The Collaboration
It would be delightful to catch the echo of those desperate, earnest, eloquent and funny quarrels which enlivened those old days." (Conrad, Preface to The Nature of A Crime)
I was useful to Conrad as a writer and as a man in a great many subordinate ways during his early days of struggle and deep poverty... (Ford, Memories and Impressions)
That we did succeed eventually in finding a new form I think I may permit myself to claim, Conrad first evolving the convention of a Marlowe who should narrate, in presentation, the whole story of a novel, just as, without much sequence or pursued chronology, the story will come up in the mind of a narrator, and I eventually dispensing with the narrator but making the story come up through the mind of an unseen author with a similar want of chronological sequence. (Ford, March of Literature)
At that time, Conrad had a reputation, obligations to various publishers, writer's block, and an empty bank account. Ford had an ego, good literary and social connections, an unpublishable draft of a "pirate novel" called Seraphina (the idea for which had been suggested to Ford by Richard Garnett, Edward's father), and a bit of money.
Both men had new families, wives they may not have loved very much, and a burning desire to do great literature according to great, well-thought-out principles.
About a week after their first meeting, Conrad wrote to Ford, formally suggesting a collaboration on Seraphina, what he would later refer to as "the Fatal Partnership." Ford accepted, and, as part of the logistics, sublet his farmhouse The Pent near Romney Marsh in Kent to Conrad and his family, moving his own family eventually into nearby Stucks Hill.
The Inheritors turned out to be their first joint product. Ford had started as a solo project and had it well under way by October of 1899, when he first showed it to Conrad, who welcomed I think it as a diversion from the difficulties of Lord Jim. Together, they had it finished by March of 1900: Ford did majority of writing, and Conrad served as editor while he worked on Lord Jim.
Much has been made of a letter from Conrad to Garnett in which he appears to belittle the effort, but the letter is worth quoting in full, for context.
Dearest Edward,
All my bits of luck come through you! You must be indeed -- as Jess says -- the best of men. I consider the acceptance of The Inheritors a distinct bit of luck. Jove! What a lark! I set myself to look upon the thing as a sort of skit upon the sort of political (?!) novel, fools of the N.S. sort do write. This in my heart of hearts. And poor H was dead in earnest! Oh, Lord. How he worked! There is not a chapter I haven't made him rewrite twice -- most of them three times over.
This is collaboration if you like! Joking apart the expenditure of nervous fluid was immense. There were moments when I cursed the day I was born and dared not look up to the light of day I had to live through with this thing on my mind. H has been as patient as no angel had ever been. I've been fiendish. I've been rude to him; if I've not called him names I've implied in my remarks and the course of our discussions the most opprobrious epithets. He wouldn't recognize them. 'Pon my word it was touching. And there's no doubt that in the course of that agony I have been ready to weep more than once. Yet not for him. Not for him.
You'll have to burn this letter -- but I shall say no more. Some day we shall meet and then --!
I am still at Jim. I've been beastly ill in February. Jessie is hunting all over the house for the February Number to send you. I am old and sick and in debt -- but lately I've found I can still write -- it comes! it comes! -- and I am young and healthy and rich.
The question is will I ever write anythings?
I've been cutting and slashing whole parts out of Jim. How bad oh! HOW BAD! Why it is that a weary heaven has not pulverized me with a wee little teeny weeny thunderbolt?
Love from us to you three. I shall write again when I get time to gasp once or twice.
Ever yours,
Joseph Conrad
I suppose you've scornfully detected whole slabs of my own precious writing in that precious novel?
This is Conrad at his catty worst, and at his canny best. That he knew or sensed that Garnett was saving his letters for posterity, that he could celebrate the publication of The Inheritors as his work, and belittle Ford, and both undermine and acknowledge his contribution to the work, all in one letter, is a tribute to his shape-shifting. Compare it then, with this letter, to Ford, at about the same time:
I have today received the cheque from Robert -- and many thanks to you for staving off the impending annihilation.... Yes [the Daily Telegraph's review of The Inheritors] all right. And so in a measure [that of the Daily News] and I feel more like a thief of your cleverness. Upon the whole (apart from cash) this thing must do us good -- at any rate as far as our next book in concerned."
Position as he might with Garnett, Conrad saw value in his collaboration with Ford: publication, money (including loans from Ford), and, most importantly, someone to talk with, late into the night, in the kitchen at The Pent.
