Books

llistah Kurtz he dead'

Richard West

Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives Frederick R. Karl (Faber £12.50) Leopold 11 of the Belgians: King of Colonialism Barbara Emerson (Weidenfeld £12.50).

In Limbo: The Story of Stanley's Rear Column Tony Gould (Hamish Hamilton £8.95).

Towards the end of his life, Joseph Conrad attempted to read his own novel Lord Jim but gave up, confessing it bored me'. This was comforting news to one, who although an admirer of Conrad, finds him a little heavy going. It takes me about ten days to read the first ten pages of any Conrad book, and if I am reading two books at the same time, it is always the Conrad that gets read second. It must be said that this vast authoritative life of Conrad is often more tedious than its subject.

Unlike most biographers of a novelist, Mr Karl works on the assumption that we have read all the novels and can remember the plots. He does not indulge himself or us by evoking the flavour and the excitement of, for example, Lord Jim and Nostromo. Nor does he play up the excitements, suspense, successes, failures and romance of Conrad's life, as for example his first book getting accepted. Such artifice may slightly distort the course of a novelist's life but it does make for enjoyable reading.

Because Mr Karl has so thorough a knowledge of Conrad's correspondence, we do get many insights into his personality. We learn that he liked Trollope; that he was once heard to cackle at George Robey performing in a Sheffield music-hall; that his first published story appeared in Titbits magazine; that he described a lady journalist as a 'yum-yum girl'. However we get very little idea of how Conrad appeared to his family and friends; if he was witty in conversation, kind to children, a social snob. One does like to know of such great men what were their tastes in food and drink as well as in literature. The book contains several reproductions of Conrad's drawing including a busty girl with a snake and three gartered can-can dancers, but nothing that I could find in the 1,008 pages of text about his artistic skills or taste in feminine beauty.

Again this book tends to regard Conrad too much as an artist in words instead of a story-teller. He may have been influenced in his style by Mallarme, James, Pater, Flaubert and even by the musician Wagner, but might he not have written much the same novels if he had not read any of these? This tracking down of artistic influences is part of the trade of Eng. Lit (and Am. Lit., for Mr Karl is a New York professor) but holds little interest for the ordinary reader. Nor does retrospective psycho-analysis, although, to be fair, Mr Karl carries his Freudianism lightly and uses it to perceptive effect regarding Conrad's relationship with his father.

Although Mr Karl accuses the last Conrad biographer, Jocelyn Baines, of 'naive critical interpretations', I found him less helpful than Baines in explaining Conrad's use of the English language, particularly its relationship with French. Much of Conrad's obscurity comes from his style of writing, rather than any artistic theories of symbolism and time change. Like Henry James, his even obscurer contemporary, Conrad appeared to write with a foreign accent.

Having so far carped, I must now say that Mr Karl has written a serious and very admirable book which must, from now on, form the basis for any study of Conrad. If he did not at the same time choose to make it an entertaining book (like Henri Troyat's life of Tolstoy), perhaps he regards that as outside his duty. The sub-title, 'The Three Lives' refers to Conrad as Pole, sailor and writer, a valid and useful distinction that Conrad himself perceived. The early part of the book and subsequent chapters bearing on Conrad's Polishness, are most well done and illuminating. In particular, we are able to see how strongly the young Conrad was influenced by the family's exile to Russia after the failed Polish rebellion of 1863. Although Conrad, in later life, affected disdain for the revolutionary liberalism of people like his father, he was always vulnerable to the accusation from Poles of having deserted his country and turned himself into an Englishman. It seems to me that Mr Karl is right in suggesting that Conrad's guilt about this inspires his most political novel, Under Western Eyes, perhaps even Lord Jim. Again Mr Karl is surely right in suggesting that Heyst, the hero of Victory, reflects Conrad's feelings about his own father. This insight adds new poignancy to the short, marvellous passage in the novel explaining how Heyst had made of his life 'a solitary achievement, accomplished not by hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but by a system of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes'. After the death of Heyst, one of the other characters says:' . . woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love — and to put its trust in lifer. The death of his mother when he was still a small child probably killed Conrad's trust in life and sent him off on that 'restless wandering' first to Marseilles and then round the world.

