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

It turns on the adventures of a young Englishman, of good family, in the West Indies early in the nineteenth century. Being forced to fly his country for some trouble with smugglers (though entirely guiltless) he falls in with some Spanish kinfolk, through whom he gets involved (though again guiltless) with a gang of pirates. The story is too complicated to follow in detail, but there is the necessary amount of love-interest, and, . . . an almost unnecessary amount of adventure. The hero gets very nearly hanged for his pains on his return to England, through a series of unfortunate, and not very possible, mistakes, but escapes at the last moment by the skin of his teeth. (Higdon 275)

Ford shows himself ideally suited to be Conrad's collaborator because he is "the finest stylist in the English language of to-day" (Remembrance 32). And although Ford acknowledges the precariousness of this estimate of his style, W. E. Henley, to whom the estimate is attributed, did warn Conrad against collaboration lest he ruin Ford's style (Conrad, Collected Letters 2:107). Conrad nonetheless pushed the collaboration. And Ford complemented Conrad's sense of "constructive beauty" (Remembrance 30) with his own sensitivity to words, his pensive approach to achieving the New Form of the novel, his tenaciousness in sticking to a task undertaken, and his determination to complete that task in the manner agreed upon (178-85). Ford shows moreover that like their Elizabethan predecessors who looked "over each other's shoulders" (March 471) he and Conrad could work together effectively. He shows this by dramatizing his taking down The Mirror of the Sea in shorthand as Conrad dictated it (Part I); by his writing The Inheritors, which Conrad called "a damn good book" (Part II);24 by his reordering the opening of The Rescue when Conrad could not manage it (Part III); by his giving Conrad the subject of The Secret Agent as well as incidental details on anarchists (Part IV); and by his working with Conrad on the ending of "The End of the Tether" (Part v).25

These five parts in which these five works are discussed are nonetheless focused with impressionistic intensity on the writing of Romance. That project, which began Ford's and Conrad's working together, resulted in something more than this novel and The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime. It made possible the other works that Ford and Conrad wrote independently of each other. And the writing of Romance also produced, Ford claims, "a third artist" who combines the best of both of them: "The third had neither [Conrad's] courage nor his gorgeousness; he himself had none of [Ford's] literary circumspection or verbal puritanism. So the combination was at least... different" (Remembrance 46). Different enough to write a novel that neither could write alone. Different enough to remind us that Romance, A Novel is a romance indeed. If it does not end with a marriage, it does end with an offspring as well as a successful quest.

Part I, "C'est toi qui dort dans l'ombre" of Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance introduces the subject of the book as the affair of writing Romance. It also introduces Conrad and Ford as the characters who work out that affair. Part 11, "Exellency, A Few Goats," by way of their collaboration on The Inheritors, shows how the proper ending of a novel should be written, giving The Inheritors as a bad example and Heart of Darkness and "Youth" as good examples. Part III, "It Is Above All to Make You See," shows how a proper beginning should be written for a novel by way of Ford's rearranging the beginning of The Rescue for Conrad. This part also goes on to treat of the structure, color, and texture that make up the middle of a novel by a discussion of general effect, impressionism, selection, speeches, conversations, surprise, style, cadence, structure, philosophy, progression d'effet, and language. Just how these techniques are translated into fiction is rendered impressionistically in the story of Mr. Slack, "your neighbour," who builds and paints his greenhouse and who has a dipsomaniacal wife whose incapacitation nudges him into the arms of Millicent, "your daughter," whom he gets with child, having won her affections with the present of a bangle bracelet. In short, Mr. Slack's story is a novel within a novel that illustrates how the New Form of the novel can be achieved.