"NOSTROMO"

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 69, 18 September 1937, Page 26

"NOSTROMO"

CONRAD'S GREATEST

MASTERPIECE OF ROMANCE

(By "Quivls.")

Jo?oph Conrad never was and never ■»ill be a popular author in the sense of the best-seller—he was too much of an artist in fiction to pander to the taste of the average reader—but his greatness, like that of George Meredith, is beyond dispute, and he will always have a following among those sensitive to the finer points in the craft of literature. Practically all his works, except one, have been published in cheaper editions, which may be taken either as a response to demand or an effort to popularise a deserving author —perhaps both. This being so, the exception noted.seems all the more extraordinary, as it was his own. favourite romance and one that most critics have come to recognise as his supreme achievement. Yet how many readers of Conrad, if asked to name it offhand, would pick it as "Nostromo." Most of them would hardly know it at all, one fancies, for it was rarely seen in -the shops until the publication of, Conrad in the collected edition after the war, and it is a rarity second-hand. Yet the critics are right. "Nostromo," with its modest second title, "A Tale of the Seaboard," was published as long ago as 1904, the first and the greatest, as is maintained, of Conrad's longer romances. One uses the- term "romance" in preference to •'novel," because it was Conrad's peculiar genius to cast the mysterious spell of romance about all he wrote. "Nostromo" is the romance of the Occidental Province of the typical South American republic Costaguana, typical and real enough in its atmosphere, yet not to be found on any map of South America. Most readers of "Nostromo will have tried to nail it down on the map. I myself, when I first read the story thirty years ago tried hard but could not reconcile all the geographical aspects clearly described with those of any single State of Latin America. Sulaco, in the Occidental Province, is on the Pacific coast, yet there is an Atlantic coast, too,, to Costaguana, and this reduces the possibilities. The Republic of Colombia is the only State that in any way meets the. specifications, but then the Pacific coast of Colombia is not its most fertile province. So, after repeated attempts, renewed on second and third readings, one hadJto give it up. It is a tribute to the creative genius of a writer that the abundance of realistic detail in his creation sends readers to the atlas to' give the scene a local habitation and a real name. CREATING THE SCENE. But if there is no such place as Costaguana on the map, the place lives in the mind as no book of travel could make an actual country live. So with the people. Conrad's method of fiction, as illustrated in "Lord Jim" and other stories, is sometimes a nuisance and a positive hindrance to the reader; in "Nostromo" it has the effect of making the reader see people and places "in the round," as they say. It is this success that makes "Nostromo" Conrad's supreme achievement.. Other great writers, like Balzac, for example, will spend pages at the beginning of their novels in laying the foundations, as it were, of the scene in long descriptions of places, before/introducing the people. Others again, where the scene may be familiar to the reader, plunge headlong into action and let the scene develop as best it cm. Conrad, in introducing a perfectly novel scene in a South American republic, succeeds in a few pages in creating both a geographical and a historical background for the action which then begins to develop under the special Conrad technique this time without failure. 'With a multitude of fine toudhes here and there the whole countryside and its people begin to live, all centred round the theme of the story, the Gould concession in the San.Tome silver mine which dominates the politics of the State and:'the lives of the characters. The effect'is extraordinarily vivid, and there is nothing in this earlier part that is extraneous to the story. "Nostromo" is divided into three parts, "The Silver of the Mine," "The' Isabels," and "The Lighthouse." In the first two. the story covers the ■whole politics of this South American republic thr6ugh revolution and .civil' war. ' The third is somewhat in the nature of an ; epilogue and anti-climax. Thia is where Conr&d really failed. "Nostromo," /the Capataz de Cargadores, who gives his nickname as the title of the book, was "meant by the author to be the principal character of the book, but somehow or other he never becomes as real as the other characters. There is no hero, as a matter of fact; the central theme is the San Tome silver mine and the effort of Charles Gould to keep it going in the teeth of corrupt politics and revolution. "Nostromo" plays his part, a decisive part in the story, but the references to it are indirect and allusive, and only in the final pages does he fill the stage. How this came about can be gathered from Conrad's own explanation of the origin of the story given in a preface to the volume in the collected edition. Here he refers to the "first hint" for "Nostromo" in the story he had heard as a sailor boy in the Gulf of Mexico, in 1875 or 1876, of "some man who was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver during the troubles of a revolution." Some **renty-six years later, he says, "I Cime across the very thing in a shabby -•olume picked up outside a secondhand bookshop." And thus, after much meditation: "I had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowing Sierra and its misty Campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions "of men short-sighted in good and evil." The book took him two years to write and, probably, intense trouble and research. Writing to a friend he said: "I have completed 'Nostromo.' The last -month I worked practically day and night, going to bed at three o'clock in the morning and sitting down again at nine. . . . Personally, lam not satisfied. ,It is something—but not the thing I tried for. . . . The strain

has been too great, has lasted too long."

A DIFFERENT THEME,

It seems clear on reading what the trouble is with "Nostromo." The germ of the story was the actual stealing of a lighter of silver. This Conrad retained, but he had to make the thief an interesting character, if he was to hold the attention of the reader. Hence, Nostromo, the Capataz, the Man of the People, faithful to his employers, but with a grievance about being asked to do so much for so little. Then came the temptation to conceal the fact that the silver supposed to have been sunk with the lighter had really been landed on an uninhabited island. Despite all Conrad's efforts there is something incongruous between the two phases of the story—the moving account of the political struggle in the first two parts, and this aftermath in the last. This would account for his artistic dissatisfaction with the result. To shift the interest from the main characters in the earlier part to one who is not as impressive as the author intended at the outset is to put an undue strain on the reader. This, however, is a technical blemish due to the retention of a theme in the story which had really been rendered unnecessary by the development dt the main theme on other lines. It is a structural fault, one that can be pardoned when understood, but it does not prevent "Nostromo" from being a masterpiece of fiction, something in its character unlike anything else in literature, as it is unlike most of Conrad's other work. To have fused such a mass of refractory material into living form is an immense achievement indeed. Where Conrad shines in this book above any other author in the English language is in his capacity to give life to men of all ranks and races. There is no caricature in his natives of Costaguana, men and women, or in his Americans, Italians, and Spaniards. To. the end Conrad was a cosmopolitan to whom the English language came hard That he should have written in English and not in French, as he had once intended, is a great piece of good luck to English literature. It is a pity, once again, that his masterpiece "Nostromo" should not be available at a reasonable price to all booklovers.