Tales of Unrest - Page 2

"A Christmas Garland," where I found
myself in very good company. I was immensely gratified. I began to
believe in my public existence. I have much to thank The Lagoon for.

My next effort in short story writing was a departure--I mean a
departure from the Malay Archipelago. Without premeditation, without
sorrow, without rejoicing and almost without noticing it, I stepped into
the very different atmosphere of An Outpost of Progress. I found there a
different moral attitude. I seemed able to capture new reactions, new
suggestions, and even new rhythms for my paragraphs. For a moment I
fancied myself a new man--a most exciting illusion. It clung to me for
some time, monstrous, half conviction and half hope as to its body with
an iridescent tail of dreams and with a changeable head like a plastic
mask. It was only later that I perceived that in common with the rest of
men nothing could deliver me from my fatal consistency. We cannot escape
from ourselves.

An Outpost of Progress is the lightest part of the loot I carried off
from Central Africa, the main portion being of course The Heart of
Darkness. Other men have found a lot of quite different things there and
I have the comfortable conviction that what I took would not have been
of much use to anybody else. And it must be said that it was but a very
small amount of plunder. All of it could go into one's breast pocket
when folded neatly. As for the story itself it is true enough in its
essentials. The sustained invention of a really telling lie demands a
talent which I do not possess.

The Idiots is such an obviously derivative piece of work that it is
impossible for me to say anything about it here. The suggestion of it
was not mental but visual: the actual idiots. It was after an interval
of long groping amongst vague impulses and hesitations which ended in
the production of "The Nigger" that I turned to my third short story in
the order of time, the first in this volume: Karain: A Memory.

Reading it after many years Karain produced on me the effect of
something seen through a pair of glasses from a rather advantageous
position. In that story I had not gone back to the Archipelago, I had
only turned for another look at it. I admit that I was absorbed by the
distant view, so absorbed that I didn't notice then that the _motif_ of
the story is almost identical with the _motif_ of The Lagoon. However,
the idea at the back is very different; but the story is mainly made
memorable to me by the fact that it was my first contribution to
_Blackwood's Magazine_ and that it led to my personal acquaintance with
Mr. William Blackwood whose guarded appreciation I felt nevertheless to
be genuine, and prized accordingly. Karain was begun on