Pod Insights The Rest Is History 541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo About this episode “The horror! The horror!”
Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ - the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's ‘Apocalypse Now’ - is one of the most celebrated literary works of all time, though now increasingly contentious. Based on Conrad’s own terrible journey into the Congo in 1890, and the horrors he beheld there while it was under the sway of King Leopold of Belgium’s monstrous regime, the novella, published in 1899, delves into man’s capacity for evil - the primal beast lurking beneath the surface of all humans - and has long stood as the preeminent cultural representation of European colonialism. It tells the story of Mr Kurtz, a great ivory trader who has disappeared deep into the African interior, and appears to have lost his mind, having penetrated some terrifying, ancient truth. Initially, Conrad’s disturbing account was viewed as the ultimate attack on imperialism, though aspects of the novella have also invited accusations of racism and imperialism, in part owed to Conrad’s own sympathy for Empire. So what is the truth at the heart of 'Heart of Darkness'? And who was Joseph Conrad himself? What horrors did he behold to have inspired such a poignant account of the nightmares within and without…?
Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’ and the real life events that inspired it, and the long term reverberations of the novella in culture and literary criticism today.
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Transcript 12,710 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:41 Tom Holland? 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.
1:58 Tom Holland? 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 somber 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
2:35 Tom Holland? 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. So 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
3:18 Tom Holland? 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.
3:34 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 on the Congo. It would be weird not to have an episode talking about it because it's arguably one of the most influential works of literature.
3:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Written in the last hundred and twenty 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 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'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, he, the great poet, he loved Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He had a poem called The Hollow Men that begins with a quotation
4:33 Dominic Sandbrook? 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." He wanted that, didn't he, as his original epigraph for his great poem, The Wasteland?
4:49 Tom Holland? Well, I mean, the thing, the thing about Heart of Darkness is it's incredibly quotable.
4:54 Tom Holland? We have been quoting it throughout this series and things like "The horror, the horror, Mr. Kurtz, he dead." I mean, Eliot, 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 Belgian Congo turns out to have been a prophecy
5:38 Tom Holland? of the darkness that will engulf Europe in 1914.
5:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I completely agree with you, Tom. I think it's a really good point. I think you can argue that Heart of Darkness prefigures so much of the kind of cultural commentary of the 20th century about, and we'll get on to this in the second half, about man's capacity for evil.
5:55 Tom Holland? Fatic, you might call it, dazing into the future and seeing the horrors that await.
6:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, if you're not interested in literature at all, you may be thinking, well, so what? Who cares? I mean, 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.
6:16 Tom Holland? More than King Solomon's Mines?
6:18 Dominic Sandbrook? I think it's Heart of Darkness now. So I think Heart of Darkness and King Solomon's Mines are kind of the polar opposites, aren't they?
6:24 Tom Holland? Yeah, they really are.
6:25 Dominic Sandbrook? King Solomon's Mines 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.
6:45 Tom Holland? 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 really fascinating.
6:59 Dominic Sandbrook? I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And actually, rather than King Solomon's Mines, Heart of Darkness has had a massive cultural footprint. So everything from video games like the Far Cry series, which are 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."
7:42 Tom Holland? Yeah, the horror, the horror.
7:43 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 civilizing mission.
8:05 Tom Holland? Because, am I right, that imperialism is a word that is coming into common use exactly at the time when Conrad is writing this?
8:11 Dominic Sandbrook? 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
8:56 Dominic Sandbrook? at the centre 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 have never read the book, it's the story of a sea captain called Marlowe. He takes a steamboat up the Congo, and he's looking for a brilliant agent of the company 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.
9:40 Dominic Sandbrook? And when Marlowe gets there, he finds out that-
9:43 Tom Holland? All kinds of stuff has been going on.
9:45 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
10:06 Tom Holland? So it's autobiographical, but it's also a portrait of a real political situation.
10:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
10:13 Tom Holland? And the political situation is what we've been talking about in the previous three episodes.
10:17 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Korjeniowski. 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.
10:57 Tom Holland? I love that.
10:58 Dominic Sandbrook? And a, yeah, and a Polish revolutionary. So he's a tremendous man, Apollo Korjeniowski. 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 in the best of form. And he says he wants to go to, he wants to go away to sea.
