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The Secret Sharer and Other Stories Edited by John G. Peters Norton Critical Editions WW Norton, 2015 xii + 599pp. $16.87 paperback / $11.99 electronic
I give the psychology of a group of men and render certain aspects of nature. But the problem that faces them is not a problem of the sea, it is merely a problem that has arisen on board a ship where the conditions of complete isolation from all land entanglements make it stand out with a particular force and colouring.
Letter from Joseph Conrad to Henry S. Canby, 1924 (379)
The Sea Chest. So Leon Edel introduces Henry James's Notebooks, with the literal site of his discovery of such a literary trove; I borrow it to start this review (ix). For John G. Peters's The Secret Sharer and Other Stories is a sea-treasure chest of a collection. It opens up to reveal, alongside the tremendous riches of the stories themselves, other primary and secondary source documents that tell the story of Conrad's transit into writing, his metamorphosing from one profession to another, both of which are writ large in this volume. In this scrupulously and carefully curated, annotated, edited and supported collection of "The Secret Sharer", The Shadow-Line, The Nigger of the "Narcissus" and "Typhoon," Peters offers a Conradian "auto-hydrography": what Conrad's writing of water says about Conrad's own writing (life) and maybe also about writing in general. This collection or conversion of life-on-the-water into writing (that "Youth" might add to but that would throw off the volume's structure, more on which below), and not only Conrad's, shimmers, a mirror of ink, to invoke Michel Beaujour's Mirrors of Ink: Rhetoric of the Autoportrait (1980) as well as a mirror of the sea-to invoke Conrad's Mirror of the Sea, and beyond.
Since Conrad's own process/progress into fiction was from profession (sail) to profession (writer), as the prefatory materials to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" contained in this volume testify, this reviewer will focus at least in part on the practical use of the edition as a means of making the "appeal," a word Conrad uses at least seven times in the original preface, for literary studies, with and through Conrad, having already used the volume in a literature course at the...