By Ford Madox Ford

I felt as if a beast from the jungle had suddenly leaped at me when first the editor of this periodical, and then the executors of the late Mr. John Quinn asked me to finish a story by Joseph Conrad—a story called "The Sisters". For "The Sisters", along with a story published in "Tales of Unrest" and called "The Return" occupied a curious position in Conrad's psychology—or at least in his psychological view of his own work. He seemed to regard them as something slightly obscene at which one could only peep in secret. They shared the quality of things kept in a locked drawer. I notice that in some notes he made for Mr. George Keating in a specially inscribed copy of "Tales of Unrest" Conrad writes:

"'The Return' was begun immediately 'The Nigger of the Narcissus' was finished. A thorough change. It shares with one other story of mine the distinction of never having been serialized. No editor would accept it—and I don't wonder at their unanimity. One was good enough to write: 'Very fine. But I can do nothing with it.' Some cultured Scandinavians liked it in translation. Nothing would induce me to look at it again."

This must have been written in 1924 and it astonishes me to find that, even so late in life, Conrad retained his feeling of aversion from this story which, personally, I always liked. For "The Return" and "The Sisters" are indications of the gradually weakening desire that Conrad had to be what I would call a "straight" writer, as opposed to the relatively exotic novelist of the sea and the lagoons which fate, the public and some of his friends forced him to become. It will be observed that "The Return" is placed in London as the other story is in Paris—a Paris rendered in so few words and so livingly that, upon my soul, reading of it here in New York I feel as homesick as can be for the Seine. It will be observed also that "The Return" deals with the relation of the sexes; so "The Sisters" was to have done. That no doubt was why the cultured Scandinavians—and I myself—liked the one story and why certain of his friends persuaded him to abandon the other.

It is with regret that I feel myself forced to refuse to finish this. There is nothing I should find more stimulating than the attempt—for it would be an attempt to throw myself back into an early frame of mind and to have a shot at a technical tour de force that would intensely engross me. It is as if Mr. Rascoe and the executors of Mr. Quinn had dared me to hold my finger in the flame of a lighted candle. But, although I would quite cheerfully accept that dare or even try to draw the bow of Achilles, literary politics of the moment forbid the contemplation and indeed, at present, I have other things to do. But think of the outcry that it would cause to arise amongst the aligned autograph collectors and old junk dealers who surrounded poor Conrad in his later years! It almost tempts me.

Conrad, then, at one time wished to be what I have called a straight writer, treating of usual human activities in cities and countrysides normal to the users of Anglo-Saxon or Latin speech. He desired in short to be a Dostoievsky who should also be a conscious artist writing in English or preferably in French. Think of what gorgeous visions that opens up.

I notice that the Polish minister to the Court of St. James stated the other day that in an interview he had with Conrad, Conrad asserted that he chose to write in English because that was the only language in which to write about the sea. But the point is that for quite a long period Conrad was intensely depressed at the thought that he would be forced forever to write about the sea.

At the time when I first knew him, which was just after the appearance of "The Return", he regarded writing about the sea as an avocation only for boys' writers and he regarded the writing about normal terrestrial humanity as the only glorious occupation for a proper man. That is to say, in common with myself, he regarded the writing of novels as the only occupation for a proper man and he thought that those novels should normally concern themselves with the life of great cities. Fate only permitted him to write two great novels dealing with city life—"The Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes". But although "The Secret Agent" was relatively a failure, "Under Western Eyes" with its rendering of political intrigue and really aching passion has always seemed to me by a long way Conrad's finest achievement. Here—again I say it seems to me—you have Conrad appearing in the rôle of a Dostoievsky who is also an artist, and if I were asked to name the book by which I was sure—and hoped—that Conrad would go down to posterity this is the book that I should name.

But at the time of which I am speaking—in the middle '90's—Conrad still faced unshaped destinies. And the voice of reason proved too strong for the promptings of artistic ambition. Henley, who had just published "The Nigger of the Narcissus" in The New Review, impressed upon Conrad that his only chance of making a living lay in writing about the sea. Henley was the British Tory Imperialist and it was the sea as viewed from British bottoms about which he desired to read.

Mr. Edward Garnett, who at that time was—as I am sure I hope he still is—the literary dictator of London, also used very strong pressure upon Conrad not to write in the spirit of "The Return". That may be seen in the lately published letters from Conrad to Mr. Garnett—the letters written just before he was about to set out on his honeymoon and to write upon a French island the other stories which make up "Tales of Unrest". Conrad used to be of the opinion that the pressure exerted by Mr. Garnett was in a sociological, rather than in a marine, direction. Mr. Garnett, he said, disliked all empires and all colonies and all colonizers, and what he desired to see written was rather stories like "Heart of Darkness" or "The Outpost of Progress" or the Malay tales which rendered the veniality, lust and brutalizing influences which white men exercise over oppressed native populations, than any projections of modern normal city life.

That at least was Conrad's view of Mr. Garnett's exhortations, although it would appear from the letters that Mr. Garnett's pressure, like Henley's, was rather in a marine direction. Be that as it may and sensible as the advice was to a man without any means and with a young wife and baby, Conrad viewed the prospect of becoming a sea writer with an extreme dejection.