11:14 Tom Holland? Because apparently, Dominic, I read that this in part was because his father had been a kind of political prisoner.
11:21 Dominic Sandbrook? That's right.
11:21 Tom Holland? 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.
11:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
11:29 Tom Holland? And so that's one of the reasons why he, he decides to go abroad. And I suppose he specifically, he ends up in Marseille, doesn't he?
11:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Mm hmm.
11:36 Tom Holland? And France is the great refuge for Polish refugees in this period.
11:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
11:41 Tom Holland? Now, if you want to become a sailor, you go to France and Marseille would be the obvious place.
11:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, exactly right. So in 1874, his relatives club together and they, they get together the money to send him to, what is he, 16, 17, to send him to Marseille to join the French Merchant Marine.
11:56 Tom Holland? This weird thing that he shoots, he shoots himself.
11:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
11:59 Tom Holland? In the chest, but it seems to have been a little bit performative.
12:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
12:03 Tom Holland? As I guess so much is in his fiction.
12:05 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
12:28 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 of this.
12:40 Tom Holland? 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, Ryder Haggard, all this kind of ripping yarns, and yet they're always stranger and darker and more hallucinatory than any of those.
12:54 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Kozhinowski. 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.
13:22 Tom Holland? He, 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, um, did you see the, 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.
13:50 Dominic Sandbrook? I think specifically, Tom, they've said it about you, to be fair.
13:53 Tom Holland? I think occasionally you as well. I accept, maybe, maybe me more often than you.
13:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Tom, who speaks English like it's his third language, exactly. 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. Eighteen eighty-nine, he's been off in the South Seas. He comes back to London, he starts writing his first novel, Almay's Volley.
14:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Then, at the beginning of eighteen ninety, 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.
15:00 Tom Holland? Well, also, he's got sea legs now, hasn't he?
15:02 Dominic Sandbrook? You think he's wobbling all over the place in the...
15:04 Tom Holland? Well, yes, but I mean, he's in the middle, surrounded by land, surrounded by the great Eurasian landmass. He must, do you think he's got a yearning for the sea? I don't know, maybe I'm being over romantic.
15:13 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 E D Morrel, all these steamship companies with concessions and contracts. This company is called the Société Anonyme Belge pour le commerce du Haut 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.
15:53 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, Zduslaw Nida, who's a Pole, his book is absolutely, it's quite hard to get hold of.
16:15 Tom Holland? This is your third language, Polish?
16:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly, exactly, Tom.
16:19 Tom Holland? Fluent pronunciation there.
16:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Thank you. It's not like I'd been preparing for hours. Nida 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 Marlowe, 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 SS Vilde Masseo at Bordeaux
17:04 Dominic Sandbrook? for this journey that his biographer Nida 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 Conrad actually says, and I quote, "I'm a Polish nobleman cased in British tar." Does it 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.
17:48 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. So the British consul, great Irish patriot, an amazing character. And Conrad really talked 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.
18:32 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 villagers, to find porters and things to carry all Conrad's stuff. So
18:49 Dominic Sandbrook? 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?
19:04 Tom Holland? Yeah, so 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 bites 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
19:46 Tom Holland? of Darkness, because when Marlowe gets to the top of the rapids, wait 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.
19:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, rivets.
20:00 Tom Holland? The rivets. You have the sense of even the claims to kind of technological superiority are a kind of sham.
20:06 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 the, in Africa.
20:18 Tom Holland? It's like getting a train in Britain.
20:20 Dominic Sandbrook? So he's on a railway placement 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. Mosquitos. 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. Wretched. Night miserably cold. No sleep. Mosquitos.
20:57 Dominic Sandbrook? And on they go. And at one point, he definitely passes a skeleton tied to a post, which is a very-
21:03 Tom Holland? Imagine seeing that when you-
21:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So that's a sign, you know, remember Conrad is very, very, very well travelled. I mean, admittedly, most of his travels have been at sea, so he hasn't often gone inland in the places he's visited.
21:17 Tom Holland? 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 as along the coasts and going inland. He's kind of compressing that entire history into his own person.
21:44 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 break it up. The second 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 Joie des Belges. 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
22:28 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, 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 who's been travelling 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
23:10 Dominic Sandbrook? of Darkness who is modeled directly on this bloke Del Commune.
