Conrad, Joseph
(1857-1924)

PERSONAL: Born Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, December 3, 1857, in Berdiczew, Podolia, Russia (now Poland); name legally changed; naturalized British citizen, 1886; died of a heart attack, August 3, 1924, in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England; son of Apollo Nalecz (a poet, writer, and political activist) and Ewa (Bobrowski) Korzeniowski; married Jessie George, March 24, 1896; children: Alfred Borys, John Alexander. Education: Studied at schools in Poland and under tutors in Europe. Religion: Roman Catholic.

CAREER: Joined French Merchant Marine, 1874, sailed to Martinique and to West Indies as apprentice and then steward, 1875; British Merchant Service, 1878-94, traveled to Africa, Australia, India, Indonesia, and the Orient; full-time writer, 1894-1924.

MEMBER: Athenaeum Club.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (novel), Macmillan, 1895, published as Almayer's Folly, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1921, reprinted, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

An Outcast of the Islands (novel), D. Appleton (New York, NY), 1896, reprinted, Transaction Publishers, 1997, revised edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle (novel), Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1897, published as The Nigger of the "Narcissus": A Tale of the Sea, Heinemann (London, England), 1898), published with new preface by Conrad as The Nigger of the "Narcissus": A Tale of the Forecastle, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1914, published as The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Doubleday, Doran (New York, NY), 1938, reprinted Norton (New York, NY), 1979.

Tales of Unrest (stories; includes "The Idiots," "An Outpost of Progress," and "The Lagoon"), Scribner (New York, NY), 1898, reprinted, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1977.

Lord Jim: A Romance (novel), Doubleday, McClure (New York, NY), 1900, published as Lord Jim: A Tale, W. Blackwood (London, England), 1900, published as Lord Jim, introduction by J. Donald Adams, Modern Library (New York, NY), 1931, enlarged edition, F. Watts (New York, NY), 1966, reprinted, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1983.

(With Ford Madox Heuffer) The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (novel), McClure, Phillips (New York, NY), 1901, with introduction by Elaine L. Kleiner, Gregg Press, 1976.

"Youth: A Narrative," and Two Other Stories (contains "Heart of Darkness" [also see below], and "The End of the Tether"), W. Blackwood, 1902, published as Youth and Two Other Stories, McClure, Phillips, 1903, with introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1959, published as "Youth," "Heart of Darkness," and "The End of the Tether," Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1984.

Typhoon, illustrations by Maurice Grieffenhagen, Putnam (New York, NY), 1902, expanded as Typhoon, and Other Stories (includes "To-Morrow" [also see below] and "Falk"), Heinemann (London, England), 1903, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1926.

(With Ford Maddox Ford) Romance (novel), Smith, Elder, 1903, McClure, Phillips (New York, NY), 1904, with afterword by Arthur Mizener, New American Library (New York, NY), 1968.

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (novel), Harper & Brothers (New York, NY), 1904, revised edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1984.

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (novel), Harper & Brothers (New York, NY), 1907, new edition, Viking (New York, NY), 1985.

The Point of Honor: A Military Tale, illustrations by Dan Sayre Broesbeck, McClure (New York, NY), 1908.

"Falk," "Amy Foster," "To-Morrow": Three Stories, McClure, Phillips (New York, NY), 1908.

A Set of Six (stories), Methuen (London, England), 1908, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1915.

Under Western Eyes (novel), Harper & Brothers (New York, NY), 1911, new edition, Viking (New York, NY), 1985.

'Twixt Land and Sea (stories; includes "The Secret Sharer" [also see below], "A Smile of Fortune," and "Freya of the Seven Isles"), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1912, reprinted, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1978.

Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (novel), Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1913, revised edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Victory: An Island Tale (novel), Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1915, reprinted, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.

Within the Tides: Tales (includes "Because of the Dollars" [also see below] and "The Planter of Malata"), Dent (London, England), 1915, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1916, reprinted, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1978.

The Shadow Line: A Confession (novel), Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1917, reprinted, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1985.

The Arrow of Gold: A Story between Two Notes (novel), Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1919, reprinted, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

The Rescue: A Romance of the Shallows (novel), Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1920, reprinted, Norton (New York, NY), 1968.

The Rover (novella), Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1923, reprinted, T. Nelson (Nashville, TN), 1964.

(With Ford Maddox Ford) The Nature of a Crime, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1924.

Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel (unfinished), Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1925.

Tales of Hearsay, preface by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1925.

The Sisters (unfinished), introduction by Ford Maddox Ford, C. Gaige, 1928.

"Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Sharer," introduction by Albert J. Guerard, New American Library (New York, NY), 1950.

"Lord Jim," "Heart of Darkness," "Nostromo," Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

"Heart of Darkness" with "The Congo Diary," Penguin (New York, NY), 1995.

