The nature of my relationship with Conrad has been a good deal misunderstood by the general public and the press on both sides of the Atlantic. Just before my last departure from Paris for New York, I received a letter from a London editor asking me for my ‘account’ of my ‘quarrel with Conrad’, and giving me to understand that someone else was giving what he alleged to be Conrad’s account of his quarrel with me. There never was a quarrel. Conrad never in his life addressed an irritated word to me about any personal matter, nor did I ever address one to Conrad.

I published three books in collaboration with Conrad, one of them of great length and calling for five years of work, joint and apart. For such work – work of such close texture – intimacy is necessary. That must be manifest to the most lay of intelligences. Intimacy calls also for a certain interchange of respect and affection. You cannot pass days and nights alone together worrying over words with an individual whom in your normal moments you regard as imbecile, a double-crosser or, as for any other reasons, nauseous.

I was, then, for more than ten years, very intimate with Joseph Conrad; our friendship was never disturbed by any quarrel, and the last words of our last letters from one to the other were full of affection. Within a few weeks of his death, once more Conrad expressed the desire, against my own wishes, publicly to identify himself with me as collaborators. This he did. The proof of all this I am about to afford; the more impatient reader may see it by turning to the last sentence in the last paragraph but four of this chapter.

The personal record of Conrad that I wrote immediately after his death was impressionistic rather than factual. That was appropriate because Conrad was the greatest of impressionistic writers and held that truly recorded impressions communicate impressions truer than the truest record of facts. The reasons for this are too technical here to go into, but that was what Conrad held and that was what he desired – to keep his memory sweet.

I was useful to Conrad as writer and as man in a great many subordinate ways during his early days of struggle and deep poverty. It was not merely, that, from 1897 to 1909, I did, at such times as he was not himself equal to them, absolutely all of his literary dustings and sweepings, correcting his proofs, writing from his dictation, suggesting words when he was at a loss, or bringing to his memory incidents that he had forgotten. It was still more, perhaps, that I was large, blond, phlegmatic on the surface and had a good deal of knowledge of the practical sides of English life that Conrad naturally ignored.

That was a question of temperaments. Conrad passionately needed some moral support of the type that such an individual could afford him. Other people might have had the same temperament or temperaments very similar, but they had not the time to give nor the same taste in words. That last was the strongest bond. In all the millions of words that we must have written or pored over together we never once disagreed over the words a sentence contained once it was given its final form. You will say that that sort of statement is easy to write and difficult to prove.

Well, in my preface to The Nature of a Crime, which was our last published collaboration and the last finished work that Conrad signed, I made the statement that towards the end of our labour on those books, we had got so used to reading our own works aloud to each other that we finally wrote for the purpose of reading aloud the one to the other. That statement Conrad corroborated by passing it for the press – as it were with his dying breath. And that we should thus have written must have meant a similar taste in words, for it would be insupportable to have to listen, evening after evening, to prose that you did not like, and almost as intolerable to read your own work to a person who did not like your turns of phrase.

I do not think that Conrad ever worked with a pen over manuscripts of a book of mine. He read them with minuteness, suggested emendations, and groaned over banalities – but he was always too harried by his own work to have a minute to give to writing into another’s. My own books of that period are entirely negligible. They were not however, neglected, for during a considerable part of the period of our collaboration I was not only much the more prosperous individual but greatly the more popular author; indeed at one period I must have been one of the most boomed writers in England.

Literary collaborations seem to present to the public aspects of mystery which they do not deserve. They are rare. It is unusual for two persons of inter-supportable temperaments to come together and bear each other’s society, day in day out, for the long space of time that it takes to write a book. Few books can be written in a very short time; collaboration slows down writing, if only for material reasons. Romance by Conrad and myself was more than five years in the writing. Whether the book itself was worth the labour, it is for the public rather than myself to say. But that the labour in itself was worth while for us I have no doubt at all. I at least learned the greater part of what I know of the technical side of writing during the process, and Conrad certainly wrote with greater ease after the book had been in progress some while.

