Conrad and Sex
THIS book is an example of a form of literary criticism which has become increasingly fashion- able during the last few decades. At some point during his study of a writer—and it seems as a rule to be early rather than late—the critic conceives a theory according to which the writer's work can be interpreted and. then forces it to fit the theory, usually with procrustean results.
Mr. Moser's theory is that Conrad was, for psychological reasons, unable to deal successfully with sexual love in his work. He implies elements of misogyny, voyeurism, impotence and homo- sexuality in Conrad. According to Mr. Moser this inability accounts for the 'failure' of 'The Return,' 'Falk' and 'Freya of the Seven Isles,' for the abandonment of The Sisters and The Rescue, and was the most important reason for the decline which set in with the writing of Chance, when sexual love became Conrad's main theme.
Conveniently, Mr. Moser finds that all those works or passages which are dominated by sexual' love are bad. With notable exceptions the most reliable critics agree with his assessment of Con- rad's stories and novels. However, 'Falk' is thought by some good judges to be one of Conrad's best stories (Conrad himself seems to have thought so), both 'The Return' and 'Freya of the Seven Isles' have a lot more to be said for them than Mr. Moser is prepared to concede, while Chance, Victory and The Rover all have enthusiastic and perceptive admirers.
But even if we accept Mr. Moser's assessment —and after all there can be no absolute certainty in evaluations—his theory sets as many important problems as it purports to solve. For instance, why was Conrad able to go through his great creative period concerning himself only subordinately with sexual love and why did he then, at the age of fifty-three, decide to adopt it as his main theme? Mr. Moser does not attempt to answer this. Then, in working out the details of his theory, Mr. Moser is betrayed into a number of wild asser- tions which mar a highly intelligent and stimulat- ing book. It is surely preposterous to claim that Jorgenson in The Rescue is a voyeur, that the father of the dancing girls in The Arrow of Gold in any way resembles old. Viola in Nostromo except that both are' Italian, have a beard and two daughters, or that Jewel destroys Jim (she tried to do just the opposite). Above all, Mr. Moser asserts: 'If we put together all the charac- teristics of the villain [in Conrad's work], what is the composite picture? We see a short, dark man, moustached, unhealthy, violent, cowardly, a foreigner and a political extremist.'
This is demonstrably false. Conrad created a wide variety of 'villains' and, to my recollection, only one of them, Ortega, could be said to possess all these characteristics; the others violate this picture in some essential attribute, while Mr. Jones and de Burral, the most outstanding of Conrad's villains, are almost its exact antithesis.
Finally, I do not believe that Mr. Moser pro- vides strong enough evidence to justify his impli- cation that Conrad was sexually abnormal to any significant extent. I should not dare to claim that he was wholly normal (who is?), but I do suggest
that there is a more probable explanation for his admitted weakness in dealing with women and sexual love. People write best of things they know about. In his early writing career Conrad had had very little mature experience of women or of educated people; and as far as is known he had never had an emotional experience with an English woman except his wife, who had a lower-middle-class background. When, there- fore, in The Sisters and The Rescue he came to tackle an emotional situation involving sophisti- cated characters he found that he was uncertain what they would say to each other in English (he might have been more at ease in French). This, coupled with Garnett's condemnation of 'The Return,' probably persuaded him to leave such subjects alone; later, when he had become close friends with educated people of both sexes and his knowledge of English was more profound, he felt equal to them. But his knowledge of the language and conduct of sexual love was still almost as limited as before, and that is perhaps why his love scenes, though often magnificent and dramatically convincing, are unreal.
JOCELYN BAINES
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