SOURCE: "Life, Art, and The Secret Sharer, in Forms of Modern Fiction: Fssays Collected in Honor of Joseph Warren Beach, edited by William Van O'Connor, University of Minnesota Press, 1948, pp. 229-42.

Stallman is an American educator, poet, essayist, and critic. In the following excerpt, he interprets "The Secret Sharer" as an allegory of Conrad's artistic struggle.

One measures an author's talent by his ability to apprehend "the full potentiality of the material," and to achieve that potentiality it takes great technical talent to recognize and single out from a myriad of memoried scraps the single consequent image, to select and place in their proper niche the character which fits, the incident which fits, the setting which fits—to find and fashion the exact image and the exact word. Conrad, in a letter to a friend, said of "The Secret Sharer": "Every word fits, and there's not a single...