November 13, 1902: Joseph Conrad publishes Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories. They are, in the order in which they appear in the book: Youth: a Narrative; Heart of Darkness; and The End of the Tether.
Heart of Darkness had previously been serialized in Blackwood's magazine in 3 issues: February, March and April 1899. Unlike the other 2 stories, it is widely remembered and read today.
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born on December 3, 1857 in Berdychiv, Ukraine, to parents of Polish nobility. He grew up in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. His father ran a merchant marine business, and sent him to Marseille, France to take the business up. By 1878, he was serving in Britain's version, and began to immerse himself in English-language culture.
A voyage to the Congo Free State in 1890 made him a writer. The Congo was not merely a colony of Belgium: It was personally owned by Leopold II, King of the Belgians, and its riches, including diamond mines, went to him. And he didn't care who had to live, and die, under what conditions, to get it. He had an endless supply of black men to work for his white overseers; and if they died, there would be more to take their places.
Seeing all this made his innate depression worse. His mental discomfort was on top of physical ones: He claimed gout, malaria, swollen hands that made writing difficult, and that every novel cost him a tooth. But his 1896 marriage to Englishwoman Jessie George not only made him happy, but enabled him to write more. They had 2 sons, Borys and John.
Heart of Darkness is narrated by Charles Marlow, who tells of his assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. This was the period where the terms "Darkest Africa" and "the Dark Continent" were common, and referred not just to the skin of the native people, but to the dangers of a vast land where cities were few and far between. After all, 1902 was the year that Cecil Rhodes, who linked Cairo and Cape Town by telegraph, and had tried to do so by road, killing thousands as a result, died.
Marlow meets Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has "gone native," and is the object of Marlow's expedition. His reputation precedes him: His mother was half-English, his father was half-French, and thus "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz." As the reader finds out at the end, Kurtz is a multitalented man: Painter, musician, writer, promising politician. Kurtz ultimately was changed by the jungle. At first, he wanted to bring civilization to the natives.
However, over the course of his stay in Africa, Kurtz becomes corrupted. With the help of technology superior to that of the natives, Kurtz monopolizes his position as a demigod among native Africans. He takes his pamphlet and scribbles in, at the very end, the words "Exterminate all the brutes!"
Despite being strongly impressed by Kurtz, Marlow is under orders to return him to the coast via steamboat. But as he does so, it becomes clear that Kurtz is dying from jungle fever. Kurtz dies on the boat. His last words: "The horror! The horror!"
Having already gained a literary reputation in Britain with novels like Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness made Conrad a star. His later novels included Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907, popularizing that term a year before James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, was born). He died on August 3, 1924, in Bishopsborne, Kent, England, outside London. He was 66.
Just one week after his similarly chilling adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds in 1938, Orson Welles starred in a CBS radio adaptation of Heart of Darkness. He wanted to make a film version, with the Kurtz character being adapted into a Fascist dictator, but no film studio would touch it. (So much for "The Jews run Hollywood.")
In 1958, the CBS anthology TV series Playhouse 90 aired a 90-minute play version, with Roddy McDowall as Marlow, Boris Karloff as Kurtz, plus actresses Inga Swenson and Eartha Kitt. The best-known adaptation is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, moving the setting to the Vietnam War, and starring Martin Sheen as a U.S. Army Captain assigned to "terminate" rogue Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando at his most eccentric.
In 1993, TNT adapted Heart of Darkness, starring Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz. The 2019 film Ad Astra is basically Heart of Darkness in space, starring Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones.
*
November 13, 1902 was a Thursday. Baseball season was over. Professional basketball barely existed, and professional hockey only existed under the table. There was 1 score in college football: Davidson College beat the Georgia Institute of Technology, 7-6 at Brisbine Park in Atlanta.
Georgia Tech finished the season 0-6-2. "The horror." Davidson, located in the Charlotte, North Carolina suburb of the same name, finished 4-4-1. Since 1954, they have not competed at the top level of college football, settling in 1989 at Division I-AA, now the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS).
No comments:
Post a Comment