Rehabilitating “The Brute”

CONRAD COMPLETED "The Brute" in January 1906. It first appeared that year in the Daily Chronicle, was reprinted in 1907 in the United States in McClure's Magazine, and was then collected in A Set of Six, published in 1908. Never, to my knowledge, has a good story been more often dismissed or ignored in critical writing. Baines considers it "a slight story, little more than a pot-boiler" (1960: 388). Graver's opinion is that it is "the least substantial" piece mA Set of Six (1969: 132). Fleishman (1967) judges it to have little literary or political interest. Watts, who dismisses it thus: "then Conrad offered [to Blackwood] one of his worst tales, 'The Brute', which was properly rejected" (1989: 77), later adds: "The 'degrading' of his creativity can be seen not only in trivial fiction for the market (tales like 'The Inn of the Two Witches,' 'The Brute' or "Gaspar Ruiz)" (131). Gail Fraser dismisses the story, along with "Gaspar Ruiz," "An Anarchist," and "The Informer" as "essentially anecdotal" (1996). And Batchelor condemns the story as "a pot-boiler about a dangerous ship, written for the (substantial) audience which liked Conrad's Old Salt nar ratives" (1994: 150). None of these critics produce evidence for their evaluations, and one is tempted to dismiss these comments as casual personal opinions. The purpose of this essay is to show that Conrad's own dismis sal of the story, which seems to have been taken too seriously by the critics, should be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, some of his comments about the volume A Set of Six, as well as about some of his other works, are uninformative, dismissive, misleading, or even absurd. For instance, he wrote to Wells about A Set of Six. "I've been writing silly short stories" (CL3: 297) and to Sir Algernon Methuen: "They are not studies ? they touch no problems. They are just stories in which I've