Complete Works

mention that these two notebooks are now preserved in the library of Harvard University, and that when I was in America in 1925 I saw them again in their new and permanent home and checked the text once more.
    As to the appended footnotes, their chief purpose has been to show how closely some of the earlier pages of “Heart of Darkness” are a recollection of Conrad’s own Congo journey. This story was serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine between February and April, 1899, and I remember Conrad telling me that its 40,000 words occupied only about a month in writing. When we consider the painful, slow labour with which he usually composed, we can perceive how intensely vivid his memories of this experience must have been, and, to judge from the parallel passages, how intensely actual. But then the notebook only goes to prove the almost self-evident contention that much of Conrad’s work is founded upon autobiographical remembrance. Conrad himself wrote of this story in his Author’s Note to the new edition
    of the “Youth” volume in which it appeared: “‘Heart of Darkness’ is quite as authentic in fundamentals as ‘Youth’ ...it is experience pushed a little (and only a little) beyond the actual facts of the case.” If only he had kept a diary of his meeting and association with Kurtz!
    The pages of The Concord Edition of “Youth” — the edition always referred to in the notes — which bear direct reference to the first volume of the diary, are only three, 70-72, but in these few pages there are an astonishing number of touches strongly reminiscent of the diary. One would argue, indeed, that he must have consulted the diary when writing the story, but Mrs. Conrad assures me that it was not so. Twice had she saved it from the wastepaper basket, and probably by the time “Heart of Darkness” came to be written Conrad had forgotten all about it, or did not dream that it had survived. He never spoke to me of it, and I never heard of its existence until after his death.
    The second notebook, which is an entirely technical account of Congo navigation, written, no doubt, in relation to the then river charts, is not printed here, simply because it has no personal or literary interest. It is much longer than the first notebook, and is contained on seventy-nine pages, apart from several pages of rough outline maps. I reproduce a portion of one page, in order to show a sample:
    “11. N. (A) Long reach to a curved point. Great quantity of dangerous snags along the stard shore. Follow the slight bend of the shore with caution. The Middle of the Channel is a S — B — [sand bank] always covered. The more northerly of the two islands has its lower end bare of trees covered with grass and light green low bushes, then a low flat, and the upper end is timbered with light trees of a darker green tint.”
    It will be seen from this passage, which, though typical, is less technical than most, that the second notebook is not really, like the first, so much in the nature of a diary as of a specific aid to navigation. But those who recall the river journey in “Heart of Darkness,” with its dangers and its difficulties, will perceive how this notebook, too, has played its special and impersonal
    part in the construction of the story.
    The title-page of the first note book is almost all torn out, but the title-page of the second reads, “Up-river Book, commenced 3 August 1890, S.S. Roi des Beiges.” Long ago, when I was making, from Conrad’s dictation, a list of the ship he sailed in, he wrote opposite Roi des Beiges — “Heart of Darkness,’ ‘Out-post.’“ And in truth, hints for” Heart of Darkness,” reminders of Heart of Darkness,” lie thick upon the pages of the first note book, though “An Outpost of Progress” — ” the lightest pat of the loot I carried off from Central Africa,” to quote his Author’s Note to “Tales of Unrest,” in which it was published — is only visible in the diary by the implication of the tropical African atmosphere.
    No other diary of Conrad’s is extant, and I am very sceptical as to whether he ever kept another. He was not at all that type of man, and his piercing memory for essentials was quite sufficient for him to recreate powerfully vanished scenes and figures for the purposes of his work. In 1890, of course, he had published nothing, and though we know that the unfinished MS. (seven chapters) of “Almayer’s Folly” accompanied him on his Congo