ports and inspect the work of the R.N.V.R. and found himself in an old sailing
ship hunting submarines in the North Sea. It was the briefest of episodes, He returned
to his writing and in The Arrow of Gold produced quite his worst novel. As the
war drew to a close all his hysteria of the Boer War, when he had held himself
aloof, returned. He "begged to be excused from the public ecstasies of
joy" at the 1917 Russian Revolution, and he watched with gloom and alarm
the post-war fate of his native Poland. He did not believe that either
conciliation with Russian or the universal peace of President Wilson were possible.
He returned in The Rescue characters of his two novels. In the Rover, he once more produced a lighter tale. All these years his
literary fame had been growing. It reached its highest point during his a lifetime in 1923 when manuscripts, the equivalent of which he had been glad
enough in his early days to sell for thirty or
forty pounds realized £4,000 in New York.
He continued writing to the end of his
life, though it is generally agreed that his later work is not his best. He
died suddenly from a heart attack in 1924. It is difficult to picture so varied
a man. Among his characteristics were determination, capacity for hard work,
and loyalty to his friends and principles. On the other hand, unfitted by his
unusual youth and his life as a sailor for domesticity, he was often selfish,
testy and unreasonable.
It does not
matter. For such a man it is the inner life, the questing of the spirit, that
is important. Conrad's vivid imagination, together with his unyielding
pessimism about the social and political future of man, condemned him to fundamental loneliness. Out of it were born his novels.
The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Lord
Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), Typhoon (1903), Nostromo (1904), The
Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes
(19!1), The Secret Sharer (1912), and The Shadow-Line (1917)
represent some of his finest works.