An Outcast of the Islands

By Paul Gray

JOSEPH CONRAD: THE THREE LIVES by Frederick R. Karl Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 1008 pages; $25

Like all major artists, Joseph Conrad was a cartographer of the imagination. He imposed color and boundaries on an unclaimed mindscape; when he was finished, certain images and sensations became forever Conradian. Unlike his sedentary fellow writers, though, Conrad roamed widely in fact as well as fancy. His career as a young seaman took him to exotic places, and the cargo of perceptions he brought home sustained him as an aging author. His travels outward were then mirrored by his journey inward. Once, Conrad had chugged laboriously up the Congo River to reach the heart of darkness; later he realized that this destination could be reached much more rapidly. All that was needed was introspection.

The tale of how a Pole named Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski became the English novelist Joseph Conrad is as crammed with accidents and uncertainties as any of his fictions. It has been told before, but not recently and never in such detail. Biographer Frederick R. Karl, a professor of English at the City University of New York, has sifted through all the documents and some 4,000 surviving Conrad letters, including 1,500 never published. The blank spaces left in this portrait are probably there for good. Conrad covered his tracks carefully, destroying letters written to him, telling different correspondents contradictory anecdotes and romantically reshaping his past in published memoirs. Lengthy segments of his life vanished, like the wake of a ship.

Karl argues that Conrad's Polish origins colored his art just as much as did the years spent at sea. Indeed, the prophetic pessimism of Conrad's fiction can be traced to his youth; a child of the 19th century, he was tossed about in true 20th century fashion. Born in the Ukraine in 1857, he quickly became a pawn to a larger power. His father, a nobleman and Polish patriot, was convicted of political crimes by the occupying Russian authorities and sent into exile, along with wife and child. In arctic solitude, young Conrad watched his mother and then his father dying slowly of consumption. An orphan at eleven, the boy felt the full force of his father's "exalted and dreamy temperament" and never forgot what it brought: misery, ruin and death. The lesson later pervaded his fiction. Men with no illusions are base, but those who have them are destroyers.

Conrad fled to the sea at 16 and tried to cut himself off from what had been. He took on new languages (French, then English) the way others don disguises. He made himself an outcast well before the age of alienation. But the decision in his mid-30s to settle in England and become a writer meant an end to running. Countless thousands of miles had carried him smack into the past.

A literary career seemed an outlandish choice. The highborn Pole was temperamentally unfit to haggle in the publishing marketplace. Worse, he was working in a language he could barely pronounce, thrown into competition with such eloquent native speakers as Henry James. At this unpropitious time he married and started raising a family. Yet Conrad succeeded in his new trade almost at once. Money problems plagued him for years, but his books attracted a growing number of faithful readers. Reviews of his best work, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Nostromo, were both favorable and reverential. Through it all Conrad remained gloomy, anchoring himself to his desk and suffering the agonies of the damned. "I writhe in doubt over every line," he wrote a publisher. "I perspire in incertitude over every word!" He drove himself to a brief nervous collapse in 1910, then got back to work, still feeling like the foreigner he was. A year later he confided to a friend: "In writing I wrestle painfully with that language which I feel I do not possess but which possesses me--alas!"

Given its variety and intensity, Conrad's life would seem hard for a biographer to botch, but Karl nearly does. His book is almost totally lacking in color and physical details; for all the strange, vivid places Conrad visited, he might just as well have traveled on the moon. What is more annoying, Karl cannot get through the beginning of an episode without blabbing the middle and end. He is thus constantly stranded in the future: "But that is jumping ahead ... This, however, is jumping ahead ..." Aside from the distraction of following the bouncing biographer, this odd narrative method strands the reader in a fog of dej`a vu. His subject may have had three lives (Pole, sailor, writer), but that is no excuse for telling so much of Conrad's life three times.

Somehow, the stern artist survives this book's excess verbiage, the repeated double negatives ("not unlike ... not unusually ... not unconnected ... not unattached") that add empty noise (and are not unboring), the windy prose, the sometimes silly sentences: "The war had settled into a malaise based on young men aimlessly murdering each other." Seeing English used so poorly is an inverse reminder of what a superb craftsman Conrad was, of the care and agony he expended in the choice of each word--and those words in his third language. Flawed as his effort is, Karl can still be commended for his devotion and scholarship. His biography may drive some readers to Conrad out of interest; others may run to the novelist for relief. In either case, the trip will be worthwhile. -- Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Returned to England in late January of 1891, Conrad was now back at square one, only older. Possibly, his experiences in the Congo turned him into a writer, or at least gave him a sense of the indifference and negligibility of human life which he could shape into his fiction. But it was only one ingredient. What he had experienced as a boy in Poland, as a child in his parents' exile, then in his years as a seaman and later in the waters around Borneo--all of these episodes taken together created what Conrad knew about human depravity, baseness, degradation, and cruelty, as well as the individual's ability to survive such knowledge. The Congo alone did not suggest images of hell; it supported such experiences which Conrad had already accumulated.

We can suggest that ... In the sense that he had learned not to give himself to uncertain plans, he may have come to the knowledge that a literary career was possible ... Ultimately, the Congo episode, which became so momentous in his later work, may have been no more than the kind of defeat which brought him to the brink of existence, his own rather than that of civilization. At that edge, where he had to stare into the abyss, he saw himself drowning, and the question for him was whether he was worth saving."

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