Joseph Conrad in Polish Eyes

BY CZESLAW MILOSZ

THE work of a writer may be said to resemble an iceberg. That part of it which is visible tempts us to explore the larger portion which remains obscure and hidden beneath the surface of the written word. For the literary historian this temptation is an obligation, for he must search for those events and complications in the personal life of an author that influenced his sensibility and determined his choice of aims in life. Such a search is not easy when a writer comes from a country the knowledge of which is only vague or incomplete. This is the case with Joseph Conrad, who was born in the Polish Ukraine one hundred years ago. Elements in his personality that may appear exotic or mysterious to an Anglo-Saxon reader look rather different when viewed by a compatriot, more familiar with the history of his youthful years, before he exchanged the life of his landlocked country for life on the open sea.

Conrad’s biographies usually begin by asserting that he came from a noble family. This conjures up the vision of a country mansion, of horses, dogs, and a certain aristocratic style. The reality was different, even though his grandfather, an officer in Napoleon’s army and an old-fashioned patriarch, did fit into the traditional pattern of the nobility. What is more pertinent, however, to Conrad’s personal history is the fact that his father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was an impoverished poet. He has a place in Polish literary history, and some of his verse plays are still performed in Poland, even finding favor with Marxist critics because of their violent diatribes against the propertied classes. Furthermore, Conrad’s maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, was also a man of letters, being the author of one of the most interesting memoirs of the nineteenth century. The milieu in which the future English novelist grew up was thus a literary one.

When, in 1857, a son was born to Apollo Korzeniowski, he gave him the Christian names Józcf Teodor Konrad. The symbolic meaning of the last of these names is clear to any Pole. For a Pole the name Konrad symbolizes the anti-Russian fighter and resister. To understand how it acquired such a meaning it is necessary to go back to the poems of Adam Mickiewicz (the great Polish poet and contemporary of Pushkin) whose verses are known by heart in Poland. One of the most famous of his poems was called Konrad Wallenrod. Here the poet’s Polish patriotism and his anti-Russian feelings (he was deported to Russia in 1824, being suspected of “revolutionary activities”) were thinly masked to circumvent the Czarist censorship, beneath the guise of a historical epic harking back to the days of the medieval wars between the German Teutonic Order and the pagan Lithuanians. Konrad, a pagan converted to Christianity and risen to become Chief of the Order, deliberately leads its army into a trap in order to avenge his people’s sufferings. His vengeance is won through monstrous duplicity, the weapon of the oppressed.

Thus from his very infancy Joseph Conrad bore a name steeped in Polish tradition. When he signed his first book “Conrad,” dropping his family name of Korzeniowski as being too difficult for an Anglo-Saxon public, he was well aware of its double meaning.

Conrad was born just one year after the conclusion of the Crimean War, that war which shook the Russian Empire to its foundation and gave rise to Polish hopes that liberation from the Czarist yoke was nigh. Not content with poetry, his father became a conspirator, and by 1861 he had become a full-fledged member of a clandestine revolutionary committee in Warsaw,

The father’s arrest in that year was a dramatic event which had a decisive impact on the development of the youthful Konrad. Between the sensitive ages of five and ten, those years when one’s individuality crystallizes, he found himself the child of political prisoners. The father was first confined for several months in the Warsaw Citadel, where the Czarist police tried to extract from him the names of his fellow conspirators. Failing in this endeavor, they sentenced him to deportation to the north of Russia. He was accompanied in his exile by his wife and the little Konrad. The journey to the east in a horse-drawn carriage and under armed guard was long and painful, and the boy fell seriously ill as they approached Moscow.

