BOOK-loving purists, nursing their nostalgia for cloth-bound editions of books that for a lifetime have had them entranced in the imagination’s magical world, understandably disdain e-books; there’s no substitute, they maintain, for browsing in an old bookshop and accidentally discovering an important out-of-print work, whereas e-books live among the clouds and looking there all some of us see is the blinding light of technology.

One out-of-print work in my library is the two-volume collected letters of Joseph Conrad (Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters by G. Jean-Aubry, published by Doubleday, Page & Co. in 1927). Certainly, it’s a work that I’d never have read had my choice of reading depended on accessing only e-books, whereas its chance discovery in a bookstore has not only given me an important insight into Conrad’s work but also persuaded me to reread his major novels, and doing so, has confirmed my long-held admiration for his mastery over the English language.

One of the best sources of instruction for a young writer and a serious reader of fiction is to be found in the letters of writers, and of these the most instructive is the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert. Conrad’s letters, especially to his fellow writers John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford, are not far behind.

Flaubert is clinical and objective, like a scientist, and arrives at theoretical conclusions that have a universal application; Conrad complements that uncompromising objectivity with an immersion into those dark subjective depths where float the tormented self’s passionate emotions. However, both writers demand imagistic precision in the novelist’s language and insist that it is not the mere content but the style of the prose that, being fashioned to highlight the individual writer’s unique aesthetic conception of his art, transforms the content into impressive ideas.

Conrad was in his late 30s when he began writing after spending two decades as a sailor, and might not have taken up writing as a full-time career had he succeeded in obtaining the command of a ship. Also, ill-health consequent upon his life at sea and his adventure in the Congo made the sedentary life of a writer an acceptable alternative. He had the good luck, too, that the publisher’s editor of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was Edward Garnett, one of the finest critical minds of that era, who, while recognising that some of his new author’s phrasing was clearly that of a foreigner, perceived that there was a distinctive tone and richness to his use of the English language.

In his prefatory note to his second book, An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad states that after finishing Almayer’s Folly his mind and heart were still set on returning to the sea, and he doubted if he would write another line; then, one evening, when taking a walk with Garnett after they had dined together, Garnett said to him, “You have the style, you have the temperament; why not write another?” Returning home late at night, Conrad “sat down and wrote about half a page’” of what became his second novel a year later. Like one of his sailing ships caught by a sudden wind, he had been driven to take an unexpected course, and, not retreating to follow the earlier set course, he proceeded in the new direction for the rest of his earthly journey, like one fulfilling a mysterious destiny; and indeed, his entire life was a journey full of unexpected turns: born in that part of Poland which was under the tyrannical subjugation of Czarist Russia, and therefore a virtual prisoner of the Russian Empire that strictly controlled the movement of its citizens, he managed to escape to France as a teenager and become a sailor. Accepting work on a succession of ships, he sailed to destinations not of his choosing, from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, from Malaysian islands to Australia, to Africa and England.

Nearly 20 years old when he first docked in an English port, he knew no English and when he learned it he spoke with a heavy foreign accent, unlike French which he spoke perfectly like a Frenchman. And yet, some 20 years later he chose to settle in England, become a naturalised citizen, and pursue a career as a writer in a language that, as speech, emerged as comparative cacophony from his mouth but appeared upon the printed page as the notation of sublime music.

Once launched on a writing career, Conrad disciplined himself to work long hours regularly. A year after his second book had appeared, the first of his finest works, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, was published. Though his first two novels had been well received, there were some literary journalists who detected a ‘foreignness’ in his work, which is a polite English way of dismissing a fresh and complex stylistic usage of their language by a non-native writer; and so, to spell out his method, Conrad wrote a preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” that reads like a proclamation of a serious fiction writer’s intentions, emphatically laying out the standard to be followed, clearly and definitively stating ideas that had earlier been expressed by Flaubert and Henry James as the aesthetic basis of fiction.

Over a hundred years after it was written, Conrad’s preface still forms the nucleus of what’s important for the reader and the writer of fiction. All art appeals to the senses, he proclaimed, the writer’s task is to attempt “the perfect blending of form and substance”, to attend to “the shape and ring of sentences” and to create that vivid visual experience which explodes as a floodlit projection of the writer’s vision upon the reader’s brain.

Rereading Nigger of the “Narcissus”, one can observe how profoundly his prose engages the reader’s senses; the third chapter, showing, in ringing sentences structured around clusters of details, the ship being battered by a gale, contains some of the finest descriptive prose in English literature; and while it strikingly captures material reality, it’s a prose enriched by a layer of metaphysical meaning beneath the surface.

That intensity of language would only get tighter and more complex in the succeeding works, especially in Heart of Darkness, in which there is not a phrase wasted, with its sentences serving a multiple function: they present a literal reality in an imagery of cinematic clarity, and the reader’s mind, absorbing those images, receives a silent transmission of a symbolic meaning of that captured reality, which reception in that mind then releases within it an intuited philosophical apprehension of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Look, for example, at the novel’s second paragraph in which the four absolutely precise and beautifully composed sentences contain the phrases “the luminous space”, “gleams of vanished spirits”, “The air was dark above Gravesend”, “a mournful gloom, brooding motionless” over London, which is not named but referred to as “the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth”. The paragraph appears to be in the familiar form of a standard scene setting at the beginning of a novel: it is what the reader would observe were he to go to the mouth of the Thames one evening and looking back from Gravesend see the gloom settling over London.

Each detail is factual but the expression presenting it takes it far beyond the simple fact being shown. “Gravesend”, which happens to be the real name of the town, is a fortuitous pun, and the reference to London that seems to celebrate its eminence turns out to be ironical, an irony that perhaps goes unnoticed, but it is there as the first suggestion of the author’s pessimistic vision which will be affirmed in the novel’s final paragraph where the mournful gloom of the second paragraph has become “a black band of clouds” and Conrad’s protagonist Marlow is “in the pose of a meditating Buddha” watching London’s “waterway leading … into the heart of an immense darkness”.

Those two paragraphs bracket Marlow’s narrative of his river journey in the Congo that had taken him to the heart of darkness as though a black hole had sucked his self into the terrifying abyss of self-knowledge that sickened his soul. Chastened by that vision of the harrowed self, he assumes the pose of one who has acquired divine wisdom; he may pose as a Buddha, but his soul has attained no calming serenity at the end of his journey: his is the affectation of a cynical god who has observed that “the luminous space” has been illusory, that there are only black clouds and darkness where the self resides, who has said of life that it is a “mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose” and who has thought that Kurtz’s last words, “The horror!. The horror!”, “had the appalling face of glimpsed truth”, now has nothing more to say.

The power in Conrad’s work is in its descriptive prose, he creates a language that moves the imagination with dense sentences in which one hears the breath of unseen meanings, it is like being in a jungle where our eyes scanning the trees see nothing but the dense growth yet sense that lurking in that beautiful vegetation is a tiger, there’s something in the air breathing its presence that keeps us attentive and alert. His two later masterpieces, Lord Jim and Nostromo, add a sociopolitical dimension to the writing that remains empowered by the deliberately shaped sentences of his descriptive prose, though it’s the intellectual content of their subject matter more than the language in which it is rendered that makes them appealing to readers who prefer their literature to have a political significance.

In a letter to Galsworthy, Conrad describes how, determined to finish Lord Jim, he “sat down at 9 am with a desperate resolve to be done with it”, and how, with few breaks, he remained there for 21 hours till it was done. Responding to Garnett’s criticism of Lord Jim a few months later, he attacks himself bitterly for having produced a mere lump of clay that is lacking in “illuminating imagination”, the effect of the book is to make him feel “bruised” and “humiliated”.

