Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad

In 1888 Conrad received his first command, as captain of the Otago, a small ship sailing out of Bangkok. It was grueling journey: three weeks to Singapore owing to lack of wind, and the whole crew riddled with fever; from there to Melbourne, Australia, where he decided to resign the command and return to England. The maddening calms of the voyage, and his uncomfortable position as a stranger on his first command, provided the inspiration 21 years later for the outlines of "The Secret Sharer."

Back in England, Captain Korzeniowski (as he was still known) wasn't able to find another command, and so through the influence of relatives in Brussels he secured an appointment as captain of a steamship on the Congo River: At the age of 9, he had put his finger on the blank space in the middle of a map of Africa and boasted, "when I grow up I shall go there"; at 32, he was fulfilling a lifelong dream. But the dream quickly turned into a nightmare. "Everything is repellent to me here," he wrote from the Congo, "Men and things, but especially men." The "scramble for loot" disgusted him; the maltreatment of the black Africans sickened him; and as if that weren't enough, he suffered from fever and dysentery that left his health broken for the rest of his life. Though his experiences in Africa were to form the basis of his most famous tale, Heart of Darkness, he returned to England traumatized. His outlook, already gloomy, became even blacker.

Though Captain Korzeniowski didn't know it, his sea career was drawing to a close. In 1889 he had started a novel based on his experiences in the East. He worked on it in Africa and on his return, and in 1895 it was published as Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad. (Years of hearing the British garble "Korzeniowski" convinced him to put something they could pronounce on the title page.) It was, like most of his books over the next two decades, a critical but not a popular success. Writing was an agony for Conrad: he was painfully slow at it, though the necessity of getting paid made him work faster than he liked. As a result of hurry, he never felt satisfied with the finished product. (Of the masterful Heart of Darkness he wrote at the time, "it is terribly bad in places and falls short of my intention as a whole.") Marriage and the birth of two sons made his financial strain even more desperate. Periods of intense productivity (such as the mere two months in which he completed Heart of Darkness) alternated with periods of despair in which nothing got written, as well as with his recurrent bouts of nervous exhaustion and gout. A description Conrad gave of his father could have described himself: "A man of great sensibilities; of exalted and dreamy temperament; with a terrible gift of irony and of gloomy disposition."

Although Conrad's income from writing remained small, his reputation steadily grew. He could count among his friends and admirers such famous names as Ford Madox Ford, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and his idol, Henry James. Financial security eventually came: in 1910 he was awarded a small pension; an American collector began purchasing his manuscripts; and his novel Chance, serialized in 1912 and published in book form two years later on both sides of the Atlantic, became his first bestseller.

Conrad died in 1924 at the age of 66. He had attained international renown, but even then he was popularly regarded mainly as a teller of colorful adventures and sea stories. But his experiments in style and technique exerted a major influence on the development of the modern novel. Since his death, the profundity- and darkness- of his vision have become widely recognized.

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