The Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer

by Joseph Conrad

  ‘‘ ‘You were his friend,’ she went on. ‘His friend,’ she repeated, a little louder. ‘You must have been, if he had given you this, and sent you to me. I feel I can speak to you—and oh! I must speak. I want you— you who have heard his last words—to know I have been worthy of him. . . . It is not pride. . . . Yes! I am proud to know I understood him better than any one on earth—he told me so himself. And since his mother died I have had no one—no one—to—to—’

  ‘‘I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or something. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

  ‘‘ ‘. . . Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?’ she was saying. ‘He drew men towards him by what was best in them.’ She looked at me with intensity. ‘It is the gift of the great,’ she went on, and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard—the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind, the murmurs of the crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness. ‘But you have heard him! You know!’ she cried.

  ‘‘ ‘Yes, I know,’ I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her—from which I could not even defend myself.

  ‘‘ ‘What a loss to me—to us!’—she corrected herself with beautiful generosity; then added in a murmur, ‘To the world.’ By the last gleams of twilight I could see the glitter of her eyes, full of tears—of tears that would not fall.

  ‘‘ ‘I have been very happy—very fortunate—very proud,’ she went on. ‘Too fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for—for life.’

  ‘‘She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the remaining light in a glimmer of gold. I rose, too.

  ‘‘ ‘And of all this,’ she went on mournfully, ‘of all his promise, and of all his greatness, of his generous mind, of his noble heart, nothing remains—nothing but a memory. You and I——’

  ‘‘ ‘We shall always remember him,’ I said hastily.

  ‘‘ ‘No!’ she cried. ‘It is impossible that all this should be lost—that such a life should be sacrificed to leave nothing—but sorrow. You know what vast plans he had. I knew of them, too—I could not perhaps understand—but others knew of them. Something must remain. His words, at least, have not died.’

  ‘‘ ‘His words will remain,’ I said.

  ‘‘ ‘And his example,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Men looked up to him—his goodness shone in every act. His example——’

  ‘‘ ‘True,’ I said; ‘his example, too. Yes, his example. I forgot that.’

  ‘‘ ‘But I do not. I cannot—I cannot believe—not yet. I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never.’

  ‘‘She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them back and with clasped pale hands across the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her, too, a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She said suddenly very low, ‘He died as he lived.’

  ‘‘ ‘His end,’ said I, with dull anger stirring in me, ‘was in every way worthy of his life.’

  ‘‘ ‘And I was not with him,’ she murmured. My anger subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.

  ‘‘ ‘Everything that could be done——’ I mumbled.

  ‘‘ ‘Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on earth—more than his own mother, more than— himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.’

  ‘‘I felt like a chill grip on my chest. ‘Don’t,’ I said, in a muffled voice.

  ‘‘ ‘Forgive me. I—I have mourned so long in silence—in silence. . . . You were with him—to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. . . .’

  ‘‘ ‘To the very end,’ I said, shakily. ‘I heard his very last words. . . .’ I stopped in a fright.

  ‘‘ ‘Repeat them,’ she murmured in a heart-broken tone. ‘I want—I want—something—something—to— to live with.’

  ‘‘I was on the point of crying at her, ‘Don’t you hear them?’ The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. ‘The horror! The horror!’

  ‘‘ ‘His last word—to live with,’ she insisted. ‘Don’t you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!’

  ‘‘I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

  ‘‘ ‘The last words he pronounced was—your name.’

  ‘‘I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. ‘I knew it—I was sure!’ . . . She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether. . . .’’

  Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. ‘‘We have lost the first of the ebb,’’ said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

  Afterword

  In the summer of 1978 I came into possession of the Signet edition of Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer, an earlier version of the one I presume the reader has just finished. It was green and battered and had someone else’s annoying writing in the margins. The introduction to that edition was written in 1950, by Albert Guerard, who, along with his colleague at Stanford, Ian Watt, was one of the great early Conrad scholars and who did much to revive Conrad’s popularity and reputation after it had fallen into a certain degree of obscurity in the middle of the century.

  At the time, I was twenty years old, a sophomore at Columbia University, and I had set out specifically to read Heart of Darkness because when I’d read it as an assignment in high school, I’d had some difficulty understanding it. Although it is short, only a hundred pages or so in this and most other editions, Heart of Darkness is one of Conrad’s most dense narratives. The structure of the book is complex, Conrad’s irony is thick and relentless, and his language is difficult as well: he had learned English while living in France and his version of it would always be heavy with Latinates. As is often the case with Conrad, his point— his meaning or his multiple meanings—is a little hard to pick out from amid the somber moods and romantic outpourings of his narrative voice.

