His body was buried at Tchumbiri on the Congo.)

Through the prism of shimmering, musical language that is the essence of Conrad’s achievement in ‘‘Heart of Darkness,’’ the author has hoped to elevate Kurtz, a white racist murderer whose actions have parodied the idealism of his speech, to the stature of tragedy; he is one whose degradation at the end of his life can’t be the sole measure of his moral worth.

Like Herman Melville, who also went to sea as a very young man, Joseph Conrad acquired in his early, impressionistic years a rich store of material to be transformed into tales and novels of exoticism, danger, and rites of passage. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski at Berdyczow in Podolia, Poland, on December 3, 1857, Conrad lost his parents at a young age, attended school in Cracow, and first went to sea, on a French merchant marine vessel, at the age of seventeen. He is said to have attempted suicide at the age of twenty-one, but recovered quickly and signed on with the British merchant navy for whom he would serve, at various ranks, for the next sixteen years. He became a naturalized British subject in 1886 and changed his name to Joseph Conrad; in that year he wrote his first short story, ‘‘The Black Mate.’’ His numerous voyages took him virtually everywhere—to the West Indies, to Constantinople, to Sumatra, India, Java, Australia, Singapore; most famously, and almost fatally, to the Belgian Congo in 1890. Though desperate to earn a living, the youthful Conrad was clearly a romantic for whom sailing was an emotional, perhaps even a spiritual vocation. Surely this is Conrad speaking in the voice of Marlow, confiding in his fellow seafarers at the outset of ‘‘Heart of Darkness’’:

Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘‘When I grow up I will go there.’’

By the time Marlow had grown up, however, Africa had ‘‘ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery. . . . It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially . . . resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.’’ This great river, the Congo, fascinates Marlow ‘‘as a snake would a bird.’’

In June 1890, Conrad was appointed captain of a river steamer on the Congo; ominously, his predecessor had been butchered by native Africans and his body left to rot unburied in the jungle. Conrad’s difficult four-mouth adventure, recorded more or less faithfully in ‘‘Heart of Darkness,’’ left him near death, devastated with dysentery and fever; his health was broken for the remainder of his life. Conrad’s predilection for extreme pessimism, depression, and anxiety would seem to have been exacerbated by his physical condition. In May 1891, for instance, following his return in Europe, he confided in a letter to a friend, ‘‘I am still plunged in deepest night, and my dreams are only nightmares.’’ (See Conrad by Norman Sherry, Thames & Hudson, 1972.)

Yet the experience was transforming to Conrad, comparable to the experience of writers who have seen armed combat firsthand or have been wounded in battle, for Conrad would one day claim that ‘‘before the Congo, I was just an animal.’’ By the end of 1894, Conrad had retired from seafaring; his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published and well received in 1895. His remarkable career had begun.

Though always a controversial figure, criticized in some quarters for his intensely poetic, frequently rhetorical prose and for the unremitting pessimism of certain of his works, Conrad is generally acclaimed as one of the progenitors, along with his mentors Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, of the Modernist novel; he has been called a master of the psychological novel, the political novel, and the ‘‘intellectual mystery’’ novel; the fastidiously rendered prose of such works as The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus,’’ ‘‘Heart of Darkness’’ and Nostromo, among others, identifies him as a writer for whom language is a kind of music, rendered with a poet’s ear. Following Henry James’s example in his essay ‘‘The Art of Fiction’’ (1888), Conrad set out, in his Preface to The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus’’ (1897), to establish his belief in the alliance in prose fiction of the moral and the aesthetic; his elevation of the writing life is extreme, suggesting almost a religious, or mystical, vocation; the artist is one who snatches ‘‘in a moment of courage . . . a passing phase of life’’ in the effort of showing life’s ‘‘vibration, its color, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its color, reveal[s] the substance of its truth.’’

By the time of Conrad’s death in 1924, in Canterbury, England, this Polish-born emigrant for whom English was not his first or even his second language, would be celebrated as one of the greatest of English novelists, revered as a classic in his own time.

Since its initial publication in 1902, in the volume Youth, Conrad’s most meticulously poetic work of fiction, ‘‘Heart of Darkness,’’ has acquired an extraordinary reputation. Nine decades after its publication it remains one of the most read, and debated, of English works of fiction; it was the model, in spirit, of the flawed but enormously ambitious film by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now1 (1979); it has easily become the surpassing masterwork of Conrad’s distinguished career, displacing even The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus,’’ Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Victory (1915), and such brilliantly realized tales as ‘‘The Secret Sharer’’ and ‘‘An Outpost of Progress.’’ Part of this is due, of course, to the novella’s brevity; like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, it is a feat of dramatic compression in which virtually every passage, if not every sentence, moves us ineluctably toward our moment of revelation: the unmasking of Kurtz, and his twin, terrible pronouncements, ‘‘Exterminate all the brutes!’’ and ‘‘The horror! The horror!’’ (The latter has achieved a kind of transcultural autonomy, very like Edvard Munch’s 1895 woodcut ‘‘The Scream’’—a bleakly comic shorthand for twentieth-century angst.)

Unlike other, longer works of Conrad’s that provide the reader with imbricated layers of exposition, history, psychology, and description, ‘‘Heart of Darkness’’ moves swiftly forward as Marlow’s journey moves him, by starts and stops, forward; this is an adventure/mystery story set in the most exotic of locales and fueled by a nightmare logic. The reader is meant to replicate Marlow’s voyage as he journeys up the Congo in a snakelike passage into the depths of a formerly blank, unmapped territory: the human soul.

In recent years, Joseph Conrad’s work, or more specifically, ideas of gender, race, class, and hegemony implicit in his work, have been severely criticized. The assumptions of Caucasian male privilege are no longer taken for granted among many readers. It should be acknowledged by Conrad’s admirers that the audience for whom he imagined his work was almost exclusively male, and assuredly Caucasian. To readers not in this category, the occasionally dogmatic and even derisive nature of certain of Marlow’s remarks will strike a discordant note:

It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there never has been anything like it, and never can be.