The desirability of that particular collaboration has been a good deal questioned. Indeed, it has been freely stated in the press that association with myself was the ruin of Conrad. That may have been the case; the penultimate sentence of my last paragraph may be claimed as an admission of Conrad’s deterioration under my influence. For it is quite possible to advance the theory against Conrad or any other man that because he writes more easily he writes worse. Mr Havelock Ellis, did, indeed, advance that view as to Conrad in a letter he wrote to me for publication in the Transatlantic Review – that Conrad’s early books written with great difficulty were masterpieces and that later his work steadily deteriorated.

I do not share that view myself, for, for me, Under Western Eyes is a long way the greatest – as it is the latest – of all Conrad’s great novels. It is almost the only great one in which I had no finger at all. In looking at the list of books by Conrad opposite the title page of The Arrow of Gold, I see the names of only four others published after the beginning of my acquaintance with Conrad, with which I had absolutely no, however subordinate, connection. They are Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Arrow of Gold. As to Within the Tides, I am not quite certain. For all Conrad’s other books I either corrected the proofs at one or other stage, or discussed the plots or incidents, or wrote passages from Conrad’s dictation – or actually wrote in passages. What I actually wrote into Conrad’s books was by no means great in bulk and was usually done when he was too ill to write himself and had to catch up with serial publication. Mr Keating has shown me twenty-five pages of my manuscript of Nostromo which he lately obtained from M. Jean-Aubry, Conrad’s official biographer who states that they were given him by Conrad. Thus Conrad could not have been ashamed of the fact that I wrote passages into his work, and I may presume that he would not now resent my mention of the fact. But, indeed, the importance of the passages I did write was so negligible, and they themselves were so frequently emended out of sight that they could not make as much difference to the complexion and glory of his prose as three drops of water poured into a butt of Malmsey.

These pages of Nostromo were written at a time when Conrad was very ill and the next instalment of the book, which was being serialised in T. P.’s Weekly, had to be supplied. Similarly a number of short passages in The End of the Tether were written by me after the manuscript had been burned and whilst it was running as a serial in Blackwoods. A little of The Secret Agent was written by me, sentences here and there, mostly about the topography of Western London – which Conrad did not know at all – and details about policemen and anarchists. That the plot of this story was suggested by me Conrad acknowledges in his preface.

Apart from the three collaborations, the plots of all of which were mine, I suggested the subject for Amy Foster, the outline of which I wrote in my Cinque Ports of 1902; and I suggested several of the episodes in a story called, I think, ‘Gaspar Ruiz’, which Conrad was desperately writing as an avowed potboiler. The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record were mostly written by my hand from Conrad’s dictation. Whilst he was dictating them, I would recall incidents to him – I mean incidents of his past life which he had told me but which did not come freely back to his mind because at the time he was mentally ill, in desperate need of money, and, above all, sceptical as to the merits of the reminiscential form which I had suggested to him. The fact is I could make Conrad write at periods when his despair and fatigue were such that in no other way would it have been possible to him. He would be lying on the sofa or pacing the room, railing at life and literature as practised in England, and I would get a writing pad and pencil and, whilst he was still raving, would interject: ‘Now then, what was it you were saying about coming up the Channel and nearly running over a fishing boat that suddenly appeared under your bows?’ and gradually there would come Landfalls and Departures. Or I would say: ‘What was the story you told of the spy coming with a sledgeful of British gold to your uncle’s house in Poland in order to foment insurrection against Russia?’ And equally gradually there would come the beginnings of A Personal Record. There are no episodes of my past life more vivid to me – you must remember that I had a great enthusiasm for my collaborator! – than those dictations that mostly took place on a little terrace of my cottage at Aldington, high up in the air, with the great skies over the Romney Marsh below. And in those days I had a very remarkable memory so that if Conrad became too tired to go on I could complete a paragraph or episode in his own words – though they might have been words of a week, a month, or several years before.

