The French Conrad

ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 part bantering, part hectoring, and always expressing hope that even better literary productions lay ahead, terminated by Stevenson's departure from England on 22 August 1887. Only death could do that. "This kind ofthing nearly makes one weep," he wrote to Haggard. To Brander Matthews he confided, "[0]ur best man is gone [t]he rest are not fit to mend his pens...." When he wrote, in "Reflections of R. L. Stevenson," that Stevenson was "unique in character as in literary genius," he was superbly well-qualified to make the judgment. These ably-edited letters, practically all of them previously unpublished, testify to the length, breadth, and quality of a singular literary friendship. Harold Orel _________________________ University of Kansas The French Conrad Yves Hervouet. The French Face of Joseph Conrad. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. xiii + 354 pp. $59.50 THE INFLUENCE of French Literature on Conrad, at least passingly noted even as his works were being published, has over the past two decades been discussed more closely with considerable scholarly energy being devoted to establishing the precise nature and extent of this inheritance. As the evidence was being painstakingly accumulated it was becoming increasingly obvious that Conrad borrowed, and borrowed heavily, from Flaubert, Maupassant, and Anatole France, to name but his most important sources. In the late 1960s, Paul Kirschner demonstrated Conrad's reliance on other writers for scenes, for sentences and even paragraphs in some of his early writing. Stephen Crane was bowled over by the death scene in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', which, as Kirschner showed, Conrad lifted little altered from Maupassant's Bel-Ami. In further establishing the scope and breadth of Conrad's borrowings, in synthesizing the work of a number of scholars, and in contributing much additional and conclusive evidence on Conrad's compositional habits and familiarity with nineteenth and early twentieth-century French writers, the late Yves Hervouet in The French Face of Joseph Conrad makes a major contribution to the study of Conrad's debts to his predecessors. And as Cambridge's advertising blurb rightly boasts, this book will also be essential reading for comparatists and for students of cross-cultural literary influence, to say nothing of future annotators of Conrad's texts. The volume is, moreover, meticulously proofread, well100 BOOK REVIEWS indexed, and elegantly produced as is Cambridge's wont. This said, one regrets to add that it is beset by a major failing: it needed and deserved a thorough overhaul before coming to press. The cosmetic editorial tinkering permitted by a too pious attitude towards its writer (evidenced in the somewhat embarrassing foreword provided by Dr. Lindsay Newman ) little helps the reader of this important and frequently stimulating work who as a result faces the uphill task of laboring against its consistently deficient organization and method. In the end, one is indeed grateful for the information offered, but rather as one is for work performed by a dentist: the sense of gratitude is most frequently felt after the experience. Hervouet's study has four main critical sections that set out to detail Conrad's debts—stylistic, philosophical, and thematic;—to French writers in his fiction and non-fiction prose. These critical discussions are followed by an appendix entitled "Conrad's Knowledge of French Authors " and by a copious scholarly apparatus. (The notes, bibliography, and two indices total very nearly 100 pages.) Hervouet's main contention is that the major influence of French literature has often been either ignored or belittled in critical work on Conrad where the main emphasis has fallen on his Polish background. His tone is unnecessarily embattled in this respect, for no conspiracy to neglect the evidence he uncovers ever operated. In any event, he succeeds entirely in showing that the influence of French writers is, indeed, extensive, perhaps even extraordinary , for as a number of his parallels establish Conrad relied upon his French models not only for inspiration but for rhythms and, perhaps more disturbingly, for wordings. He wisely avoids the accusation of plagiarism for the more subtle and valuable concept of intertextuality, and the sheer quantity of evidence adduced must demolish any defense of Conrad's procedures as...