The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (part two)

I don't like writing super long Multiply entries, so here is part two of my entry on the lives and works of Joseph Conrad. 

The picture above is of Conrad with his wife and younger son.  I think that it fits John Batchelor's bio nicely since this biographer does a better job of putting Conrad in context than Stape did.  Also, I suspect that Stape might have lost patience with Conrad.  Unsurprisingly, this can be an occupational hazard with biographers, and if one shies away from Conrad's work and hones in on his letters, it is easier to lose patience with him.

Since Stape, however, does a better job of writing about Conrad's earlier life (in Poland, France, and the merchant marines), this entry will focus on his later life as a writer. 

I wonder how an ESL teacher or theorist would look at Conrad's work.  After all, he was writing in a language that he did not learn until he was an adult.  (English was his third or fourth language, perhaps even his fifth.  I suspect that living in an area that Russia occupied, he had to know some Russian.)  An ESL teacher or theorist would shed interesting light on Conrad's struggles with writer's block and his collaboration with native writer Ford Madox Ford during the 1900s. 

Also, of course, a large part of Conrad's life in England was his attempt to establish and sustain an identity.  I imagine that this added to his tension.  Early on, Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa criticized him for writing in English even though he had not lived in Poland since he was a teenager.  Later, English natives such as Lady Ottoline Morrell & Bertrand Russell and would-be natives such as Henry James patronized him as an exotic foreigner.  When Conrad and his agent Pinker were quarrelling in 1909 & 1910, the agent struck back at him by claiming that he did not speak or understand English well enough.  Conrad, of course, responded with a stinging retort.  He also changed agents for a time.  Moreover, when Conrad did go to Poland in 1914, as Batchelor notes, his customary depression and anxiety lifted, only to return once he was in England again. 

Here is a quick outline of some of Conrad's work.  Although Heart of Darkness is perhaps his most celebrated and read work, he wrote many other novels, novellas (short novels), and short stories.  In fact, Marlow (the chief narrator in Heart of Darkness) narrates several other of Conrad's works: Youth, Lord Jim, and a later novel, Chance.  Some critics speculate that Marlow may have been Conrad's English-self or the Englishman he would have liked to have been.

In part 1 of this entry, I mentioned Almayer's Folly (1894), Conrad's first novel.  It is set in Borneo, quickly establishing Conrad's identity as an author who set his stories in exotic places.  At this point, Conrad had been a British citizen for 14 years, but he had spent most of this time at sea in the merchant marine.

Here is a picture from Borneo, a place known for its rainforests and wildlife.

As with Marlow, Conrad would continue to revisit one character from Almayer's Folly, Lingard, in "An Outcast of the Islands" (1895) and The Rescue (published 1920 but begun in the mid-1890s). 

Both Batchelor and Stape discuss Conrad's habit of beginning novels only to drop them and begin a short story that would ultimately become a novel or novella.  Heart of Darkness (1902) began this way, as a short story called "An Outpost of Progress."  Similarly, his novel Lord Jim (1900) began as "Jim: A Sketch."  However, as I have mentioned above, Conrad struggled with writer's block, and moving from project to project seemed to be his best way of dealing with it...even though this strategy was annoying to his agent and his publishers.

Below is a picture of the cover of Lord Jim, a novel about a young man who attempts to redeem himself after he jumps ship.  Batchelor compares the novel's protagonist, Jim, to Hamlet.

 

  Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) are Conrad's most overtly political novels.  The first is set in South America; the other two are set in England and Europe.  In each of these novels, Conrad views political radicalism and intrigue with extreme skepticism. 

 

With Chance (1914), Conrad had his first popular success.  This novel, like several of his earlier works, is set at sea, and it concerns a captain's attempt to ship explosives safely.  (The story that became Chance was titled "Explosives.")  However, unlike his earlier works, Chance includes a love story between an Englishman and an Englishwoman that ends happily.  Prior to this, women did appear in Conrad's work, but as you may notice from "Heart of Darkness," they are often vehicles for the author's social criticism or, as with Winnie Verloc of the Secret Agent or Emilia Gould in Nostromo, voices for this criticism.  In Victory (1915), Conrad's next novel and another success, he places a love story between Heyst, the son of a cynical philosopher, and Lena, a prostitute, at the center of his work; however, she is killed, in part because her relationship with Heyst probably could not exist outside their island.

Conrad continued to write during and after World War I.  His works received much acclaim and respect, perhaps more than their share.  He also tried his hand at adapting several of his works for the stage.  Probably his most successful adaptation was of his late novel Victory, which "ran for eighty-two performances" in 1919.  In 1923, he traveled to the United States.  When he died in 1924, Conrad was working on a novel set during the Napoleonic era in the early 1800s.