A child, as is well known, is peculiarly sensitive to adult dramas, the full meaning of which he is unable to grasp. Here in the frozen north it was more than usually difficult to conceal the drama of the family situation. The great love that father and mother felt for each other acquired as the months went by a desperate character as the severe climate of Vologda, the town to which they had been banished, progressively destroyed Evelina Korzeniowski’s health. “Vologda,” her husband wrote to a friend in one letter, “is a big swamp, three kilometers long, laid out with crisscrossing wooden passages. The year is divided into two seasons: white winter and green winter. White winter lasts nine and a half months, green winter, two and a half.” As the seasons came and went, mother, father, and son wavered between a hopeless despair and a despairing hope that the Czarist authorities might answer their appeal to be moved to a less inclement place of exile. The appeal was eventually heard, and they were allowed to move south to the town of Chernigov, in the Russian Ukraine. But the move came too late to save the ailing Evelina, and her illness ended in her death in 1865, when the young Konrad was just eight years old.

MORE shut up within himself than ever, the widower now wore a double mourning. For prior to the loss of his beloved wife, he had witnessed the deathblow dealt to the cause he had tried to serve. In 1863 the long-simmering rebellion had finally broken out in Poland and had been ruthlessly crushed by the Russians. Struck down by these two blows, Apollo Korzeniowski tried to will himself to calm, a state of mind that did not come easily to his impassioned nature. Nor in such conditions could his son have experienced much of that youthful joy which is so vital to a child. The boy’s only moments of escape were during the summer months, when he could go off on trips with relatives to the Ukrainian countryside, since he himself was not a prisoner. But the winters were long and bleak, and in the evenings Konrad’s sole companion was his father, who sat by the light of an oil lamp covering page after page with his cramped angular handwriting. For even now, with all his hopes destroyed, the unsubmissive captive continued to fight a lonely battle against the Czarist system.

One of the products of these long wintry nights by the light of the oil lamp was a treatise entitled “Poland and Russia.” Apollo Korzeniowski managed to smuggle it abroad and it appeared unsigned in a Polish émigré paper called The Homeland, which was published in Leipzig. It was, as might be expected, a bitter indictment of Russian “barbarity,” which “spreads its body from the Frozen Sea to the Black Sea and from the Vistula to the Pacific,” and it was full of dark forebodings. “Such as Muscovy is,” ran a characteristic passage, “from fear of her own annihilation she is forced to fight outside her borders. Although Europe may avoid the struggle for a long time yet, the moment will come when it will be no longer possible to escape it; but then the time will have been chosen by Muscovy. Thus will Europe be robbed of half its strength.”

Throughout these years Konrad’s father was his principal teacher, and the cramped conditions of their exile amid foreign surroundings inevitably tightened the bond between them. From his father’s correspondence we get a sketchy idea of what his early education consisted of. (“I teach him what I can. Unfortunately it is not much. I protect him against the atmosphere of this place and the kid grows up as in a monastery cell.”) But we may safely surmise that it was from his father, as much as from the unhappy conditions of his youthful life, that Conrad derived both his deep-seated antipathy for Russia and that tragic outlook on life which is so evident in his later books.

Joseph Conrad’s anti-Russian feelings are too well known to need to be emphasized here. Years later he got very angry when Henry L. Mencken claimed in an article to have discovered typically Slavonic features in his novels. In Conrad’s opinion, the Poles were separated from the Slavonic world “not so much by hatred, as by an incompatibility of character.” He pointed out that he had read only a few Russian novels — in translation — and he added: “Their mentality and emotionality have always repelled me for reasons of hereditary tendency and personal disposition.”

Apollo Korzeniowski’s influence on his son, however, was not limited to the political field. The father’s writings are marked by a basic skepticism about human nature. He was in particular obsessed by a somber vision of threatening forces which he saw rising up from a state of primeval chaos to overshadow and overthrow civilized man. His fear of Russia was a fear of shapeless elemental powers unsubjected to the rigors and restraints of moral conventions. Here we can perceive a clear continuity of theme between the political tracts of the father and the novels of the son. In Conrad’s novels The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes neither the Czarist officials nor the anarchists and nihilists recognize the simple rule “One does not do that sort of thing.”

In The Heart of Darkness Kurtz, a dealer in ivory, surrenders to the chaos of Africa, suffers a moral rupture, and while declaiming about the civilizing mission of the white man, takes part in massacres of the natives. This feeling that man, beneath a thin veneer of civilization, is undermined by his instincts was shared by Thomas Mann, and it caused him to consider Conrad as one of the truly avant-garde authors of the twentieth century.

