Conrad's life, explored in a spate of biographies, is also distinctive for its drastic fracturing. Several times exiled, with major changes of scene, nationality, and language, he seems to have suffered from a powerful sense of loss and alienation. This may have encouraged his emphatic pessimistic skepticism. Though writing in a time and culture often characterized as optimistic and affirmative, Conrad displays senses of defeat shading into a cosmic malignancy and an anxiously heavy ideological conservativism. With his exilic sense of foreignness—including the English he wrote in, learned relatively late in life (after Polish, German, and French)—he inclined to elaborately self-conscious writing and tendentious moralizing. A pervasive sense of anxiety about his roles, and other psychological involutions relating to considerable physical illness and repeated periods of great depression, may have further encouraged this elaborateness of manner and a rather un- British ideological insistence. Yet seeking popular acceptance in a foreign land and language, Conrad yoked ornate narrative methods with sentimental tales, and lush descriptive rhetoric with harshly narrow moral reflections. The resulting ideological melodramas have had considerable influence on major later novelists, such as Graham Greene and William Faulkner. Conrad's exotic scenes, stereotyped romantic figures, heavily adjectival poetic rhetoric, and moralistic male codes appear to have greatly influenced many other writers.
