'To Read an Honest-to-God Masterpiece'

I love the tartness of Elizabeth Bowen’s sentences: “When a writer has been brought to a halt by death, one kind of activity in him has to replace another: he can no longer cover more ground, like a tractor; he has to work upon us with a static persistence, like an electric drill.” Perhaps it’s her Irishness or her conviction that writing is best thought of as another species of work. Precision counts. So do dedication and a sort of ameliorated perfectionism. You can’t be sloppy or self-indulgent. That’s how people get hurt or disappointed, and you don’t want to hurt or disappoint your readers. The sentence quoted above is from Bowen’s 1936 review of Edward Crankshaw’s Joseph Conrad: Some Aspects of the Art of the Novel, collected in her Collected Impressions (1950). Conrad had been dead for twelve years and his reputation was in danger of fading:

“[H]is books come under the shadow of mortality and, if they are to live, have to reinstate themselves with us. To live, they must be either classics or curiosities—and curiosities have not much life. Their particular, personal element tells, for a time, against them—possibly we are more estranged from the lately dead than we know—they have to stand on their general, major qualities. The entertainer has now to become a monument, outside our own variations of taste and fancy. If his books are to outlive him, we expect them to outlive us.”

Bowen isn’t afraid to state the obvious: “Only perversity or smallness of spirit could deny Conrad’s stature.”

I remembered Bowen’s review after Dana Gioia told me he is reading Nostromo, Conrad’s greatest novel, the one I most often reread: “I’ve been saving the book for years,” he says. “I’ve read everything else by Conrad. The novel is even better than I had hoped. It is so good to read an honest-to-God masterpiece.”