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Joseph Conrad
Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski
(1857-1924)
Polish-born English novelist and short-story writer, a dreamer, adventurer, and
gentleman. In his famous preface to THE NIGGER OF THE 'NARCISSUS' (1897) Conrad
crystallized his often quoted goal as a writer: "My task which I am trying to
achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you fell
- it is, above all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is everything."
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 drew 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 his characters filled with a thirst for
adventure.
"We live, as we dream - alone." (from Heart of Darkness)
Joseph 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 an aristocrat without lands, a poet and translator of English
and French literature. The family estates had been sequestrated in 1839
following an anti-Russian rebellion. 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. On his death in 1894 Tadeusz left about £1,600 to his
nephew - well over £100,000 now. 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. During his youth Conrad also was involved in arms
smuggling for the Carlist cause in Spain.
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 had been deeply in debt, but his uncle discharged his debts. This was a
turning point in his life. Conrad 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. Witnessing the forces of the sea,
Conrad developed a deterministic view of the world, which he expressed in a
letter in 1897: "What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of
nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom
under the conditions of this earth is very well - but soon as you know of your
slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife . the tragedy begins."
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. However, the fabled East Indies
particularly attracted Conrad and it became the setting of many of his stories.
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 accepted the verdict of a free and independent public, but
associated this official figure of censorship to the atmosphere of the Far East
and the 'mustiness of the Middle Ages', which 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 megalomaniac 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 was narrated by Charlie Marlow and told about
the fall of an young sailor and his redemption. "You have fallen terribly, my
boy, fallen, perhaps, through your own self-confident dreams. Get up and try
again. No skulking, no evasion! Live this thing down, humbly and hopefully, in
the light of day."
Lord Jim was originally intended as a short story, but was then enlarged into 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 had hit 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 day-dreams 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.)
Heart of Darkness was based to a four-month command of a Congo River steamboat,
but in the novel the experience become analogous with a quest for inner truths -
like in Henry Rider Haggard's novel She (1887). 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. Also the account
of Commander R.H. Bacon, who travelled in Benin, described horrors: "...
everywhere death, barbarity and blood, and smells that it hardly seems right for
human beings to smell and yet live!"
The narrator, Marlow - who perhaps is not so reliable - 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 a "universal genius," an "emissary
of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else." As they near the
inner station of the company, they are attacked, and Marlow's helmsman is
killed. At the station they meet a Russian who idolizes Kurtz. Marlow 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 the seriously ill 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." -The book inspired Orson Welles but his film
project for RKO never materialized. Kurtz fascinated Welles - a genius destroyed
by inner conflicts, greatness gone wrong. During his career as a director and
actor, Welles would play this kind of Faustian character repeatedly, starting
from Citizen Kane, who also dies with a mysterious phrase on his lips. - In a
television performance from 1958 Boris Karloff was seen as Kurtz and Roddy
McDowall as Marlow. - Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) was based on
the novella, Michael Herr's Dispatches, and John Milius' 1969 script. Nicolas
Roeg's adaptation from 1993 followed Conrad's work closely. - "In Apocalypse
Now, the "horror" is symbolically repressed (killed), while in Heart of Darkness
it is brought into the light, as horrible as it might be to do so. The film,
then, accepts as a premise our capacity for evil, and goes ahead to show how the
colonialist psychosis of Kurtz, and by extension Western culture, translates
into a social nightmare." (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbets and James M.
Welsh, 1999)
In Youth (1902) the title story recorded Conrad's experiences on the
sailing-ship Palestine. NOSTROMO (1904) was an imaginative novel which again
explored man's vulnerability and corruptibility. It includes one of Conrad's
most suggestive symbols, the silver mine. In the story the Italian Nostromo
('our man') is destroyed for his appetite for adventure and glory but with his
death the secret of the silver is lost forever. The English director David Lean
planned to film the book, and he started to work with the screenplay with
Christopher Hampton in the early 1986. Steven Spielberg agreed to produce the
movie for Warner Bros. "I thought Conrad was a very good match for David's
temperament," Hampton later said, "because he was very positive about
individuals, but very pessimistic about the human race in general." Lean died in
1991 and the project was not realized.
"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or
credulities of mankind." (from A Personal Record, 1912) - "All creative art is
magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar
and surprising." (Conrad writing about Henry James)
The period between The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and UNDER WESTERN EYES (1911)
is considered artistically Conrad's most productive. H.G. Wells encouraged
Conrad and gave him good reviews and his work was also recognized by John
Galsworthy. With Ford Madox Ford 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 CHANCE.
Heart of the Darkness was partly based on Conrad's journey up the Congo River
some 12 years earlier. He learned about atrocities made by Congo "explorers",
and created in the character of Kurtz the embodiment of European imperialism.
However, in 1977 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe described Conrad as "a
bloody racist".
