Four Ways of Looking at Joseph Conrad

I am reading Collected Studies in the Use of English, by Kenneth Cox, and I will devote more time to writing about this delightful, densely written book. For now, I’m struck by Cox’s respectful treatment of Joseph Conrad, and also by how the great exiled Pole has touched so many other writers, and not only novelists. Faulkner loved his work, of course, especially The Nigger of the Narcissus, as I recall. Here is Cox, followed by three others on Conrad:

“Sailors, he said in Chance and he was thinking of conditions under sail, are great readers. In Youth the twenty-year-old second mate Marlow returns to his ship at Falmouth, after a spree in London, with a set of Byron. Extensive reading in works of travel and exploration is evident almost everywhere but sources are seldom named. One rare instance turns up in the unlikeliest place: Alfred Russel Wallace’s famous book on the Malay archipelago is cited in The Secret Agent. Somehow he kept up with modern fiction in French. He is not suspected of giving much time to the English lady novelists.”

V.S. Naipual, from “Conrad’s Darkness,” The Return of Eva Peron:

“And there are the aphorisms. They run right through Conrad’s work, and their tone never varies. It is the same wise man who seems to be speaking.”

Murray Kempton, from “As the World Turns,” New York Newsday, Dec. 10, 1989, collected in Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events:

“The cruelty and indifference of misgovernment explain the bandit’s of Conrad’s Costaguana [in Nostromo], and perhaps the same things explain the FMLN in El Salvador’s hills today. We must look to the novelist if we hope to understand. His is the matter of fact. Social science and intelligence reports are the mere poor stuff of an unadorned imagination.”

Henry James, from a letter to Conrad on Nov. 1, 1906, after Conrad had sent him an inscribed copy of The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions:

“I read you as I listen to rare music – with deepest depths or surrender, & out of those depths I emerge slowly & reluctantly again, to acknowledge that I return to life….But the book itself is a wonder to me really – for its so bringing home the prodigy of your part of experience; bringing it home to me more personally & directly, I mean, the immense treasure & the inexhaustible adventure. No one has known – for intellectual use – the things you know, & you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached. I find you, in it all, writing wonderfully, whatever you may say of your difficult medium & your plume rebelle.”