Joseph Conrad

Conrad himself claimed that if in Borneo he had not met a Eurasian named Olmeijer "it is almost certain there would never have been a line of mine in print." And even allowing for hyperbole, the fact remains that soon afterwards Conrad did indeed begin to write about the man he called Kaspar Almayer, carrying the manuscript with him from England to the Congo, Australia, and on to Poland before completing it in 1894. Olmeijer managed a trading post at an upriver port on the Berau where the Vidar made a monthly stop, and Conrad's picture of him in A Personal Record suggests a man of querulous selfimportance. It's a type that appears throughout his fiction, and perhaps, once given the mysteries of talent, we needn't look far to discover why such a man, and such a place, should have started Conrad off. For how, in Watt's words, "had this particular lonely derelict come to be stranded?" To the displaced Polish sailor, a man about to turn thirty and with nothing to show for it, Olmeijer's situation would have raised a "personal question of absorbing interest."

Born on Java, the fictional Almayer has moved down the food chain of colonial society, longing all the while for an Amsterdam he has never seen. And his world seems full of those who have been similarly, if more successfully, washed ashore. Conrad is frequently seen as a novelist of empire, and yet he doesn't often describe the colonial administrators of a writer like Kipling. His concern lies instead with the commercial life that operates around and between the institutions of colonialism itself. So the English smugglers of "Karain" live by avoiding the Dutch customs officers, while in Lord Jim the port officials-the boards of enquiry, the harbormasters-prove effective substitutes for any actual government. Almayer's Folly defines an ad hoc culture in which nobody seems to live where he might belong: the Europeans by definition, but also the Malay pirates, the Arab traders, and the Balinese prince with whom Almayer's daughter will run away. It is a vision Conrad would refine throughout the years of his great achievement; a vision that would lead him to Nostromo, that great novel of a fully globalized society. Yet even such entirely European novels as The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes owe more than they seem to the jerkwater village of Conrad's earliest work, with its picture of human jetsam on an alien coast.

Other points of resemblance between Conrad's first books and their successors are perhaps easier to trace-and not always for the good. An Outcast of the Islands was written later than but set before Almayer's Folly, with whom it shares some characters, and in places its prose also appears to have slipped back into something other than fluency: "When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect." That's the novel's first sentence, one that seems to anticipate the memory of an action it doesn't fully describe. In both pace and vocabulary-"unflinching"-its authorship appears unmistakable, but the sentence isn't Conradian so much as what's been called "Conradese," as though it were a self-parody of the style he hasn't quite yet formed. And one can trace the pentimenti of that ungainliness in some of his greatest lines: "He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull." Less than five years separate An Outcast of the Islands from the opening words of Lord Jim, and what a difference they have made! It is the same voice, but Conrad has replaced the blurred temporality of the one with a kind of quaver produced by his commas, and the nouns themselves have the punch to make one see.