In this installment of the Post, I am going to review two works; Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness and C J Cutcliffe Hyne's The Further Adventures of Captain Kettle. Why these two books? you ask. At least you do rhetorically so I can tell you why.
Why? Because when I was doing my research on Hyne for a previous blog post, the Wikipedia article on him mentioned that: "Conrad .. read Pearson's (the magazine Hyne's stories appeared in), and borrowed whole phrases, key episodes, and images from the Kettle stories for Heart of Darkness." Now borrowing incidents from other writers appeared to be somewhat common back then. I know that W Somerset Maugham was accused of borrowing a scene for his story The Moon and Sixpence, and he said so in the preface of the volume I read. He had also been accused of using real people in his story Cakes and Ale. So it would appear that a little borrowing was no great scandal, You can read about the similarities here. I glanced over it, but I was more interested in the fact that here were two writers writing about the same time and about the same place, one of whom is still remembered today while the one is forgotten. Why? Again.
To find out, I reread both of the stories.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad C
I first read this book in high school, and I remember two things about it, those being the image of a solitary warship off the shore of Africa firing its cannon into the jungle with no seeming effect or purpose. And of course the punch line, "The horror, the horror."
The story is drawn from Conrad's own experiences working on a riverboat in the Belgium Congo in 1890.
The story, such as it is, has Charles Marlow relating his experience in Africa as a riverboat pilot on an unnamed river. He is sent up stream, and spends several months slowly repairing the steamboat he was hired to command. At this station, he hears of a company agent, Kurtz, who appears to be something special, even to those who dislike and suspect him of being some sort of idealist when it comes to the natives. He appears to have some sort of great magnetism that attacks people to him. Marlow's steamboat eventually reaches Kurtz's station to find him dying, and against his will, they carry him - and his ivory - back down the river. On the journey back, Marlow also falls under Kurtz's spell, to the extent that when he presents the last of Kurtz's papers to Kurtz's fiancée, when asked what his dying words were, he tells her that he uttered her name, rather than "The horror, the horror" to protect his reputation.
The short novel or novella reads as a very surreal, dreamlike, indeed, nightmarish account of rather disreputable Europeans rotting away and dying in the steaming disease-ridden climate. all in pursuit of the fortune in ivory and sundry other products the jungle produces. It highlights the casual exploitation of, and cruelty to, the natives. It involves a lot of naval gazing by Marlow as he slowly travels deep into the heart of darkness to discover that the high minded, idealistic Kurtz, had descended into the savagery of the land. Kutz had becoming worshiped as a tin-god of a tribe whom he lead on raids against other tribes to steal their ivory. Ivory which he intended to take out of the Congo to make his fortune. Somewhat surprisingly, besides offering a few of incidents to illustrate how ill treated the Africans were, they play only a small role in the story. They are portraited a savages with an almost childlike simplicity which is ruthlessly exploited by the disreputable collection of Europeans who have ended up in King Leopold of Belgium's private colony in along the Congo River for one reason or another. Most of whom die there in the hostile climate.
I think it is important to add that Conrad never identifies the exact place in Africa his story takes place, even though he was a a riverboat captain on the Congo and worked for King Leopold's private colony/business. Nor does he ever mention the fact that King Leopold himself established the colony and company that ruthlessly exploited the natives of the Congo mostly to acquire ivory. One might argue that this is perhaps to make the story more universal. But it seems to me that he may well have not cared, or dared, to point a finger at someone who should've had fingers been pointed at, as Leopold & Co.'s treatment of the natives was outrageously brutal. I see this as being morally cowardly. Indeed, the Belgium government took over the colony from "Leopold & Co." in 1908 due to the excessive cruelty and exploitations of the natives that was the practice in the Belgium Congo under the King's company during Conrad's time in the Congo.
Still, this story, and Joseph Conrad, have endured which speak to it and his lasting qualities. It is, however, as you may've gathered, not to my tastes. Too highbrow for me, I fear.
Free Gutenberg edition of The Heart of Darkness: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/526
This books is a collection of short stories that appeared in Pearson's Magazine in 1898, the first four of which concern Captain Kettle's adventures while employed by Leopold & Co. in the Belgium Congo, first as a river pilot and then as a riverboat captain. Hyne was a world traveler and had visited the Congo before writing these stories, so they also include some first hand knowledge of the locale.
And as always when talking about the Hyne's Captain Kettle stories, I must mention that he employs a great deal of racist language and racist stereotypes in the descriptions of the non-white races and non-English nationalities he describes, which to some degree or another, likely represent the view of the author as well. It would seem both Hyne and Captain Kettle believed that the British race was superior to all other races and all other nationalities. There is also a tread of anti-Semitism in the writing as well, which was common in Britain at the time. Let me quote one passage describing the passengers of an immigration ship bound for America to illustrate this attitude. "The emigrants - Austrians, Bohemians, wild Poles, filthy, crawling Russian Jews, bestial Armenians, human debris which even soldier-coveting Middle Europe rejected..." However, Hyne presents Captain Kettle as a complex and contradictory character, who is "that master of ruling men at the expense of their feelings..." but once he rules them, he looks after them as well, as we shall see.
The first of the four relevant stories, "In Quarantine," has a desperate for work the 38 year old Kettle - he had a wife and three kids to support - signing on to be a pilot for the lower Congo River, piloting ocean going boats up the river to the Capital of the Free State or Leopold & Co.
"Here is my wife's address, sir. I'd like my half-pay sent to her."
'She shall have it direct from Brussels, skipper, so long as you are alive - I mean, so long as you remain in the Congo Service."
