Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist who today is most famous for Heart of Darkness, his fictionalized account of Colonial Africa.
Conrad left his native Poland in his middle teens to avoid conscription into the Russian Army. He joined the French Merchant Marine and briefly employed himself as a wartime gunrunner. He then began to work aboard British ships, learning English from his shipmates. He was made a Master Mariner, and served more than sixteen years before an event inspired him to try his hand at writing.
He was hired to take a steamship into Africa, and according to Conrad, the experience of seeing firsthand the horrors of colonial rule left him a changed man.
He has been lauded as one of the most powerful, insightful, and disturbing novelists in the English canon despite coming to English later in life, which allowed him to combine it with the sensibilities of French, Russian, and Polish literature.
Joseph Conrad – born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian-occupied Poland in 1857 – was a bit of a gambler in his youth. In 1878, up to his ears in gambling debts, the young Conrad attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest. The bullet missed his heart, and he lived for the next 46 years, long enough to become one of the most important writers of his generation, with novels such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Victory, and The Secret Agent earning him the respect of critics and fellow writers (of which more below).
Between 1878 and 1894, Conrad served in the British merchant navy. In 1884, he took a monkey as a pet, but when he later returned to England, Conrad found he was unable to keep the pet in the conrad1boarding-house where he was lodging. So – after an incident in which the monkey tore up some important papers – Conrad sold it. Jeffrey Meyers writes about this in his biography of Conrad.
The marine transport vessel in the sequel to Alien – James Cameron’s 1986 film Aliens – is named Sulaco, after a fictional place in Conrad’s Nostromo. Nostromo is a challenging novel because of its unconventional chronological structure, but is widely regarded now as one of Conrad’s masterpieces. Set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, it follows, among others, the idealistic Charles Gould as he tries to turn around the fortunes of the silver mine he has inherited from his father.
By this stage, Conrad’s talent for literary innovation had largely dried up, with his last few works – including the Napoleonic novel The Rover, published in 1922 – falling back on more tried and tested conventions of adventure fiction. But after his death he would be hailed as a pioneer of modernist technique. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a fan: the author of The Great Gatsby once danced on the lawn of publishers Doubleday to attract Conrad, but unfortunately Conrad didn’t notice him and the caretaker did – Fitzgerald was promptly removed.
0
0
