Heart of Darkness Read online

  HEART OF

  DARKNESS

  Copyright © 2013 Matt Kish

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-935639-67-1

  First U.S. edition 2013

  Interior design by Diane Chonette and Jakob Vala

  www.tinhouse.com

  For Charley, for the map in.

  For Ione, for the lifeline out.

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FOREWORD

  by Matt Kish

  Every illustrator, no matter what the project, is confronted with choices. In considering how to approach Heart of Darkness, I had to make a lot of choices, and they were never simple. What struck me while illustrating Moby-Dick was just how vast Melville’s novel seemed. It is an enormous book that, to paraphrase Whitman, contains multitudes. It contradicts itself in style and tone in gloriously messy ways and it’s strong enough to carry the weight of the visions of dozens of artists, from Rockwell Kent to Frank Stella to Benton Spruance to Leonard Baskin to, well, me. What I’m saying here is that with Melville, there is room.

  Conrad is something entirely different, particularly when it comes to Heart of Darkness. There is a terrifying feeling of claustrophobia and a crushing singularity of purpose to the story. It’s almost as if the deeper one reads, the farther down a tunnel one is dragged, all other options and paths dwindling and disappearing, until nothing is left but that awful and brutal encounter with Kurtz and the numbing horror of his ideas. Where Moby-Dick roams far and wide across both land and sea, Heart of Darkness moves in one direction only, and that is downward.

  While it could never have been an easy task to take a well-known piece of classic literature and breathe some different kind of life into it with pictures, the inexorable downward pull of this black hole of a story—this bullet to the head—made demands that I couldn’t have imagined. Poe wrote that “a short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it,” and I knew that in order to let Conrad’s ideas knife their way inside, every one of my illustrations had to carry this downward mood and build toward that ending. But what to exclude? What to leave out? Which path to go down? How to take this story of white men and black men and Africa, this filthy horrible business of ivory and slavery and greed and murder, and show it, really show it, in such a way that this mood would be visible?

  Begin with the title: Heart of Darkness. One would think, initially at least, that here is the first visual clue. Darkness. Blackness. Inky swirls of ebony on murky pages. That seemed too easy to me, entirely too obvious. But there was another reason why I knew immediately that this was not the right choice to make. In college, as an undergraduate, I took an introduction to poetry class. A very basic thing, really, just an overview of Western poetry hitting all the proper and expected notes. The professor, though, was not at all proper or expected, and her almost embarrassing passion for poetry put us on edge and made our minds scuffed and raw enough for the poetry we studied to leave a few scars. At some point, while discussing “Requiem” by Christina Georgina Rossetti, the professor devolved into another of her oddly personal narrations exploring the poem and its significance to her. It involved her brother, his murder, and her as a young woman in college attending his funeral on what she called the warmest and sunniest day she could remember. At first she was outraged but gradually she broke down—apparently at that funeral, then again in front of the stunned class—when she realized that murder could and did take place under the bright and shining sun, where everyone could see. It was folly to think that terrible things happen only in the dark. That experience stayed with me and informed the first choice I made. Conrad’s Africa, the scene of so much death, so much killing, so much horror, would not be a dark place in the literal sense. The sun would shine there, in my images, as brightly and hotly as it does on the happiest of days and that would be the right way, the best way, to look unflinchingly at what Conrad is putting in front of us. Immediately, the world of the novel began to take shape, a place filled with bright acid greens, the patterns of leaves and the shadows of trees, a sickly diseased yellow sky rotten with the kind of sunlight that casts everything into a sharp and lacerating clarity. The first choice had been made.

  While Heart of Darkness is set in Africa during the rape of a continent and at the height of what amounted to a racially and economically driven genocide, what disturbed me the most is that these things are hardly confined to that part of the globe or even that period of time. Our history is stained with what Conrad so aptly described as “just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind.” I knew that in order to illustrate this book truthfully, I had to find a way to show that what happens in Heart of Darkness is horrifyingly universal. That it doesn’t end there and will probably never end. That this isn’t just the story of Europeans in Africa; it is the story of humanity, wherever we may go. I needed to find a way to show that at the bottom of it all, we are all complicit in this. We have all profited from it. To do that, I had to take these pictures and pull them away from reality, away from what the viewer might be able to connect to a specific time or place or thing, and make them something so odd that they could literally be anything. Only then would the names “Africa” and “Europe” and the concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” fall away so that the reader could see it for what it is—“robbery with violence” and “aggravated murder on a great scale.” Conrad’s Europeans became grotesqueries. Pale, bloated, fleshy monstrosities with gaping, slavering mouths, huge brutal hands, and intentionally symbolic heads. Their victims, while perhaps marginally less monstrous, are gaunt and spectrally black. Shades of death, no strangers to superstition, hatred, and violence themselves, lurk furtively in the hidden spaces of a nightmare-green landscape overrun with conquerors, fanatics, and opportunists quick with the gun and the lash. The second choice had been made.

