By Anthony Fothergill, University of Exeter

A Set of Six, edited by Allan H. Simmons and Michael Foster; Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles and Allan H. Simmons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). lxxiv + 517 pp.

This new edition to the Cambridge Edition series of Conrad’s works is particularly welcome, for since the first publication of A Set of Six in 1908 these stories have received perhaps less critical attention than they severally deserve. Knowles and Simmons’ highly informative and engaging Introduction carries detailed sections on the stories’ origins (i), sources (ii) and reception (iii), and although there is a certain blurring of these divisions, each tale receives a finely nuanced critique. Their introductory comments are very substantial in themselves and are augmented by further, scrupulously edited, appendices: textual variants; original printed source materials, detailed explanatory notes, and glossaries. Simmons and Foster have done a fine job establishing the critical texts and the apparatus. Altogether the edition offers an impressive inducement to read or reread the stories and will surely invite renewed and much fuller critical attention to the stories.

Early response to the stories did not augur well for their literary success:

“They [‘An Anarchist’ and ‘The Informer’] bring more money than the sea sort.”
“[They are stories] of incident – not of analysis [… they are] simply entertaining.”
“‘‘The Brute’ is a trifle. Read it then throw the [Yankee] magazine out of the train window.”

These “throwaway” remarks (to use Leopold Bloom’s term) are not the judgements of disgruntled reviewers, but Conrad’s own words, in letters to his publisher Algernon Methuen (xxxiii; CL4: 29-30) and his friend E. L. Sanderson (CL3: 508). His words seem almost dismissive or defensive, perhaps in expectation of readers’ disappointment upon the publication of short stories (in 1908), following the epic achievement of Nostromo (in 1904) and The Secret Agent (in 1907).

The editors note Jessie Conrad’s telling remark, that the composition of the stories “cost their author great mental suffering” (244). Does this explain Conrad’s seeming casualness? Not a feigned indifference but a troubled closeness to the stories’ writing? Constant financial concerns burdened Conrad at the time he was trying to write them. He was creatively exhausted after completing Nostromo and already engrossed in the writing of The Secret Agent, and his finances were throughout his adult life in a strained, indeed parlous state, until his last successful years, with the publication of Chance (1913). Major and growing international recognition was not being matched by what Conrad thought was adequate remuneration. Among the illustrations of manuscript or copy versions for the tales offered by the Edition is a pictorial image from the Saturday Post serial publication of “Gasper Ruiz.” It shows the eponymous “hero” bravely carrying a massive cannon-barrel strapped to his back. His prostrate body is weighed down, epitomising the story of his determined resistance, motivated by a love that results in his ultimate suffering. It could be read as a metaphor for the weight of Conrad’s mental suffering.

The Introduction points to the mixture of genres among the stories, suggesting that Conrad used this fact to argue to his publisher that the stories were easily “popular” and therefore lucrative. He writes to Methuen, “All are dramatic in a measure but by no means of a gloomy sort. All, but two, draw their significance from the love interest – though of course they are not love stories in the conventional meaning. They are not studies – they touch no problem.” The remarks suggest that the stories are suited to a leisurely magazine readership, a possibility apparently endorsed by the tales’ brief “explanatory” subtitles: “Romantic” (for “Gasper Ruiz”), “Ironic” (“The Informer”), “Indignant” (“The Brute”), “Desperate” (“An Anarchist”), “Military” (“The Duel”), and, finally, “Pathetic” (“Il Conde”). Interestingly, the provisional title of this last was “Story of an Adventure in Naples,” a title which invites a more complex interpretation of an (allegedly) actual encounter between two men and, at a metaphorical level, the “encounter” between attraction and violence. But Conrad’s “simplifications” of the stories for their initial serialised magazine appearance seem designed to reassure the reader of what to expect. Critical hindsight allows us to reflect on a resemblance between the stories’ subtitles and those of Conrad’s major novels. The Secret Agent was, after all, written contemporaneously with the stories and reassuringly subtitled A Simple Tale – a fine Conradian example of “simplicity.”

The brief, wittily deadpan Author’s Note to the Doubleday edition (USA) of 1915 reveals Conrad pushing further his feigned off-handedness. Apparently a sort of apology, the Author’s Note justifies the inclusion of “A Duel” again in the Set, to those readers who already had it, since it had been published as a separate book, The Point of Honor, in 1908. If readers have already encountered the story, Conrad suggests, they could “easily skip it in the collection,” but if owned already, that “little book … in time is likely to become a bibliographical curiosity of value.” And in any case, he observes, without The Duel the publishing of the American edition would entail “the cutting down of ‘Set of Six’ to ‘Set of Five.’”

