Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad (review)

After years—even decades—of prefatory efforts by Cambridge University Press and scholars from several nations, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad seems now solidly under way, with ten volumes published since 1990, six of them since 2010. Disclosure: From 1995 to 2008 I was a consultant for the Edition. I do not recall being in discussions about Tales of Unrest or the possible editors of the volume, nor am I aware of any bias or anticipation—positive or negative—in evaluating this collection, which comprises five of Conrad’s early stories: “Karain: A Memory,” “The Idiots,” “An Outpost of Progress,” “The Return,” and “The Lagoon.” In any event, the Edition has moved well beyond my contributions.

The immense detail of and attention to minutiae of writing, revising, printing, and selling in this volume owe much to numerous articles in Conradiana (many by the volume’s editors) and to The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (also published by Cambridge). Essential to the soundness of the Edition is the decades-long research on numerous aspects of publishing Conrad’s works by scholars at Texas Tech and Kent State Universities. The detail recorded in the texts, apparatus, and footnotes of publishers,’ editors,’ and printers’ references in letters and other documents of mundane (but relevant) issues is mind-boggling, not to mention basically dull (but nonetheless invaluable grist for textual editors).

As the fourth volume Conrad published (following Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Nigger of the “Narcissus”), this collection marked, as the editors state (p. 175), “a significant turning-point in his early career. … [He] became … a fully-fledged professional author enmeshed in the protocols of late-Victorian publishing.”

An editor of Conrad must work with an author with a keen sensibility as to the sound of words and possible alternatives. Conrad is an author who, after struggling to create a satisfactory (to him) exposition, is not inclined to revise thereafter in a large fashion, although he does want to read proofs (even multiple times) and makes changes when he thinks of better alternatives to initial phrasings. Such changes are not numerous. A basic issue is that editors and compositors of Conrad’s initial versions of his works tended to load the texts they were preparing with “correct” house-style punctuations (the Cambridge editors believe that the effect of the house-styling was to reduce the fluidity that Conrad liked); and misreadings of Conrad’s handwriting were not unknown. His typist in early years used a machine whose strokes could not be read until the roller had moved up several lines, necessitating a fair amount of Conrad’s revision of typed stories, but also leading to mistakes being perpetuated in material sent to the editors and compositors.

The Cambridge Edition’s guiding principle of copy-text is to privilege the last versions that clearly were produced by Conrad. In some cases this is the MS, while in others it’s the typescript prepared from Conrad’s holograph. For example, Conrad’s hand in “The Lagoon” survives both as revised typescript (TSr) and as a set of magazine proofs (Cornhill Magazine). And it’s TSr that’s chosen as copy-text, with emendations of both substantives and accidentals based on the surviving serial proofs and on the so-called Copyright Edition (three of the stories were sent to Macmillan of New York for printing a few copies to protect the U.S. copyright). The general explanation of copy-text and emendations is precise and articulate (pp. 235–38).

This principle is also made to apply to the order of stories in this Edition volume. One might argue that the stories should be in the order in which they were written, starting with “The Idiots” (despite Conrad’s claim that “The Lagoon” was the first to be written). The explanation for retaining the...