Heart of Darkness and Ignatius Rising

Ah, there you all are, my pale-faced, bibliophile compadres.
Welcome back to the Literati thread, and by Jove, do I have a treat for your tired, red-rimmed eyes that take so much abuse from your habit of reading well into the wee hours of the morning by the light of that single flickering candle, as you are huddled up in your starched, linen nightshirt and matching cap with tassel, safe in the bosom of your fine Edwardian bedstead.

We will be serving not one but two heaping, steaming helpings of Frittati for your perusing pleasure this week.
The first is a review of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the second is a biography called Ignatius Rising: the life of John Kennedy Toole, by Rene Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy.
Conrad’s 1902 novella covers less than 100 pages with ink, and I should have been able to consume this famous story in a reading session or two, yet I found myself having difficulty immersing myself in this dark and lugubrious tale. For one, Conrad’s vision of humanity is bleak, to put it mildly, and being already familiar with the story (courtesy of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now, which is based on Heart of Darkness) I knew that the chance of succumbing to bouts of uncontrollable laughter, or stumbling upon any manifestation of beauty or hilarity were slim. Conrad has been much praised for his prose, but I found his style rather inaccessible. This book, being over a century old, contains a great many nouns which have long ago sunken to the bottom of that vast sea of desuetude which is the final resting place of so many once vibrant and productive English words. And this doesn’t improve the reading experience. Also, there is relatively little dialog in the story which leaves us marooned with Marlow the somber narrator and his dismal take on our hominid lineage.
There is no doubt that Conrad is a technically gifted writer; his description of the Thames and the towns on its banks, at the beginning of the story, is quite impressive, as is his vivid recounting of that other great river, The Congo, and its riparian, ominous jungle .

Most of you will be familiar with the plot, but I shall offer a summary nonetheless.
Restless sailor of the seven seas Marlow tells of his harrowing journey, piloting a rickety steamboat up the Congo River during the time of the brutal colonization of the Congo by the Belgians who were extracting the coveted ivory from its interior, while leaving a mountain of native corpses in their wake. Marlow is trying to reach a trading agent by the name of Mr. Kurtz whose station is the farthest reaching part of the greedy arm of the empire, and who enjoys an almost mythical status with his fellow traders who dwell in stations down river. The references to the heart of darkness, where Kurtz resides and into which Marlow is inching his way through the perilous jungle, are many. No news from Mr. Kurtz has reached the other trading stations on the river for over a year, and Marlow’s quest to find this man takes on the character of a peregrination. It is telling that Conrad often uses the word pilgrims for the traders who accompany Marlow on his leaky tub of a steamboat.
When he finally meets Kurtz, Marlow finds an insane, emaciated megalomaniac who’s made himself a God to the natives, and who has transformed the village and surrounding area into a charnel house.

While reading the novella, images of Coppola’s much vaunted movie kept coming to mind and erected another barrier between me and the story; yet another good reason to eschew motion pictures based on literature, or at least postpone their viewing until the book has been properly consumed.
Much has been written about Heart of Darkness, and the trek through the jungle, accompanied by the increasing callousness and savagery of the colonists, lends itself easily to morose musings on the hypocrisies of the ‘civilized’ European invaders and the more ethereal search for what truly slumbers in the hearts of men who wear incongruous starched shirts in the steaming jungle and who count elephant tusks while their colleagues are dying right next to them of tropical diseases.

I found the time that we actually get to spend with Kurtz disappointingly brief. His character is built up to almost legendary proportions, and Marlow keeps obsessing about the man, so that his brief appearance, disturbing and grotesque as it is, is something of a let-down, much like finally seeing the mechanical shark in the movie Jaws.

Conrad doesn’t think much of humanity which may automatically qualify him as a great thinker and author in some circles, but before the protean and ever febrile judges of the Irritati court, Heart of Darkness is awarded with a timid 6 Winonas. But, as we are in a generous mood today, we shall also heap upon Józef Teodor Konrad an honorary Aniston, which most people equate with roughly half a Winona. So there, Joseph.

Our second book today deals with John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces, whom I shall refer to in the remainder of this writing as Ken. Now, I don’t care for biographies, and would therefore never thrust one rudely and without warning into your trusting and tranquil countenance, but I will make an exception for Ignatius Rising because I am fascinated with Ken Toole and I, like many millions the world over, count A Confederacy of Dunces among my favorite books.
On March 26, 1969, when yours truly was still waddling around Holland on uncertain legs and had just mastered the art of not shitting oneself , a thirty-one-year old, well-dressed man from New Orleans, parked his white Chevrolet Chevelle in a rural area of Biloxi, Mississippi, covered the exhaust pipe with the end of a green garden hose, ran the other end of the hose through a cracked rear window, sat behind the wheel, turned the ignition, and started to breathe in the lethal fumes.
Only due to the perseverance and the antics of a mad, sad, highly eccentric and narcissistic woman -Mrs. Thelma Ducoing Toole- did it come to pass that the brainchild of her son Ken ever found its way out of obscurity and into the hearts of the world’s grateful readers, snapping up the first ever posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.

If you haven’t read A Confederacy of Dunces yet, you really, really should. It is an astonishingly funny book featuring one of the most unpleasant and memorable characters in all of fiction, Ignatius Jacques Reilly. Not possessing a single redeeming quality, this obese, self-obsessed flatulent snob and slob will nevertheless have you in stiches and, as so eloquently phrased by Walker Percy, who was so instrumental in giving Dunces to the world, “there is an underlying sadness in the book, and you never really know where it is coming from”. Dunces is considered by many literati the best book ever written about New Orleans and its denizens.

Ignatius Rising, published by Louisiana State University Press, 2001, and donning probably the worst and ugliest cover in the history of the printing press, tells the story of a precocious only child and his immensely overbearing mother. We learn of his academic achievements, his time in the service, his escalating alcohol consumption, the pressures of academic life, his unhealthy relationship with his mother, and finally his descent into depression and paranoia resulting in his untimely death.
It is well worth the read, but I shall not attempt to summarize a biography, because that would be silly.

What I would like to dwell on before I let you all return to your various louche activities, is the rejection by Simon and Schuster (and many other publishers) of this fine work.
We have all heard the stories of great works of fiction that were initially rejected by some dilettante editor or other, but in Ignatius Rising we are shown the actual correspondence between a sensitive and ambitious author, who’s deeply wounded by the rejections of his novel (which he knows to be good), and the quite sympathetic editor Robert Gottlieb, who also recognizes the quality of the work, but who ultimately sticks to his initial objection to the book, namely that “it isn’t really about anything”.

It is sad beyond words that a gifted editor (Gottlieb had Joseph Heller under his tutelage and encouraged him to complete Cath-22) could not come to an unusually good and original book without preconceived notions about what a story ought to be like.
It is very well possible that had he read the book properly, Ken would be with us today and writing his heart out, while sitting on his veranda in New Orleans, sipping a Mint Julep or a Sazerac.

Oh well, as that other author,who also insisted on writing stories that “weren’t about anything” said: So it goes.

Ignatius Rising gets 7 willowy Winonas.

Until next week, and if you must, please use a tissue afterwards.