The Secret Agent (1907)

For some time now I've been poking at the 1998 Modern Library list of the 100 Best 20th-Century Novels (see the Novels tab). I have a number of complaints about it, as I have about practically every institutionalized attempt at such honorifics, from the Baseball Hall of Fame to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to the Oscars, Grammys, and Miss America pageant. It's a flawed list, in short. I have felt free to go picking and choosing—I will never read Finnegans Wake (#77), I can say with some certainty. As further tonic, I paired it with Larry McCaffery's list of the 20th Century's Greatest Hits, another pack of 100 novels, with approximately 30% overlap. McCaffery's list leans more toward currents of the second half of the century. I will probably read even fewer of them in the long run, as it includes not only Finnegans Wake (at #10) but also Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans (at #7) and other such phonebook-sized blasts of dense non-narrative language. I like the cheek of McCaffery to make his #1 not Ulysses but Pale Fire—inspired choice. Then he makes Ulysses his #2. I guess some things you just can't get away from (not that I'm carping about something I don't know—I'm looking forward to finally getting to it). Gravity's Rainbow is #3, and so forth.

I've made my peace with the Modern Library list, even for all its flaws, as I keep finding books I love on it. I've already been aware of most of them, but not all, and some of the finds have been very fine indeed. But Joseph Conrad happens to be an example of one of the list's greatest flaws, so a ritual airing of grievances must now briefly proceed. My main problem with the list may be expressed as a bad case of Usual-Suspectivitis, combined with a kind of willful blindness toward such writers as Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. To make matters worse, the one problem exacerbates the other. The list is the result of polling the 10 members of the Modern Library editorial board at the time (names I know include A.S. Byatt, Shelby Foote, William Styron, and Gore Vidal), which is a fairly small and doubtless insular sample in the first place. It would be interesting to see the titles that fell 101-200, because then we might get a sense of how the list would change if the simple limitation of one title per author were imposed. Not that I'm necessarily in favor of it—I know it's arbitrary and precludes a certain perspective of how relatively dominating single figures might be—but I'm really not in favor of the clustered-up redundancies in the final list either.



Conrad is my springboard for the complaining because he turned out to be the reigning champion in this arena, with no fewer than four titles on the list: The Secret Agent (#46), Nostromo (#47), Heart of Darkness, which is arguably not even a novel because it's too short, and also it was first published in 1899 (#67), and Lord Jim (#85). (For his part, McCaffery has one Conrad, Heart of Darkness at #28, so it must be a 20th-century novel.) Henry James has three titles—this is a 20th-century list, remember. James Joyce also has three, though he is admittedly much more recognizably 20th century. But Finnegans Wake, really? The problem goes on, with multiple titles from William Faulkner (3), E.M. Forster (3), D.H. Lawrence (3), Evelyn Waugh (3), Saul Bellow (2), F. Scott Fitzgerald (2), Aldous Huxley (2), and more—yes, more. Some of them don't bother me as much as others, for partisan reasons. I have little problem with Faulkner showing up three times, but I am sorry to see Henderson the Rain King (#21) and Tender Is the Night (#28) on a list like this at all, let alone as high as they are. So many of those extra titles feel like lost opportunities for better writers and certainly better books. But hey, what do you do? Pete Rose still hasn't made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame either.

On Conrad specifically, it seems odd to me that The Secret Agent is judged as his best, though it barely nosed out Nostromo, whereas McCaffery's list, Francis Coppola, and my own judgment make out Heart of Darkness as not only Conrad's best, but stone iconic, that mystical elusive and much-desired quality. That is, if Heart of Darkness is a novel. That is, if it's a 20th-century novel. (You start to see how these things are such a mug's game.) Nostromo was the novel Conrad reportedly felt was his masterpiece—as did the Modern Library editorial board very nearly. But in the end they liked The Secret Agent, which is not an adventure story but rather a shadowy tale of bomb-throwing terrorists in the urban sprawl of London at the turn of the 20th century, an espionage spy novel. It should feel eerily prescient for our times, and in some ways it does, but only because it pays such close attention to the nuts and bolts mechanics and political contexts of sabotage and terror operations. It felt eerily prescient at one time for the Irish Troubles, and perhaps post-9/11 (three years after the Modern Library list) for the radicalized Islam flavor we confront and mismanage today. The players in The Secret Agent are agitating Communists operating out of Russia in order to destabilize the West (come to think of it, a more recent layer of eerie prescience from just the last couple of years). But all the prescience and due diligence noted, it is still a Joseph Conrad novel, and I have to admit he is predictably a deadening chore for me to read. His ponderous fulminations go on and on maddeningly athwart of the action, like being seated sidewise to the screen in an oversold movie theater. There is at least one strange, unexplained, and confusing jump in time here. The characters are an interesting array, but too few of them are actually involved in the story, and the descriptions grow wearying. I understand people love Conrad and I wish I knew the secret. I know I like one story of his very well ("An Outpost of Progress") but otherwise he tends to be a slog for me, even Heart of Darkness. I don't think The Secret Agent is the place to start. You have to come to it as a true believer.

In case it's not at the library.