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Hi, everybody. Dominic Sambrook from The Rest is History here.
Now, as you can probably tell from the noise of the pool I am joined by friend of the show Anthony Scaramucci who is on his island surrounded by the luxurious trappings of wealth he is of course the host of the rest is politics US and Anthony and I have a very special announcement on Sunday the 30th
of March Anthony is over in the UK and we have decided to do a live show together at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in london haven't we anthony we have you know thank god i'm not british because the brits actually admire my american a riveste attitude about life okay but in any event okay it'll be the first
time on stage with dominic i am very excited we're going to be doing a show on u .s political history called the rest is assassinations from lincoln to jfk but dominic and i both know on the 30th of march 2025 it's the 44th anniversary of the attempted assassination on ronald reagan so there's not only
assassinations here which are terrible but there's an attempted assassination several of them dominic right throughout u .s history and so uh we're excited to go through this and what the impacts were on american history and global history right and there's so many great stories so obviously JFK.
You and I disagree about JFK because I of course think it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone and you think differently.
But there are other stories.
You mentioned attempted assassinations.
So for example, FDR.
FDR was almost shot before his inauguration in 1933 and that's an attempted assassination that really could have changed the course of history because no FDR.
Does the United States still enter the Second World War?
Does the story of the 20th century play out completely differently?
So there is so much to talk about and I'm really, really looking forward to doing it what are you looking forward to most anthony well i mean all of that but if i want to i want to delve into a little bit of the secret service and some of the men in that service clint hill is still alive he was riding
alongside of jackie and john kennedy on the 22nd of november of 1963 and we'll talk about what he saw we'll talk about what other agents have written about recently and of course now that donald trump is releasing the jfk assassination files i think there'll be a lot to talk about there i think people
coming to the show are going to learn things that have never been said or heard before so the listeners if you're not excited by that i don't know what would excite you frankly so the good news is pre -sale tickets are available this friday the 21st of february from 10 o 'clock in the morning exclusively
for our rest is history club members you will get an email with the link before the sale begins and if you're not a member of the rest is history club just go to the rest is history .com to sign up and to get your email with the link general sale for this event will be open to the public on monday the 24th
of february at 10 a .m uk time we'll send out the link to our mailing list in the morning as well as posting it on the rest is history and the rest is politics us's social media feeds so if you're a patriotic brit who loves the special relationship if you're an american living in london or if you're an american who just
loves getting on planes across the atlantic to see the very highest quality entertainment we absolutely expect to see you there in the west end on sunday the 30th of march and to tell you the truth what i'm really hoping is that on the night, Anthony will finally reveal the truth behind the JFK assassination.
Well, I'm probably going to Guantanamo for many reasons, Dominic, but that would be probably the top one.
But anyway, we hope to see you there.
I think you'll learn a lot.
There'll be a lot of insight we'll provide and also provide great context on American and British and global history.
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the brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress and kurtz's life was running swiftly too ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time anything approaching the change that came over his features i have never
seen before and hope never to see again.
Oh, I wasn't touched.
I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent.
I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of an intense and hopeless despair.
Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge.
He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision.
He cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath.
The horror. The horror.
That was Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, first published in Blackwoods Magazine in 1899, and one of the most celebrated novellas, not just in English, but full stop, ever written.
We are not, the rest is literature, but this is a book that quite aside from its incredible literary value, is also well worth doing in a history podcast for reasons that we have been touching on, Dominic, throughout the series that we've just finished about the belgian congo because at the heart of darkness
is all the history all the horror as kurtz might put it as he dies that we have been talking about in those three episodes absolutely tom yes hi everybody so um heart of darkness conrad's great novel or novella has kind of um overshadowed the series that we've done on the congo yeah it would be weird
not to have an episode talking about it because it's arguably one of the most influential works of literature written in the last 120 years or so we are not the rest is literature but purely in a literary sense in a kind of purely literary cultural sense it's an enormously important book it's a it's
a brilliant example of literary modernism so the prose is very you know it's dreamlike it's like a hallucination it's very overwrought there are shifts in time narrators within the rators and the effect of all this is when you're reading it it's quite a short book isn't it tom but you feel unsettled
the whole time there's a kind of sense of anxiety and it's very influential so t .s elliott he the great poet he loved uh conrad's heart of darkness he had a poem called the hollow men that begins with a quotation later on in the book mr kurtz he dead and that passage that you read at the beginning ending
with those famous words the horror the horror um he wanted that didn't he is his in his original epigraph for his great poem the wasteland well i mean the thing the thing about heart of darkness is it's incredibly quotable um we have been quoting it throughout this series and things like the horror of the horror or mr
kurtz he dead i mean elliot who who has a kind of magpie eye for brilliant snatches of phrasing i mean it's not surprising that he would fix on it.
And I wonder also, The Wasteland is a poem about the First World War, if you like, the heart of darkness that had been revealed within European civilization.
And I think that there is a sense in which one of the reasons that Heart of Darkness has the status it does is it slightly has the quality of prophecy.
Because that heart of darkness that is located in belgium congo turns out to have been a prophecy of the darkness that will engulf europe in 1914 yeah i completely agree with you tom i think it's a really good point i think um you can argue the heart of darkness prefigures so much of the the kind of cultural
commentary of the 20th century about and we'll get on to this in the second half yeah about man's capacity for evil um phatic you might call it exactly easing into the future and seeing the horrors that await now if you're not interested in literature at all you may be thinking well so what who cares
i mean here's a here's a good um answer to that heart of darkness i would argue is by far the preeminent cultural representation of western imperialism particularly in africa so king solomon's minds i think it's heart of darkness now so we did we i think heart of darkness and king solomon's minds are kind
of the polar opposites aren't they yeah they really King Solomon's Minds is the journey into the heart of Africa that is swashbuckling, that is ultimately an optimistic story, that is jolly, that never questions, I think, ultimately, the right of the adventurers to be there.
This is an adventure that goes horribly wrong and it's very much about the dark side of that.
And also it's the fact that you keep expecting adventure type themes to kick in and they never quite do, or if they do, in a distorted and hallucinatory way.
And to read them as a pairing, I think, is, I mean, really fascinating.
I couldn't agree more.
I couldn't agree more.
And actually, rather liking Solomon's Mines, Heart of Darkness has had a massive cultural footprint.
So everything from video games like the Far Cry series, which basically riffs on Heart of Darkness, to most famously Francis Falkopoulos' film, Apocalypse Now, which came out in 1979 and transposes it to Vietnam War.
and Apocalypse Now, even the making of it turned out to be a kind of riff on Heart of Darkness because they made a film about the making of it called Hearts of Darkness and very famously Francis Ford Coppola said about the making of Apocalypse Now, we had access to too much money, too much equipment
and little by little we went insane.
Yeah, the horror, the horror.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And then there's a third dimension I think of this book that makes it incredibly interesting And that is that initially, in the first few decades after its publication, it was seen as a book that was very critical of imperialism.
It was seen as the great literary assault on the civilising mission.
Because am I right that imperialism is a word that is coming into common use exactly at the time when Conrad is writing this?
Exactly. 1890s, 1900s is the high point of the discourse, as it were, of imperialism, both pro and anti.
But now, in the 21st century, Heart of Darkness is seen not as an attack on imperialism by a lot of critics, but as an example of it, as a book that is fundamentally imperialistic and, above all, very racist.
And it's probably the one book that has come to symbolise the attack on the Western canon, I suppose you might call it, or the criticism of the Western canon.
so if you're at all interested in what people think about imperialism europe in the world literary history you know cultural history in the last century heart of darkness is at the center of a lot of those kind of debates isn't it so we'll get into a lot of these issues particularly in the second half
but in the first half i think we should set out two things the first of all is who is joseph conrad and what's he doing in the congo at all to inspire this book And secondly, you know, what is the book about for people who don't know?
So just very, very quickly, very swiftly to summarise, if you've never read the book, it's the story of a sea captain called Marlow.
He takes a steamboat up the Congo and he's looking for a brilliant agent of this, what appears to be a concession company called Mr.
Kurtz, who's a great ivory trader.
He's up there in the interior and he seems to have lost his marbles.
and when Marlow gets there he finds out that all kinds of stuff has been going on yeah all kinds of stuff has been going on we'll unpick all that a bit later on now Conrad was asked what's the book about and he said Heart of Darkness is experience pushed a little and only very little beyond the actual
facts of the case in other words you really want to understand what it's about it's a true story it's a true story exaggerated so it's autobiographical but it's also a portrait of a real political situation exactly and the political situation is what we've been talking about in the previous three episodes
exactly so let's start with conrad himself his name actually isn't i mean joseph conrad's fiction is full of kind of halls of mirrors and you know stories within stories his name actually isn't joseph conrad his name is joseph theodore conrad Korzyanovsky and he was born to a polish noble family an impoverished
family in what's now Ukraine in 1857 and this was a sort of very rural world that had once been part of the eastern borderlands of Poland and has now been swallowed up by the Russian Empire his mother Ava died when he was seven his father who had the brilliant name Apollo who was a poet I love that and a yeah
Yeah, and a Polish revolutionary.
So he's a tremendous man, Apollo Kozheniewski.
He died when Józef was 11.
So he's brought up by relatives.
He's very bored at school.
He's obviously, you know, he's not in the best of form.
And he says he wants to go to sea.
He wants to go away to sea.
Because apparently, Dominik, I read that this in part was because his father had been a kind of political prisoner.
That's right. And as such, as the son of a political prisoner, he was liable for a possible 25 year term of conscription into the Russian army.
And so that's one of the reasons why he decides to go abroad.
And I suppose he's specific.
He ends up in Marseille, doesn't he?
And France is the great refuge for Polish refugees in this period.
If you want to become a sailor, you go to France and Marseille would be the obvious place.
Exactly, exactly right.
So in 1874, his relatives club together and they get together the money to send him to, what is he, 1617?
To send him to Marseille to join the French Merchant Marine.
it's a weird thing that he shoots himself yeah in the chest but it seems to have been a little bit performative yeah as I guess so much is in his fiction I think that's absolutely right and I think he's Conrad is always a very I think a troubled man is too strong but he is a man with a deep sense a deep
melancholy to him I think throughout his life he sails all over the world Caribbean, South America and then he goes up in the world he joins the British Merchant Marine and he stays there for until 1889 and he has all kinds of adventures all over the world he goes to australia he goes to bangkok he
goes to india singapore and you can see a lot of that reflected in his fiction lots of tales of adventure in the south seas and all this yeah and this is the thing about him is that he is riffing on the same themes as kind of boys own adventurers as you know rider haggard all this kind of ripping yarns
and yet they're always stranger and darker and more hallucinatory than any of those they are indeed exactly so there is something when his books first came out people reviewed them as kind of slightly sea stories you know classic tales of the sea but a bit weirder than usual and only over time did people
kind of work out exactly what he was doing so at this point he's still using the name Kozhyniowski English is his third language I mean this is the amazing thing he starts writing in the late 1880s he writes his stories in English but I mean imagine writing in your third language he seems not to have spoken
English at all before he was 21.
I mean, it's just unbelievable that he learns it so fluently that he can write some of the masterpieces of English prose.
Although I gather, did you see the comment on Conrad's English by Ford Maddox Ford?
His words absolutely exact as the meaning, but his accentuation so faulty that he was at times difficult to understand.
People have said the same about us.
I think specifically, Tom, they've said it about you, to be fair I think occasionally you as well I accept maybe maybe me more often than you someone who speaks English like it's his third language exactly um but Conrad as a man he's very reserved he's very sensitive he has this deep sense of irony
and kind of skepticism that runs through everything he does very skeptical about human nature he is intensely in many ways intensely conservative indeed quite anti -democratic in many ways when people sometimes say you can't create great art or great literature you know if you're of a very reactionary
disposition i think conrads is one of those people who probably proves that comprehensively wrong anyway 1889 he's been off in the south seas he comes back to london he starts writing his first novel almayer's volley then at the beginning of 1890 he goes for the first time back to his homeland ukraine
and it doesn't go well he doesn't get on with his family when they're there you know you can imagine well imagine he's probably built it up in his mind about what it would be like it's very disappointing because he's quite aloof and because he's had all these strange experiences he doesn't quite fit
well also he's got sea legs now hasn't he you think he's wobbling all over the place in the well yes but i mean he's in the middle surrounded by land surrounded by the great eurasian land mass he must do you think he's got a yearning for the sea i don't know maybe i'm being over romantic possibly because when he
gets back and it's disappointing the first thing he does is to go to sea now before he'd gone to ukraine he'd been talking to a company in brussels a belgian shipping firm about joining one of their ships and he's actually already signed a contract now this company people we reminded of all these companies
from the episode we did about ed morrell all these steamship companies with concessions and contracts this company is called the société anonime belge pour le commerce du congo so it's handling the commerce from the upper congo And it had been founded a year earlier to export ivory and rubber from the interior.
So it runs a steamer service and it has a series of trading stations of its own.
And why does Conrad sign up with this company?
Well, obviously, one reason is he needs the money.
He's effectively, you know, a mercenary.
He will take the money to go on various voyages all over the world.
But as his great biographer, Zegiswaw Naidah, who's a Pole, his book is quite hard to get hold of.
This is your third language, Polish?
Yeah, exactly. Exactly, Tom.
Excellent. Fluent pronunciation there.
Thank you. It's not like I'd been preparing for hours.
Naida points out that Conrad had always dreamed of Africa.
As a boy in Ukraine, aged about nine, he had pointed his finger at a map where there was a blank space, as there was in those days, and he had said, when I grow up, I'd like to go there.
Now, he gives that line to Marlow, doesn't he, in Heart of Darkness.
And there's no reason to doubt that Conrad himself thought like that.
Anyway, there's also no reason to believe, by the way, that he doubts the civilizing mission because he actually writes about this in letters to his uncle at the same time.
Anyway, May 1890, the 10th of May, he boards the ship, the S .S.
Ville de Maceo, of Bordeaux, for this journey that his biographer, Naida, says is the most traumatic journey of his life.
They go off down the coast of Africa.
Even before they get to the Congo, one passenger says to him, you go to the congo that's an absolute nightmare that's not what you want to hear is it yeah he says basically everybody who goes there they either die or they come home early because it's so terrible and and conrad actually says and i quote
i'm a polish nobleman cased in british tar doesn't get better than that no that's that's the best thing you can possibly be so anyway about a month later they reach the capital of uh the congo free state boma so it's Just 50 miles inland.
And here, if people remember from the previous episodes, the various complicated ways you have to move up the river.
Because of the rapids and all that malarkey.
So he gets a steamer upriver to Matardi, and Matardi is the last point before the rapids where you have to get off.
Now, at Matardi, he meets somebody that we talked about on Monday.
And this is somebody who we're going to be hearing about from John Banville in next week's bonus episode, and this is Roger Casement.
He said, they're a British consul, a great Irish patriot, an amazing character.
And Conrad really took to Casement, didn't he?
He said, it's a great pleasure to have met him.
He thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic.
And there's a lot of talk that you find about Conrad and Casement and what they did.
Conrad himself seems to have misremembered what they did.
He said, we shared a room together.
They undoubtedly didn't because Casement wasn't there for a lot of the time.
but they definitely spent a lot of time together and they probably made trips together to see some of the local villages to find porters and things to carry all conrad's stuff so i think it's probably at this point that conrad starts to see that some of the terrible scenes that we've quoted in the previous
episodes so for example tom you read that passage about the six blokes with baskets of earth on their heads do you want to remind us of that some of the horror yeah so um i could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope, each had an iron collar on his neck and all were connected
together with a chain whose bite swung between them, rhythmically clanking.
And then comes to a grove and sees people there dying, black shapes, black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.
And of course, the justification that Leopold is giving for this effectively slave labour is that it's progressive slave labour, that it will enable the introduction of Western technology, steam trains, all of that, and then it will ease the burden on the porters.
But there's a kind of very ironic spin on this in Heart of Darkness, because when Marlow gets to the top of the rapids to look for his steamer, he finds that it's been sunk.
And he has to dredge it up.
And they haven't got the bit, the bolts that would enable it to be put together.
Yeah, rivets. The rivets.
You have the sense of even the claims to kind of technological superiority Minority are a kind of sham.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely there are.
I mean, what does Conrad say?
He said at one point his book was, when he was pitching it to Blackwoods, he said it was a portrait of inefficiency and incompetence in Africa.
It's like getting a train in Britain.
He's on a rail replacement bus, that's what he's on.
So he hangs around a casement for a couple of weeks and then they've got the porters and he's ready to start overland from Matadi.
And he wrote a diary in English in his third language which gives you some sense of what it was like mosquitoes at night when the moon rose heard shouts and drumming in distant villages passed a bad night no water camped on an exposed hillside near a muddy creek no shade tent on a slope sun heavy wretched
night miserably cold no sleep mosquitoes and on they go and at one point he definitely passes a skeleton tied to a post which is a very imagine seeing that when you yeah so that's a sign you know remember conrad is very very very well traveled i mean admittedly most of his travels have been at sea so he
hasn't often gone inland in the places he's visited that's so interesting isn't it because we talked earlier about how to begin with for europeans africa is all about the coast that they didn't go inland that they just seemed a waste of effort and perhaps in that sense conrad is kind of emblematic of the transition that European adventurers
make from experiencing Africa along the coasts and going inland.
He's kind of compressing that entire history into his own person.
Yeah, I think that's a fair point.
And the deeper he goes inland, the more the violence becomes apparent to him, perhaps violence that you don't see to the same extent on the coast.
It's hard to say. So at one point, he sees a government official beating porters, blows with sticks raining hard stopped it in other words he intervenes to to break it up the 2nd of august he arrives at leopoldville now kinshasa the capital of the democratic republic of congo and there as you mentioned
in the novel his proposed steamer has been damaged so he has to transfer to another steamer which is called with sublime irony the hua de belge you often read that he's the captain he's not the captain there's a guy called koch a dane who is the captain and conrad is going to be the number two and we
know from his correspondence he's already disillusioned because his uncle tadeusz writes to him at this point and says don't walk out on the contract you'll lose all your money and you'll get a bad reputation among the companies as somebody who can't be relied upon so he's clearly been writing home
and saying i'm like this is terrible i'm actually thinking of breaking my contract and his biographers think this is probably because he's fallen out with the company manager who he's going to have to give a lift to so he's been traveling with him and the company manager is a belgian called camille
del commune and he really is in heart of darkness because there's the company manager in heart of darkness who is modeled directly on this bloke del commune and who whose relationship to kurtz and his plans for kurtz is a kind of twist isn't there exactly so on they go up river um they go very quickly
they're covering a thousand miles in a month i mean these don't mess around these steamers and on board the ship there's captain coch there's conrad there's a mechanic from belgium there are 25 african crewmen del commune and three other company agents and we know from traders accounts that the passage
up river it's very lonely you don't pass many other ships The countryside is desolate.
There are burned out villages.
The people are hiding in the bush, depredations of the forced public.
And so as Dr. Juswath Naider says in his biography, the atmosphere of Heart of Darkness clearly is inspired by this kind of oppressive, claustrophobic isolation that Conrad must have felt on this boat going up river with just the silence and the emptiness.
And we mentioned this before, but there are kind of prefigurings of The Lost World and all those novels and then films where people go back into a prehistoric past and the sense of silence and desolation preceding some appalling revelation of some saurian bursting out of the jungle or something.
I mean, Heart of Darkness is much more sophisticated than that, but you sense some terror, some horror is waiting.
Definitely do. Definitely.
So on the 1st of September, they get to the last navigable point on the river.
This is what's then called Stanley Falls.
Now it's called Kisangani.
And this is basically now in the heart of Central Africa.
And Conrad wrote later, I said to myself with awe, this is the very spot of my boyish boast.
What an end to the idealized realities of a boy's daydreams so he's this is the point that he pointed to on the map all those years ago and he's got there and the the sense of not just crushing disappointment but more than that dare i say the horror of what he has seen like musk arriving in mars that wasn't
a comparison expected to be honest right um they stay there stanley falls for about a week and they pick up the local agent who's a guy called Klein a Frenchman George Antoine Klein he's in his late 20s we know very little about him he had terrible dysentery and they decide well we're going to take
this guy Klein back so then they turn back now Klein died on the return journey he died after a couple of weeks and his story is clearly the model in some way for the story of Kurtz and Kurtz when Conrad first you know start sat down and started writing the book he was called Klein but apart from that there
is nothing to connect them there's no sense this guy Klein was a madman a bad guy a guy who'd stared into the depths of the human soul he's just a French bloke who's got terrible dysentery but here is the sort of the the germ of the idea of Mr.
Kurtz I guess anyway they get back to kinshasa after about three weeks and here conrad writes to a friend of his back in belgium called marguerite porodowska and he says to her i've actually now got terrible dysentery and fever and i'm incredibly miserable he says i regret having come here i regret
it bitterly i find everything repugnant especially he says the people and he's talking about the europeans and i am repugnant to them too from the director in africa who has taken the trouble of telling a good many people of his intense dislike of me down to the lowest mechanic.
Basically, everybody hates me.
Now, the interesting thing is he never mentions the Congo itself and the violence in the Congo as a reason for his unhappiness.
And do you think that's, he's burying it?
Well, possibly because Sajiswath Naidah says in his book, and I think this does make sense.
He says he thinks that Conrad had basically failed to hide how unhappy and how shocked he was with what he could see and that the other people the del comune the other agents saw that and took against him he was kind of lily livid liberal yeah that he basically is spoiling their fun and he's judging
them and you can see therefore it would sort of make sense that they would find him repugnant because he says he's a walking rebuke to their project so he's definitely ill for the next few weeks um and then he vanishes so conrad vanished the paper trail disappears and he vanishes from sight as neither
puts it the image becomes confused blurred obscure which is actually very appropriate given the way conrad writes and actually the next time we come across him he's back he's in brussels in january 1891 on.
And then he's next time we see him after that, he's in London in February.
There's no diary entries.
There are no letters.
There is nothing. And it's as though I think whatever has happened in those last days or weeks in the Congo, he wants to forget it, whatever it is.
So it's a kind of epistolary heart of darkness.
It is indeed. We don't know.
And I think it's plausible that it's during those last weeks that he really reaches his verdict on the congo free state yeah when he attains what he called the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration and there
are sort of fragments in later letters and whatnot that give a sense of what he thought so in 1903 just a few years later he told his friend cunningham graham a founder tom of the scottish national party so a man with whom you'd have a lot of uh You'd have a lot to talk about.
He said to Cunningham Graham that Leopold and his free state agents were, and I quote, a gigantic and obscene beast.
So that's fascinating, isn't it?
Because again, we're talking about this idea of going into a prehistoric landscape.
That is the beast. That is the beast.
And he actually ends a letter to Cunningham Graham saying, you know, if you want to find out about this, you should talk to my mate Roger Casement.
He could tell you things, things I've tried to forget, things I never did know.
You know, there's this kind of sense of like the stuff at the periphery of his vision, half glimpsed, half understood that's going on.
And he doesn't really want to think about it because it's so terrible.
And I know we'll come to this, but there is something kind of the Freudian idea of a repressed memory, a darkness that even as you try and repress it, it is kind of bleeding out into your dreams and your fantasies.
Absolutely. brilliant the book absolutely has that flavor so for the next three years Conrad goes back to the merchant marine he sails around and then in 1894 he retires from the sea and he devotes himself to writing and he writes a couple of novels and he writes lots of stories in magazines like black
woods on the strand famously where Sherlock Holmes started and in the middle of December 1898 he starts his third piece for black woods magazine and he says to the publisher it's a narrative about a bloke is on a river in Central Africa I'm thinking of calling it the heart of darkness but the narrative
is not at all gloomy which is clearly I mean that's not true and he's he obviously doesn't want the publisher to say yeah not for us mate yeah it's like us with Theo trying to persuade him to do an episode it's really upbeat and jolly and people will love it full of fun and Conrad says to him the theme
is the criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling civilising work in Africa now interestingly this is Conrad's own thing he's not he's not been inspired by E .D.
Murrell's campaign or anything like that because that hasn't even started yet hasn't begun has it no nowhere near so it's obviously something that he feels he has to do or wants to do and it's presumably the time where everyone still thinks it's brilliant and it's civilizing and hooray exactly now the most
shocking thing for people like us tom is how much conrad is being paid blackwood's paid him 60 pounds for this so in relative income terms that's about almost 50 000 pounds today which is a sign of how well this kind of writing was paid back then.
And how highly rated Conrad is, I assume.
I mean, he's not Conan Doyle, I accept, but at this point he's not that highly rated.
There's just so much money in short stories and journalism, far, far more than there is today.
Great days. Yeah, great days.
So he turns it round by the 6th of February.
He delivers 38 ,000 words to Blackwell's, which I think is quite slow.
I think it's pretty fast.
That's three weeks' work.
That is three weeks' work.
Come on, mate. Anyway, it's published in February, March and April 1899.
So, just before we go to the break, for people who are not familiar with the book, who need reminding, what has he produced?
Most accounts that you read say that it's narrated by this guy, Marlow.
That's actually not true.
Marlow is not the narrator.
It's Russian dolls, isn't it?
Yeah, there are narratives within narratives.
So basically, the narrator is part of a group of people who are on this ship, the Nelly, off Gravesend in the Thames.
So in England. And night is falling and they're all just hanging around on this boat but they've got to wait there for the turn of the tide, haven't they?
They can't go home yet.
And I think it makes it clear that the narrator in some way is to be equated with Conrad because this hanging around on a ship on the Thames is exactly what Conrad was doing And he did it with kind of various mates, one of whom was a company director, one of whom is an accountant, one of whom is a solicitor.
And that maps exactly onto the description of the three people with Marlow in the boat.
Yeah. And Marlow is kind of leaning against the mast, just sort of sitting down and leaning against the mast.
He's a sort of weatherbeaten sort of sea dog, you know, hard faced sea dog character.
He kicks off suddenly.
They're all just sitting around in a desultory way as night is falling.
And he doesn't talk about the Congo.
He talks about Britain.
And he says, very famously, and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.
And then he starts musing.
You talked about this, Tom, a long time ago when we did an episode about Roman London.
I think we opened with this passage.
He says, what must it have been like to be a Roman in Britain?
The feeling to be sent north from Italy or wherever and you arrive in Britain and you have this feeling that the savagery, the utter savagery had closed around him.
All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.
That, of course, is very redolent of the Congo.
And so also is his account of what it must have been like for a Roman soldier advancing inland here and there, a military camp lost in a wilderness like a needle in a bundle of hay.
Which, of course, is historically very inaccurate.
But then he's very he's very unsentimental about the Roman Empire.
He says 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.
And then he kind of goes on from that to think about empires in general.
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.
That it's kind of a noble ideal, but in practice.
Well, in that, he has switched from the Romans to Europeans, hasn't he?
He has indeed. He has indeed.
And this then leads him to tell them a story.
And this is the story of Heart of Darkness.
And it's a story set in the past.
So it's not set in 1899 when they're getting rubber.
It's back in the heyday of ivory.
And he says the word ivory rang in the air.
You would think people were praying to it.
Of course, that's as we'll discover.
Literally true. That is literally true.
Marlowe, like Conrad, is hired to take a steamboat up the Congo, although the Congo is never named.
Well, Dominic, also, I mean, Belgium is never named and Leopold is never named and Brussels is never named.
It's what's it? It's called the White and Sepulchre.
Yeah, the Sepulchral city or something.
Yeah, exactly. Sepulchral city, yeah.
So, but it's clear, you know, there's no, it's clear, I think, where we're talking about.
But I suppose it kind of universalizes it a bit.
Yes, I think so. I mean, it's...
I think so. Exactly.
Yeah, I think it definitely universalizes it, which is why I think it's completely reasonable to set it in Vietnam in a bulk lives now or whatever.
So his job is to go up the river to collect this agent, Mr.
Kurtz, from the interior.
Everybody says to him, oh, you're going to see Mr.
Kurtz is absolutely brilliant.
Mr. Kurtz is half English, he's half French, although people say all Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz.
He's a brilliant writer.
He's painted this beautiful oil sketch of a woman holding a torch, kind of a figure of progress, of course.
he is and i quote an emissary of pity and science and progress he is the enlightenment he is western civilization you know he's he's just absolutely brilliant but he is also praised as the man who um gets as much ivory as all the other agents put together um so he is also being praised for his acquisitiveness
and whatever qualities are required to obtain that amount of ivory yeah so there is a darkness there right from the start there is indeed and and quite early on marlo starts to get some kind of sense that all is not well with mr kurtz and at one point later on he discovers that mr kurtz has written
this enormous report for the international society for the suppression of savage customs and it's a brilliant piece of work you know it's amazingly well written but it ends with this weird scrawled phrase exterminate all the brutes which kind of sets alarm bells ringing i think another of those kind
of terrifyingly quotable phrases yeah so monarch gets the boat up river he has a series of quite scary adventures i say adventures but they're they're not really are they thing is they're riffs on the kind of adventures you would see in boys stories but they're told in a really unsettling like he can't
understand what's going on but also nothing ever happens so that stuff about hearing drums in the distance or whatever in Ryder Haggard that would immediately presage an attack that would involve guns and heroism and all kinds of stuff I mean nothing like that ever happens well there is an attack when they reach
the station remember there's all the spears that are thrown at them and the bloke next to him is killed actually but it's not standing in the middle of King Solomon's mines being I mean it's just not that kind of adventure No, it's not at all.
Marlow is just standing there basically doing nothing during all of it.
He's not a sort of active, exciting protagonist.
Loading his rifle or that kind of thing.
Anyway, they get to Kurtz's station.
All the worst suspicions are confirmed.
The station is surrounded by posts with severed heads.
And I don't want to spoil the story completely for people who haven't read it, but as the company manager puts it, Kurtz's methods have proved unsound.
he's been going about his business in an unsound manner I mean he's basically being worshipped by the locals as a god but he's behaving very violently Kurtz himself is a very sick man he's an emaciated ghostly figure on a stretcher so not like Marlon Brando not like Marlon Brando at all but very like
this bloke Klein that Conrad himself had picked up Marlo and Kurtz have a series of chats slightly strange chats very elliptical hard to, elusive hard to work out exactly what they're talking about Kurtz is dying, clearly.
Kurtz says to Marlo, it's a terrible shame, I'll never have the chance to carry out my, I had immense plans, he says.
He's going to carry out great things.
But we never really find out what those immense plans add up to.
Anyway, they finally head back downstream with Kurtz, who was dying.
And then we get to that scene that you opened with Tom, where Kurtz, his final words, his line there.
And he says, it's like he's looking into the distance.
And he says, or is he looking into his own soul?
we don't know, and he says the horror, the horror.
It's a really famous death scene.
There's a brilliant essay for people who are interested online by the New Yorker's critic David Denby.
He first wrote it in 1995 and he calls it the most famous literary death scene since Shakespeare.
And I think it's very famous now because of Marlon Brando, because of Apocalypse Now.
I mean, since Shakespeare, but you might say since Christopher Marlowe and the death of Faustus who has sold his soul in return for earthly riches and then gets plunged down into hell and it can't be a coincidence.
I think that Marlowe, the character who meets with Kurtz, shares the name with the playwright who wrote that drama.
It's a nice parallel.
Contemporary of Shakespeare's.
Exactly. Now in Apocalypse Now, for people who've seen the film, this is basically the end.
Kurtz dies, end of the film.
But interestingly, that's not the end of Heart of Darkness.
Marlowe comes back to Europe and something in him has changed.
He talks again and again about feeling loyal to Kurtz.
He says that Kurtz, we'll have a bit of the reading in the next half, I think, that Kurtz has stepped over the edge of something and seen something profound.
We don't know what it is.
And as a result of this, Marlowe comes back and he goes to Brussels and he feels completely alienated from life in Brussels.
He's had an experience that has changed him.
Now Kurtz has given him a packet of papers and trusted it to him.
and the very last scene of the novel is him giving the papers to Kurtz's grieving fiance because all the the owners of the company want these papers don't they and Marlowe is saying that I don't have them and also just to say one thing that we omitted Kurtz has had an African woman who loves him that's
right and she is actually I think the most Ryder Haggard figure in the whole thing she's got a kind of a crazy headdress or something and i felt kind of slightly out of tune with everything else in the novella i totally agree with you i think that's the one moment in the book where conrad yields to
kind of late the melo the florian african melodrama agreed in this woman who's like incredibly impressive and statuesque and sort of she stands there you know lamenting loudly waving spears and yeah and all of this kind of buddhika figure anyway he hands over these papers to the fiance and to his horror she
says tell me about when he died what was the last thing he said to you and the very last thing that marlowe does in the whole story is he looks her in the eye and lies to her and he says the last word he pronounced was your name well i mean unless her name was horror yeah it seems very unlikely it seems
unlikely anyway dominic thank you um so that's The Life of Conrad and the plot of Heart of Darkness.
But Dominic, what does it all mean?
What's it all about?
We will find out after the break.
Now, before we get to the break, I would really like to tell you about another goal hanger podcast, Legacy, hosted by Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch.
That's right. They go through the annals of history and revisit the lives of some of the most famous men and women to ever have lived and ask if they have the reputation they deserve.
And this season, they are looking at perhaps one of the most famous leaders of all time, Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader whose empire expanded from Korea to parts of Eastern Europe.
And Dominic, as Peter Frankopan, a cricketing compadre of mine, would tell you, it's actually pronounced Chinggis.
Did you know that? Do you know, Tom, that's an amazing revelation to me.
I didn't know that.
You did not know that.
Genghis Khan, Chinggis Khan, however you want to call him.
extraordinary figure, I mean, unbelievably brutal figure.
It's said that his conquests and those of his immediate successors resulted, I think, something like 40 million deaths, which would be about 10 % of the world population at the time.
And yet, Tom, that's only one side of the story, isn't it?
Because did he not also develop the YAM postal system across his empire?
And his treatment of women, I read, was entirely inconsistent.
Yes, because he and his army certainly used sexual violence as a weapon of war, but also at one point he did ban the kidnapping of women.
And the series is a really extraordinary listen, in no small part because Peter wrote the bestseller The Silk Roads, which is all about Genghis's part of the world, and you will be hard -pressed to find someone who knows more about the Mongols than Peter Frankopan.
And with Afio as well as co -host, you're all in for a real treat, so listen to Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts, or listen to episodes early and ad -free at Wondery.
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kurtz was a remarkable man he had something to say he said it since i had peeped over the edge myself i understand better the meaning of his stare that could not see the flame of the candle but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.
He had summed it up.
He had judged the horror.
He was a remarkable man.
After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief.
It had candor. It had conviction.
It had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper.
It had the appalling face of a glimpse truth, the strange commingling of desire and hate.
So that's the verdict that Marlow delivers on Kurtz after his death towards the end of Heart of Darkness.
And I guess, you know, Heart of Darkness is a very, very well chosen title, that sense that there is something that a mystery that you can't penetrate, which Kurtz in some strange way embodies.
And you have the sense of kind of great depths but it's hard exactly to say what lurks in those depths uh and so dominic i mean here are the questions for you so what is it that kurtz has seen what is the truth what is the horror um is it something he's seen in himself is it something he's seen in the congo
is it something he has seen in the nature of imperialism is it something about the human condition full stop i mean what is going on?
That's a very good question tom.
Well loads questions for you.
Yeah we'll answer all those questions in this you have 45 minutes pick up your pen start now literary scholars have tried for more than a century to answer those questions and finally we can reveal the answers brilliant it's like the kennedy assassination so on kurtz himself loads of scholars have tried
to argue that he's a real person and they've tried to find out who conrad was inspired by and i think there are three or four candidates that come up again and again so one candidate is a bloke called Major Edmund Bartolot and he I'm sorry to say was a British officer he had um gone with Stanley Henry
Morton Stanley to rescue um and he has such a complicated story basically they went to they went to rescue an Egyptian governor called Emin Pasha who didn't need rescuing in the Sudan and this guy Bartolot behaved it's fair to say very poorly he was he went mad he started flocking people wildly he put
loads of people in chains and he started running around biting women really yeah very bad behavior and eventually this african bloke shot him dead and that was the end of him and everyone said god almighty what a terrible advert for britain let's never speak of this again so there's that guy bartolot
he possibly is an inspiration for um for kurtz then there's a belgian called arthur hodister strange name for a belgian i I would think, but there you go.
He was an ivory trader and was brilliant at it like Kurtz.
He was ruthless. He had a harem of local women.
There were rumors that local people worshipped him as a god, but he came to a very different end from Kurtz.
He was tortured, beheaded, and according to some accounts, eaten by Swahili slave traders for kind of intruding on their patch.
That would have been a good end to Heart of Darkness.
It would have been an unexpected end.
Yeah. then there's a guy called Carl Peters who is a German he was basically Germany's answer to Henry Morton Stanley he launched his own expedition to rescue this bloke him in Pasha who didn't need rescuing he discovered ancient sites along the Zambezi River he's basically got a bit of the Indiana Jones
unfortunately even Germans were embarrassed by this he also went a bit mad he was incredibly violent his nickname was Hangman Peters because basically you know you said good morning to him and he hanged you he was very violent and even the germans who were behaving quite badly it's fair to say or indeed
very badly in southwest africa at this point even they're ashamed of him which tells his own story and then the final candidate which adam hochschild mentions in his book king leopold's ghost is a guy called leon rom rom was a belgian he was a captain in the force public like kurtz he was a he liked
painting and writing and he collected butterflies which is nice like uh vladimir nabakov and maximilian the emperor maximilian of mexico but also he's an obsessive hunter he had loads of african concubines he had at the time and i quote the reputation of having killed masses of people for petty reasons
and he kept a flower bed at his station ringed with human heads that's very which is very kurtz so as just wolf nader says in his biography of conrad conrad may well have drawn on all these examples but it's clear that kurtz is all of them and none of them.
As Nido says, the model for Kurtz comes from literary and philosophical tradition as much as it does from real life African behaviour.
Well, there's the quality of the Byronic hero, the man who is elevated by the terrible knowledge that he has won from experience.
I mean, it's definitely a kind of literary trope.
You mentioned what I think is the obvious thing, which is Faust.
So Faust has sold his soul to the devil.
And it's not just Marlow, but obviously Goethe wrote about Faust and And then Thomas Mann will write about Faust a few decades after Conrad.
And there are a few references.
Marlowe says at one point in Heart of Darkness, Kurtz has taken a high seat among the devils of the land.
And later on, he talks about how the powers of darkness are about to claim him for their own.
So this idea that Kurtz has sold his soul to the devil, it's a very old idea and kind of European.
But there's also something new about Kurtz.
He's the embodiment of progress.
Remember that he's so talented.
He is the epitome, he's the embodiment of civilisation.
And there is an argument, I think, that what he's doing in that long – remember he writes that very long report.
Yeah, so exterminate all the brutes.
Exactly. There's an argument that that report is in itself the embodiment of the European project in Africa.
To categorise, to set down on, to turn everything into accounts and ledgers.
Which began with Napoleon going to Egypt.
Exactly. To put Africa down on paper and control it and map it.
Very Edward Said. Yeah.
That is the act of colonialism, effectively.
Well, European colonialism.
European colonialism.
Yeah. So is this, therefore, a story about colonialism and is Kurt the embodiment of all that's wrong with it?
At one level, I think the answer is obviously yes.
Marlowe at the beginning is given those lines about taking the earth away from people with flatter noses than ourselves that are kind of very pointed.
later on in the book only a little bit later before Marlow actually goes to the Congo he goes to visit his aunt and his aunt has been reading newspaper stories about Africa and Empire and she says oh it's brilliant love this project weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways and Marlow actually
says to her this is even before he's gone he says it's about money the company is run for profit you know he's unsentimental about what is what is motivating all this and of course then when he gets of the Congo.
Everything that he sees could come from a charge sheet about the crimes of empire, the skulls, the skeletons, the violence, all of that kind of thing.
I mean, one of the things that strikes me about it, a bit like War of the Worlds where Wells transposes the horrors of European colonialism to Britain, there's a sense that occasionally that Conrad is doing the same thing.
So the opening with Britain as Africa, but also there's a kind of an amazing passage.
So Marlowe is looking out at all the villages that are abandoned.
And he says, well, if loads of Africans suddenly armed with terrifying weapons started appearing on the road that stretches between Deal and Gravesend in Kent, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon.
And of course, that is a prefiguring of the slave labor in due course that the Nazis will introduce in the heart of Europe.
I think that's absolutely right and I think the beginning of the book by transposing what happens to Britain it makes it very obvious that Conrad is conscious that this has a wider implication that this is kind of universal message but here's the complication within the complication the framing narrator is very
keen on the British Empire because while he's at Gravesend he muses on the night errants of the sea bearers of a spark from the sacred fire the dreams of men the seed of commonwealth the germ of empires like people have sailed out from here with the spark of britishness and isn't that brilliant marlow
that the other narrator he also thinks the british empire is brilliant he says at one point he sees a map with a lot of africa splashed with british imperial pink or red and he said oh that's good to see because one knows that real work is being done there i .e.
the british empire is different from other empires so very kipling well we know that conrad himself thought that so just after he's finished heart of darkness the bur war breaks out and his polish relatives say to him what do you make of this you know an empire against a little people at the burrs you
know it doesn't ring any bells and he says well the british are liberty can only be found under the english flag all over the world so he's for the bur war and And then after he died, his great friend and collaborator Ford Mannix Ford said of him a line that always amuses me.
The British Empire was for Conrad the perfection of all human perfections.
So Conrad, obviously a brilliant judge of empires.
But this has led some people to say, well, hold on, you know, you can't celebrate this book as a criticism of empire.
In fact, let's go further.
This book is itself massively tainted with the crimes of empire.
It's a tainted example of imperialist literature.
Although, if you read it and you didn't know about Conrad's enthusiasm for British imperialism, would you necessarily recognise that?
Well, there are at least two critics who think you would.
So one of them, I think you mentioned him already, didn't you?
Edward Said, Palestinian American critic, one of the most famous literary critics of the last half century, who wrote a brilliantly influential book, shall we say, called Orientalism, which some scholars think is a terrible book.
I think it's brilliant.
I think you say it's brilliant.
Anyway, Said says, yes, you would recognize Comrades as an imperialist because he doesn't ever reject imperialism in his book.
he doesn't give the you know his book should end with people being given their freedom or some savage critique of the imperialism that has enslaved them I mean that is what you get that is what you get what a savage critique yes well maybe it's not a savage enough for Edward Said and Edward Said is also really
disappointed that Conrad doesn't give the Africans a chance of redemption or a chance of escape and I mentioned in the essay by David Demby the New Yorker he had a little passage in this essay in 1995 imagining saying well how would you would that work like at the end of the book you know kurt rises
from his deathbed and says to an african chief one day your people will be free and the clouds clear and the sun shines and everybody's singing and dancing it'd be ridiculous but that's why saeed is a brilliant uh cultural critic but he's you know he never writes a great work of literature because it
would simply be agitprop conrad's story is vastly more complex and unsettling than than a kind of programmatic response to this would demand.
I totally agree with you about that, Tom.
But there's a more substantial critique.
Now, this is by an African writer called Chinua Achebe.
He's a Nigerian, isn't he?
Yeah, born in 1930.
And in 1975, Achebe gave this lecture at the University of Massachusetts.
To people who don't know, this will sound like such a trivial and footling thing, but this is one of the most influential lectures ever given about literary culture at all.
it's one of the great demolition jobs and it's actually a foundational moment for what's called post -colonial literary studies and Achebe said this is i hate this book i hate comrade and i hate this book basically because he just sets up africa as the heart of darkness um it's the place where europeans
go to find the evil within themselves you know you shouldn't then comrade's message is keep away from africa or else you know you'll fall victim to the allure of the jungle the darkness will find you out you know you'll become evil if you go to africa and he said and i'm going to quote him the point
of my observation should be quite clear by now namely that joseph conrad was a thorough going racist and he goes on to say can a book which dehumanizes africans which treats africa as the heart of darkness etc etc can it be called a great work of art my answer is no it cannot and this has always been
incredibly contentious this argument among scholars and enthusiasts for joseph conrad you know is this basically a racist book and now on college campuses you will find a lot of people who say it is and either don't teach it or who teach it as an example of literary racism now a lot of people listen
to this will expect because with the rest is history that at this point we kind of turn our guns on chinua and chabe and say this is terrible comrade's brilliant blah blah blah actually there are elements of his critique i don't know you think tom but that i think are justified so first of all he does
present the book does present africa as primeval as unfathomable as prehistoric going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.
Okay. I accept that.
However, one of the reasons why it is traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world is that there are no humans and there are no humans there because they've all been scared off by the depredations of European colonialists.
So he's not simply saying, you know, the silent, what is it?
He says, an empty stream, a great silence.
That great silence is expressive of the depredations of European colonists.
I agree with you, but you might not know that reading Conrad's book.
Well, he does. He said it.
I mean, we just quoted the stuff about the Africans turning up in Kent and launching attacks.
Yes, I suppose so. But those two passages are quite far apart, and you might not draw the connection.
But that is why Conrad is a great writer, because he's setting up these echoes in the prose that reverberate.
Now, the second charge, I think slightly harder to quibble with, I would argue, is that this is a book about Africa that has no serious African characters at all.
and when they speak they don't speak they chant they grunt they make and i quote a drone of weird incantations strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language like the responses of some satanic litany and even the physical descriptions that are quite harrowing they're quite dehumanizing
so the porters that you mentioned you know the people who are with their they're carrying stuff in their heads and they're chained together they had the complete death -like indifference of unhappy savages or the railway workers dying in the grove black shapes black shadows of disease and starvation would you
talk like that about white european characters i'm not entirely convinced that you would that i would accept and we've already touched on kurtz's african concubine who is pure stereotyping yeah i mean The pure kind of fantasy figure.
And I think that is where Conrad's kind of literary mastery falls down.
Well, I mean, first of all, there's a real complication here, which is that this isn't actually Conrad talking.
This is Marlow talking.
Well, yes. Yes and no.
I mean, because there is a risk that you then start saying anything racist is Marlow talking and it's not, is Conrad talking.
I mean, you can do it either way.
I mean, if you start playing that game, depending on whether you want to get Conrad off the charge or not, you can fix your critique.
You can, but I think you have to.
So Achibi basically says in his lecture, I'm going to just basically treat Marlo as if he's Conrad.
But Marlo isn't Conrad.
Conrad is the character listening to Marlo, if Conrad is in the story at all.
So I think you just have to be a bit careful by always assuming that an author and their main character are the same person.
Well, you notice this very, very powerfully when Marlow is coming back and he's puzzling over Kurtz's character and what he represents.
You have the sense that Marlow is wrestling all the time.
He's groping after truth, but there's always the sense that it's kind of slipping his fingers.
and clearly you know he's grasping after the secrets of the human condition but he is also grasping after the reality and the truth of what is going on in the belgian congo and as we've said this is written before morel starts his kind of forensic examination of the the details of what has been happening
and you could say that there's an element there of the difficulty that historians have in making sense of what's been going on.
And it is noticeable that we don't have African accounts of what happened.
I mean, this has been a problem that you've been acknowledging throughout our account, that it really is a story about what Europeans get up to rather than Africans.
And I suppose that Konrad could talk to the Europeans, but he couldn't talk to the Africans I think that's absolutely right um now actually ultimately I think this question about is it a racist book or is it not is actually quite a boring one I don't think it's Conrad clearly I mean it's such a terribly
cliche thing to say Conrad obviously is a man of his age he reflects the assumptions that he has grown up with both in um Russian occupied you know Eastern Poland Ukraine and later on sailing around on British merchant ships I mean, he's not outside time.
Of course, he has prejudices and assumptions of his own, and they are expressed in his writing.
But the overall effect of this book is obviously not a...
I mean, it's a book that clearly makes you think really seriously about the moral issues of imperialism and the civilizing mission and colonialism and whatnot.
I mean, how can it not?
Morel, who devoted his entire life to combating Leopold's regime in the Congo, said of it that it is the most powerful thing ever written on the subject.
And I think that is true.
And I think that arraigning authors, because they fail to measure up to the ideological standards of 2024, is the least interesting approach to literature that you could possibly adopt.
Couldn't agree more.
I mean, whether or not, of course, Conrad may have been racially prejudiced.
I mean, he may mean, he may not have been.
It's, as you say, it's actually, I think, an incredibly boring question because this is such an interesting book and there's so many more things to say about it.
But the possibility that he might be, I think is woven into the, into the story.
I think that might be, you know, the heart of darkness.
That might be the horror.
Conrad, Marlow, whoever it is, is Conrad's voice within the heart of darkness i mean all those people i think are implicated in what is being discussed and i think that going beyond that the lasting appeal of the book is obviously it's about more than the belgian congo it's about more than king leopold's
free state or anything like that to me to me the key line in the book is actually that line that we quoted earlier right at the beginning before they even got to the congo where marlowe says to the people on the boat and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth and he's talking there right
about england he's not talking about the congo and the darkness is there even before the steamboat has started its journey up the river i the darkness is not in the congo it's not even in england it's in humanity it's the human soul that's what i think the book's about and he's riffing there on the tendency
well stanley is always doing isn't he all his kind of massive volumes he's always referring to darkest Africa that is the pivot that London is one of the dark places that the Thames estuary was one of the dark places and of course dark has all these kind of rich shades of meaning and it may be that um
one of those one of those shades of meaning could be cast as racist but it is only one of them and the the racism that Europeans display towards Africans is also part of the racism that is being displayed by Romans towards the Britons.
That this is what imperialists do.
And I don't think it's even that he thinks this is what imperialists do.
I think it's what human beings do.
Conrad had a remarkable, I find it very attractive because I share it, a remarkably bleak view of human nature.
In his letters to his friend Cunningham Graham, the SMP bloke that we mentioned earlier, he says of mankind, the year before he wrote Art of Darkness, he wrote to Cunningham Graham, He said, mankind is silly and cowardly, a wretched gang.
We're born initiated and succeeding generations clutch the inheritance of fear and brutality without a thought.
And another letter he said, people go on, he said, about honour, justice, compassion, but nobody really believes in them.
People believe only in, and I quote, gain, personal advantage, satisfied vanity.
And words vanish and nothing remains, absolutely nothing.
Only a drop of mud, cold mud, dead mud launched in black space, turning round an extinguished sun.
I love those lines.
Conrad has a view of mankind, of human beings that is unbelievably sceptical, ironic, bleak, dark.
Conservative. Yeah, conservative.
I mean, he's sceptical about notions of progress and that Jerusalem can be built on the earth.
Definitely. But I think the interesting thing about that is it's not just temperamental, but it's of his time.
because i was thinking about the literature of the 1880s 1890s so in 1890 the year he went to the congo um one of my favorite books la betoumen by emile zola which is about a basically a and it sounds very unpromising it's about a parisian train driver who turns out to be a sex crazed homicidal maniac
um he published this book and it's basically about the evil that is lurking within us all you know even the most banal person is actually deep down you know we could all be serial killers and rapists and whatnot this is a such a popular idea in very late Victorian culture Dracula which is Dracula in 1897
um the idea of darkness coming to England yeah absolutely or 1899 the same year Conrad publishes Heart of Darkness that's the year that Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams the idea that buried deep down in this kind of very primal and unfathomable way are anxieties and ghosts and terrible urges
that we try to repress in our kind of civilised daily lives, but will always come to claim us at night.
I mean, again, all of this sort of stuff is simmering away in the European imagination at the time that Conrad is writing.
I mean, there's no question that Heart of Darkness has given to very committed uh anti -racists anti -imperialists um some of its language so there was i think it i can't remember what was it netflix or something there was a a documentary series called exterminate all the brutes came out three two or three
years ago uh and it was about european colonialism and was not favorable at all right and it was based on a a book by sven linkfist who is a norwegian writer who is absolutely excoriating about imperialism, particularly British imperialism.
And of course, that title is coming from Kurtz's phrase, which in turn is written by Conrad.
And so the echoes are very complex, I think, the kind of the ripples, the reverberations.
I think to condemn it as a racist book is harsh, I think.
I think it's not just harsh.
I think it's a total waste of time.
I think it's a complete and utter waste of time when the book is so rich.
And we've talked for too long and actually we shouldn't.
We're not in the business of preaching to listeners.
Listeners can make up their own minds.
They should read the book.
If you think it's racist, great.
Crack on. If you don't, brilliant.
Tom, why don't we end with the end of the book?
Okay. Marlow ceased and sat apart indistinct and silent in the pose of a meditating Buddha.
Nobody moved for a time.
We have lost the first of the ebb, said the director suddenly.
I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds And the tranquil waterway Leading to the uttermost ends of the earth Flowed sombre Under an overcast sky Seemed to lead Into the heart Of an immense darkness Goodbye
