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ROBERT M. ADAMS
strange collaborative efforts with F. M. Hueffer are spelled out fully
and carefully. And the last twenty years of Conrad's life, which
Jean-Aubry summarized very briefly, occupy a fuller proportion of
the new book-at the cost of giving us more of Conrad's hypo–
chondriacal wailings and weepings than will be to everyone's taste.
On the other hand, there are some surprising oversights and
obliquities in Mr. Baines's retelling of the story. He does not tell us
how, when, or on what terms Conrad became acquainted with
Henry James, and generally handles perfunctorily what became one
of the most intriguing of literary associations. Indeed, Mr. Baines is
not gracious about introductions; Conrad's "friend Hope" turns up
on page 122 without a word of explanation as to who he was;
Richard Curle has been in and out of the book repeatedly before he
is introduced on page 390; and even Conrad's wife J essie appears
for the first time on the page (169) where Conrad decides to marry
her-her previous existence and the course of their acquaintance
being summarized in a bit of perfunctory afterthought.
Aside from its accomplishments and deficiencies in matters of
fact, Mr. Baines's biography is not a distinguished literary perform–
ance. He has a curious gift for the untimely and heavyhanded col–
loquialism. Thus we are treated to the spectacle of Conrad "mooch–
ing about," "taking his uncle for a ride," bringing characters alive,
"even if a trifle cornily," and, at the age of nearly sixty, "falling for"
a girl. These are jarring locutions to discover in the biography of a
subtle analyst of human passions, who struggled all his life for the
exact descriptive word. In summarizing Conrad's novels, Mr.
Baines's literary awkwardness seems accentuated- as the faults of a
single half page will exemplify. After picturing for us life aboard a
South Seas trader, Conrad, we are told, "goes on to describe in
The
Shadow-Line
how this young ship's officer was staying at the Sailors'
Home in Singapore, waiting for a passage home, when he realized
from the peculiar behaviour of the chief steward and the persistent
rather cryptic hints from a certain Captain Patterson (Giles in the
story) , that something unusual was afoot." The sentence is over–
loaded, avoidably ugly, and vulgar in its locutions. In recounting
the young man's further adventures, Mr. Baines must deal with the
former captain of the
Otago.
In addition to being eccentric and
neglectful, "he had other unfortunate proclivities too. The night he
