T is the custom when a writer dies

IT

after a few weeks of decent eulogy to haul his work of a life time into a sort of literary probate court, schedule assets against liabilities and striking a balance, set down his net worth once and for all. So with Joseph Conrad, we must all have our say. Into this Court I come with something akin to humility. The Olympian attitude in vogue among critics today seems to me to smack of vulgarity, not to say ignorance, in dealing with men of the caliber of Conrad. For whatever may be your opinion of his books, the man commands respect. As to his contribution to literature, his novels and short stories seem to me to place him securely in the immortal company. He wrote of the eternal verities, of fear, the fear that remains in the heart in spite of every thing; the terror that cannot be allayed by cynic or Presbyterian, that arrives before illusion in the child and remains after desire has burnt out, that is beyond good or evil, that stalks the ranks of laborers and of college graduates. But he wrote also of the ideal, or the idea, the idée fixe if you will, that supersedes even elemental terror and conquers all except blind nature, yet flings its challenge even to nature, absurdly and divinely. No one who has read that story, "The Planter of Malata," can forget the lines with which the story end, "For to whom could it have occurred that a man would set out calmly to swim beyond the confines of life

with a steady stroke-his eyes fixed on

a star." Conrad was a Greek. He had nothing to say about sex or of the nuances and subleties of desire and satiation. He was not a bed room psychiatrist. Therefore, his novels seem trivial to many of us moderns who have become accustomed to illicit love as the only theme worthy of cardboard and buckram. Yet sex as a tragic theme, unknown to the Greek dramatists, is not an elemental but a quite modern idea. I am not myself convinced that it can be used in tragedy. Sex lends itself to romance and a kind of lyric ecstasy and even better to comedy and burlesque. It lends itself towards producing a sickening disgust, as well, which is fatal to the tragic mood.

I am not sure, however, that Conrad's work does not suffer by sex blindness. To write of sex tragically and to be aware of its influence are different things, even as there is a vast fifference between possessing a sense of humor and cracking jokes. The women of Conrad are doomed to a shadowy existence. We have to take their sex on faith. They are merely conventional portraits. A head, a bodice, a skirt, shoes and a strip of stocking. The flesh underneath is absent. Conrad saw only drawing room ladies and Gibson girls. In the crises of life, they do not forget their lady-like bearing. But it is absurd to quarrel with a man because he cannot see out of the back of his eyes. If he chose to exhibit