Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Condrad's Fiction, and: Coercion to Speak: Conrad's Poetics of Dialogue (review)
because an expatriate writer teaching in capitalist America can hardly be trusted to interpret British poetry or to explain its satisfactorily to anyone. Never mind that Donald Davie is a distinguished poet and critic in his own rightÂ—born in Yorkshire, educated at Cambridge, a veteran of the Royal Navy. Mr. Lucas' ossified essay reads as if written in a jealous rage by a man who would like to have a chair of literature in America (Mr. Lucas teaches at Loughborough University of Technology). He is a big boy now and should know better than to attack others on personal grounds. It can be risky. Mr. Lucas concludes by putting into Davie's mouth things Davie does not say (as Mr. Lucas admits) but that Mr. Lucas, breathing the rank air of his Marxist nightmare, thinks anyone living in America must certainly believe. It is clear from the essay that Mr. Lucas hates both the British society he lives in and the America in which Davie has chosen to live and work. It is hard to know what venue would satisfy the author of Modems and ContemporariesÂ—a disgraceful personal polemic masquerading as critical commentary. In his conclusion that "most critics who write about Hardy are plainly unfit to do so," the arrogant author condemns only himself. H. M. Daleski is a responsible and a sensitive critic, as his studies of Dickens, Conrad, and Lawrence have shown. Unities contains interesting and incisive essays on novelists from Thackeray to Sillitoe. "Hardy's Reluctant Heroes" argues that the novels are the most sustained attempt in English (before Lawrence) to portray the varied nature of sexual relations between men and women. Mr. Daleski focuses