BOOKS
BOOKS The genius of Joseph Conrad Thomas Lavoie In 1960 J.B. Priestley wrote that Joseph Conrad was "one of those writers whose importance we find hard to estimate____ He cannot be identified...
...Even though his later, more superficial and simplistic works were the more popular, he knew they were mere semblances of his earlier books, devoid of the richly suggestive language, psychological probing, and brilliant architectonics which marked such masterpieces as Lord Jim and Nostromo...
...More startling is the fact that the success of the economy is matched in other spheres of life...
...That America needs to learn about cooperation is painfully obvious in this era of stalemate when even a national energy policy seems beyond our capabilities...
...His gravestone reads "Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski" a misspelling of Teodor, Joseph instead of Jozef, Conrad instead of Konrad...
...Basically, "public policy...
...Ford forgets that he had been making speeches that Nixon was innocent, and now he implies that he feared being compromised by seeing the evidence...
...Instead Ford, still trying to heal, called upon opponents to join him in unity and to appropriate another $1 billion in aid...
...He could not agree with Ford's double standard...
...He is currently at work on a study of Americans in Nineteenth Century Japan...
...During his address, two freshman Democrats walked out of Congress, but Ford, with pride, stresses that a veteran Democrat telephoned in support, "You just keep standing strong and tall for the United States and you'll have good Democratic support out here...
...so was the cooperative style which has given Japanese institutions their special flavor...
...Under the law, I have exclusive access to my White House papers for more than a decade, so I can tell the people what I want them to believe...
...Earlier Wilson had said, "Our conversations have been among the few consolations of my literary life through these years...
...He had to write because something inside drove him to it, and, like so many other writers, he had to write to pay the bills...
...Representative Ronald V. Dellums went to the nub of the convocation as he pointed out that "the problems of the world today are rapidly becoming political problems which we cannot solve by military solutions...
...An emergency like war or depression might lead to the kind of self-conscious national effort it would take to accept learning from Japan (or those European countries which have recognized the need for limits and planning), but such a scenario is hardly desirable...
...They constitute a kind of scapegoating that keeps Americans from the disquieting admission "that the Japanese have beaten us in economic competition because of their superior planning, organization, and effort...
...Upon counsel from Secretary Schlesinger, who wanted a smaller attack, and mostly from a young photographer, Ford reduced the size of the military operation...
...His last novels Chance, Victory, The Roverwere financial successes and, with his reputation firmly established, collectors paid generous sums for his manuscripts, typescripts, outlines, anything...
...On the way to the Vice Presidency, Gerald Ford learned how to get ahead: Stay with the pack, don't be nakedly ambitious, but don't hide your light under a bushel...
...Conrad was a combination of Odysseus and Don Quixote...
...In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair...
...In his final years he simply used his personal background all over again and it didn't work...
...History, alas, is Vogel's weakest point...
...the one prize he wanted so much eluded him...
...He went from breakdown to breakdown throughout his entire career, each one draining a little more from him even as the breakdowns simultaneously inspired him to write still another novel, short story, or play...
...Pluck, grit, hard work: these values abound...
...Its 115 million people now boast salaries and a standard of living comparable to our own...
...That sounds statesmanlike...
...And on the Warren Commission, like other members, don't probe or be a nuisance...
...Those apocryphal words might be plastered as a warning on the dust-jacket of Gerald Ford's autobiography, for even more than other Presidential memoirs, it conceals much and discloses little...
...Even though he had to produce to survive, he was no prolific Anthony Trollope...
...took precedence over a rule of law...
...Yet the similarity of message suggests a striking historical continuity...
...You are one of the very few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them," Nabokov wrote in 1948...
...The common reader may occasionally grow weary of the discussions of Russian grammar and versification, but he will find in satisfying abundance an intellectual excitement generated by the collision of two top-notch minds...
...Vogel may sound like a Jeremiah, but if as in ancient times our sins overtake us, it will be impossible to claim we were not warned in advance...
...Available from Riverside Church, New York, NY 10027...
...To ask America to change in this direction is to turn against tradition...
