The dark heart of Joseph Conrad Why have we neglected this masterful modern author?

Only once, in four decades before the mast of journalism, has an editor ever asked me to go anywhere in the world that I chose and damn (or at least file) the expense. A newspaper’s weekend magazine planned a special issue on literary travels and needed a contribution. Typically, I decided to visit a place marked on no map. Or rather, it exists everywhere and nowhere, like the “haze” of obscured meanings that Charlie Marlow seeks to penetrate on his voyage upriver in Heart of Darkness.

I longed to explore the “Eastern port” of Joseph Conrad’s fiction, conjured in spellbinding prose in a dozen stories and novels but seldom actually named. Where was it? As a seasoned seafarer, Conrad knew Singapore and Bangkok well, but no high-rise Asian megalopolis of today would preserve the look and feel of the late 19th century harbours he frequented. Even the smaller coastal towns of Borneo and Sulawesi, where the first mate of SS Vidar often called in the late 1880s, had changed beyond all recognition.

I settled on somewhere he hardly knew; a port whose conserved old town might still serve as the archetypal Conrad backdrop even as the towers, malls and resorts of booming south-east Asia sprawl beyond it. In George Town on the Malaysian island of Penang, I mainlined my “Eastern port” fix, from Chinese clan temples and labyrinths of “shophouses” to verandah-girt colonial hotels, florid mansions built by Chinese-Malay “Peranakan” merchants, and jostling places of worship along the “Street of Harmony”. In a way, historic George Town has itself become a polished, curated fiction, with help from its Unesco World Heritage listing. Still, it did the job for me. Besides, old Penang had played a pivotal role in the annual business of transporting pilgrims from eastern Asia towards Mecca: the background of Conrad’s first great full-length novel, Lord Jim (1900), with its guilt-ridden sailor who seeks atonement for deserting a shipload of Muslim passengers in mid-ocean.

No one, and nowhere, will ever quite capture the thrill of the Asian encounter summoned, for instance, in Conrad’s story “Youth” — “the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the wealth of green infinite and varied, the sea blue like the sea of a dream, the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of vivid colour” — precisely because the sea, and the port, always belong in part to memory and dream. But Conrad’s ever-shifting line between reality and delusion, past and present, the rocks of observation and the shoals of fantasy, still mesmerise. “He’s absolutely the most haunting thing in prose there ever was,” gushed T.E. Lawrence, no slouch as a rhapsodist himself. Henry James, meanwhile, Conrad’s antithesis but his firm friend and admirer, stood in awe of the outlandish reality that informed his work: “No one has known — for intellectual use — the things you know.”

Jozéf Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, that “Polish nobleman cased in British tar” (his self-description), died on 3 August 1924. The child of aristocratic revolutionaries who vainly fought against Poland’s subjection to a Russian empire that Conrad loathed in all its political guises, he had gone to sea in Marseilles in 1874. After two decades as an able seaman, mate and (only briefly) captain, he wrote full-time, to a slowly rising tide of acclaim and honour, after the appearance of Almayer’s Folly in 1895. Yet he remained an outsider, refused a knighthood, and spoke a thickly-accented English — his third language, after Polish and French — to his dying day.

His modest funeral at the Catholic church in Canterbury — he had lived in Kent since 1898 — was swamped by jolly crowds descending on the city for a cricket festival. Without even that excuse, the centenary of his death has also been submerged in random noise. A few academic conferences (the most substantial in Paris and Krakow) mark the anniversary. London’s Polish Cultural Centre has mounted events. The UK ambassador of a state that did not exist until the final years of Conrad’s life visited a small display at Senate House. The BBC excavated a couple of radio adaptations but, on television, failed to revive even its 2016 version of The Secret Agent, with the incomparable Toby Jones as the sleazy anarchist, Verloc. Thus, on iPlayer, you could until recently view the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now but search in vain for any substantial tribute to the masterpiece — Heart of Darkness — behind Francis Ford Coppola’s act of re-creation. Indeed, Franz Kafka, who died in June 1924, has done rather better with UK cultural institutions (a serious Bodleian Library exhibition, an imported biopic series on Channel 4) than the writer who so cherished his British citizenship. Conrad gained that high distinction (as he saw it) in 1886. In the same year, at the third attempt, he won his Master’s certificate in the merchant marine.

