Joseph Conrad

Conrad's readers cannot be passive ones. In an early essay on Henry James he compares the act of writing "to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind," and he speaks of it in similarly heroic terms in the preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus, "defining the writer as one who seizes "in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life." His sense of his own achievement is inseparable from his sense of difficulty, as though the struggle into narrative might provide in itself a kind of victory. Reading him requires that we too undertake the "rescue work" that the creation of meaning entails. It requires, among other things, that we both fight with and parse out his imagery; that we reconstruct the sequence of a novel's action and grapple with the significance, at once proleptic and delayed, that his very violation of chronology has produced. And if we can do that, his fiction will yield a most peculiar reward. For no matter how dark his world and how miserable the fates of his characters, his books are almost never depressing. Instead we read them with an exhilarating sense of difficulties faced and met, held by the drama of the writing itself, as if we have submitted ourselves to the destructive element, and kept our heads up.

II

Conrad's years at sea took him to many parts of the world. From Marseilles the young man sailed for the Caribbean, and in 1878 his first British vessel, the Mavis, took him to Istanbul. Over the next dozen years he would serve on as many ships, making voyages from London to Australia and from Bombay to Dunkirk; sailing out of Bangkok and Calcutta, Amsterdam and Port Adelaide. Ships were not always easy to find, however, and Conrad spent long months on shore, an anonymous life in lodgings broken by at least one spell of work in a portside warehouse. He became a British citizen in 1886, the same year he received his master's certificate, but his spells of unemployment grew longer as his qualifications increased. That is one reason why in 1890 this blue water sailor sought out a very different kind of job and found himself aboard a riverboat in the Belgian Congo.

That experience led to "Heart of Darkness," the work for which Conrad is today best known. But the part of the globe with which he's most fully identified remains that which he calls "the East," and in particular the Malay Archipelago, a region that for Conrad included Siam, Singapore, and the great islands of what was then the Dutch East Indies. Both his first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), and its successor, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), were set along the Berau River in eastern Borneo, a site that he visited in 1887 as the mate of a coasting steamer, the Vidar. Those voyages also contributed to Conrad's picture of Patusan in Lord Jim, and much of his shorter fiction seems inseparable from his experience of that region, from the hidden rivers of "The Lagoon" (1897) and the waterfront rivalries of "Falk" (1903), to those haunted tales of first command, "The Secret Sharer" and The Shadow-Line (1917). What's surprising, then, is how little time he actually passed in those islands: something under a year, and only four months with the Vidar. He spent more time in Australia, a place that has left almost no trace in his fiction at all.