The works of Joseph Conrad

[From Tellers of Tales, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1939, p. xxx:]

Conrad rarely wrote anything but short stories, though, being a writer of an exuberant verbosity, he often made them as long as most novels. He needed sea-room. He had little sense of concision. A theme with him was like the stem of a cauliflower; it grew and grew under his active pen until, all its branches headed with succulent flowers, it became a very fine but somewhat monstrous plant. Typhoon shows all his power and none of his weakness. It is a tale of the sea, which he knew better than he knew the land, and it is concerned with men, whom he knew better than he knew women. These sailor chaps are a little simpler than most of us now think human beings really are, but show more they live. Typhoon narrates an incident, which was a thing Conrad could do with mastery, and the subject gives him opportunity for his wonderful and vivid descriptions of the phenomena of nature.

[Preface to First Person Singular, Heinemann, The Collected Edition, 1936:]

Another method of telling a story that has for some time found considerable favour is to tell it from the point of view of one of the characters. This may be either a character who plays an essential part in the story or it may be that of an observer, and the latter I should like to call the method of Charles his Friend. Charles the Friend plays the part of the Greek chorus. He observes and comments; he is there to be told circumstances that it behoves the reader to know, and now and then he takes a discreet and minor part in the action. He is a useful messenger. He can be of service to embroil a situation or to unravel a mystery.

[…]

No one cultivated the method of Charles his Friend with a more anxious care than Henry James. It may seem to some that the trouble he took was not worth while and that it had been wiser, like Joseph Conrad, to treat the convention with no more respect than it deserves. Captain Marlowe does not begin to be credible and yet the reasonable reader believes him.

[From Great Modern Reading, Nelson Doubleday, 1943, p. 526:]

Joseph Conrad is less read now and less admired than during his lifetime, but Lord Jim remains a fine romantic novel. It shows him at his best.

[From Collected Short Stories, vol. 4, Penguin, 1983 [1963], “Neil Macadam”, p. 433:]

'I read a lot of Conrad.'
'For pleasure or to improve your mind?'
'Both. I admire him awfully.'
Darya threw up her arms in an extravagant gesture of protest.
'That Pole,' she cried. 'How can you English ever have let yourselves be taken in by that wordy mountebank? He has all the superficiality of his countrymen. That stream of words, those involved sentences, the showy rhetoric, that affectation of profundity: when you get through all that to the thought at the bottom, what do you find but a trivial commonplace? He was like a second-rate actor who put on a romantic dress and declaims a play by Victor Hugo. For five minutes you say this is heroic, and then your whole soul revolts and you cry, no, this is false, false, false.'
She spoke with a passion that Neil had never know anyone show when speaking of art or literature. Her cheeks, usually colourless, flushed and her pale eyes glowed.
'There's no one who got atmosphere like Conrad,' said Neil.
'I can smell and see and feel the East when I read him.'
'Nonsense. What do you know about the East ? Everyone will tell you that he made the grossest blunders. Ask Angus.'
'Of course he was not always accurate,' said Munro, in his measured, reflective way. 'The Borneo he described is not the Borneo we know. He saw it from the deck of a merchant-vessel and he was not an acute observer even of what he saw. But does it matter? I don't know why fiction should be hampered by fact. I don't think it's a mean achievement to have created a country, a dark, sinister, romantic, and heroic country of the soul.'
'You're a sentimentalist, my poor Angus.' And then again to Neil: 'You must read Turgenev, you must read Tolstoy, you must read Dostoyevsky.' show less