Joseph Conrad Biography

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Biography
by Anthony Domestico

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), a Polish expatriate born Józef Teodor Konrad

Korzeniowski, worked as a sailor on French and British ships before
becoming a naturalized British subject in 1886. He developed an elaborate,
beautiful English prose style and probed many of the deep questions of
modern fiction in his short stories and novels. His work was by turns
adventurous and darkly pessimistic, interested in the traditional virtues of
steadfastness and courage while also concerned with the epistemological
lacunae that define modern existence and perception. One of the most
noted practitioners of literary impressionism, Conrad offered a fictional
rendering of subjective response that had a profound impact on writers like
Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf. He wrote that the primary task of the
novelist was "to make you see."

Born on December 3, 1857 in the city of Berdychiv in Russian-controlled

Ukraine, Conrad was orphaned at the age of eleven; his father had been
imprisoned by the Russians for his nationalist political activities, and both
parents eventually succumbed to tuberculosis. In 1874, Conrad journeyed
to Marseilles, where he found work on a series of French vessels over the
next four years. In 1878, Conrad attempted suicide; he later joined a British
ship that first brought him to Constantinople and then to London for the first
time. He would serve in the British merchant navy for the next 16 years. At
the age of 21, he began learning to speak English, the language that he
would so brilliantly use in his writing. (He had been reading English since a
young age).

Conrad's service at sea took him to many foreign ports and cities, including
Australia, the Malay states, and the Belgian Congo. Around 1890, Conrad
began fictionalizing his seafaring experiences. An admirer of Gustave
Flaubert, he became friendly with Henry James, H.G. Wells, Ford Madox
Ford, and other major writers of the early modernist period. In 1895, he
published Almayer’s Folly, a novel set on the coast of Borneo; shortly
thereafter, he wrote and published The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897),
Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), Nostromo (1904), and others. It was not
until the commercial success of his 1914 novel Chance, however, that
Conrad began to reap real material benefits from his writings.

In Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and other stories, Conrad used a fictional
sailor and narrator, Marlow, as a framing device. This technique mediated
and complicated stories of imperialist adventure into labyrinthine
meditations upon truth and falsehood. The figure of Marlow helped Conrad
foreground issues of narrative unreliability and the complicated relation
between subjectivity and epistemology.

The work produced from 1911 until Conrad’s death in 1925, although still
well received, has been considered weaker than Conrad’s earlier
masterpieces such as Nostromo and Heart of Darkness. In this period,
Conrad wrote less of adventures in foreign lands and more of domestic
issues, less of life in the liminal spaces of the ocean and more of firmly
grounded civilization. His later years, however, were not without their
triumphs; in particular, The Shadow-Line is a complex contemplation of
supernaturalism and the inevitable and painful growth into maturity.

In recent years, Conrad’s work has been at times attacked for its
racism (most notably by Chinua Achebe) and at times lauded for its
portrayal of imperialism and colonialism. He remains one of the most
complex figures of modernism, capable of spinning entertaining yarns of life
at sea that turn out to explore unexpected philosophical depths. He
bequeathed to modernism the sense that life must have an ultimate
meaning, but one that can never be made fully explicit. As Marlow asks in
Lord Jim, "Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all
our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?"