COLONEL WALTER E. KURTZ'S BOOKS--WHICH ONES ARE THEY AND HAVE YOU READ THEM?

During one scene in Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’s abode in “Apocalypse Now”, there is a shot of a pile of books from Kurtz’s collection. Can anyone recall the titles of these books, has anyone read them, and do they (if anything) symbolise the Colonel’s state of mind (I’m looking for specifics) during his meeting with Captain Willard? Also, am I the only one who thinks that, for one supposedly mad, Kurtz actually makes a lot of sense during his mumblings to Willard?

I think after you watch the film a few times you understand a lot of the ‘“mumblings” from the mad colonel.
I think he wasn’t mad(apart from the killings) but just his mind had been taken to another level of thinking.MADNESS

I seem to remember a copy of THE GOLDEN BOUGH and FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE, but it has been a while.

^ Roscoe is correct on those two, which, by the way, were two of Eliot’s principle influences for “The Waste Land,” the poem that Kurtz recites in the film is Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

“Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper"

The two books are two of the key anthropological works of high modernism. Their presence in the film, along with Eliot’s, is not so much to symbolize something about Kurtz as they are to reinforce that the entire film is operating in, to use Eliot’s term, the mythological mode rather than as an historically accurate depiction of the Vietnam War.

Kurtz’s books are The Golden Bough, From Ritual to Romance, a book by Goethe, and The Bible. Each one of these books suggests an intriguing entry to an interpretation of the film. The Golden Bough is a mix of mythology and anthropology dealing with early pagan religions. Its significance to Kurtz may be suggested by a casual glance at some of the chapters from the book: “The King of the Wood,” “Incarnate Human Gods,” “The Perils of the Soul,” “Contagious Magic,” “The Killing of the Divine King,” and so on. From Ritual to Romance is an anthropological study of the Grail legend “from ancient ritual to Christian Symbol.” Certainly Apocalypse Now is a quest story, and in its own perverse way, a search for the grail. The tragedy of any grail quest, however, is the possibility that the right questions will not be asked, or that the grail is not authentic, and therefore, empty of personal significance. Lance B. Johnson, the surfer evokes not only LBJ (who could be said to have been lost in the jungle of Vietnam—for those who prefer political interpretations), but also Lancelot, who like Lance got wrapped up in the distractions of the world and thus lost his way. It was Lancelot’s son, Galahad, who was a Grail Knight.
Goethe wrote much, but the work he is best known for is his story of Faustus, the doctor who sold his soul to the devil for immense knowledge. Kurtz’s knowledge and power dissolve into a horror, maybe because he realizes with “his clear mind” what he has relinquished for his “mad” soul. And finally, the Bible is a book whose main message (of the Old Testament) is that one must never substitute pagan idolatry for the true God. Over and over again, throughout the Old Testament God punishes the Israelites because they have turned from him and begun to worship pagan gods. It is a book full of God’s wrath and His redemption all the way through to Revelation (The Apocalypse). The appearance of the Bible in the story suggests that an exploration of the polarity of wrath and redemption in the film could be a fruitful avenue for analysis.
One further note: to begin the film with “The End” (by The Doors), suggests another book by T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets in which you can find these famous lines:

“In my beginning is my end” (East Coker 1).

“What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning./The end is where we start from” (Little Gidding 214-16).

“Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,/Every poem an epitaph. And any action/Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat/Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start” (Little Gidding 224-227).

And there are other lines that seem appropriate for the film:
Eliot mentions the “backward half-look/Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror” (The Dry Salvages 101-02).

“I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you/Which shall be the darkness of God” (East Coker 112-13).

“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river/Is a strong brown god…”(The Dry Salvages 1-2). And “The river is within us” (The Dry Salvages 15).

And the optimistic (or pessimistic): “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time” (Little Gidding 239-242).

This is a very interesting thread and thanks to Mark for starting it (unusually ‘deep’ of you, sir – ha, just kidding…kinda). Anyway …

The Kurtz character in Apocalypse Now has always fascinated me (more so when I was younger, but still, even today when I’m “less younger”) because I’ve always felt that he was like an ‘intellectual gone astray.’ That he became caught up within the “austicity” of his own mind. His isolation in this culture that was foreign to him (no matter how much he thought he related to it, it was not his inherently) and his obvious obsession with this self-imposed philosophy seemed to, most likely, be enabled by his reading material.

Kurtz incessantly quotes various sources throughout the film and indeed this seems to shape his personality … he seems to have no personality beyond these literal influences and this interests me a great deal. Caught up within the confines of this familiar, literary world, surrounded by a foreign culture (though Kurtz believes the two are naturally related), Kurtz believes himself to be a deity and, within this context, who can argue? He ensconces himself apart from those who cannot understand his words (words, of which, are inherited – not born from original thought, or at least, from perceived original thought – which is a very different thing from the knowledge of contrivance) until the inevitable occurs: a man from his own culture who is not intimidated by things he does not understand because he knows (if not intellectually, instinctually) that these words are merely the ramblings of a disturbed mind.