Hay, we got it wrong

William Beach Thomas was a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent.

A true-life man of that comic classic 'Scoop'?

A dead-ringer for Evelyn Waugh's 'Boot of the Beast'?

Absolutely so - as festival-goers at Hay-on-Wye discussed this weekend after our White Man in Africa event (see last post).

But, back in 1902,  was this William B the best TLS reviewer for Joseph Conrad's not-at-all-comic Heart of Darkness, the other book which was on our Hay agenda?

Absolutely not. In our first year of TLS publication, this all-too-real Boot was a poor choice to 'take on' (as we say) Conrad's modern masterpiece.

Possibly our worst ever.

Beach Thomas, Lord 'Copper' Northcliffe's favourite water-bird correspondent, did not like Conrad very much.

Too much 'horror'.

Heart of Darkness had 'zest'. But it was 'precious' and had more 'poetic rhetoric' than was desirable in an adventure yarn.

It was 'quite extravagant according to the canons of art'.

Ah well. We win some, we lose some.

Then and now.

The prescribed subject this past weekend was the connection between Conrad and Waugh, two great writers on the Dark Continent, what they shared in common, what they did not.

African agonies were a strong theme in Hay's wind-and-rain-swept opening days - and attracted big crowds.

The writers Peter Godwin, Tinashe Mushakavanhu and I were up before a keen mud-splattered audience on Sunday night, undaunted, sharpened even, by the not-so-tropical May weather in the Wye valley.

We moved briskly through racism, cannibalism, Freud and Mugabe - tentatively in some parts, more boldly in others, while the cold wind howled, the tent-ropes screamed and the questioners set the pace.

But this discovery of the Beach Thomas connection was the oddest link for me.

Just as Waugh's comic mischief  in the 1930s was to send William Boot, countryside author of 'Lush Places' , to cover an incomprehensible conflict in Ishmaelia, so, twenty years earlier, a real rural writer was moved from his own world of books and badgers to the battlefields of Flanders.

This real William B, so beloved for his journalistic contributions 'From a Hertfordshire Cottage', was, sadly, less of a credit to his craft when he came to describing Britain's first battle day on the Somme.

Nineteen thousand British dead, 40, 000 wounded.

'All went well' - according to William (third from left) and his colleagues briefed by false intelligence reports from their own side.

His earlier rejection of Conrad's masterpiece in the TLS seems to have been just a warm-up, his dislike of 'indulgence in picturesque horror' merely a bizarre trial disservice to the truth.

Then even more strangely.

In the very year that  Beach Thomas was away, with others, like Percival Phillips of The Daily Express, the more generally accepted models for Scoop, all reporting what they didn't know about the First World War, The TLS decided that our original review of Heart of Darkness could not be allowed to stand.

This time we took no chances, asking Virginia Woolf - anonymously, of course, in those days - to 'take on' a new edition.

In our issue of September 20, 1917, Mrs Woolf reported that reading it, even holding it, was so different from the usual run of books 'that even our minute duties with regard to it maintain a momentary dignity'.

She lauded Conrad's genius and its 'most complete and perfect expression'.

It was this rare 'completeness' which most attracted her - 'something solid like a principle and masterful like an instinct'.

And citing Conrad's own words, 'that hidden something, that gift of good or evil, that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations'.

Racial difference. Racial perceptions of difference. Different perceptions of race.

Uncomfortable thoughts that still confront us, that should not be ducked or half-seen.

Some of the thoughts which great literature allows us to see and confront, this week in the bracing air of Hay and every week, when we get the reviewers right, in the TLS.

Comments

[Judith Fitzgerald]

Andrew +!- You're abso-deffo on the beam and off the hook reading Dickens — not that you *were* on any hooks in my books, Cap'n — but, as you most likely know, JC worshipped both CD's work (which he read in his early teens in French, IIRC) as well as the seafaring yarns of England's own Frederick Marryat.

OTOH, bet you might not know that, by the time the soon-to-become-a-gambladdict turned 16, the barely average-Joe of a scholar lowered the boom on his formal studies in Greek, Latin, geography, history, and mathematics to raise the nautical flag on the high seas for good? Hard to fathom, eh?

Here's a thought: Would Conrad himself, at that age, have been able to stand Heart of Darkness (for precisely the reasons both you and Susan Balée enumerate)? It didn't profoundly affect me either, in fact, until my third reading of it when, in a flash (after falling in love with "The Rime" all over again), the relationship between Marlow and Mariner finally clicked with me, full-frontal enthrallery (similar to what it seems to me you're expressing vis-à-vis Mikhail B's M & M).

Halves and have-nots. Doubles (or mirrorings, perhaps); but, pointedly, the culminating logic for the repetition of "The horror! The horror!" ([H]e cried out twice . . ..")

Each word carries its weight on the slow-dawning stage the Catholic Pole wishes to set, most keenly in the novella's opening pages, but one of the work's maestro-strokes for the benefit of the reader.

As Doc Thomas Dilworth notes, Kurtz's oratorical prowess wows both Blacks and Whites. Know thy audience. Play to its members. Numero-uno rhetor's rule; JC dances to its tune. Soothe the savage reps of Imperialism; but, keep the beast on its two feet or, at least, on the edge of its cheeky seat. Enter "efficiency." Romans. Exeunt. A tale of two deities, one false, the other, well . . .

H of D puts me in a Melville-ish Moby-Dickster mood (which culminates in his 1861 poem, "Greek Architecture"). In its intricately intertwingling way, H of D *is* a kind of long poem, IMO, a trybrid of sorts, half-riveting novella, half-trifurcating epyllion-variant, half-eulogistic jeremiad, wholly integrated pièce de résistance.

(OIC . . . You noticed, 2, did you? Yeppers. Math and me weren't intended to be.)

Good you plan to give this lovely little-big book another look; otherwise, we shall have to keel you. -!+

[Judith Fitzgerald]

Hrmm . . . Anthony, how much *can* one add to the near-inexpressible first fact of this model novella's brilliance (even if such a one's the same dame E. M. Forster believed responsible for extending the limits and recharting the boundaries of our shared language "a little further against the dark")?

Under my *other* hat, every once in a blue moonbeam, after reading an extraordinarily heart-stopping work of the first magnitude, instead of turning in a 750-word review outlining its value, de/merits, theme, plot, moral compass, context, et so forthia, I've sighed and sighed and thought, Drats, drats, double drats! Why are editors so unreasonable sometimes, wanting all these superfluous words surveying the field when all I really wanna write is one succinct sentence (deploying a noun I've had the exquisite pleasure of penning maybe three times in the last couple of decades)? "This author's _______ is a masterpiece. Period."

*Sigh.* The last time I held a book the way V. describes holding Heart of Darkness in her hands (and, by extension, the way she tellingly doesn't describe the way its tactile lines hold her)? Exactly ten years, one month, three weeks, and 39º 43' ago.

H of D is, arguably, among the last millennium's top five prophetic fictional masterpieces. Personally, I prefer The Secret Sharer over Youth, The End of the Tether, Lord Jim or, even, The Secret Agent.

You're so right, though, Anthony, concerning Woolf's almost obsessive re-returning to it; it does tend to affect writers' writers that way. Here, I am thinking of the equally brilliant Fitzgerald novel, The Great Gatsby (". . . the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea . . .") as well as The Quiet American (Greene). And, although not of its so-called canonical stature, either Lord of the Flies, Golding's finest (no doubt partially because of its heavily weighted H of D conclusion), or A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller, Jr.).

Additionally, I am recalling the above-mentioned author's _______ insofar as it is, IMO, the last novelistic masterpiece inked during the twentieth century (not to mention the fact it, too, made much gravitational ado about demarcating states of slavery and freedom).

Tangentially (or serendipitously), BTW, Sir Peter's subsequent 2 June Bloggadocio — Blogobiter dictum? Blogument? Bloggitorial? — reminded me of Woolf's observation that depending upon "a profession is a less odious form of slavery" than depending upon "a father." That's the other *other* half-seen lot of it, for crying out loud.

