Joseph Conrad Biography and List of Works

Polish-born English novelist and short-story writer. Among Conrad's most popular works are LORD JIM (1900) and HEART OF DARKNESS (1902). Conrad discouraged interpretation of his sea novels through evidence from his life, but several of his novels draw the material, events, and personalities from his own experiences in different parts of the world. While making his first voyages to the West Indies, Conrad met the Corsican Dominic Cervoni, who was later model for central figures of romantic daring in his fiction. Conrad often fictionalised the historical moments of liberation of the oppressed, but he focused on the colonists, especially those not already committed to liberation.

"We live, as we dream - alone."
(from Heart of Darkness, 1902)

Conrad was born in Berdichev, in the Ukraine, in a region that had once been a part of Poland but was then under Russian rule. His father Apollo Korzeniowski was a poet and translator of English and French literature. As a boy the young Joseph read Polish and French versions of English novels with his father. When Apollo Korzeniowski became embroiled in political activities, he was sent to exile with his family to Volgoda, northern Russia, in 1861.

By 1869 Conrad's both parents had died of tuberculosis, and he was sent to Switzerland to his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who was to be a continuing influence on his life. Conrad attended schools in Kraków and persuaded his uncle to let him go to the sea. In the mid-1870s he joined the French merchant marine as an apprentice, and made three voyages to the West Indies between 1875 and 1878. After being wounded in a duel or of a self-inflicted gunshot in the chest, Conrad continued his career at the seas for 16 years in the British merchant navy. He rose through the ranks from common seaman to first mate, and by 1886 he obtained his master mariner's certificate, commanding his own ship, Otago. In the same year he was given British citizenship and he changed officially his name to Joseph Conrad.

In the following years Conrad sailed to many parts of the world, including Australia, various ports of the Indian Ocean, Borneo, the Malay states, South America, and the South Pacific Island. In 1890 he sailed in Africa up the Congo River. The journey provided much material for his novel HEART OF DARKNESS (1902). By 1894 Conrad's sea life was over. During the long journeys he had started to write and Conrad decided to devote himself entirely to literature. At the age of 36 Conrad settled down in England.

Although Conrad is known as a novelist, he tried his hand also as a playwright. His first one-act play was not success - the audience rejected it. But after finishing the text he learned the existence of the Censor of the Plays, which inspired his satirical essay about the obscure civil servant. Conrad was an anglophile who regarded Britain as a land which respected individual liberties. As a writer he accepts the verdict of a free and independent public, and associates this official figure of censorship to the atmosphere of the Far East and the 'mustiness of the Middle Ages', but it shouldn't be part of the twentieth-century England.

"... one wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomanic or an utterly unconscious being."
(from 'The Censor of Plays', 1907)

Conrad married in 1896 Jessie George, an Englishwoman, by whom he had two sons. He moved to Ashford, Kent and except trips to France, Italy, Poland, and to the United States in 1923, Conrad lived in his new home country. His first novel, ALMAYER'S FOLLY, appeared in 1895. The story depicted a derelict Dutchman, who traded on the jungle rivers of Borneo. It was followed by AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS (1896), less assured in its use of English. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' was a complex story of a storm off the Cape of Good Hope and of an enigmatic black sailor. Lord Jim, the first of his books narrated by Marlow, reflected the ideal of an English gentleman and a sailor Conrad wanted to be. In YOUTH (1902) the title story recorded his experiences on the sailing-ship Palestine. NOSTROMO (1904) was an imaginative novel which again explored man's vulnerability and corruptibility.

"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind."
(from A Personal Record, 1912)

The period between The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and UNDER WESTERN EYES (1911), a surprisingly Dostoevsky-like novel, is considered artistically Conrad's most productive. These years brought him recognition from such writers as John Galsworthy and Ford Madox Ford, with whom he wrote three works - THE INHERITORS (1901), ROMANCE (1903), and THE NATURE OF CRIME (1924). Although Conrad was prolific, his financial situation wasn't secure until 1913 with the publication of CHANGE.

