And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself—and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep. I am alone with it in a chasm with perpendicular sides of black basalt. Never were sides so perpendicular and smooth, and high (Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 177).

To make matters worse, as he was racked with escalating debts (and proudly refused to lower his fairly high standard of living) he often spent large advances on work that he had hardly begun, which led him to request still greater advances; he was, therefore, more or less constantly under pressure to produce. Further, his difficulties with writing were exacerbated by a deep metaphysical pessimism that presupposed the ultimate futility of all human endeavors. In a letter to the idealistic Scottish socialist politician Cunninghame Graham, he summed up his view of the human condition, which was extrapolated from popularized accounts of the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy):

The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men (Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 16-17).

What has been termed the Conradian ethic is based, paradoxically, on acknowledging this darkly existential condition while nonetheless remaining faithful to one’s human commitments.

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.