  Yet I knew something important was there. So I was rereading it, sitting in the lobby of a building on Mornings
ide Drive in New York City. Columbia owned the building and it housed many of the university’s most distinguished faculty members—I’d been handed a job that summer as a replacement for the union doormen of that building, taking their shifts when they went on holiday. On this particular occasion, it was midafternoon on a mild day in July. The wide lobby doors were swung open to let in the air, and the bright summer light was cheerfully lacking the mean white glare so common during New York’s overbearing summers. In strolled a handsome, well-built man I recognized as Professor Edward Said, of Columbia’s English department. The foregoing sentence, and that he lived on the fourth floor of this building, constituted everything I then knew about him. The book that would make him truly famous, Orientalism, would not come out until later that year.

  He walked toward me across the long lobby and I got up, put down my book, and started over to where the elevator was located, on the north side of the building, as it was also my job to run the manual elevator. Said had a sometimes gruff and always, in those days, physically confident air with strangers; he had barely spoken to me in the past. But suddenly he was interested. ‘‘What are you reading?’’ he practically shouted and strode over to the table where I’d laid my book. ‘‘Heart of Darkness!’’ he said. ‘‘Great book, great book.’’ Little did I know, from this relatively generic reaction, that Said was a respected Conrad scholar himself, that he’d done his doctoral dissertation on Conrad, that Conrad’s exile and the effect it had on his personality and his work would be a source of continuing fascination for Said, nor, finally, that Conrad would be an author, and Heart of Darkness a text, that Said would return to over and over as he explored the fine mechanisms connecting the most transcendent art with specific cultures in specific historical situations.

  We rode up to his floor and he quizzed me about what I’d studied and read, and he urged me to take his course that fall called ‘‘Modern British Literature,’’ where we’d read Heart of Darkness, among many other major late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century British texts. I can say now with clarity that this limited exchange in that creaking and clanging old elevator, the four subsequent courses I took with Said, and his friendship in later years, were the most important professional influences of my life. Said was the greatest literary mind I have ever been in the presence of, by several orders of magnitude, and I would not be the critic and the writer I am without having known him and studied with him—all because of a little green book from Signet.

  This personal anecdote has a powerful relevance to Conrad’s work, it seems to me. The two tales you have found in this book were written ten years apart (Heart of Darkness was written in 1899, and The Secret Sharer a decade later) and they differ markedly in style, yet they are connected by virtue of sharing one of Conrad’s most crucial themes: a haunting and accidental union between two people who by all rights should never have met, and who have—often incomprehensibly—the power to change each other in radical ways.

  Conrad leaves a deep mystery at the core of the special relationships that drive these two tales. We are never directly instructed as to why the Captain feels such a deep kinship with Leggatt, his ‘‘secret sharer’’; even more difficult to fathom is Marlow’s psychological imprisonment within the ineffable relationship he forms during his brief exposure to the monstrous Kurtz. Indeed, the great challenge with which Conrad leaves us, as readers, is to come to some sort of conclusion on our own about these dark intimacies, to figure out what happens inside a person’s consciousness when he is altered by the personality of someone else.

  These relationships are vague in origins but quite tangible on the page. While Leggatt is still clinging to the ship’s ladder and glowing with the natural phosphorus of the sea, our unnamed Captain remarks that ‘‘a mysterious communication was already established between us two.’’ This mysterious communication will lead the Captain first to extend toward Leggatt a puzzling degree of blind trust and second to take extraordinary risks on his behalf.

  Similarly, on meeting Kurtz (who is, like Leggatt, a murderer, but on a far larger and more ferocious scale), Marlow finds himself inexplicably drawn to him. ‘‘The volume of tone he emitted without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips, amazed me. A voice! A voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper.’’ (Notice that, as with all subsequent descriptions of his exchanges with Kurtz, Marlow reveals almost nothing of the actual content of the conversation.) Just after this first meeting, Marlow is approached by the loathsome company manager, whom we might call a petty bureaucrat supervising the plunder and rape of a continent and who wishes to go on record as deploring Kurtz’s ‘‘unsound methods,’’ even as he profits by them. Marlow recalls with disgust that he ‘‘had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief—positively for relief.’’

