I SPENT THE NEXT five days sitting in the corner of my room beside the big window with a view of the street below, each successive book on my lap illuminated by a cone of yellow light falling from an old-fashioned lamp whose faded green shade was fringed at the edges, a self-contained space that shut out the world. The steady rhythm of Conrad’s sentences muffled the sound of traffic. The occasional shout rising from the street might as well have been uttered halfway round the world. What I found went beyond the bookseller’s prophecy. My adventures were intact, true in letter and spirit to my experiences, all so powerfully rendered that even when I rested my eyes or went to bed the ambience remained, infusing the atmosphere of my mind like a woman’s perfume lingers in the air after she has passed you on the street and disappeared into the crowd.

If I had been able to fast or live on bread I wouldn’t have left my rooms, the desire to stay in touch with those stories, with the world emerging sentence by graceful sentence, not far from what you must feel in the midst of composition, fearing that if you step away from your desk you’ll lose your sense of contact. But even though I hated to interrupt the flow of thought and feeling, I had to eat—the fact of the matter is that by dinnertime I was ravenous—and so I went out for dinner, always to a restaurant near the boardinghouse that served passable shepherd’s pie and other simple dishes at a decent price. I took a book and pored over it while I ate, occasionally looking up and noticing the odd glance from fellow diners, who must have thought I was a scholar searching for some bit of information that would justify his labors and perhaps shed a light the world was bound to notice. Those glances fed a sense, already well developed by then, of being exposed. Who wouldn’t feel naked when his most private thoughts are paraded before the eyes of strangers? It was as if the door of my bathroom had been pushed open while I stood in the tub, drying off, and people were crowding in for a look at my pasty shanks. But that didn’t dissuade me from ordering tea and lighting a cheroot and reading on to the end of the chapter, unwilling to break off for the time it would take to walk back to my rooms.

It seems as though I spent that time lost in a huge tapestry of words, each story flowing into the next, each more complex than the one before. It was intoxicating, Ford. Most of us live our lives bottled up in ourselves, at best with two or three people who care enough to notice what we regard as our singular virtues. When they speak of such things our response is almost always accompanied by a flush of pleasure. Conrad flattered me with his attention. The man in the books is better than I am, more idealistic, more generous, the man I’d have liked to be. Conrad had filtered my ideas through his mind—ingested me, made his thoughts flow in my thoughts, his blood in my veins! I remembered the bookseller saying, “It’s as if the author had disappeared into the character,” and felt as possessed as a man who thinks spirits are trampling about inside his head. For those five days I lived in the midst of Conrad’s creative ferment, in another man’s imagination, my life transmuted before my eyes in an act of alchemy—I could practically see Conrad busy over alembics and burners—into magic signs that fascinated me. My irritation all but vanished. I wanted to know how he did it, what he felt as he knitted the two of us together and named the product Marlow.

I WENT OUT for a stroll a little while ago, Ford, and have just returned with a fresh notion whose outriders started pestering me as I walked along the Old Port, trying to guess the character of ships from the stack of lights rising above their invisible hulls, an old sailor’s version of a crossword puzzle. Then I realized that something was missing from my tale and hurriedly retraced my steps to my bungalow before I lost my train of thought.

You and I, Ford, are closer to the heart of this memoir than I knew when I began it. On the way back from the port I thought of you and Conrad collaborating on your three novels, merging your skills and philosophies into a third narrative entity, a child of your minds’ fruitfulness. But it wasn’t until I was almost home that I saw how close the three of us have become in the pages of this memoir. Conrad’s use of me parallels your use of your dear friend as a model for characters in The Good Soldier and Parade’s End. You must feel an overwhelming sympathy with Conrad’s discovery of the spark for the Marlow books in the reality of another man’s experience. I wish there had been some way for you and Conrad and me to talk when the events of this story were still unfolding. You could have advised him about your own experience and probably lessened his discomfort, discomfort that lasted for years, refusing to let go until he finished the Fox-Bourne novel.