Heart of Darkness - Ed. Peters

Joseph Conrad, John G. Peters

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781460406618
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Heart of Darkness is based upon Joseph Conrad's own experience in the Congo; "it is, " as he remarks in his 1916 author's note to Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, "experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts." Unlike many other editions, this new edition of Conrad's most famous tale focuses on the time in which Conrad was himself in the Congo, while also exploring the differences between his reported experiences and their reshaping in fiction.

This edition includes an extensive selection of Conrad's correspondence and autobiographical writing, as well as contemporary accounts of the Congo from other writers. Contemporary reviews situate Heart of Darkness in its literary contexts.

Author’s Note¹

The three stories in this volume lay no claim to unity of artistic purpose. The only bond between them is that of the time in which they were written. They belong to the period immediately following the publication of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” [1897], and preceding the first conception of Nostromo [1904], two books which, it seems to me, stand apart and by themselves in the body of my work. It is also the period during which I contributed to “Maga”; a period dominated by Lord Jim [1900] and associated in my grateful memory with the late Mr. William Blackwood’s encouraging and helpful kindness.²

Youth was not my first contribution to “Maga.”³ It was the second. But that story marks the first appearance in the world of the man Marlow,⁴ with whom my relations have grown very intimate in the course of years. The origins of that gentleman (nobody as far as I know had ever hinted that he was anything but that)—his origins have been the subject of some literary speculation of, I am glad to say, a friendly nature.

One would think that I am the proper person to throw a light on the matter; but in truth I find that it isn’t so easy. It is pleasant to remember that nobody had charged him with fraudulent purposes or looked down on him as a charlatan; but apart from that he was supposed to be all sorts of things: a clever screen, a mere device, a “personator,” a familiar spirit, a whispering “daemon.”⁵ I myself have been suspected of a meditated plan for his capture.

That is not so. I made no plans. The man Marlow and I came together in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances which sometimes ripen into friendships. This one has ripened. For all his assertiveness in matters of opinion he is not an intrusive person. He haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of a tale I am never sure that it may not be for the last time. Yet I don’t think that either of us would care much to survive the other. In his case, at any rate, his occupation would be gone⁶ and he would suffer from that extinction, because I suspect him of some vanity. I don’t mean vanity in the Solomonian sense.⁷ Of all my people he’s the one that has never been a vexation to my spirit. A most discreet, understanding man….

… Heart of Darkness also received a certain amount of notice from the first;⁸ and of its origins this much may be said: it is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all kinds of spoil. This story, and one other, not in this volume,⁹ are all the spoil I brought out from the centre of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.¹⁰ More ambitious in its scope and longer in the telling, Heart of Darkness is quite as authentic in fundamentals as Youth. It is, obviously, written in another mood. I won’t characterise the mood precisely, but anybody can see that it is anything but the mood of wistful regret, of reminiscent tenderness.

One more remark may be added. Youth is a feat of memory. It is a record of experience; but that experience, in its facts, in its inwardness and in its outward colouring, begins and ends in myself. Heart of Darkness is experience too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck….

1917

J.C.

1 Youth (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), and The End of the Tether (1902) were the three tales that comprised Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (1902), to which Conrad added this “Author’s Note” for the 1917 second English edition of the collection.

2 “Maga” is a nickname for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a prominent Tory magazine (1817–1980) founded by William Blackwood (1776–1834), a Scottish publisher who also founded the publishing house William Blackwood and Sons in 1804. Conrad refers here to Blackwood’s grandson William Blackwood (1836–1912), who had headed the firm since 1879. William Blackwood and Sons published several of Conrad’s books, including Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories.

3 Conrad’s first contribution to Blackwood’s Magazine was “Karain: A Memory,” which appeared in the November 1897 issue and then later in Conrad’s Tales of Unrest (1898).

4 See p. 157, note 3.

5 An attending spirit and source of inspiration. See, for example, Curle (162), where he refers to Marlow as “Conrad’s familiar devil.”

6 HHD 114 suggests an echo of Shakespeare’s Othello 3.3.357: “Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!”

7 While Solomon comments on vanity in Proverbs (13.11, 21.6, 22.8, and 30.8), Conrad is specifically referring to Ecclesiastes 1.14: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

8 See Appendix C.

9 “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), see p. 157, note 1.

10 For more on Conrad’s experience in Africa, see Appendices B2–4, B11–14, and Appendix D.

I

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood¹ had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits.² A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend,³ and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.⁴

The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realise his work was not out there in the luminous estuary,⁵ but behind him, within the brooding gloom.

Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea.⁶ Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other’s yarns—and even convictions. The Lawyer—the best of old fellows—had, because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. The Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones.⁷ Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast.⁸ He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol.⁹ The Director, satisfied the anchor had good hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes¹⁰ was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.

And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.

Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, “followed the sea” with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror,¹¹ bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Dept-ford, from Greenwich, from Erith¹²—the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change; captains, admirals, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals” of East India fleets.¹³ Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway¹⁴—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”¹⁵

He was the only man of us who still “followed the sea.” The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow,—

“I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day.¹⁶ … Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine—what d’ye call ‘em?—trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries,¹⁷—a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too—used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read.¹⁸ Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here,¹⁹ no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death,—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here.²⁰ Oh yes—he did it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna²¹ by-and-by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes.²² Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him,—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

He paused.

“Mind,” he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower²³—”Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get and for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Joseph Conrad: A Brief Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• Abbreviations
• Heart of Darkness
• Author’s Note 1
• Appendix A: Maps
• Appendix B: Correspondence from and to Conrad
• Appendix C: Contemporary Reviews
• Appendix D: Autobiographical Writings by Conrad
• Appendix E: Contemporary Accounts of the Congo
• Works Cited and Bibliography