Few people know of Joseph Conrad these days, and if someone remembers anything vaguely about him, it is probably that his novella Heart of Darkness was the inspiration for the movie Apocalypse Now.
I was in my early 50s before I read Heart myself. My kid was assigned it in high-school lit, and I picked it up after the assignment was complete and it was unceremoniously discarded on the living-room bookshelf.
“Narrow read,” I thought. “This will take no time. Interesting to see how it matches the movie.”
It didn’t. The movie is, let’s say, remotely related to the book, rather like how the movie Clueless is based on Austen’s Emma (sure, if you say so.)
But the bigger surprise was that Conrad’s prose was simply astounding, and requires careful reading to digest properly. Like a big porterhouse, you have to take small bites - chew, swallow, clear the palate - before taking the next bite, both to savor the flavor and to be able to digest it.
That slim read took longer than I thought, as I both savored the reading and its digestion.
Enjoying the novella so much, I just circled around to read Conrad’s full-length novel, published in 1900, Lord Jim.
Again, the prose is amazing. It is layered, almost poetic, and requires a deliberate reading pace, often requiring you to go back and reread previous paragraphs to get the full meaning.
For example, here is a passage:
He became first mate…without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.
That sentence is difficult not because of the vocabulary, which is ordinary. It’s difficult because Conrad makes you hold the whole grammatical structure in your head while he keeps adding additional layers.
It starts simply enough:
“...without ever having been tested by those events of the sea...”
And then he tells you what those events reveal:
“...that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man...”
Then he keeps digging:
“the edge of his temper”
“the fibre of his stuff”
“the quality of his resistance”
And then deeper still:
“the secret truth of his pretences”
And finally:
“not only to others but also to himself.”
That last clause shifts the message from whether a man is brave or cowardly as he is tested by the sea to whether his conception of himself is actually true.
Now, this sort of reading isn’t for everyone in 21st-century TikTok world. Some of Lord Jim required reading the next page, going back and reading the previous one, then continuing from where I’d left off, a sort of two pages forward, one page back. That isn’t for everyone.
But the amazing prose, combined with themes of guilt, shame, redemption and self-definition, is wrapped inside an incredibly interesting South Pacific adventure story. And underneath it all is Conrad’s question of how well a man can really know himself, and what happens when reality doesn't match the person he thought he was.
In the end, I recommend experiencing Conrad sometime in your life, Apocalypse Now the appetizer for someone who isn't sure they want the whole steak, Lord Jim for the full meal, if you're willing to take the time to savor it.