Conrad to a Friend

77 REVIEWS 1. CONRAD TO A FRIEND Joseph Conrad's Letters to R.B. Cunnlnghame Graham, edited by C. T. Watts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. $9.50. Only twenty-five out of the eighty-one extant letters by Conrad to Cunnlnghame Graham are published for the first time in this volume . There Is nothing particularly revealing In them, compared to the biographical interest and literary charm of a number of those which ever since G. Jean-Aubry's Joseph Conrad. Life and Letters (192?) have been abundantly quoted for evidence about Conrad 's attitude to the world and to his own work. Yet In bringing «11 the letters together, Mr. CT. Watts, Lecturer In English In the University of Sussex, has produced an admirable volume, which 1« of great value for several reasons. In Jean-Aubry's collection there are omissions of interesting passages from several of the letters, and his editorial attitude was inconsistent and sometimes casual. (This of course may qualify but certainly does not cancel the merits of Conrad's early French biographer.) Mr. Watte· scholarship is no less a labor of love for his being scrupulous in his annotations. He mentions every single difference between his own and Jean-Aubry's version of each letter, and lists all the peculiarities of Conradfs spelling and orthography. Yet what makes this edition particularly attractive and helps to integrate the letters into a wider picture of Conrad's and Graham's lives and activities is the exhaustive commentary about relevant public and private events and which explores allusions to persons, quotes reviews and the works by the two authors, or offers illuminative parallels to opinions and attitudes that appear in the text. The introduction contains an acoount of R.B. Cunninghams Graham's political activities and a thoughtful study of his personality and his literary expression, with interesting observations on the affinities between the two men. It is a great pity that none of Graham's letters to Conrad have survived, but a vivid impression of their relationship can be gathered even from the one available side of the correspondence. Conrad's affection for the tall, slim, aristocratic Scotsman with Latin blood in his veins and a natural inclination towards Spanish South-American culture and history, springs to a great extent from a common inclination towards the romantic adventures of their youth and a lasting proneness towards Don Quixote-type gestures, spurred by admiration for the same ethical values. Their opposite political sympathies were to a great extent a matter of temperament. It is however worth pointing out that Conrad, who in the beginning of their acquaintance had almost completely turned into a sedentary professional 78 writer (in spite of attempts to extricate himself by trying to find a "berth"), was nevertheless five years younger than the dynamic traveller and explorer of Morocco, always ready to speak up, on platforms or In the press, for any cause appealing to his socialist conscience. Was it the fascination of Graham's prose or Conrad's feeling for him as a person that gave to most of Conrad's letters to Graham a peculiar quality absent from his letters to his other closest literary friends, such as Gamett, Ford, and Galsworthy? Many of the letters contain some turn of phrase, image or at least colorful stereotype from Graham's accounts of Arabic or South American behavior or custom, and shows Conrad's involvement with what was most appealing to Graham's sensibility. It almost became a mannerism, yet a very engaging one, producing In its turn some effective cadences in the best vein of its original models: "No thirsty men drank water as we have been drinking in, swallowing , tasting, blessing, enjoying gurgling, choking over, absorbing, your thought, your phrases, your Irony, the spirit of your vision and of Your expression." Or, In discussing Graham's style In his book on Hernando de Soto, "as though you had been writing of men with whom you had slept by the camp fire after tethering your horses on the threshold of the unknown." Such are the most vivid and life-assertlng details In letters which otherwise contain the most absolute statements of nihilism and...