ABSTRACT: This article supplements the work done in Richard Hand’s 2009 book on Basil Macdonald Hastings’s adaptation for the stage of Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory . This article collects contemporary notices and reviews of the performances (those not included in Hand’s book), along with information about the various performances.
From the first lines of the first novel, the human voice asserts itself in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. Critics have long noted and assessed the distinctive authorial voice in Conrad's work. But as a component of the fiction itself voice operates on several planes. First, Conrad scrupulously notes the tone in which speeches are delivered; the voices of characters often precede them. Indeed, they can supplant them: in the tenebrous scenes Conrad favors, detached from their speakers, voices seem to carry on a dialogue of their own. Thus disembodied, they become part of the novel's setting, contributing to a framework of immensities and uncertainties and abstractions. This opaque, impassive backdrop of the maritime fiction shares certain features of Paul's worldview in the New Testament, where the visible veils the real and created but somehow autonomous principalities and powers have sway. Furthermore, Paul's universe like Conrad's oscillates between creation and apocalypse. Nonetheless, voice is cosmically creative and, for the individual, emerges as call, bridging the poles of a reality that retains an echo of voice in its theological guise of vocation. In The Rescue, Tom Lingard, one of Conrad's typically wandering characters, navigates a cacophony of rival creeds and callings. His mission and the relationships it entails lack the clear, if unwelcome, calling of a Biblical prophet or apostle. He must discern the objects of faith and fidelity and steer a course where work is unmoored from calling.
This paper scrutinizes the speech and silence dyad in Heart of Darkness. In his renowned essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe dubs Joseph Conrad as a "thorough-going racist," contending that the portrayal of Africans as silent while Europeans are loquacious belies the author's racist proneness to foreground the Western stereotype of the African as the alien and incomprehensible Other. Via a close exegesis of characterization, this paper examines how Conrad's portrayal of Africans as inarticulate is not prepensed to dehumanize the natives but rather to evince a skeptical outlook about the reliability of human language. By the same token, this paper lays bare how the depiction of the African wilderness as silent is not harnessed to project it as treacherous, as Achebe claims, but sprouts from Joseph Conrad's Romantic affiliations.
This article presents a history of several attempts to produce a film version of Conrad's novel Under Western Eyes. It focuses specifically on the work of Adam Gillon in this area. In Gillon's co-authored screen play, The Conspirators, and his own screen play, The Betrayers, wholesale changes were made to Conrad's novel to accommodate the needs of film and market. Characters were deleted and added, as were entire scenes. This article also demonstrates how these screen attempts all shied away from the novel's dark conclusions and altered the protagonist's character. These adaptations were never able to find a film company willing to produce the film. In short, these attempts at adaptation, while cognizant of the strictures of film, nevertheless move too far from Conrad's novel, away from its pessimism and toward a romance far from Conrad's intent.
The clerk's facetious remark to Marlow in Heart of Darkness, "I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples," constitutes one of the few explicit references to a philosopher in all of Conrad's work. Moreover, the fact that Kurtz, the "universal genius" to whose making "all Europe" is said to have contributed, will later be presented as a kind of Socrates, a man "who can talk so well on love in general," seems to implicate the entire Platonic tradition in Europe's mission civilicatrice. The present paper proposes that the homoerotic educational relationship between an older man and his youthful protege outlined in the Symposium seems to have survived in some modern institutions such as the all-male community on board sailing ships, but also in the homosocial environment of the colonial enterprise. It then goes on to explore the so-called "male homosocial paradox" which destabilizes heteronormativity and conventional notions of masculinity in environments which exclude women and facilitate male bonding. It concludes that, despite the yoking of sexual and intellectual desire that typifies the homoerotic educational relationship in both the Symposium and Heart of Darkness, Marlow's amused response to the Harlequin's enraptured recollections of his midnight conversations with Kurtz about "love in general" reveals the cynicism of modern culture regarding human motives and the consequent bankruptcy of such classical ideals as Platonic love in Conrad's day.
