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

Renascence, Fall 2000 by Wiesenfarth, Joseph

Ford is manifestly not on an ego-trip for which Conrad paid the fare in his memoir. Romance "was written-where it is splendid-by Joseph Conrad," Ford told the City Editor of The World; "the rest of it was by, sir, Yr. Obedient servant Ford Madox Ford" (Naumburg 180). That is the message of Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. The memoir is not the work of "a fat patronizing slug upon the Conradian lettuce," as "The Londoner" suggested (49). Like Jessie Conrad, who thought that Ford's book "revile[d]" Conrad (Circle 65), this reviewer simply did not read Ford's memoir well enough to understand it. Like her he was "singularly lacking in imagination" (McFee 500). They did not see that it was plain to see that Ford relentlessly presents Conrad as the older and better writer in his biography. Thus "the sensitive perfection" of the fictional memoir is everywhere in evidence (English Review 865).

Ford was not able to say the same of Richard Curle's Joseph Conrad: A Study (1914). He found that that book showed no understanding of Conrad's personality and poetic achievement.26 He would later find G. Jean-Aubry's two-volume compendium on Conrad's life similarly limited (see Harvey 247-48). Curle and Jean-Aubry write books that embalm "Conrad in a grand tomb. Ford shows us the living man" (McFee 500). Indeed, Ford could not write about a poet without writing about his "brainwave" ("Literary Portraits-XXXV": 653). And Ford's Conrad is "a very great poet of today." Conrad had agreed with Ford "that a poem was not that which was written in verse but that, either prose or verse, had constructive beauty" (30). Curle's book only manages for Ford to be a "patient, laborious, and honourable study" that will make the critic himself "a distinguished ornament of that British school of letters which ... must always remain outside the great comity of European civilization" ("Literary Portraits-XLI": 849).27

Ford's Curle is incapable of being a secret sharer with Conrad as Ford himself was. Indeed, that story in which the young captain first saves Leggatt by taking him aboard his ship and Leggatt then saves the captain and his ship by letting his hat float on the surface of the sea as a mark to steer by-that story could be read as an allegory of the Ford/Conrad collaboration, which ended only shortly before "The Secret Sharer" was composed in August and September 1910. Ford and Conrad, like Leggatt and the young captain, parted company after having each given the other skills to navigate the lonesome waters of their respective literary enterprises." Neither the young captain nor Legatt, however, like Conrad and Ford themselves, were without limitations.

YET Ford admired Conrad precisely because he rose above his own human failings to become a great artist-specifically, a great novelist in the tradition of the Elizabethan dramatists. Ford further demonstrated the unique value of placing Conrad in an English tradition when he wrote, in 1927, The English Novel from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad. There Ford says once again that "the plays of Shakespeare were novels written for recitation" (43); and there, literally, he pays Conrad the ultimate compliment: "the conception of novel-writing as an art began for Anglo-Saxondom with Joseph Conrad" (33). What Ford does here he anticipates in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. The "radiance which Ford's admiration and love pour upon" Conrad, consequently, can hardly be missed (Dial 338). His awe of Conrad's talents "infuses every page" (Saunders 2:181). Typhoon, Ford told Richard Hughes-whose In Hazard he praised as the masterpiece of an "inhuman" writer- "Typhoon was written by a great writer who was a man.21 "Typhoon is at one and the same time a tremendous poem of pure humanity and a tremendous tour de force of pure writing" ("Mr. Conrad's Writing" 744).