...He, to believe his autobiography, was always the all-American boy scout...
...To suggest America needs a more comprehensive national industrial and trade policy, the creation of a small, responsible corps of independent high-level bureaucrats, and, above all, "a communitarian vision' ' is certainly to forget that our lack of planning, continuity, and vision in government and industry is also a legacy from our own past...
...The draft evaders and deserters were not so fortunate, however...
...Vogel finds such arguments misleading...
...Karl's central, analytical chapter on "The Novelist" is particularly strong...
...Haig inquired about the possibility of a pardon for Nixon if Ford became President...
...In a letter to his famous editor, Edward Garnett, he describes the torture he experienced trying to write The Rescue, a novel he worked on for thirty-three years: "I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day and the sitting down is all...
...Japan, for example, learned quickly from the West because overt openness to foreign ways was part of her tradition...
...Finck's approach was impressionistic...
...Karl spends a great deal of time exploring Conrad's Polish youth...
...12.95...
...In Japan as Number One Vogel argues that this is just the edge of a more serious problem which will emerge from the dynamic of the technological-industrial order...
...Vogel is a sociologist who has been closely studying that land for twenty years...
...During the summer of 1974, according to Ford, General Alexander Haig, Nixon's chief of staff, communicated almost daily with the Vice President on Nixon's plight, likely plans, and state of mind: Would or wouldn't he resign...
...Ultimately his portrait is frightening, for the fate that Henry Finck predicted seems ominously close...
...the edge of an abyss, his being constantly filled with a sense of isolation and marginality: "Having lost his mother, then his father, having assimilated in his childhood and youth the idea of a Poland devoured by Russia, a child victimized by patriotic parents, he chose another emptiness, the sea, a vastitude that could swallow him up...
...We can't call the book What I Choose to Conceal...
...Haig and Kissinger supported Ford...
...Japan "is systematically adopting all that is really sound in our Western institutions, and unless we follow her example and graft the best features of her moral and social institutions on our own habits, we shall be left in the lurch, and the sociologists of the Far East will, in a future century, look at us across the Pacific as we do at our untutored medieval ancestors in Europe...
...Acknowledging Japan's negative aspects urban overcrowding, mediocre universities, racism toward Koreans and the descendants of the former outcasts Vogel mainly focuses on those realms from which Americans might profitably learn...
...And so we have the "three lives" of the subtitle of Frederick Karl's biography Conrad the son of a Polish revolutionary and author, the seaman on French and later British ships, the English author of some of the finest novels ever written...
...He declares that he never nibbled at the hint of a pardon, even when the Article 25 ploy was sketched...
...He is a solitary figure in modern literature...
...Editor Karlinsky, who does his work admirably, leaves little doubt that Wilson, who had laboriously learned Russian, was usually wrong when he boldly disputed Nabokov's use of his native language...
...My future," he once wrote, "is already pawned...
...His desire to create was paramount, but the words never came easily...
...The only ques-, tion is a title...
...Among the articulate and informed spokesmen were Richard J. Barnet, George Wald, Michael T. Klare, Earl C. Ravenal, Seymour Mel-man, and Robert McAfee Brown...
...he was always in debt...
...to pass judgment either exonerating or convicting him...
...It was commonly believed that the Japanese were an unoriginal and imitative people, clever at copying the ways of other lands, and that we had nothing to learn from them...
...He once described The Arrow of Gold, one of his last novels, as so much "squeaky babble," and in the author's preface he confessed, "In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom...
...Priestley wrote that Joseph Conrad was "one of those writers whose importance we find hard to estimate____ He cannot be identified with any literary movement...
...As with Proust, his life was the constant source and inspiration for his art, but the more he wrote the less he had to draw upon...
...It boasts tough anti-pollution laws, few slums, a diminishing crime rate, little unemployment, high levels of worker satisfaction, and an insignificant amount of alienation (be that measured in statistics for divorce, drug usage, wildcat strikes, or juvenile delinquency...
...Once he had committed himself to a career as, a writer in 1894, at the age of thirty-four he never stopped...