In Lord Jim Joseph Conrad's meticulous attention to specific navigational detail is uncharacteristic of his canon, with repetition of numbers-zero, two, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-two, seventy-one. Captain Brierly's punctilious navigational orders in planning his own death, and the memories of a French naval officer aboard the derelict Patna under tow, may offer insight into the novel as autobiography encoded. Brierly's orders to Jones do not bear scrutiny in light of navigational information which would have been available to Conrad, who knew better than to mistake a course that he had sailed, so we conjecture that distances and azimuths symbolize temporally and spatially salient events in Conrad's life. We shall explore this posited numerological code, which conflates Conrad's life with the fictional Lord Jim, Brierly, the Patna, and the Ossa. Having lost everything and owing more, Conrad at age twenty had reached the nadir of his material and spiritual fortunes. His botched suicide, likely faked, was a yielding to despair. Like his Jim and Brierly, Conrad was "found out" to himself, and experienced an epiphanic initiation into maturity. So, the numbers' symbolism in Lord Jim may be seen psychologically as his attempt at expiation of guilt.
ABSTRACT: This essay closely reads the “telling situations” of the Marlow trilogy. These meta-narratives represent a specific type of the storytelling “occasion” (James Phelan’s “narrative as rhetoric”) that is self-conscious. I argue Conrad was ultimately more interested in how we impose the form of a narrative onto a narration of another person’s life-events in an attempt to account for the other’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires than in the life-events themselves, hence my focus on meta-narrative and narration. In these meta-narratives, Marlow points to the ways in which his anticipation of his audience’s expectations for his stories (namely that a tale will set them to rest) have shaped their narrative structure. The shift in Marlow’s role as narrator from “Youth” to the subsequent tales is revolutionary: in “Youth,” Marlow’s tale is flawlessly transmitted and received, setting everyone involved at rest; in Heart of Darkness , Marlow refuses to satisfy his audience’s expectations, narrativizing Kurtz, through an unreliable interpretation of his last words, as a tragic hero in order, instead, to set himself at rest; and in Lord Jim , Marlow has transformed into someone who is wary of his own and others’ need to redeem Jim in the form of narrative. Marlow’s function as character-narrator is to make readers constantly aware that when someone—whether implied author, narrator, character, or implied reader—writes the stories of others’ lives, she does so as the result of some underlying motivation and under the pressures of her own and audiences’ expectations and narrative form.
Reviewed by: The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford Linda Dryden (bio) Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 334 pp. ISBN: 9781139061452. The Cambridge Edition of The Inheritors (1901) and The Nature of a Crime (1909), edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, is the nineteenth volume of Conrad’s works published in this series. As is already evident from the previous volumes, this series of expertly edited and annotated works establishes the definitive texts with a wealth of additional material for context and interpretation. The Editorial Board is comprised of an international team of leading academics in the field of Conrad studies. Prior to the advent of the Cambridge Editions, the major textual resource for Conrad scholars was the less reliable, unannotated, Dent Collected editions. Researchers are now in the fortunate position of having recourse to authoritative texts for all the major Conrad works, and to the wealth of additional material gathered by the individual editors. The current volume is a further welcome addition to the catalogue of studies dedicated to the works of Joseph Conrad. Both The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime are often overlooked in surveys of Conrad’s literary output, and thus a whole volume dedicated to charting their genesis, interpreting and contextualizing their content, providing extensive textual notes, and offering an account of their critical reception will receive a warm reception from Conrad scholars. Although not the most accomplished works in the Conrad canon, these texts are nevertheless significant for a number of reasons, not least for the fact that, alongside Romance: A Novel (1904), they represent Conrad’s experimental literary collaboration with Ford Madox Ford. As Hawthorn says: Omitted from Dent’s Collected Edition and accordingly often passed over by Conrad readers and scholars in the latter half of the twentieth century, these important fruits of the collaboration between two of the great modernist novelists in English are thus made available to the sort of serious consideration accorded to other works by these authors. (252–53) In this respect the stories are important in that they offer us examples of how these two authors influenced each other, and of how they worked together. In Jeremy Hawthorn, the General Editor of the Cambridge Editions has engaged a renowned and highly respected Conrad scholar, whose extensive knowledge of the writer and exceptional editing skills afford this volume an [End Page 209] extremely satisfying authority. This authority is amply demonstrated in his excellent Introduction, which contains a wealth of information on the genesis of the stories, the influences behind the plotlines, and the contexts in which they were written. The commentary is erudite and extensively researched: it makes for fascinating reading at times, and the range of resources consulted is truly impressive. Using a variety of sources such as Jessie Conrad’s Joseph Conrad and His Circle (1935), Ford’s Return to Yesterday (1931), and of course the Collected Letters, Hawthorn traces the early meetings between the two authors and creates a compelling narrative that details the genesis of The Inheritors. Hawthorn’s investigations reveal evidence of the authors’ working practices. He has carefully evaluated the contribution made by each author to the stories and argues convincingly that in both cases the majority of the text was written by Ford. Relying on Ford’s accounts of the collaborations, textual evidence, and marginal hand-written notes, Hawthorn also establishes strong evidence for Conrad’s textual interventions, and points to the critical moments when he interjected to shift the tone of the narrative, or to change a word or phrase. What emerges is a detailed and extremely plausible account of the collaborative practice that Conrad and Ford engaged in. In the case of The Inheritors, the authors strayed into the territory of a literature that, in the 1920s, would become known as “science fiction,” making the text unique within Conrad’s oeuvre. Hawthorn notes the influence of H.G. Wells on the concept of the fourth dimension in the text: he outlines how The Time Machine (1895), and Conrad’s visit to Dr. John McIntyre in Glasgow for an...