It has been alleged that I started the English Review in order to print a poem by Thomas Hardy that had been refused by every magazine in England. It would be more just to say that that was the suggestion of my partner Arthur Marwood. My own most urgent motive was to provide some money for Conrad by printing the Personal Record, and other things which I extracted from him. In one of his prefaces you can read how I did extract these books by what he calls ‘gentle pressure’: in the facsimile of a letter to me which was reproduced in the English edition of my Joseph Conrad, A Personal Reminiscence, you can read how I sat up nearly all night with him gently pressing him to write a review of Anatole France’s Isle des Pingouins for the first number. That letter was written as a contribution to the Transatlantic Review. The first draft of that letter is still in my possession. Conrad added to it for purposes of publication and it is here printed from the original letter:

Oswalds,
Bishopsbourne,
Kent
Oct. 13th 1923.

My Dear Ford,

Forgive me for answering your interesting holograph letter on the machine. I don’t like to delay any longer telling you how pleased I am to know you have got hold of such interesting work, in conditions which will permit you to concentrate your mind on it in peace and comfort. My warmest wishes for its success. I won’t tell you that I will be ‘honoured’ or ‘flattered’ by having my name included amongst your contributors, but I will tell you that I consider it a very friendly thing on your part to wish to do so.

I don’t think your memory renders me justice as to my attitude to the early E.R. (English Review). The early E.R. is the only one I ever cared for. The mere fact that it was the occasion of you putting on me that gentle but persistent pressure which extracted, from the depths of my then despondency, the stuff of the Personal Record, would be enough to make its memory dear. My only grievance against the early E.R. is that it didn’t last long enough. If I say that I am curious to see what you will make of this venture it isn’t because I have the slightest doubts of your consistency. You have a perfect right to say that you are ‘rather unchangeable.’ Unlike the Serpent (which is wise) you will die in your original skin. So I have no doubt that the (Transatlantic) Review will be truly Fordian – at all costs! But it will be interesting to see what men you will find and what you will get out of them in these changed times.

I won’t say anything about myself for it wouldn’t be amusing and not even interesting. We are still sticking in this house till next year. A novel of sorts will appear at the end of this year. Another, half written, has been stewing in its own juice for months and months. I suppose I may take it that Bd. Arago is a permanent address where you can be found from now on.

Yours,

J. CONRAD

How the ‘gentle’ pressure came through to Conrad I don’t know; he would have been justified enough in hating me, for I know how one hates the people who when one is ill, stand at one’s bedside with food and say: ‘Just another spoonful!’ And I certainly felt that that was what I was doing. I would say, ‘Now … about the Tremolino’ and look away over the Marsh at the great shadows of clouds that crossed… Conrad rushing feverishly up and down the terrace! … There appears to be evidence that, at one point of that process, hate me temporarily he did, for M. Aubry in his official biography prints what purports to be a violent letter written to me by Conrad saying practically that he will not go on being connected with the English Review after about six instalments of the Personal Record were printed. But that letter was never received by me – M. Aubry did not ask me for or print any of the letters that Conrad wrote me – so it was only a sketch of a letter that Conrad would no doubt have liked to have sent. That was part of the inner politics of the day. Marwood and I being unable to continue the financing of the English Review, it was sold to a company whose members were mostly Liberal in complexion and whose managing director was a Russian, I remaining the editor. Marwood being a strong Tory and Conrad a Pole with a violent hatred for all Russians, they decided between them that Conrad’s contribution should cease. Marwood had by that time taken my place as general cook and bottle-washer in Conrad’s literary establishment. He also was large, blond, outwardly placid, and deliberate – and admirably and touchingly he performed his functions to the day of his death. I myself would have gone on editing the Review had its proprietors been military dictators and its manager a Turk. I was interested in helping on young talent and have never, I repeat, taken any part at all in politics.

