Writing career: notable works, themes, and style of Joseph Conrad

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 centre 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. 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, centres, 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.

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“Heart of Darkness,” which follows closely the actual events of Conrad’s Congo journey, tells of the narrator’s fascination 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. 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 (1915) 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.