CONRAD'S THICKET

There were two reasons why I set out to read the book. The first was a sense of obligation. The book was signalled for our October meeting. The second reason was much older. Heart of Darkness was a classic. It had survived for more than a century of earthtime. Such survivors are there to be studied and admired. Joseph Conrad’s reputation relies on his Polish origin and his outstanding command of the English language. That is what made him a classic. For me, his words printed on the page rose up. An impenetrable thicket redolent of cigar smoke and leather-covered easy chairs for the comfort of gentlemen in their clubs along Pall Mall.

I went in search of a first edition. The library had a handsome run of Blackwood’s Magazine. Here was a doorway to revelation.
1826 came forward in two leather-bound volumes. Two discoveries : William Blackwood published his monthly magazine in Edinburgh; it was a veritable miscellany designed to provide permanent reading material from the wider world for the benefit of Scottish gentlemen of leisure. It was avowedly political. A Whig counterblast to Tory intransigence. Huskisson and Grattan took me back to history lessons in the VIth Form. ‘First Love’ began : “I shall never forget the first time I ever drank rum-punch after having been smoking cigars.”
The two fat bindings of 1899 were tributes to increasing prosperity. William Blackwood & Sons were now of Edinburgh and 37 Paternoster Row, London. Here was John Buchan in January. Here the Heart of Darkness divided, like Gaul, in partes tres : February March April. And, on page 818, the grandiloquent exuberance of Lord Jim : “I was hindered by the oriental voice within the court-room expostulating with impassioned volubility.” Elsewhere : the Carlist cause in Spain; The Preservation of African Elephants; Californian gold discoveries; Game-fishing in the Thames; Mr Lecky on Mr Gladstone; Sir George Trevelyan as a historian; a biography of George Borrow; The Sins of Education; Christian Science ‘Quackery’; and much else besides. There was a military feel about it. Lt Gen Sir Henry Brackenbury, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., wrote at length from Salamanca; there were Lessons of Russian Aggression still to be learned; the necessity of the Boer War to be questioned; inappropriate equipment of British troops in Afghanistan to be lamented. Plus ça change .. ..

I have at last an explanation for Conrad’s thicket. The writing of fiction requires its own subset, its own particular register of the English language. It is like unto the conjuring of a magical spell designed to create that state of έκστασις [ékstasis] where the reader ‘steps aside’ from the everyday consciousness of physical reality into the metaphysical reality of the author’s original creation. I find myself unable to tune in to Conrad’s idiosyncratic wavelength. The yellow mellowness of London’s gas lighting and the swirling opacities of pea-souper fogs are but faded memories of Harcourt Street before I moved away. Coal-fired steamships and the blood red maps of Empire are no longer current currency. I wander all too easily among the unending landscapes of lo real maravilloso. Time’s wingèd chariot is standing at platform nine.

© francis cameron
oxford, 27 september 2008