Conrad for the Magazines

79 stronger for Conrad's repeatedly uttered conviction that he could always rely on Graham's understanding him. This shock of recognition can be felt throughout Mr. Watts' excellently produced volume . University of Zagreb Ivo Vidan 2. CONRAD FOR THE MAGAZINES Lawrence Graver, Conrad's Short Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California P, 1969" §7. 50. It is Professor Graver's contention that there are two conflicting desires present in Conrad's literary works to write well, in tune with his inclinations, and to be able to sell his output as favorably as possible. Graver considers that writing novels was his real ambition, and that the stories were often quite deliberate potboilers. But he quotes with approval opinions that Conrad could never sustain consistently high quality in his longer pieces of fiction, and believes that his true achievement lies in the "longshort " story, as Ford Maddox Ford called it. He refrains, therefore , from discussing Conrad's longer fiction and examines carefully the thirty stories under 50,000words. His treatment of Conrad's early stories ("The Black Mate," "The Idiots," "An Outpost of Progress"), which are seldom given serious consideration, is among the most interesting sections of the book. He shows the impact of Daudet, Maupassant, Flaubert, and Kipling, and indicates Conrad's efforts to emerge as an independent artist with characteristic features of his own. He proposes that the "main technical problem would be to find the most satisfactory distance from the melodramatic events of the story, and the development of an actor-narrator will be the first of several strategic advances." A letter by Conrad to the New York Times of 1901, generally overlooked , gives Graver the idea of defining Conrad's all-pervasive theme as a conflict between egoism and altruism. There are several types of egoism, from natural and impulsive to idealistic, and altruism can be either naive or complex. Conrad's favorite hero is a "romantic egoist whose faulty conception of self is tested in a situation in which the tensions between egoism and altruism are most fully developed." The dilemmas of Conrad's characters all take place under extreme circumstances, and it is Conrad's particular distinction as a fiction writer that a colorful or violent situation acquires Its full significance from using "memory as a moral instrument." Its focus Is achieved through the Interplay between narrators of competence, aware of the issues involved, and an implied audience, or even with listeners mentioned within the frame of the story. 80 Conrad was able to work out and maintain this optimal condition in his writing for Blackwood's Edlnburgh Magazine, notably the Marlow stories, but in trying to satisfy other and often better-paying editors, he compromised between the requirements of his imagination and those of a public brought up on lighter fare: The implications of "Falk" or of the situation outlined in "Tomorrow" remain undeveloped as a consequence of Conrad's apparent reluctance to expose them to an inadequate public; in "A Smile of Fortune" romantic over-writing destroys the subversive implications of the subject -matter; even in "The End of the Tether," written for Blackwood 's. an Inadequate tone sentimentalises the story and clouds the moral issue; "Freya of the Seven Isles" and the stories included in A Set of Six keep up the paraphernalia of intricate structuring , while seTf-defeatlng humor and the narrators' pretended Inability to understand choke the potential significance of the human issues Involved. Graver's Individual analyses rarely revise established critical opinion, but his Is a sound reading on the level of literary articulation, which avoids depth psychology and all imposed intellectual patterning. As a consequence, some of the stories are, partly at least, seen in a fresh light because they had usually been summarily treated in monographic appreciations mainly focused on the novels, or used as illustrations for extraliterary argument. One wishes to single out the sober accounts of "The Secret Sharer" and "Il Conde" which give full Justice to Conrad 's achievement in these two stories, while eliminating the excessive meaning which one sometimes finds critics reading into them. In his efforts at discrimination. Graver maintains high standards, and therefore few of the stories appear...