...Following that, he focused on still another emptiness, a limitless, open-ended career as a writer, dominated by sheets of white paper whose horizons extended infinitely...
...Why did Ford pardon Nixon...
...Claiming that "compassion for Nixon as an individual hadn't prompted my decision at all," he also stresses that Americans did not want "to see an ex-President behind bars'' and he felt that Nixon "had already suffered enormously...
...Depending upon which side of the international literary dateline you are standing on, Conrad is late Victorian or early modern, and if you are one of those who hate to travel, you can just call him Edwardian...
...A Time to Heal is cast in the lackluster prose of platitude, piety, and cliche...
...It has been twenty years since the last Conrad biography was published, and Karl's admirable life is welcome...
...454 pp...
...Such a vision is difficult for Americans to accept...
...He does reveal that he and Kissinger were eager for a muscular response, for they relished the opportunity, after the "loss" of Vietnam, to reaffirm American power and cheer up our allies...
...America's huge and mounting trade deficit with Japan despite dollar devaluations and informal import limitation agreements hovers around $10 billion a year...
...That warning by journalist Henry Finck was hardly taken seriously when it was published in 1898...
...This skepticism is not meant to detract from Vogel's argument in Japan as Number One, which is especially illuminating because its comparative perspective transcends the normal contours of our political debates...
...Grub Street was never far away...
...One would be hard-pressed to name another author who achieved so much * in his third language...
...He forgets to acknowledge that the ill-fated venture cost more American lives than the number of sailors on the ship...
...He was continually forced to go deeper and deeper until at last, the memories exhausted, there was no more...
...Most of the 264 letters in this absorbing book were exchanged between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson before their well-publicized dispute in 1965 over Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin...
...As a writer Conrad always looked back, turned to his memories whether of his youth or his years at sea for materials he shaped into his art...
...Then make some strategic dashes: first to become leader of the Republican Conference and then Minority Leader of the House...
...throughout the whole of Conrad's life, that they in fact "informed every aspect of his later years, [were] the matrix for his ideas, his attachments, his memories, and nightmares...
...Conrad died that same year...
...Arguing that Japan's group-oriented strength is the result not of heritage but of conscious choices on the part of modern leaders, he ignores the fact that decisions can be successful only when undertaken within a historical framework which makes their acceptance likely...
...Perhaps if Conrad had lived a little longer he too would have won, but for which country...
...When Yeats won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, Conrad predicted that the next prize would go to a novelist...
...Did he suspect as early as January that Nixon might be guilty and on the way out...
...Although it is somewhat in the current trend of the biography as "tome," it is insightful, just, never pedantic more than 1,000 , pages of solid and readable scholarship...
...When -John Quinn auctioned off his vast collection of Conrad manuscripts (while Conrad was still alive), the short story "Youth" went for $1,523, $325 more than James Joyce's long Ulysses...
...Just as Conrad's Marlow was forever coming up against an impenetrable "heart of darkness," so too was his creator facing one unknown space after another...
...On August 1, 1974, Haig said that Nixon might pardon himself before quitting, or under Article 25 of the Constitution he might temporarily .step aside but not resign...
...What is more useful, and perhaps more revealing than intended, is the new material on Watergate and the Nixon pardon, and the discussion of Vietnam and the Mayaguez...
...Ford himself has nurtured the seeds of doubt...
...He was right,*-and the novelist was a Pole, but the author's name was Wladyslaw Rey-mont, not Joseph Conrad...
...To heal, Gerald Ford believes, you must conceal...
...A country the size of California, with minuscule natural resources and only one-sixth of its land arable, has risen from the total devastation of World War II to the point where its gross national product is the second largest in the world (and may surpass that of the United States within a decade...
...With care he examines how Japan has achieved equality in basic education, a wide distribution of knowledge essential for economic growth, meritocracy in government, consensus for political programs, security in welfare, public support for law enforcement, and positive worker identification with large corporations...
...At a time when the United States and other advanced industrial nations seem to be coming apart through a combination of inflation, pollution, and social disorganization, Japan remains a model of stability...
