[In the following excerpt, Gurko explores some of Joseph Conrad's writings in the context of his exile from Poland.]

The tragedy of Poland was not only geographic, but psychological. It was bad enough that fate had ringed her with powerful enemies. Worse still was that the same fate did not equip her to discharge effectively the role demanded by a malevolent geography.

For nearly two centuries Poland has been forced, against her own nature and traditions, into a conspiratorial underground, a role she has played with notable unsuccess. Poland was traditionally divided between a small nobility and a numerous peasantry. The nobles were given to stiff-necked patriotism, complicated etiquette, and grandiloquent gestures. The peasants, largely illiterate, were equally patriotic, aggressively obstinate, and subject to spasmodic fits of bigotry. It was a society made for parade-ground wars, headlong cavalry charges, and a relatively simple, straightforward diplomacy. Instead, it was forced into undercover activities, subtle Machiavellisms, elaborate pretenses of obedience masking a violent passion for independence. Partitioned originally among three great powers, forced to swallow two hated foreign languages, Poland oscillated throughout the nineteenth century between sudden bloody outbursts of rebellious ardor and relapses into sullen passivity bordering on the comatose. There was a touch of disaster and futility to all her enterprises in bondage, quite in keeping with the split between her temperament and lot.

“You seem to forget that I am a Pole,” Conrad wrote to Garnett in October, 1907. “You forget that we have been used to go to battle without illusions. It's you Britishers that ‘go in to win’ only. We have been ‘going in’ these last hundred years repeatedly, to be knocked on the head only …”¹ Conrad's despair about Poland—an emotion endemic to the country—was, in his particular case, heightened by the unhappy experiences of his father, Apollo Korzeniowski, as an unsuccessful conspirator against the Russian occupation.

His father's melancholy private history encapsulates the chronicle of Poland. He was filled with ardor, élan, a capacity to entertain only one political idea at a time, a naïve zeal for the use of short-term methods to achieve long-range objectives, and a rigid inability to live life on any terms but his own. Under normal circumstances, he would have had a career as a scholar or a man of letters. But he lived in an unsettled time, which brought to the surface the restless, unstable sides of his character, and in the end turned even his virtues into faults. The failure of Conrad's father as a rebel personifies the failure of Poland in the same role. Man and country failed for the same reasons. They were both naïve, simple, feudal, brave, filled with chivalrous notions of gallantry and exaggerated heroism when the times called for cunning, concealment, prudence, and sophistication.

Conrad's father was a man of brilliant but unsettled parts. As a student he had pursued oriental languages without finishing. When he lost his own family property through unwise investments, he took to managing the estates of others, also unsuccessfully. But he cut an arresting figure in provincial society, becoming known and feared for a witty, sarcastic tongue. He had literary ambitions, wrote plays and poems of no great distinction, but skillfully translated Hugo, Shakespeare, and Alfred de Vigny into Polish. Highly temperamental and bitterly romantic, he fell in love with Evelina Bobrowska and waited eight long unhappy years for her disapproving father to die and her reluctant mother to give an uneasy consent to their marriage.

The antagonism between the Bobrowskis and Korzeniowskis reflected still another conflict in the history of Poland. Each represented a different aspect of the Polish gentry. The Korzeniowskis were fire-eaters, hotheads, romantic idealists, willing, even eager to die for Poland, impatient of the long view, and allergic to cautious planning. The Bobrowskis were just as patriotic and longed just as much for independence, but they were sober, restrained, willing to get along as best they could with the occupying power while working quietly for a goal they recognized, realistically, to be distant. They disapproved of Evelina's marrying a Korzeniowski, and the later disasters confirmed their opinion.

After their marriage, Conrad's parents lived in the country on a large estate Apollo was managing near the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. There, on December 3, 1857, their son and only child was born. He was named Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski.² At home the boy was always called by the third of his names, Konrad, which he was later to adopt as his English surname. In his merchant seaman days he was to sign himself in various ship's registers and in letters as Conrad Korzeniowski, Konrad Korzeniowski, K. N. Korzeniowski, and J. Conrad Korzeniowski. He seems to have enjoyed these variants on his name, which in themselves suggest the radical metamorphoses in his life.

