Bringing it home to Uncle Willie

Frank Kermode

  • Joseph Conrad: A Biography by Roger Tennant
    Sheldon Press, 276 pp, £12.50, January 1982, ISBN 0 85969 358 9
  • Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature by George Jefferson
    Cape, 350 pp, £12.50, April 1982, ISBN 0 224 01488 9
  • The Edwardian Novelists by John Batchelor
    Duckworth, 251 pp, £18.00, February 1982, ISBN 0 7156 1109 7
  • The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism by Allon White
    Routledge, 190 pp, £12.00, August 1981, ISBN 0 7100 0751 5

A biography of Conrad that makes no claim to add to the voluminous information already on record, but runs amiably and quite deftly over the course, may have its uses. Not everybody has the time or the desire to tackle the thousand pages of Karl’s Joseph Conrad, or the shelf of books – Jocelyn Baines, Norman Sherry, Zdzislaw Najder, Eloise Knapp Hay – that would provide a richer and more chaotic account of this mostly painful career; and not everybody will be put off by Mr Tennant’s not saying anything very interesting about the fictions, of which he thinks Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness are the best. A lot of quite decent lives of famous people are not strictly necessary, though they are often the ones that get read. A good life of Edward Garnett, on the other hand, might, since his is a known but hardly a famous name, fail to attract much attention. But everybody who has an interest in 20th-century English fiction should read Mr Jefferson’s book. It is sometimes a bit dull and occasionally ill-written, but it is probably the most important of the batch here under review.

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[*] The myth and the realities of Empire, as they are reflected in the fiction of Kipling and Conrad, are the subject of a well-written essay by John McClure (Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction, Harvard University Press, 182 pp., £11.55, November 1981, 0 674 50529 8). Mr McClure is sensitive to the local, temporary and personal aspects of the authors’ interest in colonialism, but also expressly committed to a more modern anti-colonialist politics.