14 (p.59) “Once when various ... ‘have no entrails”’: The account here of large numbers of agents succumbing to disease is based on the historical facts. Hochschild observes that “before 1895 fully a third of white Congo state agents died there; some of the others died of the effects of disease after returning to Europe” (King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 138).
15 (p. 61 ) allowing one man... a halter: This phrase is a play on the adage “One man may steal a horse, while another may not look over a hedge,” which conveys the idea that whereas some people are above the law, others are unjustly held to account for trivial infractions.
16 (p.64) inhabitants in the planet Mars: In 1877 the Italian astronomer Gio vanni Schiaparelli reported the existence of caneli (“channels”) on the Martian surface; the term, however, was translated into English as “canals,” spuriously lending credence to the notion that there was intelligent life on Mars. In January 1898 Conrad’s friend H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds, depicting an invasion of Earth by Martians. Conrad began writing Heart of Darkness in December of that year, and it is likely that this reference to “inhabitants in the planet Mars” was inspired by Wells’ popular novella.
17 (p. 71) “Ivory.... from him”: As we have already seen (in endnote 13, above), the manager schemes against Kurtz because he believes him to be after his job, and he worries that Kurtz’s prowess as an acquirer of ivory may enable him eventually to do just that. Further, he finds galling Kurtz’s ostensibly humanitarian notions as to how the business should be run. Disdainfully citing the latter’s contention that “[e]ach station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing” (p. 72), he makes clear his own view that such an idealistic approach would hamper the company’s ability to accrue profits.
18 (p. 82) brass wire... lumps of some stuff ... lavender colour: Sherry points out that brass wire was the staple currency of the Congo during this period, and he identifies the scanty food the African crewmen eat as a tapioca-based dough (Conrad’s Western World, p.60). Their grossly inadequate means of subsistence underscores the company’s inhumane treatment of them, and it also enhances Marlow’s admiration for what he terms their “restraint,” a quality that, as he pointedly observes later, Kurtz lacks.
19 (p.86) I was looking.... We were being shot at!: This episode is another instance of what Ian Watt has termed Conrad’s method of “delayed decoding.” For an account of this technique, see “Youth” endnote 15, above.
20 (p.90) the hair goes on growing: That is, on corpses. Three sentences earlier, Marlow has referred to “the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz.”
21 (p.92) International Society... Savage Customs: Conrad appears to have drawn the title of this organization from L’Association Internationale pour l‘Exploration et la Civilisation en Afrique (the International Association for Exploration and Civilization in Africa), which was headed by King Leopold II.
22 (p.96) Dutch trading-house: That the Russian has begun his entrepreneurial career with a Dutch company alludes to the fact that the Congo region was a heavily contested commercial territory during this era. Sherry points out that one of the greatest competitors of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo (the Belgian company that employed Conrad) was actually a Dutch trading house, the Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handels-Vennootschap (Conrad’s Western World, p. 69).
23 (p. 101) “He declared he would shoot me.... was true, too”: The Russian’s account of Kurtz’s arbitrary ruthlessness is not only an indication of his idol’s individual madness. The Machiavellian manager similarly contemplates having the Russian hanged for ivory poaching, and he is encouraged in this plan by his buccaneer uncle, who says “Why not? Anything—anything can be done in this country” (p. 72). Such pronouncements accurately reflect the attitudes and practices of the time. As Hochschild observes,For a white man, the Congo was... a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose whatever punishments you liked. If you got carried away, the penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist. A station chief at Manyanga, on the big rapids, who beat two of his personal servants to death in 1890 was only fined five hundred francs. What mattered was keeping the ivory flowing back to Belgium (King Leopold’s Ghost, pp. 136-137).
