This Day in Literary History (Joseph Conrad Lands in England)

June 18, 1878—Just months from involvement with gunrunning for Spanish rebels, steep gambling debts, and a suicide attempt, 20-year-old Polish sailor Jozef Teodor Konrad Naiecz Korzeniowski stepped off a British freighter at the seaport of Lowestoft, knowing only six words of English. By the time of his death 46 years later, Joseph Conrad had produced a host of novels and short stories, many sea-related, that led him to be hailed not only as a shrewd psychologist of the human heart but also as one of the great masters of English prose.

Those of Irish descent, such as myself, know that often the greatest practitioners of the King’s tongue hail from the fringes of the English world—outcasts not so enthralled by the language that they can’t make it rise up, sing and dance to their delight and those of readers.

Still, Conrad’s is a remarkable case. The great propulsive element in his character was imagination. You cannot live in a landlocked mass like Poland, then run off to sea, without this quality. You cannot learn a notoriously difficult language in adulthood—not only well enough to motivate and command men, or even to write in your adopted language, but to do so at the highest levels in both capacities—without this quality, either.

One of my college American Literature professors once related to our class how, after reading Melville’s Moby Dick, he had been seized by such a strong desire to sail the seas that he promptly went down to register for the local merchant marine station. “Oh, you romantic college boys!” sighed the recruiter, rolling his eyes before chasing away the future English professor and Ivy League dean.

Surely something of the same impact must have registered on young Korzeniowski when he read English translations of such novelists as Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Thackeray, and Capt. Frederick Marryat. (The last of these in particular must have fired his imagination.) A youngster with the kind of background Jozef possessed needed as much distracting as possible—he already knew too much about loss.

The Russian arrest of his father, an aristocratic poet-translator who did nothing to hide his Polish patriotism, proved catastrophic for the family. Count Apollo Korzeniowski was arrested for his activities, then exiled along with his wife in Siberia. With both parents dead by the time he was 12, Jozef was taken in by his uncle.

Joseph Conrad’s fiction reverberate with guilt, the promises of life, the lashings of fate, loneliness, and physical and spiritual displacement, themes given their greatest resonance in the most elemental of environments—the sea. At age 17, desperate to avoid conscription by the Russian authorities who had crushed his country and his family, the young man journeyed, with his uncle’s blessing, from Poland to France, where he joined that country’s merchant marine.

The next four years were a blur for the young man, concluding with an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. (The wild nature of that attempt –shooting himself through the shoulder, just missing the vital organs—was so bizarre and clumsy that biographers have divided since then on whether he really was despondent over losing his money or whether this represented a crazed scheme to escape the clutches of creditors.)

In any case, Conrad’s decision to leave the French merchant marine for the British merchant navy conveniently relieved him of the possibility of being drafted into the Czar’s army. Eight years later, he would become a British citizen and earn his Master’s certificate as a seaman.

Conrad’s life on the seas was nearly as dramatic as any of his fictional tales, such as Heart of Darkness, The Nigger of the Narcissus, The Secret Agent, or my favorite, Lord Jim. Consider what befell him in his 19 years at sea:

* A back injury on the Highland Forest;
* being burned out on The Palestine when the cargo caught fire in the South China Sea and sank; * a trip on the Congo River in which he endured the wreck of his ship, fever, and dysentery, before being shipped home with a profound (and understandable!) nervous condition.


While recuperating, Conrad (he had so renamed himself by this point) turned to a manuscript on which he had worked for years. This time, he was able to complete Almayer’s Folly. Having tired of the day-to-day lifestyle of the sailor, he was happy to take up the literary life.

Though not, as it happened, thrilled with the stresses of it. The need to feed his wife and two sons—and, beginning in 1904, the need to provide medical care for his wife, now a permanent invalid—left him chronically broke and desperate.

Even the approval of friends such as John Galsworthy, Stephen Crane, H.G. Wells, and Henry James only went so far to relieve his anxiety. “It appears to me that I will never write anything worse reading,” he wrote at his lowest. After 18 years and 15 novels, he finally achieved success in 1913 with the bestselling Chance.

For prose writers like myself, F. Scott Fitzgerald set the bar high for crafting shimmering sentences that induce open-mouthed admiration, envy and joy; Ernest Hemingway provided an example of relentless self-discipline; but Conrad became an exemplar of courage—someone who, despite terrifying depths unknown and sights unseen, still casts off to chart the landscape of experience.

So, how did this native Pole come to stand on the pinnacle of English letters at his life’s end? The answer might lie in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, in which he observes: “The light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words; of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.”