"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 of a heart attack on August 3, 1924 and was buried in
Canterbury. Conrad's influence upon 20th-century literature was wide. Ernest
Hemingway expressed special admiration for the author, and his impact is seen in
among others in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Koestler, T.S. Eliot,
Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Louis-Ferdiand Céline, Jean-Paul Sartre, and
Graham Greene.Several of Conrad's stories have been filmed. The most famous
adaptations are Alfred Hitchcock's The Sabotage (1936), based on THE SECRET
AGENT (1097), Richard Brooks's Lord Jim (1964) and Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now (1979), based on Heart of Darkness. Conrad sold the American
screen rights to his fiction in 1919. Next year he composed a screenplay
entitled The Strange Man, based on the short story 'Gaspar Ruiz'. He did not
like to work for the film business, and did not know about screenwritings. The
studio rejected his script.
His despair at the idea of
human progress was shared by many at the turn of the nineteenth century who saw
the world in Darwinist, Schopenhauerian or materialist terms (see Hardy’s Jude
the Obscure as a notable example). This despair is eloquently expressed
throughout his novels, and notably in his letter to
R B Cunninghame Graham
of December 20th 1897 and in which he sees life
as “a machine . . . [that] evolved itself . . . out of a chaos of scraps of iron
and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled.
I feel it ought to embroider, – but it goes on knitting . . . . It knits us in
and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption,
despair and all the illusions, – and nothing matters. I’ll admit however that to
look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing.”
Selected works:
ALMAYER'S FOLLY, 1895
AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS, 1896 - film 1951, dir. by Carol Reed, starring Trevor
Howard, Ralph Richardson, Kerima, Robert Morley
THE NIGGER OF THE "NARCISSUS", 1897
TALES OF UNREST, 1898
LORD JIM: A TALE, 1900 - Lordi Jim - film 1924, dir. by Victor Fleming; film
1964, written and dir. by Richard Brooks, starring Peter O'Toole, James Mason,
Eli Wallach, Jack Hawkins, Paul Lucas, Daliah Lavi, Curt Jurgens, Akim Tamiroff
THE INHERITORS, 1901 (with Ford Madox Ford)
YOUTH AND OTHER STORIES, 1902
HEART OF DARKNESS, 1902 - Apocalypse Now (1979), dir. by Francis Ford Coppola,
starring Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Marlon Brando. Loosely
based on Conrad's story. Screenplay by John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola.
Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), an expanded version of Coppola's war epic. 196
minutes. - "But the film that captured the essence of the war more effectively
than movies better grounded in historical reality is now definitely too long. A
narrative thread that was almost too thin in the original is stretched to
breaking point." (Jonathan Foreman in The New York Post, August 3, 2001) -
Hearts of Darkness (1991), a documentary on the making of Coppola's film - Heart
of Darkness, 1993, dir. by Nicolas Roeg, starring Tim Roth and John Malkovich.
ROMANCE, 1903 (with Ford Madox Ford) - film 1927, dir. by John R. Robertson
TYPHOON AND OTHER STORIES, 1903
NOSTROMO, 1904
THE MIRROR OF THE SEA, 1906
THE SECRET AGENT: A SIMPLE TALE, 1907 - Sabotage (1936), dir. by Alfred
Hitchcock, starring Sylvia Sydney, Oscar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder,
Joyce Barbour. The Secret Agent (1996), dir. by Christopher Hampton, starring
Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette, Gérard Depardieu, Jim Broadbent, Robin Williams.
- "I have seen two film on two consecutive nights. The first (in both sense),
according to the director himself, was "inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel The
Secret Agent." Even without his statement, however, I must admit that I would
have stumbled upon the connection he reveals, but never that respiratory and
divine verb inspire. Skillful photography, clumsy filmmaking - these are my
indifferent opinions "inspired" by Hitchcock's latest film." (Jorge Luis Borges
in Total Library, 1999)
A SET OF SIX, 1908
THE SECRET SHARER, 1910
UNDER WESTERN EYES, 1911
TWIXT LAND AND SEA, 1912
SOME REMINISCENCES, 1912
CHANCE, 1913
VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE, 1915 - film 1919, dir. by Maurice Tourneur; Dangerous
Paradise (1930), dir. by William Wellman; film 1940, dir. by John Cromwell,
starring Fredric March, Betty Field, Cedric Hardwicke
WITHIN THE TIDES, 1915
THE SHADOW-LINE, 1917
THE ARROW OF GOLD, 1919
PRINCE ROMAN, 1920
THE WARRIOR'S SOUL, 1920
THE RESCUE, 1920 - film 1929, dir. by Herbert Brenon
NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS, 1921
THE BLACK MATE, 1922
THE ROVER, 1923
THE NATURE OF A CRIME, 1924 (with Ford Madox Ford)
LAUGHING ANNE AND ONE DAY MORE, 1924
SUSPENSE, 1925
TALES OF HEARSAY, 1925
LAST ESSAYS, 1926
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOSEPH CONRAD, 1927 (2 vols.)
THE SISTERS, 1928 (unfinished)
CONGO DIARY AND OTHER UNCOLLECTED PIECES, 1978
THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF JOSEPH CONRAD, 1983-96 (5 vols.)
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