Papers by Laurence Davies
The letter is important not only because it adds a new recipient to the list of correspondents to... more The letter is important not only because it adds a new recipient to the list of correspondents to whom Conrad wrote, but also for the bit of light that it sheds upon the textual history of Lord Jim. The letter, of course, refers to the division of titles owned by the firm of Doubleday, McClure, which had been founded in 1897 by McClure, who then operated a newspaper syndicate and edited McClure1s, a major American magazine, and F.N. Doubleday, who, after 18 years with Scribner's, was beginning his career as a publisher.[23 The partnership collapsed in 1900, shortly after the publication of the first American edition of Lord Jim. McClure formed a new partnership, McClure, Phillips, while Doubleday and Walter Hines Page established Doubleday, Page and Company, the firm which was later to play a major role in Conrad's professional life. McClure's new publishing house was to play an important part in Conrad's career in the years immediately following the collapse of Doubleday, McClure. In 1901, The Inheritors was among the first titles published by McClure, Phillips, and Conrad's correspondence from this period makes it clear that the author regarded the McClure connection to be very important, for the
Conradiana, 2010
... allowed his authors considerable latitude on the contentious topic of masculinity (Watts, Jos... more ... allowed his authors considerable latitude on the contentious topic of masculinity (Watts, Joseph ... time, when among its regulars were the Brownings, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Matthew ... 1880s and early 1890s, when the roster had included Thomas Hardy and Meredith. ...
The Conradian the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society, Oct 1, 2007
CONRAD ALMOST NEVER spoke in public, and that, at first, surprises. Did he not come from a cultur... more CONRAD ALMOST NEVER spoke in public, and that, at first, surprises. Did he not come from a culture given to oratory? Had he not been a ship's officer, tasked with inspiring his crew? Was he not enchanted by the power of words, spoken as well as written? Yet these are not rhetorical questions, for any answer must be hemmed with doubts and qualifications. Even in the most innocuous of settings, speaking one's mind in the Poland, Lithuania, or Ukraine of Conrad's day was a dangerous business; one of the charges against Conrad's father, leading to his internment in the Warsaw Citadel and exile to Vologda, was that he had made subversive remarks in a Warsaw sweetshop (Najder 1984: 16). Officers and masters in the British Merchant Navy led by example and authority, by laconic phrase rather than rhetorical flourish. Conrad, in any case, knew more than enough about language as seduction, intoxication, or pure slipperiness to distrust those who manipulate such charms, whether as politicians, journalists, litterateurs, or speculators in the world around him, or even as characters from the world of his fiction such as Citizen Scevola, Senores Gamacho and Fuentes, Carleon Anthony, the Great de Barrai, and Mr Kurtz.After his physical and mental collapse in 1910, Conrad could also plead that his illness had put any public speaking out of the question: "Some five years ago after an attack of gouty throat I lost my voice. All its resonnance [sic] is gone" (CL5 567). There is a familiar (and reasonable) presumption, moreover, that although he had a marvellous ear for the English language, his pronunciation and his worries about idiom, grammar, and syntax, made public speech a desperate project. Even many native speakers know such hesitations, especially when mocked by the demons of inequality and privilege, or haunted, as Joyce was, by the ghost of another, inadmissible language.Nevertheless, in 1923, the last full year of his life, Conrad spoke in public three times: once to the annual meeting of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in London; once at the Country Life Press in Garden City, Long Island; and once at the Curtiss James house, an Anglo-Gothic mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He was not the principal speaker at the RNLI meeting, and the heavily revised MS draft of not much more than 300 words indicates that his speech was appropriate yet brief, expressing his admiration of the Lowestoft men being honoured that night and recalling his own connection with the port, its sailors, and ships. A note added to the MS reads: "(The first speech of my life)" (Najder, ed., 1978: 110-11).A draft of the American speech has also survived. No one knows how much of it Conrad delivered at Arthur Curtiss James's mansion prior to a reading of passages from Victory that evoked "Laughs at proper places and snuffles at the last when I read the whole chapter of Lena's death" (CL8 94). As it stands, the draft is evidently meant for an audience of Doubleday's staff in Garden City: "You must have in the course of your humane tasks read my works - some no doubt under the strain of compulsion. If any bored or displeased, I am sorry. I trust no breast in this audience nurses ill-feeling towards me on that account" (Schwab 1965: 345). The entire draft abounds in Conradian interest and deserves to be better known - as one example, for its comparison between literature and cinema. For the present purpose, though, it is the opening paragraphs that are suggestive. Conrad starts by saying that "the force of the spoken and even written word is not everything":There is the accent - which must be right. The force of the vocal chords [sic] too - thundering - or tender - for effect.You need not fear thundering from me. The thundering way of stimulating your interest (or your anger) is not for me. All I can hope for is to make myself audible. Remains then only the tender accent for me to make the best of. But to be markedly tender like this suddenly, at first sight as it were! …
Part I. The Earlier Years: 1. 1852-77: Origins and Early Travels 2. 1878-85: Marriage, Texas, Sco... more Part I. The Earlier Years: 1. 1852-77: Origins and Early Travels 2. 1878-85: Marriage, Texas, Scotland 3. 1886-8: First Years in Parliament 4. 1888-92: After Trafalgar Square 5. 1892-1900: Travels, Anti-Imperialism, the Last Years at Gartmore 6. Friendships 7. Early Writings Part II. The Later Years: 8. Further Literary Matters 9. His Later Political Career 10. Friendships and Relationships 11. Later Writings 12. Conclusion.