"The Secret Agent" and "Almayer's Folly," Bantam (New York, NY), 1995.

Ross C. Murfin, editor, "Heart of Darkness": Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press (Boston, MA), 1996.

Thomas C. Moser, editor, "Lord Jim": Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Sources, Criticism, Norton (New York, NY), 1996.

Heart of Darkness (includes "The Congo Diary and up-River Book"), centenary edition, Hesperus (New York, NY), 2003.

Stories and novels also in other multi-titled volumes.

PLAYS

One Day More: A Play in One Act (adaptation of Conrad's story "To-Morrow"; first performed June 25, 1905; also see below), Clement Shorter, 1917, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1920).

The Secret Agent: A Drama in Four Acts (adaptation of Conrad's novel; also see below), H. J. Goulden, 1921.

Laughing Anne: A Play (adaptation of Conrad's story "Because of the Dollars"; also see below), Morland Press, 1923.

Laughing Anne [and] One Day More, introduction by John Galsworthy, J. Castle, 1924, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1925.

Three Plays: Laughing Anne, One Day More, [and] The Secret Agent, Methuen (London, England), 1934.

CORRESPONDENCE

Lettres Françaises, introduction and notes by Georges Jean-Aubry, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1920.

Joseph Conrad's Letters to His Wife, Bookman's Journal, 1927.

Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895-1924, edited with introduction and notes by Edward Garnett, Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.

Conrad to a Friend: One Hundred Fifty Selected Letters From Joseph Conrad to Richard Curle, edited with introduction and notes by Richard Curle, Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.

Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska, 1890-1920, translated from the French and edited with introduction and notes by John A. Gee and Paul J. Sturm, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1940.

Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, edited by William Blackburn, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1958.

Conrad's Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends, translated by Halina Carroll, edited by Zdzislaw Najder, Oxford University Press, 1964 (New York, NY).

Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson: The Record of a Friendship, edited by Dale B. J. Randall, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1968.

Joseph Conrad's Letters to Cunninghame Graham, edited by C. T. Watts, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1969.

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Cambridge University Press, Volume I: 1861-1897, 1983, Volume II: 1898-1902, 1988, Volume III: 1903-1907, 1988, Volume IV: 1908-1911, 1990, Volume V: 1912-1916, 1995, Volume VI: 1917-1919, 2003.

OTHER

The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions (autobiographical essays), Harper & Brothers (New York, NY), 1906, reprinted, Marlboro Press, 1988.

A Personal Record (autobiography), Harper & Brothers (New York, NY), 1912, reprinted, Marlboro Press, 1988, published as Some Reminiscences, Eveleigh Nash (London, England), 1912.

Notes on Life and Letters (essays), Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1921, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press, 1972.

Notes on My Books, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1921.

Last Essays (includes "Geography and Some Explorers"), introduction by Richard Curle, Doubleday, Page (New York, NY), 1926, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press, 1970.

Joseph Conrad's Diary of His Journey up the Valley of the Congo in 1890, Strangeways, 1926.

Joseph Conrad's Prefaces to His Works, introduction by Edward Garnett, Dent (London, England), 1937.

Joseph Conrad on Fiction, edited by Walter F. Wright, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1964.

Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, edited by Zdislaw Najder, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1978.

The Mirror of the Sea [and] A Personal Record, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Conrad on Film, edited by Gene M. Moore, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Contributor to books, including Hugh Walpole: Appreciations, Doran (New York, NY), 1923; and Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrief, editor, Marcel Proust: An English Tribute, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1923. Contributor to periodicals, including Oxford and Cambridge Review, London Times, Fortnightly Review, and London Daily Mail.

OMNIBUS VOLUMES

Wisdom and Beauty from Conrad, selected and arranged by M. Harriet M. Capes, Melrose, 1915, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1922, reprinted, Haskell House, 1976.

The Works of Joseph Conrad, twenty-one volumes, Dent (London, England), 1923-1938, enlarged edition, twenty-six volumes, 1946-1955.

The Shorter Tales of Joseph Conrad, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1924, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press, 1970.

The Collected Works of Joseph Conrad, twenty-one volumes, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1925.

The Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad, Hutchinson (London, England), 1933.

The Famous Stories of Joseph Conrad, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1938.

A Conrad Argosy, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1942.

The Portable Conrad, edited with introduction and notes by Morton Dauwen Zabel, Viking (New York, NY), 1947, reprinted, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1976.

Tales of Land and Sea, illustrated by Richard M. Powers, introduction by William McFee, Hanover House, 1953.

Tales of the East and West, edited with introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1958.

Tales of Heroes and History, edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1960.

Tales of the East, edited with introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1961.

Great Short Works of Joseph Conrad, Harper (New York, NY), 1967.

Stories and Tales of Joseph Conrad, Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.

Sea Stories, Granada (London, England), 1984.

