He died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, at the age of sixty-six, and was buried near his home in a Roman Catholic cemetery in Canterbury. Although his reputation ebbed slightly in the years after his death, by the 1940s he was generally acknowledged to be among a handful of the greatest writers of his era, an estimation that has never faltered since.

“Youth,” “Amy Foster,” and “The Secret Sharer”

For both practical and artistic reasons, the short story form was important to Conrad. On the practical side, before he became a popular success, it provided the chronically debt-ridden author with a more dependable source of income than did the novel form; both in Britain and America, magazines during this era tended to pay well for short fiction, whereas selling a novel was always a dicey proposition. Yet he was also deeply invested in the short story as an aesthetic form, as was the case with several of the authors whom he most admired, such as Guy de Maupassant. Unlike Maupassant’s compact, elliptical stories, however—and despite his own assertion that “[i]t takes a small-scale narrative (short story) to show the master’s hand” (Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 124)—Conrad’s stories tend to be long and richly detailed, and, as his creative imagination was constantly at work reshaping and augmenting his material, they invariably threatened to evolve into novellas and even full-scale novels. In fact, nearly all of his novels were initially envisioned as short stories. In his entire career, to the consternation of his publishers and his literary agent, he brought only one work of fiction in at the length he had projected (the 1897 short story “The Lagoon”), and he completed very few works by the times to which he had agreed. Writing either to a set length or to a deadline was anathema to this temperamental artist.

The three short stories included in this volume are generally recognized to be among Conrad’s finest examples of the genre. As is the case with much of his fiction, all three stories deal with the theme of the dangers of sea travel, a preoccupation that stems from his first career as a seaman. Further, all three stories demonstrate Conrad’s proclivity for transmitting information through the refracting lenses of specific subjectivities—in the case of “Youth” and “Amy Foster” (each of which is a frame-tale narrative, or a story within a story), multiple subjectivities. Yet despite these thematic and formal similarities, they also present Conrad in three different modes, and each displays different of his skills. While reading any one of these stories on its own is illuminating, for reasons that are detailed below, when read together they yield considerably more than the sum of their parts.

“Youth” (1898) consists of the reminiscences of the English seaman Charlie Marlow, Conrad’s most famous narrator, to a group of his friends, one of whom subsequently passes the story on to the reader. The outlook Marlow here recalls—in sharp contrast to that of the next of Conrad’s tales he will narrate, the broodingly pessimistic Heart of Darkness —is unencumbered by introspection and psychological conflict. Yet this is not to say that the story runs no deeper than the insights of its reckless, twenty-year-old protagonist (whose limited outlook the wistful, now forty-two-year-old Marlow scrupulously reproduces); on the contrary, “Youth” contains much more than its boy‘s-adventure-tale surface immediately discloses. The story Marlow recounts is of his ill-fated first voyage as second mate on an aged, poorly maintained ship that is supposed to deliver a load of coal from England to Siam (modern Thailand). After several months of false starts, crew changes, and long periods of waiting for repairs to be done, the barely seaworthy craft finally sets off. The comedy of errors that is the voyage culminates when, en route in the Indian Ocean, the cargo of coal catches fire. The crewmen make futile attempts to put out the fire and then are nearly killed in an explosion that compels them finally to abandon the now-sinking ship. Marlow is put in charge of one of the lifeboats with two other men, and, proud to assume his first “command,” he successfully leads his boat ashore, having had a memorable adventure and an initiation of sorts into manhood.

Although the story draws heavily on Conrad’s own experiences from 1881 to 1883 as second mate on the Palestine (here renamed the Judea), which would conclude with his first voyage to southeast Asia, his claims in the 1917 author’s note that the tale constitutes “a feat of memory” and “a record of experience” (p. 4) are decidedly inaccurate. For example, Marlow’s account of the acts of recklessness committed by those in charge is heavily embellished from the facts: Captain Beard’s decision to keep his crew on the clearly doomed Judea, Captain Nash’s decision to deliver mail rather than rescue Captain Beard and his crew, and Marlow’s own decision to place the lives of the two men in his lifeboat in jeopardy by remaining silent about a ship that could potentially rescue them simply so he can continue his romantic adventure—any of these actions would have been sufficient to lead to charges that would have stripped the perpetrator of his officer’s certificate. (A court of inquiry was convened in Singapore to investigate the loss of the Palestine, and no such findings were made.) Actually, the Palestine sank not far from shore, so even to the extent that those three decisions may correspond to the facts, the perils associated with them in the fictional version do not reflect the real circumstances. Rather attached to the myths he had created of his maritime career, as well as to his honor, Conrad was not pleased when, in 1922, this fact was unearthed and publicized.

What is perhaps the story’s most interesting departure from the facts, however, was hardly a secret: the recasting of the Polish Conrad as the Englishman Marlow. Further, it is not only the author who is reinvented as an Englishman. Whereas the group with whom Conrad actually served on the Palestine could hardly have been of more international composition—although the captain and several of the crew were English, there were also men from Australia, Norway, Ireland, and the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts—the courageous, dutiful seamen of the Judea are all English; they are Liverpool men who, Marlow affirms, have “the right stuff” (p. 24). In fact, the story’s chief thematic preoccupation is with what is represented, in highly traditional terms, as a uniquely English sort of virtue that seafaring provides the opportunity for actualizing. This tendency is epitomized in Marlow’s explanation for why the crew have conducted themselves with exemplary honor and steadfastness under the most trying of circumstances:

[I]t was something in them, something inborn and subtle and everlasting.