In 1861, when Conrad was three, his father repaired to Warsaw in pursuit of a formal literary career. Instead, he became involved with a patriotic group planning a revolt against Russia. Characteristically, he attached himself to the radical wing advocating instant action, was arrested before firing a shot or distributing a proclamation, and was sent into exile. When the next great Polish uprising finally did erupt, in 1863, Apollo Korzeniowski was many hundreds of miles away, in the Vologda region of northern Russia.

His legitimate and justifiable literary ambitions had led him from the relative quiet of the countryside to the great capital, where the temptations of politics operating upon an already aroused patriotic sensibility caught him up in dangerous events for which he was unsuited by nature. Like Poland, he was the tragic victim of a split between his capacities and the pressures imposed upon them. Thirty years later this split was to become one of Conrad's great and recurrent themes.

Apollo's attachment to his wife and son moved him to agree to their company in the harshness of exile. At the camp in Vologda, the inmates were given numbers: Apollo became no. 21, his wife no. 22, Conrad no. 23. Evelina was already in delicate health, and the rigors of their existence hastened her death, which occurred in 1865, when Conrad was seven. After the shock of his wife's passing, Apollo was allowed by the authorities to move to southern Russia where, gazing at the Black Sea, his young son got his first glimpse of boundless water. Eventually, broken in health by the ravages of tuberculosis and no longer considered dangerous, Korzeniowski was allowed to return home. His last months were spent in Cracow, a city noted for its churches and mausoleums, memorializing its medieval past, a city of the glorious and epic dead. On his death in 1869 he was given a great public funeral, befitting a man who sacrificed himself, however foolishly, for the national cause, and three years later his son received the freedom of the city as a last tribute to his father, now enshrined in the myth of Poland.

What Russia must have looked like to the small boy is uncertain, though there are powerful descriptions of the endless empty countryside in Under Western Eyes and in an unfinished early story, The Sisters. What his father seemed like to him is more evident. Conrad had spent his fourth to eleventh year almost exclusively in the company of his father. More than thirty years later Conrad was to recall him in a letter to Garnett:

A man of great sensibilities; of exalted and dreamy temperament; with a terrible gift of irony and of gloomy disposition; withal of strong religious feeling degenerating after the loss of his wife into mysticism touched with despair. His aspect was distinguished; his conversation very fascinating; but his face in repose sombre lighted all over when he smiled. I remember him well.³

This restless man, at war with himself, unable to reconcile conflicting impulses and to come to terms with the world around him, is the one constant figure in his son's novels. The identity and impact of his mother are more shadowy, but she may well have inspired the figure of Mrs. Gould, one of Conrad's most loving and attractive women, who slowly withers in Nostromo as her husband sinks in the swamp of his high-minded, unattainable, and finally corrupting ideal. Evelina, the first name of Conrad's mother, is not unlike Mrs. Gould's Emilia, and the similarity in their life situation is striking.

Conrad's early childhood, isolated in an enemy country, cut off from young companions, thrown into the exclusive company of two parents dying visibly before his eyes, exposed him to abnormal tension. In the impressionable years before he came to speculate and philosophize about the nature of things, Conrad intimately absorbed the attitude of his parents: his father's rebellious lashing out against oppression, his mother's uncomplaining acceptance and endurance.

He was eleven when his father died. He was turned over to the guardianship of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, and now came in contact with still a third personality. Uncle Tadeusz was a believer in order, reason, and balance, and was willing to pay a price for them by swallowing a little of his nationalistic pride. Inside the Russian occupation he adjusted himself to political realities while maintaining his identity as a Pole. Was it possible to live like a civilized man and still maintain political and patriotic honor? To this delicate question his answer was Yes, and it served as a rule of thumb by which he sought to guide his nephew. Since he felt that an honorable and civilized life was possible in occupied Poland, he would later oppose Conrad's wish to leave. But once Conrad had detached himself from the Polish community, he urged him to embrace another, since civilization involved belonging to a community and was conceivable only in terms of work, duty, and professionalism. First, Conrad was to go to France, and then, England. It was his uncle who would urge British citizenship upon the hesitating young man. He had opposed his going to sea, but once Conrad went, encouraged him to perform his tasks as well as possible and climb in this unexpected profession as high as his talents would allow. He had distrusted his brother-in-law for attempting the impossible, and wished to control the impulsiveness and quixoticism he found in Conrad. Uncle Tadeusz was a great advocate of the possible. Whatever could be done should be done; what should be done acquired value only within the framework of organized society, which alone guaranteed the doctrine of humane realism he sought to inculcate in the boy turned over to his care.

