Joseph Conrad
Berdychiv, Ukraine, 1857 - 1924, Bishopsbourne, England
Conrad, Joseph [formerly Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski] (1857–1924), master mariner and author, was born on 3 December 1857 at Berdyczów in Ukraine.
Early years
Conrad was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski (1820–1869); named on Conrad's marriage certificate as ‘Joseph Theodore Apollonius Korzeniowski’, writer and patriot, and his wife, Ewelina (or Ewa, née Bobrowska; 1832–1865) : members of the Polish szlachta, a fusion of gentry and nobility. Na??cz was the heraldic name of the Korzeniowski coat of arms. In a series of partitions (1772, 1793, and 1795) Poland had been annexed by Prussia and Austria–Hungary to the west and by Russia to the east, so that, by the time of Conrad's birth, the country had virtually disappeared from the map of Europe. His father and mother, dedicated Polish patriots, conspired against the oppressive Russian authorities. Apollo, who advocated the liberation of the serfs as well as national independence, was arrested; and in 1862 he and his wife were sentenced to exile in the remote Russian province of Vologda; their four-year-old son accompanied them. Ewa died of tuberculosis within three years. Apollo, who himself was suffering from this disease, died after four years as a widower; and his funeral, on 26 May 1869, became a huge patriotic demonstration: the Poles had not forgotten the ruthless suppression of the 1863 uprising. Conrad's uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, an astute landowner, became the orphan's guardian, and sustained him morally and financially for many years. To this Polish upbringing may be traced Conrad's later preoccupation with the themes of isolation, embattled honour, and political disillusionment.
Maritime career
Conrad's education, of which the record remains incomplete, was irregular. His father had given him lessons; he apparently attended a preparatory school in Kraków and (briefly) a Gymnasium in Lwów (Lemberg); and private tuition was provided by Izydor Kopernicki and Adam Pulman. He certainly loved literature of travel and exploration, and this encouraged him to dream of becoming a seaman.
In 1874 the sixteen-year-old Conrad left Poland for Marseilles in France. There, for several years, he gained maritime experience, sailing the Atlantic as a passenger in the Mont-Blanc and as a steward in another barque, the Saint-Antoine. He later intimated that during this period he participated in a gun-running expedition for Colombian conservatives, and he also claimed to have smuggled arms in the two-masted Tremolino to Spanish legitimists. In 1878 Conrad attempted suicide with a pistol, wounding himself in the chest, for he was in debt after gambling at Monte Carlo. A related factor may have been the recognition that, as a Russian subject, he could legally serve on French vessels only with the permission of the Russian consul; and, since he was liable for imperial military service, such permission was unlikely to be granted. Subsequently in that year, therefore, he travelled to England and entered the British mercantile marine. Initially employed humbly on a coasting vessel, the Skimmer of the Sea, he next found a berth on the wool clipper Duke of Sutherland, which plied between London and Sydney. During the following sixteen years, making numerous voyages on ships ranging from elegant three-masters to rusty steamers, he rose in rank: third mate, second mate, master. In 1886 he not only gained his master's certificate but also took British nationality. His voyages and the landfalls (in Bombay, Singapore, Celebes, Borneo, Mauritius, and other locations) were often to be commemorated in his eventual works, which pay tribute to maritime heroism in an era when deaths at sea were an everyday occurrence. He was shipwrecked when the decrepit barque Palestine caught fire and sank near Sumatra, an event to be romantically recalled in the tale ‘Youth’; and his experiences as captain of the sailing ship Otago, plying between Bangkok, Melbourne, and Mauritius, provided bases for ‘The Secret Sharer’, ‘A Smile of Fortune’, and The Shadow-Line. A depressing African journey into the Congo Free State in 1890, when he travelled overland and in a paddle-steamer, would be recollected and powerfully transformed in his masterpiece ‘Heart of Darkness’. (Having witnessed colonialist corruption, he later aided Roger Casement and E. D. Morel in their international campaign against the cruelty of the Belgian regime to Africans.) Increasingly, as steam superseded sail and as vessels became larger and more efficient, Conrad encountered difficulty in finding employment commensurate with his qualifications, and his maritime career petered out in 1894. Subsequent attempts to return to sea proved unavailing. A large bequest from Tadeusz Bobrowski, however, facilitated his change of career.
