Word: zabel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...PORTABLE CONRAD (760 pp.)-Selected & edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel-Viking...
...heroes. A Pole by birth, a merchant seaman and ship's officer for 20 years, a student of letters whose first acquired language was French, Conrad became an English novelist only through creative sufferings of which it is painful to read; Editor Zabel calls his exercise of will power "appalling." Henry James found Conrad "absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing...
...World Receded. In the 23 years since his death, as Editor Zabel says, "the world in which his tales are set has receded to historic distance and become, with its standards of honor and fidelity, a dimming memory in men's minds. . . ." Marxian critics have 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...
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...