23:14 Tom Holland? And who whose relationship to Kurtz and his plans for Kurtz is a kind of twist, isn't there?
23:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So on they go upriver. They go very quickly. They're 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 Koch, 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 upriver, it's very lonely. You don't pass many other ships. The countryside has been is desolate, there are burned out villages. You know, the people are hiding in the bush, depredations of the force public. And so, as as Shujiswaf Naida says in his biography, the atmosphere of Heart of Darkness
24:03 Dominic Sandbrook? clearly is inspired by this kind of oppressive, claustrophobic isolation that Conrad must have felt on this boat going upriver with just the silence and the emptiness.
24:15 Tom Holland? 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, you know, appalling revelation of some Saurian bursting out of the jungle or something. I mean, Heart of Darkness is much more sophisticated than that, but there is, you you sense some terror, some horror is waiting.
24:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Definitely do, definitely. So on the first of September, they get to the last navigable point on the river. This is what's then called Stanley Falls. Now it's called Kisengani. And this is basically, you know, 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.
25:26 Tom Holland? Like Musk arriving in Mars.
25:29 Dominic Sandbrook? That wasn't a comparison I expected, to be honest. Right, they stay there, Stani 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 twenties. 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, started, sat down and started writing the book, he was called Klein. But apart from that, there
26:11 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 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
26:56 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, he's burying it? Well, possibly, because Sujisroff Nida says in his book, and I think this does make sense. He says, it's, 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 commune, the other agents, saw that and took against him. He was kind of really livid liberal. Yeah, that he basically is spoiling their fun and he's judging them.
27:40 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. And then he vanishes. So Conrad vanishes, the paper trail disappears and he vanishes some 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 eighteen ninety one. And then his 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.
28:21 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 nineteen oh three, 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
29:06 Dominic Sandbrook? of, you'd have a lot to talk about. Yeah. 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.
29:47 Tom Holland? 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, your dreams and your, your fantasies.
30:03 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 mates.
30:42 Tom Holland? Yeah, I was like us with Theo, trying to persuade him to do an episode.
30:45 Dominic Sandbrook? It's really upbeat and jolly and people will love it.
30:47 Tom Holland? Full of fun.
30:48 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Morell's campaign or anything like that because that hasn't even started yet.
31:04 Tom Holland? Yeah, it hasn't begun, has it?
31:04 Dominic Sandbrook? No, nowhere near. So it's obviously something that he feels he has to do or wants to do.
31:09 Tom Holland? And it's presumably the time where everyone still thinks it's brilliant and it's civilising and hooray.
31:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. Now, the most shocking thing for people like us, Tom, is how much Conrad is being paid. Blackwoods 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.
31:31 Tom Holland? And how, how highly rated Conrad is, I assume. I mean, he's not Conan Doyle, I accept, but.
31:36 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
31:45 Tom Holland? Great days.
31:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, great days. So he turns it around by the 6th of February. He delivers thirty eight thousand words to Blackwell's, which I think is quite slow.
31:55 Tom Holland? Yeah, I think it's pretty fast.
31:58 Dominic Sandbrook? That's three weeks' work. That is three weeks' work. Come on, mate. Anyway, it's published in February, March and April eighteen ninety nine. So just before we go to the break, for people who are not familiar with the book or need reminding, what has he produced? Most accounts that you read say that it's narrated by this guy Marlowe. That's actually not true. Marlowe is not the narrator.
32:19 Tom Holland? It's Russian dolls, isn't it?
32:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there are narratives within narratives. So basically, the narrator is part of a group of people who are on this ship. The Nellie 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.
32:40 Tom Holland? 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 Marlowe in the boat.
33:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and Marlowe is kind of leaning against the mast, is sort of sitting down leaning against the mast. He's 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, you mean, you talked about this, Tom, when we did a long time ago, when we did an episode about Roman London.
33:43 Tom Holland? I think we opened with this message.
33:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, he says, what must it have been like to be a Roman in Britain? The feeling, you know, 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.
34:07 Tom Holland? 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.
34:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
34:22 Tom Holland? Which of course is historically very inaccurate.
34:24 Dominic Sandbrook? 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...
34:58 Tom Holland? Well, in that, he has switched from the Romans to Europeans, hasn't he?
