"Cliff Notes - Heart of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

mannered and, above all, an excellent sailor. The author would
later claim, rather romantically, that he got a scar on his left
breast fighting a duel.

Since the young man couldn't serve on another French ship
without becoming a French citizen, which would have entailed the
possibility of being drafted, he signed on at the age of 20 to
an English steamer. The year was 1878. For the next 16 years
he sailed under the flag of Britain, becoming a British subject
in 1886. Life in the merchant marine took him to ports in Asia
and the South Pacific, where he gathered material for the novels
he still--amazingly--didn't know he was going to write. His
depressive and irritable disposition didn't make sea life any
easier for him. He quarreled with at least three of his
captains, and he continued to suffer from periods of poor health
and paralyzing depression.

In 1888 Conrad received his first command, as captain of the
Otago, a small ship sailing out of Bangkok. It was grueling
journey: three weeks to Singapore owing to lack of wind, and
the whole crew riddled with fever; from there to Melbourne,
Australia, where he decided to resign the command and return to
England. The maddening calms of the voyage, and his
uncomfortable position as a stranger on his first command,
provided the inspiration 21 years later for the outlines of "The
Secret Sharer."

Back in England, Captain Korzeniowski (as he was still known)
wasn't able to find another command, and so through the
influence of relatives in Brussels he secured an appointment as
captain of a steamship on the Congo River: At the age of 9, he
had put his finger on the blank space in the middle of a map of
Africa and boasted, "when I grow up I shall go there"; at 32, he
was fulfilling a lifelong dream. But the dream quickly turned
into a nightmare. "Everything is repellent to me here," he
wrote from the Congo, "Men and things, but especially men." The
"scramble for loot" disgusted him; the maltreatment of the black
Africans sickened him; and as if that weren't enough, he
suffered from fever and dysentery that left his health broken
for the rest of his life. Though his experiences in Africa were
to form the basis of his most famous tale, Heart of Darkness, he
returned to England traumatized. His outlook, already gloomy,
became even blacker.

Though Captain Korzeniowski didn't know it, his sea career was
drawing to a close. In 1889 he had started a novel based on his
experiences in the East. He worked on it in Africa and on his
return, and in 1895 it was published as Almayer's Folly by
Joseph Conrad. (Years of hearing the British garble
"Korzeniowski" convinced him to put something they could