Whatever the reason, this major anniversary for one of Britain’s most important modern authors has glided by almost as stealthily as a lightless sloop on a midnight tide. Blame ignorance and inattention for this neglect rather than conscious silencing. True, Conrad has stirred whirlpools of critical controversy at least since, in 1975, the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe bombarded Heart of Darkness for its allegedly racist depiction of Africa as “a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity”. Yet Achebe’s indictment proved the opposite of a “cancellation”. Conrad studies proliferated for a while in its wake. As a navigational star for later writers, so brilliant that Graham Greene gave up reading him for fear of being outshone, he endures. The crew of those who wrestle with his legacy stretches from Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Naipaul to the leading Colombian novelist, Juan Gabriel Vásquez. His The Secret History of Costaguana both pays homage to, and turns the tables on, Conrad’s South American epic Nostromo. And Conrad’s devastating tale of migration and exile, “Amy Foster”, haunts My Friends: the new, Booker-longlisted novel by the Libyan-British writer Hisham Matar.

Still, a passage with Conrad can prove arduous both in terms of style and vision. His sceptical pessimism leaves little space for political, or metaphysical, hope. He befriended the anti-colonial socialist — and swashbuckling adventurer — R.B. Cunninghame Graham but wrote to him in a bleak testament that he viewed the universe as a giant, oblivious knitting-machine of fates: “I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled”. The world’s existence “is a tragic accident — and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it”. The son of high-minded rebels against Russian autocracy, he respected reforming idealists: whether Cunninghame Graham, or the human-rights pioneer Roger Casement, whom he met in the Congo during the ill-starred 1890 stint in Belgian riverboat service that resulted in Heart of Darkness. To Casement he wrote of his utter disgust at the profit-driven atrocities of Belgian rule in the monstrous King Leopold’s private domain of rapacity and cruelty: “It is as if the moral clock had been put back many hours”. But he was never a joiner, a campaigner. He detested all zealotry, and retained a deep-rooted suspicion of (in The Secret Agent’s words) “personal impulses disguised into creeds”.

As for his sheer mastery of tight, closed, male worlds (not only at sea but in political or financial cabals), it stamps him with an indelible taint of exclusive masculinity that literary culture now finds uncongenial, or worse. All the same, readers will meet some extraordinary women on Conrad’s shores: not least, at the outset, Nina in Almayer’s Folly. The mixed-race daughter of a burnt-out Dutch trader and his Malay wife, Nina becomes “more contemptuous of the white side of her descent” as she suffers the racial scorn of Europeans. In any community, she finds only “the same manifestations of love and hate, and of sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar in all its multifarious and vanishing shapes”.

And it is that perpetual hunt for the “uncertain dollar” that helps keep Conrad’s fiction afloat today. He surely counts as the greatest and — in many respects — most prophetic writer of the first age of globalised commerce and finance. Whether ferrying sugar around Borneo or migrants to Australia, Conrad’s maritime experience over two decades tracked the rise in cross-border, and trans-oceanic, traffic. That growth had led, on the eve of war in 1914, to an international web of investment, trade and profit in which 20% of global GDP derived from assets held in foreign countries. Not until the Seventies would that figure be matched. In his Economic Consequences of the Peace, J.M. Keynes famously evoked the pre-Great War world in which a Londoner “could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth… and reasonably expect their early delivery on his doorstep”. As sail (which he loved) gave way to steam (which he tolerated), Conrad’s ships aided the frictionless flow of those products, and their profits. By the 1880s, the British merchant fleet in which he served carried 70% of globally traded goods.

In this “earth girt round with cables”, pulled together by telegraph wires, capital flows, fast steamships, and tentacular railways, he gives the view from the cargo hold, the skipper’s bridge, the bale-stacked quay, and the upriver trading post peopled by “human outcasts such as one finds in the lost corners of the world”. His fiction ventures, as Lord Jim puts it, “three hundred miles beyond the end of the telegraph cables and mail-boat lines”, to where “the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation wither and die”. Even in the remotest backwater, however, capital-driven modernity arrives to dismantle and remake places, cultures — and people. The Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff’s book The Dawn Watch (by far the finest study of Conrad as a global author) chooses as its epigraph a wonderful line spoken by a crooked entrepreneur to another stranded European misfit in his late novel, Victory. “I am the world itself,” says the sinister Mr Jones, “come to pay you a visit”.

