Suspense by Joseph Conrad (review)

Conrad’s fiction contains more than twenty-five different types of hats. The first mention of “shako,” a tall and cylindrical hat, occurs in Suspense (first published in 1925). This is slight evidence that Conrad is still—with this his last piece of fiction writing—taking time to include an original detail, carefully crafted to fit time and space constraints. As expected, this latest edition of Suspense pays attention to these types of minute details and notes that the shako is a “rather elaborate military cap in the shape of a truncated cone with a peak or plume” (353).

But then maybe the cap is important for Suspense. In the first chapter there are nine references to a man in a cap, Attilio. The man, or the vision of him, is almost equated with his cap—as in The Secret Sharer (1910) where the mate is difficult to dissociate from his whiskers [“the frightful whiskers made themselves heard giving various orders” (119)]. In addition, “the man in the hat” (182), Latham Cosmo, the well-dressed protagonist of Suspense, wears a spectacular hat: “the latest thing in men’s round hats” (167), bought in Paris. Within the tightly plotted fragment that is Suspense, this Parisian hat plays a pivotal role. When captured, Cosmo “picked up his hat and as he did so it seemed to him that there was something strange about the feel of it. When he put it on his head some object neither very hard nor very heavy fell on the top of his head” (163). Attilio, occupied in “mysteriously corresponding with Elba” (52), has hidden a bundle of papers there—“dangerous documents” (165). This is an old Conradian hat trick; in Under Western Eyes (1911), Peter Ivanovitch “returned instantly with a parcel wrapped up in white glazed paper, which he must have extracted from the interior of his hat” (169).

And then, of course, in Suspense there is also “that vanquished fat figure in a little cocked hat” (123): Napoleon. A mythical and elusive Napoleon, not introduced as a factual entity, but constructed from rumors and “plenty of gossip” (129), like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1899). Indeed, to the extent Heart of Darkness is about a Kurtz that we never really see, Lord Jim is about the sinking of a ship that never happened, and The Sisters is about a painter that does not paint, Suspense is a Napoleonic novel that is not explicitly about Napoleon. It is, rather, about his influence—an area of research that Hans van Marle (1922-2001) and Gene M. Moore have carefully considered when editing this unfinished novel. They have provided detailed description and analysis on origins, sources, contemporary reception, and 39 pages on Conrad’s production process—the dictation, writing, and editing, delineated with references to Conrad’s correspondence. The edition is also enriched with a list of fifty pages of emendations and variations; seven pages of extracts from the Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne (to illustrate influence); copies of the preserved notes Conrad took when visiting the British Museum Reading Room; Richard Curle’s introduction to Suspense; and a map of Genoa. There are in total 204 pages of commentary that frame Suspense, itself reproduced on 189 pages. Although the Cambridge editions of the works of Joseph Conrad primarily seek to free Conrad from his editors and restore the original texts, there is an element of contradiction associated with the added commentary; the Cambridge editions provide a raw and unedited Conrad within a visually imposing frame of criticism.

Regarding the editing of the text, it has been undertaken with an attempt to stay faithful to Conrad’s “inconsistent preferences and practices” (234). The editors have respected Conrad’s inconsistencies (mistakes?), as when he uses two acceptable spellings for the same word, “chebek” and “zebec,” or wavered between using hyphens for the same word [“‘good-bye’ eight times with a hyphen and three times without” (234)]. The many corrections are of relatively minor significance for...