I collaborated, then, with Conrad officially in three books: Romance, The Inheritors, and The Nature of a Crime. The preface to this last, as I have said, was the last completed literary work from the pen of Joseph Conrad – our friendship and common work continuing thus till the day of his death. We contemplated, indeed, and talked for years about another collaboration, which was to have been about the execution – or rather the escape – of Marshal Ney after Waterloo. The book was to have begun with frigate warfare in the Mediterranean, the chief character being with Napoleon on Elba in 1814–15 and going to Paris for the Hundred Days and so coming in contact with Ney. In June 1916, when I was going out to the front, during a valedictory interview with Conrad, we cleared up a number of outstanding matters, he consenting to become my literary executor and asking me to write a memoir of him if I survived, arranging that the collaborations were to appear in both our collected works and so on. Incidentally, we settled about the Ney collaboration. As I was going to a place where collaborations are not literary, Conrad was to take over the book altogether. This was only fair, for Conrad had done a great deal more reading for the book than I had. His power of consuming memoirs always appeared to me fantastic – and although I had read a good deal, he must have read five times as much. So eventually Conrad wrote Suspense which, alas, remains a fragment. It was whilst I was in the service or afterwards incapacitated for literary work, that Conrad wrote the four books with which I had no connection at all.

Our methods of collaboration were in no way mysterious and must have been those of most other collaborators. One of us would write a passage, or a draft of a book, the other going through it and making changes or re-writing. In the case of Romance, I wrote the whole book first – I wrote it indeed before I had met Conrad. The Inheritors is almost wholly mine so far as the writing is concerned, except in the last twenty pages of the book. As for The Nature of a Crime, when it was republished, twenty years or so after it was written, neither Conrad nor I could remember anything about it and both at first denied that it existed. I had however, much earlier, written about half a long short-story having the same subject. The story was one my grandfather used to tell about one of his wealthy Greek art patrons who imagining himself to be ruined, wrote a letter to his mistress to the effect that he was going to commit suicide rather than be detected in a fraudulent bankruptcy and then found that bankruptcy could be avoided.

As I have elsewhere stated, the idea of the Ney book came to me in Philadelphia in 1906 when a Southern lady told me that in New Orleans of her youth she had seen – or her mother had told her of – an old, mild gentleman who said he was Marshal Ney and possessed a remarkable presentation sword. It was the sword that most impressed me because when Ney was arrested in 1815 it was a sword presented to him by Napoleon that drew attention to him. On returning to England, I told the story to Conrad who was at once enormously seized with it as a subject – and when a subject got hold of him, his determination to treat it was as overwhelming as any tornado. If you like, that may have been the reason of our collaborations, that I had a knack of getting hold of subjects that appealed to him.

To the lay reader it sounds like tremendous presumption to claim to have suggested subjects to Joseph Conrad; and the chief onus of the attacks that were made on me in 1925 lay in the fact that I had stated that I had done so. The experienced writer will know how foolish is that view. For you must get subjects from somewhere, except in tales depending purely on invention, and those have seldom any literary merit. Most, for instance, of Henry James’s subjects were heard of from one lady or another at the dinner table. Many of Conrad’s came from the memoirs that he so continuously read. I myself, as I have said, got the subject of the Ney collaboration from a lady in Philadelphia. For that matter, as too I have said, I had the story of The Nature of a Crime from my grandfather; and that of Romance, as I have related, was suggested to me by Dr Richard Garnett; the details of the story of The Secret Agent I heard from one of my cousins, who had something to do with the actual events; the story of Amy Foster was told me by Meary Walker on Romney Marsh in 1894.

No, there is no particular glory attaching to the suggestion of a subject, although I should be grateful enough to anyone who would suggest a subject to me now. But a temperament is necessary, and I suppose it was because my temperament caused me to select certain types of subject for conversation or treatment that Conrad took forcible hold of so many of them.

I have written so much about the origins of Romance in my book on Conrad that I will only repeat here that it was some time after hearing me tell the story of the book – which I then called ‘Seraphina’ – that Conrad wrote to me and asked to be allowed to collaborate with me in writing it. He said that he had consulted his friends and that they had strongly recommended the experiment because he wrote so slowly and with such difficulty.

I may as well dispose, once and for all, of the legend that I had any part in teaching Conrad English, though on the face of it it may well look plausible enough since he was a foreigner who never till the end of his life spoke English other than as a foreigner. But when it came to writing, it was at once quite a different matter. As I said elsewhere a little time ago, the moment he got a pen in his hand and had no eye to publication, Conrad could write English with a speed, a volubility, and a banal correctness that used to amaze me. So you have his immense volume of letters. On the other hand, when, as it were, he was going before the public, a species of stage fright would almost completely paralyse him so that his constructions were frequently very un-English.

