Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [7]
Having spent much of his early career as a writer using his own experiences and observations as grist for his art (most of his early tales are set at sea or in parts of the world to which he had traveled during his years as a seaman), Conrad now, after completing Typhoon (1903), began to treat subjects that were remote from his own experiences. This was in part a strategic shift of gears: he did not like the idea of being thought of as a writer whose sole subject matter was seafaring. The great political novels Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) were his primary achievements during this period. His political interests found expression at this time in nonfiction writings as well, most notably the 1905 essay “Autocracy and War,” which he wrote on the occasion of the defeat of Russia in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. In this essay, Conrad astutely analyzes the increasingly bellicose climate of Europe generally, asserting that it has become “an armed and trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for life and death, and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions” and presciently warning of the growing danger of German militarism (The Works of Joseph Conrad: Notes on Life and Letters, p. 112). He also used the piece on behalf of his homeland with the assertion that “[t]he common guilt of the two [that is, German and Russian] Empires is defined precisely by their frontier line running through the Polish provinces” (p. 95). He would in later years take up this issue at greater length in the polemical essays “A Note on the Polish Problem” (1916) and “The Crime of Partition” (1919), in which he would represent the Poles as “Western” rather than “Slavonic” and would appeal to the “Western Powers” to protect Poland from the twin evils of “Russian Slavonism” and “Prussian Ger manism” based on “the moral and intellectual kinship of that distant outpost of their own type of civilisation” (pp. 131, 135).
Public affirmations of loyalty to Poland appear to have been very important for Conrad, particularly following a debate that had transpired at the turn of the century in the Polish press over the emigration of talent. During this debate he was publicly denounced by one of Poland’s most famous novelists for alleged disloyalty for having emigrated to Britain and chosen to write in the English language. So acutely sensitive was he to such charges that he contended in a 1901 letter to a fellow Pole (who happened to share the name Józef Korzeniowski), on the matter of his adoption of an Anglicized pseudonym,
I have in no way disavowed either my nationality or the name we share for the sake of success. It is widely known that I am a Pole and that Józef [and] Konrad are my two Christian names, the latter being used by me as a surname so that foreign mouths should not distort my real surname.... It does not seem to me that I have been unfaithful to my country by having proved to the English that a gentleman from the Ukraine can be as good a sailor as they, and has something to tell them in their own language (Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 322-323).
Although the claims of some critics that Conrad’s fiction may be viewed primarily as displaced expressions of his own sense of guilt over having abandoned Poland have been taken beyond plausibility, there is no doubt that this issue played a prominent role in his psychology and in the development of his fiction, which pursues with a relentlessness bordering on obsession the themes of conflicted loyalties and betrayal. In fact, his 1912 autobiography, A Personal Record, is particularly interesting as a rhetorical effort to represent himself as faithful to his native homeland yet nonetheless as a natural fit for his adoptive country. The latter tendency is epitomized in the author’s note he wrote for a new edition of the volume in 1919 that includes a rather mysterious account of his relationship to the English language, which, it bears recalling in this context, he always spoke with a thick Polish accent:
The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption