KIPLING WAS STONED, CONRAD WASN’T

The bard of the Raj knew from substances. From the mention of marijuana in “Kim” – referring to a certain spy technique, the eponymous hero is counseled, “It must be used sparingly, like bhang” – to the opium that enlivens Findlayson in “The Bridge Builders,” to the mysterious little brown pills holding the platonic pals of “In the Same Boat” in their thrall, drugs fascinated Kipling, and states of intoxication in his work are the doors allowing new perceptions to arise among his bumbling Britishers.

Not so Joseph Conrad. His traumatic early life, his hypochondria, his approach-avoidance attitudes toward marriage, fatherhood, and the commercial aspects of literary success, created in him a far different, far darker mental state. Conrad was born stoned, and the stated values of his work – devotion to duty, solidarity with peers, the necessity of calmness in a crisis – represent his desperate struggle to escape the fantastic and hallucinatory drag of a hypersensitive imagination. Kurtz drinks the LSD-laced Kool-aid, as it were, permits his imagination to reinvent him as the Dark Lord of benighted cannibals, while Marlow despite near-fatal illness – mental derangement being a common component of acute malaria – manages to hang on to the grail of rationality. Drug addicts in his fiction – not many, but
two of them in The Shadow-Line – are helpless, pathetic incompetents.

Kipling as a young man in the 1960s would have been on the bus, to employ a hoary metaphor. Quite possibly that might have been to his detriment, but then again many young people proved sufficiently resilient to carve a fully functional life out of the amorphous glop of random drug use. Conrad, on the other hand, would have been fuming, snarling about haircuts and the futility of flowers. He required sobriety. He could not live in a stoned world, because he had been born into one – his parents being idealists, radicals, careless of money and uncaring of what the world thought – and throughout his life ran as fast as he could, and as far as he could, in the opposite direction