Word: conrad
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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...
...tale of how a Pole named Józef 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...
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...
...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...
...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...