...Even in early April 1975, when South Vietnam was near collapse, Ford and Kissinger were still struggling to "save" it...
...Finck was a journalist who made a single trip to Japan...
...A constructive approach to the potential routes of a "journey from madness to humanity...
...Even today he defends the Commission's report: "while not perfect [it] is a document of which the American people can be proud...
...his life was an unending quest for reconciliation with himself and his heritage...
...5.95...
...He chose English as the language in which to write because as a young man it had impressed him as economical and precise...
...Karl considers Conrad a novelist of images ivory, jungle, a sinking ship, a leap, the silver of the mine rather than ideas...
...In December 1978, 700 people joined in a two-day "reverse the arms race" convocation at New York's Riverside Church...
...158 pp...
...From the beginning of our involvement," Ford writes, "I had always thought we were doing the right thing...
...In truth, Japan's recent progress is a "miracle...
...Big bombs and military power cannot bring peace to the Middle East...
...Now, as the title of his new book suggests, a similar note is sounded by Ezra Vogel, chairman of the Council on East Asian Studies at Harvard University...
...To heal a nation," Ford offered them amnesty with stiff conditions...
...Many of his pronouncements about key matters are predictable his uneasy relations with Henry Kissinger (full of mutual admiration), his treatment of New York City (let New Yorkers tighten their belts), his battles with inflation (mostly Lyndon Johnson's fault), and his policy on Angola (the Soviets were aggressors...
...Nevertheless, Ford ordered four air strikes against Cambodia, and he is still angry that the first and fourth never took place...
...They had to earn it...
...No others were present during this conversation, Ford acknowledges, yet he stresses that he was normally careful to have witnesses on such occasions...
...If there is one key word to success in all these realms it is "cooperation...
...15...
...Japan confounds most of our notions of the problems that must necessarily accompany modernization...
...Ford was forever praying and trusting, he (or his literary "ghost," Trevor Armbrister) keeps telling us: "Throughout my political life, I always believed what I was told...
...There's not a single word to send you...
...There are some minor tidbits: Secretary James Schlesinger was less "hawkish" on SALT than Ford and Kissinger, attorney Edward Bennett Williams was Ford's first choice to replace William Colby at CIA, Richard Nixon first proposed Nelson Rockefeller as Ford's Vice President, Ford regrets having dropped him from the ticket in 1976, and Nixon had planned in 1973 that Vice President Ford would retire in 1976 and that John Connally would be the Republican Presidential candidate...
...He has published articles on Conrad and Milton...
...Yet cynical readers, noting Ford's caution in January and his hasty pardon upon entering the White House, may well be left unconvinced...
...12.50...
...I've lost the Presidency, but I can get nearly a million for my memoir," the former Chief Executive said...
...Japan's 'miracle' IAPAN AS NUMBER ONE: LESSONS FOR AMERICA by Ezra Vogel Harvard University Press...
...Conrad's eventual popularity as a novelist brought a gradual relaxation of the money problems...
...Vogel's is sober and documented...
...Robert A. Rosenstone (Robert A. Rosenstone, professor of history at the California Institute of Technology, spent a year as a Fulbright Professor at Kyushu University...
...One of the achievements of this biography is the way in which Karl masterfully demonstrates how intricately all three lives were interwoven...
...Primarily, he tells us, "to heal the nation" and to get on with governing: to put Watergate "behind us as quickly as possible [and] to get the monkey off my back one way or the other...
...Whether it be his attempted suicide, half-hearted attempts at gun-running, fighting rough weather at sea, or the confrontation between his past and the blank sheet of paper, Conrad always needed to test and prove himself, and once one challenge had been eliminated another was immediately sought...
...Common wisdom holds that Japan's success has been due to cheap labor, or such unfair practices as dumping, or collusion between Japan's government and the business community...
...The problem is that our institutions were shaped by an individualism that has degenerated into what is aptly being called a "culture of narcissism," where loyalty to anything greater than the self is situational and fleeting...
...Much of his book, especially the pre-Presidential part, has all the depth and nuance of postcards from a kid at summer camp...