  In both stories, then, we see formed a profound bond based on little available information or personal context, but rather some invisible but irresistible moral imperative, some core and highly mysterious requirement of being human. Written very close on the heels of Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s great novel Lord Jim—which also features Marlow as narrator—has a moment that sums up this mystery in a brilliant and almost incoherent and wordless moment. Jim, a criminal like Leggatt and Kurtz, comes to understand the bond that has formed between Marlow and himself, and all that Marlow has done for him, and he stutters, in shock, ‘‘I—you—I . . .’’ These might be the three words and two dashes that in all of Conrad best evoke his central artistic and moral concern.

  If we are going to understand the bond between these figures, it is important to look at how the stories are told. The Secret Sharer is told in direct first-person narration, but the story belongs to Leggatt—it is his conundrum that drives the plot. For all the Captain’s maneuvering to protect Leggatt, the Captain is not the doer of this story, but the teller, and as he relates to us, the readers, Leggatt’s story and the Captain’s own complex psychological reaction to it, a similar bond is formed between narrator and reader as was formed between the two characters in the tale.

  Heart of Darkness multiplies this implied morality of narration, if we may call it that, many times over. Indeed, it is a frequently noted characteristic of Heart of Darkness that we have to do significant analysis just to determine what the story actually is, and who is actually telling it. The telling begins, as it were, on the deck of the cruising yawl Nellie2, where four friends who were once men of the sea and who still enjoy sailing together are waiting at the head of the Thames for the tide to turn. The reader is addressed by an unnamed narrator, who sets up the situation before Marlow starts to speak. Everything that Marlow will say will come to us through this other narrator whose name we never learn.

  So we can fairly easily see a three-layered narrative structure that goes from Marlow, to his companion, to us. But is this really Marlow’s story? Or is he not in a similar role in relation to the real story here as the Captain is in The Secret Sharer? This is Marlow’s story of hearing a story.

  Conrad was by all reports a man who was uncomfortable in society, awkward, shy, and gloomy. Later biographers have revealed that he was subject to fits of temper that led him to be abusive to his family. He never lost his thick accent, although he had done the heretofore unimaginable feat of being a foreigner certified as a captain in the British Merchant Service. It is not clear why he chose, among his five or six languages, to write in the one he learned latest in life: English.

  This drama of language and culture and belonging also has its play in Heart of Darkness. You’ll recall that Conrad goes across to ‘‘the Continent,’’ to ‘‘the sepulchral city’’ to gain employment, with the help of his aunt. The city in question is Brussels, and the country is Belgium, which controlled (with unparalleled brutality and savage looting) the entire Congo region. These facts indicate a powerful atmospheric and literary situation that Conrad never once makes explicit: that Marlow, an English
man, has spent this entire story, until he reaches Kurtz, among French speakers. In addition to the other narrative complications we’ve explored, we must add the fact that the story has been ‘‘translated’’ by Marlow from French into English, that it took place, as it were, in French. And when Marlow considers why Kurtz has bestowed on him all Kurtz’s horrible visions, he concludes that it was ‘‘because [he] could speak English to me.’’ So the painful, ruinous, almost lethal redemption that Marlow implicitly claims for himself—having undergone something like Kurtz’s own trials and lived to tell of them—resides not only in the successful conveying—the honest evocation—of the story, but in the English language itself. Knowing as we do the facts of Conrad’s life—his parents’ early deaths after imprisonment by the Russians; his travels; his time on the sea—there is something very moving about his profound connection to the English language, to his commitment to it as a vehicle of redemption, even for Kurtz, who, having finally found an English speaker, is freed to tell his horrifying truth.

  Speech, indeed, is a specific and timely savior. When Marlow rises at midnight and discovers that Kurtz has left the ship, and finds him in the tall grass trying to return to the tribesmen who are loyal to him, Marlow succeeds in stopping him by saying, ‘‘ ‘You will be lost . . . utterly lost’ ’’:One gets sometimes such a flash of inspiration, you know. I did say the right thing, though indeed he could not have been more irretrievably lost than he was at this very moment, when the foundations of our intimacy were being laid—to endure—to endure—even to the end—even beyond.

  That this unlikely intimacy would endure, long past Kurtz’s death, and transform Marlow, becomes the reason why he tells the story to others—each new listener presumably influenced by his own sense of intimacy with Marlow and with his own capacity to change. The story Marlow ‘‘hears’’ is Kurtz’s story. Marlow never really tells us what that story is:I’ve been telling you what we said—repeating the phrases we pronounced—but what’s the good? They were common everyday words—the familiar, vague sounds exchanged in every waking day of life. But what of that? They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.