Alrighty, then. Your challenge, should you choose to inspect it, involves solving the identity of Mystery Masterpiece Maker _______. There's enough info-ammo to piece together the name of the reclusive, erm, elusive genius in this spontaneous no-name no-title-novel game. (Please, feel free to blame the author of this Blog for my silliness. Just ogled 5 June zinger. Mamma-fucking-mea culpa . . . I is still sniggling!)

[Andrew Kenneally]

Well, Judith, the extracts you show are very fine writing but I think my point may hold true. However we've all presuambly turned away from a book where it failed to click, owing to whatever mental circumstances we may have been in, only to pick it up at a later time only to become enthralled. So with me and Bulgakov's Master & Margarita quite recently. So perhaps I wasn't quite in the mood for Heart of D, picked up on the brooding atmosphere as being slightly excessive and allowed that to turn myself away from the book. i'll give it another look soon, I promise, to see what I make of it! Says he wishing there existed something between the full stop and the excitingly jolly exclamation mark. In the meantime, I'm pursuing Dickens' Tale of Two Cities.

[Anthony Cummins]

Though she returned so often to Heart of Darkness in her own fiction, Woolf hardly mentioned it in her TLS review, did she? She focused more on the two other pieces in Dent's 1917 reprint: 'Youth', the title story - where that quotation about 'racial difference' appears - and 'The End of the Tether', which she praised as being the greatest example of the 'completeness' she found in Conrad's book. By the way, Beach Thomas also thought 'The End of the Tether' was the best thing in *Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories* - so perhaps the critical sensibilities of these reviewers were not so divergent as your (quietly amending) reception history suggests!

[Judith Fitzgerald]

"Uncomfortable thoughts that still confront us, that should not be ducked or half-seen."

Couldn't agree more, Sir Peter. Mr. A. Kenneally laments Conrad's "painting of the brooding, dark atmosphere laid on pretty thick."

That's the half-seen of it. The following set of quotes comes from the first few paragraphs of _Heart of Darkness_ (and, should one read carefully, one will fully see the shades, shadings, and colourings swathing the brilliant narrative's opening sequences [from the whited sepulchre to the yellows, reds, silvers, purples, golds and, even, the rainbow]):

"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 sprits."

"It was difficult to realise his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom."

"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 marsh 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 sombre 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 for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. . . ."

"The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman light-house, 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."

Surely, as well, it is impossible to overlook the role of, say, Virgil's _Aeneid_ in terms of a certain slant of light in the compressed Conradian epic? (Think MORITURI TE SALUTANT.)

Just my half-'n'-half deux.

[Andrew Kenneally]

I'm not so sure about Heart of Darkness though. Began re-reading it not that long ago aand gave up after ten pages or so as I found the painting of the brooding, dark atmosphere laid on pretty thick. Perhaps in the Tropics in certain dangerous conditions this would seem natural but the boat hadn't got out of sight of London at this stage. Maybe I'll give it another look but I found it a bit of a variation on the "doth protest too much" thing where Conrad wasn't trusting in the art to subtly create the mood but was shovelling out the darkness vibe just in case the reader lacked the necessary subtlety to absorb the desired point.

[Susan Balée]

Excellent post, but I also think Conrad fares better on a second reading. Watching my teenage daughter struggle through "Heart of Darkness" earlier this month, I tried to console her with the thought that though she hates it now, she'll love it when she rereads it in 15 years. At least, that's what happened to me. When I eventually had to teach the book as a professor (for a course on novellas), I discovered Conrad's genius. At 17, I'd been too young, too callow, to get him.

Embarrassingly enough, I must say the same of Shakespeare: I didn't really begin to love his plays -- no, especially, his sonnets -- until I was about 30. In fact, there are lots of writers who fall into this category, methinks. Henry James is another acquired taste, though of him the best line came from Henry Adams' sharp-tongued wife, Clover. She said, "Most writers bite off more than they can chew. Henry [James], though, chews more than he bites off."

Then there are those writers one loved when young who don't bear up when returned to years later. But that's another comment for another post.