BOO KS
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perhaps
Youth
as vintage Conrad, on the strength of which he has
made his way among readers. Not that this is the only "good" fic–
tion; but that here we will find in highest concentration the qualities
which have made readers care about Conrad. There is not much
doubt that it is greatly imaginative fiction; not much doubt, either,
that it is greatly flawed. For the sake of the mournful poetry hidden
in these stories, how much we must put up with! Artificial rhetoric
(straining, abstract adjectives contribute the worst of it) , artificial
feelings (chiefly amorous) , clumsy machinery (longwinded letters,
impossible observers ), gropings and gaspings after points which re–
main in the end "mysterious," that dreadful bore Marlow with his
insistent commentary, his extraneous confusion plastered on top of
Conrad's own. Yet out of all this, it is the poetry that we remember,
not the purple patches about landscape or heroism or philosophy,
but the poetry of failure and of endurance under failure. Conrad's
novels are acts of involvement, the conflicts of which frequently
surpass the author's powers of resolution, of dramatization, some–
times even of formulation. We connect this gap with "flaws" in the
fiction; but in fact the flaws of a systematic overreacher are the
conditions of his virtues.
If
Jim actually did "redeem himself" at
Patusan, if honorable fidelity were a sufficient answer to the nihil–
ism of Kurtz, we should be a great deal poorer in our perception of
these stories. Some of the power of Conrad's evocation must depend
on its romantic incompleteness. But how then shall we draw the
line which entitles us to feel
Victory
as stagy and melodramatic?
These considerations provide an ideal field of exercise for the
critical biographer; but if the criticism is not incisive and the bio–
graphy is not artfully engaged with it, the reader will be left at a
depressing distance from Conrad. This is the fate of the book under
review. After surveying the life and volumes of his subject, Mr.
Baines dismisses us with the pretty dim impression that Conrad
wrote a number of novels, some of which have been called great and
all of which are pretty good, though some are better than others,
though no one is quite sure which ones they are, or why. Possibly a
critical biography cannot undertake to define matters more closely
than
this without losing the biographical thread in the critical soup;
but
it is a real deficiency in the mixed form which leads a man to
mingle generally competent and sometimes useful biography with
