The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad by Joseph Conrad (review)

Obliged to "declare an interest," I necessarily begin with some reminiscences.

In 1964 I submitted to the Examinations Office at Cambridge University my PhD thesis entitled "Joseph Conrad and R. B. Cunninghame Graham: Their Friendship in Its Literary Aspects." Part of that thesis was an edition of eighty-one letters from Conrad to Graham. In 1969, that section of the thesis was published by Cambridge University Press as Joseph Conrad's Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham. In my edition, I criticised G. Jean-Aubry's twovolume Joseph Conrad: Life & Letters, which at that time was the standard edition of Conrad's "collected letters." Of course, that Jean-Aubry edition, which did not purport to be complete, lacked thousands of letters. And, alas, the correspondence in Jean-Aubry's two volumes was badly edited. His transcriptions were often inaccurate, and so were his annotations. He had censored some of the letters without giving the reader any indication that censorship had taken place. My own edition had its flaws, of course. Since Conrad's French was comprehensible to me (although I had no formal qualifications in French), I deemed a translation unnecessary; but American reviewers soon persuaded me that a translation of the French would have been helpful. There was also an error in dating, and there were some proof-errors. But the reviewers were, on the whole, kind and even enthusiastic.

At that time, Professor Frederick R. Karl in New York had started to assemble the materials for a "Collected Letters." In view of the response to Joseph Conrad's Letters to R.B. Cunninghame Graham, in 1970 Cambridge University Press asked me to join Professor Karl in editing that new big collection. After discussion with Karl, and due reflection, I declined to do so. One reason was that, in the time available, I wished to write about numerous authors in whose works I found intriguing puzzles: Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Keats, Ibsen, and Graham Greene, for example. I recommended that, instead of me, the Press should employ Laurence Davies. At that time, I was supervising Laurence's Sussex University PhD thesis, "R.B. Cunninghame Graham and the Concept of Impressionism," and I had been greatly impressed by Laurence's range of abilities. To put it frankly: I believed he would do a better job on the "Collected Letters" than I could. He had a globe-trotter's energy, a lucid intelligence, a wide range of knowledge, a liberal outlook, and linguistic sensitivity.

Time has vindicated my belief in his abilities. I looked on with growing admiration and, indeed, wonder, as the great sequence of volumes gradually emerged over the following thirty-seven years up to 2007. Laurence, at first collaborating with Fred Karl, emerged as the main editor of the immense series. At various times, he has been aided by numerous able co-editors: Owen Knowles, Gene M. Moore, and the late J.H. Stape, with the late Hans van Marle as a wise advisor, heading a large team of assistants. Nevertheless, Laurence has been the central figure in this immense project.

And with every volume, his command has become more assured. He is immensely resourceful and energetic. He is formidably intelligent, and his cultural knowledge has such range and depth that anyone, however well qualified, should be able to learn from his introductions and annotations. His urbanity and scholarly acumen are leavened by a sense of humour and an appreciation of irony. Of course, in so vast an undertaking there were plenty of local errors. Usually these were corrected in a subsequent volume.

At the same time, the Cambridge edition of Conrad's novels, tales, essays, and autobiographical writings has been proceeding. That Cambridge edition is indispensable, since it has yielded many valuable new readings, but it has been marred by the decision to remove house styling which Conrad generally accepted. The result is a Conrad whose style often seems under-punctuated, and sometimes, indeed, seems illogical or uncouth. To take...