Conrad Without Pattern

...But considering the opportunity Baines had, his book is generally disappointing...

...Just as Baines refuses to find any pattern in Conrad’s works, he refuses to draw anything like a portrait of his subject, to trace any pattern in the wealth of biographical fact that he presents, other than to suggest every now and then that Conrad was a stranger in a strange land, an isolated figure, aware of a sense of guilt in leaving Poland...

...Perhaps he has done the best he can, but even when Conrad himself has spoken to a point, Baines takes recourse in “it seems” or “apparently...

...Baines suffers in part from the defects of the very virtues that distinguish him from Conrad’s “official” biographer Aubry, from Gustav Morf, from Miss Jerry Allen...

...What Baines has written is a chronologically arranged record of events, interspersed at the appropriate dates with comments on each of the novels, stories and collaborations that make up the canon of Conrad’s works...

...When the novels or stories are more or less autobiographical, Baines, though with undue caution, extracts from them what biographical evidence they can be made to yield...

...Surely the point of this novel depends upon the fact that these anarchists are harmless phonies, representative of the varieties of revolutionary doctrine which in this novel lead to endless talk and no action...

...All of this, of course, is commonplace...

...We come to believe that Baines does not care to build upon the critical judgments of others, that he recognizes Conrad’s critics only when he disagrees with them...

...This seems to condemn the biographer to failure from the outset, but in any case it does not produce the “rounder portrait” that Baines feels he has drawn, freed as he hopes from the impressionism of those who knew Conrad personally...

...for example, that while Conrad was in Switzerland “he apparently worked at Almayer’s Folly because he wrote . . . ‘Geneva...

...But he suffers more from attempting what he calls a “critical biography...

...This term is a misleading one...

...Despite its disappointing weaknesses, Baines’ book is the best we have...

...But he owes Moser and others the courtesy of coming to grips with their argument, or at least indicating that he knows of the existence of Moser’s work...

...He tells us...

...is rendered forever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in the history of Almayer’s decline and fall.’ “ He is daring only when he has no evidence to support a conjecture, as, for example, when he maintains that Conrad, dominated by his father in his youth, found the father-son relationship too emotionally charged and allowed his deepest impulses to find “disguised expression through a portrayal of the father-daughter relationship,” beginning with Almayer and Nina...

...The field was wide open...

...But at those critical moments in the life of his subject when we would like enlightenment or at least an informed guess, Baines is pretty much disposed to leave matters where they stand...

...But Baines, here as elsewhere, is seldom disposed to consider the part in relation to the whole, and he compares these anarchists unfavorably to what he thinks of as the genuine revolutionary figures of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, figures who would be fantastically out of place in the plot of The Secret Agent, In violent reaction to Albert Guerard and Douglas Hewitt, Baines finds “The Secret Sharer” to be “intensely dramatic but, on the psychological and moral level, rather slight...

...This seems a fair enough description of his disadvantage...

...his predecessors were less comprehensive, less responsible, too clearly biased...

...It will be unfortunate if this book is allowed to remain the “standard life” of Joseph Conrad...

...The biography is to become a “critical” one, and it does...

...The anarchists in The Secret Agent seem “not very convincing” to Baines, or “rather they are slight, two-dimensional characters...

...Baines confesses finally that his handling of Conrad’s works has the disadvantage of burying “the unity of a writer’s work” under a “mass of superficial differences in detail...

...He makes more extensive use of Polish sources than anyone else and he makes letters available for the first time, even though he cannot resist publishing this material at greater length than is really relevant, justified presumably because the Polish documents and the letters are hard to come by...

...Still, it is “undoubtedly one of his best short stories” (and so is “Falk” we discover when we come upon the same phrase repeated...

...Baines consistently refuses to see the novels and stories of Conrad as in any way a whole...

...No study of Conrad offers as many facts as Baines has assembled: no earlier biographer has been more indefatigable in his pursuit of sources...

...In commenting on the role that he has chosen to play as a biographer, he says that, not knowing Conrad, he can assert definitely only the “barest and least significant facts,” and depend on the “incomplete and in the most important respects unverifiable evidence of others...

...But he is by no means content to use the work of Conrad merely for this end...

...Otherwise he tries to go it alone and too frequently writes as if his reader had never read either Conrad or any of Conrad’s critics...

...Reviewed by William M. Sale Professor of English, Cornell University JUDGMENT of Jocelyn Baines’ life of Joseph Conrad is difficult to make without seeming uncharitable...

...He cautiously weighs Conrad’s Polish heritage and though more impressed by some of Morf’s speculations about that heritage than he always admits, he avoids Morf’s extremes...

...His book is “indispensable,” but Baines has neither the art of the biographer nor the perceptiveness of the critic...

...There are, to use one of Baines’ favorite phrases, “a lot” of critics of Conrad whom Baines may accurately call “dabblers in the occult,” but they are not all “alchemical,” nor is Baines infallible in distinguishing between those who have recognized the genuine subtlety of Conrad’s art and those who seem bent on providing the least likely hypothesis by way of interpretation...

...we can only suppose, when he pronounces this or that work one of the best or worst, when he somewhat painfully summarizes the action of a novel, when he extracts brief passages from their context because these passages are fine or not so fine prose, when he uses, with no apparent awareness of the danger, such critical terms as “romance” and “realistic,” and when he takes, as in his discussion of “The Secret Sharer,” a perverse position of his own presumably because he is so exasperated with the perversity of other critics of this story...

...He is certainly privileged to reject the currently fashionable pattern imposed upon Conrad’s work, the pattern best summarized by the subtitle of Thomas Moser’s critical volume: “Achievement and Decline...

...The Shadow-Line, he tells us, is “an outstandingly well-told tale in crisp, vivid prose,” in which the mate Burns is a “brilliantly portrayed character” who provides “some fine comic relief...

...In dissociating himself from some of Conrad’s more facile and less earthbound critics, Baines wins sympathy...

...Of course he is well advised to avoid the flamboyancy of Jerry Allen’s biography, The Sunshine and the Thunder, and he acutely undermines the conjecture about Conrad’s love affair in Marseilles which Miss Allen has placed centrally in her portrait...