Again a few years later, when he had completed Nostromo, he said in a letter to Garnett that it was like recovering from a dangerous illness, and wrote to another correspondent that he’d worked at it “with the tenacity of despair” and then said, “Personally I am not satisfied. It is something — but not the thing I tried for. There is no exultation, none of that temporary sense of achievement”. His is the artist’s self-torment of observing that the work he has produced does not live up to the greatness he is capable of creating — Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy, in their letters, express a similar disappointment with their own work. When it came to assessing the work of others, Conrad offered polite praise but could be critically instructive when commenting on their work to his friends as in his letter of Nov 11, 1901 to Galsworthy in which he tells him, “In a book you should love the idea and be scrupulously faithful to your conception of life”, and goes on to advise him that his technique needs more refinement so that it can reach “the point of crystallisation”.

To another correspondent, in December 1902, he says, “I doubt if greatness can be attained now in imaginative prose work”, and then adds, “When it comes, it will be in a new form” and to discover it, it is every living writer’s “duty to try, to try everlastingly, with no regard for success”. And sure enough, greatness did come 20 years later, and it came in the new forms created by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

The two volumes of Conrad’s Life and Letters beside me contain a dozen more bookmarks where I’ve noted passages that show the great writer suffering from the same doubts and anxieties that beset any artist — “Upon my word I hate every line I write”, variously expressed, is not an infrequent cry. We see him struggling with severe gout and depression, forcing himself to write to earn the money to meet his family expenses that included costly medical treatment for his wife and elder son.

After one such depression, he wrote to Galsworthy: “But the most cruel time is afterwards, when I crawl out of bed to sit before the table, take up the pen — and have to fling it away in sheer despair of ever writing a line.” (June 5, 1909). It is inspiring to sit fingering the pages, rereading such passages, and others where he talks about how much he depends on instinct and what comes from his unconsciousness when he is writing, and not the least of one’s pleasures is the sensation in one’s fingertips as they caress the cloth binding of the 88-year-old books found by chance in a bookshop.

But such an accidental discovery is not the exclusive provenance of printed books. Needing to spend some days in a hospital recently, I took my iPad with me to keep abreast of my e-mails. Seeking distraction one sleepless night, I was writing e-mails to several friends when I remembered the Gutenberg Project that offered online access to thousands of books. There was a list of 100 most asked-for books from which my fancy chose to reread Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I’m almost tempted to make the wholly unscientific assertion that reading it contributed to my recovery; it’s such a beautiful book, it’s like wandering into a glorious landscape where, whatever the state of one’s body, one is filled with serene contentment. But then, another accident, a fingertip mistakenly touching a button on the iPad, brought another list of books on the screen and my eye fell on ‘The Deserted Village’ by Oliver Goldsmith.

Seeing the title released the memory of reading Goldsmith’s poem when I was a schoolboy. It had made a strong impression on me then, and what I’d retained was a sentimental and romantic notion of the beautiful countryside deserted by the villagers looking for a livelihood in cities.

Rereading it, the opening passage confirmed that it was a sentimental picture of a happy peasantry who have “health and plenty” in the village where “smiling spring” comes early and summer lasts long with “lingering blooms”, all very charming but sugary to the point of becoming nearly distasteful. The second passage describes the vanishing of that loveliness, which too reads like a routine lamentation, and one fears the poem is going to gush sentimentality to the end. But then come these lines:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:

Goldsmith proceeds to decry the shift of values whereby humans, drawn to luxury, will justify any desecration of a peaceful established goodness if there’s money to be made by doing so. Trade, unscrupulously seeking profit, usurps the land. “Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose” where there was a village, and “The rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s decay”.

Instead of presenting a sentimental picture of happy rural life that has been compromised by the bourgeoisie’s love of luxury, Goldsmith raises issues that concern a modern social democrat and even an environmentalist.

Composed in 1770, the poem is addressing questions that trouble us in the 21st century, proving that a good work of literature does not go out of date. However, while its didactic message continues to be relevant today, it also proves that, as with all didactic works, the message has been a failure: it speaks to the already converted who are pleased to read what affirms their previously held beliefs but it does not stop the spreading rot, which instead spreads more viciously. The deserted village is fast becoming a deserted globe.

ZULFIKAR GHOSE is a poet, novelist and literary critic. His novels include the trilogy The Incredible Brazilian, and The Murder of Aziz Khan which launched Pakistani fiction in English when first published in London 50 years ago. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.