Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [5]
His budding career, however, was temporarily brought to a halt when, in December 1877, he was informed that, as a Russian subject, he could no longer serve on French vessels. Without a livelihood, he remained in Marseilles, where he lived beyond his means and then tried to recoup his losses by gambling. The ensuing financial crisis led him to attempt suicide. (Conrad himself always insisted that the scar on his left breast was from a gunshot wound received in a duel, a claim perpetuated in his pseudo-autobiographical novel The Arrow of Gold [1919], which consists of heavily embellished memories of his Marseilles period, including romantic stories of gun running for the Spanish Carlist cause and a torrid love affair. His uncle, who rushed to Marseilles, helped him recuperate, and paid off his debts, publicly affirmed this myth—presumably because suicide is a mortal sin for Catholics whereas dueling was viewed as honorable—but in a confidential letter he acknowledged the truth.) After his recovery, no longer eligible to serve on French ships, Conrad joined the British merchant marine and first arrived on British shores in June 1878. Over the next several years he rose through the ranks, passing his exams for second mate in 1880, first mate in 1884, and captain in 1886, the same year in which he was naturalized as a Briton.
Yet employment opportunities for captains were scarce during this era, for the demand for sea officers was steadily declining as steamships were supplanting smaller sailing vessels (a historical shift Conrad wistfully treated in his 1906 memoir The Mirror of the Sea, in which he makes clear his belief in the dignity of sail over steam). So over the next several years he accepted positions as first mate and second mate, and in January 1894 he completed his last voyage. His two-decade-long career as a seaman had taken him all over the world—to southeast Asia, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, India, and throughout Europe—and would provide him with much of the material for his second profession, as a writer. The year 1894, in fact, constitutes a watershed in Conrad’s life, as the end of his period as a seaman was followed rapidly by the death, the next month, of his beloved uncle Tadeusz and the completion of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, which he had begun writing five years earlier. The novel was published in 1895 under the name Joseph Conrad (the inaugural use of this pseudonym), and, although it did not sell well, it received generally good reviews. With this modest success, the thirty-seven-year-old Conrad embarked on a literary career that from this point on would be the consuming passion of his life.
Conrad settled permanently in England in 1896 and (to the surprise of some of his friends) after a brief courtship married Jessie George, an intellectually unimpressive lower-middle-class Englishwoman nearly sixteen years younger than he. They would remain married for the rest of his life, and she appears to have provided the domestic support and stability that the irascible, high-strung author found necessary in order to work. In the same year his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, was published, followed in 1897 by The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” whose preface may be viewed as his aesthetic manifesto: he defined “art” as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect