541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo

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Hi, everybody. Dominic Sandbrook from The Rest Is History here.
Now, as you can probably tell from the noise of the pool.

I am joined by a friend of the show,

Anthony Sca. Dominic Sandbrook from The Rest Is History here.
Now, as you can probably tell from the noise of the pool, I am joined by a 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, and thank God I'm not British, because the Brits actually admire my American 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 US history. And so 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 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 therestishistory.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 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. This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile.
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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 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, Heart of Darkness, Conrad's great novel or novella, has kind of overshadowed the series that we've done in the Congress. 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 narrators and the effect of all this is when you know, it's dreamlike. It's like a hallucination.
It's very overwrought. There are shifts in time,

narrators within narrators.

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. Eliot, the great poet,

he loved 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 the horror of 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 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 a 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 belgian 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 fartick 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 answer to that heart of darkness i would argue is by far the preeminent cultural representation of western imperialism particularly in africa 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 are king solomon's minds is the journey into the heart of africa that is swashbuckling that is 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 a fact that you keep expecting adventure type themes to kick in, and they never quite do, or if they they do in a distorted and hallucinatory way and and to read them as a pairing i think is is i mean really fascinating i couldn't agree more i couldn't agree more and actually rather liking solomon's minds 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 Ford Coppola's 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 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 um assault on the civilizing 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 symbolize 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, 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 and 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 and what's he doing in the Congo at all to inspire this book?

And secondly, what is the book about for people who don't know?

So just very, very quickly, very swiftly to summarize.

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 it's a true story it's a 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 josef 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 eva died when he was seven his father who had the brilliant name apollo who was a poet i love that and uh yeah and a polish revolutionary so he's a tremendous man apollo um korenyovsky he died when joseph was 11 so he's brought up by relatives he's very bored at school he's obviously you know he's not of form. And he says he wants to go to, he wants to go away to sea.
Because apparently, Dominic, 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. Yes.
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.

Yes.

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 clubbed together and they get together the money to send him

to, what is he, 1617? To send him to marseilles to join the french merchant marine this is weird thing that he should he shoots himself yeah 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 comrade is always a very i think a troubled man is too strong but he 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 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 Korzenyowski.
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 to 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, be fair i think occasionally you as well i accept maybe maybe me more often than you tom 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 conrad is one of those people who probably proves that comprehensively wrong anyway 1889 1889 has been off in the South Seas.
He comes back to London. He starts writing his first novel, Almeyer's Folly.
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 can 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 landmass.
Do you think he's got a yearning for the sea i don't know maybe i'm being overly 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 will be reminded of all these companies from the episode we did about ED Morel, all these steamship companies with concessions and contracts. This company is called the Société Anonyme 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 a mercenary. He will take the money to go on various voyages all over the world.
But as his great biographer, Zdjyslaw Naider, who's a Pole, his book is quite hard to get hold of. This is your third language, Polish? Yeah, exactly.
Excellent. Exactly, Tom.
Thank you. Fluent pronunciation there.
Thank you. It's not like I'd been preparing for hours.
Naider 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 the 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 SS Ville de Maceo, a 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? He says, basically, everybody who goes there, they either die or they come home early because it's so terrible. 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 the best thing you can possibly be.
So anyway, about a month later, they reach the capital of the Congo Free State, Boma. So it's just 50 miles inland.
And here, if people remember from the previous episodes, there's the various complicated ways you have to move up the river. Because of the rapids and all that malarkey.
So he gets a steamer up river to matadi and matadi is the last point before the rapids where you have to get off now at matadi 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 so the the british consul 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 that Conrad, 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 some of the terrible

scenes that we've quoted in the previous episodes

So for example, 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 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 it's been sunk uh and he has to dredge it up and they they haven't got the bit the bolts that would enable it to be put together rivets the rivets you have the sense of even the claims to kind of technological superiority 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's pitching it to blackwoods he said it was a portrait of inefficiency and incompetence in the in africa it's like getting a train in britain so where he's on a realm replacement bus that's what he's on so he's 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 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.

Past a bad night. No water.
Camped on an exposed hillside near a muddy creek.

