These adventures began when he was still only sixteen, on board the Mont Blanc, bound for Martinique out of Marseilles. No doubt his subsequent sailing to the Caribbean provided much of the visual imagery for his later writing, especially Nostromo. It seems likely that he was also involved in a disastrous scheme of gunrunning from Marseilles to Spain. Deeply in debt both from this enterprise and from gambling at Monte Carlo, he attempted suicide, shooting himself in the chest. Uncle Tadeusz bailed him out, discharging his debts and inventing for him the fiction that he was shot in a duel, which Conrad found useful later for his wife and his friends.63
Conrad’s sixteen-year career in the British merchant navy, starting as a deckhand, was scarcely smooth, but it provided the store upon which, as a writer, he would draw. Typically Conrad’s best work, such as Heart of Darkness, is the result of long gestation periods during which he seems to have repeatedly brooded on the meaning or symbolic shape of his experience seen against the background of the developments in contemporary science. Most of these he understood as ominous, rather than liberating, for humanity. But Conrad was not anti-scientific. On the contrary, he engaged with the rapidly changing shape of scientific thought, as Redmond O’Hanlon has shown in his study Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Conrad’s Fiction (1984).64 Conrad was brought up on the classical physics of the Victorian age, which rested on the cornerstone belief in the permanence of matter, albeit with the assumptions that the sun was cooling and that life on earth was inevitably doomed. In a letter to his publisher dated 29 September 1898, Conrad describes the effect of a demonstration of X rays. He was in Glasgow and staying with Dr John Mclntyre, a radiologist: ‘In the evening dinner, phonograph, X rays, talk about the secret of the universe, and the non-existence of, so called, matter. The secret of the universe is in the existence of horizontal waves whose varied vibrations are set at the bottom of all states of consciousness…. Neil Munro stood in front of a Röntgen machine and on the screen behind we contemplated his backbone and ribs…. It was so – said the doctor – and there is no space, time, matter, mind as vulgarly understood … only the eternal force that causes the waves – it’s not much.’65
Conrad was not quite as up-to-date as he imagined, for J. J. Thomson’s demonstration the previous year showed the ‘waves’ to be particles. But the point is not so much that Conrad was au fait with science, but rather that the certainties about the nature of matter that he had absorbed were now deeply undermined. This sense he translates into the structures of many of his characters whose seemingly solid personalities, when placed in the crucible of nature (often in sea voyages), are revealed as utterly unstable or rotten.
After Conrad’s uncle fell ill, Józef stopped off in Brussels on the way to Poland, to be interviewed for a post with the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo – a fateful interview that led to his experiences between June and December 1890 in the Belgian Congo and, ten years on, to Heart of Darkness. In that decade, the Congo lurked in his mind, awaiting a trigger to be formulated in prose. That was provided by the shocking revelations of the ‘Benin Massacres’ in 1897, as well as the accounts of Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s expeditions in Africa.66 Benin: The City of Blood was published in London and New York in 1897, revealing to the western civilised world a horror story of native African blood rites. After the Berlin Conference of 1884, Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the Niger River region. Following the slaughter of a British mission to Benin (a state west of Nigeria), which arrived during King Duboar’s celebrations of his ancestors with ritual sacrifices, a punitive expedition was dispatched to capture this city, long a centre of slavery. The account of Commander R. H. Bacon, intelligence officer of the expedition, parallels in some of its details the events in Heart of Darkness. When Commander Bacon reached Benin, he saw what, despite his vivid language, he says lay beyond description: ‘It is useless to continue describing the horrors of the place, everywhere death, barbarity and blood, and smells that it hardly seems right for human beings to smell and yet live.’67 Conrad avoids definition of what constituted ‘The horror! The horror!’ – the famous last words in the book, spoken by Kurtz, the man Marlow, the hero, has come to save – opting instead for hints such as round balls on posts that Marlow thinks he sees through his field glasses when approaching Kurtz’s compound. Bacon, for his part, describes crucifixion trees surrounded by piles of skulls and bones, blood smeared everywhere, over bronze idols and ivory.
Conrad’s purpose, however, is not to elicit the typical response of the civilised world to reports of barbarism. In his report Commander Bacon had exemplified this attitude: ‘they [the natives] cannot fail to see that peace and the good rule of the white man mean happiness, contentment and security.’ Similar sentiments are expressed in the report that Kurtz composes for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Marlow describes this ‘beautiful piece of writing,’ ‘vibrating with eloquence.’ And yet, scrawled ‘at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment is blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!”’68
This savagery at the heart of civilised humans is also revealed in the behaviour of the white traders – ‘pilgrims,’ Marlow calls them. White travellers’ tales, like those of Henry Morton Stanley in ‘darkest Africa,’ written from an unquestioned sense of the superiority of the European over the native, were available to Conrad’s dark vision. Heart of Darkness thrives upon the ironic reversals of civilisation and barbarity, of light and darkness. Here is a characteristic Stanley episode, recorded in his diary. Needing food, he told a group of natives that ‘I must have it or we would die. They must sell it for beads, red, blue or green, copper or brass wire or shells, or … I drew significant signs across the throat. It was enough, they understood at once.’69 In Heart of Darkness, by contrast, Marlow is impressed by the extraordinary restraint of the starving cannibals accompanying the expedition, who have been paid in bits of brass wire but have no food, their rotting hippo flesh – too nauseating a smell for European endurance – having been thrown overboard. He wonders why ‘they didn’t go for us – they were thirty to five – and have a good tuck-in for once.’70 Kurtz is a symbolic figure, of course (‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’), and the thrust of Conrad’s fierce satire emerges clearly through Marlow’s narrative.71 The imperial civilising mission amounts to a savage predation: ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human conscience,’ as Conrad elsewhere described it. At this end of the century such a conclusion about the novel seems obvious, but it was otherwise in the reviews that greeted its first appearance in 1902. The Manchester Guardian wrote that Conrad was not attacking colonisation, expansion, or imperialism, but rather showing how cheap ideals shrivel up.72 Part of the fascination surely lies in Conradian psychology. The journey within of so many of his characters seems explicitly Freudian, and indeed many Freudian interpretations of his works have been proposed. Yet Conrad strongly resisted Freud. When he was in Corsica, and on the verge of a breakdown, Conrad was given a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams. He spoke of Freud ‘with scornful irony,’ took the book to his room, and returned it on the eve of his departure, unopened.73