One of Conrad's childhood companions, Jadwiga Kalucka, remembered him at eleven as a lively, merry boy of extraordinary intelligence. He spent holidays with her family in Lwow. He wrote comedies, organized amateur theatricals, quoted from Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish epic poet, demonstrated prodigally the literary training he had received from his father, and was altogether the life of the household.⁴ Literature and a literary sensibility were quite plainly intimate parts of his earliest experience. During his early years of close companionship with his father, Conrad had enjoyed hearing him read aloud from his translations of French and English writers. The boy himself had occasionally stolen into his father's study and read from the galley proofs.

After his father's death, the five years Conrad spent going to school in Cracow seemed tame indeed. They consisted of a routine of uninspired studies. Like all educated Poles of the nineteenth century, he learned to speak French as a matter of course. But except for geography, everything was academic and cut-and-dried, and aroused in the boy only an irritated and rebellious boredom. And even geography, he remembered many years afterward, was taught by “mere bored professors … who were not only middle-aged but looked to me as if they had never been young. And their geography was very much like themselves, a bloodless thing with a dry skin covering a repulsive armature of uninteresting bones.”⁵ A passion for “the geography of open spaces and wide horizons” had already been aroused by the memoirs of Mungo Park and Captain Cook, which he had come upon in private.

The traditional system of loyalties that most boys accept automatically appeared not to have taken deep hold of Conrad. He did not believe in the superiority or expertise of his teachers; they frankly bored him. Although he always remained on affectionate terms with his relatives, as a family unit they failed to inspire him with awe. He was born a Roman Catholic and brought up in an orthodox way, yet religion never seems to have moved him deeply; he was to grow up a nonbeliever. As to Poland, for all his natural feelings of patriotism and national pride, the last thing in the world he wanted to do was join its underground.

The years in Cracow were punctuated by a romantic attachment to an equally youthful cousin named Tekla that offended the family's sense of propriety, and were climaxed by the crisis over his decision to leave Poland (then completely landlocked) for the sea. His study of geography had roused in him an interest in places far from home. Mungo Park's Africa, the Pacific regions of Captain Cook appeared to him magical. And when he was not reading books of travel and exploration, he was losing himself in the sea stories of Hugo, Marryat, and Fenimore Cooper, and the first tenuous thought of becoming a sailor himself took root in his mind.

Once there, this strange ambition flourished vigorously and was not to be dislodged. His uncle did everything in his power to stifle it, without success. Arguments, family conferences, exhortations to nationalism, efforts at passing off the impulse as a passing phase of romantic adolescence were all unavailing. In the summer of 1873, when Conrad was fifteen, a university student was engaged to take him on a walking tour of Switzerland and northern Italy with the express purpose of talking the boy out of his folly.⁶ But a glimpse of the Adriatic at Venice seems to have canceled out the tutor's most eloquent arguments. Even his uncle, to whom he was strongly attached, could not deflect Conrad. In the end, with cautious, regretful wisdom, Bobrowski let the boy go. It was typical of his sober realism that he did not allow him to depart unprovided for, but arranged a monthly allowance and gave him letters of introduction to connections in Marseilles.

To the end of his days Conrad remembered the pressure upon him to remain. “Stupid obstinacy” and “fantastic caprice” were among the milder epithets applied. In the struggle to leave he was without allies, and was even unable to summon reasons for his folly. They were not verbalized or analyzed, but deeply and temperamentally felt. He was vehemently assured on all sides that what he wanted to do was wrong. Jarring though this was, it had no effect on his resolve to do it. But his sense of anguish, amounting perhaps to a complex of guilt, remained with him throughout life and created in him a perpetual desire to justify his action. In A Personal Record he recalls the shocked opposition to it in tones whose dryness does not conceal the surviving tension.

I don't mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my desire to go to sea. But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough, in all conscience, the commotion of his little world had seemed a very considerable thing indeed. So considerable that, absurdly enough, the echoes of it linger to this day. I catch myself in hours of solitude and retrospect meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by voices now forever still; finding things to say that an assailed boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people who called upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations.

(pp. 120-121)

The pressure exerted to keep him from taking the jump left its mark. He was given to ironic outbursts, reminiscent of his father, followed by moody silences when he was altogether withdrawn.

His passion to go to sea, vague at first, grew steadily more powerful, and was linked in an equally powerful way with a personal need to break out of the dark tunnel of Poland. Since the remote places which made their appeal to him in geography and fiction were invariably reached by water, the sea became the imaginative means of exit from the prison of land. He longed as much as any Pole for his country's independence, but did not believe it would come. He had seen his father and mother swallowed up by Poland's oppressive situation, learned of the melancholy death of his father's two brothers in misadventures that were partly political in character, and was constantly reminded of the heroic sacrifices made by his patriotic ancestors for the Polish cause. These reminders filled him with pride, but also with futility. Polish patriotism was marked by valor and self-sacrifice; yet it seemed always to end in failure and death. He belonged to a country doomed by history to be crushed. The impulse to free himself of these burdensome traditions, to get out from under the weight of this tragic destiny, flared up in him. If his father had rebelled against Russia because he found life in occupied Poland intolerable, Conrad was to rebel against Poland for exactly the same reason. It was the revolt of a youth against iron circumstance which he felt could not be altered, neither by him nor by his compatriots.

His father's tragedy, which Conrad was as resolutely determined to avoid as his nation's, was that of a man cast by circumstance into a role he was unfit to play. Later, Conrad realized that it was not only circumstance but something in his father's own nature that had compelled him to play it. The same tragic fate affected the country; it, too, was thrust into an underground role with a psychic apparatus equipped to function only in the open. This was in due course the tragedy of Lord Jim in the celebrated novel written by Conrad twenty-five years after his exit from the reluctant underground of Poland. Jim, too, was wedded to an ideal of conduct that the resources of his nature were unequipped to realize—the inward division that Conrad projects with an imaginative energy that goes back to his own earliest experience.

The state of the father and the nation was mirrored, also, in the ancient south Polish city where Conrad lived and attended school from 1869 to 1874. Cracow, torn between a glorious past and a drab present, offered still another portrait of a divided self to the impressionable boy. One of his younger contemporaries, J. H. Retinger, grew up in the same town, which he described in a book of reminiscences.

… its hundred churches, each of them a reliquary of some past splendor, an unending procession of architectural glory—and the drabness of everyday life. Cracow the most beautiful of ancient towns—and the most uninspiring. …

In opposition to the past, the present in Cracow did not supply any spiritual food for youthful, adventurous imagination—there was, indeed, a complete lack of faith in it. … The greatest festivities of the town were celebrations in honor of men dead a long time ago, of those who had toiled and suffered for Poland. Festivities of mourning!

In my childish imagination the part of Cracow which was not a temple or museum, was a cemetery!⁷

From this magnificently preserved cemetery Conrad was resolved to escape. As a microcosm of Poland, Cracow reinforced his earliest impressions of his country's fate. His father's feverish, futile, desperate life had come to an end there, and in memorializing him, in placing a stamp of heroic legend upon him, the city fathers were dramatizing his dissociation from the living present. Conrad's experiences during his first sixteen years were remarkably consistent. They built up in his mind an image of existence which was not only to inform his books but to drive him irresistibly into exile.