Conrad’s later (British) Author’s Note might be expected to offer a serious aesthetic overview comparable to that found in Henry James’ Prefaces to his 1908 New York Edition. But instead, the new Author’s Note – published in 1920, only when the Heinemann Editions were first collected together, almost two decades after their original writing and the Set’s appearance – is retrospective; it is written for posterity, not to consolidate a rising talent. At times ironic, unrevealingly abbreviated and teasingly enigmatic in his comments, Conrad was completing an account of the stories largely because his English publishers were requesting it. It does not have the critical depth of his Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), which has often been taken as the “manifesto” of his philosophical/political aesthetic, in that it provides a way to read the tale, possibly pre-empting its complexities with the assertion of his “whole purpose” and his imperative declaration, “to make you see.”

Unlike the Preface, Conrad’s Author’s Note to A Set of Six is relaxed, almost casual, in its remarks on the stories and their “origins”:

Of “The Informer” and “An Anarchist” I will say next to nothing. The pedigree of these tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth disentangling at this distance of time. I found them and here they are. The discriminating reader will guess that I have found them within my mind; but how they or their elements came in there I have forgotten for the most part; and for the rest I really don’t see why I should give myself away more than I have done already.

Conrad’s actual sources are judiciously discussed in the Introduction, which elegantly segues from evidence to commentary on Conrad’s use of them, while the Author’s Note can stand as a playful, almost Borgesian “joke,” with a metafictional obscurity appropriate for these tales of secrecy, intrigue, identity, and violence. Indeed, as the Introduction subtly suggests, the ubiquitous use of framing devices provides narratological ambiguity. This accentuates the mixed genres, self-reflectivity (including unexplained “humour”), and indeterminacy which play through the stories. The Introduction challenges the “discriminating reader” to be alert to subterfuge and to the problematic relation of subjectivities and displaced involvements. As Knowles and Simmons observe:

One or two of the tales (“The Brute” and “Gaspar Ruiz”) make unashamed concessions to the literary market-place – with their uncomplicated narrators, strong plotting, simplified character types and resolute endings. But elsewhere the stories are closer to being probing metafictions, in which Conrad both embraces and dismantles the conventions of Edwardian magazines fiction (xxxvii).

This admixture of high melodrama and self-reflectivity and the unreliability of would-be oral story-tellers (in “The Informer” and “Il Conde,” for example) opens up a narrative space within the generically conventional, which allows for the exploration of ideas and moral values which pervade the whole Set: secrecy, violence executed or just intended, loyalties betrayed and covert plotting, even love which dares and dies or which dares not speak.

The section of the Introduction devoted to A Set’s reception draws on volume 2 (ed. John G. Peters) of the invaluable five-volume Contemporary Reviews [CR] in the Cambridge Joseph Conrad edition. These reviews, along with the Collected Letters [CL], serve as valuable companions for the reading of this and all the Cambridge editions. There is a clear difference between the reviews of 1908 and those of 1915, the latter in response to the American edition of the stories. In retrospect, we might see Conrad as having reached the heights of his literary career in 1908, but most reviewers, though overwhelmingly laudatory, still perceived him as just then establishing his reputation. The 1915 reviews see him as having attained world-wide success. The early British reviewers predominantly stressed the familiar trope: this Polish writer was surprisingly impressive in writing in English as his third language, simultaneously praising and patronising him (a nice form of English acceptance).

The Edition’s explanatory notes and glossaries offer a further informative gloss on Conrad’s language. In references to foreign phrases, mainly French and Spanish, but also Italian, they also provide extra insight into his style, allowing us to catch a sense of Conrad’s “realistic” representation in stories such as “Gaspar Ruiz” and “The Duel.” Occasionally these foreign expressions are identified as “mistakes,” unintended linguistic Gallicisms or syntax and idioms with Polish colour, but in other contexts they suggest Conrad’s immersion in imagining the narrative situation. The same point could be made about his (teasing) insistence on maintaining the “mistake” in the title of “Il Conde,” which, as was repeatedly pointed out to him, should be “Il Conte” in Italian. No doubt Conrad knew. The notes inform us that “Conde” is the local Neapolitan form of pronunciation, so the “error” might thus render linguistic realism rather than “accuracy.”

