The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Conrad’s best-known books, Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (published in book form in 1902), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907), draw on ideas from Darwin, Nietzsche, Nordau, and even Lombroso to explore the great fault line between scientific, liberal, and technical optimism in the twentieth century and pessimism about human nature. He is reported to have said to H. G. Wells on one occasion, ‘The difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!’61 It was a Conradian joke, it seems, to dedicate The Secret Agent to Wells.

  Christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Conrad was born in 1857 in a part of Poland taken by the Russians in the 1793 partition of that often-dismembered country (his birthplace is now in Ukraine). His father, Apollo, was an aristocrat without lands, for the family estates had been sequestered in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. In 1862 both parents were deported, along with Józef, to Vologda in northern Russia, where his mother died of tuberculosis. Józef was orphaned in 1869 when his father, permitted the previous year to return to Kraków, died of the same disease. From this moment on Conrad depended very much on the generosity of his maternal uncle Tadeusz, who provided an annual allowance and, on his death in 1894, left about £1,600 to his nephew (well over £100,000 now). This event coincided with the acceptance of Conrad’s first book, Almayer’s Folly (begun in 1889), and the adoption of the pen name Joseph Conrad. He was from then on a man of letters, turning his experiences and the tales he heard at sea into fiction.62

  These adventures began when he was still only sixteen, on board the Mont Blanc, bound for Martinique out of Marseilles. No doubt his subsequent sailing to the Caribbean provided much of the visual imagery for his later writing, especially Nostromo. It seems likely that he was also involved in a disastrous scheme of gunrunning from Marseilles to Spain. Deeply in debt both from this enterprise and from gambling at Monte Carlo, he attempted suicide, shooting himself in the chest. Uncle Tadeusz bailed him out, discharging his debts and inventing for him the fiction that he was shot in a duel, which Conrad found useful later for his wife and his friends.63

  Conrad’s sixteen-year career in the British merchant navy, starting as a deckhand, was scarcely smooth, but it provided the store upon which, as a writer, he would draw. Typically Conrad’s best work, such as Heart of Darkness, is the result of long gestation periods during which he seems to have repeatedly brooded on the meaning or symbolic shape of his experience seen against the background of the developments in contemporary science. Most of these he understood as ominous, rather than liberating, for humanity. But Conrad was not anti-scientific. On the contrary, he engaged with the rapidly changing shape of scientific thought, as Redmond O’Hanlon has shown in his study Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Conrad’s Fiction (1984).64 Conrad was brought up on the classical physics of the Victorian age, which rested on the cornerstone belief in the permanence of matter, albeit with the assumptions that the sun was cooling and that life on earth was inevitably doomed. In a letter to his publisher dated 29 September 1898, Conrad describes the effect of a demonstration of X rays. He was in Glasgow and staying with Dr John McIntyre, a radiologist: ‘In the evening dinner, phonograph, X rays, talk about the secret of the universe, and the non-existence of, so called, matter. The secret of the universe is in the existence of horizontal waves whose varied vibrations are set at the bottom of all states of consciousness…. Neil Munro stood in front of a Röntgen machine and on the screen behind we contemplated his backbone and ribs…. It was so – said the doctor – and there is no space, time, matter, mind as vulgarly understood … only the eternal force that causes the waves – it’s not much.’65

  Conrad was not quite as up-to-date as he imagined, for J. J. Thomson’s demonstration the previous year showed the ‘waves’ to be particles. But the point is not so much that Conrad was au fait with science, but rather that the certainties about the nature of matter that he had absorbed were now deeply undermined. This sense he translates into the structures of many of his characters whose seemingly solid personalities, when placed in the crucible of nature (often in sea voyages), are revealed as utterly unstable or rotten.

  After Conrad’s uncle fell ill, Józef stopped off in Brussels on the way to Poland, to be interviewed for a post with the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo – a fateful interview that led to his experiences between June and December 1890 in the Belgian Congo and, ten years on, to Heart of Darkness. In that decade, the Congo lurked in his mind, awaiting a trigger to be formulated in prose. That was provided by the shocking revelations of the ‘Benin Massacres’ in 1897, as well as the accounts of Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s expeditions in Africa.66 Benin: The City of Blood was published in London and New York in 1897, revealing to the western civilised world a horror story of native African blood rites. After the Berlin Conference of 1884, Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the Niger River region. Following the slaughter of a British mission to Benin (a state west of Nigeria), which arrived during King Duboar’s celebrations of his ancestors with ritual sacrifices, a punitive expedition was dispatched to capture this city, long a centre of slavery. The account of Commander R. H. Bacon, intelligence officer of the expedition, parallels in some of its details the events in Heart of Darkness. When Commander Bacon reached Benin, he saw what, despite his vivid language, he says lay beyond description: ‘It is useless to continue describing the horrors of the place, everywhere death, barbarity and blood, and smells that it hardly seems right for human beings to smell and yet live.’67 Conrad avoids definition of what constituted ‘The horror! The horror!’ – the famous last words in the book, spoken by Kurtz, the man Marlow, the hero, has come to save – opting instead for hints such as round balls on posts that Marlow thinks he sees through his field glasses when approaching Kurtz’s compound. Bacon, for his part, describes crucifixion trees surrounded by piles of skulls and bones, blood smeared everywhere, over bronze idols and ivory.

  Conrad’s purpose, however, is not to elicit the typical response of the civilised world to reports of barbarism. In his report Commander Bacon had exemplified this attitude: ‘they [the natives] cannot fail to see that peace and the good rule of the white man mean happiness, contentment and security.’ Similar sentiments are expressed in the report that Kurtz composes for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Marlow describes this ‘beautiful piece of writing,’ ‘vibrating with eloquence.’ And yet, scrawled ‘at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment is blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!”’68

  This savagery at the heart of civilised humans is also revealed in the behaviour of the white traders – ‘pilgrims,’ Marlow calls them. White travellers’ tales, like those of Henry Morton Stanley in ‘darkest Africa,’ written from an unquestioned sense of the superiority of the European over the native, were available to Conrad’s dark vision. Heart of Darkness thrives upon the ironic reversals of civilisation and barbarity, of light and darkness. Here is a characteristic Stanley episode, recorded in his diary. Needing food, he told a group of natives that ‘I must have it or we would die. They must sell it for beads, red, blue or green, copper or brass wire or shells, or … I drew significant signs across the throat. It was enough, they understood at once.’69 In Heart of Darkness, by contrast, Marlow is impressed by the extraordinary restraint of the starving cannibals accompanying the expedition, who have been paid in bits of brass wire but have no food, their rotting hippo flesh – too nauseating a smell for European endurance – having been thrown overboard. He wonders why ‘they didn’t go for us – they were thirty to five – and have a good tuck-in for once.’70 Kurtz is a symbolic figure, of course (‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’), and the thrust of Conrad’s fierce satire emerges clearly through Marlow’s narrative.71 The imperial civilising mission
amounts to a savage predation: ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human conscience,’ as Conrad elsewhere described it. At this end of the century such a conclusion about the novel seems obvious, but it was otherwise in the reviews that greeted its first appearance in 1902. The Manchester Guardian wrote that Conrad was not attacking colonisation, expansion, or imperialism, but rather showing how cheap ideals shrivel up.72 Part of the fascination surely lies in Conradian psychology. The journey within of so many of his characters seems explicitly Freudian, and indeed many Freudian interpretations of his works have been proposed. Yet Conrad strongly resisted Freud. When he was in Corsica, and on the verge of a breakdown, Conrad was given a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams. He spoke of Freud ‘with scornful irony,’ took the book to his room, and returned it on the eve of his departure, unopened.73

  At the time Heart of Darkness appeared, there was – and there continues to be – a distaste for Conrad on the part of some readers. It is that very reaction which underlines his significance. This is perhaps best explained by Richard Curie, author of the first full-length study of Conrad, published in 1914.74 Curie could see that for many people there is a tenacious need to believe that the world, horrible as it might be, can be put right by human effort and the appropriate brand of liberal philosophy. Unlike the novels of his contemporaries H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy, Conrad derides this point of view as an illusion at best, and the pathway to desperate destruction at its worst. Recently the morality of Conrad’s work, rather than its aesthetics, has been questioned. In 1977 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe described Conrad as ‘a bloody racist’ and Heart of Darkness as a novel that ‘celebrates’ the dehumanisation of some of the human race. In 1993 the cultural critic Edward Said thought that Achebe’s criticism did not go far enough.75 But evidence shows that Conrad was sickened by his experience in Africa, both physically and psychologically. In the Congo he met Roger Casement (executed in 1916 for his activities in Ireland), who as a British consular officer had written a report exposing the atrocities he and Conrad saw.76 In 1904 he visited Conrad to solicit his support. Whatever Conrad’s relationship to Marlow, he was deeply alienated from the imperialist, racist exploiters of Africa and Africans at that time. Heart of Darkness played a part in ending Leopold’s tyranny.77 One is left after reading the novel with the sheer terror of the enslavement and the slaughter, and a sense of the horrible futility and guilt that Marlow’s narrative conveys. Kurtz’s final words, ‘The horror! The horror!’ serve as a chilling endpoint for where social Darwinism all too easily can lead.

  4

  LES DEMOISELLES DE MODERNISME

  In 1905 Dresden was one of the most beautiful cities on earth, a delicate Baroque jewel straddling the Elbe. It was a fitting location for the première of a new opera composed by Richard Strauss, called Salomé. Nonetheless, after rehearsals started, rumours began to circulate in the city that all was not well backstage. Strauss’s new work was said to be ‘too hard’ for the singers. As the opening night, 9 December, drew close, the fuss grew in intensity, and some of the singers wanted to hand back their scores. Throughout the rehearsals for Salomé, Strauss maintained his equilibrium, despite the problems. At one stage an oboist complained, ‘Herr Doktor, maybe this passage works on the piano, but it doesn’t on the oboes.’ ‘Take heart, man,’ Strauss replied briskly. ‘It doesn’t work on the piano, either.’ News about the divisions inside the opera house were taken so much to heart that Dresdeners began to cut the conductor, Ernst von Schuch, in the street. An expensive and embarrassing failure was predicted, and the proud burghers of Dresden could not stomach that. Schuch remained convinced of the importance of Strauss’s new work, and despite the disturbances and rumours, the production went ahead. The first performance of Salomé was to open, in the words of one critic, ‘a new chapter in the history of modernism.1

  The word modernism has three meanings, and we need to distinguish between them. Its first meaning refers to the break in history that occurred between the Renaissance and the Reformation, when the recognisably modern world began, when science began to flourish as an alternative system of knowledge, in contrast with religion and metaphysics. The second, and most common meaning of modernism refers to a movement – in the arts mainly – that began with Charles Baudelaire in France but soon widened. This itself had three elements. The first and most basic element was the belief that the modern world was just as good and fulfilling as any age that had gone before. This was most notably a reaction in France, in Paris in particular, against the historicism that had prevailed throughout most of the nineteenth century, especially in painting. It was helped by the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussman in the 1850s. A second aspect of modernism in this sense was that it was an urban art, cities being the ‘storm centres’ of civilisation. This was most clear in one of its earliest forms, impressionism, where the aim is to catch the fleeting moment, that ephemeral instance so prevalent in the urban experience. Last, in its urge to advocate the new over and above everything else, modernism implied the existence of an ‘avant-garde’, an artistic and intellectual elite, set apart from the masses by their brains and creativity, destined more often than not to be pitched against those masses even as they lead them. This form of modernism makes a distinction between the leisurely, premodern face-to-face agricultural society and the anonymous, fast-moving, atomistic society of large cities, carrying with it the risks of alienation, squalor, degeneration (as Freud, for one, had pointed out).2

  The third meaning of modernism is used in the context of organised religion, and Catholicism in particular. Throughout the nineteenth century, various aspects of Catholic dogma came under threat. Young clerics were anxious for the church to respond to the new findings of science, especially Darwin’s theory of evolution and the discoveries of German archaeologists in the Holy Land, many of which appeared to contradict the Bible. The present chapter concerns all three aspects of modernism that came together in the early years of the century.

  Salomé was closely based on Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name. Strauss was well aware of the play’s scandalous nature. When Wilde had originally tried to produce Salomé in London, it had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain. (In retaliation, Wilde had threatened to take out French citizenship.)3 Wilde recast the ancient account of Herod, Salomé, and Saint John the Baptist with a ‘modernist’ gloss, portraying the ‘heroine’ as a ‘Virgin consumed by evil chastity.’4 When he wrote the play, Wilde had not read Freud, but he had read Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, and his plot clearly suggested in Salomé’s demand for the head of Saint John echoes of sexual perversion. In an age when many people still regarded themselves as religious, this was almost guaranteed to offend. Strauss’s music, on top of Wilde’s plot, added fuel to the fire. The orchestration was difficult, disturbing, and to many ears discordant. To highlight the psychological contrast between Herod and Jokanaan, Strauss employed the unusual device of writing in two keys simultaneously.5 The continuous dissonance of the score reflected the tensions in the plot, reaching its culmination with Salomé’s moan as she awaits execution. This, rendered as a B-flat on a solo double bass, nails the painful drama of Salomé’s plight: she is butchered by guards crushing the life out of her with their shields.

  After the first night, opinions varied. Cosima Wagner was convinced the new opera was ‘Madness! … wedded to indecency.’ The Kaiser would only allow Salomé to be performed in Berlin after the manager of the opera house shrewdly modified the ending, so that a Star of Bethlehem rose at the end of the performance.6 This simple trick changed everything, and Salomé was performed fifty times in that one season. Ten of Germany’s sixty opera houses – all fiercely competitive – chose to follow Berlin’s lead and stage the production so that within months, Strauss could afford to build a villa at Garmisch in the art nouveau style.7 Despite its success in Germany, the opera became notorious internationally. In London Thomas Beecham had to call
in every favour to obtain permission to perform the opera at all.8 In New York and Chicago it was banned outright. (In New York one cartoonist suggested it might help if advertisements were printed on each of the seven veils.)9 Vienna also banned the opera, but Graz, for some reason, did not. There the opera opened in May 1906 to an audience that included Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, and a band of young music lovers who had come down from Vienna, including an out-of-work would-be artist called Adolf Hitler.

  Despite the offence Salomé caused in some quarters, its eventual success contributed to Strauss’s appointment as senior musical director of the Hofoper in Berlin. The composer began work there with a one-year leave of absence to complete his next opera, Elektra. This work was his first major collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose play of the same name, realised by that magician of the German theatre, Max Reinhardt, Strauss had seen in Berlin (at the same theatre where he saw Wilde’s Salomé).10 Strauss was not keen to begin with, because he thought Elektra’s theme was too similar to that of Salomé. But Hofmannsthal’s ‘demonic, ecstatic’ image of sixth-century Greece caught his fancy; it was so very different from the noble, elegant, calm image traditionally revealed in the writings of johann Joachim Winckelmann and Goethe. Strauss therefore changed his mind, and Elektra turned out to be even more intense, violent, and concentrated than Salomé. ‘These two operas stand alone in my life’s work,’ said Strauss later; ‘in them I went to the utmost limits of harmony, psychological polyphony (Clytemnestra’s dream) and the capacity of today’s ears to take in what they hear.’11