So in October 1874, two months before his seventeenth birthday, he left Poland for the port city of Marseilles, where he entered the French merchant marine as a trainee seaman and a steward.

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” (Kimbrough edition, p. 145). He was well aware that his rather elevated artistic vision of fiction was not typical of English assumptions of the period. On the contrary, as Ian Watt points out, “Conrad’s basic conception of the novel was not of English origin. Nor was it derived from Polish sources, if only because the novel developed rather late in Poland, compared to poetry and drama. For Conrad the exemplary novelists were French, and, in particular, Flaubert and Maupassant” (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 48). As Conrad forged ahead with his literary career, his domestic life continued to develop. In 1898 the first of his two children, Borys, was born, and his first volume of short stories, Tales of Unrest, was published. In the fall of that year the family moved into Pent Farm, a home near the Kentish coast that Conrad had subleased from a new friend of his, the writer Ford Madox Huef fer (later, Ford Madox Ford). The relationship with Ford would prove to be important, as the two would go on to collaborate on several projects, most notably the novels The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), before a quarrel would effectively end their friendship. It was also during this period that Conrad began to cultivate relationships with some of the most important writers of the era, several of whom—H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, and Henry James—were now his neighbors. His second son, John, born in 1906, would in fact be named after his friend, the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Galsworthy.

The family lived at Pent Farm until 1907, and it was here that Conrad wrote most of his finest and most enduring fiction, beginning with Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900). Although his output was prodigious during his years at Pent Farm—and he remained steadily prolific throughout his career as a writer, with not only novellas and novels but short stories and essays as well—he suffered chronically from delibi tating bouts of depression and writer’s block. In a letter to the literary critic Edward Garnett, written shortly before he began full-time work on Lord Jim, he dramatically conveyed his anguish and sense of paralysis:

The more I write the less substance do I see in my work. The scales are falling off my eyes. It is tolerably awful.