The Complete Short Fiction, edited by Samuel Hynes, ECCO Press (New York, NY), Volumes I and II: The Stories, Volume III and IV: The Tales, 1992.

Selected Works, Gramercy Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Stories and novels published in numerous collections; works widely represented in anthologies.

ADAPTATIONS: Lord Jim was released as a movie starring Peter O'Toole, Columbia Pictures, 1965; Conrad's short story "The Secret Sharer" was adapted into a one-act play of the same title by C. R. Wobbe, 1969; Apocalypse Now, starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen, was an adaptation of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," United Artists, 1979. Several stories by Conrad were adapted as the play Tales of Unrest: Joseph Conrad on Stage, produced in New York, NY, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Joseph Conrad was a British novelist and short story writer whose major works appeared between 1895 and 1924. Conrad's work marks a shift from the novel as popular entertainment to the novel as high art, an art as carefully crafted as poetry. His experiments in fictional form and narrative prepared the way for the technical innovations of novelists Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and John Fowles; his characteristic themes of alienation and thwarted heroism and his preoccupation with individuals in remote places had a continuing impact on writers throughout the twentieth century.

Conrad was born in Russian-occupied Poland on December 3, 1857. Although Poland had been a major power in central Europe from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, the country had been partitioned into German, Austrian, and Russian sectors, and, by the time of Conrad's birth, only Warsaw remained under Polish control. The Poles fought partition and occupation, particularly Russian occupation, with patriotic and religious fervor. Conrad's family on both sides had a history of commitment to the cause of a free Poland; his parents, Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, were active in the insurrection of 1863. The Russian authorities sentenced the family to exile in Vologda, Russia, then, after two years, to Chernikhov in the Ukraine. When Conrad was five, his mother died from illness worsened by the privations of their exile. Ewa's death plunged Apollo into depression and illness, despite his having gained permission to return to Warsaw. When he died in May of 1869, he was given a public funeral befitting a hero.

Conrad, then twelve years old, was put in the care of his mother's younger brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a lawyer. Conrad remained under Tadeusz's care until the age of seventeen, when, after two years of importuning his uncle, he was allowed to attend a maritime school in Marseilles. Conrad's four years in Marseilles have received considerable scrutiny because of evidence of his attempted suicide. Conrad himself told his son and friends that he had been shot in the chest during a duel. But Bobrowski, who went to his nephew's rescue, seems plainly to say in a letter to a friend that Conrad had tried to kill himself, as Zdzislaw Najder in Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle and Frederick R. Karl in Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives pointed out. Biographers have speculated that the suicide attempt may have been the result of debts, a foiled love relationship, or disappointed expectations. When Conrad recovered from his injury, he fulfilled his ambition to sail on an English ship, the Mavis, bound for Constantinople.

Conrad spent the next fifteen years on English ships, where he was known among sailors as "Polish Joe." He rose steadily in his profession, passing the required examinations for second mate in 1880, first mate in 1883, and then, on his second try, captain in 1886, the same year he became a naturalized British citizen. In 1890, Conrad accepted a job as commander of a Congo River steamboat owned by a Belgian firm. Once in Africa, he saw extreme examples of imperialistic exploitation, which he described in "Geography and Some Explorers"—included in the collection Last Essays—as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration." When he arrived at the town of Kinshasa after a thirty-six-day overland trek, he found his command had been sunk, but he was given another steamboat and ordered to proceed immediately up the Congo River to rescue Georges Antoine Klein, a valuable company agent who had taken ill. On the return trip the agent died, and Conrad was stalled in Kinshasa, perhaps, as some have theorized, because he did not get on with his superiors. After months fighting fever and dysentery, he returned to Europe, his health wrecked.

During the next five years, Conrad spent less time at sea and committed himself to the life of a writer. In 1894 his guardian, Bobrowski, died. A year later, Conrad published his first novel, Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River, and dedicated it to his uncle. His second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, derived in plot and theme from the first, followed quickly in 1898, a productivity stimulated, perhaps, by Conrad's marriage in 1896 to Jessie George, with whom he had two sons, Borys and John. During his long career as author of English fiction, Conrad wrote three works with Ford Madox Ford, more than a dozen novels, twenty-nine short stories and novellas, two books of essays, two memoirs, and three plays. Conrad died on August 3, 1924. He was buried at the cemetery of St. Thomas Catholic Church in Canterbury, where his tombstone bears a passage from sixteenth-century British poet Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please."

Critics have divided Conrad's canon into three phases. The first phase includes the works from Almayer's Folly through 1903's Typhoon. Based squarely on Conrad's experiences in Eastern seas, the early work earned him a reputation as a teller of sea stories. In the middle phase, from 1904's Nostromo to 1911's Under Western Eyes, autobiographical elements are either vastly transformed or subordinated to political themes. The later work, from Chance in 1913 to the posthumous Suspense in 1925, is less coherent as a body than the early or middle work, and it is usually set apart simply on the basis of its alleged inferiority to Conrad's previous writings.

