American Markets, Serials, and Conrad’s Career

S. W. Reid, Kent State University

© S. W. Reid. No part of this text may be reposted or republished without the permission of the author.

[10,285 words]

[First published in The Conradian 28/1 (Spring 2003): 57–99. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of S. W. Reid.]

Despite its title, this paper is not about popular afternoon entertainment on American TV, though the tale it tells had its melodramatic elements and some moments that looked like American soap opera, if not East Enders. Alternative titles have come and gone: “Conrad Conquers the Realm of the American Magazine,” “Conrad Colonizes the Popular Periodical,” and, finally, “Dismayed but not Defeated: Conrad’s Colonization of the Serial,” the title that served on the occasion of its delivery at the special meeting of the Joseph Conrad Society of America in Vancouver in August 2002.¹ These options may suggest a hazy concept of the subject, and that inference might not be entirely off the mark, for there are several strands to this enquiry, and at best it is exploratory: it concerns the extent to which the factors we associate with Chance and the change in Conrad’s career that it represents were at work (or at play) earlier.
Two of the titles might also suggest that much of the tale told here concerns American magazines principally: in fact, five organs – The Metropolitan Magazine, Ridgway’s Magazine, The New York Herald, The North American Review, and Harper’s Monthly Magazine – in which Conrad’s writings appeared serially between the years 1906 and 1912. The last two, The North American Review and Harper’s, were ultimately under the control of one man, Colonel George M. Harvey. He was the editor of The North American Review and had been at the beginning of the century, when, on the recommendation of F. N. Doubleday and others, he was brought in by the creditors of the financially strapped Harpers publishing company to put the old firm back on its feet. In this effort he succeeded, and because he had done so, Harpers were able not only to publish the American book editions of The Secret Agent in 1907, of Under Western Eyes in 1911, and of A Personal Record in 1912 (see figure 1), but also to serialize in Harper’s Monthly Magazine both “The Secret Sharer” (1910) and “The Partner” (1911) and, in The North American Review, Under Western Eyes (1910 through 1911). That is not to mention, of course, both the English and American editions of Nostromo that the firm published in 1904, nor the American edition of The Mirror of the Sea in 1905, nor the stories “An Anarchist” (1906), and “The Informer” (1906) that appeared in Harper’s, which all lie essentially outside the time of this tale (see figure 2).
This list of titles may suggest a subtext: that in one way or another Harpers had their hand in the publication of almost everything Conrad wrote from Nostromo up to, but not including, Chance. They were in effect Conrad’s American publisher through much of the first decade of the twentieth century, the time of the great political novels. But they gave up that role to Doubleday, who would publish Chance, around 1912 (see figure 3). More precisely, they gave it up with the publication of ’Twixt Land and Sea, bought by George H. Doran and then quickly sold to Doubleday within a year of its first publication (see figure 4). This was at the time that Conrad was turning to another kind of fiction. It was also the time his commercial fortunes began to rise, and the time, according to one dominant view of the arc of his career, that he began settling into what Thomas C. Moser has called his decline. It is chiefly this transition that is considered here, because there are some interesting factors at work that both complicate and clarify the picture we have drawn of this crucial period in Conrad’s life and career (see figure 5).

The Secret Agent

The serialization of The Secret Agent in late 1906 and its impact on the book version of the novel published in late 1907 exhibits, retrospectively, many of the features to be seen in Conrad’s handling of magazine and book publication during the early years of his association with J. B. Pinker. As will be recalled, the composition and revision of the novel occurred, roughly speaking, in four stages between early February 1906 and mid-August 1907 (see figure 6) while Conrad tried repeatedly to “get on terms” with Chance (CL3 394). In the first three, Conrad created the version published in Ridgway’s: A Militant Monthly for God and Country. While on the Continent in early 1906, Conrad wrote the first three chapters (on Verloc the double agent). While in England, after the publication of Robert Anderson’s book on Scotland Yard and during the summer months before and after John’s birth, he managed to draft the middle chapters (Chapters 4–6) on the anarchists and the police, bringing the narration back to Brett Street in the person of the Assistant Commissioner (in the short Chapter 7) by early September. And then, once back at The Pent, Conrad produced in about six weeks the more than two hundred pages of manuscript that centre on Verloc’s family and its dismemberment (Chapters 8–9, 11). By early October Ridgway’s had begun publishing weekly instalments, and Conrad was writing against the press. The last week of October saw him working frantically to bring the tale to a tolerable and temporary conclusion, so as to meet the New York mailboat on 3 November in order to provide Ridgway’s with copy.
In this sense, then, the process of serialization determined the initial form of the novel. Thoroughly exhausted by the end of 1906, Conrad, and the novel, rested, with two-thirds of the eventual book form written and published serially in America. In the late spring and summer of 1907, while in Geneva, he received proofs of Methuen’s first English edition containing this version of the tale; it was then that he added Chapter 10 (on Mr. Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner) and expanded the ending (on Winnie, Verloc, and Ossipon) in the subsequent chapters. Broadly speaking, the serial version focussed largely on political affairs from the successive perspectives of several males; domestic issues and female perspectives were subordinate. The expanded book version shifted the balance, developed the domestic and so-called “romantic” relationships, showed the double-agentry of the political and social world to be deeply enmeshed with duplicity in private worlds, and, as Bruce Harkness has remarked, enabled Conrad later to call it “Winnie Verloc’s story” (8).²
Several elements in this situation crave attention. First, and most obviously, Conrad was dealing, though at arm’s length, with an American organ, one based in New York. This directly affected the way he wrote the last chapters published there and led to publication of an American text that was unfinished. The evidence of the manuscript and the cor-respondence make it clear that the last week of October and the first few days of November saw Conrad rushing The Secret Agent to a close in order to meet the weekly mail boat to New York and Ridgway’s deadline.³
Second, the magazine’s nature had various material effects on the text it published. Ridgway’s was a new idea that did not wholly succeed. It was half-newspaper and half-magazine. At first produced and issued simultaneously in fourteen American cities each Saturday (see figure 7), it maintained a distinction in its several “departments” and in its production methods between newspaper matter – editorials, news summaries, features – and more traditional magazine material: “good, wholesome fiction with honest sentiment and red blood in it,” humour, poetry, and sixteen pages of half-tone “pictures.” Fresh, newsy material was “telegraphed to each of the cities after midnight on Friday” from the East Coast and was typeset and printed overnight in local newspaper offices. The magazine features were produced differently. Covers were “printed in New York to be sent by express.” The Secret Agent, another story, and the rest of the “magazine” matter were apparently typeset in New York but printed locally, as were “half-tone cuts ... printed on flat presses separately from the text.”
Technically innovative, Ridgway’s must have been a printer’s nightmare. Magazine and newspaper matter, with different origins, had to be combined in a short time; and within the space strictly allotted to the magazine matter, the texts had to be fitted around both illustrations and advertisements (see figure 8). Whether for this reason alone, or on general policy grounds as well, Conrad’s text was subjected to the editorial knife. Passages that did not forward the plot disappeared. Mrs. Neale was twice suppressed: once, early in Chapter 9; once, at the end of Chapter 8, to make way for a two-column advertisement of Balzac’s novels (see figure 9). Along with her went an instance of Stevie’s sympathy as well as Winnie’s second question about putting out the light and Verloc’s second reply, with its reverberations fore and aft. Conrad’s passage on Winnie’s butcher boy, with its echo of Verloc’s walk and its foreshadowing of the knifing scene, also disappeared. The relationship between Stevie, his mother, and his sister received less attention in Ridgway’s, depreciating the story’s domestic dimension and subverting Conrad’s attempt to prepare for the catastrophe.
