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JOHN THOMPSON
these books today have the power to strike us thoughtlessly and di–
rectly. We read them, I think, not with the old sense that this
is
life
only more so, but with the historical sense that these constructions
are the oblique comments of an author who feels and thinks certain
things about life but would not otherwise be willing to say them.
For contemporary literature this will not work. We do not want to
have to assume attitudes in order to read what should be news to
us. There are many reasons for this; perhaps one of the least of
them, but a real one, is simply that doing what it had to do, our
literary criticism has extended our awareness so far that it has
become harder and harder for us to experience literary art in the
old unconscious way. Can we now feel for the names in novels, as
we used to do, the old pity and terror and purgation?
Every form of our literature
is
turning more and more to the
direct statement, to autobiography, to confession, to forms of the
essay. Perhaps soon none of the names will even be changed to
protect the guilty. Our willing public ignorance of ourselves may
then dissolve not in emotion and ritual but in consciousness, and
we may then yet do something about our troubles. Only suppose,
for instance, that we agreed to make abortion both legal and blame–
less.... But if that
is
too much to expect, or too little, we may at
least learn to experience our troubles consciously and together. For
nothing
really
works; there will always be something left, some mess
of troubles, something to gossip about.
John Thompson
VIEWS OF CONRAD
JOSEPH CONRAD: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY. By Jocelyn Bo ines.
McGrow-Hill. $8.50.
The Conrad vogue advances, and having reached the
stage of a dozen paperbacks, half a dozen full scale critical stu–
dies, some unthinkable quantum of doctoral theses, and the elabor–
ately documented critical biography noted above, may now be
accounted official. To be sure, this is less a second wave of Conrad
