Louis_J_Sheehan

Conrad’s first works, shepherded by his editor Edward Garnett, a well- connected member of the literary world, were well received but modestly remunerated. Conrad would vacillate for years about returning to sea, but for the time being he pressed on. Meanwhile, through Garnett and a few other acquaintances, he groped his way into English life, constructing that masquerade of personality that he called “Joseph Conrad.” http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
His sense of alienation can be gleaned from “Amy Foster,” the brilliant story he would soon write, in which a European castaway on English shores is met with uncomprehending hostility, viewed as a kind of gibbering monster. In person, Conrad could neither hide his accent nor conjure away his foreign looks, but print made for a better place to bury secrets. With a single, slight exception, his fiction would never give the faintest hint of his Polish background. In his first two novels–the name of the second, An Outcast of the Islands, suggests its continuity of setting and theme with the first–nothing directly reveals even his nautical one. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

“When speaking, writing or thinking in English,” Conrad had written as early as 1885, “the word Home always means for me the hospitable shores of Great Britain.” The initial qualification is telling, given that Conrad often spoke, wrote, and thought in other languages. Equally telling is the generic nature of his imagined home: Great Britain in general, but not any particular place in it. Conrad had long yearned to find himself a specific English home, and in 1896, immediately after the publication of An Outcast–whose title can be read in more than one way–he made a precipitous jump into English domesticity, marrying an undereducated working-class woman he seems scarcely to have known. He was thirty-eight, Jesse George was twenty-three. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

The record of Conrad’s erotic life, both before and after his marriage, is exceedingly thin. Sexuality seems to have been a less potent force for him than his desire for friendship–this is perhaps another reason we find him so difficult to understand. The Conrads settled in the countryside, near Ford, Stephen Crane, H.G. Wells, and other members of his growing circle. His fiction, too, moves toward comradeship and, haltingly, toward self-revelation. The Nigger of the “Narcissus” finally takes up his nautical experiences directly, but the novel is troubled by Conrad’s difficulty in locating himself in relation to the shipboard community whose unself-conscious fellowship it depicts. He seems to have been unable to figure out how he wanted to appear before his English audience. His struggles with identity had become an impediment to his art. The answer that he discovered was not to place himself– not even his “Joseph Conrad” self–as a narrating presence within his fiction. The answer was to invent yet another persona, comfortably nautical and solidly English, with his own circle of friends and listeners. The answer was Marlow.

Marlow unlocked the door to Conrad’s major work, helping him produce, in the space of two years, “Youth,” the first of his great short stories; Heart of Darkness; and Lord Jim. The second of these is not his most ambitious work, and arguably not even his greatest, but it will surely be the one by which he is longest remembered. A long string of imitations and counter-versions–by Wells, V.S. Naipaul, António Lobos Antunes, James Dickey, Caryl Phillips, Francis Ford Coppola, and many others–has ratified its canonical, or we might say (adopting a term coined for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that other river journey) its hyper-canonical status. Like Robinson Crusoe or Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Heart of Darkness achieves its transcendent stature by approaching the condition of myth. Indeed, like Ulysses or The Waste Land, though far less laboriously than those other modernist masterworks, it compresses a whole set of myths into a single narrative substance. The voyage of exploration, the heroic quest, the epic descent, the journey into the self: all are implicit in Marlow’s odyssey.