No shade. Tent on a slope.
Sun heavy. W wretched night miserably cold no sleep mosquitoes and on they go and at one point he does 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 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 it 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 at 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 has been is desolate as there are burned out villages you know the people are hiding in the bush depredations of the force public and so as as uh shijiswath nider 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 honest.
Right. They stay there, Stanley Falls, for about a week, and they pick up the local agent, who's a guy called Klein, a Frenchman, Georges 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.
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 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 is a reason for his unhappiness and do you think that's's, he's burying it? Well, possibly because Sajiswath Nader 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 a 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'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 nida 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 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, you know, whatever it is.

So it's a kind of epistolary heart of darkness.

It is indeed.

You know, 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 of 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 yeah he said to cunningham graham uh 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 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.
And the book absolutely has that flavour. 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 Blackwoods and the Strand, famously where Sherlock Holmes started. And in the middle of December 1898, he starts his third piece for Blackwoods magazine.
And he says to the publisher, it's a narrative about a bloke who's on a river in Central Africa. I'm thinking of calling it the heart of darkness but the narrative is not at all gloomy he says 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 the 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 been inspired by E.D.
Morell's campaign or anything like that, because that hasn't even started yet. Yeah, it 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 civilising 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 for this. So in relative income terms, that's about almost £50,000 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 yeah um 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 marlo that's actually not true marlo 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 um 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 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 um on the th 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 he's sort of sitting

down leaning against the mast he's a a sort of weather-beaten sort of sea dog you know hard-faced

sea dog character and 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 and you mean we you talked about this Tom when we did a long time ago when we did an episode about Rome and London I think we opened with this message yeah um he says what must it have been like to be a Roman in Britain the feeling you know to be, 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.
And 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.
Yeah. Which, of course, is historically very inaccurate.
But then 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 so it's not during it's not set in 1899 when they're getting rubber it's back in the heyday of ivory and he says you know 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's literally true marlo 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 called the White and Sepulchre.

Yeah, the Sepulchre City or something.

Yeah, exactly.

Sepulchre 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.

Thank you. But 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 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 apocalypse 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 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. So there is a darkness there right from the start.
There is indeed. And quite early on, Marlow 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 is fascinating. Another of those kind of terrifyingly quotable phrases yeah so mona 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 is um killed actually but it's not standing in the middle of king solomon's minds being i mean it's just not that kind of adventure no it's not at all and marlo 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 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 ellipt elliptical hard to elusive hard to work out exactly what they're talking about kurtz is dying clearly kurtz says to marlo oh it's terrible shame i'll never have the chance to carry out my i had immense plans he says it's going to carry out great things but we never really find out what those immense plans add up to.
Anyway 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 is lying there and he says yeah 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 um it's a really famous death scene there's a brilliant essay for people who are interested online by the new yorkers 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 marl 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. Yeah, 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. Marlow 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, Marlow 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 andusted it to him.
And the very last scene of the novel is him giving the papers to Kurtz's grieving fiancé. Because all the owners of the company want these papers, don't they? Yeah.
Marlow is saying, I don't have them. And also, just to say one thing that we omitted, Kurtz has had uh an african woman who loves him that's right and she is actually i think the most rider 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 Victorian African melodrama.

Agreed.

And 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 Boudicca 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 he 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 anyway dominic thank you um so that's the life of conrad and the 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 it'll be a little bit better. 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 Hirsch 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

Thank you. heaped 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 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 about the human condition full stop? I mean, what is going on? That's a very good question, Tom. Well, loads of 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 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 British officer. he had gone with Stanley Henry Morton Stanley to rescue 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 went mad.

He started flogging 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 Kurtz. Then then there's a belgian called arthur hoddister strange name for a belgian i always 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 um 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 was a German. He was basically Germany's answer 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 zambesi 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 Publique.
Like Kurtz, he liked painting and writing. And he collected butterflies, which is nice, like Vladimir Nabokov.
And Maximilian. Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.
But also he was 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 Kurtz.

Which is very Kurtz.

