Enigmatic Novelist

Professor Gurko has written an absorbing work of biographical criticism about that enigmatic English novelist, Joseph Conrad. He may seem to stress the obvious – that Conrad was a Pole – yet it is the Polish influence on Conrad’s thought which has remained subterranean, considered too little by his critics. Conrad wrote to Edward Garnett in 1907: ‘You seem to forget that I am a Pole. You forget that we have been used to go to battle without illusions. It’s you Britishers that “go in to win” only. We have been “going in” these last hundred years repeatedly, to be knocked on the head only. . . .’

Professor Gurko, with good reason, sees in Conrad a Polish sensibility – protean, time-haunted, alternately passive and rebellious – expressing itself by the medium of English prose. His inquiries into the process and origins of Conrad’s novels cannot be paraphrased. They seem to me to bear the stamp of true creative criticism. He is imaginatively in tune with Conrad. Speaking of that masterpiece Typhoon he says, ‘And Jukes, at the crest of the typhoon, falls into the psychic apathy which is the imprimatur of a Conrad novel. . . .’

In a sense, Professor Gurko’s book is an exploration of this ‘psychic apathy’ in Conrad’s life and writings. He is wise enough not to try to identify it in psychological terms, but faithfully follows its nuances in geographical, erotic, and political dimensions. What emerges from his inquiry is precisely that tragic acceptance of anti-human forces operating within the human condition which constitutes the ethic of the Conradian hero. Eventually one sees Conrad’s own ‘exile’ as a type of the common exile of the human race from spiritual security and beatitude. At least, that is how I read Professor Gurko’s profound commentary.

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