Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), novelist: notes on his health

Joseph Conrad [formerly Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski] (1857-1924), master mariner and author, was born in 1857 at Berdyczów in Ukraine. He was the son of Polish patriots who conspired against Russian rule and were exiled with him to Vologda in Northern Russia when he was only four. His mother Ewa (née Bobrowska) died of tuberculosis in 1865 after which his father Apollo Korzeniowski was allowed to leave Russia for Austrian Poland, where he too died of tuberculosis four years after his wife. The young Conrad was from this time onwards the ward of his mother's brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who took a more pragmatic and less romantic view of the Polish national struggle; the tension between the Korzeniowski and Bobrowski strands in his upbringing and character is something to which Conrad returns in his autobiographical writings.

In 1874, aged 16, Conrad left Poland for Marseille, where he sailed on various ships in different capacities, hinting in later life at gun-running missions. Much about this period in his life is obscure, including a suicide attempt in 1878 when he wounded himself in the chest, possibly as a result of gambling debts. This may have been a factor in his relocation to England later that year; putting himself further out of the reach of the Russian authorities may also have been involved. Over the following 16 years he sailed in various British vessels, rising to Captain in 1886 and taking United Kingdom citizenship in the same year. Incidents from his maritime career occur, in varying degrees of disguise, in his fiction: a journey up the Congo in 1890 was the basis of "Heart of Darkness". Conrad the mariner was a product of the age of sail and as steam power took over shipping he found his skills less in demand. After 1894 he did not return to the sea and turned to fiction instead: his first novel (Almayer's Folly), which was written in his spare time whilst still a master mariner, was published in 1895.

Over the next sixteen years, writing in English - his third language - Conrad produced numerous major novels and short stories; the most important, perhaps, being "The Nigger of the Narcissus" (1897), Lord Jim (1899), "Heart of Darkness" (1899), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), "The Secret Sharer" (1910) and Under Western Eyes (1911). Fractured time-scales, multiple points of view, and the use of narrators (who may or may not be reliable) and free indirect speech involve the reader in a constant struggle to understand the action before him/her, both in the simple sense of synthesising a linear narrative from what may seem a collection of fragments, and the more complex (and, Conrad would probably say, more important) sense of deciding the moral weight to lay upon the events before one. As F.R. Leavis points out in The Great Tradition, Conrad can be seen as following Henry James (whom he knew and admired) in the minute analysis of motive and morality. His technical innovations were often discussed with his friend and sometime collaborator Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), and Ford's own novel The Good Soldier owes much to Conrad formally.

Following the completion of Under Western Eyes Conrad underwent a breakdown and his later works show a decline, although paradoxically he enjoyed greater public acclaim in these years. The initial perception of him, based upon his early works set in the Malay Archipelago, had been as a writer of romances, and in his later years he produced chiefly work that merited this view (going so far as to return to and complete The Rescue, a novel set in the Malay Archipelago that he had abandoned in the 1890s). During these years of declining powers he was acclaimed as never before and was offered (but declined) a knighthood, as well as making a triumphal visit to the United States in 1923. An emotional return to Poland had preceded this in 1914, during which hostilities broke out and the Conrad family found themselves behind enemy lines and took a long journey home via Vienna; in 1919 the son of exiled Polish patriots was able to see Poland reappear on the map of Europe.

Conrad married Jessie Emmeline George (1873-1936), a typist and daughter of Alfred Henry George, bookseller, in 1896; they had two sons, Borys and John, born in 1898 and 1906. Jessie is a rather shadowy figure in some depictions of Conrad's life, a "mere" domestic anchor in a highly literary household, stigmatised by Virginia Woolf as a "lump". It is clear, however, that Conrad was devoted to her and that her emotional stability was a vital counterbalance to his own excitable and neurotic temperament. His last recorded words were to call for her, when in August 1924 he suffered a heart attack and died at his home in Kent. He was buried in Canterbury.

Richard Henry Parnell Curle (1883-1968) was a writer, editor and critic who acted as an assistant to Joseph Conrad during the novelist's later years, and who produced some of the earliest critical and biographical writing on Conrad.

Gérard Jean-Aubry was a writer and translator, who translated Conrad's works into French, wrote an early biography of him, and edited his correspondence.