Much of the fiction in Conrad's early phase arose from his experiences as mate on the trading vessel Vidar, on which he sailed from Singapore on several voyages throughout the Malay Archipelago beginning in 1887. The works based on Conrad's life on the Vidar include his first novel, Almayer's Folly, many short stories, and four other novels: An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim, Victory, and The Rescue. Recognized for its experiments in narrative technique, evocation of place, characterization, and profound exploration of alienation, Almayer's Folly is considered a remarkable first novel.

Almayer's Folly centers on Kaspar Almayer, a Dutch trader at the port of Sambir, holding what had been a very profitable post until Arabs found their way through the thirty miles of the Pantai River channels to the town. Almayer dreams of returning, with his beloved half-caste daughter Nina, to the native land that he has never seen. A third major figure in the tale, Dain Maroola, is a Malay chieftain from Bali, sent out by his father, the Rajah, to secure gunpowder to fight the Dutch. The fourth actor is Tom Lingard, an aging British trader-adventurer. All intensely isolated, these figures are bound together in a "community of hopes and fears." Almayer's hope is riches and escape from the swamps of Sambir (he had married Lingard's adopted Sulu daughter to secure Lingard's fortune). Lingard's hope is to discover a mountain of gold in the Bornean interior, for which project he loses the wealth Almayer had expected. Dain lives to defeat the Dutch and, unknown to Almayer, to carry off his daughter. Lingard disappears into Europe, trying to raise financial backing for his expeditions into the interior. Almayer loses his daughter and all his hopes, which are symbolized by his "folly," a large house he had begun building in better days; he finally turns to opium to forget. Dain and Nina gain one another, but Nina, though in love with Dain, admits to her father before she departs, "No two human beings understand each other. They can understand but their own voices."

In addition to introducing the typical Conradian theme of alienation, Almayer's Folly also displays several techniques that would become characteristic of Conrad's fiction, including experimentation with narrative flashbacks and flashforwards and with the juxtaposition of points of view. The novel's evocation of place is authentic, as are all its minor characters. The work was well received by critics; an anonymous reviewer for Bookman termed it "a remarkable novel where wild nature and strange humanity [are] powerfully portrayed." Conrad's second work, 1896's An Outcast of the Islands, which recounts how the Arabs traveled up the Pantai and ruined Lingard's monopoly, received even better press than Almayer's Folly. Both novels, however, are considered minor works.

After he had finished An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad wrote three short stories—"The Idiots," "The Lagoon," and "An Outpost of Progress"—and then began The Nigger of the "Narcissus," which was first published in 1897 as The Children of the Sea. Whereas the earlier novels and tales are derivative, solidly in a tradition of what Conrad called in the work's preface stories of the "white man in the tropics," The Nigger of the "Narcissus" transcends and transforms the sea tale as told by such nineteenth-century writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Marryat, Richard Henry Dana, and Herman Melville. Conrad combined his intimate understanding of life at sea with his vision of "the truth of life," which he also explains in the novel's preface. "Truth," he wrote, is "what is enduring and essential," yet it is also an "appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments." Both absolute and changing, truth is "the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment"; it is "the feeling of unavoidable solidarity. . . which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world." Thus, in Conrad's view, art is an intimation of solidarity forged despite each person's individual loneliness.

Conrad's notion of loneliness is profoundly expressed in The Nigger of the "Narcissus." Ship and sea bind the ship's crew together physically, but each crew member understands only his own voice. The common seamen of the "Narcissus" are for a time bound all the more by the sad, mysterious figure of the black man, James Wait, who "waits" for death and is so frightened of it that he feigns illness. The men take sides with him against the officers when the captain confines Wait to a cabin as punishment for his shamming. This confinement is actually an act of compassion on the captain's part, for he sees that Wait is truly ill. But the order leads to a mutinous moment when the worst of the crew, a scruffy Cockney named Donkin, hurls a belaying pin at the captain. The crew is rendered incompetent, divided by its fascination with Wait. Thirty hours of a violent storm restore a sense of solidarity on the ship, but only temporarily. When Wait finally dies, the narrator—an unnamed member of the crew—understands that the bond holding the crew together has been as false as Wait's initial pretense.

