150
MARTIN GREENBERG
also carries a copy of
Lord Jim
in his duffle. The story concerns a young
fellow who must find the courage, with the help of a world-weary
old hand who is the ship's scapegoat, to possess his own manhood. So
the general intention of the novel, as well as the title, is Conradian. But
the style and quality of the narrative are the opposite of Conradian.
Instead of long reflective sentences, a rich commentary on the action,
and slowly ripening significances, Mr. Madden's story has short declara–
tive sentences and abrupt transitions, few observations, and a significance
so little realized as hardly to exist without the title and the epigraph.
I don't of course accuse Mr. Madden of failing to write like Conrad.
An
author may come to his subject matter through a master and take his '
title and even the intention of his work from him, and still
be
free to
produce his own very different kind of story. You can write just as
well with short declarative sentences as with long reflective ones, maybe
even better. But Mr. Madden's short sentences are bald and jejune,
catching only the surface of things, and so is his story. After invoking
the name of Conrad which stands for the magic of storytelling if any
name does, Mr. Madden proceeds to rattle the dry knucklebones of a
narrative style that is about as unmagical as one could be.
I turn with some relief to
Clem Anderson,
by R.
V.
Cassill. He is
no storyteller either. But his swollen (627 pages), wordy novel, which
is madly pedantic and self-obsessed and which falls about as flat as a
story can fall, is nevertheless an interesting failure: one must respect
how much he cares about literature, and the passion with which he
denounces the corruption of contemporary literary culture.
Clem Ander–
son
is about the life and work, decline and early death of a modern
American literary genius, as told by his college teacher friend. He is
supposed to represent the "natural and demon-driven writer," full of
wit and fate, greatness and subversion. But this is purely a literary in–
tention; in actual, dramatic fact Clem is none of these things. His wit
is lame, his fate unreal, as a subversive he is little more than a wise
guy, and his greatness as a man and a writer is pure declamation on
the author's part. Not that the author doesn't try with embarrassing
literalness to make Clem live as a writer. My God, how he tries! We
are given whole poems and parts of poems by Clem Anderson, and
a long extract from his novel. But this kind of feat is always hard to
pull off. The poems are pastiches, lacking just that individuality which
Clem is supposed to possess, and the extract from his novel reads much
like the main novel, although Clem is supposed to
be
the wild creative
type and his friend a dry-as-dust teacher and critic.
Clem's corruption and decline as a man and a writer is represented
