Word: conrad
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Robbed: Sari Gabor ("Zsazsa") Hilton, emerald-eyed, diamond-bright Miss Hungary of 1936, estranged wife of Hotelman Conrad Hilton (New York's Plaza, Los Angeles' Town House, Chicago's Palmer House); in the mirrored boudoir of her Manhattan penthouse. Jewel-&-fur-bearing Mrs. Hilton (who once told tabloid reporters that unidentified villains had kept her in "continuous slumber" for six months with mysterious drugs) now reported to police that a tall stranger in a grey suit, fedora, pigskin gloves and dark glasses had tied her and her maid to a love seat and made off with...
...Disaster of Lawrence. A fellow critic has called Pritchett "the most humane of critics . . . not looking for perfection but for the essential life in a book." The "essential life," for Pritchett, is usually blunt and British. With such novelists as Lawrence, Wells and Conrad he is less humane. Wells, he writes, lived in a "new world of agitating chemicals, peculiar glands, and obliterating machines. . . . He did not attribute anything but an obstructive value to human personality." Conrad had a feeling for real life, but obscured it with a "dubious Romantic over-world." Lawrence's "phallic cult was a disaster...
...found him "exotic" because he failed to write of factories; a perennial kind of plain, impatient critic has found his preoccupations morbid. The stories assembled in this volume, and the longer novels, Victory, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes, make both these accusations seem as irrelevant as the "dating" of Conrad's work. Neither time nor fashion really affects its nature, which is Sophoclean and tragic: "The plight of the man on whom life closes down...
...Conrad was a master not only of English words but of various devices of storytelling, including what Mr. Zabel describes as "a complicated exercise of the mode of averted suspense"-enough so to drive his fascinated reader, at times, nearly to distraction. In its progression, elaboration and somber irony, his prose rarely loses for long the immediate visual impact of phrases such as the one describing Kurtz, emaciated yet commanding, sitting up to harangue the natives in Heart of Darkness: "I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving...
...Struggle of Truth. But the quality that distinguishes Conrad's best writing from that of artists equally resourceful is his exhaustive and passionate honesty. As Zabel says, "He corrected the failure of his contemporaries to become morally implicated in what they were doing." Zabel's critical introduction to this book is a striking recognition of the fact that in Conrad's case it is hard to separate the art of fiction from the struggle to tell the truth; all Conrad's narratives in their way exemplify his own obedience to Stein's famous injunction...