A Mariner's Chart

...Primarily, Moser sets himself two questions: "Why did a writer of Conrad's caliber write so unevenly and why is his later work so inferior to his earlier...

...His arguments necessarily debunk mythical or allegorical interpretations to the contrary...

...He discovers it, as is to be expected, in the master's style with its idiosyncratic employment of personal narrative, illustrative episode, rearranged chronology, sensory image and the like...

...As with expression, so with philosophy...

...His uninhibited scholarship may be gauged from this kind of broadmindedness: In studying his subject's prose, he does not hesitate to report that he finds a repealed psychoanalytical relationship between Conradian faulty expression and sexual situations...

...They do more: They clear away gross misunderstandings that make us deaf to the true Conrad...

...He discovers it first in an ethic in which humanity and fidelity under stress is emphasized...

...As a result, books like The Arrow of Gold, The Rover and Suspense are not affirmations of greatness, he expounds, but witnesses to exhaustion and demoralization...

...He discovers it also in types of characters: the simple hero, the vulnerable hero, the perceptive hero, and, less admirable, the villain unmoral and shameless...

...His own concrete symbolic writing, ironic in tone, flattens and loses richness...

...Having established a locus of achievement, Moser is able to measure the extent of Conrad's uneven-ness...

...In the last analysis, they bring us to an awareness, as he hopes, "of one of the finest voices in our literature: pessimistic, skeptical, ironic—but also courageous, sympathetic, profoundly human...

...To answer either question, he must manifestly establish what the Conradian high mark is...

...or they are destroyed, either literally as when Willems is shot dead by Ai'ssa or metaphorically as when Alvan Hervey is denied connubial bliss by Mrs...

...In these terms, Moser answers his second question, the one that poses the inferiority of Conrad's latter works...

...The difficulty (only Nostromo is wholly free of it) is as present in more notable works like Lord Jim or The Secret Agent as it is in lesser creative efforts like Almayers Folly or An Outcast of the Islands...

...Reviewed by Max Cosman Scholarly interest continues unabated in T. J. K. Korzeniowski (more commonly known as Joseph Conrad...

...He discovers it, too, in Conrad's own complexity, in his skeptical sad mind, with its doubts of fixed standards of conduct, which knew well the terrible effects in man of physical or moral isolation...

...The earlier insistence on accountability, on the strenuous struggle, alters to a denial by him of individual guilt and, what is more startling, to an acknowledgement that peace is man's greatest good...

...Whether it was physiologically a thinness of the sexual in his own nature, or professionally his lonely sailor's inability to cope with a sex outside of his habitual ken, or neurotically his Strind-bergian fear of the human love duel, the result was ever the same: His characters tend to withdraw from sexual entanglement, as Verloc does...

...If, then, compared with his power to present the facing of moral decisions in some position of responsibility, Conrad fails to project dramatically his conviction that love is more important than life, it is not surprising that his later work should not only be charged with such failure but, as illness and age took hold of him, even with a diminution of inventiveness and creative energy...

...or they idealize women out of reality, as is the case with Peter Ivanovich...

...Though Moser's approach is exe-getical, that is, attentive to the text, he is not negligent of other considerations...

...Hervey...

...The fact is that Conrad, with all his insight into human relationships otherwise, had no gift for portraying roundly the romanticism of the one between man and woman...

...Pole by birth, Russian subject by fate, naturalized Briton by choice, and writer of a series of fictions like Nostromo, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Under Western Skies, and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' that are part of the treasure of English literature...

...Basically—and this is Moser's contribution to the canon of Conradian criticism—it is Conrad's difficulty in writing about love that vitiates his work...

...To earlier leading studies by M. C. Bradbrook and F. R. Leavis, and more recent ones by Oliver Warner and M. D. Zabel, must now be added this monograph by Thomas Moser...