So, as Jiswath Nider 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 Nider says, the model for Kurtz comes from literary and philosophical tradition

And drawn on all these examples but it's clear that Kurtz is all of them and none of them as Nida says the model for Kurtz comes from literary and philosophical tradition as much as it does from real life African behavior well there's the quality of the Byronic hero the man who is elevated by the the terrible knowledge that he has won from experience I mean it's definitely a kind of literary trope you mentioned what I 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 then Thomas Mann will write about Faust a few decades after Conrad.
And there are a few references Marlow says at one point in Heart of Darkness, Kurtz has taken a high seat among the devils of the land 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 is sold his soul to the devil you know it's a very old idea in kind of european but there's also something new about kurtz he's the embodiment of progress remember that he's so talented he's so he is the epitome is the embodiment of civilization 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 categorize to set down on to turn everything into 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 marlo 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 marlo 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 marlo 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 um what is motivating all this and of course then when he gets to the congo everything that he sees could come from a charge sheet about the crimes of empire the skulls the skeletons you know 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 whole, the opening with Britain as Africa. But also there's a kind of an amazing passage.
So he's looking out at, Marlow is looking out at all the villages that are abandoned. And he says, well, you know, if loads of Africans suddenly, you you know armed with terrifying weapons um started appearing on the road that stretches between deal and gravesend in kent uh catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads of 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 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 a 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 but we know that conrad himself thought that so just after he's finished heart of darkness the burr 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 doesn't ring any bells and he says what the british are brilliant liberty can only be found under the english flag all over the world so he's for the burr war and then after he died his great friend and collaborator ford malax 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 uh 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 Coronet's enthusiasm

for British Imperial literature although um if you read it and you didn't know about coronet's enthusiasm for british imperialism would you necessarily recognize 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 saeed um 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 saeed 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 savage enough for edward saeed and edward saeed 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 in the essay by David Demby of The New Yorker, he had a little passage in this essay in 1995 imagining saying, well, how 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 cultural critic, but he never writes a great work of literature because it would simply be agitprop. Conrad's story is vastly more complex and unsettling 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.
So 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 thing but this is one of the most influential lectures ever given about kind of 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 Conrad and I hate this book basically because he just sets up Africa as the heart of darkness. It's the place where Europeans go to find the evil within themselves.
You know, you shouldn't. Conrad'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 Africarica 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. 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 this point we kind of turn our guns on chinyu and chaby and say this is terrible conrad's brilliant blah blah blah actually there are elements of his critique i don't know what you think tom, 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. one of 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 it is he's not simply saying you know this 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, you know, the Africans turning up in Kent and launching attacks.
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, you know, these echoes in the prose that reverberate.

Now, the second charge, I think slightly harder to quibble with, I would argue, is that the book, 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, the people who are carrying the stuff in their heads and they're ch the chain 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 marlo talking well yes yes and no i mean because there is a risk that you then start saying anything racist is marlo talking it's not it's conrad talking i mean you can do it either way i mean if you start playing that game depending on what you you know 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 Marlow as if he's Conrad. But Marlow isn't Conrad.
Conrad is the character listening to Marlow, 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 Marlowe is coming back and he's puzzling over Kurtz's character and what he represents.

You have the sense that Marlowe 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 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, you know, Conrad could talk to the Europeans, but he couldn't talk to the Africans. I think that's absolutely right.
Now, actually, ultimately, I think this question about is it a racist book or is it not, is actually quite a 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, it not morel who devoted his entire life to uh combating leopold's regime in the congo said of it that it is the most powerful thing ever written on the subject yeah and i think that is true and i think that um 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 marlowe 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, 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, 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 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. 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 it, 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 one of those, one of those shades of meaning could be cast as racist, but it is only one of them.
And the, the, the racism that Europeans display towards Africans is also part of the racism that is being displayed by Romans towards the Britons. Yeah.
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 an a remarkable i 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 heart of darkness he wrote cunningham 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 honor justice compassion but nobody really believes in them people believe 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. a view of mankind of human beings that is unbelievably skeptical ironic bleak dark conservative yeah conservative i mean he's skeptical about notions of progress and that jerusalem can be built on 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 bete humaine by emil zola which is about basically a i know 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.
Even the most banal person is actually deep down. We could all be serial killers and rapists and whatnot.
This is such a popular idea in very late Victorian culture. Well, also Dracula, which is published in 1897.
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 civilized daily lives but will come always come to claim us at night i mean again all of this sort of stuff is 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 anti-racists, anti-imperialists, some of its language. So there was, I think, I can't remember, was it Netflix or something? There was a documentary series called Exterminate All the Brutes, came out two or three years ago.
And it was about European colonialism and was not favourable at all. And it was based on a book by Sven Linkvist, 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 um tom why don't we end with the end of the book okay marlowe ceased and sat apart indistinct and silent in the pose of a meditating Buddhadha 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 somber under an overcast sky seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness goodbye

goodbye