In his letters, that is to say, he just let himself go without precision of phrase as without arrière pensée, pouring out supplications, abuse of third parties, eternal and unvarying complaints, so that in the end the impression is left of a weak, rather whining personality. But no impression could be more false. Conrad was a man, a He-man if you like, who fought against enormous odds with undying – with almost unfaltering courage. And his courage was all the more impressive in that by birth, race, and temperament he was an unshakable pessimist. Life for him was predestined to end tragically, or, if not, in banality; literature was foredoomed to failure. These were his choses données, his only certain truths. In face of that creed, his struggles were unceasing.

And it was astonishing what small things could call down to his underlying buoyancy. I remember once we had been struggling with Romance for hours and hours, and he had been in complete despair, and everything that I had suggested had called forth his bitterest gibes, and he was sick, and over ears in debt, and penniless. And we had come to a blank full-stop – one of those intervals when the soul must pause to breathe and love itself have rest. And Mrs Conrad came in and said that the mare had trotted from Postling Vents to Sandling in five minutes – say, twelve miles an hour! At once, there in the room was Conrad-Jack-ashore! The world was splendid; hope nodded from every rosebud that looked over the windowsill of the low room. We were going to get a car and go to Canterbury; the mare should have a brand new breeching strap. And in an incredibly short space of time – say, three hours – at least half a page of Romance got itself written.

That was how it went, day in day out, for years – the despair, the lamentations continuing for hours, and then the sudden desperate attack on the work – the attack that would become the fabulous engrossment. We would write for whole days, for half nights, for half the day, or all the night. We would jot down passages on scraps of paper or on the margins of books, handing them one to the other or exchanging them. We would roar with laughter over passages that would have struck no other soul as humorous; Conrad would howl with rage and I would almost sigh over others that no other soul perhaps would have found as bad as we considered them. We would recoil one from the other and go each to our own cottage – our cottages at that period never being further the one from the other than an old mare could take us in an afternoon. In those cottages we would prepare other drafts and so drive backwards and forwards with packages of manuscript under the dog-cart seats. We drove in the heat of summer, through the deluges of autumn, with the winter snows blinding our eyes. But always, always with manuscripts. Heavens, don’t my fingers still tingle with the feeling of undoing the stiff buckles, long past midnight, of a horse streaming with rain – and the rubbing down in the stable and the backing the cart into the coach-house. And with always at the back of the mind, the consideration of some unfinished passage, the puzzledom to avoid some too-used phrase that yet seemed hypnotically inevitable.

So it went on for years – seven, ten, eleven – I don’t remember how many. At any rate, it was after Romance itself was finished that Conrad wrote that ‘Ford has become a habit’, rather wondering at it because, he said, no one liked me.

My early job was to get Conrad’s work over. I do not believe that any other person could have tackled it then, though later on Marwood was quite as indispensable – quite as much of a habit. Given that you acknowledge that Conrad’s professional career was fortunate from the date of our association, the conjunction must have been materially fortunate for him whether or no his work deteriorated. That it was fortunate for me I am sure, for if I know anything of how to write almost the whole of that knowledge was acquired then. It was acquired at the cost of an infinite mental patience, for the process of digging out words in the same room with Conrad was exhausting. On the other hand, the pleasure derived from his society was inexhaustible: his love, his passion for his art did not, I believe, exceed mine, but his power of expressing that passion was delicious, winning, sweet, incredible. When – but how rarely! – a passage went right or the final phrase of a long-tinkered episode suggested itself, his happiness was overwhelming, his whole being lit up, his face became serenely radiant, his shoulders squared, his monocle gleamed like rock crystal. It was extraordinary.