FOLLOWING his wife’s death Apollo Korzeniowski realized that he too would not have long to live, for he was riddled with tuberculosis. His letters betray a growing anxiety about his only child, who, he knew, would soon be left alone in the world. “My health is gravely affected and my beloved boy takes care of me. We are but two on this earth,” he wrote to one of his friends. “If only I could set Konrad on his native soil and among good men, link this living body and awakening soul to the body of our society, I would not wish for much more than that. As for myself, I want only to set foot on my own land, to breathe its air, to look upon those I love and to cry: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ ”

Liberation came at last, thanks to the efforts of his relatives and to his tuberculosis. In 1867 he obtained a passport for a journey from Russia to Madeira. Taking his son with him, he crossed over into Austro-Hungary. There, however, he abandoned the idea of the voyage, mainly because he lacked the financial means to make it, but also because he was deeply interested in the Polish literary movement in Galicia (the Polish-speaking province which had been incorporated into the Hapsburg Empire). Father and son thus settled down first in Lwów (Lemberg) and then in Cracow. Just two years after crossing the borders of the Russian Empire, Apollo Korzeniowski died. All Cracow went into mourning. The old revolutionary was given a hero’s funeral, and it was turned by the populace into a great patriotic demonstration.

His father’s death left Konrad an orphan at the age of twelve. His guardian from then on was his uncle Bobrowski, and the adolescent now found himself torn between two contrary influences. His uncle was the complete opposite of his father and he made repeated efforts, and sometimes unpleasant ones, to stifle everything in Konrad that he considered the atavistic inheritance of the “worse” side of the family. No biographer of Conrad can afford to underestimate this spiritual conflict, since the uncle’s influence in his nephew’s life was a lasting one, giving rise to a correspondence which continued during Conrad’s long sea voyages on British ships.

Bobrowski’s memoirs show him to have been a wise, educated man of strong convictions. This liberal conservative was a realist with a marked sense of irony. He was hostile to revolutionary “dreams” and he condemned his countrymen’s attempts to combat Czarism openly, urging them to pursue a path of gradual reform in the hope of achieving some kind of autonomy within the framework of the Russian Empire. He considered all members of the Korzeniowski family as adventurers and financial failures. Apollo, in his opinion, was as marked with the family stigma as his two brothers (who had shown too great a fondness for alcohol and cards), simply because Apollo was a poet. What was worse, all three Korzeniowskis joined the revolutionary movement and had ended as its victims. One of them had died on the battlefield, another in Siberia, and the third of tuberculosis contracted in exile. Such, Bobrowski thought, is the recompense of dreamers. It was necessary, therefore, to uproot this pernicious heritage from the boy’s spirit.

For several years this partisan of sobriety and restraint worked steadily at a sort of memorandum entitled “To the knowledge of my beloved nephew, Konrad Korzeniowski.” This document consisted mostly of financial figures, drawn from the family records — figures intended to inculcate in the last flower of the Korzeniowski line a feeling of family culpability, to warn him against prodigality, and to provide him with sane counsels.

This clash between the two powerful personalities of uncle and father may help to elucidate the contradictions to be found in Conrad himself: what may be called his anti-romantic romanticism, his strange blend of Polish patriotism and skepticism toward the “Polish cause,” his love of adventure and his simultaneous cultivation of order and self-discipline.

The anxieties of the uncle were not without foundation. His early studies under his father, without companions of his own age, as well as his tragic family situation, had bred habits of solitude which did not bode well for a “useful member of society.” The boy had been permitted to read all the books at hand, so he devoured the Polish romantic poets, the novels of Victor Hugo, and volumes of Shakespeare in translation. It is said that at the age of eleven he had already written plays which he staged with the aid of grown-up persons. But he was extremely reluctant to submit to school programs or rules of any kind. His relatives called the young man a “shirker.”

