Joseph Conrad

CONRAD, JOSEPH (1857-1924), English novelist, was born on Dec. 6, 1857, in the Ukraine, of a Polish family of the name of Korzeniowski; his father, a man of letters, became in volved in the Polish insurrection of 1863 and was banished to Vologda, whence he returned to Cracow before his death. In Cra cow, the son, Joseph, passed his boyhood. He learned to speak and write French with fluency as a youth. His first acquaintance with English literature was made through Polish translations of Shakes peare and Dickens ; later on Hugo's Travailleurs de la mer and the novels of Marryat and Fenimore Cooper—particularly Cooper's The Pilot—inspired him with romantic ideas of the sea man's life.

At the age of 17 he found his way to Marseilles, and for two years served in French ships in the Mediterranean and on the South American coast. With hardly a word of English speech at his command, he came to Lowestoft in 1878, qualified as able seaman on a coasting vessel, and in Aug. 1880 sailed as third mate to Sydney in the Clyde-built, Clyde-owned sailing ship "Loch Etive," commanded by a famous clipper captain, William Stuart of Peterhead. Four years later he had become a master in the British merchant service and a British subject, and for a number of years his calling sent him to many parts of the world and through a constant succession of adventures, all contributory to the cosmopolitan spirit and the range of incident in his subse quent stories.

"My first English reading was the Standard newspaper," he wrote to a friend as late as 1911; "and my first acquaintance by the ear with it was in the speech of fishermen, shipwrights and sailors of the East Coast. But in 188o I had mastered the lan guage sufficiently to pass the first examination for officers in the merchant service, including a viva vote of more than two hours. But `mastered' is not the right word ; I should have said `acquired.' I've never opened an English grammar in my life." A Sequence of Novels.—During a period of ill-health (the result of Congo fever), he started his first novel, Almayer's Folly, the writing of which engaged him, with frequent and pro tracted intermissions, from 1889 till 1894. Into its composition went many personal experiences of his own as first officer of a ship in which he had sailed between Singapore, Borneo, Celebes and Sumatra. When published in 1895 it was recognized, by acutely discerning readers, as a portent of something new in English fic tion, the product of a rare temperament and of unusual experi ences, expressed in a fastidious choice of phrase, in a studied cadence whenever that would carry an emotional effect, or best suggest half-lyrical moods evoked by natural scenes or moments of human crisis. His style in general had dignity, clarity and idiomatic vigour, with an elusive quality of charm which few readers probably suspected might be due to the writer being a foreigner, with at least three languages at his command where from to choose and adapt the colours and harmonies of his verbal palette.

This first novel was enough to establish a small though devoted band of permanent Conradians, but neither it, nor its immediate successors—An Outcast of the Islands (1896), The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902) and Typhoon (19o3)—found any large body of the reading public to share the enthusiasm of the critics till many years after. Of The Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad, in the year before he died, declared it was "the story by which as a creative artist I stand or fall; at any rate, no one else could have written it." It and Youth and Typhoon brought out hitherto unexploited aspects of life at sea with amaz ing effect, and gave ocean storms and the trials and endurance of the mariner an epic grandeur. The scene of An Outcast of the Islands and of Lord Jim was laid on the same coasts as Almayer's Folly.

Soon after his emergence as a writer, he gave up the sea, and went to live in Kent. But the public apathy regarding his work, and the stress of pecuniary cares paralysed his pen for a while; ever a slow writer, he began to find a whole day at the desk pro duced no more than a few sentences, and thoroughly disheartened, decided to go to sea again. Fortunately for himself and English letters, his efforts to get a command on a Clyde ship, four years after giving up the sea, failed. A modest Civil List pension was secured for him, and relinquished as soon as the sales of his books made his circumstances easier. Still in the prime of life, he wrought industriously and could yet call up reserves of zest, pas sion, poetic and romantic mood to vivify the recollections of his earlier strange experiences. In the following 25 years he produced a score of volumes of fiction ; complete novels for the most part, others, collections of his short stories; as well as several volumes of his own reminiscent experiences.

Conrad's "first period" is generally classified as ending with Nostromo (1904), a tale of an imaginary state in South America, with its atmosphere created from an old book of South American travels. The Mirror of the Sea which followed, a blend of remi niscence, fable and reflection, may be looked upon as commenta tory on a chapter closed.

The Second Period.

It was, in many respects, a new Conrad who produced in 1907 The Secret Agent, a fantastic tale of the anarchist and criminal underworld, which 15 years later, he dram atised. Chance (1914) first brought him a large public and ade quate financial rewards. Within the Tides (I 915 )--a series of short tales—was followed by Victory (1915) (with the old Celebes and Java background), The Arrow of Gold (1919), The Rescue (192o) and The Rover (1923). For many of Conrad's earliest admirers those novels, though delightful, missed something of his first creative ecstasy, but by them he secured a great vogue for all his works in Britain and America, and on his death he was recognized and honoured on both sides of the Atlantic.

The

historical tale with its scene laid in the peninsula between Toulon and Hyeres—was, in a sense, the residual product of a much greater Mediterranean story he had been brooding on since 19o7, dealing with French intrigue at Napoleon's Elba period. This latter work, begun only in June 1920, was but half or two-thirds done when he died, and it was published in its frag mentary state in 1925, with the title of Suspense.

An Estimate.

Conrad, as has been said, brought to his first essays in English writing at least trilingual knowledge, and al though he never contemplated writing in French, he found in the best French writers inspirational effects of balance, light and shade, a delight in words for their own sake, as well as more subtle psychological results arising from the indulgence of personal mood even at the cost of action, held momentarily in suspense. This French influence was rarely absent from his work, and won derfully enriched it.

He came to the study and practice of English in his maturity, with an instinctive sense of verbal beauty, a respect for good technique, a cultivated mind and high ideals as an artist. In all his books is manifest a scrupulous avoidance of cliché either of thought or phrase, and a philosophy that forbade surrender to ro mantic sentimentalism on the one hand or "realistic" squalor on the other. It was his conviction that only through an unremitting care for the shape and ring of sentences, an approach could be made to plasticity, to colour, and the light of magic suggestiveness could be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the com monplace surface of words worn thin by ages of careless usage. "The sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on the road as his strength will carry him, to be undeterred by f alterings, weariness or reproach, was," he said, "the only justi fication of the worker in prose." There was no deliberate ethical purpose in his books. "I sus pect," he said, "that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular—a spectacle for awe, love, adoration or hate, if you like, but in this view—never for despair. These visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves." For the most renowned Russian nov elists he had neither respect nor admiration, which perhaps is not to be wondered at in a Pole. Though he disliked the appellation of "romantic novelist" and preferred to be known as a "creative artist," he greatly vindicated romance in a period of "realistic" reaction. He died at Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, on Aug. 3, 1924. A volume, Last Essays, was published in 1926.

See Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad (1924) ; A. Symons, Notes on Joseph Conrad: With some unpublished letters (1926) ; G. Jean Aubry, Joseph Conrad, Life and Letters (1927). (N. M.)