And his delight was just as great if the trouvaille had been mine as if it had been his own. Indeed, the high-water mark of our discoveries was reached with a phrase of mine – ‘Excellency, a few goats!’ – which so impressed him that twenty years later he was still chuckling over it. It was that generosity that atoned for – say, his abusive letters written about myself to his friends. After all you cannot – nobody could – live with another man practically as a room-mate for years without occasional periods of exasperation, and if you have the habit of volubly expressing yourself, in unstudied letters, your exasperations will work through into print.

In one such letter Conrad alludes to our struggles over The Inheritors and ends with a burst of mordant humour at my expense. The reader may seek out the letter for himself because I do not choose to quote abuse of myself by Conrad. But in it he describes how I sat at the desk writing and reading out what I wrote whilst behind my back he stormed and raved and declared that every word I produced was the imagination of a crétin. That was all right between ourselves, because he was accustomed to indict every word that he himself wrote even more incisively. It was the passion – the agony – of the idealist who seeking with every fibre of his brain to express perfection seems to see the fine gold turn to clay beneath his fingers. However, in this particular letter, he must have thought that he had gone a little too far, for he asked Mr Garnett, to whom it was addressed, to burn it. Mr Garnett preferred to publish it. The reader will find it in the collection of Conrad’s letters to him that Mr Garnett lately edited. It substantiates – if that is really necessary – the statement I have made that The Inheritors is practically all my writing. Or if the still sceptical reader continues to doubt, let him glance at the facsimile of the inscription by Conrad on the fly-leaf of that volume. Conrad wrote it for Mr George Keating who has been kind enough to afford me a sight of it. [See p. 156 – Ed.]

But in spite of these rubs of the game – and what a game for rubs it was! – our friendship remained unbroken and only interrupted by the exigencies of time, space, and public events. It is in the end better if the public will believe that version – for nearly ideal literary friendships are rare, and the literary world is ennobled by them. It was that that Conrad meant when, looking up from the play of King John at which he had been glancing for a little while, he quoted to me, who was writing and had to turn my head over my shoulder to listen:

and he added: ‘C’est pas mal ça; pour qualifier nous deux!’

And by that he meant not that we were producers of great books but writers without envy, jealousy, or any of the petty feelings that writers not unusually cherish, the one towards the other. That gave him lifelong satisfaction, and one of his last literary acts was to testify to that – to the public as to myself in his preface to The Nature of a Crime. For a reason that I won’t go into, I was not myself very anxious that my name should be attached to that volume even if it meant that the volume did not appear. I accordingly wrote to Conrad and suggested that that course should be pursued. He, however, wrote to me on May 17, 1924 – three months before his death – ‘I have looked at the proofs (of The Nature of a Crime) and made a few corrections which escaped you. I have also considered your proposal of my writing a preface and I forward you here the outcome of it with the hope that you will act in the spirit of the last paragraph.’ In the last paragraph he had inserted a plea that – coram populo – I would contradict his more or less humorous account of the methods of our joint labours. He continues: ‘It seemed to me that neither of us (alone) could write a preface with propriety. Yet from the point of view of the book’s future … I think each of us may contribute a few words of introduction over our separate signatures.  The enclosed is my contribution. I hope it will meet with your approval (I mean as to its being suitable from the point of view of the public)…

‘If you are too full of work or do not want the bother, or from any other reason, you may delete the last paragraph and move my initials up accordingly.

‘But I hope you will not. For your contribution of an introduction will not only be valuable per se, but may influence the fortunes of the book in a considerable way. After all, this is the last piece of our joint work that is likely to appear, and it seems to me becoming that we both should be heard on such an occasion.’

For the sake of sentiment, and to please myself, I will here add the last sentence of the last letter that, four days later, I had from him: ‘As to the novel’ (a book of mine that I had sent him) ‘I think that, between us two, if I tell you that I consider it tout à fait chic you will understand perfectly how much that phrase d’atelier means to the initiated.’

Five days later I again sailed for New York from Cherbourg. When, late at night, the France touched at its English port, I was seized with an overwhelming conviction that I should never see Conrad again. I got up and desperately scrawled to him a last letter assuring him of my forever unchanging affection and admiration for his almost miraculous gifts.