Martin Ray’s Posthumous Conrad Bibliography

The spirit of Martin Ray will hover over Conrad studies, together with that of Hans van Marle (1922–2001), in a godfatherly manner for the foreseeable future. Ray’s Joseph Conrad: Interviews and Recollections (Macmillan, 1990) is a supremely valuable anthology providing the general reader with a portrait of Conrad in sixty or so fragments. That book stood modestly—along with the works of van Marle, Owen Knowles and J. H. Stape inter alia—as superlative in its insights, range and depth, setting out what are the primary sources to the biography of this enticingly opaque author. Now Rodopi, in association with the Joseph Conrad Society (UK), has published posthumously his Joseph Conrad: Memories and Impressions—An Annotated Bibliography. Ray died in the summer of 2007, age fifty-two. This last volume is testament to his extraordinarily generous, precise work, and is the first in a series intended to make available rare, out-of-print or newly discovered items of Conradiana.

I was slightly stumped by the manner in which Ray organized this book—not chronologically or thematically, but by alphabetical order of contributor. Joseph Conrad: Interviews and Recollections was splendidly laid out with loosely chronological themes. Rich biographical and other notes were given, as they are here. In the volume under review Ray gives the reader a patchwork quilt of some texture, but it often feels as if Ray willfully forgot to supply the needle and thread to stitch the patches together.

This is both compliment and criticism. I would have enjoyed reading something by Ray about how what he unearthed in his magnificent trawl of material helped him view Conrad as a man, other than the two stunningly humble pages that make his Foreword. Yet the absence of any argument from the book’s editor almost makes us see an older Conrad, as he might have wished, pace “The Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’.” Ray’s achievement here is incomparable. What emerges is a sly portrait of the author as an old man.

The focus, if there is one, is on material collected covering Conrad’s visit to the United States in the spring of 1923, a visit about which Doubleday wrote to Quinn: “I think the trip did him good, but how he ever had the nerve to leave England in his condition beats me.” Ray’s concentration on this visit unveils some fascinating newspaper reports and diary entries—but there are other treasures for Conrad scholars. New to me were the following facts: Conrad bit his nails, if you believe Compton Mackenzie. Conrad was painted in 1923 by a cartoonist who had drawn Lenin the year before: commenting on the experience, Oscar Edward Cesare said, “I never felt so much at home with a victim.” That Conrad met the great Polish composer Karol Szymanowski—rather underwhelmingly described in a footnote as “pianist and musician”—is thrillingly tantalizing. It seems extraordinary that, after his death, Ida-R Sée—a French tutor to Conrad’s sons—felt the need to go into print with her memories of Conrad: she says nothing much (“he read Flaubert religiously”) but the fact she says it says more about Conrad’s international reputation at the time of his death. Ray makes wonderful use of the interview between Conrad and Rodolphe Louise Mégroz (1891–1968), and quotes the sculptor Jo Davidson recalling a lunch-time conversation which touches on the way Conrad transformed flesh into fiction:

“Look,” said he, “see that man over there?”

I looked up and saw an oldish man with a short straggly beard, a big nose and a gaunt face, bending over his plate, concentrating on his food.

Conrad said, “You know, that man—he does so-and-so, and so-and-so,” and he began spinning a yarn. Listening, I looked at the man, and was astonished at how true the story rang—I got to believing it.

“I’ll go and ask him,” said I.

“Don’t do that. It...