Empire: World History - 306. Joseph Conrad: From Russian Exile To The Heart of Darkness

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

How did a Polish sailor become one of the greatest writers in the English language? Why were Conrad’s parents exiled to the harsh conditions of northern Russia? Should we continue to read The Heart of Darkness in spite of its outdated views? Anita and William are joined by Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch, to discuss the adventurous life of Joseph Conrad and how his work shaped readers' understanding of imperialism. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Producer: Anouska Lewis Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Just a little warning for this episode of Empire. It will contain references to suicide. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William, Drupal. Settle back, because I'm going to tell you a story.

In November 1889, just as the chugging compound engines of steamships were beginning to take the wind out of the elegant sails of the great rake-mastered clippers, and out-of-work Polish sea captain, unable to find a command in London, signed up with a Belgian shipping company. A job had just turned up in the Belgian Congo. The previous occupant of the post had been killed in mysterious circumstances. and Captain Conrad Koshinovsky soon found himself setting sail down the African coast. If only you'd seen all the tin boxes and revolvers, he wrote to a friend, the high boots and all the bottles of medicine. Now this was the voyage which would produce one of the most famous of all books on colonialism, The Heart of Darkness.

Published under the name the captain assumed when he took British citizenship and which he later chose to write under. Joseph Conrad. And here to tell us all about Conrad is our old friend, both on and off the pod, Maya Jasanov. And I've just tried to stop Anita running off with my friend and inviting her out for a drink on her own without me to gossip about. The whole purpose of going out for a drink with Maya. She's caught the dirt on you, isn't it, Maya? Absolutely. She does. She's maybe longer than anyone. Yeah, it's true. Guilty. I'm so delighted that we have Maya on the programme because when it comes to Conrad, I mean, there's been a lot written, Maya. You know, biographers have poured over his life.

Critics have studied the minutiae of his work. But I can't think of a more strikingly original book than your own, the Dawn Watch, Joseph Conrad, in a globalised world. And it isn't, I mean, it's fair to say it's not quite a biography or a work of criticism because it's both of those things, but it's also travel writing too. When did you become immediately fascinated by Conrad? It sounds like it feels like when you read your word. more consumed by Conrad than fascinated by?

I think that's a great word, consumed, more than fascinated. And I think, you know, it's very kind of you to say these things about the book. I would like to just put in a plug for history, because what it really is is a work of history. And history encompasses all of the things that you just talked about. So I got interested in this idea sort of from two ends. One was reading Conrad, which I did in high school. At the time I was in school, it was pretty common, I guess,

for students to be assigned heart of darkness, which is relatively short, among its many other virtues, which makes it very suitable for giving students with short attention spans. But for all that it's relatively short, it is an unbelievably densely crafted and thoughtful, symbolically rich, and historically rich work of fiction. So when I read it, I just thought, you know, I've never read anything like this. It seemed to me, coming out of a pretty steady diet of 19th century fiction, but it was turning things on its head in terms of which characters I was meant to root for and which ones I wasn't, in terms of the structure of the story, which did not go neatly from the beginning to the middle to the end, but sort of looped around

in all kinds of ways. And to me, the sense that it was really getting at something very deep, the nature of evil, was extremely compelling. So that was my early encounter with Conrad. And then later in my career as a historian studying empires and in particular being interested in the way that people and power cross borders. I was struck at the idea that for all that most scholars of the British Empire and maybe some listeners of this podcast might associate Britishness and empire with the author Redyard Kipling. He of the white man's burden. We are dealing with him in the same very much the same series. We're going to be doing Orwell and Kipling. And and a few others do with any luck.

Yeah, and Kipling is known for his poem, The White Man's Burden. Kipling is known for, you know, East is East and West as West and Never the Twain shall meet. He's become the kind of mottoist, if you will, of a certain idea of Empire at its height, which is extremely chauvinistic, among other things. But Conrad was an exact contemporary of Kipling, really, give or take a few years. And Conrad, who wrote, I think, the novel of Empire, namely Heart of Darkness. It's funny because I think of him as being later, but you're right, he is a contemporary, isn't he? Although his attitudes are much more close to us than Kipling's.

Absolutely. And so what I thought to myself, you know, again, thinking about how people and power cross borders, you know, here's Conrad. Same time as Kipling, writing from, of course, a very different vantage point, but also writing from such a different set of positions and experiences in the world. So Kipling was born in India and knew it intimately, spent time in South Africa, spent time in the U.S. Conrad, on the other hand, was born Conrad Korshanyoski. he was Polish. He was born a subject of an empire, namely the Russians. And he went on to have a career for 20 years as a working sailor before he ever wrote. And then when he wrote his fiction, he set it in places around the world, none of which actually overlap with the pink spots on the

imperial map of legend that indicated the parameters of British power. So it just struck me that if I wanted to know something about how empire worked, which I do because I'm that kind of nerd, then looking at Conrad would be a really interesting way to do it. What I want to talk about is really the origin story of Joseph Conrad, his childhood, because when you get most biographies of great writers, you know, they only really start getting interesting and get going when they're sort of coming into their 20s, they're coming into their own. And yet you've got a man here in Conrad who sort of seems to not just live a life, but two lives, three lives, four lives in one. Tell us, take us right back to the beginning of what makes Conrad Conrad. So Conrad, as I mentioned, was born

Conrad as one of his Christian names, on Korsenovsky as his surname. He was born to Polish parents in a part of what is now Ukraine, which was then under Russian rule. So you have sort of already, you know, stacked up a bunch of different kinds of identities, ethnicities, languages back to back. And he was born in 1857, which was a time when Poland had long since, really, ceased to be a nation state of its own. It had been divided up in the late 18th century. across the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians, and the many Polish speakers in Europe were therefore distributed under different sovereignties. This matters because Conrad's parents were incredibly fervent Polish patriots. They belonged to a social class called the Schlahta,

which is a kind of gentry nobility, who had had sort of traditional rights in the old Polish Commonwealth, saw themselves as the keepers of a kind of political tradition, were highly literate, French speakers, as well as Polish speakers. Conrad's father was a man of letters. They were sort of minor landowners, but above all, throughout fervent patriots, their big hope was to get an independent Poland back. And so to this end, Conrad, as a little boy, really, ends up following his mother and father on their quest to bring back Poland, which leads them, in the first instance, to Warsaw, when he's just a few years old, his father is going to start a literary magazine there.

You haven't mentioned so much, his mother who sounds remarkable too, and you quote her line in a letter to Conrad's father, saying, my soul yearns for that young Poland of our dreams, which you will create, roused to life, and lead into the future. That's quite fiery stuff. Absolutely. I mean, the two of them, again, they're both highly literate, educated people, and they are died in the wool patriots. And, you know, there's something very, what would I say?

I mean, the word, I suppose, in terms of literary style is romantic, heavy romantic, heavy dramatic, melodramatic, really kind of nationalism of that period. They would, for example, dress in black because they were in mourning for the Polish nation. It's that lived experience. Very 19th century. Yeah, very much. Anyway, so they go to Warsaw, and Conrad's father, who's called Apollo, is going to start an underground magazine that's going to help rally patriotic support. And they all three of them are there, Conrad's an only child. And one night there's a knock on the door of their rented flat and income Russian policemen.

And they whisk Apollo Korshenovsky off to their, a place called the Citadel in Warsaw. You can visit it today. And specifically to Pavilion X, which is this sort of brilliantly Kafka. It is and it is the place where the political prisoners get put. So, you know, we're thinking a lot these days about authoritarianism and about. freedom of speech. Well, this is a very good example of what it looks like when you don't have freedom of speech and when you have authoritarianism. And this happens at a time when Conrad is very, very young. So I mean, it is a hugely formative experience. You know, he may not remember the minutiae of

it, but he will remember the fear, that feeling of, you know, ice dread that daddy's not here anymore and the way his mother will react to the absence. And there is an early, very early piece of writing from Conrad where he's just thanking his grandmother. I mean, it's just very sweet. And I find these things utterly humanizing. He writes to his grandmother and he says, you know, grandmother, you help me send pastries to my poor daddy in prison. And they just don't know what has happened to him. He does Apollo get eventually sentenced by a military tribunal.

What do they decide to do to this man? So they exile him and the family goes off to deeper into Russia. And Conrad, again, he's only four when this happens. So I would say that in terms of memory formation, you know, there's probably a little first-hand memory, but there's also going to be a lot of his mother telling him things. I'm framing it for him. And then they're all going to go into exile. And what does he experience there? Well, I mean, he sees his parents literally wasting away for two reasons. One is that there's a big effort in what is now Poland to launch an insurrection against the Russians in particular in 1863. And this upheaval that has been being planned for a while happens, but is absolutely completely uncomprehensibly crashed.

And this is devastating across the Polish community. His parents write these very heartfelt letters about how they can barely, you know, stand to look at the newspapers every day because it feels like it's another knife in the breast, that kind of thing. So there's this kind of ongoing existential political despair. There's also just the everyday conditions of exile and living in a very bad climate with very poor resources around them. I mean, this is on the edge of Siberia. So we're talking about frozen, you know, sort of wastelands. Yeah, it's not Siberia proper, but Russia's big. And it's definitely one of the places that they're in is very damp, poorly drained. You know, it's tough. And they're poor and they don't have heating and things like that. And mom has TB. Yeah. So both his parents fall ill. And again, what is Conrad's childhood experience? It's seeing this, again, existential despair devastation. And then the wasting way of his parents, mother from tuberculosis, she dies. Conrad's. And the father go off in mourning, now not only for Poland, but for the mother. There's a letter from Dad at this time, the little mite is growing up as though in a cloister.

The grave of our unforgettable is our Memento Mori. So that's mum being commemorated by what's left of the family. And then Dad gets ill to. Yeah, he gets ill too. Conrad himself is sort of sickly on and off as a child. And dad ends up dying as well. And so then, you know, at the age of 11, Conrad is an orphan. And he writes again, I mean, this is almost half a century after he loses his father, who he clearly adores.

And he's thinking back to that funeral that takes place for his father. You quote it so well, and I'll try and do it justice to read it. But in the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs and tragic memories, I could see again the small boy of that day following a hearse, a space kept clear in which I walked alone, conscious of an enormous following. Half the population had turned out that fine May afternoon. They had come to render homage to the ardent fidelity of the man whose life had been fearless confession in word and deed of a creed which the simplest heart in that crowd could feel and understand.

I mean, that is just vintage Conrad and beautiful, but about himself as well. It is, and it's moving that he didn't write about his childhood until much later. And of course, we have to bear in mind all of... the kinds of filters that happen between anyone in their past, but particularly anyone in a traumatic past and anyone in this very politicized past. So there's a lot of things we would want to inspect if we were being critical readers of this. But I think the fundamental point, which your passage there eloquently brought out, is the emotional wrenching of being orphaned in this way at this time and these circumstances and just left adrift in the middle of Europe without a place to

call home. So, I mean, left adrift, this young boy has to grow up very, very quickly. And he really does almost cut himself a drift. You know, his life becomes a metaphor for being rootless. And he goes to see. Now, how does that happen? Yes, not a usual thing for someone in Krakow. No. It isn't at all. So, you know, I deliberately used that word precisely because I think that one of the things that we can see in the young Conrad is somebody who's really just not got a obvious place to put himself and who, you know, in a rather boyish way is dreaming of adventure. but is also clearly dreaming of trying to get away from it all. And so he is taken up, after his parents died, his guardian is a maternal uncle who is kind of a wonderful character I enjoyed getting to know, as it were, through the pages of his correspondence. He's at once a very doting and loving uncle. He's also quite sniffy about a particular Conrad's father, who he saw as this artsy, spendthrift, good for nothing. And he is like much more of a hard-headed, pragmatic businessman. And so he's very eager to make sure that his nephew doesn't go off and become an artie. you know, good for nothing. Airy, fairy poetry that your dad was in. Enough of that. Exactly. Exactly. So there's

this sort of incredible tussle, you know, in the letters between, again, a very loving and supportive uncle, but also very chastising about how his nephew is spending his money. Anyway, after a certain amount of cajoling, the uncle agrees to allow Conrad to fulfill this sort of boyhood dream, which he had to have gotten basically from books. There's no other way. You know, he grows up in a landlocked place. He calls himself a reading boy, doesn't he? Yeah, and he does obviously read a lot, which children, I think, often do. Particularly maybe lonely children in faraway places without lots of friends around them.

Yeah, exactly. Sickly, you know, he doesn't really go to a real school, he has much more kind of private education, etc. So anyway, he's obviously read about the sea in some way, and the uncle says, okay, fine, you can go. So he goes off to Marseille at the age of 17. Marseille, because he speaks French fluently, as many men of his sons. social class, Amelia Doe, and Poland doesn't have a merchant marine at that time.

This is the same world as the French-speaking Tolstoyan sort of society. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So Conrad goes off to Marseille, and I think his uncle assumes, okay, look, he'll do this for a year or something, and then he'll get it out of his system. Get it out of him. Yeah. And in fact, Conrad does a couple of voyages. He sticks it out, and he carries on with this career. I wouldn't be surprised if some of it is that he also wants to show the uncle. look, I can do this, you know. But it sticks. But also, there's kind of near disaster asly when he gets into debt and tries to shoot himself.

Well, thank you for the spoiler there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, William. Don't feel you have to do an Anita each time. So he, you know, does these voyages in France. He is living essentially on a stifent from his uncle because I can say many things about training to be a sailor, but let me mostly say this, which is that at a time when, for example, in military, you would have been able to buy a commission and just get in at a certain rank, you cannot do that in seafaring.

You actually have to learn what to do. And so you start off, there are ways that kind of, you know, wealthier people can get apprenticeships and so on. But essentially, you have to learn the ropes. Literally, yeah. Pertinent seafaring phrase. So he's doing these very apprentice-like positions that don't earn him very much. And then he's really working out through the ranks. He has very little money. He has his allowance from his uncle, and he blows through it throughout his life. He is terrible at managing money. And so he ends up borrowing money from a friend. He ends up attempting to make the money back by going to a casino, which I think most of us could have said is a bad idea.

This is not a financial plan, Joseph Conrad. No. So, you know, there he is. He's the, you know, Marseille, French Riviera, goes to a casino, gets even more in debt. and then he invites his friend over to T to tell him, I can't pay you back. And then shortly before the friend comes, he takes a revolver and holds it to his chest and pulls the trigger. Now, there's a way in the writing about Conrad and biographies that people sort of move past this quickly.

They say, oh, you know, just boyish, melodramatic stuff. And, I mean, even my buildup, it's hard not to kind of fall into some of these traps of the melodrama. On the other hand, taking a gun and pointing it to your chest and pulling the trigger. Yeah, it's quite serious stuff. It really is. But it's also sort of very rooted in that sort of Russian fatalistic writing of Lermontov and others that, you know, you get to this point and it is a full stop and therefore it is perfectly romantic almost to put an end on your terms. I mean, that's sort of Russian literature is filled with all of that, isn't it? Jules and suicides. Yeah, of course it is. But I think, you know, we could even

say this today. I mean, you know, there's various, you know, we see the way the social media is influencing people in some really terrible ways. And of course, there's narratives that make people do things, but still not everyone is going to do this. He still has to pick up the gun, right? And he still has to point it to his chest. Yeah. I mean, my point here is this, that Conrad is a lifelong depressive, a very seriously depressive man. And reading his descriptions of how he feels are very resonant to people who are familiar with this condition. And he's a very resonant to people who are familiar with this condition. And many people find themselves in difficult straits in life, but not everybody responds to those situations in exactly these kinds of ways. And so I mentioned this

because I think it's a theme that will come up throughout the course of his life and that will, of course, come up throughout his writing, in which, among other things, there are tons of people who commit suicide all the time in his writing. So when he does finally sort of, you know, recover from this awful thing, he does then head to Britain in 1878. What is the draw of Great Britain? And, you know, does he write about it later that, you know, this was his second lease of life and he wanted to live, his rebirth, if you like, in Britain? You may not be surprised to hear that he never talks about the suicide attempt. So we never get that part of it. Do we get that in the uncle's letters? Or how do we know about the suicide? Yeah, we know about it from the uncle's letters, I mean, for sure, which are very clear. I mean, the uncle is at a trade.

fair in Kiev, and he gets a telegram saying, you know, come right away, and he does. So we know, we know all about it. But no, Conrad himself doesn't talk about it. And in fact, what actually happens versus what does Conrad say? This is a gap that when I was writing about him, I had to be very attentive to because they don't align. So what actually happens is he recovers from the thing. He gets on board another ship. And at some point on that voyage, it docks in Norfolk, Loistoft. And he just gets off and that's it. And he leads his commission on that ship early and ends up in England, where he stays and will go on to continue his maritime career. What he says later is, I knew that if I was to be a sailor, I had to be an English sailor and no other. And he turns it

into a very kind of patriotic statement, a patriotic statement, I should say, that he makes at a time of his life, from a time in British history, when it's helpful for an immigrant to be emphasizing that about themselves. Is there any sign of anglophilia before this, or is it a totally absent part of the world that doesn't mention? I mean, he was familiar with English literature, in particular Shakespeare and Dickens. His father actually translated Shakespeare, and they read hard times together. And there's a nice line in Conrad's memoirs where he says, I remember being so surprised that Mrs. Nickleby could chatter so fluently in Polish. So, you know, he's familiar with that.