Another work based on Conrad's life as a sailor, "Heart of Darkness"—first published in serial form in 1899—is the first of three great works produced by Conrad between 1897 and 1902. The novella is a fictional version of Conrad's Congo experience. An indictment of European imperialism, the work takes much of its descriptive material from a diary Conrad kept during his service in the African interior. The story is told by Marlow, who narrates the events of his journey up the Congo to four companions on a boat on London's Thames River. In the employ of the Belgian government, Marlow is charged with finding and relieving Kurtz, one of Belgium's most profitable ivory traders. Through Marlow's narration, Conrad exposes the brutal exploitation and destruction wreaked by the Belgians on the African country and its people and satirizes such bourgeois European ideals as the work ethic, efficiency, faith, home and family, community, progress, self-restraint, and the processes of law. Small incidents in each stage of Marlow's journey dramatize the corruption of these ideals: a French man-of-war firing into the bush like a toy ship at a continent; black workers left to die in a grove; and an accountant who keeps his books "in apple-pie order" despite the groans of a man dying nearby.

Marlow first learns about Kurtz from several other employees at the central trading station. Kurtz is variously praised as "a first-class agent," a "very remarkable person," and "an emissary of pity, science, progress, and devil knows what else." Marlow overhears the manager describing Kurtz as a Christian soldier who preached that "each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade, of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing." Marlow consequently fixes his hopes upon Kurtz's fabled integrity, but instead of a beacon, Marlow finds a dying man driven insane by his own greedy and murderous behavior.

"Heart of Darkness" appeared first in book form with two other complementary tales—"Youth," in which Conrad introduces Marlow, and "The End of the Tether." The author once described the three works as tales of youth, middle age, and old age. Neither of the other two stories is as respected as "Heart of Darkness," but both are powerful. "Youth" is centered on a simple but gripping and funny incident taking place on the ship Judea. "The End of the Tether," in contrast, is the most pessimistic of Conrad's early works, its protagonist an old, blind captain who commits suicide.

Lord Jim, perhaps Conrad's greatest novel and certainly his best known, is also narrated by Marlow. The first four chapters are told by an anonymous narrator who relates the early life and career of the titular figure. After the initial chapters, the narrative presents Marlow watching the proceedings of a maritime Board of Inquiry, which is probing the conduct of the captain and officers of the Patna. Believing the ship to be sinking, the crew had abandoned the ship and left the eight hundred pilgrims on board to drown. Jim is one of the deserters, and Marlow befriends him. Jim, who never admits guilt, appeals deeply to Marlow as the embodiment of hopeful youth. After the court pronounces Jim's guilt, Marlow obtains several jobs for Jim, each one ending when his involvement in the Patna affair is revealed. Finally Marlow seeks the advice of an old trader and explorer, Stein, who gives Jim charge of a remote but prosperous trading post, Patusan.

There Jim rises to a place of honor. The natives call him "Tuan Jim"—Lord Jim. But Jim fails again with the arrival of the renegade, Gentleman Brown. An escaped convict, Brown intends to ravage the village, but he and his men are trapped by the villagers, who have united under Jim's leadership. Brown, however, makes an instinctive and devastating reference to Jim's past, asking him if he agrees that when "it came to saving one's own life in the dark, one didn't care who else went—three, thirty, three hundred people." Jim lets Brown and his men have an open road back to sea, but the white trader whom Jim has supplanted shows Brown how to ambush a contingent of men led by Jim's best friend, Dain Maroola. When his friend is murdered by Brown, Jim presents himself to Dain's father to be shot.

Using chronological juxtapositions, sudden and rapid jumps in time, and incidents placed within incidents, Conrad designed Lord Jim to sustain pervasive ironies and ambiguities. Thus the telling of the tale is just as much the subject of Lord Jim as are heroism, courage, self-understanding, or the impingement of European ideals upon native peoples. The novel's unresolved ambiguities still fascinate readers.

The 1902 novel Typhoon, the last work of Conrad's early period, focuses on the responses of officers to a natural and human crisis. The natural crisis is a typhoon; the human crisis is occasioned by the cargo, a load of coolies returning home with their wages of several years kept in small wooden chests. During the gale, the chests smash and the coolies start a free-for-all. Captain MacWhirr sends in an officer to quell the riot, then devises a way to distribute the cash among the laborers. Typhoon is considered Conrad's best piece of direct, idiomatic prose. In contrast to Lord Jim and "Heart of Darkness," it has a simple, linear narrative structure, each of its five chapters marking off a distinct segment of the tale.

While Conrad's early work typed him as a writer of the sea, the major works of his middle period—Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes—turn resolutely away from the sea to cities and to the development of political themes that had been implicit but secondary in the early work. Among Conrad scholars, the first two of these novels are rated very highly, and the last also has devoted admirers. Because these novels diverged from Conrad's earlier concerns, they elicited criticism from some of his contemporaries. British novelist D. H. Lawrence, for example, thought Under Western Eyes incomprehensible and boring, although he liked Conrad's previous works very much. Nostromo received negatived reviews, except in American newspapers; fourteen years after its publication, Virginia Woolf, in the Times Literary Supplement, called the novel a "rare and magnificent wreck." The judgment would be echoed forty years later by Albert J. Guerard in Conrad the Novelist; for him, Nostromo is "a great but radically defective novel." Not until the 1960s were Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes accorded esteem among Conrad scholars. Among critics in general, The Secret Agent is greatly admired for the ferocity of its plot and the sustained irony of its tone.