One of the more fascinating and persistent theories about Conrad postulates a feeling of guilt at deserting Poland in her hour of greatest need, at the time in her history when she was most ground down under the heel of powerful oppressors. Gustav Morf first advanced this idea in The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad. Morf explores all the novels, Lord Jim in particular, as subconscious efforts by Conrad to purge himself of the burden of betrayal which he assumed that fateful October day in 1874 when he boarded the train for France. Jim deserts the Patna (Poland) with its cargo of sleeping pilgrims (the Poles faithful to their belief in independence), and jumps into the “everlasting black hole” of the lifeboat (exactly like Conrad's “jump out of his racial associations”). He has been urged to abandon ship by the rascally German captain (Germany was one of Poland's traditional enemies). The Patna, however, did not go down; by some miracle she stayed afloat. Some time later she was rescued and towed into port by a French gunboat (France was Poland's traditional friend and ally). Jim tries to exorcise his guilt by standing trial and by justifying his actions to Marlow (Conrad addressing himself to his readers, for, according to Morf, his art is an attempt to work out his deeply buried anxieties symbolically, and thus rid himself of them). A subtle variation on this approach to Lord Jim is suggested by the émigré Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz: with a slight change of the ship's name Patna to Patria, the whole drama of national loyalties emerges.⁸

The approach is ingenious, and lends a note of authentic fascination to the reading of the novel. But is it true? It would perhaps be more persuasive if we were sure that the feelings Conrad carried with him on “deserting” Poland required exorcism. There is no real evidence that they did. He was disturbed by the opposition of his family, but though very young and utterly alone he followed his own intent unswervingly and never, in any of his later writings or letters, gave any indication that he regretted his decision. On several later occasions, his uncle, hoping this would win him back, urged him to write travel pieces for Polish magazines; he never showed the slightest interest in doing so. As a young man he returned to Poland to see his uncle, and in 1914, twenty years after his uncle's death, took his English wife and two sons back for a stay that was cut short by the war. These visits were undertaken as perfectly matter-of-fact vacation trips and were scarcely the actions of a man consumed in the deepest part of his self with a sense of treason.

Yet Conrad was visibly upset by Polish attacks upon him after his career as an English writer had begun. Was he indeed a betrayer who had put even his talent to the service of another country? The accusation may have wounded him because it was true. The reverse is equally plausible. It may have wounded him because it was false. Painful falsehoods can rend us as deeply as painful truths; it is sentimental to ascribe to the second a more penetrative power than the first. At any rate, his own private relations with Poland remained friendly. He was gratified when his books were first translated into his native language, the more so because the translator was his cousin. And in many an essay and declaration he espoused the cause of Polish independence, and expressed his pleased surprise when this actually came about after the First World War.

Yet if the theory of guilt is not valid in the personal sense, it has validity in an imaginative sense. The entire syndrome of guilt and treason took sharp hold of Conrad's mind when he was exposed to it as a boy. It became for him a constant of human experience not because he accepted the accusations of treason launched against himself, but because he was intimately involved in them. Against his will he was appointed a central actor in the drama of betrayal, without accepting or giving inner consent to the role of betrayer forced upon him by his accusers. Thus the whole issue penetrated his imagination far more than it did his conscience.

It is therefore conceivable that he called Jim's ship the Patna because the name began with the same consonant as Poland and had the same number of syllables. If so, the suggestion of the country behind the ship derived less from Conrad's need to exorcise private ghosts than from an imaginative capacity to derive parallels and find analogies to a situation which he understood very well and regarded as a fixed point of the human condition. To pursue Morf's line is to accept the book as the victim of the man, where it deserves to be accepted as a demonstration of his insight and aesthetic power. We see clearly in Conrad's case how his life experiences fed his imagination and nourished his art, how in the writing of his books, as he observes in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” “the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal” (pp. xi-xii). To the degree that his stories remain victimized by the specific circumstances of his life, to that degree they remain unconquered by the imagination, and serve mainly as indexes and guides to the biography of one man rather than as universal statements. To read Lord Jim as a compendium of clues to Conrad's personal feelings is to shrink its range of discourse and turn literature generally into a treasure hunt for disguised personal references, which in any given instance may or may not be there.⁹