But no, it's not really a big deal to him. I mean, again, France is sort of the hub of culture for people from that part of the world then. But by going to England, he's able to accomplish a lot of things. So, you know, the key thing, really, is that Britain at that time was the leading world power, and it had by far the biggest merchant marine. And if you are going to be a sailor, well, it actually does make sense to be an English sailor and no other. It has a relatively easy path up. If you learn your steps as a seaman, you take tests and you move up and you can become a captain, career open to talent in that sense. It has lots of jobs going. And then, and this will not be completely incidental, you know, it doesn't have the kind of policing and surveillance culture that you'll find in other parts of Europe. Now, France, you know, is mixed over this period. It depends on. which regime you're under and where you are and all that sort of thing. But one of the challenges

that he was running into back in Marseille was that as a young man of military recruitment age, he was potentially subject to a Russian conscription order. And the French were potentially going to enforce that in a way that the British were not going to. So there's certain aspects of a kind of political freedom that I think he benefits from as an immigrant in Britain at that time. I mean, those are the big, big freedoms. They're not going to send me into the Russian army. So thank God for that. But the little freedoms as well that you write very beautifully about how he really appreciates the freedom of being able to move around without going through checkpoints, without being stopped, without being questioned all the time.

One of the most beautiful bits of your book, in fact, is this moment when Conrad discovers London. And you've obviously had a lot of fun painting that picture of London at this time, which felt oddly unfamiliar to me because it's a place which is filled with immigrants, which is not. what we think of 19th century, London. We think of that as 20th century London. But you paint it as this big imperial centre buzzing with people from different parts of the world. Yes, and this was exactly what I wanted to get across. So, you know, again, why Britain. I mean, Britain is the most open place in Europe at this time. I mean, some exceptions for Switzerland here, are there, okay? But, you know, it's the biggest economy, it's the biggest world power, and it doesn't have this kind of surveillance. So that's why you have Karl Marx sitting in the British Library right in

capital. It's why you have people like, you know, Metzini or Garibaldi or whatever. you know, Italian revolutionaries coming. You have Koshutlayosh from Hungary coming. You have earlier in the century. You have Latin American rebel leaders coming, revolutionaries, coming to London. It's the place for these people to gather. And it's slightly odd maybe for us to think about the place that is at once the big imperial capital that is involved in crushing freedom movements in India. Exactly. But on the other hand, you know, the concept of British liberty is a very real concept. And so, of course, there are now. to be made with the United States in both dimensions now. But Britain and London, really London, had substantial communities of refugees from Europe. And that's the other thing. I think that people think about London in its imperial context, thinking about Asia, thinking about Africa, thinking about the Caribbean. But, you know, it's a big European city. And there's lots of people coming from the continent who live there. How quickly does he master the language? These things can be very challenging, but this man seemed to cope. He arrives in Britain,

in 1878, he's 21 years old. He does not speak English. He is in short order writing in English, having a career in English, and he will go on to be one of the great English language novelists. He learns English only after the age of 21, and it's his third language. It's really incredible. It's amazing. Actually, that's why one of my teachers at school just venerated him, just saying, you know, this is a man whose mind we can worship, who was soaked in this desire to communicate and was able to do it so quickly and so well. Yeah, and I mean, I know we'll talk about some of the ways that he's been received later, but I'll just flag that as a writer in English, not writing in his first language, he's, of course, very much like a lot of the writers that we

admire today who come from Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world. And he describes at some point learning English by reading newspapers in the pub. So he's clearly adept at this, but he's putting time into it and just, you know, pouring over the papers and figuring it out. It's amazing. Also, London, as you say, has one of the greatest merchant navies. So he is able, again, at the, you know, very young age, only 21, while he's still sort of learning and mastering English, to set sail from London to Australia. Now, that is an awfully big adventure, Maya. Tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, he goes on a number of voyages. And one of the things that I was interested in throughout writing about him and why I emphasized that my book is really a history at the outset is because I was animated by this question of how much a person's life is the product of their own decisions and how much a person's life is the consequence of the circumstances that they're in.

And this is a tension that, of course, applies to anybody at any time. But I was particularly struck in Conrad's case because if you just look at a biography, you would think, oh, there's this weird thing and there's this other weird thing and, oh, what an unusual trajectory? But I wanted to see the places of the trajectory that maybe were not so unusual, or rather could be explained by other historical factors. And that's where the sailing came in. And what I found is that at that time, the British merchant Marine was very heavily staffed by non-English people. It was huge. There were a lot of jobs. The jobs didn't pay very well, however, by comparison to say, you know, even a working class industrial job in the Midlands, say you would have earned more per day and your working

conditions would have been better. So it's a very attractive opportunity for immigrants from poorer parts of Europe. So you have a ton of Scandinavians, you have some Germans, you have, obviously you have Conrad, you have some people from the Mediterranean. And as I mentioned earlier, it's kind of open to talent. So they can all come in and they can all have these jobs. And the other thing I was interested in is this question of sailing ships. Conrad is, you know, working in what will turn out to be the last great age of the big sailing ships as compared to steamships. And the fundamental differences here for those of us on the outside of the maritime world are that steamships appear to be the new technology, they're more reliable,

they're faster, you know, all of these kinds of things, they seem to be the harbingers of modernity. For Conrad, though, from the working side, they also had very different kinds of labor that they required. So a steamship has engineers. It has stokers for the boiler, you know, pushing the coal into the boiler. But a sailing ship has all of the people, you know, running up and down the masts and messing with the sails, doing all of these things to make this unbelievable machine go on the force of the wind. I mean, it's an extraordinary technology. And so for Conrad, who is coming in as this technological transition is taking place, he ends up on sailing ships. Why? Well, again, I wanted to figure this out. It was partly because those were the less well-paid ones. So if you're at the lower-down end of the spectrum, you're going to end up on the sailing ships. But also in the course of it, he enters this world of high skill, high craft, people who have sort of developed a lifelong attachment to this way of life. And in his later writing, when he goes back to talk about the sea and sailors, which is the subject of much of his fiction, he dramatizes this kind of relationship.

between the sailing ship and the steamship as the difference in a sense between two different visions of what a society can be. We are going to have to take a break now, but when we come back, we're going to follow Conrad to the South Seas. Welcome back. So we left with Maya, beginning her odyssey into the maritime. And one of the great pleasures of reading her book is the fact that she's clearly enjoyed all the ship talk very, very much. There's a whole vocabulary at play in your maritime sections. I have three questions from this thing.

What is a dog watch? What is a polywog? And what is a shellback? So a dog watch is a two-hour shift as opposed to a four-hour shift. So one of the things about being on a sailing ship, on any ship, actually, it doesn't have to be a sailing ship.

It can be a steamship is that people do take watch, right? So you're on watch duty. You're on duty for four-hour shifts. Again, any sailors in the audience would be absolutely familiar with this. And it goes around the clock because somebody always has to be awake

making sure things are okay. So people go in four-hour shifts on, off, et cetera, but to ensure that you're not on exactly the same four-hour rotation day after day after day, it's broken up by the dog watch, which is a two-hour slot. One of the four hours is broken into two. So you'll do your watch, your dog watch, and then you'll end up, you know, on the slightly different rotation. Do you become a polywog after that, or what's the polywog? No. So polywag, well, first of all, in case you don't know, a polywog is, of course, we would also call a tadpole. A tadpole. A tadpole. Polywog and a bog. It's such a great son. Did you know that? I didn't know that. Of course I did. Yeah, yeah, no. I'm very impressed. So anyway, that is what a polywog is in nature. What it is in the seafaring vocabulary is someone who has not yet crossed the equator. And there's a longstanding maritime tradition of when you cross the line, as they call it, having these sort of folkloric, roughhousing kinds of traditions, sort of a hazing ritual type of thing. Bullying. Some may say. It's like, you know, high sea bullying.

Well, I think in good faith. Okay, yeah, all right. Well, I will say it's in good faith. And it's my understanding. And again, listeners may know about this that on cruises, for example, when they cross the equator, they do some ceremony about this. Anyway, the point of it is that a polywog is someone who hasn't yet crossed the equator and a shellback is somebody who has. So when you are a polywalk and you cross the equator, do they dunk you? Is that what they used to do?

Yeah, they dunk who. Somebody dresses up as a King Neptune and they come and they dunk you. and they do different things. Oh, okay. Oh, that's quite nice. And that's not bullying at all. But all of these experiences, he's storing them away, and they will come out and show themselves in works like Lord Jim,

which are beautifully wound around these experiences, you know, sort of sailors narrated. And Southeast Asia as a background to this, too. Let's flesh out the geography here a little bit more, because that's one of the things that I think is so interesting about Conrad. So, again, comes from Central Europe into London. So what we see is London from the point of view of a continent, European. But then he goes sailing, and when he goes sailing, he goes to parts of the world that are

not parts of British Empire. Australia, of course, is. But notably, he sails around Southeast Asia a lot. And Singapore, which is a British colony, is an important hug. But he goes around the Dutch East Indies, really, a great deal. And he is running these sort of circuits, at least for a short time, on a steamship that goes around Borneo. And in the course of that, he encounters what is a very plural society, El Mesa, first of all, about that part of the world. But second of all, a kind of intersection of sort of rivery island, well, Borneo is so huge. It is an island, but it has a gigantic landmass, but it has all of these rivers, and the steam ships are good at going up and down rivers, in a way, sailing ships are not, and they can sort of pull in

and out of harbors easily. He's going to these river ports where he finds these mix of, you know, Chinese, Malay, Dutch, people, all sort of living together in, what would I call it, a somewhat backwatery in the places that he's in, but also a certain kind of power structure that is not as clear as he might have found, had he been sailing in and out of Calcutta or Madras or Bombay, as those cities were called them. And from there, he hears about a job in the Belgian Congo as we opened the podcast with. what is it that takes him from Southeast Asia to the Belgian Congo, which is really the place that many of us know him best for?

So one of the things that happens in the maritime career is you sign on to a ship, you're working for as long as that voyage is going on, and sometimes you can re-up if it's, for example, the steamer doing the routes. But otherwise, each time you get off, you have to then go find another job. And over time, he goes up in rank, which is great. But as many people know, from pyramids of hierarchies, there are usually fewer jobs. at the top, then there are lower down. So he has more and more trouble finding a job, especially when the technological landscape is changing around him. And so as it gets harder and harder for him

to find a job, he has to kind of look further and further out. And it's through this series of efforts to get work that he ends up drawing on a kind of family contact that he has in Belgium, which let's just point out that if you're looking at things from a maritime point of view, you know, Antwerp or Amsterdam are actually very close to Britain. So it's not that far away, even if it's another linguistic zone. So he ends up finding out about possible jobs in the then quite newly formed society that is set up in order to take advantage of the resources of this huge tranche of Central Africa called the Congo. This is King Leopold the second of Belgium, who is at the top of this rather heinous pyramid of skulls. I mean, just describe for people what the treatment of

the native population of Congo was under the Belgian rule. So the best book about this at its height is by Adam Hochschild and it's called King Leopold's Ghost and I highly recommend it to listeners of this podcast. We must get Adam on the pod some point. It's an extraordinary and dark book. And that is a book which talks about a slightly later period from when Conrad was there. And I just want to mention the slight difference in time for a few reasons. So what do we have? Well, mostly we have, this is the period known as the Scramble for Africa. European powers are going in, they're carving up the continent, obviously with virtually no consultation with any of the people there, but they're, you know, they get together in Berlin. Couldn't happen today. Can you imagine that happening today? Yeah, exactly.

