Conrad's First Novel Authenticated

ELT 39:2 1996 was all your own." (Is this "dialogic"—two discourses in one? Is it similar to a stylistic feature of many of Woolf s narrators and characters?) Stape's collection of reminiscences and portraits will serve well as an introduction to Woolf s life, the particularized, miscellaneous immediacy here providing a balance to the very solid, massively developed and argued biographies (good ones) of Woolf that are now available. As William Plomer writes in the piece included in this collection, Woolf expressed a preference for autobiographical writings over novels; in the former, Plomer notes, "her appetite for social knowledge and reminiscence was much gratified." With Stape's collection, so is ours. Judy Little ______________ Southern Illinois University Conrad's First Novel Authenticated Almayer's Folly. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad. David Leon Higdon and Floyd Eugene Eddleman, eds. Intro. Ian Watt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. lxiv + 260 pp. $69.95 AT TIMES JOSEPH CONRAD must have thought of Almayer's Folly as his own folly. After all, consider the impertinence of a self-exiled, thirty-one-year-old Pole who had somehow decided to write a novel in English (his third language) while awaiting a maritime assignment in the desultory final years of his seafaring career. Consider, also, the sheer stubbornness of his refusal to part with the manuscript for four and a half years as he criss-crossed Europe, voyaged to Australia, and descended into the heart of darkness (located geographically in the midregion of the Belgian Congo, albeit psychologically in the core of human consciousness). That the manuscript survived at all we might consider remarkable, but that this relatively brief novel transcends the customary literary apprentice work one expects of great writers may be even more striking. Almayer's Folly tells the pathetic story of Kasper Almayer's terminal alienation from the world around him as he clings to the crumbling ramparts of his egoistic delusions of grandeur. Twenty years prior to the opening of the narrative he had married a Malay, not out of love but because he hoped to curry the favor and even inherit the fortune of Tom Lingard. Now Lingard and his wealth have vanished, and Almayer lingers at his deteriorating trading post surrounded by contemptuous Malays and Arabs. The novel dramatizes the sequence of events leading up to Almayer's loss of his daughter, Nina, who had come to embody all 238 BOOK REVIEWS his grandiose hopes for emigrating to Europe as a financial potentate. At the conclusion, Almayer drifts from bitter disillusionment to the forgetfulness of death as he becomes the first of a multitude of Conradian exponents of the fallacies of hope. Perhaps the most impressive feature of this volume in the graduallyaugmenting Cambridge Edition of Conrad's works, Ian Watt's 44-page introduction covers immense historical and biocritical territory with his customary ease. Watt's overview includes extensive discussions of the genesis and evolution of Conrad's first significant narrative, and he is particularly incisive in his substantiation of how Conrad's empathy for the predicament of the historical Olmeijer (who retained "extravagant hopes" despite the "petty actualities" of his situation) may well have struck a resounding chord in the recesses of Conrad's inner life. Both individuals, Watt notes, viewed themselves as "victims of history," and this may partially account for Conrad's assertion that had he never met Olmeijer he might never have written fiction. Ultimately, Watt affirms, Conrad viewed Olmeijer as the touchstone linking his own previous existence as a self-exiled sailor with his role as a literary artist who dipped into the well of memory to give life to his fictive imagination. Watt also provides a lively commentary on the progression of the manuscript and typescript, including the Author's Note to the novel, which was composed prior to 4 January 1895 but did not appear in print until the Doubleday and Heinemann collected editions of 1921. Unfortunately , Watt is unable to shed any light on Conrad's 1913 contention that the Author's Note had been "suppressed." But what makes Watt's introduction unique is his detailed examination of the fifth paragraph of Chapter...