The writer was Galsworthy, who was to help Conrad. In 1895, after more than a
decade at sea, this Polish gentleman published Almayer’s Folly and married a young
English typist. He explained in his Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) that
‘My task ... is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel- it is, before all, to make you see.’ The idiom is not quite natural; ‘above all’ would
be usual in English. He soon suggested to Ford Madox Ford that they should collab-
orate; they wrote The Inheritors and Romance. Ford shared Conrad’s view that the
English novelist
does not go about building up his book with a precise intention and a steady mind. It
never occurs to him that a book is a deed, that the writing of it is as an enterprise as
much as the conquest of a colony. He has no such clear conception of his craft.
Conrad’s books were admired rather than bought; his narration was unstraight-
forward and his style was mannered. An exile from nation, language and family,
writing in his third language, he wrote of lonely lives, on ships or in outposts, or of
exiles in London. Family history and personal experience had made Conrad mistrust
political idealists. His writing is torn between a proud sense of honour and a
profound sardonic irony.
Heart of Darkness
The first words of Conrad encountered by many students are ‘Mistah Kurtz – he
dead’, the epigraph T. S. Eliot used for ‘The Hollow Men’. They are spoken in Heart
ofDarkness, a long short story or novella based on Conrad’s trip up the Congo in
1890 to become a river pilot for the Belgians, who ran the trade on the river. To reach
the heart of the dark continent had been a dream of Conrad’s boyhood; the experi-
ence undermined his health and changed him. Kurtz is the company agent at the
Inner Station, a colonialist intellectual corrupted by the pursuit of ivory and of
power; he is worshipped in ‘unspeakable rites’ involving human sacrifice. Marlow,332 12 · ENDS AND BEGINNINGS: 1901–19
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), 1904. George C.
Beresford/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.