Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19192-0 - The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad Edited by: Laurence Davies Excerpt More information INTRODUCTION i Biography frequently relies on diaries and letters, but because few let- ters and no diaries from Joseph Conrad’s first thirty years have sur- vived, reliance goes the other way.1 Even if we had more documents written in his hand, a life as remarkable as his, involving two vocations, several languages, and many polities, needs a fuller introduction than the brief chronologies that begin each section of this volume. All the same, readers well acquainted with his history may care to skip this opening section. Conrad’s story is one both of steadfastness and circumstance. His parents and most of his extended family were devoted to the restora- tion of Polish independence, lost in the partitions of 1782, 1793, and 1795 as Russia, Prussia, and Austria divided up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth among themselves. He grew up carrying a burden of sacrificial duty, an imperative he admired for its demands on courage and tenacity but, in his life as exile, sailor, author, could never follow absolutely. As he told his close friend Cunninghame Graham, who was mourning the loss of his wife, ‘Living with memories is a cruel business. I – who have a double life one of them peopled only by shadows grow- ing more precious as the years pass – know what that is’ (7 October 1907). He had become a British subject on 19 August 1886, at the age of 29, not only as a practical necessity but as a demonstration of loyalty to a nation whose institutions he admired and whose merchant navy had afforded him a career. Conrad detested being labelled as a maritime author at the expense of the great political novels, Nostromo, The Secret Agent,andUnder Western Eyes. The distinction was artificial, largely created by publishers and some (but by no means all) review- ers who had a romanticised view of life at sea, especially in the tropics, and were unable to imagine, let alone understand the experiences of tyranny, self-sacrifice, conspiracy, and cruelty that shaped his early life. 1 His only known journals are the two notebooks from his time in the Congo basin, when he was age 32. xix © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19192-0 - The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad Edited by: Laurence Davies Excerpt More information xx Introduction Born on 3 December 1857, he spent the first ten years of his life under Russian and the next six and a half years under Austro- Hungarian rule. His full name was Józef Teodor Konrad Nałecz ˛ Korzeniowski, or, for short, Konradek. The name Konrad was his par- ents’ tribute to the exiled Polish-Lithuanian poet Adam Mickiewicz, evoking patriotic characters in the narrative poem Konrad Wallenrod, where the villains are Teutonic Knights, and the verse drama Fore- fathers’ Eve, where the villains are Russian. The Ukrainian name of Kon- radek’s birthplace is Berdychiv, and the Polish, Berdyczów. The town was in Volhynia, a province formerly part of the old Commonwealth and now a Russian guberniya (governorate); Ukrainian was the major- ity language in the province, followed by Yiddish; roughly five per cent of Volhynia’s population, mostly of the landowning and professional classes, spoke Polish as their mother tongue, and a smaller percentage, Russian, the language of officialdom.1 It is clear from Conrad’s later correspondence that he came to understand the ethnic tensions and instabilities of his home territory all too well. He told Hugh Walpole, who had been doing war-work in Petrograd: ‘It’s very curious. I feel startled when I remember that my foster-brother is an Ukrainian peas- ant. He is probably alive yet. What does he think? I am afraid that what he thinks bodes no good to the boys and girls with whom I used to play and to their children’ (18 May 1917). In 1861, Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, formerly an estate manager and still a poet, dramatist, and translator, moved to Warsaw to work clandestinely for the left-leaning wing of the independence movement (which stood for the abolition of serfdom and the indepen- dence of Ukrainians and Lithuanians as well as Poles). A few months later, he was arrested by the Russian authorities, and was jailed with other dissidents in the fearsome Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, a place ever associated with torture and execution. Meanwhile, Konradek’s mother, Ewa Korzeniowska, endured four interrogations about her own and her husband’s activities. In 1862, the family was sent under armed guard to Vologda, a town in deep Russia of harsh winters and soggy, fly-plagued summers. The following year, they were moved to Chernikhov, where conditions were a little easier, but Ewa’s health was failing, and she died there of tuberculosis in 1865. These events gave Conrad a lifelong detestation of Russians, which he could only sometimes overcome. 