One other aspect of Conrad's life in Poland remains to be mentioned, the impact of Shakespeare upon him. When still a boy, he had read a number of the plays in his father's translations. Centuries of research have failed to reveal that Shakespeare had a “philosophy,” in the sense that Dante or Tolstoy had one. It is hard to say with certainty that in his work he had opinions or assumed attitudes, as Dickens did. What Conrad in his extremely impressionable early years derived from Shakespeare was none of these; even if they existed in articulated form, it is doubtful that they would have meant anything to him between the ages of seven and twelve. What he did derive, rather, were examples and situations: bold men hurling themselves into large endeavors, or sensitive figures like Hamlet being trapped into misfortune and disaster. There was the constant Shakespearian spectacle of the miscast man forced into circumstances that go athwart his nature: not simply Hamlet alone, but Othello, driven to endure the devious modes of jealousy though his character is tuned to straightforwardness and candor; Brutus forced to assassination and war though essentially of a quiet, reflective disposition; Hotspur the victim of an age where his purely medieval pride and honor were out of place; Romeo and Juliet committed to stealth and subterfuge while their youthful ardor can flourish only in the open.

Conrad's father was also a miscast man, belonging to a country trapped into a miscast role. To Conrad the plays of Shakespeare were violent, dramatic demonstrations of the same pattern, made all the more eloquent by their richness of action and the phenomenal vitality of their language. These belied the sad ends of the heroes, kept the tragedies from being depressing, and made bearable the idea that life was often too much for the men who lived it. The human lot may be described as a hard and limited one, but if a writer asserts it with enough imagination and gusto, it has a way of shedding its limitations. Shakespeare asserted it with all the imagination and gusto of the Renaissance. To the boy caught within the enclosed world of Russia and Russian Poland in the 1860's the plays supplied whatever élan, whatever impulse to self-fulfillment that he may not have secured from Marryat, Hugo, and Mungo Park.

When Conrad boarded the express on October 26, 1874, for Marseilles,¹⁰ he was still six weeks short of his seventeenth birthday, but he brought with him the emotional baggage of a grown man. The harshness of his experiences had clouded his youthful spirit, but had not crushed it. It deepened the strain of melancholy in him, the melancholy that was later to erupt so frequently into fits of prolonged depression when a sense of his own emptiness, if not of the emptiness of the world, would overwhelm him. He had already learned to protect his inner self by the mask of manners, another of the legacies from Poland. The Polish gentry had wrapped itself for centuries in a thick veneer of etiquette. An elaborate courtliness of gesture and speech had survived virtually unchanged from medieval times and retained a defiantly feudal air into the present. It served as a wall to keep out inquiring eyes, behind which the privacy of emotion could be freely cultivated. Manners coated Conrad like a suit of armor, and would one day harden into a formidable reserve, an impenetrably aristocratic air that would bloom like an exotic continental plant during his years in rural England.

A precocious sense of tragedy, an exultant if vague desire for the adventure and excitement of some widening experience outside the claustrophobia of his native country, an encrustation of polished etiquette, and a facility in two languages, Polish and French, were the main items in the assorted paraphernalia Conrad took with him on the train to France.

Notes

1. Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895-1924, ed. by Edward Garnett (Indianapolis, 1928), p. 209. All future references to this volume will be abbreviated to Garnett.

2. The name Korzeniowski derived from korzén, the Polish word for root.

3. January 20, 1900, Garnett, p. 167.

4. “Conradiana VI,” Poland, August, 1927.

5. “Geography and Some Explorers,” Last Essays, p. 12.

6. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record, p. 43.

7. Conrad and His Contemporaries (New York, 1943), pp. 19-20.

8. “Joseph Conrad in Polish Eyes,” The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1957, p. 226.

9. Elsewhere, Morf's comments retain their interest while growing more conjectural and farfetched. He regards Almayer as a composite symbol of Conrad's paternal grandfather and two paternal uncles who lost their fortunes and lives speculating, gambling, and drinking. He spots Conrad himself among the crew of the Narcissus in the person of the Finn. This sailor is a foreigner betrayed by his accent, has a dreaming temperament, and comes from a country under Russian rule. Finally, Morf regards Conrad's reversion in his last writings to southern France as a veiled return to Poland, since the two regions have “a strong temperamental affinity.” Though one of the earliest books on Conrad, Morf's opus remains, for all its wild-eyed speculations and occasional nonsense, one of the more fascinating.

10. “I got into the train as a man gets into a dream,” was the way in which he remembered the incident forty years later (Letter to Harriet Capes, July 22, 1914, Yale).