Edward Crankshaw, Joseph Conrad: Some Aspects of the Art of the Novel (London: John Lane, 1936)1
What most strikes me on reading Mr Crankshaw’s admirable and unusual monograph about my late friend is astonishment at the way in which his speculations into the art of the novel re-cast Conrad’s own wandering into that endless maze. The resemblance of the mental attack is at times startling. Reading the book I seem to be a third of a century back, sprawling in a deep chair as I used to do in the smallest hours of the mornings, listening whilst Conrad stormed up and down the long, low parlour of the Pent, in his endless search after the New Form… for the Novel. Hour after hour, for night after night, for year after year…. For, next to his family solicitudes, or before them, even, that was the one stable and for ever unsatisfied longing of his life.
And, with Conrad’s books to help him – which poor Conrad hadn’t – Mr Crankshaw comes amazingly near to working out the pattern on that carpet. He gets indeed everything that he could get out of Conrad’s books; to get more he would have had to know Conrad – to know the really extraordinarily Promethean quality of Conrad’s mind… of his very passions.
For really to know Conrad you had to realize that he was always acting a part – except in the matter of the two passions I have mentioned. And one of those was a dual affair. He desired passionately to find a New Form for the Novel because he desired with every fibre of his being that the Novel should be honoured. Novel-writing was to be regarded as – as indeed it is – the only pursuit worthy of the proper man. It was to present a picture of life so that humanity might appreciate its own nature; it was to solve all human problems because it would present all human problems in a steady, clear light and thus they should become assimilable. It was to be the Gospel; the Stay; the Light; the Paraclete. It could, he used to repeat over and over again, do anything. As who should say: ‘With God all things are possible!’
The Novel was, in fact, his religion, his country, his unchanging home and his only real means of communication with his fellow beings. So that really to know Conrad you had to read all his books and then to fuse the innumerable Conrads that are in all of them into what used to be called a composite photograph….You could know him in fact only as you know Shakespeare who was at once Iago and Othello. In the same way Conrad was Marlow; but he was also Stein and the French naval lieutenant – and Nostromo and Lord Jim and Haldin – and Mr Verloc – and tried desparately to be all the Anarchists of The Secret Agent.
He hated the necessity to be all these things. He became unwell whilst he was being Haldin. He tells you himself in the preface to The Secret Agent how he groaned over the necessity to become for three weeks what he imagined Anarchists to be. But he could be Verloc with pleasure because what he liked best to be was what in their leases the French call bon père de famille, in a blue melton cloth overcoat with velvet collar and billycock to match, in the endless rattle of dominoes in a City Mecca playing interminable games of matador, a game at which he displayed real genius. I must have played a thousand games with him and never won more than four. When he was sleepy! … But he was so seldom sleepy over his darling pursuit.
His central, his unbuttoned, self was in fact just you and me … And the grocer of the corner shop. And the policeman, a little…. And of course any dago of mysterious avocation… A commission agent making large profits, with lots of leisure.… He had to make his desperate sorties into the wearisome and disreputable pursuit of weaving innumerable lies… but didn’t he groan over it! And didn’t he at times in sheer exasperation of boredom throw, like Cézanne, his mahlstick at his canvas and shout:
‘I can’t go on with these damn masterpieces. A daub’s a daub. Damn aesthetic consistency.’
I like to consider Conrad as a painter because it was about the only thing he never was…. Unfortunately he was not, like Cézanne, a rich man. So he could not afford, like Cézanne, to slit his canvases to pieces with his palette knife and throw them into the tops of trees. He was bon père de famille and they had to go to make fortunes for the parasites who prey upon us novelists.
It is because he does not take into account all these characteristics of the author of Under Western Eyes that Mr Crankshaw’s book is not a complete, an exhaustive, résumé of the methods of Conrad. But that was not his purpose as is shown by his sub-title. His sensitive probings would eventually have brought him to all these conclusions … perhaps only after he shall have written as many novels as Conrad himself will he really have arrived at that conclusion. For I suppose it is only the weary novelist who can really tell you how novels are written.
But his sub-title Mr Crankshaw does exactly fill out. Some aspects of the Novel he comments on exhaustively, using some aspects of Conrad for his corpus vile. His book is all the more valuable because of that. Conrad was an individual with wilfulnesses, private characteristics, défaillances. But the Novel is something clear, hard, unchanging…. Merciless even.
And because, in his search for the New Form, Conrad brought the Novel to its present stage, Mr Crankshaw could have used no one else for the purpose of his dissection. No one else, at any rate, has since Conrad made any new excursions into the Form of the Method of the novel. The temper of the times has changed. We have evolved prose cadences more suited to our passing moods. But as far as form, construction, charpente and progression d’effet go,1 if you want to progress beyond him you will have yourself to make the difficult explorations into the minds of men.
All that Mr Crankshaw finely brings out. I do not know of any book like his in English-English or any better one in either American or French … or indeed any one nearly so complete. It should thus prove extremely valuable; for the poor Novelist – and the poorer Public – should have someone to go to for light on the Difficult Art of conveying vicarious experience. And with Mr Crankshaw they will be safe.
His chief defect is that he writes so admirably that the soothed mind glides over his phrases missing at times the content. To get home to our bemused intelligences criticism should he written crudely and with the brutality of the up-state crime reporter. This trick Mr Crankshaw has not yet learned. And I don’t know that we ought not to hope that he never will.
Because, if we had many writers who wrote such sensitized matter in a manner so unobtrusive and rhythmed, we might become civilized beings.
Time and Tide, 17:21 (23 May 1936), 761–2.
1 [charpente: framework or construction; progression d’effet: a central Fordian technical term, connoting a calculated progressive increase in tension. See pp. 147, 186 above.]