Conrad’s language was an abiding topic for reviewers, linked as it was to attempts to define his cultural “nationality” and language, since “national identity” was a potent political issue.  In one outspoken early review of A Set of Six, Robert Lynd in the Daily News offers a politically interesting, if idiosyncratic, critique of Conrad and his choice of English rather than his “natural” Polish:

A writer who ceases to see the world coloured by his own language -- for language gives colour to thoughts and things in a way few people understand - is apt to lose the concentration and intensity of vision without which the greatest literature cannot be made. It was a sort of nationalism of language and outlook which kept wanderers like Turgenieff and Browning from ever becoming cosmopolitan and second rate.

Lynd continues: “Mr. Kipling, who has never had a native country but only a native Empire, is a writer who has not been entirely saved from cosmopolitan danger [sic], despite the fact that he is fortunate enough to write in a language to which he was born” (CR2: 446). Conrad’s response to this was wonderfully terse: “Who’s that fellow Lynn [sic]?” (lxiii; CL4: 107). Recently, Richard Niland’s account of Lynd in The Conradian, 3, no.1 (2008) gives us the answer.¹

It might be worth noting that at this moment in European politics and afterwards, the word “cosmopolitan” had a polemical weight: for some it was a synonym for “cultured (internationalist) intellectual;” for others it signified some kind of “carrier of foreign contamination and danger,” with ultimately disastrous political, human, consequences. Lynd was a fervent Irish nationalist, though we may note the irony that he moved from Ireland and lived in London, writing in English, not Gaelic. Conversely, Joyce left Ireland precisely to escape “the nets of nation, language and religion” which held him (A Portrait of the Artist); the “Irishman” Beckett wrote his major works first in French, translating them (himself) only later into his “native” English; and the émigré Irishman Oscar Wilde wrote in Wildean.

Lynd’s criticism of Conrad as “a writer without a country” or language introduces a motif echoed in Virginia Woolf’s famous essay on Conrad, written after his death. There she refers to him as “a guest” in England. Although she was generally very positive, what has sometimes been criticised as her, or “Bloomsbury” or “English” snobbery (or, from a different perspective, “provincialism”), cast an unintended light on an aspect of Conrad’s writing, narrative style and temperament which has raised interpretive issues for scholars and which the Introduction explores: Conrad’s mode of framed narration and the nature of his irony and (possibly national) sensibility.

Might a sense of humour and nationality be intertwined? To tease out the “nationhood” of his imagination, reviewers consistently pursued the trope of Conrad’s being foreign and yet gifted with English literary linguistic style. One aspect of this thinking about nationhood relies on a sense, if there is one, of knowing what “English” (or “British”) might mean. Many “nations” have stereotypic, self-confirming versions of themselves. A recent essay in TLS cites “fair play” and “pragmatism” as primary tropes of English self-definition. Other English clichés invariably include “a unique sense of humour” and irony, particularly self-irony (in the line of Fielding, Austen or Wodehouse rather than Hogarth, Gillray or Donald McGill). One could easily cite analogous clichés for the French, Germans and Italians. What all nations seem to share is a strong belief in their own self-confirming stereotypes.

But Conrad posed for his English reviewers an obvious conundrum. He had a sense of humour (of sorts), but was this temperament really English? Or was it “foreign,” even “Slav”? Reviewers enthusiastically pursued both tracks. Harold Child in the TLS has high praise for the quality of Conrad’s creativity and notes particularly that “it is part of the mystery of this author (whose English style is the other part) that his stories are characteristically English by virtue of the humour that plays about them and through them” (lxiii; CR2: 455). Conversely, James Douglas, reviewing A Set for The Star, describes Conrad’s storytelling as “always oblique,” unlike other “unphilosophic storytellers” (Dumas, Stevenson, Conan Doyle). He compares Conrad’s dark ironic humour to that of Hardy: his “pessimism is that of the Slav, not the fierce rebellious pessimism of the Saxon. It is soft with wise resignation.” Here, “the Saxon” is evidently representative of the English resistance to the enemy, the foreigner.

