The New Lifetime Reading Plan

First, he was Irish—or, as he put it, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire." Hence he viewed English life, his immediate world, with a detachment and an irony difficult for an Englishman.

Second, he was a Fabian (antiviolent, gradualistic) Socialist who never recovered from Karl Marx [82]. Hence, in his work economic knowledge, as he says, "played as important a part as the knowledge of anatomy does in the work of Michael Вngelo."

Third, he had a deep faith in the capacity of human beings to rise by effort in the scale of mental evolution. His mouth- piece Don Juan in Man and Superman speaks for him: "I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself, I cannot be easy until I am striving to bring it into exis- tence or clearing the way for it."

Fourth, he is probably the greatest showman of ideas who ever lived. He is continually using ali his resources of wit, para­dox, clowning, humor, surprise, invective, and satire, plus a thousand stage tricks, in order to fix firmly in the readers or playgoers mind ideas ordinarily found in volumes of sociology, economics, politics, and philosophy that would be inaccessible to the average intelligence. He is always preaching—but from the middle of the center ring of the circus.

You will see below the titles of eleven of Shaw's forty-seven plays. (He wrote ten more than Shakespeare, a man he considered rather inferior to himself as a dramatist—but then he lived almost twice as long.) Always read the prefaces that usually accompany the plays. As prose they are masterly. As argument they are often more comprehensive and persuasive than the plays—see, for example, the astounding Preface to Androcles and the Lion on the prospects of Christianity. Arranged in order of publication or pro- duction, this list suggests a little of the evolution of Shaw's mind over his most fertile quarter century, from 1894 to 1923: Amms and the Man; Candida; The DeviVs Disciple; Caesar and Cleopatra; Man and Superman; Major Barbara; Androcles and the Lion; Pygmalion; Heartbreak House; Back to Methusela; and Saint Joan.

C.F.

100

JOSEPH CONRAD

1857-1924

Nostromo

The same year, 1895, in which Thomas Hardy [94] gave up novel writing saw the publication of Joseph Conrad's first book,

Almayers Folly. The traditional English novel—a large, loose, free-flowing narrative, depending largely on externai action and easily grasped characters—has begun to die. A new kind of fiction—original in form, full of technical devices, its tensions flowing from the exploration of mental life—is being born. Sterne [58], Austen [66], George Eliot [84], and Hardy had ali helped to clear its path. But it is really Conrad who announces its themes and methods. At this point in our reading we will feel a greater richness if we see Conrad as helping to make possible our understanding of Henry James [96], D.H. Lawrence [113], Joyce [110], Mann [107], Proust [105], Faulkner [118], and others, such as Andrй Gide, not included in the Plan.

Strangeness, somberness, nobility: these mark Conrad's career. He repels affection, he compels admiration. Born a Pole, of a family tragically dedicated to the desperate cause of Polish freedom, he was left an orphan at twelve. At seventeen he turned westward "as a man might get into a dream." Without ever forgetting his aristocratic Polish heritage, he committed himself to a new world. Some years of curious, almost cloak-and-dagger adventure followed, during which, for instance, he smuggled arms for the Carlist cause in Spain. Then, adopting the life of a seaman and an Englishman, he spent twenty years in the British Merchant Service, rising to the rank of master. He pursued his vocation on most of the seas of the world and particularly in the fabled East Indies, the setting of many of his stories. At last came the fateful decision which had doubtless been incubating in his mind for years. With a certain reluctance he abandoned the sea and, now a mature man, using a language not his own, and interpreting the world as a Continental writer would, this Polish sailor in the end became (this is my own opinion, though shared by many others) one of the half-dozen greatest novelists to use our magnificent tongue.

For years, stoically suffering neglect and, what is worse, misunderstanding, Conrad toiled at his desk. He tested his