...The photographer, David Kennerly, had offered a perspective not conceived by America's leaders: The seizure of the vessel might have been the decision of a local commander and not of the still disorganized Cambodian government...
...Because of his privileged access to all of Conrad's letters, which Karl is presently editing, we at last have a complete portrait of an exceedingly complex and private man who was, along with Hen- ry James (whom Conrad much admired), one of literature's supreme ironists...
...1,024 pp...
...He even envisions Conrad's life in terms of a series of images, with one of the most important that of emptiness, of Conrad always living on JOSEPH CONRAD: THE THREE LIVES by Frederick R. Karl Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Unless drastic changes are made in the United States, the well-honed Japanese social-political-industrial machine will outperform the American economy at an increasing rate, with negative consequences for our industrial output, standard of living, tax revenues, and social programs...
...Ford still revels in his minor war in May 1975 to liberate the American sailors on the captured Mayaguez...
...He was frequently beset with fits of depression and despair over not being able to produce sufficient copy...
...Vietnam...
...Karl notes, "In some kind of grim irony, which Conrad himself might or might not have appreciated, he was neither English nor Polish on his tombstone, or perhaps he was both, in that intermingling of experiences which had characterized his life...
...Barton J. Bernstein (Barton J. Bernstein teaches American history at Stanford University...
...This sense of plunging head-first into vast unknowns formed another pattern in Conrad's life...
...272 pp...
...The issue of language is a significant one, for Conrad's first was Polish, his second French...
...Alternatives to nuclear madness Peace in Search of Makers, edited by Jane Rockman (Judson Press...
...They had disagreed amiably for years on numerous subjects, but the 1965 argument, a spirited clash between proud and learned men, ended a long friendship...
...How to get ahead A TIME TO HEAL by Gerald R. Ford Harper & Row/Reader's Digest...
...346 pp...
...He has written extensively on the Cold War and edited the book, "Politics & Policies of the Truman Administration...
...English also had a tinge of romantic aura about it when he first heard it spoken...
...When Nixon offered evidence in January 1974 to show he was not involved in the Watergate cover-up, Ford refused to look at it...
...He contends that these early experiences exile and separation, illness, questions of identity, romance and illusion, transience were repeated Thomas Lavoie teaches literature at Syracuse University...
...Finances, Karl writes, were Conrad's Armageddon...
...Why not A Time to HeaP...
...While the facts and humanistic viewpoints will be familiar to readers of The Progressive, this well-edited paperback assembles the highlights in a handbook that could be useful for both individuals and discussion groups...
...Kissinger, Ford discloses, wanted him to deliver a tough speech blaming Congress for the debacle...
...I was truthful to others...
...And thus, in a burst of principled bitterness, Jerald terHorst, Ford's press secretary, resigned and became the first to abandon the floundering new ship...
...Today our most obvious concern is economics...
...Military power, bombs, and missiles cannot bring down the price of oil...
...All labels aside, Conrad's "importance" remains...
...Vogel himself tacitly recognizes the difficulties, for his policy recommendations in Japan as Number One seem vague compared to his specific portrait of Japanese strengths...
...Two final ironies...
...He hated the desk, he hated the blank pages, but they were his sole salvation...
...Conrad's creative process was the mirror image of his lifestyle...
...The new President did want Nixon to admit his guilt in return for the pardon, but somehow, in ways left remarkably vague in A Time to Heal, Nixon squirmed away...
...Thus spoke not John Wayne but Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley...
...The Japanese possess a remarkable ability to work amicably together, make long-range plans, meet each other halfway, resolve potential disputes by "aggregating" competing interests, downplay the individual ego, and acknowledge that ultimately everyone has a stake in, and share of, those entities to which they belong family, neighborhood, city, university, corporation, and nation...
...Books Briefly Collision of minds The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940-1971, edited by Simon Karlinsky (Harper & Row...
...He explains, "I didn't want...
...To pay the bills, to support his wife and two sons, he borrowed money for works in progress, for works in outline, for works hardly begun, even for works . promised to others...
Vol. 43 • October 1979 • No. 10