With an extreme dejection! He considered the fate of Captain Marryat, whom he always regarded as one of the very greatest of English novelists, and he saw himself relegated like the author of "Midshipman Easy" to the tattered schoolbook shelves of eternity. His agony at this thought was at that time very great and indeed, even as late as 1923, he wrote to a gentleman who had written to him a distasteful puff of his collected edition: "That infernal tale of ships and that obsession of my sea life ... after all I may be a seaman, but I am a writer of prose". And of all the agonies of the poor fellow's agonized career this, if not the greatest, was the most consistent and enduring.

He bowed his head to his friends and the inevitable. Readers might be found for books about the sea; it was unthinkable that they would support Slav introspections passing in Paris. So, as I have said, the manuscript and the very thought of "The Sisters" was, as it were, put away in a locked drawer. He bowed his head and faced a destiny as harsh and bitter as the sea itself. He had to provide a future for his beloved Borys and that to him was a duty as sacred as that of any priest.

Nevertheless, from time to time, as if guiltily, as if swiftly contemplating the obscene, he would take a peek into that locked drawer and for a minute the Tiger would raise its burning head. In those years my intimacy with Conrad was very great. Day after day, month after month and year after year we sat till far into the night, sometimes right through the night, devising of literature. Sometimes of the hearts of men but always returning to how to render what passes in the hearts of men! So I may claim to know the mind of Conrad of that day better than any other man. And he had that inhibition—that thwarted desire to write of the relationship between men and women. That he denied to himself as any church-warden and father of a family might have denied it to himself and for the same reason.

I remember his saying with extreme contempt that Stevenson in one of his letters declared he would never write about women because he would lose his market. And then suddenly he, as it were, drooped and added, "But after all am I any better?" And what he, curiously, desired to write of was incest.

I don't mean to say that he proposed to write of the consummation of forbidden desires, but he did want to render the emotions of a shared passion that by its nature must be most hopeless of all. At the end of his life when he felt his position secure he began upon this task. He was accustomed to say that it had always been his ambition to write a novel of Napoleonic frigate warfare, but far, far more it was his ambition to write of the passion between a couple who were, unknowingly, brother and sister. That, in "Suspense", he was going to risk. It would have contained precious little of the frigate warfare which he got off his chest in writing that very serenely beautiful book "The Rover".

Incest as a subject seems somehow predestined for treatment by Conrad. In Poland he had been brought into contact with a number of tragic romantic instances of unconscious unions that were within the limits of the Canon Law. And curiously enough "The Inheritors", the first of our collaborations to be published, has a faint and fantastic suggestion of—unrequited—love between brother and sister. It was as much as anything, because of this, that Conrad fiercely—almost fanatically—insisted on collaborating in this book and interrupting the course of "Romance" upon which we had already been laboring for several years. "The Sisters" was an early try at the other thing. The pensive Slav painter was to have married the older sister and then to have had an incestuous child by the other. I do not profess to know every detail of the plot of this story as it would finally have stood. Conrad mentioned it perhaps half a dozen times in the course of ten years.

And of course in his shadowy and rather hurried projections of this forbidden story Conrad varied the narrative very often and I do not remember now all the variations. What comes to me as a sort of composite photograph is this: Stephen was to have met, fallen in love with and married the elder sister. Then the younger sister, failing in the religious vocation that her uncle the priest desired her to have, was to come to Paris and to stay with the young couple in Stephen's pavilion, the tyrannous character of her aunt being such that she could not live with the orange merchant and his wife. The elder sister proving almost equally domineering, Stephen was to fall before the gentler charm of the younger. And the story was to end with the slaying of both the resulting child and the mother by the fanatic priest.

That I think would have been the final form of the story, but of course there were many variations upon this backbone. I think the emotion was to have been screwed up by a visit to Paris of Stephen's brother who, equally, was to have fallen in love with the younger sister thus creating a rivalry between the two brothers, and I know that at one time Conrad meditated transporting the characters both to Spain and to Russia so as to get the last drop of contrast out of contrasted race natures.

The difficulty was the figure of the priest. I don't know whether Conrad began the story before he had read Une Vie or the other story of Maupassant's in which a fanatical priest murdered the guilty couple. I rather think that must have been the case. Or he may have begun the story with the idea that he could sufficiently differentiate his priest from Maupassant's. Or he may even have thought of treating the priest out of rivalry to him as the author of La Maison Tellier. I know we both frequently talked vaingloriously and only half in earnest of treating one or other of Maupassant's projects and indeed, I did eventually have a shot at it.

But that abbé was the real snag—the question of how to treat him similarly and yet differently proved too difficult and I daresay that reluctance to face the problem was what really made him put the manuscript away once again. So we have "Chance" instead of "The Sisters". For myself I regret the substitution. The vista that opens to me of the works of an immensely great international writer, another but more impassioned Turgenev, another Flaubert but more of a poet, has a gloomy glory that I cannot but regret. Contact with Anglo-Saxondom has, alas, a belittling effect on the artist, we so love trivialities and so avoid the contemplation of great causes. But the majority of my readers will not agree with me and so I may as well drop the subject.

I had hoped to have sufficient room to write a little on the subject of Conrad's style at the time when "The Sisters" was written, but I haven't, so I must drop that too. Perhaps the Editor will permit me to return to it one of these days.