Literary career until 1900
In his spare time Conrad had been working on his first novel, Almayer's Folly. On the advice of W. H. Chesson and Edward Garnett, this was accepted by the publisher T. Fisher Unwin and published in 1895. Reviews were numerous, often lengthy; and, though they were mixed, praise predominated. The Spectator, noting the atmospheric power of this work set in Borneo, prophesied that Conrad might become ‘the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago’ (19 Oct 1895, p. 530). Before that first publication, Conrad had begun An Outcast of the Islands, which appeared in 1896; again, the reviews included sufficient high praise to confirm him in the choice of the literary career. He had established a strong identity as a writer of exotic, adventurous fiction who brought to the material a sophisticated, ironic, sceptically reflective mind, acute political awareness, and distinctive stylistic virtuosity. His recurrent themes were human isolation, beleaguered solidarity, the vanity of romantic aspirations, the myopia of racial prejudice, and the recognition that loyalty to one principle may entail treachery to another.
Then came several false starts. Conrad began The Sisters, of which only the opening was ever finished, and The Rescuer (later The Rescue), a novel which proved so difficult that he took more than twenty years to complete it. In 1896–7 he published in magazines the highly uneven quartet of tales (‘Karain’, ‘The Lagoon’, ‘The Idiots’, and the satiric masterpiece ‘An Outpost of Progress’) which, with the cumbrously analytic story ‘The Return’, comprises the volume Tales of Unrest (issued in 1898).
On 24 March 1896 Conrad married Jessie Emmeline George (1873–1936), a typist, daughter of Alfred Henry George, bookseller. Their two sons, Borys and John, were born in 1898 and 1906, during the period when Conrad was the tenant of Pent Farm, near Hythe in Kent. Jessie proved to be resourcefully supportive to her highly strung and temperamental husband, although her subsequent memoirs gave telling glimpses of his sometimes neurotic, irascible, and demanding conduct. Conrad's friends and acquaintances during the first decade of his literary career included Edward Garnett (the most perceptive and persuasively enthusiastic of his reviewers), Edward Sanderson, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy, and Ford Madox Hueffer (who changed his surname to Ford in 1919). A particularly sustaining friendship was with R. B. Cunninghame Graham, the aristocratic socialist and adventurer. William Blackwood, the proprietor of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, proved to be a crucially generous publisher.
Garnett describes thus the Conrad of this time:
My memory is of seeing a dark-haired man, short but extremely graceful in his nervous gestures, with brilliant eyes, now narrowed and penetrating, now soft and warm, with a manner alert yet caressing, whose speech was ingratiating, guarded, and brusque turn by turn. I had never seen before a man so masculinely keen yet so femininely sensitive. (Garnett, vii)
The major phase
Conrad's major phase as a writer extends from 1897 to 1911. It includes The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (serialized and published as a book in 1897), ‘Youth’ (serial, 1898), Lord Jim (serial, 1898–9; book, 1899), ‘Heart of Darkness’ (serialized 1899), Youth (a volume containing ‘Youth’, ‘Heart of Darkness’, and ‘The End of the Tether’, 1902), Typhoon (serial and book, 1902), Nostromo (serial and book, 1904), The Secret Agent (serial and book, 1907), ‘The Secret Sharer’ (serial, 1910), and Under Western Eyes (serial and book, 1911). This is a period of astonishing range and richness. With Under Western Eyes he even dared to challenge (and arguably surpassed) Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. ‘Heart of Darkness’ or Nostromo alone would have sufficed to earn Conrad an enduring reputation; but this immense sequence of works (so richly descriptive and morally complex) confirms his stature as one of the greatest fiction-writers—and probably the greatest political novelist—in English.
Although Conrad's prose was occasionally marred by grammatical or idiomatic lapses (particularly into inadvertent Gallicisms), generally his command of styles ranging from the colloquial to the lyrical was audaciously effective. A colourful passage of rhythmic, assonantal and alliterative ‘prose poetry’ that became renowned (and would be parodied by E. M. Forster) was the description of the burning ship in ‘Youth’:
Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. (‘Heart of Darkness’ and other Tales, 124–5)
More to the taste of comparatively recent readers were the sardonic anti-imperialistic descriptions in ‘Heart of Darkness’; for example:
Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign drooped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. (ibid., 151–2)
Conrad learned to combine sharp realism with calculated ambiguity and thematic orchestration. His mastery of perspectives enabled him to present a suffering individual now as the vital centre of the universe and now as of no more value than a drop of water in the ocean. Repeatedly the tensions in his own nature found expression in renderings of a close interaction between a central character and a subversive figure, as in the relationships between Marlow and Jim, Marlow and Kurtz, the captain and Leggatt, or Razumov and Haldin. He relished the ‘psychopolitical’, portraying events which were simultaneously psychological and political, illustrated by the derangement of Kurtz or the subtle corruption of Gould. Traditional values suffered trial by ordeal, and sometimes failed their tests. If his originality delighted such connoisseurs as Wells (for a while), Garnett, Cunninghame Graham, and Arnold Bennett, it sometimes baffled other early readers and reviewers. Nevertheless, Conrad was fortunate in the timing of his literary career.
