Exertions in the Deep

THE PORTABLE CONRAD (760 pp.)--Selected & edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel--Viking ($2).

The range of Joseph Conrad's material, as of his splendid glooms and lucidities in storytelling, could scarcely be better shown than in this collection of eleven long and short tales. They include, besides the familiar sea stories, tales of Poland, England and Asia. Among them are the classic Youth, Amy Foster, Typhoon, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Heart of Darkness. The editor, one of the best of U.S. literary critics, has shown good judgment in not chopping Conrad's longer masterpieces into incomprehensible fragments just to get them inside an anthology. He has also made room for a score of Conrad's wry and courtly letters and Conrad's most important statements on the art of fiction.

Conrad was a rarely skilled practitioner of that art, and is one of its heroes. A Pole by birth, a merchant seaman and ship's officer for 20 years, a student of letters whose first acquired language was French, Conrad became an English novelist only through creative sufferings of which it is painful to read; Editor Zabel calls his exercise of will power "appalling." Henry James found Conrad "absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing."

A World Receded. In the 23 years since his death, as Editor Zabel says, "the world in which his tales are set has receded to historic distance and become, with its standards of honor and fidelity, a dimming memory in men's minds. . . ." Marxian critics have found him "exotic" because he failed to write of factories; a perennial kind of plain, impatient critic has found his preoccupations morbid. The stories assembled in this volume, and the longer novels, Victory, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes, make both these accusations seem as irrelevant as the "dating" of Conrad's work. Neither time nor fashion really affects its nature, which is Sophoclean and tragic: "The plight of the man on whom life closes down. . . ."

Conrad was a master not only of English words but of various devices of storytelling, including what Mr. Zabel describes as "a complicated exercise of the mode of averted suspense"--enough so to drive his fascinated reader, at times, nearly to distraction. In its progression, elaboration and somber irony, his prose rarely loses for long the immediate visual impact of phrases such as the one describing Kurtz, emaciated yet commanding, sitting up to harangue the natives in Heart of Darkness: "I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving."

A Struggle of Truth. But the quality that distinguishes Conrad's best writing from that of artists equally resourceful is his exhaustive and passionate honesty. As Zabel says, "He corrected the failure of his contemporaries to become morally implicated in what they were doing." Zabel's critical introduction to this book is a striking recognition of the fact that in Conrad's case it is hard to separate the art of fiction from the struggle to tell the truth; all Conrad's narratives in their way exemplify his own obedience to Stein's famous injunction in Lord Jim: ". . . To the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. . . ."

The destructive element was reality: the bottomless and hostile universe. Conrad's typical theme was the immersion, sudden or gradual, of an individual in this isolating bath where illusion fell away and true moral existence began. Few writers have managed to convey more powerfully the lonely fright of that moment of recognition, the ironies that surround it, or the human virtues--love, fidelity, duty --that may save the swimmer. Conrad told tales but misrepresented nothing.

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