Although Conrad hated Russia and most Russian authors, protesting that Poland was part of western Europe, his novel on Russian emigres, Under Western Eyes, and, to a lesser extent, The Secret Agent, have more in common with Dostoevsky, whom Conrad detested, than with the 'western' Turgenev whom he admired. (Dostoevsky in turn appeared todislike the Poles; they are shown in his novels as arrogant and sly.) In both these political novels, Conrad revealed a contempt he shared with Dostoevsky for every kind of political leftist, revolutionary or reformist. His view of life in general, and of modern society in particular, was unremittingly pessimistic. As a Darwinian (or a post-Darwinian as Mr Karl prefers to call him), as an admirer of Spengler, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, he thought that England would end in artnY dictatorship and the whole world go to perdition. Like Kipling, to whom he was often compared (to the annoyance of both men) Conrad was not surprised by the first World war and the Bolshevik revolution. Had he lived a little longer (he died in 1924) Conrad would not have been surprised by the advent to power of Hitler over the Germans, whom he disliked as much as the Russians. He did not much care for Americans, although he enjoyed his visit to the United States.

Conrad's pessimism was most grimly expressed in the harrowing, short novella Heart of Darkness, written in 1899, as though as a prediction of the 20th century. The book is a fictionalised account of the months Conrad had spent as the captain, or captain-designate, for he never got his command, of a Congo river steamer. The narrator, Marlow, describes how even as a child he had longed to visit that 'place of darkness. But there was one river espe' cially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest, curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depth of the land'.

In 1890, when Conrad went to the Congo, its length had already been explored by the journalist H.M. Stanley and now its treasure had come into the hands of King Leopold II of the Belgians. His last biographer, Neal Ascherson, called him The King Incorporated, for he controlled the centre of Africa as a personal fief. He was the first and probably still the worst of what we now call multi-nationals.

This cold, harsh but brutally able mail was second king of the Belgians after their break with Holland, in which separation Holland came away with the colonies in the East and West Indies. Although Belgium was then the industrial heart of Europe, a region comparable to the North and Midlands of England, she lacked a tropical colony as a source of raw materials and purchaser of her manufactures. Leopold looked around for colonies all over the world, from Argentina, to China and the Phillipines. At one stage he tried to get his hands on Sarawak, the setting of Lord API and other of Conrad's novels. At another time he tried to get Vietnam, with its 'friendly people', but wisely left that accursed land to the French.

Leopold chose the Congo for several reasons. In the 1870's, it still had not been colonised or even coveted by one of the European powers. Later, Leopold managed to play off the English against the French. He got on well with Stanley and hired him to build a railway up from the coast. Meanwhile books by Stanley and Livingstone had roused public opinion in Europe, especially in England, against the persistent Arab slave-traders in central and eastern Africa. Leopold started his great commercial empire under the guise of philanthropic bodies such as the Study Committee on Upper Congo, the African International Association and Anti-Slavery Congress. Just as the powers, like Russia now greedy for oil and minerals, conceal their schemes under the guise of 'freedom fighting' and 'anti-racialism', so Leopold tricked the Evangelical Christians and the liberals, the ancestors of our World Council of Churches. 'I have sought' he told his cousin, Queen Victoria 'to meet those most interested in bringing civilisation to Africa. There is an important task to be undertaken there to which I would feel honoured to contribute'.

His latest biographer, Barbara Emerson, has written a good book, though overpriced, considering that it is less than one third the size of Mr Karl's whopper. She is kinder than Mr Ascherson to King Leopold, Whom she credits with at least some inklings of philanthropy. She points out that his Obsessions with a colony began after the heart-breaking death of his son. She also Points out that the old monster was good to his final mistress. But monster he certainly was with regard to Africa; or `witchman' as Conrad called him. 'It was just robbery with violence Conrad said.

