BY PHOEBE ADAMS
The construction of JERRY ALLEN’S THE SEA YEARS OF JOSEPH CONRAD (Doubleday, $6.95) required, according to the author, ten years of document-chasing. I marvel that it wasn’t thirty, for Mr. Allen has, it would appear, run down absolutely everything having any connection at all with Conrad at sea — not only his ships and their routes, but who built them, who sailed on them, how they were employed before Conrad joined them, and what became of them after he left them. At first, all this looks like a case of research become obsession, but as the facts pile up, Mr. Allen’s purpose becomes clear and defensible. He is re-creating the sailors’ world, at once far-flung and circumscribed, through which Conrad moved for twenty years and in which he found the people, the places, the episodes that he reworked into fiction. What astonishes is Conrad’s fidelity to plain matters like names and worldly circumstances; it’s a wonder that he was never sued for libel. Tom Lingard, for instance, was William Lingard, a trader as well known in Singapore as a public monument and described like one in various histories of the city. But this loudmouthed, amiable buccaneer is Conrad’s Lingard only in name and gunrunning; what Conrad called the “ideal value” of the character is his own invention. When Mr. Allen draws conclusions about Conrad’s thinking, about the cast of mind that enabled him to transform reality into his particular kind of pattern, one can say merely that where no guess is provably right, Mr. Allen’s guess is as good as any and better than some. Conrad himself, surfeited with dunderheaded reviews, once complained, “There is even one abandoned creature who says I am a neo-platonist. What on earth is that?”
YUKIO MISHIMA’S novel THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (Knopf, $3.95) is, on the surface, a blood-chilling tale about a group of horrid little boys. They have stern, romantic ideas of integrity, and when Noboru’s seagoing stepfather fails to meet their standards, they propose to exterminate him. What one makes of the book, beyond its exciting story, is a matter of choice, for the boys can be taken as monsters out of hell or the unconscious, and also as legitimate, if overviolent, critics of adult society.
WALTER and MIRIAM SCHNEIR, authors of INVITATION TO AN INQUEST (Doubleday, $5.95), report that they began this detailed study of the Rosenberg case with open minds and finished it with the conviction that the Rosenbergs were innocent of the espionage for which they were executed. The shape of the book, in which the authors make space for a history of the development of the atomic bomb but neglect to quote the questions that the Rosenbergs, invoking the Fifth Amendment, declined to answer, has the effect of persuading me that they were guilty — a thing I have never been certain of before.
NO HEAVEN FOR GUNGA DIN (Dutton, $3.50) is offered as the work of a frowzily self-educated Iranian farmer named ALI MIRDREKVANDI and nicknamed Gunga Din. It is a religious fairy tale about the abolition of hell, concocted out of a deeply charitable disposition, pieces of Near Last folklore, and solid experience as batman to British and American officers during the Second World War. I wish I could believe that this funny, charming fable is genuine, but the inconsistencies in Gunga Din’s maltreatment of English shake my faith.
WHEN LONDON WALKED IN TERROR (Houghton Mifflin, $4.95), by TOM A. CULLEN, is an exhaustive history of the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders. It is properly bloody and enlivened with odd details — Mr. Cullen has discovered that most of the fellows who cleared bars by roaring “I am Jack the Ripper" were prankish Irishmen. Mr. Cullen produces, with a certain aura of official support, a candidate for Jack, but the chief interest of the book is its revelation of the confusion of London’s metropolitan police force, directed at the time by a military man who should have been otherwise employed.
Soviet travelers and a fake English Communist collide in JOHN WAIN’S THE YOUNG VISITORS (Viking, $4.50), with results that are never quite as amusing, surprising, or satirical as they should be.