The reception of The Inheritors was luke-warm at best, but the two made some money from it, defended the novel in several public forums, and moved on to Seraphina.
In summer 1900, after birth of their daughter Katherine, Ford and his family went to Bruges, where Conrad and family were to meet them after Conrad finished Lord Jim, and where they were to begin work in earnest on what they were now beginning to refer to as Romance, a project they had reframed to be "an adventure story that would out-sell" Robert Louis Stevenson.
In July 1900, the two pick up Romance, while Conrad was also working on Typhoon. By September of 1900, Parts I, II, III and most of the conclusion were finished. The draft product was rejected by Blackwood's in late summer of 1901; Conrad set out to finish and completely revise the text, which he had done by March 1902. They c continued working on the text while looking for publishers in the US and UK: Smith Elder and McClure signed on. In April 1903, the two men corrected the proofs of Romance at the Pent, and the work was published in October 1903 in the UK.
The collaboration cooled after this; Ford had a breakdown in early 1904, and Conrad was continually consumed with his own projects.
During 1906, Ford loaned his Winchelsea house to Conrad for a period of time, and began traveling down to Conrad from London at weekends to work on "the Burden story" as Conrad called it: what would become The Nature of A Crime. The novel had, like both The Inheritors and Romance been started by Ford, probably in early April 1905. Although Ford probably did most of the writing, Conrad held the manuscript until its publication in 1909. Conrad was at that time working on The Secret Agent, which Ford helped with conceptually, having been close to the turn-of- the-century Russian anarchist exiles in London, through his grandfather's menage.
And Conrad -- did he contribute to Ford's solo work? It's unlikely that he even read drafts of the work Ford did during this time, which included: Rossetti (1902), The Face of the Night (1904), The Soul of London (1905), The Benefactor (1905), Hans Holbein (1905), and The Fifth Queen (1906).
The point to be made here is that, in regards to the question of balance in the partnership during its hey-day, Ford clearly out-contributed Conrad. What Ford thought he got for that contribution was a perpetual annuity, in terms of his "association with Conrad" as he liked to call it. But he was fundamentally mistaken.
It has always seemed to me, reading the primary material -- the collaborative texts and the letters of the period -- that the two men had an intense private relationship that neither of them could handle very well, and that the private intensity of that relationship was the very thing that led to public acrimony, and to almost 75 years of pointless bickering by scholars about who was the offender and who was offended against in the relationship.
For Conrad, the intensity was a source of anxiety and discomfort: he who had made it his life's work to be, as he wrote in Victory, a solitary observer amidst changing scenes, someone who needed no one for themselves (particularly women), must have been significantly unsettled by the extent to which Ford was able to get Conrad to open up, to be himself, to say what he thought. That anxiety -- along with his truly Victorian sense of public propriety, which Ford's breakdowns and philandering offended in the extreme -- led him to belittle both Ford and their joint work.
For Ford, Conrad was always il miglior fabbro, and, in terms of consistent contribution, that sense is borne out historically: Conrad's work is consistently top-drawer, while Ford's top-drawer work is in the distinct minority within his 80+ volume output. When Ford was in good mental health and in money, he saw his time with Conrad as he saw his relationships with other literary figures: as his due as an artist among artists, and as a connection to be exploited (and to be dined out upon). When Ford was under the mental or financial weather, he exploited his association with Conrad for all it was worth: which in practical pecuniary terms was never very much. As Conrad's financial and authorial life stabilized after the success of Chance this clinging and wringing behavior (combined with the dining-out stories) rankled Conrad in the extreme: it was as if, in some real senses, Ford was selling Conrad's letters to curio collectors for pocket change.
Conrad did not have it in himself to be generous to Ford, as Ford was to Conrad in the early years of their association. Ford did not have it in himself to recognize that the conservatism, the rectitude that attracted Ford to Conrad would not brook Ford's personal excesses or his story-telling.
James and Wells both expressed dim views of the Conrad-Ford collaboration when they first heard of it; for both men, the talents of Conrad and Ford were non-contiguous and, in combination, damaging. The two may not have been suited for collaboration, but the really fatal element of the Fatal Partnership were the limitations, the blindnesses of both men.
Edward Garnett, ed. Letters from Joseph Conrad 1895-1924. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.
Alan Judd. Ford Madox Ford. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Frederick R. Karl. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979.
Arthur Mizener. The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford. New York: World Publishing, 1971.
Ian Watt. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.