Cardiograms of Darkness

By R. Z. Sheppard

CONGO DIARY AND OTHER UNCOLLECTED PIECES by Joseph Conrad Edited by Zdzislaw Najder; Doubleday; 192 pages; $7.95

In 1903 Joseph Conrad was asked by a London weekly to list the books he read as a boy. "I don't remember any child's book; I don't think I ever read any," the Polish-born author replied. "The first book I remember distinctly is Hugo's Travailleurs de la Mer [Toilers of the Sea], which I read at the age of seven."

Today Conrad has replaced Victor Hugo. A similar survey of contemporary writers would turn up many of the master's titles: An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and his greatest story, Heart of Darkness. His ominous Slavic intensity and his understated English produced a prose style that generations have found intoxicating. Countless youths acquired their first sense of literary power in such passages as "When an opportunity offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones."

Congo Diary traces the first autobiographical flutters of that sentence from Heart of Darkness. After more than ten years as a seaman and officer in the British merchant navy, Conrad signed a three-year contract with a Belgian company to serve on river steamboats that plied the Congo River. "Like an empty Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin" was his description of boats like the Roi des

Belges, the double-decked stern-wheeler that he sailed up to Stanley Falls. Heart of Darkness conveys the dwarfing effect that the 1,000-mile journey must have had on the 32-year-old Conrad: "Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico."

Yet truth is often flatter than fiction.

In the part of the Diary known as the "Upriver Book," Conrad is all business, the professional sailor noting the course for those who will come after: "Always keep the high mountain ahead crossing over to the left bank. To port of highest mount a low black point. Opposite a long island stretching across. The shore is wooded."

The-1890 adventures hi the Congo altered the course of the writer's life and art. He returned to England disillusioned and physically racked by tropical sickness. In addition, the destructive effects of Belgian colonialism on tribal life made a lasting impression on the son of a Polish patriot who had been jailed and exiled for his activities against Russian imperialism. During an overland trek from Matadi to Kinshasa, the Diary notes, he "met an off[ic]er of the State inspecting; a few minutes afterwards saw at a camp-[in]g place the dead body of a Backongo.

Shot? Horrid smell." And later: "Today did not set the tent but put up in Gov[ernmen]t shimbek. Zanzibari in charge--very obliging. Met ripe pineapple for the first time. On the road today passed a skeleton tied up to a post. Also white man's grave--no name. Heap of stones in the form of a cross."

Among those whom Conrad met in the Congo was Roger Casement, at the

The grass through his ribs hid his bones. time working for the Belgians as a rail road project supervisor. He was also storing the evidence of atrocities against blacks that he would report to the world in 1903. Thirteen years later, Casement was to die on a British gallows for his part in the Irish independence movement.

Casement's view of Congo life was contagious. Immediately after noting their first meeting, the Diary records doubts about Conrad's future in the region: "Think just now that my life amongst the people (white) around here cannot be very comfortable. Intend avoid acquaintances as much as possible."

His growing pessimism about Euro pean civilization in Africa finds its full artistic expression twelve years later in Heart of Darkness: "They were dying slowly--it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom."

Other Conradia in this collection published 54 years after the author's death include the novella The Nature of a Crime, which Conrad wrote with his friend Ford Madox Ford under the improbable pseudonym Ignatz von Aschendorf, and a fragment of The Sisters. This is a deservedly obscure work in English, though Editor Zdzislaw Najder notes the book was a great success in Polish because in that lan guage "the syntax, loose and contrived, becomes natural and even limpid."

Conrad's forewords, prefaces, letters to newspapers, appreciations and even a 1923 speech at the 99th annual meeting of the Lifeboat Institution are also here.

To many these pieces may seem unnecessary ballast. To those who served their literary apprenticeships under Captain Conrad, these fragments should have the appeal of messages unexpectedly washed up in bottles.

Excerpt

"Friday, 1st of August, 1890. Put up at Gov[ernmen]t shanty.

Row between the carriers and a man stating himself in Gov[ernmen]t employ, about a mat. Blows with sticks raining hard. Stopped it. Chief came with a youth about 13 suffering from gunshot wound in the head. Bullet entered about an inch above the right eyebrow and came out a little inside. The roots of the hair, fairly in the middle of the brow in a line with the bridge of the nose. Bone not damaged apparently. Gave him a little glycerine to put on the wound made by the bullet on coming out. Harou not very well. Mosquitoes. Frogs. Beastly. Glad to see the end of this stupid tramp. Feel rather seedy. Sun rose red. Very hot day. Wind S[ou]th.

General direction of march--NE by N. Distance--17 miles.

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