A cheery soul

The moral agent | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

It must be literary night here at OD. See the link above for a long article on Joseph Conrad.

I had liked Typhoon (a short novella) which was in a high school book, and many years later read Lord Jim. Although I finished it, it certainly put me off him as a novel writer. His writing style is just incredibly dense, although at first I thought that this might be my fault for being too wedded to "easy" reading.

But no, according to the article, he was even heavy going for his readers when he was alive. HG Wells wrote a review in which he described Conrad's style as being:

"like river-mist; for a space things are seen clearly, and then comes a great grey bank of printed matter, page upon page, creeping round the reader, swallowing him up".

As I recall, "Lord Jim" is supposed to be a tale told around a table in one night. Many reviewers must have found this an unbelievable conceit, as the edition I read included a foreword by Conrad claiming that this criticism was unfair, and you really could tell the tale in one night. (Maybe, if you are in polar regions in winter.)

Anyhow, the article shows that Conrad was the nervous type whose cynical, modernistic view of the world is summed up by this extract from a letter to a friend:

Life knows us not and we do not know life - we don't even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth, and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.

Yes, well. Joseph certainly sounds like the last person on earth his mates would have thought about inviting out for a few drinks and a yarn. If he got anywhere near a gin bottle, they would've had to make sure sharp objects were out of reach of his wrists.