A parcel of fortunes, p.9
A Parcel of Fortunes, page 9
The book provoked fierce arguments. He had given it to his class to read over the Easter holidays so that he could begin teaching it at the beginning of the summer term. When he asked for initial responses in the first lesson, a furious girl – was she called Jo? – had erupted. ‘I think it’s a vile book. How can we be expected to read something, let alone study it, which uses the word ‘nigger’ and which portrays Africans in such a disgusting way?’
Later, once they had started a close study of the text, Jo had said that not only was the novel deeply and offensively racist, but also sexist, citing the lie that Marlow told to Kurtz’s fiancée. She quoted his excuse: ‘“They – the women, I mean – are out of it – should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own.” Conrad wants women to be wrapped in cotton wool, to be protected. The fairer sex. To shimmer for men and not trouble their pretty little heads…Urgh! Why are we studying this nonsense?’
‘Are you suggesting,’ Matthew asked, ‘that anything that reflects the attitudes of a particular time that differ radically from the attitudes of our own time should not be studied? Should be destroyed even? Literary revisionism? It sounds very Stalinist!’
‘But it is racist in a way that is unacceptable now,’ someone had said. ‘The way that Conrad sets the culture and refinement of Europe against the brutalism and bestiality of Africa.’
‘It’s not as simple as that.’ Things never did seem as simple to David Chapman as they did to others. ‘Conrad is actually less interested in the differences of culture and more interested in the similarities, and kinship, even, between white man and black man. What seems to terrify Marlow is the possibility of his kinship with these beings.’ He reads from the text: ‘But what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.’
Somebody else chipped in. ‘I think you are being unfair to Conrad calling him racist. He presents a very negative view of the Belgian imperialists as well. Or Marlow does. Let’s not forget that it is Marlow’s story we are getting.’
Chapman shook his head. ‘The very negative view of the Belgian imperialists does not in any way ameliorate the portrait of African man. And the fact that the portrait of Africa is separated from Conrad by the insulation of two narrators does not excuse Conrad. He has not offered any criticism of his narrators – Marlow sits Buddha-like, with all the wisdom that seems to imply – and, significantly, he does not give any alternative frame of reference by which to judge them.’ As so often is the case, Chapman’s pronouncements have the sound and appearance of dispassionate and monolithic statements of truth, unchallengeable.
He disliked the book, especially the account of the core of the book, Kurtz’s discovery of the heart of darkness. ‘It’s confused, woolly-headed. Look at the way that Marlow – Conrad – uses words such “mysterious” and “inscrutable”. They repeatedly do duty for more specific description—’
Some brave or foolhardy spirit jumps in. ‘This surely is because Conrad is indicating the ineffable nature of Kurtz’s existential discovery, the—’
On the word ‘ineffable’ there is a grunt of derisive incomprehension from someone, then a snort from Chapman. ‘Yes, yes, I know. The limits of my language are the limits of my world, that words are an approximation and all that, but I think Conrad needed to do better than that.’
*
Who were the someones of that class, Chapman’s classmates? Matthew never threw away his old mark books (should he give them to the school archive?), and made a trip to the attic to recover the relevant one.
He found the battered, bottle-green ledger – ‘Matthew Agnew 1988–1992’ – and looked with interest at who was in that David Chapman class. Jo Perry. It was Jo who took issue with Conrad’s racism and sexism. And Shakepeare’s. And other writers’, too. She read with a watchful readiness for prejudice. She had gone on to read English at UCL, if he remembered correctly. And there a name he had long since forgotten, Paul Smedding. The face came back to him. A bored expression normally. A level English was a means to an end for him, a simple end, one that he felt was pretty much the sole purpose of an expensive education. To make lots of money. Quickly.
Matthew looked up a passage in Heart of Darkness that he remembered reading to his class. It was about the Belgian colonists:
these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard… like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.
Someone – another someone, Matthew couldn’t remember who – had drawn a comparison with the 1980s culture of greed, the ‘loadsmoney’ culture that characterised a certain aspect of Margaret Thatcher’s deregulated Britain. ‘Loadsamoney, Paul!’ someone had whispered, leaving Smedding to simmer with an inarticulate rage, his face a picture of dull stupidity.
*
Did Chapman say that Conrad’s articulation of Kurtz’s horrific epiphany was woolly, was linguistically wanting? Or was Matthew giving licence to his memory as he tried to recapture some teaching days long past? It was difficult to say. What he could say, what he knew, was that he found Marlow’s psychic journey into the heart of darkness, man’s darknesss, the de-moralising darkness of Kurtz’s own heart, compelling and convincing.
He looked again at his old mark book to see what essays he had set the group. One caught his eye in particular. ‘“Kurtz is destroyed in his final confrontation of what Marlow views as the ultimate truth: that the essentials of experience remain amoral and, even, alinguistic.” Discuss.’ A critical quote. From whom? No matter. He noticed that Chapman had received a very high mark.
