Ford's Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance as metafiction: Or, how Conrad became an Elizabethan poet

Renascence, Fall 2000 by Wiesenfarth, Joseph

When we think about The Inheritors today in the context of the Ford/Conrad collaboration, the novel's metafictional aspects outweigh its interest as a political roman a clef in its own day.6 Granger's betrayal of his honor is acute because he and Churchill, a fundamentally decent politician, agree to collaborate on the writing of The Life of Cromwell. Churchill is already well along with the project when he invites Granger to be part of it. Granger's betrayal of Churchill for the love of Fate, who presents herself as his "sister"-his betrayal, then, of friendship for incest-also takes place as a collaboration. Her plot knocks out the past and brings in the future. Both of these collaborations-the honorable as well as the dishonorable one-bear some of the marks of the Ford/Conrad collaboration. For Conrad was better at the structure and plotting of novels (at what Ford called "architectonics"') and Ford was better at realizing a plot in colloquial English (at making "prose seem like the sound of someone talking"8). Echingham Granger helps execute the schemes laid down by Churchill in his Cromwell and by Fate in her plot to bring down Churchill's government. And we note, furthermore, how the plot of The Inheritors, with its "worm at the very heart of the rose" (319), is like Conrad's plots in which the center cannot hold. The Greenland scheme reminds us of something insubstantial on which everyone and everything depends, like the San Tome mine in Nostromo or the attack on the Greenwich Observatory in The Secret Agent. And Granger, though inherently more capable than they, reminds us of such pawns as Donkin's hapless James Wait in The Nigger of the "Narcissus" and Verloc's feebleminded Stevie in The Secret Agent. Almayer's folly is rewritten in de Mersch's folly as the heart of darkness moves from the tropics to the Arctic.

The Inheritors, then, not only can be read as metafiction; it is best read as metafiction. It reminds us that Ford's collaboration with Conrad so intensely preoccupied his imagination that he more or less consciously made it the subtext of this novel. The same thing happened in The Nature of a Crime. Conrad said it was "fantastic" that he and Ford could "have believed, for a moment, that a piece of work in the nature of an analytical confession... could have been developed and achieved in collaboration!" (Nature 6). Yet, although Conrad wrote even less of it than he did of The Inheritors, he agreed to its publication under both his and Hueffer's names.

The unnamed narrator of The Nature of a Crime is an embezzler-a master of plots-whose masterplot can continue only if the unnamed woman to whom he writes will continue to talk and write to him. This is analogous to the Ford/Conrad collaboration. Conrad can continue as a novelist if Ford is there for him. More than anything else, Ford was important to Conrad as someone to speak to, as someone to listen to him.' The collaboration led, as Bernard Meyer remarked, to a "broader emotional attachment" between them. The result of this for Conrad was inspiring: it animated his career in the most dramatic way.