The New Lifetime Reading Plan

craft by a set of standards unfamiliar to the Victorians. He sought the perfect form for each of his stories. He searched human character in depth, fearless of what he might find there. He sought out wonderfully suggestive symbols (such as the silver mine in Nostromo) to mirror large areas of emotion. Just as Flaubert [86] did, he consciously forged a style suited to his special view of human nature under special conditions of moral stress. He thought of himself as an artist fiercely dedi- cated to his calling. He had no friendly relation to his public as Dickens [77] and Thackeray [76] had. His relation was to the vision within himself.

Nostromo is not an easy novel to read, and it is best to take it slowly. It does not tell itself, as Tom Jones [55] seems to. It uncoils, retraces its steps, changes its angle of attack. Into it Conrad put his most anxious effort, and if he has a masterpiece this is probably it.

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.