35:02 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 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.
35:27 Tom Holland? Literally true.
35:28 Dominic Sandbrook? That is literally true. Marlowe, like Conrad, is hired to take a steamboat up the Congo, although the Congo is never named.
35:35 Tom Holland? 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.
35:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the Sepulchre City or something like that.
35:45 Tom Holland? Yeah.
35:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
35:45 Tom Holland? Sepulchre City, yeah.
35:46 Dominic Sandbrook? So, but it's clear, you know, there's no, it's clear, I think, where we're talking about.
35:51 Tom Holland? But I suppose it kind of universalizes it a bit.
35:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, I think so. I mean, 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 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. Mr. Kurtz is absolutely brilliant. Mr. Kurtz is...
36:13 Tom Holland? Yeah, I love him.
36:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Mr. Kurtz, he's half English, he's half French, although people say all Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz. He is a brilliant writer. He's painted this oil, 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 just absolutely brilliant.
36:41 Tom Holland? But he is also praised as the man who gets as much ivory as all the other agents put together. So he is also being praised for his acquisitiveness and whatever qualities are required to obtain that amount of ivory.
36:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
36:59 Tom Holland? So there is a darkness there right from the start.
37:02 Dominic Sandbrook? There is indeed. And quite early on, Marlowe 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, as far as I know.
37:32 Tom Holland? Another of those kind of terrifyingly quotable phrases.
37:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So Marlowe gets the boat upriver. He has a series of quite scary adventures. I say adventures, but they're...
37:41 Tom Holland? They're not really, are they?
37:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Thing is, they're riffs on the kind of adventures you would see in boy's stories, but they're told in a really unsettling, like he can't understand what's going on.
37:51 Tom Holland? But also, nothing ever happens. So that stuff about hearing drums in the distance or whatever, in Rider 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.
38:05 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
38:13 Tom Holland? But it's not standing in the middle of King Solomon's mines being, I mean, it's just not that kind of adventure.
38:19 Dominic Sandbrook? No, it's not at all. And Marlowe is just standing there basically doing nothing during all of it. He's not a sort of active, exciting protagonist.
38:27 Tom Holland? Loading his rifle or that kind of thing.
38:29 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 been 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.
39:01 Tom Holland? So not like Marlon Brando.
39:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Not like Marlon Brando at all, but very like this bloke Klein that Conrad himself had picked up. Marlowe 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 Marlowe, oh, it's a 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, they finally head back downstream with Kurtz who is dying. And then we get to that scene that you opened with, Tom, where Kurtz, his final words, he's lying 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
39:47 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
40:08 Tom Holland? 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.
40:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
40:27 Tom Holland? That drama.
40:28 Dominic Sandbrook? It's a nice parallel.
40:29 Tom Holland? Contemporary of Shakespeare's.
40:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. Now in Apocalypse Now, if 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, he says that Kurtz, we'll have the, 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.
41:12 Dominic Sandbrook? And the very last scene of the novel is him giving the papers to Kurtz's grieving fiance.
41:19 Tom Holland? Because all the, um, the, the owners of the company want these papers, don't they?
41:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
41:24 Tom Holland? Marlowe is saying that, you know, I don't, I don't have them. And also just to say one thing that, that we, we emitted, um, Kurtz has had, uh, an African woman who loves him.
41:35 Dominic Sandbrook? That's right.
41:36 Tom Holland? And she is actually, I think, the most Ryder Haggard figure in the whole thing.
41:40 Dominic Sandbrook? She's got a kind of a crazy headdress or something.
41:42 Tom Holland? And I felt kind of slightly out of tune with everything else in the novella.
41:46 Dominic Sandbrook? I totally agree with you. I think that's the one moment in the book where Conrad yields to kind of late.
41:53 Tom Holland? The melodrama.
41:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, African melodrama. Agreed. And this woman who's like incredibly impressive and statuesque and sort of, she stands there, you know, lamenting loudly.
42:03 Tom Holland? Waving spears and.
42:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and all of this.
42:05 Tom Holland? Kind of Boudicca figure.
42:07 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
42:28 Tom Holland? Well, I mean, unless her name was horror.
42:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, seems very unlikely.
42:32 Tom Holland? Seems unlikely. 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.