Anyway, so there they are in Berlin, and there's a map, and they draw the stuff, and boom, there it is. and it's by the European diplomats that's understood as a way of maintaining the balance of power within Europe. Well, what ends up happening, King Leopold the second, king of the Belgians, is able in all of these negotiations to snag this big part of Africa for, not so much for Belgium, but for himself. And that's actually quite important because there is not an oversight mechanism to this. So he has this territory. But, and here's where I again want to sort of highlight, maybe a slight difference from the period that Hochschild is talking about. when he sets it up, it's not a colony. It's called the Congo Free State, a phrase some people might know from the Irish free state, which will be formed later after decolonization by the British. And the ruse of it is that it is an independent entity that is governed by this company that's going to advance the mission of civilization in Congo. And Anita, you are already snickering. haven't we heard this time and time again? You know, you spread civilization at the sort of the tip of a

a bayonet, if you like. Absolutely. So what does civilization look like? Well, civilization looks, you know, partly like religion, which is, of course, a part of it in many parts of the world, but it really looks like free trade. And so what they want to do is they want to set up trading posts all over the Congo River in particular. And they want to trade at that time in ivory. This is before rubber. So they want ivory and they want to do it through free trade. And I mean, yes, the hypocrisy, we can devote ours to unpacking it. But the point that I want to make here is that the idea is all of this is going to be a model for how a region of the world that is quote unquote underdeveloped can actually get ahead, can get our technology, can get our ideas, can participate in the global

economy. Does that sound at all familiar to the kinds of ways people talk about other parts of the world today? So that's the idea. And King Leopold himself, yeah, I mean, he's like behind this company, but again, it is not a Belgian colony. It is a free state. That's the idea. So Conrad gets a job. He gets on the boat and he's supposed to be doing these routes up and down the Congo River, picking up ivory and all of that. And he finds very quickly that, of course, the reality is far from what has been described. One of the things that is immediately at issue is that the acquisition of the territory along the way, that allowed Leopold to claim he was kind of building this up with some legal grounding, is that he had agents go up and down the river and around the region with these kind of contracts that they would shove in the face of different chiefs, and they would say, you know, sign this, and the chief would basically sign away their whole land. The other thing that happened is they used conscripted labor to build, in particular, a railroad, which they try to build, and roads and all of this kind of thing.

And so one of the things about the Congo River is that it's an enormous artery. in the middle of Africa, but at the mouth, unlike, say, the Amazon or the Nile or the Mississippi, it actually does not just open out into a delta right there. At the mouth, there's a big rapids that separates, kind of the top of the river from the bottom of the river. And what it means is that they have to literally port everything up on the backs of human laborers, typically, to get up to the place where it becomes navigable. So Conrad is making his way up. And along the way, you know, he sees like these emaciated laborers, you know, he sees people who have been shot for disobeying orders. I mean, just the brutality of the labor exploitation.

Galatins tied to posts, you write. Village boys bleeding from the wounds of Belgian gunshots, rotting bodies everywhere. It's a very dark moment in your book. Absolutely. And the white people who are supposed to be these, you know, agents of civilization are a bunch of just mean, angry, aggressive, hostile people. people who he finds absolutely loaths on. Yeah, and I was just wondering about, you know, sort of how he copes with all of this, because this is clearly still relatively young man who has suffered from the worst PTSD,

who has tried to take his own life, who is then seeing all of these things. Do we know what it did to such a fragile mental health? Well, what we do know is that one way or another, at the end of just one voyage, and he was supposed to do a three-year term, mind you, after one voyage, which is a few months, He leaves, I mean, he quits, he leaves, and he goes into probably the biggest depression of his life to date. What all is behind it, you know, there's so many possibilities here. But it is for him a heart of darkness in terms of his own mental state when he comes out. And this is the point when he turns to writing, is it, or is that later?

Yeah, so this is an interesting pivot moment. So let me just mention one thing about Congo going forward. So sometimes in history, there are these just unbelievable, coincidences where people meet each other at a certain point in life who then turn out to have important lives later, and it's just a completely bizarre thing that they ran into each other at whatever stage. And this is something that happens to Conrad. So when he's making his way up the Congo River, he meets this young Irishman who's working for the railroad company. Roger Casement. Yeah, it's called Roger Casement. And Roger Casement will go on to be the great

exposer of the crimes committed under King Leopold a little bit later, which is what comes up in the Hookshould book, when the ivory trade having been sort of extinguished, or I shouldn't say extinguished, having been sort of exhausted a little bit, a new thing has found, and that new thing is rubber. And rubber is available in the jungles raw, whereas it's cultivated on plantations elsewhere in Malaysia, for example. But there's this kind of window where there's this huge rubber boom where the best way to get it is partly from these vines in the jungle. And this is when the just absolute horrors really take off. When under King Leopold's supervision,

there are these basically teams of Western agents who are going around and rounding up villagers to just go off and get the rubber out of the trees to certain quotas, and if they don't, they get their hands cut off, all of that. And it's absolutely vile. And I say all this because when Heart of Darkness comes out, it's actually like right around the time that that stuff is taking off. And so it based in an earlier moment of exploitation,

it sort of speaks to a later moment of exploitation. Casement will be the guy who ends up, you know, shining a light on all of this and telling the world that this is what is going on, you know, sort of summary punishments for the children of people who don't deliver their quotas, arms hacked off, legs hacked off, is punishment for the parents who haven't delivered the quotas. The horror, the horror, it sums up this period of history in the, the Congo. At what point does he start processing all of this on the page and become the Conrad that we know and we understand today? So the other thing that makes this episode, I think,

important is that he has, as Willie has signaled, already started writing. And we don't know entirely kind of how and why he started, but we do know that there was a competition he came across in a Sailor's Magazine. Titbits Magazine, my favorite bit of your whole book. Yeah, and so he does submit something for this competition, I think. And I mean, his father was a writer. He does come from his very literary family. He has a lot of time on the ship. I mean, it's not completely puzzling that he ends up doing this. But anyway, the point of it is that he is already writing a work of fiction, which is set in Southeast Asia, that he takes with him to Congo. And I find this fascinating because there's a journal that he keeps in Congo, which is the only journal we know that he kept, which still survives.