The precocity of the young egotist offended those around him from whom he did not attempt to conceal his scorn. Some of his biographers claim that he finished eight years of secondary school in Cracow. Other data support the view that he did not get this amount of schooling, then considered the necessary minimum for a member of the intelligentsia. One of his girl cousins transmitted the following impression of him: “Very developed intellectually; he hated school regulations which tortured and bored him. He used to say he had a great talent and would be a great writer. This, together with the sarcastic ironic expression on his lace and his frequent critical remarks, provoked surprise in professors and the mockery of his colleagues. He did not like to restrain himself in anything. At home, at school, on visits, he used to lie back in a half-reclining position.” If he received some foundation of knowledge, it was mainly thanks to the books he chose following his own tastes, and to his private tutor, a medical student of Cracow named Adam Pulman. With him, at the age of sixteen, he made his first trip to Western Europe, a three-month ramble through Switzerland.

Not only the fame of Conrad but the severe tone of his books — the tone, after all, of a moralist — must have come as a complete surprise to those who had known him in Cracow. The transformations through which certain individuals pass are never easy to understand for those who live close to them, for they are inclined to see traits of character as a sort of fixed chemical composition. But the same personality factors are able to regroup themselves into continually new combinations. What is necessary for this transformation is experiences that will destroy a pattern, thus preparing a new synthesis. Such an experience for Conrad was his long service in the British Navy.

When the nonchalant youth proclaimed that he would be a great writer, his relatives saw in this only another proof of his vanity. When he announced that he had decided to become a sailor, they received it as one does a child’s wish to be a fireman or a locomotive engineer. In a continental country, the thing seemed fantastic, and his obstinacy worried them.

Conrad’s devotion to the sea has been the object of many quarrels among literary historians. They have pondered over whether the first stimulus may have been Victor Hugo’s Travailleurs de la Mer, read in childhood, or the impression made upon him by the Russian port of Odessa which he visited with his uncle on a vacation from Chernigov. One may wonder whether his dream of such a career was not simply a secret wish for escape from the unresolvable net of Poland. All these are only conjectures. Conrad was a discreet man who placed a filter between his personal feelings and his published works that had little to do with “sincerity.” Only indirectly can we distinguish in him a sort of obsession. More than one character in his books seems to be an incarnation of continental conspirators — those fearless and purehearted knights — disguised as Malayan chieftains or sea captains, as if to illustrate the maxim: “What is to live in art must die in life.”

Why did his relatives, hostile to a career at sea, finally submit before the lad’s persistence? Probably they lost hope of doing anything reasonable with him. Yet they looked for a compromise solution: there was talk of placing him in the Hapsburg Naval Academy in Pula. This proved impossible because he was not an Austrian citizen. Though living in Cracow, the boy was registered as a citizen of the Russian Empire. A biographical detail unknown until now (I take it from materials published in Poland in 1956) may also have contributed to the uncle’s change of heart. The student, who was giving him trouble enough, had a quite scandalous love affair with a cousin called Tekla Soroczynska. It was deemed advisable to send him as far away as possible. It was hoped that he would thus sow his wild oats and return repentant. His uncle set up an allowance for him of 2000 francs a year, a decent sum at that time, and the adventurer left for Marseilles on October 26, 1874.

CONRAD is an English writer and the Poles have never tried to assimilate him into their literature, as they have likewise made no claims to the French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, whose true name was Kostrowicki. Great Britain, in the form of her ships, gave to the sailor what he had lacked: an understanding of the struggle for life and an awareness of human fraternity in the face of a cruel and indifferent Nature. She gave him also her language. He always spoke it badly, with a strong foreign accent, while his power over it in his writing made him one of the rare phenomena of cultural transplantation in a mature individual.

The matter would be simpler to understand if the exotic seas and continents of his voyages had impressed a primitive imagination — if Conrad had become acquainted with the larger world starting from scratch. Such would have been the case, for example, if he had come from a peasant background, so that all the new notions and impressions he received would have been immediately inscribed on a blank slate in a newly acquired language. But Conrad was a literary type. He had grown up among books and was well acquainted with Polish poetry, devoting himself to it more ardently than to his studies. The Polish reader, then, has a strange feeling as he trips constantly over things that have a familiar ring. Certain themes, and even the rhythms of certain passages in his novels, are reminiscent of verse lines very close to him, whose sources, upon reflection, can be named. What happened in Conrad was a perfect fusing of two literatures and two civilizations.

