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

Ford presents his hero as an "Elizabethan Gentleman Adventurer" (19)22 in order to give him a distinct identity. He does this to counteract the public perception of Conrad as "Slav," "Oriental," and "Romantic," which Ford sees as totally inappropriate. His Conrad "was practical ... the last thing he was was Slav" (53). He deals effectively with his grocer, his publisher, and his insurance agent. He gets what he wants without fomenting revolutions. And his style is not, as H. G. Wells thought, "Oriental" (48). He seeks words like "serene" and "azure" to express his meaning precisely in the cadences of the English language (173). And Conrad has not a romantic attachment to the past. Rather he presents himself as a traditional English Gentleman only to promote the goal of his quest, for "all revolutions are an interruption of the processes of thought and of the discovery of a New Form ... for the novel:" (58). That form insists on "rendering" and "constatation": "Never state, present" (Ford, "Joseph Conrad" 77). Thus Conrad shows himself in his novel-writing to be like the Elizabethan playwrights who wrote like novelists. And with even greater subtlety than they- "they could not," for instance, "prize honour quite so highl[y]" as he did (72)--Conrad emerges as "the finest of the Elizabethans" (70). Thus, "Lord Jim is all of all of us" ("Joseph Conrad" 323). Ford's memoir insists on such metafictional motifs as these to reincarnate Conrad as an Elizabethan poet who creates a New Form for fiction.

The romance of writing Romance is also a love-story, as we would expect a romance to be. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford agree to work together as collaborators to rewrite Ford's novel-in-manuscript, "Seraphim," and turn it into Romance. They bring to this union their strengths and weaknesses as human beings; thus they take each other for better or worse, not really knowing (as the title of Part I indicates) "qui dort dans l'ombre."23 Each as they meet is a character in shadow to the other because they do not, at the beginning, know each other at all well. The course of their collaboration reveals Conrad as one of a "new class of mental adventurers," like the Elizabethans, plundering Mediterranean civilizations (March 460). At the same time, Conrad cherishes a love of England and an ideal of fidelity that he admired in Marryat's fiction and that reminds Ford of Sir Francis Drake as well as of Christopher Marlowe. "For, if this country have any civilisedness at all, any tradition, or any craving for self-respect, it is because its real inner standard, its poetic view of life, comes still from the poets who made feasts at the Mermaid" ("Literary Portraits-XLI": 848).

Collaboration further reveals to Ford Conrad's highly developed talent as a navigator in the world of fiction. Ford finds in his mariner a master of the architectonics of fiction as well as of exotic lands and troubled seas. Ford's Conrad is, consequently, ideally suited to tell the story of John Kemp, a young English sea adventurer, the hero of Romance, who is "kidnapped by pirates and misjudged by the judicial bench of our country" and who is, additionally, "a political refugee, suspect of High Treason and victim of West Indian merchants" (Remembrance 42). Macmillan's reader summarized the plot this way: