"Cliff Notes - Lord Jim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

a little too intense for the young man to handle. Ultimately he
found himself desperately in debt, and one evening he invited a
creditor to tea and shot himself before the man arrived. In
early 1878 an urgent telegram reached Bobrowski saying his
nephew was wounded and needed money. Bobrowski went to
Marseilles and was relieved to find his nephew's health, if not
his pocketbook, in reasonably good shape. Young Conrad was
handsome, robust, and well-mannered, and he had become an
accomplished, though impoverished, sailor. (The author would
later romanticize the bullet mark on his left breast into a
dueling scar.)

Since Conrad could no longer remain in the French merchant
marine without becoming a French citizen--entailing the peril of
conscription into the French military--later in 1878 he signed
on an English freighter. He served with the British merchant
marine for the next 16 years, becoming a British subject in
1886. Conrad sailed to Asia and the South Pacific, where he
collected the raw material for novels that--amazingly--he still
had no ambition of writing. However, his irritable and gloomy
disposition didn't work to his advantage. He had quarrels with
at least three of his captains, and periods of poor health and
terrible depression continued to immobilize him.

During the 1880s, Conrad made voyages to such Asian ports as
Singapore, Bangkok, and Samarang (on Java). All three have
their place in Lord Jim: Singapore as the unnamed city where
the Patna inquiry is held; Bangkok as one of the ports where Jim
works as a water-clerk (and gets into a fight); and Samarang as
another of these ports, and the home of Marlow's friend Stein.
On one of his voyages, Conrad was injured during a storm, much
as Jim is in Chapter Two, and was laid up in the same Singapore
hospital where Jim recuperates. After his recovery, he signed
up as mate on the steamship Vidar, which traveled around the
islands of the Malay Archipelago. It was in these exotic
islands that Conrad found the raw material for his first two
novels, Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. He
transformed one Borneo locale into the fictional Patusan, where
the last half of Lord Jim is set.

By 1888 he had risen to the rank of captain, and he received his
first command on a small ship sailing out of Bangkok. On his
return to England, he was unable 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. But
once he reached Africa, Conrad fell prey to fever and dysentery
that left his health broken for the rest of his life. Though
his experiences there 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.