And then his eye was caught by another name. George West. He hadn’t lasted the course, expelled in the Upper Sixth, one of the many pupils sent packing after David Chapman’s investigation into drug-taking. Matthew had been fond of George. He was quite bright and fitfully hard-working. What Matthew liked in him was his adventurousness. He read with a wide-ranging curiosity, and he argued so that ideas – his own and those of others – might be tested; and he believed that youth, especially that part that belonged to late adolescence, was a time for experimentation of all kinds. Which is presumably why he had dabbled in drugs.
George had loved the Harlequin man in Heart of Darkness, loved his enthusiasm and his open-mindedness. He had seen him as some kind of prototype hippy: ‘But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.’ Where was George now? What did he do? Matthew might check that, out of nothing more than idle curiosity, when term resumed.
*
On the day in early July on which Rolf Harris was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison for various convictions of indecent assault, the Agnews set off for a short break amongst the billowing hills of West Dorset. They had hired a cottage that looked out onto Colmer’s Hill. This almost perfectly conical elevation was topped by a small clump of Caledonian pine trees, which sat rooted precariously in the shallow soil that covered its sandstone mass. The unusual symmetry of the hill, with its crowning tuft of trees, was one of Dorset’s iconic landmarks. Much painted and photographed, a winter image of it, with a light covering of frost and arising out of a thick and flat mist, had appeared in the Times. It looked enchanting, and had set Rachel searching online for a suitable cottage.
Rarely these days did the Agnews seek the exoticism of abroad, preferring the quieter pleasures of domestic holidays. Their requirements were simple. Good food and good walks in stimulating countryside. Nearby Chideock was surrounded to the west, north and east by two horseshoes of hills separated by the Marshwood Vale, and it was in these hills and valleys and woodlands that they spent the next few days. They climbed to the grassland of Pilsdon Pen, where they saw and heard larks, and where they got their first sighting of a burnet moth, brilliant red on black. And they walked along the arching holloways that were a feature of the area, imagining the sheep that might have been driven down these flinty tracks in former times. Golden Cap offered them a fine view of the Jurassic coast and of Lyme Regis in the distance. And for Foxy, it was her first experience of the sea. She loved the texture of the sand beneath her feet, and she enjoyed running towards an incoming wave, challenging it to catch her before springing away with smart agility.
The school seemed a world away. The archive an irrelevance. And Chapman wasn’t spared a moment’s thought.
*
Once home again, Matthew’s mind was dragged back to Chapman. The battered mark book lay open on his desk where Matthew had put it before they had left for West Dorset. He looked to see what essay titles he had set on Antony and Cleopatra. No very startling or original titles there. A shame. It was a challenging text to teach to adolescents, who found it difficult to understand the middle-aged lust of the protagonists; many were repelled by the notion of mature people, their parents perhaps, having any kind of sexuality.
The temperamental opposites of David Chapman and George West argued over this text as they had over Heart of Darkness. When George had talked about the protagonists’ self-sacrificing passion and ennobling love, Chapman could barely contain his contempt.
‘This is not at all what Shakespeare is showing us! He is presenting two delusional lovers, each, in the moment of their defeat, claiming a spurious dignity to the sorry ends – the sordid ends – they have led themselves to. He is not glorifying them at all. Their relationship is selfish and distasteful and, if Shakespeare really is trying to glorify their deaths, then he is wholly unconvincing…I read somewhere that the key to the play might be seen in Enobarbus’ comment that “Men’s judgements are a parcel of their fortunes”.’
‘Yes,’ Matthew had agreed, ‘this is a valid interpretation. Antony’s judgements, misjudgements, go hand in hand with his fortunes…misfortunes, as he spins uncontrollably to the bottom of the whirlpool. The vagabond flag upon the stream, like a piece of detritus on the sea’s surface, going back and forth on the changing tides to rot itself with motion. Like a feather to every wind that blows.’
‘I think that’s harsh, sir.’ George West, the romantic, was having none of it.
‘The dissolution of Antony, dislimning like a cloud that is dragonish, is pitiful, certainly, George. But is there enough worth and enough pity?’
Perhaps that was Kurtz, too, his judgements a parcel of his fortunes. But how had Marlow escaped the seductions that claimed Kurtz? When Matthew had asked that question, it had been George West who had articulated Marlow’s limited perspective.
‘He’s obsessed with his tin-pot steamboat. It’s his over-riding preoccupation, the saving reality that he sinks himself into.’ He immediately corrects himself. ‘“Sinks” is the wrong word, because actually he makes a point of inhabiting a surface reality. He says he had to keep guessing at the channel, to keep a lookout for signs of dead wood they could use for fuelling the steamboat. And then he says, “When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality – the reality, I tell you – fades. The inner truth is hidden – luckily, luckily”.’ Matthew is nodding in approval as George then thumbs his book looking for another passage he has marked. ‘He explains why he didn’t go ashore for a howl and a dance, like Kurtz. And of course it was because he had to look after the boat. “I had to watch the steering, and circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man”.’