42:48 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.
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44:30 Tom Holland? 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 glimpsed
45:11 Tom Holland? truth, the strange commingling of desire and hate. So that's the verdict that Marlowe 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. 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? Is it something he's seen in himself? Is it
45:55 Tom Holland? 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?
46:05 Dominic Sandbrook? That's a very good question, Tom.
46:06 Tom Holland? Well, loads of questions for you.
46:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, we'll answer all those questions in this.
46:10 Tom Holland? You have 45 minutes. Pick up your pen. Start now.
46:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Literary scholars have tried for more than a century to answer those questions. And finally, we can reveal the answers.
46:18 Tom Holland? Brilliant. It's like the Kennedy assassination.
46:20 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 gone with Stanley, Henry Morton Stanley, to rescue an Egypt, such a complicated story. Basically, they went to, they went to rescue an Egyptian governor called Emin Pashu, 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
47:05 Dominic Sandbrook? running around biting women.
47:07 Tom Holland? Really?
47:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, very bad behaviour. 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 Bartholot, he possibly is an inspiration for Kurtz. Then there's a Belgian called Arthur Hodesther, 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. There were rumours 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, you know, intruding on their patch.
47:52 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Karl Peters, who was a German. He was basically Germany's answer to Henry Morton Stanley. He launched his own expedition to rescue this bloke, Emin 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 bloke. 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 its own story.
48:36 Dominic Sandbrook? 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'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 Kurtz. Which is very Kurtz. So as Jisroth Nida 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."
49:20 Dominic Sandbrook? As Nida says, the model for Kurtz comes from literary and philosophical tradition as much as it does from real-life African behaviour.
49:29 Tom Holland? 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.
49:40 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Marlowe, 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, Marlowe says at one point in Harte Darnes, 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's soul is sold to the devil, you know, 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's so, he
50:19 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
50:29 Tom Holland? Yeah, so exterminate all the brutes.
50:31 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
50:43 Tom Holland? Which began with Napoleon going to Egypt.
50:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. To put Africa down on paper and control it and map it.
50:49 Tom Holland? Very Edward Said.
50:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, that is the act of colonialism, effectively.
50:55 Tom Holland? Well, European colonialism.
50:56 Dominic Sandbrook? European colonialism, yeah. So is this, therefore, a story about colonialism? And is Kurtz 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 in 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
51:38 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
51:53 Tom Holland? I mean, one, 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, that Conrad is doing the same thing. So the whole, um, the opening with Britain as Africa, but also there's a kind of an amazing passage. So he's looking out, Marlow is looking out at all the villages that are abandoned. And he, he says, well, you know, if loads of Africans suddenly, 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 for them. I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon. And of course, that is a prefiguring of the slave
52:38 Tom Holland? labour in due course that the Nazis will introduce in the heart of Europe.
52:42 Dominic Sandbrook? I think that's absolutely right. And I think the beginning of the book, by transposing what happens to Britain, it, it makes it very obvious that Conrad is, 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, the, the other narrator, he also thinks the British
53:25 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
53:39 Tom Holland? So very Kipling.
53:40 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Burr's, you know, doesn't ring any bells? And he says, well, 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 Maddox 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.
54:25 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
54:37 Tom Holland? Although, um, if you read it and you didn't know about Conrad's enthusiasm for British imperialism, would you necessarily recognize that?
54:49 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. He wrote a brilliantly influential book, shall we say, called Orientalism, which some scholars think is a terrible book.
55:08 Tom Holland? I think it's brilliant. I think you say it's brilliant.
55:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Anyway, Said says, yes, you would recognize Conrad 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.
55:28 Tom Holland? I mean, that is what you get. That is what you get.
55:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, a savage critique.
55:32 Tom Holland? Yes.
55:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, maybe it's not 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 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.
56:01 Tom Holland? But that's why Said is a brilliant cultural critic, but he's, you know, he never writes a great work of literature because it would simply be adject prop. Conrad's story is vastly more complex and unsettling than than a kind of programmatic response to this would demand.
56:19 Dominic Sandbrook? I totally agree with you about that, Tom. But there's a more, there's a more substantial critique. Now, this is by an African writer called Chinua Achebe.
56:29 Tom Holland? Nigerian, isn't he?
56:30 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 fudling 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,
57:14 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 dehumanises Africans, which treats Africa as the heart of darkness, et cetera, et cetera, 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,
57:59 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 listening to this would expect, because with the rest is history, that at this point, we kind of turn our guns on Chinua and Chabot 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, 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 travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings."
58:39 Tom Holland? Okay, I accept that. However, one of the reasons why it is travelling 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 colonists. 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.
59:04 Dominic Sandbrook? I agree with you, but you might not know that, reading Conrad's book.
59:07 Tom Holland? 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.
59:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, I suppose so. I suppose so. But those two passages are quite far apart, and you might not draw the connection.
59:17 Tom Holland? But that is why Conrad is a great writer, because he's setting up these, you know, these echoes in the prose that reverberate.
59:25 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 dehumanising. So the porters that you mentioned, you know, the people who are with the, they're carrying the 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
1:00:08 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:00:19 Tom Holland? That I would accept. And we've already touched on Kurtz's African concubine, who is pure stereotyping.
1:00:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:00:28 Tom Holland? I mean, the pure kind of fantasy figure. And I think that is where Conrad's kind of literary mastery falls down.
1:00:36 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:00:45 Tom Holland? Well, yes, yes and no. I mean, because there is a risk that you then start saying anything racist is Marlow talking, it's Conrad talking. I mean, you can do it either way. I mean, if you start playing that game, depending on what you, whether you want to to get Conrad off the charge or not, you can, you can fix the, fix your critique.
1:01:08 Dominic Sandbrook? You can, but I think you have to. So Achebe basically says in his, 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, and their main character are the same person.
1:01:27 Tom Holland? 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.
1:01:50 Tom Holland? 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 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, you know, Conrad could talk to the Europeans, but he couldn't talk to the Africans.
1:02:35 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 boring one. I don't think it's Conrad clearly, I mean, it's such a terribly cliched thing to say. Conrad obviously is a man of his age. He reflects the assumptions that he has grown up with, both in Russian occupied, you know, Eastern Poland, Ukraine, and later on sailing around on in British merchant ships. I mean, he's not, you know, 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
1:03:18 Dominic Sandbrook? mission and colonialism and whatnot. I mean, how can it not?
1:03:21 Tom Holland? 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.
1:03:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:03:31 Tom Holland? And I think that is true. And I think that a reigning 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.
1:03:46 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:04:01 Tom Holland? 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 Heart of Darkness. I mean, all those people I think are implicated in what is being discussed.
1:04:19 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:04:45 Tom Holland? Right.
1:04:45 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:05:03 Tom Holland? 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 racism that Europeans display towards Africans is also part of the racism that is being displayed by Romans towards the Britons.
1:05:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:05:39 Tom Holland? That this is what imperialists do.
1:05:41 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 SNP bloke that we mentioned earlier, he says of mankind, the year before he wrote Heart 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,
1:06:23 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 and extinguished sun. I love those lines. Conrad has a view of mankind, of human beings, that is unbelievably sceptical, ironic, bleak, dark.
1:06:45 Tom Holland? Conservative.
1:06:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, conservative.
1:06:47 Tom Holland? I mean, he's sceptical about notions of progress and that Jerusalem can be built on the earth.
1:06:55 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, one of my favourite books, La Bête humaine by Emil Zola, which is about basically, I know it sounds very unpromising, it's about a Parisian train driver who turns out to be a sex crazed homicidal maniac.
1:07:21 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 such a popular idea in very late Victorian.
1:07:35 Tom Holland? Well, also Dracula, which is.
1:07:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Dracula, yeah.
1:07:38 Tom Holland? Published in 1897, the idea of darkness coming to England.
1:07:42 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 come, 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.
1:08:16 Tom Holland? I mean, there's no question that Heart of Darkness has given to very committed anti-racists, anti-imperialists.
1:08:27 Tom Holland? 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 three, two or three years ago, and it was about European colonialism and was not favorable at all.
1:08:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
1:08:44 Tom Holland? And it was based on 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.
1:09:14 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 listen, 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?
1:09:35 Tom Holland? Okay.
1:09:37 Tom Holland? Malo 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 somber, under an overcast sky, seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. Goodbye.
1:10:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Goodbye.
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