“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality”: A Possible Source for Under Western Eyes Alan Procter (bio) The third sentence of Under Western Eyes, in the words of Conrad’s Russian-literate narrator, reads, “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” In the four parts of the novel that follow, this startling claim gets manifest support in significant ways, just one of which is the lies uttered by various characters in their pursuits of various troubling, self-justified, delusional versions of unreality. But the subordinate tag to his claim, “as is well known,” in those four following parts lapses, the fame uncorroborated, as if its source in the mind of the narrator, like his very acquisition of words themselves, lay too deep to be resurrected. In quite another book, a recent study of the poetry of the Russian Arsenii Tarkovsky, Kitty Hunter Blair, in commenting on a line of Tarkovsky’s poetry, makes reference to an echoed line in a poem of a century earlier, a “much-quoted line” (23). The poem is the brief “Silentium,” its author Feodor Tiuchev (1803–73; also spelled Fyodor Tyutchev). Blair renders the relevant lines from “Silentium” as “a thought once spoken is a lie” (23). Similarly, Charles Tomlinson translates the lines: “Utter your thoughts / They flow in lies” (lns. 9–10). If among literate Russians the line has been much quoted, then the narrator’s claim to its fame is justified, just as his recollection of the line itself is faithful. It is possible, then, to conjecture that Conrad’s own Russian experience included this poem, thereafter perhaps lying deep within him until it resulted here in his narrator’s instinctive unreflective, unelaborated, unidentified recall of it. If so, then a paradox ensues, for Tiuchev’s poem reckons on words to proclaim the primacy of that wordlessness, of inexpression that he so cherished, the “reality” of the narrator’s third sentence of Under Western Eyes. Such cherished reality for Conrad’s characters seems to exist outside the boundaries of their word-filled lives within which they place themselves, or find themselves. Foremost among them, the protagonist and Tekla brave the costs of seeking release from the great foes of reality. In writing his novel, unique as it was in the severity of costs to his own well-being, Conrad may have been seeking for himself a similar release, his silentium. [End Page 179] Alan Procter ALAN PROCTER is an independent scholar. Following a degree in English language and literature in 1958 from the University of Toronto, he engaged for thirty-some years with teenagers and literature in Toronto suburban-school classrooms, and now continues to enjoy the worth of others’ writing. WORKS CITED Blair, Kitty Hunter. Poetry and Film: Artistic Kinship between Arsenii and Andrei Tarkovsky. Tate, 2014. Google Scholar Tiuchev, Feodor. “Silentium.” Translated by Charles Tomlinson, Russian Poets, edited by Peter Washington, Everyman, 2009, p. 45. Google Scholar Copyright © 2019 Texas Tech University Press
Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson G. W. Stephen Brodsky (bio) Robert Hampson. Joseph Conrad. London: Reaktion Books, 2020. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781789143071. Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson adds lustre to a collection of ninety-eight critical works at its date of publication (2020) in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives Series, devoted to “the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period” (pre-title page). This highly readable volume accomplishes an interpretive feat in just over two hundred pages that much larger critical biographies, such as Frederick Karl’s formidable Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979), accomplish in over a thousand. This enviable gift of Hampson’s is no less than we have come to expect from his pen. From the outset, elements of Conrad’s life and literature in their historical settings are integrated in ways imparting to the reader a common-sense wholeness. Early in chapter 2, about Conrad’s maritime career, for instance, Hampson approaches Heart of Darkness by way of noting poignantly that Henry Morton Stanley returned from Africa via Marseilles in 1877, in Conrad’s [End Page 95] “murkiest period,” thus inferentially drawing a line from Conrad’s boyhood romance with Burton and Speke’s accounts of African exploration through his despondency leading to his purportedly deliberate botching of a suicide attempt the following year (Hampson 37),1 and on to his disillusion and depression in the Congo a dozen years later. We find these and other kinds of linkages—international affairs and publishing history—throughout this exceptional critical biography. THE AUTHOR The authorship of Joseph Conrad is signal enough that it is both required reading for Conrad specialists and an intriguing entry-level text for the Conradian tyro: Professor Robert Hampson, FEA, FRSA,2 Professor Emeritus, Royal Holloway, University of London, and currently Research Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, is author of three previous works of similar merit: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Macmillan, 1992); Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Palgrave, 2000); and Conrad’s Secrets (Palgrave, 2013). His work has been described in acclaimed critical sources as “striking and inventive” and “an indispensable