24 (p.102) those heads on the stakes: Hochschild has compiled impressive circumstantial evidence to support the claim that Kurtz was likely modeled on several particularly sadistic white officers in the Force Publique (the private army created by Leopold II to police the Congo) who, like Kurtz, collected the heads of their African victims. One such officer, Léon Rom, is an especially strong candidate. He was the station chief at Leopoldville (the Central Station) when Conrad passed through there in 1890, and he subsequently became a commander at Stanley Falls (the Inner Station, site of Kurtz’s compound), where he decorated the outside of his home with the heads of twenty-one slain Africans. Hochschild points out that Conrad almost certainly would have known of Rom’s head collecting from multiple reports in the British press, including one in The Saturday Review (which he read faithfully) on December 17, 1898, several days before he began writing Heart of Darkness (King Leopold’s Ghost, p.145).
25 (p.104) Kurtz-that means short in German: Marlow’s observation serves both as an ironic commentary on Kurtz’s fraudulent career (“the name was as true as everything else in his life,” he quips of the man whose emaciated body appears to be “at least seven feet long”) and as an evocation of the name of the actual company agent upon whom Kurtz is loosely based: Georges Antoine Klein’s surname means “small” in German.
26 (p.106) She walked with measured steps.... passionate soul: Marlow’s account of the African woman is highly exoticized as well as eroticized. Conrad toned down the latter aspect by deleting from the end of the serialized version’s paragraph a sentence that explicitly renders her an object of Marlow’s desires: “And we men looked at her—at any rate I looked at her.” Marlow’s attraction to a woman who is apparently Kurtz’s lover contributes to the parallels between himself and Kurtz that are developed in the ensuing pages. Conrad’s claim that the novella’s last scene—Marlow’s meeting with Kurtz’s fiancée—contains a “mere shadow of love interest” (Collected Letters, vol. 2, p.145) furthers these parallels as well.
27 (p. 115) “The horror! The horror!”: Especially compelling among the broad range of interpretations that this famous passage has received is the suggestion that it sums up Kurtz’s insight into the basic depravity of human nature. T. S. Eliot had planned to use the passage that concludes with these words as the epigraph for The Waste Land (1922) but was dissuaded from doing so by Ezra Pound, who heavily edited the poem. Apparently having in mind Marlow’s characterization of Kurtz as “hollow at the core” (p.103), Eliot subsequently used as an epigraph for “The Hollow Men” (1925) the terse announcement “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” (p. 116).
28 (p.124) It seemed to me.... was his due?: Conrad here alludes to a Latin maxim: Fiat justitia, ruat caelum (Let justice be done, though the heavens fall).
“Amy Foster”
1 (p.125) Martello Tower: More than a hundred of these small but massively fortified and heavily armed structures had been constructed on the southeastern English coast between 1805 and 1812. Given that Yanko’s landing in England is viewed by the rural people as an assault of sorts and that this period was characterized by heightened fears of the military ambitions of European powers toward Britain, this Martello Tower (which is mentioned twice in the story) provides Conrad with an important symbol of insular British xenophobia during an era in which that tendency was particularly pronounced.
2 (p.125) Brenzett ... Colebrook ... Darnford: Although Brenzett is an actual town in Coun
ty Kent, unlike Conrad’s imaginary counterpart it is several miles inland. The actual Colebrook is not in County Kent, and Darnford is wholly fictional.
3 (p. 128) as some German ... is no thought: Dr. Kennedy is wrong to impute this phrase to a German. The reference, in fact, is to the Dutch philosopher and physiologist Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893), who is widely regarded as the founder of nineteenth-century philosophical materialism. Moleschott famously asserted “without phosphorous, there is no thought” as a way of succinctly conveying his claim that consciousness is a proper subject for investigation by scientists rather than theologians.
4 (p.132) iron track: The reference is to a train track. Later in the paragraph the “steam-machine” denotes a train, and then still later the “steam-machine that went on the water” is a steamship. Many parts of Kennedy’s narrative faithfully reproduce the limited outlook of the peasant Yanko’s account.
