Joseph Conrad’s final months were especially tough. In November 1923 the writer declared himself a ‘crocky, groggy, tottery, staggery, shuddery, shivery, seedy, gouty, sorry’ wretch. The sculptor Jacob Epstein found him sad, jaded and ‘played out.’ ‘I haven’t been well for a long time’, Conrad wrote to a friend, ‘and strictly entre nous I begin to feel like a cornered rat.’ On 1 August 1924 he suffered a heart attack at his home in Kent, and a doctor and family members were summoned to his bedside. Two days later, his wife, Jessie, heard a cry in the adjoining room, followed by a crash. Conrad had died suddenly, and alone, aged 66.

A century on from Conrad’s death, his stories – the character-driven yarns set on high seas, the politically-charged dramas that play out on terra firma – still have the power to captivate, thrill, illuminate and provoke. Looking back over his work with his death in mind, we are reminded just how much of it is preoccupied with dying. In Heart of Darkness (1899), after Kurtz dies surrounded by death – shrunken severed heads on posts – Conrad’s fictional alter ego Marlow admits: ‘I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.’ In The Secret Agent (1907), the anarchist terrorist known as ‘the Professor’ wanders the streets of London with a bomb in his coat pocket, aware that he has one up on the authorities who ‘depend on life’ – ‘whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked.’ And in Under Western Eyes (1911), the Russian student Razumov infiltrates a group of violent revolutionaries and comes to realise that: ‘A man who resigns himself to kill need not go very far for resignation to die.’

It is perhaps unsurprising that death was a recurring feature of Conrad’s fiction, for it reared its head frequently throughout the author’s life. He first came close to it when he left Poland for Marseilles in 1878. It wasn’t long before he found himself in dire straits: shorn of prospects after failing to produce the correct paperwork to work onboard a ship bound for the French Antilles; deprived of funds after investing in a dubious affair off the coast of Spain; and blowing 800 francs in Monte Carlo. Lonely, ill, insolvent and depressed, Conrad resorted to drastic measures by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver. Fortunately, his uncle and guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski, travelled by train from Kyiv to pick up the pieces – paying his troubled nephew’s debts, suggesting new future plans for him and heading off gossip by spreading the word that he was wounded in a duel.

Death loomed large again in 1890 on the expedition Conrad made in the Congo. The conditions were challenging. On a 230-mile trek to Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), he was plagued by fatigue and mosquitos, and endured thick, torrid heat during the day and plunging temperatures at nights. While on the move, he passed corpses rotting in the sun. One of his terse diary entries reads: ‘another dead body lying by the path in an attitude of meditative repose.’ On a month-long trip upriver in a ‘tin-pot steamer’ (with one or two cannibals among the 30 crewmembers) Conrad witnessed widespread atrocities carried out by the Belgian administration. A recently appointed agent became gravely ill and died during the voyage. Then Conrad was felled by dysentery and malaria, which cut short his travels and his African adventure.

Conrad’s time in the Congo was short – only six months – but it was long enough to transform his outlook and permanently impair his health. From this point on he was routinely afflicted by bouts of sickness and despondency, some so severe they must have felt like miniature deaths. He worked in physical pain and under the darkest clouds, and was forever doubting his creative powers. He told a friend in 1899 that writing Lord Jim was akin to ‘piling crime upon crime: every line is odious like a bad action… I am like a man who has lost his gods’. Writing Nostromo pushed him to the brink of mental collapse. Under Western Eyes pushed him over the edge: after completing it in 1910 he suffered a total breakdown that left him unable to write for months and, in his words, ‘all of a shake’. As his biographer, John Stape, notes: ‘Conrad had quarrelled with the world and urgently needed an escape from gathering pressures. His breakdown was a way of finding this.’

Various other disasters compounded Conrad’s misery. He could never make ends meet and was constantly borrowing money to pay for everything from his son’s school fees and his wife’s medical bills to rent, coal and furniture for his house. He argued with, and was rejected by, someone he couldn’t afford to fall out with – one J.B. Pinker, his publisher and the source of his financial security. And he was deeply affected by the ‘never-ending sorrow’ unleashed by the Great War, to the extent that it prevented him from working. As he told a friend: ‘who can be articulate in a nightmare?’

At particularly low ebbs, Conrad would once again be afflicted by suicidal impulses. Some of his letters read like cries for help. ‘Really all these anxieties do drive me to the verge of madness – but death would be the best thing’, he told Pinker in 1902: ‘if one hadn’t wife & child I don’t know –’ In other despairing letters he talks of outside forces finishing him off. In 1908, still smarting from a negative review of his short story collection A Set of Six, he told one of his physicians: ‘My brain may be all right but as I have an unconquerable impression that it is going to pieces, the look out is not cheery. A sort of horrible disillusion with everything has mastered me or all but. I am still struggling feebly but I feel the net is over me, and the spear is not very far.’ One year later, he wrote to John Galsworthy – not asking for a loan, as was customary, but venting his frustration with writer’s block. ‘I wish sometimes I had remained at sea, which, had I honestly stuck to it, would no doubt be rolling now over my head.’

Not all of Conrad’s life was doom and gloom, just as not all his fiction was morbid. There is an argument to be made that he was happiest, and most at peace with himself, while out at sea – joyfully adrift, far from shore and the trials and responsibilities found there. His seafaring characters certainly are. There is a scene in the story ‘The Secret Sharer’ in which the protagonist, a captain, steps onto the quarter-deck of his ship at night as it heads towards the Malay Archipelago. At that moment, he says, ‘I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.’ That character’s creator also found ‘security’ at sea. But he achieved immortality on dry land.