Imperialism was a loaded word, a most unsavory word, in academia in the U.S. in the 1960s when I wrote a Ph.D. thesis about Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad titled “The Mythology of Imperialism.” I was a grad student on a scholarship from “Her Majesty’s Government” at the University of Manchester in England, once near the beating heart of the industrial revolution and the cotton industry, and the city where Frederick Engels, Marx’s comrade, wrote the classic The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
More than a century later, Manchester was still thoroughly working class, though when I asked an English woman, soon after I arrived, if there were wealthy people in the city she said, “Where there’s muck there’s brass.”
I wasn’t the only person in my circle of American friends who went to England in the mid-1960s; Michael Meeropol, the older of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s two sons, went to England and so did Peter Linebaugh and Eric Foner, all of whom I knew from New York. I was 22 in 1964, the year I arrived in Manchester, eligible for the draft. I received a notice from my draft board asking me to report for a physical exam, but I received an exemption because I was a student, and married and living in England.
My wife, Eleanor, also attended the University of Manchester and wrote a thesis on The Masses, the lefty magazine that the U.S. government shut down in 1917 on the grounds that it conspired to obstruct conscription during World War I, which Lenin described as “an imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital.” Lenin argued that the “contradictions of imperialism” led to an “inevitable revolutionary crisis.” He certainly did in Russia and Germany.
One of my Manchester advisers and mentors, Frank Kermode, an English eccentric born on the Isle of Man— and the author of the widely acclaimed Romantic Image and The Sense of an Ending— called my thesis “Bolshie,” (short from Bolshevik) which probably said more about him and his life and times than about me and my work. It spoke well for Kermode that he cut his ties to Encounter magazine when he learned that the CIA funded the publication. He was not a Cold War intellectual, and in that regard unlike Lionel Trilling, probably the Columbia College professor who influenced me more than any other when I was an undergraduate from ‘59 to ’63.
It was in Trilling’s comparative literature class that boasted on the reading list works by Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Marcel Proust and where I first tangled with Conrad’s searing novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), which taught me more about imperialism than Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism or any other book on the subject, including J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902). The Bolshevic leader, V. I. Lenin believed that imperialism was the last phrase of capitalism and would lead to socialist revolutions.
Born in Ukraine in 1857, which was then a part of the Russian Empire, Conrad witnessed the ravages of imperialism in Europe, Africa and Asia. Employed by a Belgian corporation, he traveled up the Congo River in 1890 and saw first hand the atrrocities committed in the Congo Free State, a private colony of King Leopold II. Workers who didn’t meet quotas had their hands chopped off.
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much,” Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, says in Heart of Darkness and seems to speak for the author himself. “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river [the Thames] into the mystery of an unknown earth!,” he says to the men who listen to his tale.
Marlow adds, “The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.” Perhaps Conrad’s greatest achievement in Heart of Darkness was his creation of Mr. Kurtz, a quintessential imperialist who says he wants to civilize the Congolese and who is described as “an emissary of pity and science and progress,” and who ends up slaughtering Africans and mounting their heads on poles outside his compound.
Of the Congolese men he sees up close, Marlow says, “they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; 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.”
Some of Conrad’s language is crystal clear and some of it is opaque, as when he writes about, “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” Say what?
Wisely, Marlow leaves it to an African to utter the last words about the “emissary of pity and science and progress.” He says, “Mr. Kurtz – he dead,” a line that T. S. Eliot memorialized in The Waste Land.
Near the end of Marlow’s journey into the heart of the Congo’s darkness he encounters an African woman whom he romanticizes as “ a wild and gorgeous apparition” and who strikes him as emblematic of the wilderness itself and its own “tenebrous and passionate soul.” When he meets Kurtz’s European fiancé he lies to her and says nothing about the atrocities Kurtz has committed.
What Professor Kermode and I had in common was a shared interest in endings, the apocalypse, and millenarian movements, though he definitely didn’t see imperialism from a Leninist perspective as an end game, and didn’t use the word “imperialism,” either. Kermode introduced me to the history of end-of-the-world narratives which are at least as old as the Old Testament if not older.
In the mid-1960. the only writers who were likely to use the word imperialism were Marxists. Maoists and guerrilla warriors like Che Guevara who aimed to topple imperialism in the Congo and Bolivia and might have succeeded if it had not for the intervention of the CIA.
