A STEAMER TRAVELING up the Congo. An island in the South Seas. These were the settings not only for Joseph Conrad’s dark and adventurous fiction, but also for the first half of his life. Born into the Polish nobility, Conrad (1857–1924) first apprenticed on a ship as a teenager, then spent twenty years working his way to master mariner. In his lifetime he was known best for his sea stories. But like Herman Melville, a seafaring author before him, Conrad was much more than an adventure writer. Marlow, Conrad’s recurring narrator, is a keen observer of human nature, and books like Heart of Darkness (1902) and Lord Jim (1900) are intriguing psychological journeys. Have you seen “The horror! The horror!”? Journey into the heart of this Conrad quiz.
TRUE OR FALSE?
1. Conrad did not learn English until he was twenty-one years old.
2. Conrad lived for several months on the South Seas island of Patusan, where the novella Lord Jim is set.
3. Mr. Kurtz, the ivory trader in Heart of Darkness, was likely based on Leon Rom, a Belgian officer who kept severed heads in his garden plot.
4. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe called Conrad a “bloody racist” in a controversial 1977 essay.
5. T. S. Eliot’s long poem “The Waste Land” uses Mr. Kurtz’s last words in Heart of Darkness—“The horror! The horror!”—as its epigraph.
ANSWERS
1. True. Conrad first learned English aboard a British merchant ship in 1878.
2. False. Patusan is not a real island.
3. True. For more on Rom, check out Adam Hochschild’s excellent history, King Leopold’s Ghost.
4. True. Achebe’s essay, “An Image of Africa,” called attention to the nonspeaking, dehumanized African characters in Conrad’s work, especially the “savages” in Heart of Darkness. The essay was controversial because the novel had generally been praised for its critique of European colonialism in Africa.
5. False. Eliot intended to use the line as an epigraph, but Ezra Pound, who edited the poem, objected. The line was replaced with a quote by the Roman author Petronius.