The beginning is secluded, intimate, but portentous, almost ominously so:
`The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of the interminable waterway, In the office the sea and sky were welded together without any 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 vanishing spirits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark about Gravesend, and further back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.’
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad’s opening to the great novella, `Heart of Darkness’ (1898) occurred in a place whose atmosphere had already been celebrated in works like the opening scenes of Charles Dickens’ `Great Expectations’ which had appeared almost half a century before. Artist and author Rachel Lichtenstein in more recent times has written extensively of the Estuary, the stretch of water from the end of London out to the sea, and the very particular landscape on either side, on the Kent and Essex coasts. (Rachel Lichtenstein, `Estuary’, Hamish Hamilton, 2016).
Marlow, Conrad’s protagonist in `Heart of Darkness’, speaks to the small gathering around him on the ship moored in the Estuary. `And this also,’` he says `has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ He meditates with his listeners on `the very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago… Imagine him [the Commander] here – the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke… going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you will.’ Back then, this would have been a place with `precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink… Here and there a military camp lost in the wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay – cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death – death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush.’ This was a place of `savagery, utter savagery.’
Marlow’s narrative shifts to Africa, and to his encounter with the world of the ivory trader Kurtz, ill and morally ruined, running a trading station pervaded with disease, brutality and exploitation, despite Kurtz’s proclamation of his transcendent values. Seen in part as a coruscating denunciation of colonisation, and as a subversive support for the mindset upholding it, the story has maintained its force to the present day. It was one of the works purchased by former US president Barrack Obama during a visit to a Washington DC bookstore while in office with his children.
Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 in a part of the Russian empire subsequently to belong to Poland and the Ukraine. His early life was spent as a seaman, and the experiences from that period were ones he was to draw on for the writing through which he found fame in the latter part of his life after settling in the UK in the 1890s. Exceptionally, English was his third language after Polish and French. But he chose this to become an author in. His links to Kent are powerful. He lived in different parts of the county, with one brief interlude, from the late 1898 to his death in 1924. He is buried in the Canterbury municipal cemetery, after dying in the last house in which he lived, Oswalds, in the village of Bishopsbourne.
According to the memoirs of his son, Borys (1898-1978), Conrad had an affinity with Kent. `[Conrad] was determined to remain within this area of Kent which we had all come to regard as our native habitat.’ (Borys Conrad, `My Father Joseph Conrad’, Calder and Boyars, London, 1970, 89). Pent House, in the small village of Postling near Hythe on the coast of Kent, was his first home in the county, from 1898 – and the one he lived in the longest. `The small, very old and charming if inconvenient house lacked water, gas, and electricity,’ one of his biographers Jeffrey Meyers writes. `The kitchen had a wavy brick floor, and an oak beam ran across the low ceiling of the deep parlour.’ (Jeffrey Meyer, `Joseph Conrad: A Biography’, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1991, 178). Conrad himself wrote that `behind the house are the hills (Kentish Downs) which slope in zigzag fashion down to the sea like the battlements of a big fortress… The colouring of the country presents brown and pale yellow tints – and in between, in the distance, one can see the meadows, as green as emeralds.’ (Ibid).
Standing before Pent Farm today is a sobering experience. This was the place where Conrad was to produce some of his greatest work, including the `Heart of Darkness’, which was published in 1899. According to his son, Conrad dictated. The farm today, standing slightly back behind hedges along a small lane, is usually surrounding by eery silence. It is strange to think of Conrad’s voice, one which carried a heavy Polish accent, coming out in such a still and peaceful place as this, with the lines of the story which was, though after his death, to become one of the great texts of literary modernism, and serving as the principle inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s `Apocalypse Now’.
Apart from a brief stay in Bedfordshire, Kent remained Conrad’s home till is death. After Pent Farm the family moved first to some rooms above a butcher’s shop in Aldington, near Ashford in 1908. `The squealing of the pigs on the weekly “killing” days together with the smell from the old-fashioned curing shed must have been very trying,’ Borys wryly noted. The family lasted here for only a little over a year. From 1910, for the next nine years, he lived at Capel House, Orlestone, again near Ashford – a seventeenth century building which was `three old cottages knocked into one – the rooms have low ceilings with oaken beams and floors that were crazily uneven.’ Even this was an improvement on Aldington. (Meyer, 262). For six months, in 1919, because of the death of the landlord of Capel House, the family then moved to another seventeenth century manor called Spring Grove in Wye, near Canterbury. Their final home from 1920 to Conrad’s death in 1924 was Oswalds. This latter house, in the same village in which the writer Jocelyn Brooke was to live later in the century, was to prove more conducive – a place with electricity, servants, the right amount of space, and relatively accessible to Canterbury.
Conrad’s literary work, beyond the brief mention of Gravesend in `Heart of Darkness’ and the setting of `The Secret Agent’ (1907) bombing of the Greenwich Observatory (part of Kent till it fell within the County of London from 1889) is most often set in the further reaches of the earth – places where Conrad himself had visited as a seaman in his youth. These range around South East Asia, Latin America, Africa, as far as Australia, and the Pacific. In that sense, Conrad could be described as one of the first authors of globalisation – and of its negative and positive sides. Why the Kentish landscape appealed to him as a place to live is a hard question to answer. He experienced financial hardship for much of his life, making London less viable because of its expense perhaps. He also followed the influential author Ford Maddox Ford in being based in the areas he lived in, at least initially. As Meyer speculates, he liked the life of a seeming English rural landowner, despite owning neither land nor house. His son’s account of the family’s journeys from Pent Farm towards Hythe for their weekly shopping in a very early car show a figure who is almost staidly Victorian in their social mores and sense of the need for a particular kind of public face.
Maybe, though, there is something deeper than this – the quality of stillness and silence that the often remote places he lived in in Kent gave to Conrad as he worked – a sort of habitat conducive to contemplation. Visiting these places even almost a century after his life here, they are still quiet, almost oppressively so. The character sketches and recollections of Conrad by those who knew him best, people like Ford, or his son, show someone who was by turns melancholy, often prone to depression, and sometimes tumultuously romantic so that emotions erupted from them. Conrad himself wrote of the `indestructible loneliness that surrounds, envelops, clothes every human soul from the cradle to the grave, and perhaps, beyond.’ Kent’s landscape may have been the perfect accompaniment to this inner turmoil, with its memory traces of vast amounts of events from the distant past, but its placidity and silence in the present.
Conrad’s library is to this day recreated and maintained in the museum in Canterbury. A small memorial plaque to him is placed on the wall of the village hall in Bishipsbourne, and another at Oswalds beside the church there. His other houses however, or at least those that still exist, are unmarked.