Joseph Conrad, The Making of a Novelist by John D. GordanReview by: George T. KeatingModern Language Notes, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Apr., 1942), pp. 307-308Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2911290 .

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REVIEWS 307

perfectionism on the one hand and with the idealization of the American Indian on the other. A more adequate equipment in the background of ideas would have enabled him to see significance in a great deal that he has passed over lightly and would have com- pleted the picture for us of the interests and preferences of the less erudite American public from 1789 to 1860, a picture which he has so admirably drawn for us up to a certain point.

Lois WHITNEY Russell Sage College

Joseph Conrad, The Making of a Novelist. By JOHN D. GORDAN.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1940. Pp. xiv + 430. $4.00.

Ford Maddox Ford held the opinion that in time there might come an obscuration of Conrad's fame, his contention being " that it is natural for each succeeding age to react against the master- pieces produced by the age immediately preceding it." Nevertheless, November saw the publication of two books on Conrad: The Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited and translated by John Archer Gee and Paul Sturm of Yale University, and Joseph Conrad, The Mlaking of a Novelist by John D. Gordan of Harvard University.

The amount of patient and exhaustive research in Mr. Gordan's book is prodigious, and future students of Conrad and of English literature cannot afford to be without it. Who was this man Conrad? Mr. Gordan shows us all the facets of this inexhaustible genius, the core of his mind and soul, lofty, tender, and under- standing, " one of us "-as he explained Lord Jim. This new study holds nothing back: we see a creative artist producing a succession of masterpieces, harassed by continual personal and family illnesses, the demands of editors and publishers, dunned by tradesmen and creditors. This condition was existent and constant until after the publication of Chance in 1914, when his place was assured. Here is a sympathetic and factual disclosure of the mind and methods of Conrad, revealing in detail his incessant search for the right word correctly to mirror his experiences and philosophy. " Give me the right word," said Conrad, " and I will move the world." The changes in text and in the titles themselves are duly set down: The Children of the Sea-" absurdly sweet"; then the substitution of the original title A Tale of the Forecastle; then-A Tale of the Sea, A Tale of Ships and Men, and finally the blunt, but particularly appropriate The Nigger of the Narcissus, which title that noble but lonely saga of the sailing era bears today. There are copious examples illustrating the growth of the text, a veritable encyclopedia of Conrad source material.

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308 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, APRIL, 1942

In the research work connected with compiling A Conrad Me- morial Library I felt the need of a more fully documented biography than the studies by Curle, Jean-Aubry, and others, avail- able at that time. Conrad in his Author's Notes gave us valuable clues to the genesis and background of the stories, and now Mr. Gordan in going back to the original manuscripts, corrected proofs, published and unpublished letters, has given us in a single volume all the information that the most serious student could wish for. Fortunately, the bulk of the manuscripts and other Conradiaina are preserved in this country.

Well, there cannot be too many studies of the life and works of the great Pole. Ford says, " He was a great poet and an honest man. So scientifically and with precision we may deduce his immortality, and his dust may lie in its Kentish sunlight heedless of passing clouds."

GEORGE T. KEATING Rancho Santa Fe, California

Charles Egbert Craddock (Noailles Murfree). By EDD WINFIELD

PARKS. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1941. Pp. xvi + 258. $2.50.

Mr. Parks's book is less significant as biography or criticism than as a revealing account of the literary career of a Southern gentle- woman, Mary Noailles Murfree (" Charles Egbert Craddock "), "a gifted amateur of letters," who published her first article, "Flirts and Their Ways," in 1874 and her last, " Muscle Shoals in Colonial Days," in 1921, a year before her death at the age of seventy-two. At the beginning of her long and productive career, at the moment when an interest in local color was in the ascendant, Miss Murfree was so fortunate as to discover a vein of material- the lives of the Tennessee mountaineers-which she worked indus- triously for over a decade. Her first notable success was the vol- ume of short stories assembled from the pages of the Atlantic Monthly and published under the title In the Tennessee Mountains in 1884. Her best local color novels were The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885) and In the "Stranger People's" Coun- try (1891). In 1896 she was shocked to learn that her publishers were losing interest in her repetitious use of the material most familiar to her, but, turning courageously to the working of a new vein, the American historical novel, she produced two moderate successes, The Story of Old Fort Loudon (1899) and A Spectre of Power (1903). When the vogue of this type of novel passed in its turn, she was unable to understand or to master the new modes of

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