The fact that so many of Conrad's works were serialized is a reminder that, in various respects, this was a golden age for story-tellers. The expansion of education in Victorian England had created a vast literate public; and numerous periodicals, many of them publishing or reviewing fiction, came into existence to meet the needs of this enlarged readership. Technological advances made books cheaper to produce; commercial advertising and publicity became widespread; and international copyright agreements (notably the Chace Act of 1891) guaranteed payment for works published abroad. Frequently, Conrad was paid several times for a single item. (Even the complex and technically challenging novel Nostromo first appeared in a popular magazine, T. P.'s Weekly.) Yet, although Conrad's reputation steadily burgeoned, so did his debts. His chronic prodigality was aided by loans from friends (notably John Galsworthy and William Rothenstein); donations came from the Royal Literary Fund (£300 in 1902, £200 in 1908) and from the Royal Bounty Special Service Fund (£500 in 1904); and in 1910 he was awarded a civil-list pension of £100 per annum. Above all, James Brand Pinker, his literary agent from 1900, advanced huge sums in the hope that the author would one day be financially prosperous. By 1909 Conrad's debts totalled £2250, at a time when the average annual earnings of a doctor were about £400. Not surprisingly, his letters are often jeremiads: he complains about his physical ailments (notably gout), his mental state (he was long afflicted by depression), and the daily struggle to wring from his imagination works of integrity while the debts mount. ‘I had to work like a coalminer in his pit quarrying all my English sentences out of a black night’, he told Garnett (Collected Letters, 4.112). The completion of Under Western Eyes was marked by a breakdown in which for days he lay in bed conversing with the imaginary characters.
To accelerate the flow of marketable writing, Conrad had collaborated with Ford Madox Hueffer on some inferior works: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and ‘The Nature of a Crime’ (first published in Hueffer's English Review in 1909). This collaborator and amanuensis was also paid for his contribution to Conrad's largely autobiographical The Mirror of the Sea (variously serialized; book, 1906), although only Conrad's name appeared on the title-page. The relationship between the two writers deteriorated and became recriminatory in 1909. Eventually Ford, who gained renown with The Good Soldier, would commemorate the collaboration in lively but unreliable volumes of reminiscence.
Remarkable non-fictional work of this period includes Conrad's letters to Cunninghame Graham, a sequence in which he expresses, often with fine rhetorical panache, his most pessimistic views of human nature and the human situation. For instance, in a letter of 1898, he declares:
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 ... Life knows us not and we do not know life—we don't even know our own thoughts. (Collected Letters, 2.16–17)
A letter to the New York Times, published in 1901, has a quotably contrasting emphasis: ‘The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous—so full of hope’ (ibid., 2.348–9). An important essay is ‘Autocracy and war’ (first published in two periodicals in July 1905, later included in Notes on Life and Letters). Here Conrad predicts not only the First World War (as an outcome of aggressive Prussian militarism) but also the Russian Revolution, which, he says, will result only in a new tyranny that will endure for many years. He expresses, furthermore, a bleak recognition that democracy is dominated by commercialism. ‘And democracy’, he declares, ‘which has elected to pin its faith to the supremacy of material interests, will have to fight their battles to the bitter end’ (Notes, 107).
Transition: 1911–1919
The period from 1911 to 1919 was in two senses a period of transition for Conrad. First, while some of its novels and tales are impressive, others indicate a marked decline in his powers. Second, sales of his work increased sufficiently to end his struggles with debt and ensure his prosperity.
