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By Dirk Van
Hulle, Universiteit Antwerpen
Joseph Conrad, Notes
on Life and Letters, edited by J. H. Stape with the assistance
of Andrew Busza. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. liii
+ 449 pp. £70/ $120
The history of editing is marked by a
few famous examples of late revisions by authors towards the end
of their careers. For instance, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
reread some of his early works, such as Die
Leiden des jungen Werthers, he
decided they had to be thoroughly rewritten to be included in his
collected works. The longer an artist lives, the greater the temptation
to revise early works or to adjust the image of the person he or
she once was. But another tendency is equally important.
In Marcel Proust's A
la recherche du temps perdu, after
a few hundredf pages, the narrator suddenly discovers that the painter
Elstir, whom he regards as man of genius, is in fact the same person
as the ridiculous painter he had encountered many years before.
Since he can hardly hide his disappointment and disbelief, Elstir
tells him there is not a single man, however great and wise, who
has never done anything in his earlier life of which he is not so
proud, or which he would even prefer to wipe from his memory. Yet,
Elstir insists, one should not repudiate this earlier version of
oneself, because it is the proof that one has really lived.
In this respect, Joseph Conrad's attitude
comes closer to Proust's than to Goethe's. In the "Author's Note"
to his Notes on Life and Letters
(first published in 1921), he addresses
the matter in all frankness. Conrad compares his collection of shorter
pieces to a book shelf on which perhaps not all of his pieces deserve
a place. But he was not able to treat them as "removable rubbish":
"All those things had a place in my life" (3). Not unlike Elstir,
Conrad eventually - after numerous moments of hesitation –
decided to range the old
pieces on his shelf, "dusted ... but in no way polished, extending
from the year '98 to the year '20": "for those pieces of writing,
whatever may be the comment on their display, appertain to the character
of the man" (3).
The "character of the man" is an important
notion to Conrad, as is evidenced by his discussion of several authors
in the collection's first part ("Letters"). In his literary essays
Conrad tends to focus on the bigger picture. He prefers to discuss
an author's whole oeuvre, rather than a single book, trying to find
the "character of the man" behind the works, notably the personalities
of Henry James, Alphonse Daudet, Anatole France, Ivan Sergeevich
Turgenev, and Stephen Crane. In a single sentence Conrad summarizes,
for instance, Crane's Red
Badge of Courage as a story about
"war, from the point of view of an individual soldier's emotions":
"That individual (he remains nameless throughout) was interesting
enough in himself, but on turning over the pages of that little
book ... I had been even more interested in the personality of the
writer" (35).
A similar concern with the way his own
personality would be perceived after his death may have been one
of the main reasons why Conrad eventually decided to collect the
pieces. When the idea of a volume of critical essays was first suggested
by Methuen as early as November 1904 Conrad initially seems to have
been quite enthusiastic, though he may not have realized at the
time how time-consuming this enterprise could be. Conrad came up
with different suggestions to combine literary essays with his sea
sketches, but he failed to convince his agent J. B. Pinker, and
the idea was put aside. Fifteen years later, in October 1919 Conrad
claimed (in a letter to Dent): "Personally I have a great dislike
to have a collection of fragments of my prose in volume form" (xxxv).
But his publisher eventually managed to convince him.
It was a "testamentary act," as the edition's
exemplary Introduction elucidates. Apart from the volume's prehistory,
J. H. Stape also carefully delineates its reception, pointing out
that the reviews were on the whole favourable, but that "reverence
and ginger treatment at times concealed or downplayed disappointment
with its heterogeneous contents and occasional casualness" (xxxix).
In spite of this heterogeneity, some
characteristics do form a thread that runs through this volume.
As J. H. Stape convincingly argues the generalization characterizing
the literary essays "evidences a loyalty to his 'brothers' in letters"
(li). A similar loyalty to what Conrad called "the brotherhood of
the sea" characterizes, for instance, the three pieces on the British
Merchant Service. Both "brotherhoods" provided Conrad a social identity,
and in that sense this collection of essays indeed brings into practice
what he had already suggested to Pinker as early as 1905: "giving
both sides of Conrad –
seaman and artist" (xxxiii). Or to quote one of his essays: "I may
fairly call myself an amphibious creature. A good half of my active
existence has been passed in familiar contact with salt water" (164).
This "good half" is represented by eight
essays on matters relating to shipping in the volume's second part
("Life"), which also contains several essays devoted to the land,
Poland in particular. Among the essays related to navigation, Conrad's
remarks on the sinking of the Titanic
deserve special attention. A day
after the epitome of nineteenth-century self-confidence struck an
iceberg in the night of 14-15 April 1912 Conrad already offered
an article on the ship's loss to Nash's
Magazine; eventually the essay
appeared in the May issue of the English Review, which also published
a second essay by Conrad on "Certain Aspects of the Admirable Inquiry
into to Loss of the Titanic"
in its July number.
In the pieces on the Titanic
the dark side of progress that determines the basso
continuo in so many of Conrad's
works is spelled out quite explicitly: "the mere increase of size
is not progress. If it were, elephantiasis which causes a man's
legs to become as large as tree-trunks would be a sort of progress
too" (182). Even "the horror" is present, this time in the form
of people drowning under deck: "Just think what it means! Nothing
can approach the horror of that fate except being buried alive in
a cave" (181-82).
The "big ship" is not a servant of progress
but of commercialism, Conrad argues. And after these variations
on "progress," Conrad concludes in the second essay by returning
to the main theme: "Do not let us take a romantic view of so-called
progress. A Company selling passages is a tradesman tho' from the
way these people talk and behave you would think they are benefactors
of mankind in some mysterious way, engaged in some lofty and amazing
enterprise" (190).
In the meantime another enterprise deserves
to be spotlighted. The editorial enterprise of which this volume
is the beautiful result does not advertise itself as lofty or amazing,
but it is all the more impressive. These two hundred pages of text
by Joseph Conrad have been carefully restored and edited in a volume
that – apart from the
useful chronology and elucidating introduction –- also contains
four samples of Conrad's manuscripts and typescripts in facsimile;
a hundred pages of detailed information on the genesis and constitution
of each of the texts; an apparatus recording the emendation of substantive
readings; a separate list with emendations of accidentals (punctuation,
spelling and word-division); three appendices with extra documents
and relevant correspondence (notably regarding the loss of the Titanic);
a fifty-page section with notes to the texts; and two maps, one
of partitioned Poland ca. 1905, the other of the centre of Cracow
ca. 1914.
The annotations are extremely useful.
For instance, in the essay "Henry James: An Appreciation" Conrad
notes that "if gratitude, as someone defined it, is a lively sense
of favours to come it becomes very easy to be grateful to the author
of the 'Ambassadors'" (16). To recognize this "someone" as François
duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-80) requires either a more than average
amount of erudition, or a set of rich notes such as the ones in
this volume, which provide the reader with both the French original
and an English translation of the reference to the Maximes:
"La reconnaissance de la plupart
des hommes n'est qu'une secrète envie de recevoir de plus grands
bienfaits" (394).
The sub-title of this piece on Henry
James – "An Appreciation" – is a straightforward description
of the text's content. In this respect it contrasts sharply with
another essay with the same subtitle, written about three years
later: "The Censor of Plays: An Appreciation" (1907). The resulting
tension subtly reinforces the irony of the second sub-title, which
differs as radically from the first as Pierre Menard's Don
Quixote in Borges's famous story
differs from Cervantes'.
The piece on "The Censor of Plays" is
an excellent case study to appreciate the value of the excellent
editorial work that underpins this volume. In 1907, Edward Garnett
asked Joseph Conrad to write a letter in reaction to the Lord Chamberlain's
decision to deny a licence to Garnett's play The
Breaking Point. On 4 October, Conrad
agreed to write an essay and only four days later he sent it to
Garnett. The result of this brief writing process is a passionate
appeal against the Censor of Plays.
In his essay Conrad imagines a creature
"with a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy of its distorted
form" (65): "He must be obscure, insignificant and mediocre –
in thought, act, speech and sympathy. He must know nothing of art,
of life – and of himself.