Nostromo is a critique of materialism. Set in Sulaco, a town in the imaginary South American country of Costaguana, the novel illustrates the impact of material interests on individuals and communities. The central characters, Charles Gould and Nostromo, are both aliens in a strange land. Gould is the descendant of two generations of Englishmen settled in Costaguana, Nostromo an Italian sailor come ashore to try his luck. Using new technology, Gould reopens the silver mines that had ruined his father, joining forces with the railway and the steamship company to become the dominant force in the political and economic life of Costaguana. Nostromo rises from laborer to foreman of the dock workers of the steamship company. The central event in the tale is a revolution led by a general of native Indian descent. The courage and resolution of Gould and Nostromo defeat the rebels, but both men's values, critics have argued, have become slightly tainted.

A plot summary of Nostromo looks clearer and simpler than it is. It too is rendered subtle by narrative juxtapositions, but those are of less moment than the vivid stories of the novel's secondary characters, who suffer with Gould and Nostromo in Costaguana. Referring to the narrative methods of Nostromo, Guerard claimed that Conrad's techniques are "an important step in that deformalization of the novel which will attract the twentieth century's greatest talents." Yet at the same time, Nostromo seems a nineteenth-century novel, Dickensian in its wealth of character and incident. It looks as much backward to Dickens's Bleak House as forward to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

The Secret Agent is a more austere, ironic fiction. Set in London, the novel uses as its central incident the death of an idiot boy named Stevie. Stevie's brother-in-law, Verloc, is a triple agent—working for the police, for the anarchists, and for an unnamed central European power; he uses the code name Agent Delta. As a cover, Verloc sells cheap stationery and petty pornography; in this way he has lived for several years, happily married to Stevie's sister, Winnie. But his European paymaster suddenly demands real action from him—a bombing—in order to stir up popular resentment against the anarchists and thus abolish the haven England provides for them. Verloc is outraged at this intrusion into his placid, bourgeois existence, but he has no choice. He obtains the bomb and gives it to Stevie to carry. On the way to the target the boy trips over a root and is blown to bits. When Winnie learns how her brother died, she stabs Verloc, runs off with an anarchist, and commits suicide on the crossing to France.

The final work of Conrad's political phase, Under Western Eyes, is set in Russia and Geneva. Protagonist Razumov, a student who is the illegitimate and unacknowledged son of a Russian official, is implicated in an assassination. He turns over one assassin to the authorities and is sent off to Geneva to act as a double agent, since the revolutionaries believe him to have been an accomplice of the real assassin, Victor Haldin. In Geneva, he meets Haldin's sister, falls in love with her, confesses his guilt, and, deafened by a revolutionary who is also a double agent, is run over and maimed for life. The tale's narrator is an English professor of languages who lives in Geneva. His sustained incomprehension of events is interpreted as a study of the differences between the traditions of autocracy and democracy.

Autobiographical information made available in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, particularly the third and fourth volumes, offers important insight into the author's life and state of mind during the early and middle phases of his creative life. The correspondence of Volume III: 1903-1907 covers the significant years in which he produced Typhoon, The Mirror of the Sea, and Tales of Unrest, as well as the novels Nostromo and The Secret Agent in their entirety. Noting the impact of Conrad's chronic financial difficulties on his work, John Halperin wrote in Modern Fiction Studies that Conrad "seemed to thrive, creatively speaking, on his miseries—almost needing them, it would appear, to prick him into life as an artist."

"I'd rather dream a novel than write it," Conrad confessed in a 1907 letter cited by Halperin, "for the dream of the work is always much more lovely than the reality of the thing in print." John Batchelor commented in Review of English Studies on the noticeable disparity between the tenderness of Conrad's fictional characters and the author's actual insensitivity. "In his own relationships with friends in life," Batchelor observed, "the letter-writer can seem manipulative, mendacious, whingeing, disloyal, money-grubbing, and parasitical. The contradiction is resolved, I think, when one reflects that for Conrad, as for other men of genius, human relationships were subordinated to the work, the object of his creative drive."

The contents of Volume IV: 1908-1911 reveal circumstances behind the less-fertile years in which Conrad composed Under Western Eyes, "The Secret Sharer," and Chance. The writer suffered several breakdowns during this period, and both the quantity and quality of his writing began to taper. As Halperin noted, "this is the period sometimes described by Conrad scholars as the beginning of his 'decline'as a writer of fiction." Prone to severe bouts of depression, "In some moods composition, for him, was no less terrifying than death, and regarded with perhaps even greater loathing," explained Halperin. Praising The Collected Letters series as "excellent and indispensable," Batchelor concluded that the publication of Conrad's correspondence "continues to make available a huge body of work which greatly extends our knowledge both of Conrad's life and (a slightly different matter) of his literary identity."

