Savage Pessimist

BOOK REVIEWS cessive mothering" was a seemingly endless willingness to support her son emotionally and financially when all other means of support had been drunk or frittered away. One might have expected a biography that works so hard to rehabilitate the reputation of a literary "enabler" to be more sympathetic to the ways in which that figure was himself "enabled " by those around him. Literary history has tended to erase the contributions of publishers, editors, and mentors and yet, as Pound's marks on the margins of The Waste Land reveal, the production of a literary text is often a collaborative effort. Hibberd's immensely readable biography usefully reminds us that the period's most canonical writers benefited hugely from their involvement with someone like Monro—a man deeply engaged in efforts to unite the world's poets, to redefine Utopia, to change society. Yet in spite of his mentoring role, Monro was not a figurehead for the period's great literary innovations; that position was taken, it must be admitted, by poets with a surer grasp and voice. Hibberd works diligently to stress his subject's importance, to situate him at the heart of the avant garde, yet Monro seems to have been a pivot for poets who ultimately slipped beyond his range. SARAH BlLSTON Yale University Women's & Gender Studies Program Savage Pessimist Joseph Conrad. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Volume 6, 1917-1919. Laurence Davies, Frederick Karl and Owen Knowles, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. lvii + 570 pp. $110.00 IN 1917-1919 Conrad was in his early sixties. Depressed by the war, the Russian revolutions and the fate of Poland; fearful of Borys's safety at the front, Jessie's recurrent knee operations and his own deteriorating health; characteristically cynical, discontented and anxious, "savage, and misanthropical, and pessimistic," he seemed older than his years, yet regressed to childish dependence on his wife and his agent. Borys had joined the Mechanical Transport Corps, where he could use his expert knowledge of car engines. Three weeks before the end of the war he was (like Ford Madox Ford) gassed, concussed and shell-shocked. Conrad refused to share the public ecstasy about the Russian revolutions in 1917. He felt Russians were "born rotten" and was mainly concerned with keeping "the Russian infection, its decomposing power, from the social organism of the rest of the world." The Russians' Western counterparts, the democratic "virtuous leaders of mankind," should 441 ELT 46 : 4 2003 have been sent to the North Pole to "die out into a frozen, unsympathetic silence." In an anguished passage, the Polish patriot explained that he sprang "from an oppressed race where oppression was not a matter of history but a crushing fact in the daily life of all individuals, made still more bitter by declared hatred and contempt." These public anxieties were matched by private torments. Jessie, incurably crippled and endlessly "carved," retained an extraordinary faith in Dr. Robert Jones, despite repeated assurances and repeated failures —even threats of amputation. When Jessie was in hospital, Conrad—lost and lonely without her to "boss the show and cheer one's heart"—showered her with slightly absurd effusions: "You are a very dear good, charming plucky, sweet, pretty kitty-faced girl and I love you very much. Ever, your Boy." During her frequent medical crises he admired her habitual serenity and staunch character: "firm as a rock, with her pride in the boy, her love for me and her profound unquestioning patriotism ." An expert cook, Jessie expressed "her affection in her artless manner by concocting various dishes." Conrad also suffered physically. When he broke two front teeth on a cherry stone, he wrote that "the breach in my mouth feels big enough to drive a coach and four through." And he was often tormented by gout: "all my attacks bring on temperature—and that makes one feel so beastly ill and then so weak afterwards." Still, he told his faithful agent J. B. Pinker, "you can trust to my tenacity.... It has pulled me through worse periods and out of deeper depressions." He'd struggled for twenty years like a tight-rope artist without a net and...