Modern Language Review, Oct 1, 1983
Part I. The Earlier Years: 1. 1852-77: Origins and Early Travels 2. 1878-85: Marriage, Texas, Sco... more Part I. The Earlier Years: 1. 1852-77: Origins and Early Travels 2. 1878-85: Marriage, Texas, Scotland 3. 1886-8: First Years in Parliament 4. 1888-92: After Trafalgar Square 5. 1892-1900: Travels, Anti-Imperialism, the Last Years at Gartmore 6. Friendships 7. Early Writings Part II. The Later Years: 8. Further Literary Matters 9. His Later Political Career 10. Friendships and Relationships 11. Later Writings 12. Conclusion.
Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010, 2011
Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2017
The Conradian the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society, Oct 1, 2009
Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 2006
Leviathan, 2009
A lthough this paper speaks of dealing justly with the dead, it will do less justice to Melville ... more A lthough this paper speaks of dealing justly with the dead, it will do less justice to Melville and to Poland than to Conrad. Nevertheless, I hope that charting the uncanny contiguities of exile, home, memory, judgment, and ancestral presences in Conrad may throw-as Marlow would say-"a kind of light" on Melville. Here we are at the limit of deep-water navigation on the Odra (Oder) River, in a polyglot city shaped by exile, devastation, and involuntary resettlement as well as by the wealth, cultural and financial, brought by the Baltic shipping trade. 1 Neither Conrad nor Melville ever saw the Baltic, but Szczecin is a likely place to feel the poignancy of exile, the impermanence of home, and the heft of national identity (or, for Conrad, identities) in the work of two conspicuously international authors. Their affinities are not confined to experience fore or aft. It goes almost without saying that the author of Billy Budd and "The Encantadas" is a polyphonist and a mixer of modes, writing in a multitude of voices, switching from poetry to prose, to drama, from fiction to statistical account, but so, more quietly, is the author of Heart of Darkness and An Outcast of the Islands as he glides without warning from the grandly operatic to the savagely ironic, from the orotund to the colloquial. 2 These are protean writers, hard to confine in any ideological cage, not least when they treat of the uncanny, the supernatural, the metaphysical.
