Letters from Joseph Conrad - 1895-1924 Book

Letters from Joseph Conrad 1895-1924 Edited with Introduction and Notes Edward Garnett Illustrated Indianapolis The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers Printed in the United States of America COPYRIGHT, 1928 BY THE CENTURY COMPANY INTRODUCTION Letters from Joseph Conrad INTRODUCTION OF THIS volume, Letters from Joseph Conrad, thirty-one have been selected by Monsieur G. Jean-Aubry and published in The Life and Letters of Joseph Conrad. 1 The others are new. Apart from other points of interest it may be said that this series supplies at first hand fuller and closer information about the first four years of Conrads work, after he had turned author, than can be gathered from his letters to others. I met Conrad first as the publishers reader who had rec ommended Almayers Folly, and as the earliest of his literary friends he turned to me first for criticism and advice. He showed me the manuscript of everything he wrote up to November, 1898. I thus saw and commented on in turn An Outcast of the Islands, Tales of Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, The Rescue first draft, and the tentative chapters of The Sisters. The first hundred letters, chiefly filled with Conrads literary development and his difficulties in composition, show in detail his struggles, his hopes and fears, his dejections and exultations from month to month. More than twenty years later when Conrad wrote the Pre face to the Collected Edition 1920, his memory naturally failed to recall many facts and details preserved by these let ters, e. g. f - his chronology of the composition of Tales of Un rest is wrong. My own memory certainly did not retain a tithe of the details which the letters set down. They fill out 1 Copyright, 1927, by Doubledny, Fnga and Company. Letters from Joseph Conrad my general recollection that as regards Conrads work, ninety-five was a leisurely year, ninety-six was a strenuous, prolific year, while ninety - seven and ninety-eight were years of struggling anxiety, years largely wasted by his unavail ing labor over The Resue, till with The Heart of Darkness, begun in December, 1898, Conrad suddenly found the chan nel clear and forged ahead. As I have said I first met Conrad in November, 1894, some months after I, as Mr. Fisher Unwins reader, had written one of my hasty, perfunctory reports and had ad vised the acceptance of Almayers Folly. My friend, Mr. W. H. Chesson, whose duty it was to take charge of the manuscripts, tells me that he called my particular attention to the manuscript. My wife recollects that I showed her the manuscript, told her it was the work of a foreigner and asked her opinion of his style. What particularly captivated me in the novel was the figure of Babalatchi, the aged one eyed statesman and the night scene at the rivers edge be tween Mrs. Almayer and her daughter. The strangeness of the tropical atmosphere, and the poetic realism of this romantic narrative excited my curiosity about the author, who I fancied might have Eastern blood in his veins. I was told however that he was a Pole, and this increased my in terest since my Nihilist friends, Stepniak and Volkhovsky, had always subtly decried the Poles when one sympathized with their position as under dogs. Since I spent the greater part of every week in the country I rarely made the acquaintance of authors whose manuscripts I had read, 2J Letters from Joseph Conrad But on this occasion Mr. Fisher Unwin arranged a meeting between Conrad and me at the National Liberal Club. On the last Christmas before his death, Conrad described to Mrs. Gertrude Bone his recollection of this first meeting, and I quote from the account she has sent me. 1 My memory is of seeing a dark-haired man, short but extremely graceful in his nervous gestures, with brilliant eyes, now narrowed and penetrating, now soft and warm, with a manner alert yet caressing, whose speech was ingratiating, guarded, or brusk turn by turn...Read More