Chapman was gazing out of the window, but most of the class were interested in what George was saying. ‘I see it,’ he continued, ‘that, unlike Kurtz, he is not a psychic adventurer. He has taken a quick and timid glimpse over the edge of the precipice and pulled back. His perspective, therefore, is limited, biased even. He doesn’t want to enlarge his mind like the Harlequin man; he wants to limit it.’ Were these George’s words? Verbatim? Probably not. And did or did not Matthew hear someone muttering quietly ‘Likes a spliff!’ when the words ‘psychic adventurer’ were uttered by George? He thought he did remember that.
He pictured the classroom he had taught in for many years before retiring, housed in a 1970s block, ugly and distant relation to the grander buildings of the school campus. Unlike Victorian schoolrooms with their windows set high to avoid distractions, this black-brick building had one wall entirely glazed, the full length windows, ceiling to floor, forming a permeable membrane between the young minds within and the world beyond. The world immediately beyond was an attractive vista towards the Music School which, with its similar 1970s modernity, threw back an echo of the English Centre. Neat borders, with carefully planned and planted flowers and shrubs and ornamental trees, lay each side of the neat gravel path connecting the two buildings. An English-country-garden scene. Quite unlike the millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high and curtaining the heart of Africa’s darkness.
Some of the most animated discussions were about the end of the book, and the morality of Marlow’s lie to Kurtz’s Intended when he returned to Belgium.
‘Kurtz is, of course, a very interesting character, but actually I have always found the end the most engaging part of the novel, because of the way it challenges us to think how we should live our lives. With the truth, complete and unvarnished, with all the pain that might involve? Or on the surface, perhaps, to avoid what’s disturbing or hurtful? What Marlow calls “surface-truth”.’
‘You’re offering a binary choice, sir. It’s not as simple as that,’ said Chapman.
‘But that’s what Conrad is choosing to present to us, David. Marlow visiting Kurtz’s fiancée as dusk is falling, deepening to darkness. He meets a beautiful woman incredibly needy in her grief. A woman whose faith in her fiancé is intense, her expectation of what she will be told unshakeable. I think that Conrad writes this last section brilliantly. We see the Intended leading Marlow, manipulating Marlow, as she questions him, squeezing the answers she wants from him. And as the hesitant answers fall shakily from him, a dull anger grows in him. Until the final lie is plucked from him: “The last word he pronounced was – your name”. Marlow expects the heavens to fall in upon his head for his lie, which of course they don’t. And then he wonders if they would have fallen in if he had told the truth. If he had given Kurtz the justice that was his due. But he can’t. Why?’
‘Because the truth would have been “too dark”! Much too horrible for a mere woman to bear!’ The speaker is Jo, whose distaste for Conrad’s various isms has jaded her study of the text.
Matthew laughed. ‘Not entirely fair, Jo! Okay, the book is sexist, but let’s give Conrad his due. It is an important question. How much truth can we bear? How much illusion should we allow people to cling on to? Do you tell a three-year-old child that Father Christmas doesn’t exist?’
‘That’s just silly,’ Jo tutted.
‘Not entirely. And you are not being entirely fair. Let me read this to you.’ Matthew pauses to find the passage. ‘Marlow talks about bowing his head before…“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.” He is not protecting her because she is a woman but because she is a human, and he sees innocence and illusion as preferable to the corrosive darkness that has eaten into Kurtz’s heart. Marlow sees where Kurtz’s adventurism has led him. He prefers the surface of things.’
A surface reality. Pottering about. Navigating the shallow coastal waters, avoiding the mysterious deep beyond. Short paces on the stepping-stones of illusion rather than bold exploratory strides into the unfamiliar. A way to live. Who would not prefer the sugar-coated lie to the sharp and bitter bite of toxic truth?
Ah, who indeed? Not the delver, surely, trowel in hand, dusting away the dirt of lies.
CHAPTER 8
The start of the autumn term finds Matthew preparing an archive display to commemorate the centenary of the First World War. Edwardian tranquillity transformed to the horror, the horror of senseless war. He is looking at the journal of one of the many hundreds of former pupils of the school who took part in the war, five hundred and seventy-three of whom sacrificed their lives. Oliver Webb joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1915; his journal records his service for the next three years. A hundred and twenty-three of the yellowing pages of the lined ledger contain written entries. Between many of the pages are insertions of various kinds: photographs, letters, telegrams, military orders, concert programmes and newspaper clippings. The photographs are varied. Many different kinds of aircraft, mostly biplanes, are shown, from the B.E.2c in which he flew from Farnborough to Flanders in the summer of 1915 to the Avro 788 that he spent much of his time flying; there are photographs of comrades, sometimes relaxing, sometimes busying themselves about their base. Most interesting are the aerial photos, interesting because they are the first of their kind. Matthew can imagine the sense of awe they must have inspired, this new form of virtually instant cartography offering the very latest intelligence on enemy positions and enemy movement.
The journal entries themselves have a wonderful immediacy. They convey the sense of excited discovery in the earliest days of his service. Much later in the war, there is a deepening gloom in the tone, an exhaustion, an intense desire for it all to be over.
