Book Review: The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, by Maya Jasanoff (2017)

The paperback cover of The Dawn Watch, by Maya Jasanoff. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Maya Jasanoff’s 2017 book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, is a fascinating examination of Conrad’s major writings. Focusing on Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent, Jasanoff makes the argument that Conrad’s writings contain themes that speak deeply to our own era, as well as Conrad’s.  

Joseph Conrad had a fascinating life: born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in Berdychiv, in what was then the Russian Empire, and is now part of Ukraine. His parents were staunch Polish nationalists and were sent into exile by the Russian government. Jozef was 7 when his mother died, and just 11 when his father died. Sent to live with his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, Jozef dreamed of becoming a sailor, and he joined the French merchant marine at age 16.  

Korzeniowski eventually moved to England and joined the British merchant marine, becoming a British citizen and passing the master mariner examination—the highest examination level—in 1886. It would be nine more years before he published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, written in English, his third language. It was not much of a change to go from Jozef Konrad to the Anglicized pen name Joseph Conrad.  

Conrad had a unique viewpoint through which to view the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His career in the merchant marine had taken him to Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Congo, to name just a few of his journeys. Conrad was better traveled than perhaps any other writer of his era, and his novels were set throughout the world.  

During his lifetime, Conrad’s world was becoming more interconnected. One of the major concerns of his fiction is what happens when different societies and cultures comes into contact with each other. You could argue that Conrad was not sufficiently attuned to indigenous peoples, but it’s clear that he was critical of European imperialism and colonialism.  

The Dawn Watch is a good book, but it’s a little odd. It’s part biography, part literary examination, but it might not be enough of either part to satisfy readers. You’d better make sure you’ve read all four of the major works that Jasanoff discusses, as she will take you through painstakingly detailed plot summaries. Jasanoff spends too much time detailing the plot points, and not enough time analyzing what makes Conrad’s writing great. I suppose that I am the target audience for The Dawn Watch: I’ve read the four books by Conrad, but I haven’t read any biographies of him.  

The narrative is not chronological, which fits with Conrad’s own writings, as they often jump forwards and backwards in time, but in a biography, the non-linear approach is tricky. For example, The Secret Agent is discussed first in the book, when it actually comes last in the chronology of the four major works that Jasanoff discusses.  

Conrad did not write much about his own childhood, which makes sense, given how painful the losses of his parents must have been. While I was reading The Dawn Watch, I happened to page through a novel by Dick Francis, the British mystery writer. Francis wrote in the foreword to the novel that people often speculated about his relationship with his parents, because so often his characters had difficult family lives. Francis wrote that he had a good relationship with his parents and enjoyed a good relationship with his two sons. He wrote, and I’m paraphrasing here, that because he had such good family relationships, he was able to write about dysfunctional families in his fiction. If he would have had bad family relationships, it would have been too painful to write about. That made me think of Conrad: he probably didn’t write about his parents because it would have been difficult.  

Conrad’s sailing career bridged the time between sail and steam, and he clearly preferred the former, which was quickly becoming a relic of the past. Conrad lived his life in a middle zone: the Polish side of him pined for a country that did not exist, and the English part of him perhaps sensed that he would never be “truly” English. Perhaps it was this push and pull that made Conrad such a great writer—he understood the displacement that all of his characters in Nostromo felt, for example.  

Conrad’s trip as a captain up the Congo River in 1890 was awful, and it provided much of the inspiration for Heart of Darkness. After his return to England, Conrad was still plagued by nightmares and poor health. He wrote in a letter: “I am still plunged in densest night and my dreams are only nightmares.” (p.215)  

Jasanoff pinpoints Conrad’s clear vision about the horrors of colonialism and imperialism in this passage: “What made the difference between savagery and civilization, Conrad was saying, transcended skin color; it even transcended place. The issue for Conrad wasn’t that ‘savages’ were inhuman. It was that any human could be a savage.” (p.224-5) This is exactly the point of Heart of Darkness: that Kurtz has been corrupted, not by the Africans, but by power, by the whole corrupt system of colonialism and imperialism.   

The Dawn Watch is a fascinating glimpse into the life and times of Joseph Conrad. After I finished reading The Dawn Watch, I pulled out my old Encyclopedia Britannica to read the entry on Conrad. The end of the first paragraph struck me as a wonderful summation of his talents: “A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists.”  

Book Review: To-morrow, by Joseph Conrad (1902)

The Penguin Little Black Classics edition of To-morrow, by Joseph Conrad. (Originally published in 1902, this edition published in 2015.)

Author Joseph Conrad, pictured in 1904.

Joseph Conrad’s short story “To-morrow,” was first published in the pages of The Pall Mall Magazine in 1902. The following year it appeared in book form in the collection Typhoon and Other Stories. In 2015, Penguin Classics issued “To-morrow” as a stand-alone book in their “Little Black Classics” series. It seems somewhat silly to issue just one story on its own, especially as “To-morrow” is only 50 pages long, but I happened upon “To-morrow” at Half Price Books for 99 cents, and since I don’t have the story in any of my other Conrad books, I decided to buy it. 

“To-morrow” tells the story of Captain Hagberd, who moves to the seaport of Colebrook in the hope of being reunited with his son, whom the Captain has not seen in many years. The Captain is a widower, and his one friend is his next-door neighbor, Bessie Carvil, who takes care of her father, a boat-builder who has gone blind. 

The story is full of Conrad’s beautiful prose. He describes Bessie looking at Captain Hagberd: “She would look at her father’s landlord in silence—in an informed silence which had an air of knowledge, expectation, and desire.” (p.2)

After Captain Hagberd has been in Colebrook for a while, he stops speaking to the townspeople about when he thinks his son will be back. Conrad writes: “For all one could tell, he had recovered already from the disease of hope; and only Miss Bessie Carvil knew that he said nothing about his son’s return because with him it was no longer ‘next week,’ ‘next month,’ or even ‘next year.’ It was ‘to-morrow.’” (p.8-9) 

Captain Hagberd is convinced that his son will return tomorrow. He is continually optimistic, as he is always looking forward to the next day. “To-morrow” reminded me a bit of a Samuel Beckett play, with a character living in constant anticipation of the future, rather than living in the present. 

“To-morrow” is a superb story, and it highlights Conrad’s ability to craft an engaging tale.

Book Review: The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad (1907)

The paperback cover of the 1983 Signet Classics edition of The Secret Agent that I read. (The Secret Agent was originally published in 1907.)

Polish/British author Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924. He's probably thinking, "And how many classic novels have you written in your third language?"

Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent is a classic work of political intrigue. As the novel begins, it focuses on the hapless Adolf Verloc, a British citizen living in London who is actually a secret agent for an unnamed foreign government—most likely Russia. Verloc owns a shop that sells dirty books, and has a wife, Winnie, who is one of the most interesting characters in the novel. Verloc also supports Winnie’s mother and her younger brother, Stevie, who we would probably diagnose today as having some sort of learning disability. Verloc has contacts among London’s anarchists, and he informs on them to the government he works for. Verloc is called to the Embassy, where Mr. Vladimir, a new administrator, excoriates Verloc for his incompetence. Vladimir tells Verloc that he needs to prod his anarchist friends to carry out an attack, so that the British government will then crack down on civil liberties. Vladimir’s idea for a target is science, and what better scientific target than the Greenwich Observatory? Yes, the Prime Meridian! Greenwich Mean Time! The very house of the great god of science itself!

I’ll leave the plot summary there, so as not to spoil anything. The Secret Agent is a complicated book, with a narrative point of view that shifts as we enter numerous characters’ heads for a period of time. While the novel is told in the third person, there’s part of a paragraph at the beginning of Chapter Two that is in first person. It’s the only time the first person narrator intrudes, so it’s an odd little moment. 

Conrad’s writing is sharp and precise, as he delineates many characters, and their various ways of thinking. Conrad is able to get inside the heads of characters like the Professor, a radical anarchist who walks around with a bomb in his coat, ready to push the button if he’s ever cornered by the cops, and Chief Inspector Heat, who has nothing but contempt for the anarchists. 

Along the way, Conrad has many excellent quotes: “The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.” (p.76)

Another of my favorite quotes was this: “But Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise—at least not truly so. True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position.” (p.79) 

A piece of terse wisdom from Conrad emerges as he describes the Assistant Commissioner of police and his relentless drive to investigate: “We can never cease to be ourselves.” (p.102)

Joseph Conrad had a very interesting backstory, to put it mildly. He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in Berdychiv, in what is now the Ukraine. English was his third language, after Polish and French, and he didn’t start to learn English until he joined the British merchant marine in his twenties. Pretty impressive, as he is now considered one of the greatest novelists of the English language. After a 19-year marine career, Conrad published his first novel Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River in 1895, when he was thirty-seven years old. Conrad devoted himself to writing for the rest of his life, and he produced a substantial body of work that has proven to be highly influential, including the novella Heart of Darkness, and the novels Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes, among others. 

The Secret Agent is an excellent book, and quite a haunting one. Some of the events in the book were inspired by the 1894 death of Martial Bourdin, a French anarchist who accidentally blew himself up in Greenwich Park, close to the Observatory. It’s unknown what Bourdin’s ultimate goal was, but it may have been an attack on the Observatory. In a 1920 “Author’s Note,” to The Secret Agent, Conrad wrote of Bourdin’s actions as “a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own logical processes.” The Secret Agent is Joseph Conrad’s attempt to explain the logical processes of this kind of perverse unreason.