For if he did he would not dare to be what he is" (67). But the
most incredible fact, according to Conrad, is that the "absurd and
hollow creature of clay seems to be alive" (65). Conrad compares
his power to that of the most irresponsible Roman emperors, such
as Claudius or Commodus. "But this is England in the twentieth century,"
Conrad concludes, suggesting to knock this obsolete object off its
shelf. "With an old broom handle for instance" (67).
The passionate tone of indignation seems
to have surprised even the man who requested the essay in the first
place, for after reading it Garnett suggested not only a few alterations,
but also nine major cuts. As J. H. Stape explains in his admirable
textual essay, these changes "considerably soften the essay's virulence
and, cumulatively, encroach upon its rhetorical impact and meaning"
(261). The adverb "cumulatively" is important as it indicates the
subtle impact of censorship at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The situation is quite extraordinary. A play is censored; the author
asks Conrad for a reaction but subsequently censors this reaction
in his turn, possibly for fear of offending the Censor.
The very first alteration is already
symptomatic: Garnett toned down the title by making it less personal,
changing "The Censor of Plays" into "The Censorship of Plays." Thanks
to the volume editor's essays on "The Texts" it is possible to reconstruct
Garnett's pruning. A couple of passages cut by Garnett suffice to
realize the extent of their cumulative effect:
He [the Censor] has the reality of
a power the reflection of which, a mere dream can only be found
in madhouses. (66)
He can go out in the morning, this
grotesque magistrate of a free commonwealth, catch a donkey on
Hampstead Heath, lead him into his study and sit him down in his
curule chair. Has not Caligula made his horse a consul? He can
do that and there is no one to say him nay. Perhaps indeed no
one could detect the difference. He may call his cook (Molière
used to do that) from below and give her five acts to judge every
morning as a matter of constant practice and still remain the
unquestioned destroyer of men's honest work. He may have a glass
too much. This accident has happened to persons of unimpeachable
morality – to gentlemen.
He may suffer from spells of imbecility like Clodius, have a special
craze like Commodus. (66)
The Cambridge Edition not only restores
these and the other deleted passages, but it also provides the reader
with a few facsimiles of the manuscript to make Garnett's pruning
more visible. As the textual notes explain, Garnett's deletions
are characterized by straight lines –
a large St Andrew's cross in the case of the latter passage quoted
above. These straight strokes contrast sharply with Conrad's own
undulating cancellations during writing or revision. The wavy strokes
are not a form of (self)censorship, but the material evidence of
Conrad's attempts to find le
mot juste and to embed it in the
most suitable grammatical constellation. In this case, after having
cancelled five lines Conrad immediately reformulated them. The undulating
strokes indicate that, contrary to what the text's tone of indignation
might suggest, the essay was not written in a fit of blind fury,
but carefully formulated. The idea to include this facsimile and
show the tension created by the different cancellations characterizes
this edition's subtle attention to the composition history of Conrad's
texts.
This is a critical edition; its aims
differ from what German editorial theorists call a historisch-kritische
Ausgabe, or from the French concept
of an édition génétique.
But even though the present critical edition's purpose is not to
provide researchers with transcriptions (and preferably facsimiles)
of all the stages of the writing process, it does set great store
by the genesis of the texts. In accordance with the general principles
of the Cambridge Edition, the copy-texts are manuscripts, revised
typescripts or, in case these documents no longer exist, "the printed
texts closest to the lost originals" (307).
In the case of "The Censor of Plays"
the edition adopted Conrad's final revised manuscript as copy-text,
which, as Stape notes, is "angrier and wittier" than any version
previously published (263). The concluding paragraph of the essay
on "The Texts" duly stresses: "The Cambridge Edition publishes for
the first time the text of 'The Censor of Plays' uncensored, as
Conrad created it in 1907" (308). In this way, the edition does
exactly what Conrad suggested in his "Author's Note": it presents
his pieces of writing in the way they appertained to "the character
of the man" and "had a place in [his] life" (3).
© 2006 Dirk Van Hulle
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