Conrad's Changes in Narrative Conception in the Manuscripts of Typhoon and Other Stories and Victory

Extract

Joseph Conrad's Mss provide a curiously intimate link with the personal life of their author. Among other things, the reader may note that Conrad was a smoker, that he had had drawing lessons at some period in his life, that he was on occasion worried about money, and that he was not averse to a refreshing glass. But the greatest importance of his MSS is that they tempt surmises about his creative rather than his personal life. It is lucky that Mr. John Quinn and other collectors were not discouraged by the fact that the holographs were anything but fair copies. The MSS they have preserved contain a full scale of revision offering an unusual opportunity to observe how a narrative art came into being. Conrad says much in his letters of how slow and painful the creative process was for him. His MSS confirm this, not so much by the inordinate amount of revision as by the fact that they show little evidence of pages thrown away or of imaginative lungings. In Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, they suggest an obstinate effort at total recall of scenes and situations that the author had either witnessed or believed he had witnessed. One feels that he was the slave as well as the master of his creations. When he put something on paper, it took on the objectivity of fact for him. He could serve such facts, but he could not alter them.