Other observers, like Roger Casement, were later to write on the Congo horrors, but none with such sombre force as Conrad in Heart of Darkness: 'Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half-effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair . . . They were dying slowly — it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now — nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest'. According to Mr Karl, Conrad may have been thinking here of Russia where he and his family went into exile. The imagery of those African serfs is still more ghastly, now we have learned of Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago; when most of the world has become a place of darkness. Besides conveying a generalised horror, Heart of Darkness shows how an individual trader and journalist, Kurtz is transformed by Congo corruption from a philanthropist to a murdering maniac. The man who wanted to bring civilisation becomes a rapacious ivory trader, with African heads impaled on stakes in his garden. Over his anthropological treatise he scrawls 'exterminate all the brutes'. His dying words to Marlow are 'The horror! The horror!'

The story of Kurtz may have been based on a scandal that came out in the Eighties and now forms part of the subject of Tony Gould's book In Limbo. We have recently had several books about Stanley and in particular his rather absurd expedition to rescue the Austrian scientist Emin Pasha, from what is now the southern Sudan. The rescue expedition went right across Africa from west to east, causing the death of most of the whites and blacks who took part. It turned out that Emin Pasha did not want to be rescued; he cracked his skull in a fall at the rescue celebrations; and he was murdered very soon afterwards. It is a wierd, unsatisfactory story and so are the books concerning it, not least Stanley's own.

It was therefore a good idea to devote a book to the rear column of British officers and African troops that Stanley left behind in the upper Congo. Since they spent most of their time in base camp, the reader is spared those wearisome tramps through the jungle that take up most books of adventure in Africa. We see in their diaries and reminiscences that corrupting effect of life in darkest Africa.

At least one of the officers, Major Bartellot, was already a negrophobe at the start of the expedition, but even the gentler men came to accept the custom of flogging the African soldiers up to and past the point of death. Although they took African mistresses, they seem to have felt little concern, and certainly no affection for those that King Leopold wanted to civilise. They had no qualms about asking help from the local Arab slave-traders. They quarreled insanely among themselves.

Bartellot was eventually murdered by one of the Africans he had been abusing. But the strangest story of all was that concerning James Sligo Jameson, a married man, and by all accounts the most decent and admirable of the rear column. He was a botanist, and a bird and butterfly collector and also an artist, a fact that contributed to the scandal after his death. An Arab interpreter published a detailed account of how in an African village 'Mr Jameson said he was very anxious to see a man killed and eaten by cannibals'. Whereupon, after the gift of six handkerchieves, a girl was brought forward, stabbed to death and consumed on the spot — while Jameson sketched the whole scene. Later Jameson's widow published a letter in The Times giving Jameson's version of the event: that he had not asked for anybody to be killed; that the killing was done too quickly for him to prevent it; and that the drawings were made later from memory. But as The Times editorial said, this explanation struck 'a still heavier blow at his reputation'.

A similar controversy has arisen several times recently with regard to press and television photographs of atrocities, such as the incident in the Congo when an Italian film crew were said to have staged the shooting of one of Lumumba's men. In Elisabethville in 1964, I myself lunched with a sort of journalist who, it later transpired, had machine-gunned a whole African village.

Conrad himself got as far as the Stanley Falls, near the scene of the cannibalism. He hated the pace, caught dysentry and malaria, and nearly died. Yet for all its scenes of corruption and murder, Heart of Darkness is most disturbing when Marlow is ending his story to friends on a yacht moored in the mouth of the Thames.

Earlier he had been talking about the Romans who came to the river.' "And this also" said Marlow suddenly "has been one of the dark places of the earth" '. Looking forward, Conrad saw that England, her industry and her institutions ruined, might revert to horror comparable with that of the Congo, or Zaire as it is now called — but no less hot rible. In this, his pessimism, Conrad was only too prophetic. His Heart of Dark ness became a significant book to writers like T.S. Eliot who used as an inscription for his The Hollow Men (and wanted to use for The Waste Land) Conrad's sardonic epitaph: `Mistah Kurtz — he dead'.

As I was writing this I learned from the New York Review of Books that V.S.

Naipaul, one of our finest and most Conrad ian writers, has just published a novel in the United States entitled A Bend in the River. And what river? Yes, you have guessed it: Naipaul too has been visiting those dark places of the earth.