5 (p. 133) no military service to do: The fact that one of Yanko’s reasons for attempting to emigrate to America is to avoid conscription in his home country enhances the autobiographical dimension of the story. One of Conrad’s chief reasons for emigrating from Russian-occupied Poland was that, as a Russian subject and the son of a convict, he would have been liable for up to twenty-five years of compulsory duty in the Russian Army had he remained.
6 (p. 147) I wonder whether... of her pity: Conrad had characterized Jessie George, shortly before they married, as a “not at all striking-looking person (to tell the truth alas—rather plain!) who nevertheless is very dear to me” (Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 265). Because of her evident intellectual inferiority to Conrad, the latter’s friend Edward Garnett went so far as to attempt to dissuade him from marrying her. Such sentiments were reciprocated by Jessie’s provincial family, who were skeptical of the strange foreigner Conrad. Jessie recalls that her mother in particular had qualms about giving her consent to the marriage, as “she had a strong prejudice against a foreigner”: “Oh dear; one could never take him for an Englishman, and he doesn’t look French, either,” her mother whispered to her upon first being introduced to her future son-in-law (Joseph Conrad and His Circle, pp. 16, 14). The next paragraph’s assertion that Yanko and Amy “went on ‘walking out’ together in the face of opposition” appears to allude to this situation. It is also noteworthy that Jessie herself shared this sense of Conrad’s peculiar foreignness. She recalls that her initial impression upon meeting him was that “[h]is strangeness was very noticeable, almost oriental in its extravagance, both in gesture and speech,” and she goes on to make the astonishing admission that “[h]e was the first foreigner I had met” (Joseph Conrad and His Circle, p. 9).
7 (p. 151) Suddenly coming to himself... the child in her arms: This scene, in which Amy feels “the unreasonable terror... of that man she could not understand creeping over her,” bears striking resemblances to what Jessie Conrad recalls about her husband’s episode of fever during their honeymoon in Brittany in 1896:For a whole long week the fever ran high, and for most of the time Conrad was delirious. To see him lying in the white canopied bed, dark-faced, with gleaming teeth and shining eyes, was sufficiently alarming, but to hear him muttering to himself in a strange tongue (he must have been speaking Polish), to be unable to penetrate the clouded mind or catch one intelligible word, was for a young, inexperienced girl truly awful (Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him, p. 35).
“The Secret Sharer”
1 (p. 157) I asked myself... the kindest of motives: The narrator’s ensuing encounter with Leggatt will provide a practical test of precisely this question and will lead him to the conclusion that such departures from routine in favor of kind motives are, in fact, justifiable. Notably, it is his initial departure from “the established routine of duties” (his unorthodox decision to take the watch, which has created an impression among the crew that he is eccentric) that precipitates these reflections as well as sets the plot in motion, for it leads directly to his discovery of Leggatt.
2 (p.159) like my double: This is the first of many such passages that draw parallels between the narrator and Leggatt. The fact that both have trained as cadets on the Liverpool-based ship the Conway (as has the director of companies in “Youth”) further solidifies the sense of identity and solidarity between them.
3 (p.161) “My father’s a parson in Norfolk”: Among the various correspondences between Leggatt and the eponymous protagonist of Lord Jim (1900) is that both exiled transgressors have fathers back in England who are parsons (representatives of upright conduct and traditional morality), and in each story the narrator is entrusted to provide both moral and material support for the transgressor.
4 (p.165) brand of Cain: This is the first of several allusions to the biblical story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1-16; KJV), in which Adam and Eve’s son Cain, having killed his brother, Abel, is branded by God and exiled. Casting himself as the exiled fratricide Cain, Leggatt continues the reference later by remarking, “What does the Bible say? ‘Driven off the face of the earth’ ” (p. 185). The narrator will extend this allusion as well in the story’s conclusion by reflecting on the fact that, unlike his biblical counterpart, Leggatt will have “no brand of the curse on his sane forehead to stay a slaying hand” (p.192).