resource for specialists and enthusiasts alike.”3 Through the 1990s until the present Robert Hampson has become, as it were, a household name among Conrad specialists. He has edited and co-edited works by Conrad, was editor of Conradiana for seven years, and in 2017 was awarded the Ian P. Watt Prize for Excellence for his lifetime’s work on Conrad. THE VISUALS Our first encounter with the paperback version of Joseph Conrad is the cover’s photo-portrait of Conrad, familiar to Conradians as originating in 1904 in his forty-seventh year, still dark-bearded and with the eyes of the sea dreamer late come from his true home afloat. Not yet a decade from the seas, he remained largely unsung and undiscovered by the popular readership.4 A frontispiece shows Conrad nine years later in 1913, the grey-bearded mature artist, posed self-assuredly at his desk as if interrupted in writing a line of Chance, the book published that year which ended his obscurity and thrust him into the forefront of British novelists with Henry James and H. G. Wells. Most of the other visuals are known to Conrad scholars, but whereas they commonly appear in glossy pages bunged into the center of biographies, Hampson has judiciously had them placed appropriately where they unobtrusively illuminate the particular subject of the moment. [End Page 96] THE STRUCTURE As to the external mechanical aspects of the book, presumably the editors of the Reaktion series impose house protocols. Thus, for instance, Joseph Conrad contains a Select Bibliography of Conrad’s works at the end (202), but no chronology and, regrettably, no index. Oddly, the Acknowledgements are at the last. But assuredly these lacunae and eccentricities are not by the author’s design. More important, though, is the internal structure of Joseph Conrad, unique among critical biographies, that imparts coherence of meaning to Conrad’s life and work.5 Hampson’s structural apparatus throughout matches Conrad’s life experience to the literature, to “make us see,” so to speak, how...
Reviewed by: Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein Brian Richardson (bio) Hugh Epstein. Hardy, Conrad and the Senses. Edinburgh: University Press, 2020. 304 pp. ISBN: 9781474449861. Hugh Epstein’s book is a revealing study of sensory experience, sight, and sound in the work of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad framed largely by the perspective of Victorian science. The first chapter describes the relations between the work of both authors as perceived by their contemporaries, recent critics, and themselves. The most striking aspect of this account is the general lack of connections that have been made between these two figures who do in fact have much in common. Epstein starts by noting that both authors’ development occurred during the period where a simple concept of psychological materialism was replaced by an insistence on sense data; that is, we do not know things themselves, we know mental perceptions, and must therefore deduce those things from our perceptions. Epstein goes on to state that the two authors are alike insofar as they work within the encounters of the mind with experience, and are thus “drawn to sensation, to surfaces, to the meeting place of self and the surrounding world. Their novels are novels of inference” (4). Epstein usually examines a pair of novels, one by each author, in chapters devoted to related perspectives: Desperate Remedies and The Rescue and the physiology of sensation; Far From the Madding Crowd and Lord Jim for perceptions of sight and light; A Laodicean and “The End of the Tether” for visible space; The Return of the Native and Heart of Darkness for sonic imaging; Nostromo for the sound of history; The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Nostromo for the relations between self and world; and Jude the Obscure and Under Western Eyes for the senses in general. Given the subject of this journal, I will confine most of my remarks to the sections on Conrad and his works, while noting that Epstein makes a very powerful case for seeing the two authors as participating in a shared undertaking, one that distances them from seemingly similar projects by Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Epstein boldly states: “I am thus arguing for an impressionism in early Conrad which renders the physics of the scene that contains the mind, rather than the psychology of the mind that contains the scene. This ‘scenic realism’ draws Conrad closer to the modernity of Hardy than to the Modernism of James” (42; see also 25, 56). The first chapter explores the new role of “sensation” in later nineteenth-century science and culture, and stresses that the embodied mind organizes disparate sense perceptions into whole units. Epstein identifies numerous salient points of such contact in the work of both Hardy and Conrad. Discussing The [End Page 81] Rescue, he quotes a representative passage in which Lingard encounters the Traverses aboard their yacht; it is one which “deprived him in a manner of the power of speech. He was confounded. It was like meeting exacting spectres in a desert” (122). Epstein observes that “Conrad does not describe Lingard’s perception of the Traverses; rather, in a move typical of all his writing, to describe the sensation of being confronted by them, he leads away from perceptual veri-similitude, away from realistically accurate depictions of a seen surface, into stark and fantastic regions through the gateway of simile” (32). This chapter’s account of the act of sensation leads Epstein to reanimate earlier critical discussions as he contests Jesse Matz’s conception of Conrad’s impressionism (32–33) and astutely observes that Ian Watt’s term, “delayed decoding,” might more accurately be designated “delayed encoding” (34). We are able to get to the essence of much of Epstein’s contribution by looking at his treatment of the Victorian science of “sensationalism” and contemporary notions of vibrations and waves as he encourages us, while reading crucial passages reporting sensory effect, not “to construct convincing characters, each with a psychology formed of thoughts on their neural pathways,” but rather “to hear adjurations and assertions as participants in the vibrations of the moment, invested with human significance, caught in its passage over a particular...
Reviewed by: Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad ed. by Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli Richard Ruppel (bio) Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad. Edited by Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 239 pp. ISBN: 9781350168923. To help celebrate the 2022 New Year, Yael Levin hosted a virtual meeting of Conrad scholars from Japan, Israel, the UK, and the United States to discuss two questions: Why should we teach the work of Joseph Conrad, and how should we teach it? Participants shared their earliest, bewildered encounters with Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and The Secret Agent, their vague understanding that these stories were disturbing and strange, difficult but imaginatively stimulating: worth, we ultimately agreed, spending a significant portion of our professional lives figuring out. Teaching Conrad, on the other hand, has become problematic for several reasons, reflecting a general crisis in the humanities. Briefly, the group concluded, it is increasingly difficult to teach Conrad because he may be considered just another privileged white male and, though he opposed colonialism and, to a degree, racism, in Heart of Darkness and other works his treatment of race is sometimes offensive. Though some academics may scoff at our students’ sensitivities and mock those who feel “triggered,” we agreed that student distress may be justified: African American students might well have had experiences that make reading “The Nigger of the Narcissus” painful, or enraging, or both. Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli’s twelve-essay collection, Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad, provides several different answers to these questions about why we should continue to teach Conrad and how, as writers and teachers, we can accommodate our evolving understanding of and sensitivity to ethnicity, nationality, and race in Conrad’s work. In their Introduction, Salmons and Zulli point out that while transnationalism is currently a popular term associated with the flow of capital, goods, cultural and political beliefs and behaviors, and people across national borders, [End Page 181] “in its literary declination and in its intellectual and narrative forms, as an expression of global relations articulating the interaction of cultures and ideas through scholarly thought and fictional representations, transnationalism is a much earlier concept. Joseph Conrad described the world as ‘in a state of transition’ (Conrad 1926, 130), a perception that was not confined to geographical movement, but instead encompassed the philosophical, psychological and political changes that populate his fiction” (2). Conrad has long been identified as an international figure, a European whose work is seldom confined to Great Britain. But this collection is useful in the way it focuses on how Conrad’s fiction is often concerned with borders, crossings, initiations, and fractured or multiple identities. The first chapter, Robert Hampson’s “Conrad’s Rites of Entry and Return,” connects Conrad’s many experiences of entry and return to Chance, “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, “Amy Foster,” and The Rover. For me, the passages devoted to “Narcissus” and Heart of Darkness did the most to advance the critical conversation. Hampson notes how the seamen come into focus, become fully realized, as they are mustered aboard the Narcissus, and how they lose that realization when they dissolve in the English port and become individuals, prey to “prostitutes, publicans, and boardinghouse-keepers” (21). The men are defined, quite literally, by their work; they lose that definition ashore. Hampson also usefully draws our attention to the way Marlow’s meetings at the close of Heart of Darkness with the Company and journalist reveal historical Belgium’s attempt to hide the Company’s cruel and lethal trade practices. Hampson notes how Marlow seeks but never finds community throughout the story: in Brussels, on his voyage to Africa, at the Central Station, back in London, or even while he tells his tale to the (sometimes resistant, even contemptuous) men aboard the Nellie. William Atkinson’s fine “Back in Ukraine: Rites of Passage and Rites of Entry” explores Conrad’s fundamentally indefinite, insecure background. The word “Ukraina” in Polish means “margin” or “edge.” A Pole born on the margins, a French and then a British mariner, trained to captain sailing...
Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: A Study in Collaboration by John Hope Morey Fiona Houston (bio) Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: A Study in Collaboration John Hope Morey. Leiden: Brill, 2021. 198 pp. ISBN: 9789004449701. While the relationship and collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford is well known and well acknowledged, the nature of the relationship, however, is perhaps no longer, or rarely, analyzed, or challenged. This is not to say that scholars necessarily agree on the nature of the collaboration: did Ford exaggerate the extent of the help he provided for Conrad? Did Conrad underplay the importance of Ford’s services? John Hope Morey’s doctoral dissertation—edited and reproduced “to make it more readily available to a wider readership” (ix) by Gene M. Moore—is by no means recent scholarship (the very opposite is true); yet its tracking and testing of what Morey refers to as [End Page 188] the “Conrad controversy” (x) is vital reading for a new generation of scholars, as well as those who have been immersed in Ford or Conrad studies for years. Many works discuss the collaborative work of these two men, yet few track and test it so thoroughly as Morey, and the publication of this work decades after its original production highlights the importance of questioning accepted assumptions which may perhaps have been repeated without enquiry for many years. Conrad’s and Ford’s reputations have differed greatly from each other over the years, perhaps perpetuated by the loyalties of Ford scholars and Conrad scholars alike in defense of each man, a fact Morey acknowledges. He highlights the extent to which Conrad was “revered,” arguing that his “enormous popularity almost completely obscured the fact that he and Ford had ever collaborated” (2–4). He recognizes that those with “predilections in favour of Conrad [. . . .] scoff at [. . . .] the claims of Ford, while Ford adherents are often guilty of uncritically accepting what Ford said about his relationship with Conrad” (67). It is this contradiction of loyalties that makes this thesis such an important piece of work: written without bias towards either man, but rather laying out the facts and the history of this literary collaboration to try and ascertain the truth. After all, the fact that a close relationship did exist cannot be contested, and “for a period of ten years they talked about fiction, wrestled with English idiom, discussed plots and—most important of all—wrote fiction together” (151). What Morey undertakes is a close study of the nature of that relationship. Throughout the work, Morey dissects numerous claims about the authors’ partnership, testing them against evidence and comparing published works with works that were unpublished at the time of his writing. In many ways, his doctoral dissertation acts as a defense of Ford’s character: Morey devotes a great amount of time to discussing Ford’s reputation and public opinion of him, testing the many claims that were made against his character by friends and supporters of Conrad. Morey claims that through the evidence provided in his thesis, we are able to see that “some of the claims made by Ford—claims which have been scoffed at or ignored for many years—are valid” (65–66). One key line of enquiry Morey undertakes is a detailed analysis of Ford’s claims of his having lent Conrad money. Morey explores the founding of the literary magazine The English Review, investigating Ford’s claims that it was set up in part as a method of providing a source of income for Conrad and providing opportunity for his friend to publish work. Another point of contention against Ford for supporters of Conrad are his claims of the extent of his input in some of Conrad’s work, including Nostromo. Morey, however, again gives credit to Ford, acknowledging that “more than once Ford disclaimed any essential part in Conrad’s work, and took pains to [End Page 189] state explicitly the precise nature of the help he provided” (88). Morey carefully and extensively analyzes the claim that Ford was able to represent and imitate Conrad’s style, allowing him to complete works on his friend’s behalf when Conrad was...
