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

Renascence, Fall 2000 by Wiesenfarth, Joseph

The result of this "broader emotional attachment" was Ford's "quasi-catalytic effect upon Conrad's creative energy." During what Meyer calls the "Hueffer decade" Conrad wrote "Heart of Darkness," Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, A Personal Record, "The Secret Sharer," Under Western Eyes, "Falk," "Amy Foster," "The End of the Tether"-virtually all of his finest work. Meyer thinks it is questionable whether Conrad alone, without Ford's moral support, "would have possessed the daring to explore man's `forgotten and bestial instincts' with the audacity manifested by him during the `Hueffer decade."' (Brebach, Making 29)

That judgment gains weight when we remember that Ford helped Conrad with the ending of "Heart of Darkness";10 wrote half of a chapter of Nostromo (Part II, Chapter V, "The Isabels")11 when Conrad was too depressed to do so for T P's Weekly; provided Conrad with the plot of The Secret Agent and details on anarchists for Under Western Eyes;12 gave Conrad the idea for A Personal Record, took dictation for it and published it as "Some Reminiscences" in the English Review;13 took down parts of The Mirror of the Sea in shorthand;14 carried out "book surgery" on The Rescue;15 encouraged Conrad's work on Chance, which profited from their previous work on The Nature of a Crime;16 provided Conrad with the germ for "Amy Foster,"" and helped him rewrite "The End of the Tether" when parts of the original perished in a fire.18 Ford also helped Conrad dramatize his story "Tomorrow," which was performed as One Day More at the Royal Theatre in June 1905.19

What the embezzler/plotter in The Nature of a Crime does in his letters to his beloved/collaborator is discuss in detail the making of plots and the drawing of character. He does so by revealing how he has embezzled money from the estate of his ward, Edward Burden, and how, when chance saves him from suicide, he will return that money. In a word, he tells her how he cooked the books and how, now, he is going to uncook them. His plot is Conradian in its use of a center that cannot hold. The plot's center is the embezzler-his accounts are about to be audited and the scheme by which he enriched himself is about to be exposed-who will kill himself by biting into a poison ring. This does not happen, however, because Edward Burden decides that it would be ungenerous to submit his gentlemanlike guardian to such an ungentlemanly act. So Burden lifts the burden of the unnamed narrator's having to kill himself.

Now Burden himself has led a double-life. About to come of age and marry on his twenty-fifth birthday, he comes clean too, admitting that he has had a lover prior to his fiance, Annie Avrey. This intensifies the plotting of the novel by giving us, so to speak, the nature of another hidden crime. And it leads Burden's guardian to see himself and his beloved as playing Tristan and Isolde to Edward and Annie's ordinary Darby and Jane. He and she are dramatically superior human beings. So just as Granger and Churchill collaborate to realize the Life of Cromwell in The Inheritors, the plotter/embezzler/lover and his confidante collaborate to realize the perfect love-story of Tristan and Isolde (without the inconvenient deaths) by being perfect-if, unavoidably, Platonic-- lovers.