Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]

by Henry Seidel Canby

MEN AND THEIR BOOKS

CONRAD AND MELVILLE

THE appearance of the definitive edition of Joseph Conrad, with his interesting critical prefaces included, was a provocation to read and reread his remarkable series of books, the most remarkable contribution to English literature by an alien since the language began. But is it a reason for writing more of an author already more discussed than any English stylist of our time? For myself, I answer, yes, because I have found no adequate definition of the difference between Conrad and us to whom English thinking is native, nor a definition of his place, historically considered, in the modern scheme; no definition, that is, which explains my own impressions of Conrad. And therefore I shall proceed, as all readers should, to make my own.

If you ask readers why they like Conrad, two out of three will answer, because he is a great stylist, or because he writes of the sea. I doubt the worth of such answers. Many buy books because they are written by great stylists, but few read for just that reason. They read because there is something in an author's work which attracts them to his style, and that something may be study of character, skill in narrative, or profundity in truth, of which style is the perfect expression, but not the thing itself. Only connoisseurs, and few of them, read for style. And, furthermore, I very much doubt whether readers go to Conrad to learn about the sea. They might learn as much from Cooper or Melville, but they have not gone there much of late. And many an ardent lover of Conrad would rather be whipped than go from New York to Liverpool on a square-rigged ship.

In any case, these answers, which make up the sum of most writing about Conrad, do not define him. To say that an author is a stylist is about as helpful as to say that he is a thinker. And Conrad would have had his reputation if he had migrated to Kansas instead of to the English sea.

In point of fact, much may be said, and with justice, against Conrad's style. It misses occasionally the English idiom, and sometimes English grammar, which is a trivial criticism. It offends more frequently against the literary virtues of conciseness and economy, which is not a trivial criticism. Conrad, like the writers of Elizabethan prose (whom he resembles in ardency and in freshness), too often wraps you in words, stupefies you with gorgeous repetition, goes about and about and about, trailing phrases after him, while the procession of narrative images halts. He can be as prolix in his brooding descriptions as Meredith with his intellectual vaudeville. Indeed, many give him lip service solely because they like to be intoxicated, to be carried away, by words. A slight change of taste, such as that which has come about since Meredith was on every one's tongue, will make such defects manifest. Meredith lives in spite of his prolixities, and so will Conrad, but neither because they are perfect English stylists.

I am sure also that Conrad, at his very best, is not so good as Melville, at his best, in nautical narrative; as Melville in, say, the first day of the final chase of Moby Dick; I question whether he is as good in sea narrative as Cooper in the famous passage of Paul Jones's ship through the shoals. Such comparisons are, of course, rather futile. They differentiate among excellences, where taste is a factor. Nevertheless, it is belittling to a man who, above almost all others in our language, has brooded upon the mysteries of the mind's action, to say that he is great because he describes so well the sea.

We must seek elsewhere for a definition of the peculiar qualities of Conrad. And without a definition it is easy to admire but hard to estimate and understand him.

I believe, first of all, that Conrad has remained much more a Slav than he, or any of us, have been willing to admit. A friend of mine, married to a Slav, told me of her husband, how, with his cab at the door, and dinner waiting somewhere, he would sit brooding (so he said) over the wrongs of his race. It is dangerous to generalize in racial characteristics, but no one will dispute a tendency to brood as a characteristic of the Slav. The Russian novels are full of characters who brood, and of brooding upon the characters and their fates. The structure of the Russian story is determined not by events so much as by the results of passionate brooding upon the situation in which the imagined characters find themselves.

So it is with Conrad, always and everywhere. In "Nostromo" he broods upon the destructive power of a fixed idea; in "The Rescue" upon the result of flinging together elemental characters of the kind that life keeps separate; in "Youth" upon the illusions, more real than reality, of youth. No writer of our race had ever the patience to sit like an Eastern mystic over his scene, letting his eye fill with each slightest detail of it, feeling its contours around and above and beneath, separating each detail of wind and water, mood and emotion, memory and hope, and returning again and again to the task of description, until every impression was gathered, every strand of motive threaded to its source.