In order, the main publications of this phase of Conrad's artistic life are: A Personal Record (1912, originally Some Reminiscences), by far the more interesting of his two books of autobiographical reflections; 'Twixt Land and Sea (1912, three previously published tales, including ‘The Secret Sharer’); Chance (serialized in the New York Herald in 1912 and published as a book early in 1914); Victory (serial and book, 1915); Within the Tides (1915, four of his more trivial previously published tales); and The Shadow-Line (serial, 1916–17; book, 1917).
The short stories in the collections are remarkably uneven in quality, ranging from ‘The Secret Sharer’, a vivid and enigmatic tale which has elicited a wealth of interpretation, to ‘The Inn of the Two Witches’, a trite piece reminiscent of Wilkie Collins's ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’. Of the novels, numerous critics concur in regarding The Shadow-Line as one of Conrad's best: echoing Coleridge's ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, this is a subtly allegoric depiction of the stresses on a young captain whose first command is a disease-ridden and apparently accursed sailing-ship. Victory is much more problematic for the critics, some seeing it as one of the Conradian masterpieces, others seeing it as a flawed and embarrassingly melodramatic work. It employs a remarkable range of source materials: notably the Bible, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Milton's Comus, Schopenhauer's bleak doctrines, A. R. Wallace's Malay Archipelago, Anatole France's Le lys rouge, Villiers de l'Isle Adam's Axël, H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, Stefan ?eromski's Dzieje grzechu, and particularly The Ebb-Tide by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. Conrad had always been resourceful in assimilating heterogeneous materials; but, in this case, arguably, the materials do not effectively cohere, and the paradoxical themes lack persuasive embodiment.
In this transitional phase, the publication which most deeply affected Conrad's fortunes was Chance. Aided by a substantial publicity campaign for the serial in the New York Herald (which insisted that Conrad was now writing with women in mind) and by zealous marketing by Alfred Knopf in the USA, this novel sold well: surprisingly so, in view of its technical intricacy, which caused even Henry James to complain of the excessive elaboration. One explanation of Chance's success is that the feminist debate was then highly topical. During this novel, though Marlow makes various misogynistic comments, modes of male chauvinism are sardonically depicted, and centrality is given to a young woman's struggles through oppression to maturity. (Incidentally, in 1910 Conrad had signed an open letter to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, advocating female suffrage.)
In January 1914 Chance was published in book form; within two years there were numerous reprints. In the same month Lord Jim was reissued in a large popular edition: 15,000 copies at a shilling each. Soon, almost all of Conrad's earlier works were being reprinted. Pinker was able to obtain advances for Victory of £1000 for the serial rights (in Munsey's Magazine) and £850 for the book. Even a short, occasional essay, ‘Tradition’ (a tribute to British merchant seamen in time of war), earned £250 in 1918 when published in Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail. Since 1912 John Quinn, a manuscript collector based in New York, had been purchasing Conrad's manuscripts on a regular basis: an astute investment. T. J. Wise, a diligent bibliographer and alleged forger, was another eager purchaser. Hollywood film producers recognized that within the stylistic and thematic subtleties of the novels lay popular cinematic materials: dramas of violence and sexual intrigue set in exotic locations. In 1919 motion picture rights to four Conrad works would be bought for over £3000 (at a time when an attractive four-bedroom house in London might cost £1000). At last Conrad was amply wealthy, and his debts to the ever-generous Pinker were cleared.
Decline
In the closing years of Conrad's life, as collected editions were issued by Doubleday in New York, by Heinemann, Gresham, and Dent in London, and by Grant in Edinburgh, Conrad's main publications were: The Arrow of Gold (serial, 1918–20; book, 1919); The Rescue (serial, 1919–20; book, 1920); Notes on Life and Letters (1921, a collection of essays and occasional pieces); and The Rover (serial and book, 1923). Posthumously published volumes were Suspense (unfinished, but both serialized and issued as a book in 1925); Tales of Hearsay (an uneven collection, 1925); and Last Essays (1926). All four novels of this late phase are disappointing. The Rover is relatively concise, but in the others the narrative too often meanders, romantic values are too largely endorsed, and there is too little of the salt of scepticism. Understandably, the author's energies were flagging. As ‘modernism’ emerged strongly in the works of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence, so Conrad, who had once been boldly innovative, was now regressing. While his writing lost its bite, however, public adulation increased. In 1919 Conrad had moved into Oswalds, a large and elegant Georgian house at Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury. On a visit to the United States, where he lectured and gave a reading in 1923, he was lionized: ‘To be aimed at by forty cameras held by forty men that look as if they came out of the slums is a nerve-shattering experience’, he wrote to his wife (Najder, Joseph Conrad, 475–6). Later, he courteously declined a knighthood offered by Britain's first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. His health deteriorated, and on 3 August 1924 he died of a heart attack at his home.
After a service in Canterbury at the Roman Catholic church, St Thomas's, Conrad was buried in the public cemetery on Westgate Court Avenue. The gravestone bears the words which he had chosen as the epigraph for The Rover:
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
These are the words uttered in Spenser's Faerie Queene by ‘a man of hell, that cals himself Despaire’. Though Conrad was buried with Catholic obsequies, the inscription is a reminder of the radical scepticism which gives so much power to his writings; and, furthermore, by providing a reminder of Peyrol in The Rover, who lives and dies by his work as a seaman, the words appropriately recall the dual career of Conrad, the seaman turned writer, who was still toiling at his creative writing in the season of his death.
Subsequent reputation
Although Conrad's literary reputation seemed to flag in the 1930s, after the Second World War interest in his work surged. The praise given by F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948) heralded a diversity of academic studies, critical, biographical, and scholarly, while numerous paperback editions extended his popular readership. The formerly widespread notion that Conrad was primarily a nostalgic writer of the age of sail (a notion based largely on The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, ‘Youth’, and The Mirror of the Sea) was superseded by recognition of his moral sophistication and of his proleptic power: repeatedly, it appeared, he had anticipated subsequent psychological, political, and philosophical findings. Critics found Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, and ‘absurdist’ features; the texts seemed to solicit and reward a diversity of critical approaches. Appropriately, given the international topics of his novels, his fame grew internationally. By the 1990s, for example, he was served by the Joseph Conrad societies of the United States, the UK, France, Italy, Scandinavia, and Poland; intensive scholarly work (accelerated by electronic communications) proceeded in locations as diverse as Lubbock (Texas), Amsterdam, Cape Town, and Tokyo; and his writings had been translated into more than forty languages, from Albanian and Korean to Swahili and Yiddish. While his texts were studied in schools and universities, film adaptations had brought his works to audiences of millions. Gene M. Moore (in Conrad on Film, 1997) listed eighty-six versions on film, television, and video. Of these, the most spectacular was Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), a lavishly free adaptation of ‘Heart of Darkness’ to the Vietnam War. The same novella was adapted several times for the theatre. Operas inspired by Conrad's texts have been composed by Tadeusz Baird, John Joubert, Richard Rodney Bennett, and Romuald Twardowski.
Conrad's cultural influence can be detected in the works of numerous eminent figures. Bronis?aw Malinowski declared: ‘Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad’ (Firth, 6); indeed, he almost became the Kurtz of anthropology when, working among the Papuans, he ominously echoed Kurtz's ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ (This became ‘Exterminate the brutes!’ in Malinowski's Diary, 69.) Bertrand Russell, whose friendship with Joseph Conrad was so intense that he gave the name Conrad to his elder and younger sons, recorded in his Portraits from Memory the recognition that the novelist had proved politically wiser than the philosopher. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which originally took its epigraph from ‘Heart of Darkness’, contains some Conradian themes and details, while ‘The Hollow Men’ takes its title, its epigraph, and its subject from that African tale. Graham Greene regretted that some of his early work, particularly Rumour at Nightfall, had been deleteriously influenced by The Arrow of Gold; but Greene's greatest debt is probably to The Secret Agent, for ‘Greeneland’ (that seedy, corrupt terrain) has clear affinities with the murky, debased city of Conrad's novel; and indubitably The Secret Agent has contributed many features to It's a Battlefield. Probably Conrad's peripatetic life helped to shape Greene's. When Greene voyaged up a Congo tributary to research A Burnt-Out Case, ‘Heart of Darkness’ was in his hand.
Conrad's range is indicated by the diversity of other writers influenced by him: among them Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, Jorge Luis Borges, John le Carré, Siegfried Lenz, William Golding, V. S. Naipaul, George Steiner, Howard Brenton, and Gabriel García Márquez. Thomas Mann and André Gide paid him handsome tribute. L'étranger, by Albert Camus, offered a reprise of the central paradox of Lord Jim, the contrast between the subjective view and the judicial view of a scandalous action; and Camus remarked that Clamence in La chute was ‘a less brilliant Lord Jim’ (New York Times Book Review, 24 Feb 1957, 36). In the United States, numerous major writers, including Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and even William S. Burroughs, admired and learned from his writings. Another American admirer was Orson Welles, who planned films of ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Lord Jim, and twice adapted ‘Heart of Darkness’ for radio. His cinematic masterpiece, Citizen Kane, has various Conradian affinities. ‘I think I'm made for Conrad’, he declared; ‘I think every Conrad story is a movie’ (Welles and Bogdanovich, 320). Among African writers (though Chinua Achebe vehemently denounced Conrad as a racist), the acclaimed novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o based his vivid novel, A Grain of Wheat, largely on the plot and themes of Under Western Eyes; and Conradian elements have been traced in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. In the late twentieth century, Conrad was criticized by various feminists, Marxists, and post-colonial writers; and the ensuing controversies naturally tended to enliven and increase his readership. While cultural changes seemed to reveal some ideological flaws in his works, his moral intensity exposed by contrast posterity's capacity for decadence and ideological hypocrisy. Zdzis?aw Najder wrote in 1997: ‘Conrad identified problems and perils which are still with us today. We need him’ (Conrad in Perspective, 187).
Conrad was a versatile intermediary between the Romantic and Victorian traditions and the innovations of modernism. He was romantic in his interest in adventurous individuals and in his keenly sensuous responsiveness to the beauty, power, and immensity of the natural environment. He was Victorian in his registration of the burdens of thought in an era when science offered bleak vistas; Victorian, too, in his recognition of the magnitude of imperial enterprises, and in his high valuation of an ethic of work and duty. Poland had nourished his concern with the claims of honour and of fidelity to causes which might seem lost, while his favoured French authors (Flaubert, Maupassant, Anatole France) had strengthened his habits of sceptical and ironic analysis. His sense of individualism sometimes modulated towards a modernistic relativism or even, occasionally, solipsism; and modernistic, too, were his sense of the absurdity of moral beings in a non-moral universe, his profound scepticism about the value of industrial society and its acquisitive imperialisms, and his belief that many people were myopic participants in destructive processes. Frequently, his works enact the difficulties of maintaining a humane morality when that morality lacks supernatural or environmental support. The passage of time, while predictably revealing various limitations, has largely vindicated his technical audacity and his political pessimism. ‘Heart of Darkness’, which offered a forewarning of the Hitlerian demagogue, seems virtually inexhaustible in its recessive ambiguities and paradoxes. Nostromo, in its epic scale and panoramic scope, has proved to be an audaciously penetrating study of economic imperialism. Its view of history, Albert Guerard once remarked, is ‘skeptical and disillusioned, which for us today must mean true’ (Guerard, 177). Technically, Conrad was resourceful in applying such devices as the time-shift, delayed decoding, covert plotting, symbolic imagery, transtextual narratives, and the unreliable intermediary narrator; he submitted dramatic and sometimes even melodramatic topics to sophisticated reflective scrutiny. The effect of the technical devices was usually to multiply ironies and, broadly, to accentuate possible divisions between appearance and reality.
Conrad found that when he adapted The Secret Agent for the stage, removing the narrative flesh to expose the underlying plot, what emerged was a rather grisly skeleton; similarly, many of the film adaptations of his texts have tended to make prominent the melodramatic incidents while silencing the voices of eloquent and sophisticated narrators. Lord Jim, after all, is significant less by virtue of his own character than by the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of the comments that he provokes from other characters and particularly from Marlow; while the technique of delayed decoding (which depicts an effect while delaying or withholding its cause) involves us intimately with Jim's fate. In ‘Heart of Darkness’, Kurtz's last words (‘The horror! the horror!’) have their strange ambiguity amplified by Marlow's commentary, so that they seem to sum up, without resolving, major paradoxes of the tale. Perhaps ‘the horror’ is Kurtz's own corruption; perhaps it is death; perhaps it is the irrational universe; but no interpretation is certain. In Nostromo, the suicide of Martin Decoud is described with resonant power. When he shoots himself, he sinks into the Placid Gulf, ‘whose glittering surface remained untroubled by the fall of his body’; and the death of this sceptic bears critical reflections which themselves are memorably sceptical: ‘In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which w
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Ledbury, England, 1878 - 1967, near Abingdon, England
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Schleinitz, present day Unterkaka, 1816 - 1895, Leipzig
