The Creative Impact of War

...Misplaced, neglected, pedantically pigeonholed, like Ver-meer, Rembrandt, Bach, Melville- that is possible...

...As he sees it, Conrad's concern during the Great War became concentrated in his own public persona, or, to use Said's own phrase, with "The Development of Joseph Conrad...

...What would you think," he inquires blandly, "of an attempt to promote fraternity amongst people living on the same street, I don't even mention two neighboring streets...

...This, however, is not exactly the way Said interprets the facts...

...To his friend Galsworthy, who had referred to the War conventionally enough, as "this hell,' he replied comfortingly, "It may be more in the nature of a Purgatory if only in this respect that it won't last forever...

...Said's scholarship suffers from a tendency toward presumptuous imaginative flights...

...I do not find this motivation credible in the light of anything I have ever read either by Conrad or about him...

...Whatever the shortcomings of Said's study, its seriousness should demonstrate conclusively why this has not happened or is likely to happen...

...Thus, despite the qualities of sensitivity and intelligence, Said's book is not of the exceptional kind which gives a new view of its subject...

...Artists of such magnitude cannot, in the absence of complete cultural amnesia, be forgotten...

...Its critical virtues lie in the sensitivity of its texture and in some of its detailed observations...

...In an important letter to his "idealistic" friend Cunninghame Graham in 1899 (which Said reprints), he disclaimed the title of "democrat...

...The idea itself, like that of many dissertation topics, has a certain plausibility...

...While I think this book (which the Preface tells us originated as a doctoral dissertation at Harvard) fails to fulfill its initial promise, in some ways it is still a creditable piece of work...

...A decade ago, Bertrand Russell wrote in a memoir: "Conrad, I suppose, is in process of being forgotten...

...He tried to incorporate some of his new insights into his creative work...

...Paradoxically, the War, which for many of the young became the source or the excuse for disastrous disillusionment, healed and illuminated the spirit of the elderly Conrad...

...He had long been bitterly cynical and pessimistic about the possibilities of human nature...

...Said's intentions, including the full meaning of his title, are never fully illuminated...

...its defects are due to obscurity in the execution of its overall design...

...In most cases, such enterprises turn out to be less than hoped for, though more than sufficient to fulfill the degree requirement...

...Conrad's newly found faith in man and his destiny even survived the War...

...Said's exploration of the background and theme of the story "The Shadow Line," written during the War, may perhaps lead to a more sympathetic re-examination of his later work...

...In the least propitious circumstances, he suddenly became hopeful...

...Yet it remains true that the more persuasive Conrad is the early pessimist, who confronted his European contemporaries with his discoveries of human illusion in the depths of Africa and east of Suez...

...Even in autobiographical works where the decencies are preserved by a mere fig-leaf of fiction, the relationship between the two genres is extremely problematic...

...International fraternity," he wrote, was an "illusion" that "imposes by its size alone...

...The shock proved psychologically if not artistically salutary, and in a sense confirmed his conviction that all experiences which do not destroy a person outright eventually save and make him stronger...

...At first the War did not seem to require any radical reorganization of Conrad's ideas or attitudes...

...The effort to demonstrate parallels between life and art in such cases is probably as doomed to failure as an attempt to correlate the life of a great chess player with the style of his game...

...But the realization of his worst nightmares produced a completely unexpected and unpredictable effect upon him...

...He is also sometimes careless of his facts, as when, in the same story, he attributes a fairly important statement-"We are not living in a boy's adventure tale"- to the mysterious character, Legatt, rather than to the narrator...

...He entered the arena of the actions and passions of his age, which he had been hitherto inclined to regard from a curiously detached and critical position...

...Though he was clearsighted and realistic enough to perceive that an organization like the League of Nations was engaged in a task almost as futile as sketching out a tennis court while the ground was moving underfoot, he apparently strove to become as good a European as the great Goethe, whose beatific vision of a united Europe he had treated ironically years before...

...But such "planets" invariably swim back "into our ken," never to disappear again...

...The most thought-provoking passage of Conrad's life emerging from Said's study took place during World War I. Though much too old to serve as an active combatant, Conrad was as deeply affected by the international explosion as any of the younger fighters...

...Two ends of the same street...

...for example, though admitting there is no objective evidence for the connection, he identifies a minor character in The Secret Sharer with Conrad's publishers...

...More than ever before he began to credit the importance of an ethical will, as distinguished from the blind, striving will postulated by Schopenhauer...

...Turning political journalist and employing a type of rhetoric he had once treated satirically, he declared in an Australian newspaper that "the Commonwealth [is] passing through this fiery baptism into the rank of a world-power, not great yet, but bound to lead in its part of the world progress of ideals...

...One is curious to see what will come of it...

...In a way that is too bad, for though he went into an esthetic decline, the older Conrad (like the older Wordsworth) may have become philosophically a sounder and more balanced guide...

...Author, "The Proustian Vision" Edward Said seems to be a man of delicate sensibilities intent on sympathetically tracing the parallel developments of Conrad's life and thought during his writing career- that is, from the time he decided to try to become an author instead of a sea-captain in 1889, to the time of his death in 1924...

...Indeed, one would think that Conrad should have been prepared for the outbreak of hostilities on a catastrophic scale unprecedented in history...

...Nor do I even find it consistent with some of the other things which Said himself writes about Conrad...

...The tone here has an edge reminding me somewhat of C?©line-whose African chapters in Journey to the End of the Night, incidentally, seem much indebted to Conrad's Heart of Darkness...

...Perhaps most striking of all, he wrote in 1916 to his French translator, Andr?© Gide, of his unshakable confidence in the future of mankind and his profound conviction that the "shadow of Germanism" (which he detested as much as "Russianism," in either its Czarist or Bolshevik phase) would finally pass away from the earth...

...The War apparently caused Conrad to doubt the maturity of his earlier romantic response to the problems of life and to accept the resolute assertion of the will as something more than the evil or expiatory force that it had previously seemed to him...

...But we are stimulated to think freshly about that subject...

...In stories like Conrad's, characterized by a very active and extensive imaginative invention, the problem may perhaps be insoluble...