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

Renascence, Fall 2000 by Wiesenfarth, Joseph

The situation of the writing of this novel duplicates, in part, the situation of its plot. Ford tells us that he wrote it to read to Conrad: "We wrote and read aloud one to the other" (Nature 11). This itself duplicates the way the collaboration began with Ford reading "Seraphina" to Conrad (Remembrance 16). And Conrad tells us that he got tired of The Nature of a Crime-though it eventually helped him in the writing of Chance20-- and told Ford to bring it to an end.

I seem to remember a moment when I burst into earnest entreaties that all of those people should be thrown overboard without much ado. This, I believe, is the real nature of the crime. Overboard. The neatness and dispatch with which it is done in Chapter VIII were wholly the act of my collaborator's good nature in the face of my panic. (Nature 7)

The letter-writer who writes for his beloved so that she can read about him after he dies likewise quickly ends the correspondence when his burden is lifted in his last letter.21 Casting his analysis of this novel in a deconstructive mode, Eric Meyer centers it on the poison ring which recalls to him Derrida on "Plato's Pharmacy" where the pharmakon is both beneficent and maleficent-the drug can both heal and kill. The threat of killing himself becomes the letter-writer's source of new life in The Nature of a Crime. "Like the pharmakon, writing becomes a cure for itself that sickens to heal, that kills to make well," says Meyer (504). And he goes on to point out that this combination is more memorably realized when John Dowell takes life from Florence's death and tells the saddest story at his own expense in The Good Soldier (1915), which is the story of Edward Ashburnham's suicide. And, as Dowell goes on to claim of Edward Ashburnham, "he was just myself ' (291). So if we follow this thread from The Nature of a Crime to The Good Soldier, we can see that just as Conrad's collaboration with Ford led to his greatest fiction, Ford's collaboration with Conrad did the same for him. Their more intense life as novelists is encapsulated in the intense plotting of the letter-writer to make his way back to life once he escapes the sentence of death.

If we see that The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime are not only novels in which collaborations are underway (to finish a life of Cromwell and to live the Tristan and Isolde story) but novels that also center on Conrad's trademark of a decentered plot and that discuss writing in detail-if we see these things clearly we immediately recognize the intensity of Ford's metafictional preoccupation in writing them. And we see, perhaps more importantly, when Ford came to write his memoir of Conrad and center it on the affair of their writing Romance, that that memoir had to be metafictional too.

THESE novels, then, lead inevitably to Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), which is metafiction in the form of memoir. One reviewer noted that it is, "in part, a textbook for novelists" ("Biography" 866). And another that "there can be no better textbook" for "the writer or student of writing" (Farrar 83). Indeed, A Personal Remembrance is a novel about writing a novel. "Le centre," Louis Cazamian pointed out, "est la composition de Romance" (553). To take the implication of these remarks to their logical conclusion is to read the memoir as metafiction: the romance of writing Romance. Its major action is a quest for the New Form of the novel, which grew out of Ford's and Conrad's conviction that "the writing of novels was the one thing of importance that remained to the world and that what the novel needed was the New Form" (Remembrance 30). A Personal Remembrance presents the search for this one important thing as a heroic quest that confers immortality.