Conrad was deeply attached to the English language, and from his utterances we may surmise that he found it a vehicle exceptionally well suited to his temperament. His correspondence with his uncle in Polish was undoubtedly full of interesting descriptions of Asian and African ports where he went ashore. Yet Bobrowski’s efforts to get him to write for the periodicals of his native country failed. Curiously enough, the uncle, seeking to counteract his nephew’s estrangement from Poland, exploited the figure of his father in his arguments. So in a letter of 1881 he says: “Since you have not forgotten Polish (may God bless you; you have my blessing already) and since you even write very well, I must repeat what I have already remarked: it would be wonderful if you would contribute to the magazine Wedrowiec in Warsaw. I am sure everyone will be extremely interested in what you have to say. You would in this way tighten your links with your own country, and furthermore it would be a pious act toward the memory of your father, who desired to serve and did serve his nation with his pen.”

An immigrant will often, for motives of selfdefense, cut himself off completely from his land of origin or show toward it a friendly condescension, thereby contrasting his own success to the miseries of those left behind in the old country. The Irish, the Italians, and the Poles in America furnish many examples of this. Were it possible to find such a tendency in Conrad, it would mean that the problem had lost its acuteness for him and that it could be set aside in an analysis of his work. But, in fact, this matter does not lend itself to simplification. And as we go more deeply into the biographical materials we come to the conclusion that a carefully hidden complex of treason is discernible in some of his writings — a feeling that he had betrayed the cause so fanatically embraced by his compatriots and, above all, by his father.

Literature in Poland and Russia — and this is one of the rare features of similarity between these two dissimilar countries — has traditionally been viewed in a way differing from that of Western Europe. There it is conceived of as an arm in the struggle for the community good. Conrad did not believe in the future of his country and this provided him with a self-justification. But no amount of self-justification can insulate us from doubts about the rightness of our choice.

When his first books brought him fame abroad, his relatives sent him clippings from Polish papers showing the response they had evoked in Warsaw literary circles. But the local press was not always favorable. Conrad was particularly affected by a violent attack made on him by Eliza Orzeszko. This woman, of the suffragette type, was an admired humanitarian novelist in the tradition of Auguste Comte (who was then considered a prophet in Europe). She openly accused Conrad of treason for having offered his talents to a foreign literature.

The process of investigating layers of meaning in a novel is a pretty thankless task. Yet Conrad’s enigmatic Lord Jim certainly acquires an additional dimension if, as some critics have suggested, we see in it a drama of national loyalties. A sailor leaves his disabled vessel, feeling that it is not possible to save it, and the consequences of that act continue to pursue him to the end of his days. By slightly changing the ship’s name, Patna, and substituting the word Patria, we may touch upon a multiplicity of meaning which sometimes gives the prose its mysterious charm. Yet even if we make full allowances for a strong attachment to one’s homeland met to such a degree only in Central and Eastern Europe, the speculation is risky, and the secretive writer that Conrad was does not encourage it.

Nevertheless his adaptation to England, despite his marriage to an Englishwoman, was incomplete. In the recollections of Jessie Conrad we can note the amusing horror provoked in her by periodic visits of “Eastern people,” and perhaps a regret that a great sphere of her husband’s life remained, for her, inaccessible. Conrad must have applied certain tactics in his relations with her and his English friends. He kept silent on questions bearing upon things foreign to them. This was all the easier for him since he chose to live in England as a matter of personal preference. He was furthermore a patriotic supporter of the British Empire as it confronted the two continental powers he disliked, Russia and Germany. But though an Englishman by choice, he periodically re-emphasized his double loyalty, making it clear that he did not intend to dispense with that duality. When his friend Robert Cunninghame Graham invited him to take part in a pacifist meeting in London in 1899, he answered with a letter containing the following words, sharply underlined: “There will be Russians at this meeting. Impossible!” He added that he could not accept the idea of fraternity, not because he considered it unrealizable but because its propagation might weaken “the national sentiment whose conservation is the precise object of my preoccupations.”

