Conrad mined his life for material, but chafed at being called a “writer of the sea.” Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

In March, 1893, John Galsworthy—a product of Harrow and Oxford who had recently passed the English bar exam—was boarding the passenger ship Torrens, in Port Adelaide, when he noticed a small man with black hair boisterously loading cargo. In a letter home, a month into the voyage, he described “a capital chap,” Polish, somewhat odd-looking, with “a fund of yarns on which I draw freely.” Galsworthy’s sister credited this encounter with turning him away from the law. By early 1897, Galsworthy had assembled a book of short stories, and his Polish friend, who had engineered a midlife career change of his own from British seaman to English novelist, under the name Joseph Conrad, was writing to Edward Garnett, who worked as a publisher’s reader—a sort of grand scout—asking him to look out for a manuscript by “my literary! friend.”

Mostly, though, the favors travelled in the other direction. For the next couple of decades, Galsworthy served as Conrad’s consigliere—lobbying the Royal Literary Fund (“No living writer of English, to my mind, better deserves support”), fielding Conrad’s queries about his son’s education (“I am sending you the prospectus to look at”), playing “ ‘in between’ man” during a dispute with the agent J. B. Pinker (“Conrad asks me to ask you to write to him”). One of Galsworthy’s greatest acts of service came in 1913, after the publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday invited Conrad to lunch, in London, and proposed purchasing his existing American copyrights and reprinting his books. Conrad welcomed the idea, but, fearing it wouldn’t come off, asked Galsworthy if he could write to his friend Alfred A. Knopf, the Doubleday, Page employee who, in Conrad’s words, had formulated “this plan of ‘taking me up.’ ”

Knopf was twenty years old and brimming with ideas for remedying the outrage that “a great writer” could fail to command “a large audience.” Among his promotional schemes was an illustrated pamphlet, a press release parading as an essay. On receiving word from Galsworthy, he sent Conrad an effusive letter along with an aging, error-strewn ten-page typescript entitled “Joseph Conrad,” which he had found somewhere and was gutting for information.

Conrad read the typescript carefully, and made numerous amendments and additions. The southern province of Poland, where he was born in 1857, was “Ukraine.” His father, Apollo, a poet and translator, and his mother, Ewa, had been exiled to Vologda, not Siberia, for their support of Polish nationalism. (Apollo had marked Conrad’s birth with a poem entitled “To My Son Born in the 85th Year of Muscovite Oppression.”) When he was orphaned, at the age of eleven, he was “taken care of by his mother’s brother.” Conrad’s first voyages, in his late teens, had been to the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean. Then he joined an English steamer—not a war vessel—bound for the Sea of Azov (not the Bosphorus). Where the “notes on me,” in his phrase, had mentioned “a trip to Pacific waters,” Conrad explained that after becoming a master in the English merchant marine—and a British citizen—he spent much of the eighteen-eighties in the East, organizing steamers out of Singapore, then commanding the bark Otago. The Torrens, he wrote, had been a sort of “swan-song.”

But Knopf wasn’t just asking for help with facts. He was granting Conrad a collaborative role in telling his own story—the selection of detail, the fixing of emphasis. In the finished pamphlet, which closely follows Conrad’s responses and his memoir, “A Personal Record” (Conrad sent Knopf a copy), his sea career is presented as virtually a hiatus between an eighteen-sixties childhood spent in prodigious feats of reading and the moment when he started writing “Almayer’s Folly” (1895). Even Conrad’s taste for the sea is pegged partly to a literary source—his father’s translation of Hugo’s “Toilers of the Sea,” which he read aloud, from beginning to end. A synopsis of Conrad’s life at sea that begins “He had been to the corners of the earth” culminates in “He had read widely in English and French.” Conrad objected to being defined as “the greatest sea-writer,” and Knopf instead celebrated a man who “has attained a distinction as a master of the art of fiction as great as that of any living writer.”

Thanks to Galsworthy’s intervention, Conrad became a best-selling Doubleday author, but Knopf quit the company soon afterward, leaving Conrad’s work with those who hadn’t been so closely coached. In 1916, Conrad received the galleys for a uniform edition of his work. Its name was “The Otago,” the emblem a sailing ship. Returning the pages to Doubleday, he explained that he wanted “to avoid all reference to the sea,” and added, “I am something else, and perhaps something more, than a writer of the sea—or even of the tropics.”

In a limited sense, Conrad was simply stating what he considered to be a fact. As he put it not long before his death, in 1924, and exaggerating only a little, “In the body of my work barely one tenth is what may be called sea stuff.” Things get a little shakier when you reach the bit about “the tropics.” With few exceptions, most notably his novel about anarchists in late-Victorian London, “The Secret Agent” (1907), his stories unfold in Asia, Africa, and South America. But then Conrad was really talking aesthetics, not arithmetic—and making, or not quite making, an argument about how he treated his settings.

It had taken him a little while to find his favored route to abstraction. In his great novella, “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ ” (1897), about a sailor who refuses to accept that he is dying, the material world—the sailors’ “forecastle,” the London streets—is solidly present and correct. As Alan H. Simmons explains in his new scholarly edition, part of Cambridge’s complete printing of Conrad’s works, the novelist distinguished between writers who treat the sea as simply “a stage” and writers in whose work the sea represents “a factor in the problem of existence.” “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ ” straddles the border. The ship is a setting as well as a symbol, a microclimate as well as a microcosm. But it’s possible to see Conrad chafing at the constraints of realist storytelling in his use of philosophical digression—and hinting at future priorities in the book’s final paragraphs, which shift from a collective viewpoint with moments of omniscience, a “we” that behaves like a “he,” to an unabashed first person: “I never saw one of them again.”

Next came the breakthrough—a startlingly original narrative voice that not only severed Conrad’s fiction from realism but questioned the idea of a consensual “reality.” In January, 1898, the month after “The Nigger” was published, Conrad wrote the story “Youth,” introducing the forty-two-year-old merchant seaman Charles Marlow, who recalls his maiden voyage to Eastern seas. Defined by his creator as “a mere device . . . a whispering ‘daemon,’ ” Marlow is more specifically a vehicle for exploring the perspectival nature of human affairs—the idea that, for example, the Indian Ocean has no stable essence or identity beyond the excitement it inspires in one excitable twenty-year-old sailor. Recalling the Judea, the bark on which he served as second mate, Marlow says that, to him, it was not “an old rattle-trap” but “the endeavour, the test, the trial of life.” Youth is what Marlow saw with and what he saw. Places tell us about the people who visit and inhabit them.

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Marlow doesn’t celebrate the role played by passion or prejudice in our descriptions of the world; it’s just something he acknowledges. In Conrad’s next Marlow story, “Heart of Darkness” (1899), set in an unnamed colony whose rulers talk exclusively in propagandist falsehoods, Marlow is the one person willing to call a rattletrap a rattletrap. Coming upon a group of natives labelled “enemies,” he identifies men who were “nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.” But bafflement is futile. The world has been rewritten in accordance with the white man’s vocabulary. What he says goes.