5 (p. 178) “Beats all these tales ... Yankee ships”: The first mate’s implication here is that honor, discipline, and standards of conduct generally on English ships are greater than on ships of other nations, such as those of the Americans, and that a killing of this sort is therefore absolutely scandalous. The captain of the Sephora makes this point as well when he exclaims, “I’ve never heard of such a thing happening in an English ship” (p. 174). Clearly, however, he is less concerned with the stain to the honor of the British merchant marine than to his own reputation: having his first officer kill a crewman is bad enough, but having the killer escape is doubly disgraceful and potentially ruinous to his career.
6 (p. 181) a sword over our heads: In classical mythology, the tyrant Dionysius demonstrates the precariousness of worldly power by having a sword suspended by a single hair above his courtier Damocles’ head. The phrase “the sword of Damocles” is used figuratively to mean an ever-present peril.
INSPIRED BY HEART OF DARKNESS
Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one.
—MARTIN SHEEN AS CAPTAIN WILLARD IN APOCALYPSE NOW
Numerous legacies have washed up in the wake of Marlow’s steamship. The epigraph for T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” (1925) is the concise announcement “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.” Eliot had planned to use the passage from Heart of Darkness that ends with Kurtz’s “The horror! The horror!” as the epigraph for his long poem The Waste Land (1922) until Ezra Pound persuaded him against doing so. Barbara King solver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), modeled on Heart of Darkness, is set in the years shortly before and after the Congo won its independence from Belgium in 1960. Narrated by the wife and four daughters of a Kurtz-like American Baptist missionary, the tale reflects the continued exploitation of the Congo region by Western powers generations after Conrad was there.
The adaptation of Heart of Darkness that makes Conrad’s novella particularly relevant to the modern era is Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979). When the film—a brilliant retelling set against the background of the war in Vietnam—finally opened in theaters after three years of highly publicized delays, it sent shock waves throughout the United States and beyond. Many view Coppola’s treatment of this literary classic as the greatest war film ever made.
Operating on a shooting schedule that was initially slated for seventeen weeks but instead sprawled over sixteen months, the film crew, on location in the Philippines, was subjected to a steady stream of dire events. A monstrous typhoon ripped through the islands and washed away film sets; star Martin Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack; some actors were fired while others frittered away their days in a drug haze; and helicopters lent by the Philippine go
vernment of Ferdinand Marcos were routinely called away by the military to combat Communist insurgents nearby. Far exceeding its original budget, the disorganized production began to drive its crew literally insane, and eventually came to mirror the convoluted Vietnam conflict itself. As Coppola described Apocalypse Now at a press conference: “My film is not a movie; it’s not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.” The drama and agony of bringing the film to the screen was later showcased in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, by Fax Bahr and George Hick enlooper, inspired in part by documentary footage, notes, and tape recordings made by Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, during production.
Apocalypse Now strips away surface and grapples with humanity’s primordial nature, aptly capturing the spirit of Conrad. The film opens with the jungle tree line ablaze with napalm fire and the hypnotic drone of helicopter blades dissolving into a whirring ceiling fan in a hotel room. Captain Benjamin Willard (Sheen) is assigned to track down Colonel Walter Kurtz, a decorated war hero gone missing whom the military has accused of murder. Willard is ordered to terminate Kurtz “with extreme prejudice.”
In the climactic confrontation between Willard and Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), Kurtz describes the superior fortitude of the Vietcong. He relates a tale in which his Special Forces unit was sent to inoculate the children of a North Vietnamese village for polio. The soldiers later return to the village, only to find the inoculated limbs in a pile, hacked off by the Vietcong. As a result of this experience, Kurtz realizes that America’s military will never defeat those who possess the will to amputate children’s arms, and he disciplines himself to embrace the inner darkness of humanity to the point of insanity. This insanity threatens Willard, who struggles with the absurdity of America’s police action as well as his own mission, and with the terrifying madness and brutality of Colonel Kurtz.