If we restore its proper meaning to the term “cosmopolitanism” — ignoring the use made of it by Stalinists — and recognize that it covers bad as well as good qualities, then we may say that Conrad, though he traveled to distant parts of the world and wrote about different peoples speaking many different languages, was not really a cosmopolitan. It was impossible for him to be one because of his need for roots. But he knew how to maintain a certain equilibrium between the demands of his double fidelity. “If you will take my word for it,” he wrote in a letter to a Polish acquaintance in 1903, “say that in the course of my navigations around the globe, I have never separated myself, either in my thoughts or in my heart, from my native country and that I hope to be received there as a compatriot, in spite of my Anglicization.”

The Heart of Darkness, which appeared at the very beginning of our century, was a Cassandra cry announcing the end of Victorian Europe, on the verge of transforming itself into the Europe of violence. The First World War, which ushered in the new epoch, destroyed many illusions. In this respect Conrad’s fear of anarchy found its somber confirmation. At the same time the war aroused new hopes for the independence of those nations which had been subjected, from the time of the Congress of Vienna, to the control of powerful monarchies. Not doubting of the final victory of the Western Allies, Conrad submitted a memorandum to the British Foreign Office in 1916 entitled “Note on the Polish Problem.” It contained a detailed plan for re-creating an independent Poland with access to the sea, under an Allied protectorate. The unforeseen turn of events, and principally the weakening of Russia through the revolution of 1917, brought about the realization of his projects to an extent surpassing his hopes.

CONRAD died in 1924, but in the upheavals which later touched the corner of Europe he came from, he had a not unimportant role to play. In the last years of his life, Conrad made his own corrections to Polish translations of his writings. The translators, the best ol whom was his cousin, Aniela Zagorska, were conscientious in their task, and his novels became necessary additions to every self-respecting private library in Poland. But as happens to all eminent authors, interest in them rose and fell in waves. Never, though, did his popularity reach such a peak as during the Second World War. The reasons for this were mainly political. Poland’s defeat and occupation by the Nazis gave rise to an underground movement or, rather, to an underground state. Liberation was expected to come from the West. But as the international fronts settled down, it was more and more apparent that Poland had a choice only between a Nazi and a Soviet victory. This meant that the Poles could either be baked or boiled.

The Poles sought support in Conrad for a desperate and gratuitous heroism, and they tried to imitate those of his characters who embodied a fateful loyalty to a lost cause. We shall not judge whether the conclusions they drew from his works were the right ones. In any case, when the Red Army entered Poland and the new Communist government undertook the liquidation of the “underground state,” Party journalists proclaimed Conrad an immoral writer and a corrupter of youth. They even went so far as to condemn Conrad’s ethical ideals as only useful to capitalists. Thus when he depicted a crew’s loyalty toward its captain and its ship, he was in reality serving the purpose of shipowners.

Furthermore, Conrad belonged irremediably to Western civilization, and its prestige had to be deflated. The bureaucrats, gifted with a sound Party instinct, realized that the aristocratic scale of values, dear to Conrad’s sailors, pirates, and soldiers, was not compatible with the creation of individuals completely subservient to the state. That is why, after the Stalinists gained control of the literary market through the nationalization of publishing houses and the installation of censorship, they placed Conrad on the black list. Even in the first years after the war, when considerable freedom of expression still existed, new editions of his novels were forbidden, a situation which was naturally perpetuated during the period of insane witch-hunting that followed. Strangely enough, during this same period (1945 — 1955) theaters performed some of his father’s plays, emphasizing their attacks on the nobility and toning down those against the Czarist regime.

When Conrad was “defrosted” in 1955 and Polish publishers began preparing new editions of his works, a careful observer might have seen in this a sign that the “thaw” in Poland was a serious affair. Thus, by a strange detour, his father’s wishes in giving him the name of Konrad were finally fulfilled. The son who did not want to assume a burden that had crushed his father had nevertheless become the defender of freedom against the blights of autocracy.