The work of Conrad's third and last period is much less thematically unified than the work of the earlier phases. Marlow appears again in the 1913 novel Chance and tells the tale of Flora DeBarral, daughter of a ruined financier, and her lover, Captain Anthony. 1915's Victory relates the story of another pair of lovers, Axel Heyst and Lena. The first novel ends happily for the lovers; the second, set in the East of Lord Jim, ends with Lena's death from a gun shot and Heyst's suicide. In 1920 Conrad published a novel he had begun in 1897 as a sequel to Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. Originally titled "The Rescuer," The Rescue portrays Lingard's love for a married woman, Edith Travers, a love that destroys his plans to help a native friend regain his land.

All of the work in Conrad's third phase looks, in part, to the past. In 1919 Conrad looked back even farther, to his days in Marseilles, for material for The Arrow of Gold, in which love is found and lost amid intrigue, duels, and gunrunning. Conrad set his last two novels, The Rover and the incomplete Suspense, during the Napoleonic Wars. He had wanted to write an historical novel for many years, a desire that was perhaps an outgrowth of his lifelong preoccupation with the individual's relationship to history. In The Rover, Conrad creates an optimistic tale, with an elderly seaman as its protagonist.

Although the claim is rarely made that any one of these last works is the equal of Lord Jim or Nostromo, critical debate about the intrinsic merits of Chance, Victory, and The Rescue has been intense. Thomas C. Moser's Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline focuses on the debate surrounding the later works. Moser put the issue in uncompromising terms: for him, the work after 1912's "The Secret Sharer" shows "the degeneration of Conrad's prose style." Victory is "utterly inferior" to Nostromo, the critic declared. Moser blamed the falling off on Conrad's turning to "love stories, the intended meanings of which ran counter to the deepest impulses of his being." "Love"—that is, female sexuality—was for Conrad the "uncongenial subject," Moser contended. John Palmer, however, in Joseph Conrad's Fiction: A Study in Literary Growth, argued that Moser and others have ignored or misread the subtle and complex ironies in Chance, Victory, and The Rescue. The later works, in Palmer's view, must be seen as ironic allegories in which Conrad grows both in thought and in technical virtuosity. But there is, nonetheless, a consensus that Conrad's greatest achievements in fiction came between 1897 and 1907, in such works as The Nigger of the "Narcissus," "Heart of Darkness," Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent, in which he experimented with innovative narrative techniques in order to explore the mysterious, elemental passions of human existence.

The publication of The Collected Short Fiction, conscientiously edited and introduced by Samuel Hynes, brings together thirty-one chronologically arranged stories and tales in four volumes, including minor works alongside such masterpieces as "Heart of Darkness." David Grylls wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that, "Together, these volumes demonstrate Conrad's remarkable versatility and range." Referring to the first volume of the series, Wendy Lesser noted in the Yale Review, "What you will find, in his collection of such widely reprinted stories such as 'Youth'and 'An Outpost of Progress'as well as incredible neglected works like 'The Idiots,''The Return,'and 'To-morrow,'is that Conrad was a man of many faces, many hearts."

According to Walter Sullivan, who comments on the collection in Sewanee Review, "Conrad was gloomy by nature and was made more so by the circumstances of his early life—his father's exile and premature death, his own disordered young manhood—and few of his fictions come to happy endings. Reading his novels and his long stories, one encounters the workings of an antagonistic fate, a cosmic scheme devised in irony to bring men and women ultimately to grief. In most of Conrad's novels, you know things are going to end badly, but the characters are so fully developed and the plots are built with such compelling causality that most of us remain unaware that, should it be required, the author's hand is poised to nudge the story further still into bleakness."

Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Monika Brown summarized Conrad's considerable importance as a major literary innovator and leading modernist writer: "Conrad's novels and stories transmute the adventures of his early life and evoke a godless universe rich in ambiguity. In his fiction, aimed at both an immediate and lasting public, modernist experiments coexist with plot devices of popular romance, and unforgettable phrases emerge from vague description. A writer of high artistic ambition who compared himself to Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev, Conrad wrote fiction that challenged readers and critics alike."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES

BOOKS

Bachelor, John, The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1994.

Bender, Todd K., Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë, Garland, 1997.

Billy, Theodore, A Wilderness of Words: Closure and Disclosure in Conrad's Short Fiction, Texas Tech University Press (Lubbock, TX), 1997.

Bloom, Harold, Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Sharer," Chelsea House (New York, NY), 1995.

Cheng, Yuan-Jung, Heralds of the Postmodern: Madness and Fiction in Conrad, Woolf, and Lessing, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1998.

Conrad, Joseph, Almayer's Folly, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1895.

