A Captivating Portrait of a Believable and Fascinating Person

of society (the artists and intellectuals) go from a partisan enthusiasm in the nineteenth century to a view of empire in the twentieth century as an inglorious enterprise, deforming both ruler and ruled. This reading of the novel as a study of the "self-destructive dynamics of the imperialist venture" thus prepares the way for the view of empire found in later writers, such as Forster, Orwell, Joyce Cary, and Evelyn Waugh. Conrad's view of imperialism is not completely favorable to the colonized, however. While Nostromo may be a brilliant critique of capitalism in its picture of a Latin Americn colonial enterprise, it also suggests that the colonized people are incapable of self-rule. McClure presents a well-reasoned thesis which shows his subjects as men of their time whose works continue to deserve fresh critical attention. Moreover, his approach and readable prose, largely free of critical jargon, encourages even the general reader to experience once again the writers under discussion. J. Randolph Cox St. Olaf College 4. A CAPTIVATING PORTRAIT OF A BELIEVABLE AND FASCINATING PERSON Roger Tennant. Joseph Conrad: A Biography. London: Sheldon Press, 1981. Õ 12.50 Roger Tennant's biography of Joseph Conrad should be distinguished from other biographies of this great English writer. First, Tennant considers Conrad's life in a way different from the usual one. Whereas Frederick R. Karl sees his subject 's life in three divisions, Pole, sailor, and writer, Tennant discerns three stages in his life: Conrad's youth In Poland and his adventurous life as a seaman, his time of poverty and struggle in England while writing his major works, and his last years which included his triumphal visit to the United States and his decline in creative power. Both arrangements of Conrad's life seem valid, but Tennant's may be more useful. Second, the great difference between the two biographies—and between Tennant's and all other lives of Conrad—is that Tennant does not attempt to produce a major work containing both biography and criticism of his subject's works; instead, he emphasizes biography but necessarily includes the works as part of Conrad's life and uses them for quotations and support to illustrate his explanations and conclusions about them. In his forward, Tennant informs his readers that, having played as a child in Hobart just across the river from the place where the hulk of Conrad's Otago "lay dissolving in the mud," he later visited most of the places Conrad had visited. In the 1950s, he read Lord Jim and then produced some Conradian works. He lived so long with this author that, as he states, "I like to think that I know just what he would do, or say, as he jerked his shoulders and threw away his newly lighted cigarette, in any imaginable situation." And this is exactly what he has succeeded in doing in his biography of Conrad, and he has done it well. He achieves fully what he attempted to do: not to offer any new facts about Conrad but to present "a psychologically credible portrait of the man I regard as the greatest writer in the English language." Although he makes a large claim, Tennant has, 60 almost perfectly, produced an unusually readable and exact record of Conrad's life which includes his works (unlike Karl, he writes extremely well), written for readers who delight in learning about a great writer without the problems of a scholar and who love to read excellent writing by a man who lovingly reminisces his way through Conrad's life and achievements. Tennant's achievement is a boon for general readers who are not interested in the critical details, but occasionally he may disturb some readers by doing— unusually well—what is usually considered dangerous, that is, to deduce the "real" life of a writer largely from his works alone. Most of his quotations are from Conrad's works. T. S. Eliot, among many others, points out this problem: in The Three Voices of Poetry, he notes that attempts at tracing a poem back to its psychological sources distract us from the poem by directing attention "on to something else which, In the form...