TheNation-May282018

May 28, 2018 The Nation. 19

JOSEPH CONRAD (GETTY / HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION)

IN KURTZ’S WORLD

Joseph Conrad and the violence of civilization

by GREG GRANDIN

I

am glad you’ve read the Heart of D.

tho’ of course it’s an awful fudge,”

Joseph Conrad wrote to Roger

Casement in late 1903. Casement,

an Irish diplomat working for the

British Foreign Office, had just returned

to London from Belgium’s African colony,

the Congo Free State, and was about to

submit a report to Parliament detailing the

existence of a vast system of slavery used to

extract ivory and rubber. Looking to draw

public attention to the atrocities, Case-

ment traveled to the author’s home outside

London to attempt to recruit him into

the Congo Reform Association. Conrad

was sympathetic: Africa, he told Casement,

shared with Europe “the consciousness of

the universe in which we live,” and it had

been difficult for him to learn that the hor-

rors he witnessed on his 1890 trip up the

Congo River had only gotten worse. But he

resisted playing the part of an on-the-spot

authority and begged off joining Casement’s

association. “I would help him but it is not

in me,” Conrad later explained to a friend.

“I am only a wretched novelist inventing

wretched stories and not even up to that

miserable game.”

Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University

and is the author of The Empire of Necessity,

among other books. His newest, The End of the

Myth: From the Frontier to the Border in the

American Mind, will be out in December.

The Dawn Watch

Joseph Conrad in a Global World

By Maya Jasanoff

Penguin Press. 400 pp. $