Edwardian Ford. Ed. Laura Colombino and Max Saunders. International Ford Madox Ford Studies,, 2013
The Inheritors, Mr. Apollo, and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes might be called sports - playful, wilful... more The Inheritors, Mr. Apollo, and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes might be called sports - playful, wilfully charming, and, in the evolutionary sense, odd.1 Although they are infused with ?Modemist openendedness',2 their author's resort to the modes of fantasy and, to a lesser extent, science fiction appears to distance these works from The Good Soldier or the Tietjens sequence. To use Samuel R. Delany's scheme of narrative subjectivities, they are speculative fictions whose events either ?have not happened' (as in science fiction) or ?could not have happened' (as in fantasy), rather than naturalistic fictions which ?could have happened'.3 It is tempting to frame these texts as generic potboilers, driven by the need to be amusing. Yet, far from being byblows, they are the creations of an evolving literary agenda, experiments in narrative rendering engaged with issues of the day and inspired by Ford's tireless interest in the nature of perception. In these Fordian ventures into the fantastic, we find delayed decoding, derangement of the senses, moments of epiphany, and an awareness that ?we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other'4 - this awareness embracing time as well as space. Thus their narrative practices overlap with those of Ford's more ?serious' or ?ambitious' realist, or rather ?impressionist' fiction. To borrow a concept derived from the Russian formalists and favoured mainly by critics of science fiction, his novels, perhaps even his entire oeuvre, exemplify the literature of cognitive estrangement.5The Inheritors: An Extravagant StoryThe initial reception of The Inheritors was a mixture of curiosity, admiration, bewilderment, and dislike. A good few early reviewers found the novel ?clever', period code for intelligent but not too solemn.6 Others, such as the reviewer for the London Daily News, heard a note of the macabre: ?the authors are in cap and bells, but the dance they dance is a Dance of Death - the death of loyalty and love and all the social virtues' {Reviews 357-8). The Manchester Guardian praised the ?extraordinary delicacy of its literary presentment' and its ?exquisite humour of phrase' {Reviews 353). Conversely, a significant number of reviewers complained that the book was too elliptical, too disjointed, too imprecise. According to the London Daily Chronicle, ?The style is spasmodic, the dialogue gaspy [....] We cannot find words strong enough to express our irritation at that asthmatic dialogue' {Reviews 354). The Brooklyn Daily Eagle judged the plot ?a ridiculous hotchpotch' and the writing ?as bad as the style of Henry James' {Reviews 369). Both its style and its allusions to the fourth dimension piqued The Times: ?The Inheritors [. . .] leaves the bewildered student with the impression that it is a very clever book, and that he is a very stupid person for not seeing what it is all about' {Reviews 364).I do not quote these reviews to pit critical sagacity against critical obtuseness, or wonder about their effects on the collaborators' morale, or make the obvious point that reviewers usually don't agree. The most noteworthy feature of these responses is the divide between those drawn to what Yeats calls ?the fascination of what's difficult' and those appalled by it.7 There is something close to a consensus that The Inheritors makes demands upon its readers, that its authors are trying something new, that in terms of plot and language, the writing makes a virtue of opacity.8 In his letter of remonstrance to the New York Times Saturday Review, Conrad acknowledges these objections: ?Doubtless a novel that wants explaining is a bad novel: but this is only an extravagant story - and it is an experiment'.9 Five paragraphs later, he ends with what Max Saunders rightly calls ?a magnificent statement of joint purpose';10 in language echoing the Preface (strictly speaking an Afterword) to The Nigger of the ?Narcissus', Conrad affirms that ?the writer's self-forgetful fidelity to his sensations' transforms fiction's ? …
Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad, 2021
The Modern Language Review, 1990
The Modern Language Review, 1983
Part I. The Earlier Years: 1. 1852-77: Origins and Early Travels 2. 1878-85: Marriage, Texas, Sco... more Part I. The Earlier Years: 1. 1852-77: Origins and Early Travels 2. 1878-85: Marriage, Texas, Scotland 3. 1886-8: First Years in Parliament 4. 1888-92: After Trafalgar Square 5. 1892-1900: Travels, Anti-Imperialism, the Last Years at Gartmore 6. Friendships 7. Early Writings Part II. The Later Years: 8. Further Literary Matters 9. His Later Political Career 10. Friendships and Relationships 11. Later Writings 12. Conclusion.
Studies in Scottish Literature, 1974
Ford Madox Ford’s Cosmopolis: Psycho-geography, <i>Flânerie</i> and the Cultures of Paris, 2016
Ford's Mister Bosphorus and the Muses (1923), a 'Variety Entertainment in Four Acts', is a carniv... more Ford's Mister Bosphorus and the Muses (1923), a 'Variety Entertainment in Four Acts', is a carnival of modes and media, unstageable yet, in its aural qualities and its playful breaking of frames, eminently theatrical. It mingles dream, ekphrastic cinema, polemical history, pantomime, songs, parody, satire, the technique of the 'dissolving view', and wood engravings by Paul Nash. While Ford's satirical targets are English people and English institutions, his cultural affiliations are much broader. Nourished by the plays of Aristophanes, Provençal and German lyrics, commedia dell'arte and twentieth-century European cabaret as well as the history of English poetry and the comedy and pathos of the music halls, it is rural and metropolitan, literary and demotic, English and cosmopolitan. Yet to speak of history misleads. Mister Bosphorus is always on the move through time and space. Flux is of its essence, collision frequent, and metamorphosis a constant. To do it justice requires not so much a sense of influences given or taken as a sense of affinities with other experiments in identity and form, preceding or to come: among others, Orlando, The Threepenny Opera, and Ulysses.
The Modern Language Review, 1986
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Papers by Laurence Davies