“The Brute: An Indignant Tale” (1907) from A Set of Six

#HBD Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) 🎂

John Clute notes¹ that Joseph Conrad's language signals an author as determined as Edgar Allan Poe, or William Hope Hodgson, or H P Lovecraft, or even David Lindsay, to articulate "that true horror is a novum, perhaps - that each iteration of true horror speaks of something new to our perception of the planet - and that true horror is therefore very hard to utter." [Clute (27)]

Novum, a coinage of Darko Suvin², describes "the scientifically plausible innovations used by science fiction narratives."

Novum is certainly a descriptor of the ship, The Apse Family, in Conrad's horror story "The Brute." She is cutting-edge tech (for her time) and as destructive an infernal machine as anything handled by Mr. Verloc.

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Some paratextual notes

 A Set of Six begins with these lyrics:

Les petites marionnettes 

Font, font, font, 

Trois petits tours 

Et puis s'en vont.

Which may be translated:

They go like this, this, this

The little puppets

They go like that, that, that,

Three little turns

And then they go away.

Another translation of the full song is here: https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=151

The 1908 UK edition of A Set of Six gives "The Brute" the subtitle "An indignant tale." 

The original UK periodical publication in The Daily Chronicle, Dec. 6, 1906 uses "The Brute; Tale of a Bloodthirsty Brig." 

The November 1907 issue of the U. S.  McClure's Magazine uses the subtitle, "A piece of invective."

Paratextual material is usually a product of editorial decision-making, not authorial intent. Still, the differences are suggestive as the reader works to find their way into this enigmatic masterpiece.

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Jack Sullivan's entry on Conrad in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986):

CONRAD, JOSEPH (born Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski)(1857—1924.)

Polish born novelist, who wrote in English as his third language AFTER BECOMING A BRITISH SUBJECT. Most WIDELY KNOWN for Heart of Darkness (1902), a novella that has inspired MORE CRITICAL COMMENTARY THAN ANY MODERN HORROR TALE, WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF JAMES’S The Turn of the Screw. Childhood darkened by his family’s exile to Russia for secret political activities; EARLY CAREER AS A SEAMAN; DID NOT BEGIN HIS WRITING CAREER UNTIL AGE THIRTY-EIGHT.

Conrad was quickly recognized by Henry JAMES and others as the supreme writer of sea stories in English and as a major innovator in narrative technique, but he nevertheless lived in poverty until World War I. Widely known for tales with exotic settings, he also wrote The Secret Agent (1907), one of the first and most terrifying urban political thrillers.

Although Conrad is not commonly thought of as a horror writer, his Heart of Darkness, as well as several lesser-known tales such as “Amy Foster” (1903) and “The Brute" (1908), were once regarded as vivid specimens of the genre. Dorothy L. Sayers included “The Brute" in the supernatural horror section of her Omnibus of Crime (vol. 1, 1929), and Edmund Wilson, in his “Treatise on Tales of Horror” (1944), rated Heart of Darkness one of the supreme horror master works of the twentieth century. Conrad’s fiction does have a remarkably consistent atmosphere of mystery and dread, and many of his works contain a powerful hint of the supernatural. He was an admirer of Marryat, James, WELLS, and TURGENEV, all of whom wrote superb horror fiction even though their main careers were in other fields.

On a psychological level, Conrad's fiction focuses on his lonely heroes’ attempts to recognize and come to terms with the demons inside themselves, the “destructive clement” To which Lord Jim and others must “submit” before they can learn to live. Life is “a battle-field of phantoms, terrible and charming, august or ignoble,” says the typically isolated narrator of “The Lagoon” (from Tales of Unrest, 1908). These “phantoms,” located in the narrator's subconscious, are metaphorically present in the eeriness of Conrad's jungles; sometimes, as in “The Secret Sharer”(1912), they assume the form of a shadowy doppelganger that forces the once-stable hero into a frightening crisis of identity.

Some of Conrad’s tales are genuinely supernatural. “The Idiots” (from Tales of Unrest), which features an “unappeased” apparition from the grave, is about a group of idiot children drifting “according to the inexplicable impulses of their monstrous darkness”; “The Brute” (1908), which features one of Conrad’s densely woven tapestries of tales within tales, is about a malignant ship with “diabolic propensities” that has the nasty habit of killing off her crew. (This ship is a forerunner of the deadly supernatural cars in H. Russell WAKEFIELD and Stephen KING.)

Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, is a horror tale in the most literal sense, moving through the most fearful of all Conrad’s jungles toward a climactic utterance about human existence -- “The horror! The horror!” Overanalyzed as a religious allegory about the loss of innocence, a political allegory about imperialism, a Freudian allegory about a journey into the unconscious, and a modern retelling of the search for the holy grail (to name only a few postulations), the story has a more immediate appeal based on its unsurpassed atmosphere of doom and horror—the “sheer blank fright” constantly referred to.

The plot involves a journey up the Congo by Marlow, Conrad’s favorite narrator, as he searches for Kurtz, a mysterious, charismatic imperialist who has in some terrible way been “claimed” by the “heavy, mute spell” of Africa. Conrad’s labyrinth of stories within stories is filled with “the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.” With its hallucinatory narrative and subtle insinuation of black magic, Heart of Darkness has a nightmarish authenticity (based, no doubt, on Conrad’s near fatal fever contracted during his own Congo voyage) that makes it one of the great jungle tales in the literature of terror. Yet ultimately “the horror,” which is never explained, reaches beyond Africa to the terrible relativity and “blank” mystery of human perception. What begins as a classic use of ambiguity in horror fiction—with words like impalpable, inscrutable, and unearthly strewn throughout the narrative—becomes a philosophical statement about existence.

Conrad once wrote that he shied away from fantasy literature per se because writing it would be a denial that life itself is fantastic. But Conrad is one of those writers who makes life fantastic by creating a mood and a world that outlast the reading of a given story. We remain in the “heart of darkness" long after we have finished the tale….

I first read “The Brute” in the 1990s, in Karloff’s 1946 anthology And the Darkness Falls. “The Brute” is a cauldron of thickening inevitability, akin to a first viewing of Val Lewton’s 1943 film The Ghost Ship.

My own notes on “The Brute,” after a 2017 rereading:

In his 1920 preface to the collection A Set of Six, Conrad discusses the source material for "The Brute."

“The Brute,” which is the only sea-story in the volume, is, like “Il Conde,” associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship but the first I heard of her homicidal habits was from the late Captain Blake, commanding a London ship in which I served in 1884 as Second Officer. Captain Blake was, of all my commanders, the one I remember with the greatest affection. I have sketched in his personality, without however mentioning his name, in the first paper of The Mirror of the Sea. In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute and it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the mouth of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The existence of the brute was a fact. The end of the brute as related in the story is also a fact, well-known at the time though it really happened to another ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless character, which certainly deserved a better fate. I have unscrupulously adapted it to the needs of my story thinking that I had there something in the nature of poetical justice. I hope that little villainy will not cast a shadow upon the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of tales.

The story may be drawn from "warm human lips," but "The Brute" is a story of dread, damp, cold sea water, shattered spars and hulls, split canvas, and broken and drowned corpses.

Its uncanny atmosphere recalls the power of William Hope Hodgson's finest novel, The Ghost Pirates [1909]. But where Hodgson's novel prioritizes a supernatural doom, Conrad gives us a ship not as a victim but as a homicidal lunatic.

….They called it the launch of a ship, but I’ve heard people say that, from the wailing and yelling and scrambling out of the way, it was more like letting a devil loose upon the river. She snapped all her checks like pack-thread, and went for the tugs in attendance like a fury. Before anybody could see what she was up to she sent one of them to the bottom, and laid up another for three months’ repairs. One of her cables parted, and then, suddenly—you couldn’t tell why—she let herself be brought up with the other as quiet as a lamb.

     “That’s how she was. You could never be sure what she would be up to next. There are ships difficult to handle, but generally you can depend on them behaving rationally. With that ship, whatever you did with her you never knew how it would end. She was a wicked beast. Or, perhaps, she was only just insane.”

     He uttered this supposition in so earnest a tone that I could not refrain from smiling. He left off biting his lower lip to apostrophize me.

     “Eh! Why not? Why couldn’t there be something in her build, in her lines corresponding to—What’s madness? Only something just a tiny bit wrong in the make of your brain. Why shouldn’t there be a mad ship—I mean mad in a ship-like way, so that under no circumstances could you be sure she would do what any other sensible ship would naturally do for you. There are ships that steer wildly, and ships that can’t be quite trusted always to stay; others want careful watching when running in a gale; and, again, there may be a ship that will make heavy weather of it in every little blow. But then you expect her to be always so. You take it as part of her character, as a ship, just as you take account of a man’s peculiarities of temper when you deal with him.      But with her you couldn’t. She was unaccountable. If she wasn’t mad, then she was the most evil-minded, underhand, savage brute that ever went afloat. I’ve seen her run in a heavy gale beautifully for two days, and on the third broach to twice in the same afternoon. The first time she flung the helmsman clean over the wheel, but as she didn’t quite manage to kill him she had another try about three hours afterwards. She swamped herself fore and aft, burst all the canvas we had set, scared all hands into a panic, and even frightened Mrs. Colchester down there in these beautiful stern cabins that she was so proud of. When we mustered the crew there was one man missing. Swept overboard, of course, without being either seen or heard, poor devil! and I only wonder more of us didn’t go.

     “Always something like that. Always. I heard an old mate tell Captain Colchester once that it had come to this with him, that he was afraid to open his mouth to give any sort of order. She was as much of a terror in harbour as at sea. You could never be certain what would hold her. On the slightest provocation she would start snapping ropes, cables, wire hawsers, like carrots. She was heavy, clumsy, unhandy—but that does not quite explain that power for mischief she had. You know, somehow, when I think of her I can’t help remembering what we hear of incurable lunatics breaking loose now and then.”

“The Brute” can be read here. 

Jay

3 December 2023

1. Clute, John. Stay. Hachette UK, 2016

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum