The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad: Within the Tides eds. by Alexandre Fachard, Laurence Davies, and Andrew Purssell (review)

Should one want evidence of the seriousness of Cambridge University Press's project to publish a corrected version of Joseph Conrad's entire oeuvre, one might turn to the 2012 edition of Within the Tides. This mid-career collection of four of Conrad's lesser known stories has mostly been treated with critical indifference. One could be forgiven, then, for wishing to see the volume treated with a little brio, not least, as Laurence Davies suggests in the opening paragraphs of his lively introduction, in the interests of the reader who might come away "with a more thorough understanding" of the stories "as art" (xxvi). This appeal is a lofty one for tales that were, in Conrad's much-cited words to Galsworthy, not just "second rate efforts" but, tellingly, "not so much art as a financial operation" (CL 5: 455). The ambitions of the volume might therefore seek to deflect its detractors towards a more generous tolerance of the collection's potential to surprise us. Here the challenge for the editor, Alexandre Fachard (with contributions from Andrew Purssell) has been to marry the supporting material and corrected texts providing the raison d'être of the Cambridge Edition to Davies's efforts to draw our attention to the stories themselves.

Indeed, there are good reasons to be curious about Conrad's last collection of short stories. Published together in 1915, the separate texts of Within the Tides might give perspective to the period of uncertainty following its author's 1910 breakdown; and while this latter event can be associated with the critical outlook Thomas Moser would make famous as his "achievement and decline" thesis of 1957, the collection does coincide with the years during which Conrad moved from the high water mark of Under Western Eyes (1911) through the period bestriding Conrad's mid-career novels, Chance (1914-15) and Victory (1915). Although composed in the crucial 1910-1914 period between that spell of nervous exhaustion and what Owen Knowles and Gene Moore, following Moser, label Conrad's late period of "sentimental 'affirmation'" (1), one is nonetheless tempted to accede to Conrad's own suspicions that these four sea stories are neither here nor there, and so, as the volume's title pointedly suggests, rightly consigned to the space between the high and low of Moser's influential schema, there to ebb between better-defined states of being or, as Conrad says in his "Author's Note" of their putative realism, "neither art nor life" (Conrad 7).

And what are these stories? To take them in their order of appearance and bulk, "The Planter of Malata" relates the amorous complications of an adventurer, now island planter, in the South West Pacific. Visiting a journalist friend in Sydney, Australia, the planter becomes entangled in the affairs of a young English woman seeking her disgraced former fiancé. That the planter had engaged this missing man as an assistant for his silk farming venture becomes the impetus for the woman's family to accompany the planter to his island, thus setting the stage for the story's surprising and finally uneven last turns in which the planter's largely one-sided infatuation with the woman, that "tragic Venus" (37), are unraveled. By contrast, "The Partner" is a multilayered account of a shipping partnership tragically undone by a crooked business scheme inaugurated by an American confidence man. In spite of the maritime dramatics circling around the purposeful sinking of a well-insured merchant ship, the tale's interest lies primarily in its telling: "The Partner" is told to the would-be writer of the tale by a rough stevedore, thus birthing an elaborate literary hoax since the finally unwritten story is, after all, textually performed—a narrative trompel'oeil matching the insurance caper behind the story's "staged" marine disaster.

The two much shorter stories are...