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Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad


THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Joseph Conrad didn't set out to become one of the great English novelists. He didn't set out to be a novelist at all, but a sailor, and besides, he wasn't English. English was his third language and he didn't begin learning it until after he was 20 years old!

He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in an area of Poland that was part of Russia and is now part of the Soviet Union. The Poles were fighting for independence from Russia, and both parents were fiercely engaged in the struggle. Conrad's father was arrested in 1861 for revolutionary activity, and the family was exiled to the remote Russian city of Vologda. On the journey there, four-year- old Conrad caught pneumonia. He remained a sickly child, and he suffered from ill health for the rest of his life.

Conditions in Vologda were grueling. They were too much for Conrad's mother, and although the family was eventually allowed to move to a milder climate, she died of tuberculosis when Conrad was only seven years old. His father's spirit was broken, and so was his health. The Czarist government finally let him return with Conrad to the Polish city of Cracow, but he died there after a year, when Conrad was eleven.

For the next several years Conrad was raised by his maternal grandmother. A stern but devoted uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, saw to his education. Bobrowski had a lot to put up with. Conrad wasn't much of a student. (Surprisingly, he didn't show any particular talent for languages; even his Polish could have stood improvement.) What was worse, at the age of 14 the boy got the unheard-of notion- unheard-of in land- locked Poland, that is- that he wanted to become a sailor. Bobrowski packed him off for Europe with a tutor who was supposed to talk sense into him, but the tutor ended up pronouncing Conrad "hopeless" and giving up the struggle. In 1874, at the age of 16, Conrad traveled to Marseilles to learn the seaman's trade.

During his four years in the French merchant marine, Conrad sailed to the West Indies and possibly along the coast of Venezuela, and he had an adventure smuggling guns into Spain. He participated fully in the cultural life of Marseilles, and a little too fully in the social life. He got himself into a spectacular mess. Deeply in debt, he invited a creditor to tea one evening and shot himself while the man was on his way over. His uncle received an urgent telegram: "Conrad wounded, send money- come." He did, and he was relieved to find young Conrad in good shape (except for his finances)- handsome, robust, well mannered and, above all, an excellent sailor. The author would later claim, rather romantically, that he got a scar on his left breast fighting a duel.

Since the young man couldn't serve on another French ship without becoming a French citizen, which would have entailed the possibility of being drafted, he signed on at the age of 20 to an English steamer. The year was 1878. For the next 16 years he sailed under the flag of Britain, becoming a British subject in 1886. Life in the merchant marine took him to ports in Asia and the South Pacific, where he gathered material for the novels he still- amazingly- didn't know he was going to write. His depressive and irritable disposition didn't make sea life any easier for him. He quarreled with at least three of his captains, and he continued to suffer from periods of poor health and paralyzing depression.

 

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