Joseph Conrad

Nor is Conrad's demonstration of that solidarity limited to style alone. Halfway through, the ship's people must fight their way across a flooded deck, "swinging from belaying pin to cleat above the seas" in order to rescue the book's tide figure, James Wait. I'll consider Conrad's handling of race in greater detail below, but for now will simply note his 1914 comment that "A negro in a British forecastle is a lonely being. He has no chums," not even on the polygot Narcissus, with its mixed crew of Cockney and Celt, Norwegian and "Russian Finn." Wait is a sick man when he joins the ship: strong enough to answer the muster and pass for able, but not strong enough to work. Some of the crew think he's shamming, and indeed he is: shamming sick as a way to hide from himself just how ill he actually is. His berth becomes the locus of all the discontent on board, with the crew divided in their view of him, and yet in that storm they act as one to save him, despite the "monstrous suspicion" that he has been "malingering heartlessly . . . in the face of our devotion." And other examples of that "solidarity" could be summoned from throughout the tale, enough to suggest the truth of Eloise Knapp Hay's claim that Conrad "could not think of men at all without thinking of the individual's immediate reliance upon, and obligations to, a politically defined community." For Conrad is never not political, and even in dealing with the blasts and blows of the elements themselves, he remains always concerned with the questions of social order and cohesion.

III

By the time of his death in 1924, Conrad had become an unlikely bestseller, and sets of his collected works soon began to fill the shelves of both the libraries and the used bookstores of the English-speaking world. But his posthumous reputation was a curious one. His powers of description-his ability to bring his exotic experience into the light of the fictional page-continued to command respect. Nevertheless he was admired with faint praise as an adventure writer and for his early tales of the sea. That began to change with the 1947 publication of Morton Dauwen Zabel's Portable Conrad, a book that served to establish a canon of Conrad's short fiction, and yet one that has today the character of an historical document-a document that bears witness to the terms of criticism itself in the middle of the twentieth century.

Zabel saw Conrad as a writer for whom it was still necessary to make a case: first, because he had not yet emerged from the "probationary reaction of literary reputation" that strikes most writers after their deaths; and second, because what reputation did remain was based on the severely limited conception of his work that I've defined above. He offered a different account of Conrad's strengths, arguing, in the years immediately after the Second World War, that the writer's "sense of the crisis of moral isolation" was such as to demand "a larger reference, bringing him into the highest company the English, and the European, novel provides." Nor was he alone in that claim. At almost the same moment Leavis published The Great Tradition, which put its weight on the books that, like Nostromo, were then sometimes bracketed off as "political." Then came a flood. Much of the scholarship in the decades that followed was on a high level, and any student of Conrad today continues both to rely on and to respond to it. The period did have its biases. It put a heavy emphasis on questions of evaluation and suffered from a predilection for both symbol-hunting and psychobiography. But Conrad was far from the only novelist to receive that treatment, and Zabel's Portable can be taken as inaugurating what one might call the "heroic" phase in Conrad criticism, a phase that reached its synthesis, and its summa, in the 1979 publication of Ian Watt's Conrad in the Nineteenth Century.