For Conrad, the world pays everyone a visit, near or far. In “Amy Foster”, it arrives on the Kentish coast in the shape of poor Yanko Goorall (“Johnny Highlander”), a castaway from somewhere near Conrad’s own ancestral home in present-day Ukraine, shipwrecked after falling for an emigration scam run by Hamburg people-traffickers. In this most topical of tales, the love of a local girl can’t protect this small-boat survivor from “the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair”. In the magnificent story “Karain: a Memory”, it fetches up on a silver beach in Mindanao (in the southern Philippines) in the form of a rascally band of British gun-runners who fall under the spell of a vagabond Malay warlord, himself in exile from his Sulawesi home. The narrator of “Karain” voices the pure Conradian ideal of fellowship between free, but solitary, spirits. He affirms that “No man will speak to his master; but to a wanderer and friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things”. Then, “words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One heart speaks — another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life”.

Conrad’s global perspective is, at heart, a tragic vision. He writes of the forces that still sway lives — trans-continental commerce, geopolitical rivalry, resource extraction, cross-cultural encounters and migrations — not as steps along the road of progress but tsunami waves of fate. His people both love and hate the destiny that the modern gods of money, traffic and technology have decreed for them. Just as the sailors of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ — his astonishing novella not just about shipboard solidarity, and its failure, but about the creation of racial difference itself — both love and hate Jimmy Wait. He is the talismanic West Indian seaman who becomes their scapegoat, their sacrifice, but also (in a way) their idol. The first words spoken by Wait, “calm, cool, towering, superb”, are worthy of Othello: “I belong to this ship.” Thanks to its title, and Conrad’s casual use of the shipboard vernacular of his time, no students in the Anglosphere will ever now read this  stunning work. Yet it has more to say about the making of “whiteness” as the outcome of world-spanning patterns of commerce and contact than a dozen academic tracts.

Conrad’s outcasts, drifters and adventurers belong to the vectors — the vessels, the romances, the schemes — that take them far from home, as much as to their points of origin. When he wrote, relatively few people shared such lives in transit: seafarers, merchants, settlers and ocean-crossing migrants. Now, not only in geographical but cultural terms, billions do. Many more than in Conrad’s time literally find themselves, like Yanko, “a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible… in some obscure corner of the earth”. But even those who stay put may now feel like castaways marooned by inexorable change. Conrad refuses to indulge in nostalgia for immobile communities: his characters lust after new discoveries, and the enrichment they can bring. Curiosity and desire, as much as greed or ambition, thrust his people into one another’s arms. Neither does he pretend that the human agonies brought about by global disruption are passing wrinkles on an otherwise placid sea. Cables, colonies, and capital have knit the wide world into a precariously unified network. Now its thrown-together peoples must live with their inescapable entanglement. That will be hard labour. Jasanoff counts 17 suicides in Conrad’s works. Their depression-prone author tried, clumsily, to shoot himself in Marseille in 1878.

On the starboard side of Conrad’s tragedy of globalisation lies a philosophy of exile and estrangement, tempered only (as he writes in the manifesto-preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’) by glimpses of “the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity”. On the port side looms political-financial power, and its drive to hold ever more of the planet and its peoples firmly in its grip. In Nostromo, Conrad’s most elaborate pursuit of his vision (and, by the way, as vehemently “anti-capitalist” novel as you will ever read), the tycoon Holroyd acts as the mouthpiece of the dawning American century, with his “temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest”. Plotting his interference in the republic of Costaguana, he admits that “We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it — and neither can we, I guess.” Holroyd is still a prince of the age of silver and steel, even if the historical event behind his trajectory — the American-backed revolt that permitted the completion of the Panama Canal — remains as crucial to the global economy in 2024 as in 1904. Curiously, though, he comes from the same city as his digital-age successors in world-devouring tech: San Francisco. His heirs, however, aspire to control not merely mines, but minds.

Conrad, ironic to his calloused fingertips, objected to the label of gloomy tragedian as much as he disliked the patronising sea-story pigeonhole. Yet the human costs of a globally integrated system, which he witnessed in embryo and at the margins, now occupy the forefront of our social stage. These days the metropolitan heartlands of Europe and America may suffer all the pangs of displacement and dispossession once felt in a jungle-fringed Borneo creek. It was Charlie Marlow, after all, who in Heart of Darkness gazed down the twilit Thames and saw in it “one of the dark places of the earth”. As for Nina Almayer, offspring of a freshly confused and intermingled world, she feels herself “shivering and helpless on the edge of some deep and unknown abyss”. We know more about that abyss now but, in Eastern or Western ports, it still exerts its disorienting power.

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Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor, and literary and music critic, and author recently of The 100 Best Novels in Translation.

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