And that's a manuscript that people have paid some attention to because it chronicles the day by day and people like to match what he experienced in the journal with what he wrote about in Heart of Darkness. But he brings another manuscript with him, and that is the manuscript of this novel. And I think when we put them together, we see, you know, these are both river journeys. These are both on steamships with all of the kind of connotations that Comrade attaches to that. These are both regions with sort of marginal and peculiar kinds of power structures at stake. I mean, on the one hand, obviously a kind of light Western assertiveness, but also blurriness around the edges. And you mentioned earlier William Apocalypse Now, which takes heart of darkness and situates it in Vietnam on a different river in a different part of the world. and yet there's some kind of poetic justice in the fact that Conrad himself who went to Africa with Southeast Asia on his brain,

you know, wrote this book, which can then be kind of transposed somewhere else, back in this case, to Southeast Asia. I mean, this is not germane to, you know, the conversation we're having, but I'm just fascinated, and I can't not ask. You've seen the journal. What is his writing like? How ordered is his thinking? What does it look like and feel like this journal? You can look at it online. We can give the link to your readers. His handwriting is pretty legible, and he dood. That's one of the great things you get when you actually look at manuscripts, and it's one of the things I love about actually looking at manuscripts. So there are little doodles here and there. He writes in pencil, very short notes in the journal. It's not a thoughtful journal in terms of reflection, but little notes.

And then a lot of notes about how to navigate the river, because he's basically having to learn his job, which is where do you, where's the sandbank and which way do you go at this bend and all of that kind of thing. And by this stage, he's relocated to rural Kent, which he was an incredibly probable. place for Conrad. Yet he finds an odd sort of home there, doesn't he? He makes his way there. After Congo, he is writing. He has a breakdown. He thinks happened. I mean, he has this transitional phase where he stops sailing insofar as he stops looking actively for a birth. He writes more. He ends up getting his novel accepted for publication. And he marries an English woman. Who he's barely met, and it's sort of an oddly improbable match, yet it works. It works extremely well. She's a typist. He's a basically working class girl from the East End, and his later literary friends and

contacts, some of them are quite sniffy about her. But it's a loving marriage, and it works, and she's incredibly supportive. Virginia Woolf is pretty sniffy about him in general. Well, she's sniffy about a lot of people. But yes. Our guest, she calls him, Conrad. Yeah, but it works extremely well. She's extremely supportive of him and he of her, and so that's all great.

But the point in all of this, I keep saying that the point of all of this. because in Conrad, he sort of have to say that because there's so much surrounding it. He can't afford to live in London, but he wants to be near London because that's sort of where the action is. This is like V.S. Nypole and Salisbury. Yeah, so he ends up renting a place. He finds his home in Kent, and he will end up spending the rest of his life in various rented houses. He never owns a house. He never is a wealthy man. It's also over the coming couple of decades that he really leans into being English, British,

and particularly by the time you get to World War I. I mean, he's very kind of vocal and patriotic about it. And so there's something that fits about living in the home counties and being very English. You mentioned Virginia Woolf already, but I mean, he does eventually over this period of time of transitioning into being, you know, sort of an author. And even thinking of himself as an author, he does have the society of some of the greatest minds of the time. Just tell us about his circle of friends. Well, I'll give you one other example of just a bizarre happenstance, which is that on one of one of his greatest minds of the time, which is that on one of his world, his last jobs as a sailor. He's on a sailing ship to Australia as it happens, and that ship is taking

passengers and not cargo. And one of the passengers on the ship is a young lawyer by the name of John Galsworthy. And that lawyer will go on to drop his legal studies and will instead, you know, become a writer of both fiction and plays, which is in fact what Gullsworthy was very known for in his own time. Galsworthy becomes immensely rich because he's very successful and will be a very important friend to Conrad and sometime financial patron of his going forward. And they hit it off on board ship, do they? Yeah, they meet when Conrad is a first mate or something, and Galsworthy is a passenger, and Galzworthy is traveling with a friend who also becomes a lifelong friend of Conrad's.

Anyway, his writing is early recognized by Edward Garnett, who is an important, very important editor of the period. Many of us who write are kind of aware of these figures kind of behind the scenes who turn out to be very pivotal to their eras. And Garnett is like that, a bit like the Bob Silvers or something of the late 19th century. This was the legendary editor of the New York Review of Books. A man we both loved. And Garnet, whose wife Constance, is actually an incredibly important translator of the Russian novels. Of Tolstoy. I read Constance Gallis's War and Peace, which is the most beautiful translation. Exactly. Anyways, you know, he helps find Conrad. And Conrad is when he starts writing quite avant-garde writer. in terms of the content, of course, but also in terms of the style, is bringing things to the page

that are quite unfamiliar to British readers, which means that he's taken up by some of the more avant-garde writers of the period and intellectuals. H.G. Wells, Henry James, Ford, Baleigh, Ford, all these sort of guys. Exactly. And what's interesting about that is that, you know, when he starts writing, he's older than a lot of those men, but he is charting away for them. At the end of his life, he'll die in 1924, it is people like, say, Virginia Wool for James Joyce who are setting the tone. And at that point, you know, what they're doing is very different from whatever Comrade is doing. So he kind of loops across this big literary transition as well. How does his life come to an end? What's the

end of his story, Meyer? Well, he spends 30 years, 1894, really, when his first book is published or thereabouts, to 1924 when he does as a writer. And he gives up ideas of going back to see in the 1890s, Or returning to Poland? Well, yes. I mean, but again, bear in mind, Poland doesn't exist. I mean, that is Poland only comes back onto the map after World War I. And indeed, he does take a trip back with his family. Actually, with exquisite timing, he decides to take his family to Poland, which at that time is, again, it's part of Austria, Germany, Russia, in like August 1914.