"The men who could understand his silence were gone - those men who knew how to exist beyond the pale life and within sight of eternity. They had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent those men as whining over every mouthful of their food; as going about their work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery - but knew not fear and had no desire of spite in their hearts."
(from 'The Nigger of the 'Narcissus')

Last years of his life were shadowed by rheumatism. He refused an offer of knighthood in 1924 as he had earlier declined honorary degrees from five universities. Conrad died on August 3, 1924, of a heart attack and was buried in Canterbury. Conrad's influence upon 20th-century literature was wide. F. Scott Fitzgerald too his cue for his Nick-Carraway-Jay Gatsby formula from the Marlow-Kurtz relationship, Ernest Hemingway expressed special admiration for the author, and his impact is seen in among others in the work of Arthur Koestler, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Louis-Ferdiand Céline, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Graham Greene.

Heart of Darkness (1902) was based to a four-month command of a Congo River steamboat. Conrad gave Marlow his boyhood dream about penetrating into the heart of the continent, but he also was knew about Henry Morton Stanley's journey up the Congo river in the mid-1870s. Stanley's revelation of the commercial possibilities of the region had resulted in the setting up of a trading venture. The book was written in 1899 and published in 1902 in YOUTH: A NARRATIVE WITH TWO OTHER STORIES. The narrator Marlow depicts to his friends a journey in Africa, where he becomes curious about a man called Kurtz. Marlow works for a company that is only interested in ivory and he witnesses the suffering of the native workers. He goes on a journey to reach Kurtz, an agent whom Marlow expects by his reputation to be an apostle of Western altruism. He finds a man who has made himself the natives' god and who has decorated the posts of his hut with human skulls. Marlow tries to get Kurtz away down the river, but Kurtz dies: 'He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath - '"The horror! The Horror!" Back in Europe Marlow lies to Kurtz's fiancée, that "the last word he pronounced was - your name."

"All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising."
(Conrad writing about Henry James)

Lord Jim (1900) was originally intended as a short story, but was then enlarged to a novel. The beginning of the story is partly based on true events: in 1880 a British captain and his crew abandoned the steamship Jeddah, carrying Muslim pilgrims, when the ship started to leak. Jeddah was brought by another steamship safely to port. Particular blame was attached to A.P. Williams, the first mate, who had organized the desertion of the vessel. Lord Jim depicts a British naval officer who is haunted by guilt of cowardice, when he left his ship, Patna, in a storm without taking care of the passengers. During the voyage towards Mecca, the ship strikes a submerged object, and when the small crew lowers a lifeboat, Jim impulsively jumps in it. Contrary to the crew's beliefs, the ship did not sunk and Jim is left to stand in front of the Court of Inquiry. After disgrace Jim moves through a variety of jobs ashore and finds work as an agent at the remote trading post of Patusan. He gains the confidence of chief Doramin and becomes a respected figure. When Gentleman Brown and his fellow European adventurers appear, Jim promises Doramin that Brown and his men will leave the island without bloodshed. He is wrong, Doramin's son is killed, and Jim is finally forced to face his past - Jim allows himself to be shot by the grieving Doramin. "...Jim stood stiffened and with bared head in the light of torches, looking him straight in the face, he clung heavily with his left arm round the neck of a bowed youth, and lifting deliberately his right, shot his son's friend through the chest." In the end Jim become an obscure conqueror of fame. His sinking into romantic daydreams originally led to the accident at Patna. During the story Jim leaves behind his innocent, moral blindness, and accepts the reality and its consequences. - (Other sailor/adventurers: Ulysses, Sinbad, Hugo Pratt's comic hero Corto Maltese.) - See also: Aksel Sandemose, Michael Innes.

For further reading: The Sea-Dreamer by G. Jean-Aubry (1957); Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography by J.Baines (1960); The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad by Jerry Allen (1965); Joseph Conrad by Ford Madox Ford (1965); Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives by F.R. Karl (1979); Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle by Z. Najder (1983); Conrad Companion by N.A. Page (1986); Culture and Irony: Studies in Joseph Conrad's Major Novels by A Winner (1988); Joseph Conrad by Jeffrey Meyers (1990); Conrad's Existentialism by O. Bohlmann (1991); Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse by Richard Ambrosini (1991); Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition by Andrea White (1993); Joseph Conrad by M. Seymour-Smith (1995); The Invention of the West. Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire by Christopher Lloyd GoGwilt (1995); Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma by John W. Griffith (1995); The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. by J.H. Stape (1996); One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad by Geoffrey Galt Harpham (1996)

ALMAYER'S FOLLY, (1895)