His first experience on arriving in Banana is traveling along with the pilot of the Lower Congo, Nilsson, piloting a Portuguese steamer, in a hurry, up the Congo River that smells like crushed marigolds. The reason for the haste is that the native passengers are restless, fearful, and dying, because there's sickness aboard, which turns out to be smallpox. Indeed, two very sick passengers were said to have died of it while Kettle and the pilot were taking a meal in the mess room - though it was pretty clear to them, that they were not exactly dead when they were sent over the side of the ship with iron bars attached to their legs. The small pox is discovered when the ship arrives in harbor and the ship sent to the quarantine station with all aboard until the disease runs its course. As the ship's captain takes to his cabin and stays drunk, Kettle takes charge of the ship, cleaning it up and keeping order. At the end of the outbreak he carries the last dying native and locks him along with himself just to make it fair, in the captain's cabin for a night as revenge for the murder of the two native passengers. The next morning the ship's captain, in fear, decides to swim for the shore and goes over the side, and never surfaces, "Guess a crocodile chopped him." The story illustrates this important feature of Captain Kettle, whatever his opinion of the blacks and other people he looks down on, he still places a value on them as people.
In the next story, "The Little Wooden God with the Eyes," sees his servant killed and eaten by cannibals during a visit to a native village while he is staked to the ground to be eaten alive by ants. Freed by a missionary/gun trader, he drives the natives from the village in a rage for killing his servant. And when Kettle gets sick, it was Nilsson's native wife, "Mrs. Nilssen who tediously nursed him back to health. Kettle had always been courteous to Mrs. Nilssen, even though she was as black and polished as a paten leather boot; and Mrs. Nilssen appreciated Captain Owen Kettle accordingly." In this story we also meet that missionary who decided that gin and guns paid better than missionary work but ended up being chopped, i.e. eaten. "Chop" is a word used for both food and the act of eating in the pidgin English used as the lingua franca of the coast.
In the third story, "A Quick Way with Rebels," finds Captain Kettle a riverboat captain, and after getting ambushed by rebelling native troops and the riverboat stranded on a sand bar because the loss of power due to a bullet hole in the boiler, Kettle convinces the Belgium army officer to let him take overall command of the expedition. He repairs the steamboat's boiler with the bullet hole in it while under fire, and then frees his steamboat from a sand bar. The attack on the steamboat echoes an similar incident in The Heart of Darkness, though the reasons for the attack are different. In this story, Kettle takes the steamboat down river to collect wood for the boiler, and to be use as protection from gunfire for the crew and soldiers they are carrying, and returns to exact some sort of revenge for his crew members that they had killed, black and white in the ambush. However, when they return to base the Belgium army officer Kettle had superseded gets the base commander to order the arrest of Kettle, and probably hang him as a "rebel" for disobeying him. Kettle will have nothing of this, disarms the people trying to arrest him, and together with an English doctor, Dr. Clay, and the 50 native troops onboard the steamboat, take the steamboat up river to escape.
And in the last relevant story, "The New Republic." the story begins, with "The fighting ended, and promptly both the invaders and the invaded settled down to the new course of things without further exultation or regret. An hour after it had happened the capture of the village was already regarded as ancient history..." Kettle has a new scheme, setting up a new state in the heard of the Congo with the help of the black crew and soldiers, some 70 all told who had been "dragooned" into obedience with little trouble, as Hyne asserts that if the natives are fed, and led, they are "quite content to work, or steal, or fight, or be killed as that master sees fit to direct."
In any event Kettle is intent on setting up this new state where natives are treated not as equals of white people, but uplifted from their savage life to something like the European ideal of civilization, though "it's understood that we run this country for our own advantage first."
"What other object should white men have up-country in Africa?' said Clay. "We don't come here merely for our health."
'But I've got a great notion of treating the people well besides. When we have made a sufficient pile - and mark you, it must be all in ivory, as there's nothing else of value that can be easy enough handled - we shall clear out for the Coast, one-time"
Which means, like Kurtz, they set out to acquire as much ivory as possible by stealing it from the surrounding villages as they built this "New Republic". Unlike Kurtz, Kettle and Doc Clay awe the natives with Kettle's accordion and Clay's banjo playing and singing. Kettle, a very church-going man ashore, also set out to preach to his citizens, though Clay could hardly keep a straight face, given what they've set out to do. Their Congo New Republic ends not with Kettle dying, but with Doc Clay's death. His leg was mangled by a falling tree in a sudden storm, and though he instructed Kettle on how to amputate it, which he did, he could never quite recover, and slowly died with Kettle at his bedside. By refusing to leave Doc Clay's bedside his New Republic falls apart as a result of an intrusion of Arab slavers and Kettle's refusal to take to the field to deal with them. Kettle then must make his way slowly to the coast traveling through the jungle by being a traveling minstrel, entertaining the natives with his accordion playing and singing, a story that must await the pen of Captain Kettle to be written, in blank verse with hymns and songs he sang at each stop.
So there you have it. Two treatments of a similar incident. One a study in moral collapse, the other as a series of extraordinary adventures written as light entertainment. I think that Hyne's stories, despite their intent, are more authentic, in that he is far more descriptive of the place and the people, as viewed by an Englishman of the era. Conrad did not even care (or dare) to mention Leopold & Co by name, while Hyne does, and he also includes pidgin-English phrases to give the story a more authentic feel.
The remaining stories cover Kettle's return to the sea, with him ending up having to take on 650 people from a burning liner, which involved tossing some of the cargo over the side of his ship to house them all - and earning the disfavor of his owner and customers, which eventually gets him fired to become a farmer. Though, like Sherlock Holmes, his retirement is short lived, and nine more books follow.
Free Gutenberg edition of A Master of Fortune; Being Further Adventures of Captain Kettle; https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12556
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