Wow. Timing. Oh, wow. That's a story for another day. But he, no, he settles in England. He has two boys. He's, you know, living his life, writing novels. The novels don't do well commercially until about 1914 when he starts to make some money and does better.

But it's also around then that people will debate this in the Comrade community. I'm sure people are welcome to write to me and we can talk about this. But I think the later novels, certainly the very last novels are kind of, again, they don't represent the kind of cutting-edge literary style or motifs that his early work did. by the 1920s, he's writing these books that very few people are going to read now, at the same time that modernism is really taking off. So when he dies, he's achieved at last a type of commercial success as well as critical success. But I think he also dies at a moment when his reputation gets a little bit bifurcated, where, you know, there's some people like, for example, a very young Ernest Hemingway,

who loves Conrad, who takes him up as a writer of adventure stories, sea stories, etc., which is a way in which he's marketed, probably even to you, Willie, when you were in school. Yeah, victory we were made to read. Yeah, yeah. And there's another Conrad, which is much more the complex Conrad of Empire, that doesn't get foregrounded quite as much among the reading public, until a bit later when other writers, like, for example, Biasan Eye Paul, or the literary critic Edward Said, or a lot of post-colonial writers will step in.

So let's see it. into this today. So how should we read him? I grew up seeing him as the great anti-imperial writer who portrayed the horrors of imperialism and yet the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebbi in the 1970s before I'd ever discovered Conrad was already writing that he was a racist. He calls him an offensive and totally deplorable writer, racist and imperialist. He reads them completely differently from how I did. And Naipal himself sees himself in bits of Conrad. He said it'd always been everywhere I'd been before me,

and yet doesn't particularly warm to his books. Take us through that and tell us how you think we should read Conrad now. I think it is possible to be anti-imperial and racist at the same time. So I think that's the first and most significant thing to say. And I think related to that made me intellectually interested in Conrad and what I tried to get at in writing about. him was to piece together opinions, views, and perspectives that people can have that don't always pull in exactly the same direction. And I think that Conrad was very much ahead of his time when it came to identifying the hollowness of some of the language of civilization, when it came to identifying the insidious pull of ideas of nationalism, and particularly ethno-nationalism,

when it came to identifying, above all, on my mind these days, the corrupting power of capitalism when ungoverned. And of course, challenging authoritarianism. In all those ways, I think Conrad, we see virtually all of that, is in just Heart of Darkness, but his great novel Nostromo is the best indictment of capitalism. In any event, he was ahead of his time, I think, in those ways. He was very much of his time in thinking about people as half. having racial types or falling into racial types. He doesn't have very nice things to say about Jewish characters, you know, he uses racial stereotypes about Asians as well as about Africans.

Those are there. And I think that what Acebe did for us as readers of Conrad was to make us understand Conrad in his times. And as an author whose own intellectual universe was shaped in some ways in opposition to others, categories of otherness, that were themselves cliches, stereotypes, offensive stereotypes in many ways. And to show us what we would call without trying to get too jargony about it, the mutual constitution of a Europe and in Africa. That, you know, you can only think of Europe as civilized if you think of some other part of the world as uncivilized. And that comes up with a chabee again and again. Another is just saying, you know, look, if you look at the way in which particularly black people are portrayed. They are just a sea of darkness. They aren't

individuals. They aren't people with personality or agency at all. And that's an interesting thing. It's going to come up again and again in this series on writers that we're doing, even, you know, sort of comic books that we'll come to later on in this series. But I think one of the things you emphasize in your wonderful book is that he's prescient, that he understands our world in a way that other 19th century writers do not. There's a lovely section in your book where you write how much he connects with present-day preoccupations. After 9-11 and the rise of Islamist terrorism, you write, I was startled to remember that the same author who condemned imperialism in the heart of darkness had also written the secret agent, which centres on the terrorist bomb plot in London.

After 2008, the financial crisis, I found Conrad in Nostromo, portraying multinational capitalism, getting up to the same sort of tricks that I read about in the daily newspaper. As a digital revolution gathered pace, I found Conrad writing movingly in Lord Jim and many other works about the consequence of technological disruption in the industry he knew best shipping. As debates about immigration, unsettled Europe and the United States, I marvelled a new and afresh at how Conrad had produced any of these books in English, his third language, which he'd only learnt as an adult. So, Maya, I mean, this is a question that we're going to ask again and again in this series.

Is it fair and right to judge these authors out of their time and to balk at some of the things that they have written? I think what I would say is that, you know, the real question is what do we get from reading and what do we get from reading fiction? And I think what we get from reading fiction is the ability to put ourselves in different situations and to expand our emotional sensory and really moral sense of the world. and range. And I think that reading a novel is not an exercise in trying to detail the politics of the writer or even come up with a judgment about them. It's about trying to think about the ideas that they're putting on the page and the characters and how they're dramatizing it and to take those away with us and apply them to the world that we're in and the challenges or opportunities that we're facing. So I think Conrad continues to be rewarding in those ways.

I think Conrad gives us things to think about. Maya, thank you. You always give us stuff to think about. Maya Jasanoff, again, another star turn here on Empire. If you are enjoying learning about sort of the origin stories of these great writers of Empire, why not sign up to the club, EmpirePodUK.com. That's where we are, EmpirePodUK.com. And you can get straight into Jane Austen and the Georgians and their relationship with Empire. Boy, there's a lot to talk about there.

And you can listen to that right now. Thank you very much for listening. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnh. And goodbye from me, William, Duremberg.