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The real secret of Mr. Conrad-and it is open to the whole world-is not that he is a Polish mariner, but that he is an Elizabethan poet.
"Literary Portraits-XLr,
JOSEPH Conrad wrote three novels in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford: The Inheritors (1901); Romance, A Novel (1903); and The Nature of a Crime (1909, 1924). Each of them has a metafictional thrust in it, varying from plotting a suicide to collaborating on the writing of a biography of Oliver Cromwell. These metafictional moments seem inevitable in works that were the product of two writers who incessantly discussed with each other every aspect of the writing of fiction. What happened in their life together, appropriately enough, made its way into their fiction. And their metafictional quality makes these novels more interesting to modern readers than they would otherwise be. This metafictional matrix also adds a dimension to Ford's Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924). Its major action is the quest for the New Form of the novel. This is a heroic quest that grew out of Ford's and Conrad's conviction that "the only occupation fitting for a proper man in these centuries is the writing of novels" (Remembrance 186) because
great works of art ... put their fingers upon the disease spots of nations or describe the diseases of civilisations. A great work of art is a precise diagnosis of human estates, and this is why great works of art are so frequently disliked. They are passionless; they state without comment; and, just as we dread the surgeon who declares that we are doomed by a mortal disease, so we dread the writer who tells us dispassionately what is the matter with us.1
This dangerous quest for the truth and a form in which to render it is as heroic as any task one can undertake and confers immortality on the writer who succeeds. Why? Because "a great talent occupies itself with the deep places of the mind and frames its projections of those secrets in projections of kingdoms that are the kingdoms not merely of to-day" (Thus 95). So although the writer must die, the work need not. The Elizabethan poets and dramatists, more than anyone else in the English tradition, have made this, indisputably,...