1 These estimates are based on the first and only Russian imperial census, compiled in 1897; in 1857, the Polish-speaking population was probably a little larger. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19192-0 - The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad Edited by: Laurence Davies Excerpt More information Introduction xxi For the next four years, the boy lived with his father in two Austrian- controlled cities, Cracow and Lwów. Konradek’s health had always been precarious, and his episodes of illness meant that he had to be privately tutored as well as (probably) attending the Imperial and Royal St Anne’s Gymnasium in Cracow. He had already learned a good deal of French from his father and now had to learn Latin and Ger- man. Apollo was subject to deep melancholy, mourning his wife and the failure of the 1863 insurrection against the Russians. In between bouts of dejection, he went on writing. When he died, several thou- sand mourners followed his coffin to the cemetery in a cortège headed by his 11-year-old son. The Polish inscription on the gravestone hon- ours ‘Apollo Nałecz ˛ Korzeniowski – victim of Muscovite martyrdom’ (Najder 2007, p. 35). For the next few years Konradek was under the care of various relatives and family friends, notably his maternal grandmother Teofila Bobrowska, who tried unsuccessfully to get him Austrian citizenship, and maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski. Bobrowki’s letters to him and about him are among the main biographical sources for the next quarter of a century. Politically far more cautious than his sister and brother-in-law, but also critical of the narrow lives of the local gentry, a positivist rather than an idealist, his endorsement of modernity and progress did not lessen the shock of learning that his nephew wanted to become a world traveller and perhaps a sailor. Various attempts to dissuade Konradek failed, and, at the age of 17, he set off for Marseilles. Over the next three and a half years, he made three voyages to the Caribbean. He began acquiring the skills and knowledge of a sailor on the second and third of these voyages and on shorter trips in local waters with his piratical mentor Dominique-André Cervoni, a Corsi- can and perhaps a gun-runner. On shore, Konrad frequented cafés, theatres, and the opera house, consorted with artists, journalists, and political conspirators of the far left and far right, had love affairs, lost heavily at the tables in Monte Carlo and in consequence tried to kill himself. When Bobrowski arrived from Ukraine, the bullet wound to Konrad’s chest was said to be a duelling injury. The sheer range of his liminal adventures in Marseilles, the clarity of light, and the freedom of being, mostly, out of range of disapproving eyes, gave him a fond- ness for the Mediterranean that was still there in his last two novels, The Rover (1923) and the unfinished Suspense. On 24 April 1878 he shipped as an unregistered apprentice in the Mavis, a British steamer bound for Yeysk on the Sea of Azov. Although © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19192-0 - The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad Edited by: Laurence Davies Excerpt More information xxii Introduction travelling on Russian papers, as the son of political dissidents he could not go ashore without running the risk of long-term conscription into the Russian army.1 When the Mavis reached Lowestoft on the return voyage, he registered at a hotel as Konrad de Korzeniowski. Thus he began his career in the British merchant navy as a Polish gentleman, a Russian subject earmarked for surveillance, and a novice sailor with some knowledge of French waters who had quarrelled with his English captain. At this point of the story, career might be the wrong word. For Kon- rad’s parents and their allies, though the prospect was of suffering and martyrdom, destiny was prospective. To speak of their son’s des- tiny as an English sailor or author only makes sense retrospectively. According to his uncle’s letters, Konrad thought of enlisting in the French navy; at various times during his life at sea, he considered other work, for instance as a whaler, some of it on shore. Yet circumstances demanded that he start learning colloquial English, he seems to have read widely in English literature during his time off-watch, and by 1886 was beginning to write fiction. In the same year, he passed the exami- nation for his master’s certificate at the second attempt.