Some Americans, including SDS members who opposed the war in Vietnam began to use the word in about 1965 to characterize American’s role in Vietnam and to express their total condemnation of the invasion and occupation of the South East Asian nation which had been a colony of France until the Vietnamese defeated the French at a place called Dien Bien Phu, one of the most dramatic battles of the 20th century.
Then, the US stepped in and stepped up its role militarily, politically and economically, as the Pentagon Papers would reveal when they were published by The New York Times, thanks mostly to Daniel Ellsberg, whom I called in print a “white collar guerrilla,” much to his delight.
My Manchester Ph.D. thesis tackled the subject of British literature and the British Empire, but the subtext was American colonialism and imperialism in Vietnam. By the 1960s, it was clear to me and to many others in my generation that the British Empire had fallen and that the American empire had taken its place. All empires declined and fell, I concluded, beginning with the Roman Empire.
Some of Conrad’s most vivid images in Heart of Darkness — such as gunboats shelling the African jungle — seemed to anticipate the American bombardment of the Vietnamese landscape.
It made sense to me that when Francis Ford Coppola made his Vietnam War feature film he drew inspiration from Conrad’s novella. Some of the best-known lines in the novella, such as “ horror the horror,” show up in the film, while the words “exterminate the brutes” have been borrowed repeatedly and used as short hand for the way that imperialists and colonists think and act. Call it genocide.
Trilling assigned my paper on Heart of Darkness an A- and asked on the last page, “Is Conrad’s novella only about imperialism?” I wanted to say, but I never had the opportunity to say, “no, it’s not only about imperialism, but no critic has noticed the obvious, that imperialism is the heart of darkness and the heart of darkness is imperialism.”
Conrad knew it, but psychological critics like Albert Guerard, the author of Joseph Conrad (1947), didn’t see it or if they did they chose to ignore it. For Guerard Heart of Darkness was all about Jungian archetypes. I thought that was a monumental evasion.
I received a BA from Columbia in ’63 and an MA in American lit from Columbia University in ’64. I wrote a master’s thesis about Henry James titled “The Historical Imagination” and focused on the images of the French Revolution which crop up at critical moments in James’s novels when he compares his fictional characters to doomed French aristocrats in 1789.
James, I argued, was much more political than Trilling, the “Jamesians” — the Henry James “mob” or enthusiasts — and T. S. Eliot allowed. “He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it,” Eliot insisted. Sorry, T.S., James had ideas.
In the early 1960s, when I was an undergraduate, politics was a topic to be avoided at Columbia; real writers, I was told by Trilling, Jacques Barzun and Quentin Anderson—who taught a class I attended on Ralph Waldo Emerson and another on mid-nineteenth century American fiction— were apolitical. Politics contaminated prose and poetry Anderson, Barzun and Trilling insinuated, suggested, and argued ad nauseum and ad infinitum, though around the world and especially in Europe and Latin America critics linked literature and politics as though it was the most natural thing to do.
When I was interviewed by Stephen Marcus, one of Trilling’s protégés, and Daniel Bell, the author of The End of Ideology, Bell asked me “Do you know any communists,” I was shocked and horrified. I stormed from the room and told my friends what had happened.
Given the rejection of Marxism, Marxist literary criticism and even social criticism by America scholars and reviewers, such as Granville Hicks, Maxwell Geismar and F. O. Matthiessen, in the 1940s. 1950s and 1960s, I decided that I’d better not even try to write a Ph.D. thesis at Columbia that would combine literature and imperialism. Professor Lewis Leary recruited me to join the Ph.D. program at Columbia, but I declined the opportunity.
England seemed to offer an intellectual home for young wannabe cultural and literary critics like me. E. P. Thompson, E. J. Hobsbawm and Arnold Kettle, who wrote insightfully about imperialism and literature in his two-volume study of the English novel, taught at British universities, and unlike American lefties weren’t purged.
If there was a Red Scare in England it was much milder than in the States. I became friends with Kettle and visited him and his family in Leeds, where he taught.
For three years, from 1964 to 1967, I read widely and deeply in the fiction and nonfiction about imperialism and colonialism in the main library in Manchester and in the British Museum Reading Room in London. Once a week I met my tutor, R. G. Cox (not C. G. Cox) and read a paper I’d written that week about Conrad’s Victory, Nostromo or The Nigger of the Narcissus.
Conrad, I would realize, embodied contradictions; an anti-imperialist, he tended to be, but wasn’t always a white supremacist and a believer in the virtues of the British Empire. Though R. G. Cox often dozed while I read an essay, I was not phased. I’d done the work and liked the work I’d done.
I had contradictions of my own. I was writing a politically charged thesis, but I steered clear of everything political: marches, demonstrations and protests. In fact, I settled in England not only because I thought I’d receive a warmer welcome in academia there than in the States, but also because I wanted to be far away from the temptation to organize for civil rights and against the war.
All through my undergraduate days, I’d protested against segregation, the committees that investigated “subversives,” and the paternalism of Columbia, our “alma mater,” where students were treated like children who couldn’t make wise decisions.
I figured that if I stayed in New York, I’d join SDS, CORE or one of the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs – there were a half-dozen or so small lefty groups in New York in the early and mid 1960s — and become a full time radical. I didn’t see a way to straddle and combine research and scholarship and the causes of the day.
In Manchester, I was having heaps of fun in pubs, at parties, and in the company of Ian, Mike, and Tony —Irish, Scots and Welsh folk singers and poets. The English proved to be elusive. I could understand why Doris Lessing titled one of her books In Pursuit of the English.
Indeed, one had to search for them, and pry them loose from their Hobbit holes, their drawing rooms and from flats and digs that didn’t seem to be much improvement over the conditions of the working class that Engels described in 1844. Moreover, many of the union officials I met and got to know were dead set against Pakistanis joining their unions. They wanted white-only organizations and even went on strike to keep Pakistanis out.
During my last year in Manchester, my thesis finally took off, took shape and held together when I stumbled upon a 1919 essay by T. S. Eliot — a self-defined Anglican, a royalist and a traditionalist — titled “Kipling Redivivus” in which he wrote that “Conrad is the antithesis of Kipling. He is, for one thing, the antithesis of Empire, (as well as democracy); his characters are the denial of Empire, of Nation, of Race almost; they are fearfully alone with the Wilderness.” That was all the ammunition I needed to finish my thesis.
Of course, Eliot was also an avant-garde poet when he wrote The Waste Land, and an astute, dialectical critic when he wrote the essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent.
I finished my thesis, defended it before a committee that included Walter Allen, an expert on the English novel. Kermode, the quintessential peripatetic professor, had moved to another university. I attended the graduation ceremony, was awarded a Ph.D. and received a diploma. I was hired to teach at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and returned with my wife to the U.S.
Two months after I returned, I stood outside the walls of the Pentagon with thousands of other anti-war protesters. I joined SDS, served on a panel with Susan Sontag at the inaugural Socialist Scholars Conference and discussed the topic of the responsibility of intellectuals vis-à-vis Vietnam.
Later, I met Professor Edward Said who was teaching Conrad at Columbia and who assigned to students my book, The Mythology of Imperialism, published in hardback by Random House and in paperback by Delta. In April 1968 I was arrested with about 800 students and “outside agitators” like myself at Columbia.
It was as if I had never left the States and gone to England to tackle the subject of imperialism which seemed in 1968 more ominous than ever before.
In 2009 Mythology was republished by Monthly Review Press with an introduction by Columbia professor Bruce Robbins, an afterword by me about Edward Said, and with the original preface in which I meant to channel Sartre and that begins, “We, the readers of literature have been hijacked. The literary critics, our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the wall and held us captive.” I was angry. I still am.
If I had to select one sentence to exemplify my voice, my style and my point of view I would select the above sentence from the thousands of sentences I have written over the past half-century. I was young, I was brash and I was ready to take on imperialism, fangs and all. Imperialism still lurks at the heart of darkness all over the world and wherever rebels seek liberation and freedom.
Conrad’s tale, flaws and all, still demands to be read and understood. It’s a classic in the field of literature about empire and its indelible corruptions. I think Lenin would have admired it. An astute literary critic, Lenin wrote insightfully about Tolstoy, whom he called “a great artist” riven by “contradictions,” but who created “incomparable pictures of Russian life” and “made first-class contributions to world literature.”
Mr. Kurtz – He ain’t dead. He’s alive wherever men with guns and lies aim to conquer, oppress and exploit men, women and even children who don’t look like them, whether in Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe.
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