Conrad, Ford, Wells and Company

For Silver, Candida expresses "the classical Oedipal situation of a boy vying with a man old enough to be his father for the possession of a motherly woman." He does not account for the seductiveness of Candida's behavior with young Marchbanks. Although he dwells upon the scene where Candida manipulates a poker in the most orthodox Freudian manner, Silver assures us that "a 'pure' mother ... Is what Candida represents to both Marchbanks and Shaw himself." Pygmalion becomes a primer of flagellation and autoerotlcism, although Silver believes that "Shaw has deliberately created a father-daughter relationship," in this play, that "parallels the one between Pygmalion and Galatea." In his search for "dark" psychodynamics, Silver appears to have missed the legendary meaning of the smitten sculptor's awakened artwork—the transformation wrought by Love; even his index is innocent of Ovid. Sliver has seen Shaw through a very smoky lens, and with monocular vision. Quite a while ago, Jacques Barzun reminded us, in defense of Shaw, that "culture,, humaneness, spiritual grace, are not forced on us by logic: they are self-evident goods or pointless." Of course, Shaw himself would say that Professor Silver defeated his purpose precisely because of his determination to do nothing wrong. Barbara M. Fisher City College, CUNY 3. CONRAD, FORD, WELLS AND COMPANY Nicholas Delbanco. Group Portrait : Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, H. G. Wells. New York: William Morrow, 1982. $11.50 Few studies of turn-of-the-century novelists are considered complete without reference to the groups of British and American novelists who settled In Kent and East Sussex about 1900. Not until the publication of Nicholas Delbanco's Group Portrait, however, has there been a concerted attempt to understand comprehensively the literary experiences of that community. There was, Delbanco suggests, borrowing perhaps from a D. H. Lawrence essay, a "spirit of place" for a brief period in 1900 that Influenced the careers of Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford (then still known as Hueffer), Henry James, and H. G. Wells. To begin his study Delbanco describes the landscape of the two counties and imaginée the five writers living near each other, separated by a village green which they traverse or encircle by bicycle, motor car, horse, and dog cart. They pause occasionally from their private labors to stay overnight at Crane's fourteenth-century, run-down Brede Place; to comment on each others' works; to join in composing an improbable drama; to offer to collaborate with each other; and to do such everyday things as worry about 111 friends and fret about being photographed while eating a doughnut at the Brede Rectory garden. But spirits of place shift; the writers grouped together almost ldyllically in chapter two of Group Portrait drift apart; and the spirit of place, that for a short while seemed to Delbanco to hold so much promise for the writers, changes. Delbanco suggests that some of the best work of the five was inspired by the Kent and East Sussex sojourn, while other works evolved after long periods of gestation resulting from their associations with each other. But communities of dynamic and disparate people seldom last long in harmony, despite similarities of idea and 319 desire for unity. The authors in Kent and East Sussex never had the sense of philosophical unity that the Bloomsbury group seemed to have when the latter espoused G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Associations decidedly more unified socially and philosophically than the Kent group often struggled for unity before dissolving: Hawthorne, after all, described unsympathetically the spiritual and physical disintegration of the Brook Farm experiment in Bllthedale Romance, and even Wordsworth and Coleridge drifted apart after their successful collaboration at Nether Stowey. Perhaps it should not come as a shock, then, that despite Delbanco's professed wish to present—as his subtitle "A Biographical Study of Writers in Community" suggests -,—a community of artists interacting creatively, he seems to become more Interested in detailing the diversities that led eventually to the dissolution of community. At the same time, he confirms, perhaps ironically, what he must have realized while he was compiling his study: despite the undoubted stimulation that writers...