Conrad, Joseph, A Personal Record, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1925.

Conrad, Joseph, Last Essays, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1926.

Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim, Modern Library (New York, NY), 1931.

Conrad, Joseph, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Doubleday (New York, NY), 1938.

Conrad, Joseph, "Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Sharer," New American Library (New York, NY), 1950.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 10, Modern British Dramatists, 1940-1945, Volume 34, British Novelists, 1890-1920: Traditionalists, 1985, Volume 156: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880-1914: The Romantic Tradition, 1995.

Ford, Ford Madox, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1924.

Gillon, Adam, Joseph Conrad, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1982.

Gillon, Adam and Raymond Breibach, Joseph Conrad—Comparative Essays, Texas Tech University Press (Lubbock, TX), 1994.

GoGwilt, Christopher Lloyd, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1995.

Griffith, John W., Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma: "Bewildered Traveller," Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Guerard, Albert J., Conrad the Novelist, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1958.

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1996.

Jackson, Tony E., The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1994.

Jean-Aubry, Georges, Joseph Conrad, Life and Letters, Heinemann (London, England), 1927.

Jordan, Elaine, Joseph Conrad, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Karl, Frederick R., Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1979.

Karl, Frederick R., A Reader's Guide to Joseph Conrad, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1997.

Lockman, J. N., Parallel Captures?: Lord Jim and Lawrence of Arabia, Falcon Books (Whitmore Lake, MI), 1997.

Moore, Gene M., Owen Knowles, and J. H. Stape, editors, Conrad: Intertexts & Appropriations: Essays in Memory of Yves Hervouet, Rodopi (Atlanta, GA), 1997.

Morzinski, Mary, Linguistic Influence of Polish on Joseph Conrad's Style, East European Monographs (Boulder, CO), 1994.

Moser, Thomas C., Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1958.

Moses, Michael Valdez, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Murfin, Ross C., editor, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, University of Alabama Press (University, AL), 1985.

Najder, Zdzislaw, editor, Conrad's Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends, translated by Halina Carroll, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1964.

Najder, Zdzislaw, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, Rutgers University Press (Rutgers, NJ), 1983.

Najder, Zdzislaw, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Navarette, Susan J., The Shape of Fear: Horror and the fin de siècle Culture of Decadence, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1998.

North, Michael, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Palmer, John, Joseph Conrad's Fiction: A Study in Literary Growth, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1968.

Panagopoulos, Nic, The Fiction of Joseph Conrad: The Influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1998.

Pendleton, Robert, Graham Greene's Conradian Masterplot: The Arabesques of Influence, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1996.

Phillips, Gene D., Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1995.

Quick, Jonathan, Modern Fiction and the Art of Subversion, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1998.

Robert, Andrew Michael, editor and author of introduction, Joseph Conrad, Longman (New York, NY), 1998.

Rozenberg, Paul, Joseph Conrad, L'ombre bive, Editions La Bibliotheque (Paris, France), 1997.

Sherry, Norman, Conrad: The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London, England), 1973.

Snyder, Katherine V., Bachelors, Masculinity, and the Novel, 1850-1925, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Stape, J. H., The Cambridge Companion to Conrad, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1978, Volume 6, 1982, Volume 13, 1984, Volume 25, 1988.

Wexler, Joyce Piell, Who Paid for Modernism: Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence, University of Arkansas Press (Fayetteville, AR), 1997.

Wilson, Robert, Joseph Conrad, Sources and Traditions, Weir Press (Rogers, AR), 1995.

PERIODICALS

American Scholar, autumn, 2003, Jamie James, "Rereading: Jim and I," p. 135.

Book, May-June, 2003, Gene M. Moore, "Art of Darkness," p. 22.

Bookman, May, 1896.

Choice, June, 1992, p. 1539.

CLIO, spring, 2003, Stephen Bernstein, "Politics, Modernity, and Domesticity: The Gothicism of Conrad's 'The Secret Agent,'" p. 285.

Conradiana, ongoing.

Explicator, summer, 2003, J. Kerry Grant, "Conrad's Heart of Darkness," p. 213; winter, 2004, Terence Bowers, "Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Dante's Inferno," p. 91.

Journal of Literary Studies, December, 2003, Harry Sewlall, "Deconstructing Empire in Joseph Conrad," p. 331.

Modern Fiction Studies, winter, 1989, p. 786; summer, 1992, p. 507.

Modern Language Review, January, 1990, p. 159.

New York Times Book Review, January 25, 1987.

Review of English Studies, May, 1990, p. 282; November, 1993, p. 606.

Sewanee Review, January, 1994, p. 171.

Studies in the Novel, winter, 2003, p. 490.

Times Literary Supplement, March 15, 1918; August 6, 1993, p. 22.

Washington Post Book World, March 1, 1992.

Yale Review, July, 1992, p. 205.*