Contra Lynd and Child and echoing Douglas, however, Edward Garnett is quite vehement, claiming “it is almost impossible for a writer of genius to denationalise his spirit” and that his “rare gifts have been fructified through their transplantation into English soil … anything less English than his ironic, tender, and solemn vision of life is hard to find” (lxiv; CR2: 460). Conrad’s stories are of resolutely foreign heritage and unbounded by the “special illusions our English society cherishes.” His spirit is “a liberating force to our English insularity” and his humour “essentially Slav in its ironic acceptance of the pathetic futility of human nature and quite un-English in its refinement of tender, critical malice” (lxiv, CR2: 471). But we need to pause on Garnett’s “Slav.” Conrad the Slav’s position was characteristically complex, for “Slav” embraces cultures with internally contradictory political interests, as Conrad “the Pole” knew all too well in relation to “Slav” Russia. He was accordingly sceptical about aspects of the Garnetts’ Russophilia.

Conrad was able to voice, with precision, not being completely one thing or another. It is this which gave him such powerful political and historical insights. Writing to his French translator, Davray, who was working on “The Duel,” he carefully seeks to define his relations with his readers and with his own complicated sense of being “an English writer who lends himself so little to translation [into French].” Kipling is “a national writer” who “translates easily” and “talks about his compatriots. I write for them” (CL4: 29). The letter to Davray is an intricate exercise in the intersections of language, culture and identity. The ambiguities of what he says might even endorse Woolf’s use of the word “guest,” a welcome incomer to a group, one who is “in the club” but not quite part of it. This apartness gives fresh interpretive energy into what, exactly, “one of us” might mean, an abiding question for those interested in “nation” and identity politics.

Although many contemporaries stress the “ironic” and sometimes “farcical” elements in his writing, and although regarded as an honorary “guest,” Conrad’s sense of humour was clearly no laughing matter. This was a quality that Cunninghame Graham – the socialist radical Scot who lived so long abroad, and was in so many ways like Conrad, an “aristocratic outsider” himself – could recognize in his friend.

In his Preface to Conrad’s Tales of Hearsay, he observed that Conrad’s sensibility was often misunderstood. Like a gifted fencer in a duel,

[a]ll his ripostes in conversation came straight off the blade. … His humour was so subtle that dullards generally failed to perceive that it existed and went away thinking that they had helped an interesting foreigner to face the fell coruscations of real British wit, without discrediting himself. [There are] passages of the subtlest and most sarcastic humour that no reviewer ever seems to have observed.

Conrad’s British “hosts” were like those who receive a fatal wound without noticing it, subjected to a “joke” the purpose of which might be that they “don’t get it.” Graham concludes that Conrad’s was “[r]ather grim humour, but perfect of its kind, and cruel in its truth. … In every word there breathes the spirit of the Polish patriot, the burning sense of wrong, and of resentment at the hypocrisy of Europe” (Tales of Hearsay, x-xi).

This personal insight is valuable advice for an attentive scrutiny of Conrad, for the play of his ironic (and political) mode of thinking, which penetrates all the stories in the volume and challenges our reading. The jokerman Conrad, confirming Graham, might say, “I just write the jokes. I don’t explain them.” The very use of confusing or displaced framing-narration, and of overheard, or scrappily written or orally passed-on sources, enables this flexibility that eschews explanation and renounces any arbitrating authority. Take, for instance, “The Informer,” with its puzzling ending and the narrator’s failure to comprehend the Connoisseur Mr X’s joke. The latter’s sense of humour is shared by the narrator’s Parisian friend. For the narrator, the joke is without a punchline, without an explanation or resolution. Much critical effort has been expended on this conclusion., the frame-narrator swiftly dismissing it all as “cynicism.” This dismissal chimes with that of the first-person narrator of “Il Conde,” a friend of the Count, who, as the Introduction implies, is perhaps the closest Conrad comes to his first-person narrator. He insists that the Count’s taste was “natural rather than cultivated” and “had no jargon … of the connoisseur. A hateful tribe” (211).

The power of a fine short story, of course, lies predominantly in its brevity and silences, in what is left unexplained. These blank spaces and the questions they raise can resonate long after the story’s final sentences, not only in terms of the story’s plotting, but in terms, too, of its political implications and its characters’ psychology. As the Introduction demonstrates, the very lack of resolution insisted on by Conrad’s gifted creation of unclarities or “obscurities” becomes the story’s thematic strength and centre.

Graham discerned beneath Conrad’s “humour” a shared, powerfully held historical and political awareness and opposition to imperialist European and American “material interests” and their economic oppression of weaker peoples and cultures. While Graham’s and Conrad’s political temperaments and thus “solutions” were quite different, they recognized and valued in each other the determination to expose what they both deplored. These historical political currents can be discerned in the seemingly “personal” dramas in A Set of Six, as some scholars (Fleischman and Schwarz, for example) have recently argued. War and revolution, class and violence, contest with and destroy love, allegiances and human sympathies.

For while Conrad was in Capri in early Spring 1905, writing some of these tales, it was clear that revolution was in the air. He was also writing “Autocracy and War” (published in the summer of 1905). It is an account of the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War, which was at times an absurdly conducted and ultimately humiliating defeat for a Russia that sought imperial expansion over “racially inferior,” presumptuous Asians in the Far East. The essay paints this event onto the larger canvas of broader European history, Conrad recalling Napoleon’s “Grand” Moscow venture a century earlier, a long-distance enterprise with failing supply-lines ending in ignominious retreat and anticipating imperial clashes between Germany and Russia. (Conrad writes almost prophetically; “Operation Barbarossa,” the German attack on Russia a century later, ends disastrously at Stalingrad in 1941).

In 1905 this idiot wind, the grandiose imperial last gasp of a dying Tsarist empire, was blowing violently back to Europe to create widespread domestic unrest in Russia. It led to the 1905 revolution and although this failed, it was the expression of long-simmering political and social turmoil across Europe and in the Americas, as Conrad’s fiction constantly figures. Locally, in Britain, fear of anarchist attacks and “terrorism” had led to anti-foreigner immigration anxiety, embodied in the Aliens Act of 1905. Then as now, sympathy and pity for poor immigrants was mixed with real or politically contrived suspicion, hostility and fear, all of which Conrad’s fiction acutely registers in The Secret Agent: Mr. Vladimir can see the advantages to exploiting amateurish anarchism and beleaguered conditions to provoke an authoritarian crack-down by the Establishment.

As the Introduction points out, motifs from Conrad’s major works are interwoven with those of his short stories, even if he pragmatically claims that the stories are simply entertaining. Conrad’s political concerns are clear in “Gaspar Ruiz,” “An Anarchist,” “The Informer,” and “The Duel’.” The historical and geographical setting of “Gaspar Ruiz” shadows that of Nostromo as Conrad’s own remarks on his sources affirm. But rather than referring to the earliest years of the Spanish American revolution recounted in Don Avellanos’s Fifty Years of Misrule (which fictional work remained “unpublished”), Conrad wittily adopts a new fictional authority, General Santierra, as the framing narrator of the story. He has spent the whole fifty years fighting on the revolutionary side, and like the names of others, his own name is “preserved in history,” so that “vanishing from men’s active memory [it] still exist in books … in paper-and-ink immortality” (13). Narrative self-reflectivity here makes a human point and also an argument about history, memory, and the palimpsest relation of fact to fiction as well as the relation of the ordinary lives of men and women to the vast movements of historical forces. As with the “The Duel,” the Edition’s meticulous notes and maps of South America help us locate this dialectical fictional/factual dynamic, in which the fate of individuals narratively overlays the fates of nations. The stories thus stand in the forefront as counterpoints in the minor key to the major epic movements of history.

Readers of the Edition will wish that the editors had been given more space to expand their subtle insights into these complexly simple short stories. The tales’ “simplicity” is perhaps most conspicuous in the longest and most explicitly “absurd” tale in A Set of Six, “The Duel, A Military Story.” Its very length is a measure of the “inappropriateness” of the expectations a reader brings to the tale, a reader brought up on accounts of actual historical or literary incidents when “satisfactions of honour” are at stake. The structure of such encounters normally lends itself to swashbuckling drama and definitive conclusions. Conrad’s tale and the actual case on which it was based defy these conventions and expectations to a thought-provoking extent.

Of course, duels were the stuff of actual and fictional history which Conrad could exploit in a sombrely parodic way. Socially coded, ritually regulated and performed, and (at least sometimes) fatally concluded, duels were exciting fictional literary material. The popularity of the genre grew in the 19th century, despite or perhaps because of the general illegality of duelling, nations across Europe and America having imposed legal prohibitions on this centuries-long tradition of attaining “satisfaction” and maintaining “honour.”  Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers immortalises duelling as romantic heroism, and Pushkin made out of it something close to a national myth in Eugine Onegin. In an instance of life imitating art, Pushkin was himself a lively participant in over thirty duels, the last one proving fatal (for him).

In historical reality, as I have discovered in my own researches, duels had about them as much “absurdity” as “heroism,” as Conrad seemed well aware and as his sources for “The Duel” imply. In a stroke of bizarre legal humour, for example, the punishment for any survivor of a duel in English law was the death penalty. Irony, even farce, seems to accompany duelling events, aesthetic sensibilities and violent risk lying not far apart. The writer Saint-Beuve, accused of plagiarism, attended his duel carrying a pistol in his “shooting” hand, and, as it was raining, he held an umbrella in the other. Both participants survived, each failing to aim properly. As Saint-Beuve explained afterwards, while he was not afraid of dying, he did not want to get his clothing wet while doing so. Naturally, journals published accounts and illustrations of the encounter. Proust was also engaged in a duel in 1897, over a charge reminiscent of the accusation made two years earlier by the Marquis of Queensberry against Oscar Wilde. Wilde fought his “duel” in court, while for Proust, pistols were drawn at dawn. Both he and his accuser, fellow-writer Jean Lorrain, unacquainted with guns, were hopelessly poor shots, and each duellist missed the other. So, as often, the pen was mightier than the sword (or gun): Proust was able to continue writing his long novel.

Something of the absurdity of violent contretemps is crucial to Conrad’s historical sensibility. In the case of “The Duel,” as the Edition’s detailed appendices with maps help us understand, he offers serious political–historical perspectives on war. He claims in his Author’s Note that the source for the story was just a “ten-line paragraph in a small Southern French provincial paper.” The Edition refutes this characteristic Conradian obscurity; the note offers forensic research into its actual sources. But, in his Author’s Note, Conrad elaborates his claim: recreating “a bit of historical fiction,” he had largely to “invent” the characters and their motivations, to make it “sufficiently convincing by mere force of its absurdity.”

The Introduction refers to some fifteen accounts of a duel as potential sources for Conrad, identifying passages in Conrad’s tale which closely correspond to his principal historical source. In the appendix are two accounts of the famous duel that Fournier and Dupont, two French soldiers who eventually rose to the rank of general, fought a number of times for two decades from 1794. One account appears in the American magazine Lippincott’s in 1869 as part of a longer article entitled “The Satisfaction Usual among Gentlemen.” It concludes with slight but telling sentences. A life-long truce was enforced by the would-be “winner,” the more sovereign figure of Dupont over the impetuous Fournier, “[a]nd thus ended this long-protracted affair. Surely none but Frenchmen would have carried on such a tragi-comedy for so long a time” (476).

There is much of this inconsequential black humour in Conrad’s own tale, which some early reviewers noted either as a criticism of Conrad’s plotting or more positively as an apposite description of “The Duel.” The end of the tale offers no clear answer to the question of how it began, no clear cause or starting point of the initial “insult” and thus an end without finality. For, to end yet again, “The Duel” seems a precursor to Beckett’s tragi-comic “Waiting for Godot” (also written with unspoken resonances of war, as the second World War raged and Beckett escaped across France from Nazi-occupied Paris). One critic reviewed Beckett’s two-act play with the observation, “It is a play in which nothing happens. Twice.” The fraternal jousting between Vladimir and Estragon begins in the middle with the opening lines “So there you are again” and ends “Let’s go. (They do not go).” Conrad’s tale also begins in a pause, “a short interval of peace” for the Strasbourg garrison, where the two duelling soldiers are based. At the personal level things also start in the middle, D’Hubert arresting Feraud for dishonourably fighting a duel with a civilian before the start of the tale. But the actual offence committed is obscure and Feraud’s antagonisms and challenges appear unwarranted. That does not stop the seemingly endless repetition of their subsequent fighting.

The Introduction comments on Conrad’s keen awareness of the painful historical-political subtext that underpins the story, the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath. Conrad stresses this subtext in a letter to Garnett, saying he wanted to capture as much of the “Napoleonic feeling as the story could hold,” but, he adds, all reviewers have missed this, “being made blind by the mere tale” (lvii, CL4: 107). His desired title for the story, he writes, had been “The Masters of Europe.” The deep, weary irony of this would have embraced both the world-historical and personal layers of these narratives. The opening is quite explicit: Napoleon’s wars were “a duel against the whole of Europe,” and the tale, which simultaneously forefronts and footnotes the conflict, recounts “a private contest through the years of universal carnage” (133). The monumental, decades-long, European military “duels” form the backdrop to Conrad’s story of the recurring duels between the genteel, pragmatic, Picardian D’Hubert and the erratic, pugnacious Gascoigne Feraud. From Conrad’s wearily ironic historical perspective, nothing seems to halt the endless repetition of violent conflict. History seems to repeat itself here, the first time as tragi-farce and the second time as tragi-farce.

Conrad’s interest in the Napoleonic wars was abiding and almost traumatically personal, for the role of Poland in Napoleon’s enterprises was intimately linked to his family’s historical memory: “I have two of Napoleon’s officers among my ancestors,” he writes (lv, CL4: 58). However, what the Introduction does not add is that Conrad felt no sense here of any “heroism” in Napoleon’s campaigns. In the catastrophic collapse of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, Conrad’s two relatives were forced to eat dead dogs, as the six-year-old Conrad mentions in disgust to his grandmother (recorded in A Personal Record). How could his great-uncle, belonging to the Polish landed gentry, Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, possible eat dog? His grandmother ripostes, “Perhaps you don’t know what it means to be hungry.” The mature Conrad knew that grand national political “honour” can clash with crude necessity and the realities of human suffering. But the trauma remained: as he wrote, the “childish horror clings absurdly to the grizzled man” (35). Beneath the “heroism,” the major political historical events and concerns, there is for Conrad an abiding crucial and repeated tale of individual and national histories of violence, suffering and loss.

Like the wars themselves, the duel in Conrad’s story ends, and so does not end, with a truce rather than a resolution. The endless repetitiveness of the act quietly allows room for the changing history of duelling to be registered in the weapons chosen over many years: duelling with sword, then sabre, on horseback, later with pistols. The Edition’s notes elucidate other registers of historical change, as for instance dress-fashion. I did not know, for example, that “kerseymere breeches, Hessian boots” were an early nineteenth-century fashion throughout Europe. (Though etymologically linked to “cashmere,” as is noted, “kerseymere” was not a delicate wool, but a tough cavalry “twill”.) We also learn that the couture of Red Lancers was dictated very precisely, since fashion – subject to historical change – was a marker of social class and military and political status and allegiances. The notes suggest not just Conrad’s dress sense, as photos of him confirm, but also his awareness of the historical depths of would-be “superficiality.” A careful reading of the notes in conjunction with the map of Europe allows readers to appreciate in “The Duel” how fights between characters may be superimposed over imperial historical and geographical–territorial movements.

Some of the Edition’s notes may seem at first glance to be redundant or unnecessary, but in fact turn out to carry historical potency. Surely we know all we need to know about sauerkraut? But the “Explanatory Note” for the phrase “sauerkraut-eating” and Feraud’s pejorative comment on a “civilian” living in Strasbourg (495) – a still-familiar insult embedded in Germans as “Krauts” – offers a fuller, unspoken political story. The origins of the dish go back to the Alsace, which was in the highly disputed territory which France and Germany had fought over for centuries since 1648. It was a frontier area under constant political, religious and cultural upheaval, as were other areas of Europe, as Conrad knew only too well. The moment in “The Duel” when Feraud alludes to Strasbourg is about 1806, and the Alsace is French; at the time of Conrad’s writing it was German.

Fascinated by the historical implications of duelling opened up by the Edition, I have unearthed another “absurd” story of a would-be duel with ironic links to “The Duel” and “sauerkraut traces,” a non-event with massive historical ramifications, in which the personal intersects with Weltpolitik at a Napoleonic grand historical level. It resonates with Conrad’s story in a curious way. Duelling etiquette normally held that the challenged party chose the weapon. To add to the folly often accompanying duels, as if an outworn parody of ancient disputes of honour, the choices and scenario could be very idiosyncratic. In 1865 Otto von Bismarck, then leading Prussia, challenged Prof. Rudolf Virchow, a parliamentary opponent and epidemiologist, to a duel over arguments about the political funding for the Prussian navy. Virchow was at the same time researching the chemistry of food. He was specifically worried about the marketing of contaminated, poisonous meat that was ravaging Germany, Bismarck, however, was side-lined by military matters. Concerned to highlight this environmental danger, Virchow chose sausages as the “duelling weapon.” Both men were to eat a sausage, one containing poisonous meat, the other not. In this duel with the flavour of Russian roulette. Bismarck would choose his sausage first. Bismarck withdrew his accusation.

This historical duelling non-event had momentous consequences, for Bismarck remained in power, which led to the course of European history that Conrad came to know. In a would-be replay of the Napoleonic wars, Germany under Bismarck was victorious over France in the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71), reclaiming Strasbourg and all of the Alsace (“Elsass”) as part of the newly created German State (1871). The “lasting peace” that followed did not last. The Franco-Prussian war was, for Conrad, a revitalisation of the Napoleonic wars decades after D’Hubert and Feraud duelled, fictionally, in Strasbourg / Strassburg, and Feraud mocked “sauerkraut-eating” Alsatian civilians. If we read between the lines of the Edition’s notes and chronology, we are forcibly reminded that the distance between Conrad and Napoleon’s wars was little more than the gap between readers today and WW2, with our anecdotal “memories” and visions about it (and even WW1) through local and familial accounts. Conrad’s critique of duelling, international and personal, was almost present and not just past: for memory, like identity, is always in the present and over-lays the past. As Borges put it, “everything that happens, happens now.”

A Set of Six’s concluding story, “Il Conde,” confronts the reader with equally complex questions about viewpoints and unreliable sources of knowledge. As the Introduction strikingly puts it, readers of Conrad’s tales may feel themselves “hapless victims of a conjuror’s smoke-and-mirrors trick” (lii). In this final tale, “simplicity” is again revisited as covert plotting and that which remains unspoken. But on securer ground, as the Chronology notes, Conrad was in 1905 on a recuperative holiday on Capri, known as a resort for a largely expatriate cosmopolitan and often “colourfully libertine” community (as the Introduction describes it) with a taste for risky illegality. As the notes inform us, here Conrad met Norman Douglas, traveller, writer, and keen explorer of homosexual interests, who was to become a long-term friend. Conrad also met a compatriot, Count Zygmunt Szembek, an elegant, genteel Pole from a landowning family (szlachta), and the assumed source for “Il Conde.” The proximity of Capri to Naples and the latter’s mixed reputation as a home to organised criminality in the Neapolitan version of the Sicilian Mafia also has a bearing on Conrad’s story.

“Il Conde” begins and ends with the same proverb, “Vedi Napoli et poi mori” (“See Naples and then die”), a saying that has sometimes been adopted by other cities in Italy (Venice, Rome, Florence) in praise of its own beauty and culture. But Conrad’s use of it turns out to be deeply sardonic: the story starts with the beautiful and ends “in what amounted to suicide” (225). In the National Museum, the anonymous first-person narrator and a coincidental fellow-visitor, the Count (the fictional source of the narrator’s account), are sharing their appreciation of a celebrated sculpture of “Resting Hermes.” As the tale’s opening notes, the “delicate perfection” of beautiful Pompeian sculptures exhibited in Naples “has been preserved … by the catastrophic fury of a volcano;” beauty preserved as a result of nature’s “violence.” “Vedi Napoli et poi muori” (the phrase has been meticulously corrected in the Edition) enables a reading in which beauty and rhapsodic death are paired with potential ironic versions, attraction and threatened violent demise. Conrad parodically inverts the primary meaning of the opening, a would-be cultural Liebestod, a wish to die in rapturous pleasure, in the story’s ending, as the Count leaves Naples on a train, “a funeral cortege,” “a marked man” escaping in fear of violent murder. The narrator’s final view is of the Count framed behind glass at a lighted carriage window, sculptural “in stony immobility,” avoiding an inevitable violent end by returning home to suffer his terminal illness. The Introduction, for this story and others, offers a detailed and nuanced account of the embedding of the narrative voices and structure and also pinpoints here the homosexual allusions and the recent critical attention this “secret” has received. But it also comments on Conrad’s own close acquaintance with Szembek: “Whether Count Szembek ever realized it or not, he and Conrad may have shared something: a secret and a virtual silence” (lv). Subtitled “a Pathetic Tale,” its conclusion is seriously “pathetic:” not at all derogatory, but rather conveying Conrad’s pervasive sense of silent pity and sympathy with irremediable suffering.

The Cambridge Editions series of Conrad has already produced fine volumes, and this volume has a worthy place amongst them. I’m not competent to comment in any detail on the very full textual commentaries (on emendations and variations). But the breadth of knowledge and information represented throughout and the nuanced intelligence of argument in the Introduction are impressive. The Edition will richly reward all readers of Conrad who visit, or revisit, these often underrated tales and think afresh about their “simple entertainment.”

¹See also R. Niland’s recent essay on Conrad’s reception in Ireland, in The Reception of Joseph Conrad in Europe (2022), ed. R. Hampson and V. Pauly, pp. 323-329.

© 2023 Anthony Fothergill