  But pictures do not move; they lie on the page frozen in time, static and dead. This is not a choice; it is a simple fact. And yet it was something I felt I could use to my advantage. Heart of Darkness, in spite of being a story about a journey up a river, is rife with a sense of paralysis, stasis, stillness, and futility. In his narration, Marlow relays image after image after image, all of which emphasize this dance of death taking place before him. On his way to Africa aboard a French steamer, he describes how “[w]e pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers—to take care of the custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved.” There is the awful feeling that no matter what is done, what effort is expended, it won’t matter at all. The sun will keep hammering down, the killing will continue, and the awful charade will go on and on. And the relentless dance of death continues, unceasingly and unmercifully. Again, Conrad puts it best when he writes of a warship incomprehensibly firing its cannon into the jungle “and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. The
re was a touch of insanity in the proceeding.” This “touch of insanity” hangs over the book, the journey, and the final meeting with Kurtz like a cloud of flies on a corpse.

  It all eventually comes down to Kurtz. He is the dark polestar at the center of the novel, the rotting heart around which everything circles in the slow maelstrom. Kurtz almost proved to be my undoing. In Moby-Dick, Ahab is at least a kind of antihero whose insane pride and unwillingness to accept divine providence drive him on and on to lash out continually against an uncaring and unyielding universe. Kurtz gives nothing; he only takes. Kurtz is a disease for the reader, a rot that starts almost innocently but ever so slowly sinks deeper and deeper, cell by cell, into the brain like a cancer until what was there before is no longer known and all is Kurtz. Marlow’s curious synthesis of hatred for and terror and worship of Kurtz mirror the reader’s, I think, and definitely my own. It is said many times that Kurtz is “a remarkable man,” but it is not until the climax, the inevitable meeting, that this is made quite clear. Kurtz, a product of all of Europe and now safely nestled in the bosom of the wilderness, astride both worlds, has a vision that “was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’” Initially, we may react to this with disbelief and denial. But we can’t help eventually giving in until the surrender is near total. Having to live with this, having to think about Kurtz and his ideas every day for months, having to become complicit in bringing the man to some kind of life through these illustrations took a savage toll on me. Like Marlow, I became infected with his ideas. Like Marlow, I began to see Kurtz as a “remarkable man.” Like Marlow, who admits, “That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal,” I found in Kurtz a dark and welcoming mirror. It seems that Conrad has, in this tale, provided the key for all of us to unlock our own heart of darkness.

  And this can be seen, quite literally seen, in the illustrations. Kurtz begins as an icon, a severed head floating on a golden background crowned with a blood-red jewel embedded with ivory, the bleached-white skull-like face of a minor god. The adoration grew as his ideas took root and more and more of Kurtz is revealed—a gaunt and stricken colossus of a man, by no means unintentionally resembling Christ, hanging transcendentally in a green hell no longer brightened by the sun but instead stained with the blackness of his judgment. Kurtz, having retreated deeper and deeper into the wilderness, closer and closer toward that ultimate personal confrontation with reality, has not quietly faded into the solitude of his hard-won knowledge but instead, like a magnet, draws those in his orbit nearer and nearer. This is what it means to read Conrad. That is what it means to illustrate Conrad, and to bring his words into a different kind of life.

  Books always end. The reader can delay this in any number of ways, but the final page is always reached unless the story is abandoned. While I had read Heart of Darkness several times in the past, never before had I followed so closely, so uncomfortably, in the footsteps of Marlow. And never before had I felt the death grip of Kurtz so profoundly on both my waking thoughts and my troubled dreams. But, thankfully, it ended. Looking back on this body of work, this step-by-step journey to the heart of darkness and, hopefully, back again, I can see its shape better. I can see how each image was designed with one singular mood, and how that murderous intent was carried through and delivered upon. This book is for me, personally and artistically, a long and slow road through the kind of hell that never ends and never changes. It is a travelogue of our history as human beings and even now I am not sure quite how to feel about it all. Of Moby-Dick, Melville wrote, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.” Of this Heart of Darkness, I cannot say the same. I feel changed. I feel older. I feel tired. I feel more wary. I feel, at times, less hopeful. The sunshine seems sometimes be a lie. To return to Conrad one last time, in order to understand these images you must “imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

  But while I may not feel spotless, I don’t feel ashamed. Conrad wrote a crucial book. It had to be done, and it must continue to be read. Hopefully, in showing this tale in a new light, I have added something to that. It had to be done. And I hope you will look.

  HEART OF

  DARKNESS

  I

  THE NELLIE, A CRUISING YAWL, SWUNG TO HER ANCHOR WITHOUT A flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

  The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished spirits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

  The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.

  Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other’s yarns—and even convictions. The lawyer—the best of old fellows—had, because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. The accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzenmast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol. The director, satisfied the anchor had good hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more somber every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.

  And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.

  Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, “followed the sea” with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of
the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith, the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ’Change; captains, admirals, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals” of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

  The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

  “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

  He was the only man of us who still “followed the sea.” The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.