CONRAD
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at times a suicidal defeatist; the Romantic lover of the sea was bored
to fury whenever he had to pass much time on it; the lover of truth
had a way of lying about his past; the defender of chivalry made
babyish demands on his wife and resented the existence of his chil–
dren. Conrad's idolators will have to ponder such incidents as his
tossing his infant's clothes out a train window, or his retiring to his
room for three weeks when the family maid died and writing melan–
choly letters from "Your boy" to his wife downstairs. It seems cruel to
mention these long-available details of petty behavior, which could
probably be matched from any great writer's life, but the cruelty is
toward a false image and not toward Conrad, whose dignity consisted
precisely in his struggle to overcome his emotional incapacities.
Paradoxically, I suspect that a certain iconoclasm toward the
beauty of artists' lives may be conducive to an honest respect for
their art. However eager we may be to look up to a novelist for
moral guidance, this wish is clearly not what involves and holds us in
his fiction.
If
fiction teaches a lesson it is only as a by-product of
something more crucial, a shared experience; not ideas but fantasies
entice us into someone else's imaginative world. It is no coincidence
that Moser and Meyer, with their interest in aspects of Conrad's
work that contradict his deliberate moral intentions, can make better
sense of verbal nuances and oddities of plotting than other critics have
done. No moral or formal commentary can account for the fact that
Conrad's best work, in Mudrick's words, produces an effect of "ob–
struction and deadlock, an opposition of matched and mutually para–
lyzed energies...." Conrad's most significant level of discourse is the
unconscious level, where inadmissible wishes are entertained, blocked
and allowed a choked and guarded expression.
The atmosphere of Conrad's fiction is only partly one of physical
challenge; there is always an opposite pull toward easeful death.
The source of this urge is obviously his own depressive tendency,
which he fought, disguised and tried to negate in his art as in his
life. And yet he is a consistently autobiographical writer; the effort
to shout down his deepest impulses entails an incessant recasting of his
psychic history.
As
Dr. Meyer points out, "almost without exception
Conrad's heroes are motherless wanderers, postponing through mo–
mentary bursts of action their long-awaited return to a mother, whose
untimely death has sown the seeds of longing and remorse, and
