But before we read Nostromo it is best to clear our minds of some notions about Conrad still entertained by many.
First, he is not a writer of "sea stories," much less of adven- ture stories. He is a psychological novelist who happens to be exploiting material he knew intimately.
Second, though he wrote many tales of the East Indies, he is not an "exotic" novelist. Local color is there, of course, laid on with a painters eye, but again this is subordinate to his interest in the roiled depths of the human heart.
Third, he is not, except superficially, a "romantic." The tests of fidelity, fortitude, and understanding to which he submits his characters are ruthlessly true to the human condition as seen by a most unsentimental eye. Conrad does not flee or evade, nor, despite his sense that life itself is a kind of dream, does he take refuge in dreams. He is far more realistic than a Sinclair Lewis.
Critics always quote one sentence from his famous Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus. I will quote it, too. But we must understand what Conrad means by the word "see." He is not talking like an Impressionist painter. He means the kind of
seeing that has the depth, clarity, and often agony of a vision, visible only when the mind and the imagination are at full ten- sion. Once we grasp this, the sentence may stand as a short- hand summary of Conrad's ideal relationship to the ideal reader: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above ali, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything."
For additional reading in Conrad I would suggest three long short stories: "Heart of Darkness," "The End of the Tether," and "Youth."
C.F.
101
ANTON CHEKHOV
1860-1904
Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Selected Short Stories
The experience of reading Chekhovs plays is never quite satis- factory, because the readers imagination must meet a difficult challenge. The page cries out for the stage. The words demand the actors voice. The dialogue is not tidy and explicit, as with Shaw [99], but more like ordinary conversation. It is marked by breaks, pauses that make their own statements, involuntary gestures, small digressions, abrupt transitions, incomplete thoughts, careless syntax. Chekhovs apparently inconsequen- tial talk is designed to reflect the contradictions, the confu- sions, the frustrations hidden deep within his characters.
Chekhov has no program. A doctor by profession, he has some of the physician^ requisite detachment. He does not care about changing your mind; he cares only about telling the truth about the human heart. He wants to make you feel what lies behind the daily, the ostensibly trivial. As playwright he has no option, words are his only mйdium. But these words he thinks of as a mere screen. His business is to reveal holes and gaps in the screen, thus allowing us glimpses of the reality it conceals.
In these respects, as in others, Chekhov contributed some- thing new, as did Ibsen, to the art of the playwright. Since Chekhov, the serious theater has never been quite the same.
The theme of the three major plays I have suggested is human wastage. His characters, the provincial intelligentsia, the petty aristocracy, the small landowners and bureaucrats of prerevolutionary Rъssia, are in effect functionless. Essentially they have nothing to do except to contemplate their unsatisfac- tory lives. They are talkers, not doers. And they sense their own weakness. They know, as Yeliena Andryeevna puts it in Uncle Vanya that "things have gone wrong in this house," and we cannot but feel that the house is Czarist Rъssia. In Three Sisters Baron Toozenbach says, "The time's come: there^ a terrific thundercloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up!" (Three Sisters premiered sixteen years prior to the Revolution.) In the same play Olga offers the vague consolation: "Our suffering may mean happiness for the people who come after us."
But we must not think of Chekhov as a leftist, much less a revolutionary. He would not have welcomed 1917. His mind was not political, only contemplative.
That contemplation is pessimistic; perhaps melancholy is a better word. Chekhov^ exposure of the provincial middle class is sad rather than indignant. And even that sadness is qualified by humor; he once wrote to a friend that The Cherry Orchard (which to most readers seems so downbeat) was "not a drama but a comedy: in places almost a farce."
The mood of many Chekhovian characters is one many of us have felt. It is expressed by Chebutykin in Three Sisters: <4What difference does it make?"
Yet Chekhov is no nihilist. His own life was marked by gen- erosity, adherence to traditional moral values, and a persuasive compassion. He has no fixed or comprehensive view of life.
What interested him was detection of the almost unseizable reality of human behavior. Few dramatists have done this more successfully. To his friends he would say, "Let the things that happen on the stage be as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life."
The social world of his plays is rather restricted. To per- ceive the full extent of his understanding of other Russian types, including the peasant, we must go to his short stories. In this field he is one of the few great names. He helped revolu- tionize the short story as he helped revolutionize modern drama.
C.F.
102
EDITH WHARTON
1862-1937
The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth
Born into an upper-class but only moderately wealthy New York family, Edith Jones spent her early years as a shy and bookish young woman who was much more comfortable as an observer of high society than a participant in it. Her rigorous intelligence took note of the pretensions of the "Old New York" families guarding their dwindling wealth and clinging to the prestige inherited from their Dutch forebears, and of the social climbing and vulgar display of the new millionaires who were jostling to replace them. In the drawing rooms of Fifth Avenue mansions and in modest side-street brownstones, in elegant hotйis and shabby rented rooms, in fashionable sum- mer resorts, she found material that would serve her well during a lifetime as one of the most successful and admired novel- ists of her era. Soon after her death her reputation went into decline, and she was dismissed as merely a "popular writer"; in recent years her work has enjoyed a well-deserved revival.
Her own life had its novelistic elements. In 1885 she mar- ried, with no great enthusiasm, Teddy Wharton, a well-to-do but vapid Bostonian who was conspicuously her intellectual inferior. For a few years she lived a life of idle affluence, building her dream house, The Mount, in Lowell, Massachusetts, and frequenting the haunts of the wealthy in Saratoga, Newport, and New York. At the same time she began, tenta- tively, the literary career she had dreamed about as a young girl; her collection of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899) won some favorable notice. She began to achieve real celebrity as a writer with a steady output of novйis in the early 1900S; by that time her marriage was showing serious strains (Teddy began embezzling money from her trust fund and spending it on more compliant young women) and she was living mostly in Europe, with or without her husband. In 1906-09 she had an affair with Morton Fullerton, the great love of her life, who unfortunately turned out to be a cad. She and Teddy were divorced in 1913, and her relations with men thereafter were confined to warm but asexual friendships with men prominent in the arts—most notably Henry James [96], but also Walter Berry and Bernard Berenson. (The dark tone of her best-known short novel, Ethan Frome, published in 1911, very likely reflects her disenchantment with the institu- tion of marriage.) Edith Wharton settled permanently in Europe, living on her ever-increasing royalties and acting as a literary hostess and generous friend to young writers at her sumptuous Paris apartment and her garden home in the south of France.