That brings us to the third point we should notice. Conrad was not fully in control of the serial version in even the loosest terms. The line-drawings that accompanied the text bordered, as Cedric Watts has aptly remarked, on caricature (1989, 105), emphasizing the grotesquerie of the characters and shifting attention to incident as in a mere thriller, or even comic-book (see figure 10). As we have seen, Ridgway’s need for lead time to typeset The Secret Agent in New York and ship it round the country forced Conrad to bring his tale to a hasty and temporary conclusion in November 1906. But a month earlier he had known that it might be thought too long even in this state. He told Pinker: “when you produce the type for an editor you may say that it is an extended, uncorrected copy.” He offered “to shorten the tale for ser pub: I have passages already marked in my mind for the purpose. I can take out 2 to 3 thou. words if so desired – analysis. But no one else must mangle the thing.” By this time, however, Pinker had already agreed with Ridgway’s for American serialization, and the first instalment was already shipped and the second probably typeset. Later, Conrad observed to Pinker: “Ridgways are sending me their rag. It’s awful – and it don’t matter in the least. I see they are ‘editing’ the stuff pretty severely” (CL3 364, 369). He was very much out of the loop (see figure 11).
Of course, such rueful statements have to be filtered, especially those to Pinker. But this one does suggest my fifth point: at this time Conrad was disposed to take the position that serialization was merely a matter of money anyway, of increasing the revenue for the same piece of work, of double dipping, if you will. Otherwise, it was of little account.
The last two points concern logistics, the material reasons Conrad failed to control the serial text, as against the book text, of his novel as much as he would have wanted. Pinker had two typescripts made of the serial version (see chart, figure 12).⁴ In the first half of the serial there are revisions by Conrad that are also present in the book editions. The manuscript’s “Minnie,” for instance, is “Winnie” in Ridgway’s and the books. Conrad presumably made these changes in the typescript, now lost, that was copied from the manuscript during the spring and summer of 1906 (TS1). From this revised typescript were made two copies of a second typescript (TS2), also now lost, that incorporated these changes. One copy went to New York and served as printer’s copy for Ridgway’s, whereas the other was used for the first English edition, from which derives all subsequent book editions. However, in the second half of the serial version, typed after his return to The Pent in September 1906, Conrad was not able to make revisions before one of the two copies of the first typescript was sent directly to New York. The “Winnie,” for instance, in the serial’s earlier pages, reverts to being “Minnie,” as in the manuscript, and only becomes consistently identified in the first editions. The differences between the serial and book texts reflect, then, not Conrad’s attempt to distinguish the two versions for different audiences and different contexts, but rather his failure to use the two typescripts to do so.
It was the copy of the second typescript that did not go to New York to which Conrad referred when he wrote to Algernon Methuen on 7 November 1906 offering to send the typescript of The Secret Agent “at once” and stating that “when it is prepared for ‘book form’ it will be 68,000 words in length – or perhaps even more” (CL3 371). The last four words are crucial, for as Conrad later protested he always meant to revise, or finish, the novel in the book form. The misunderstanding of this point became the nettle in their relationship that, along with other irritations, festered into a contract dispute and led to Conrad’s break with Methuen a few years later and to his alliance with Dent, who would become his English publisher in the years of his professional prosperity. Conrad’s remark to Methuen in 1906 was, however, certainly ambiguous, if not half-consciously designed to obscure the use he was planning to make of the book proofs.
In the short run, a dispute arose over the nature of the Methuen proofs. In his letter of 7 November 1906 Conrad had asked “to have the book set up and galley slips pulled off for me to work on” (CL3 371). By the next spring, he had not received proofs in which to revise, and Harpers in New York needed a set in order to begin typesetting their book. Pinker, following a suggestion from Methuen’s staff, proposed sending them a set of raw Methuen proofs. Conrad’s response of 3 May 1907 to Pinker cited his need to rework the book and overruled the proposal with a typically desperate statement: “The mere notion of you sending the proofs to Harpers puts me in a fever of apprehension. Don’t do it for goodness’s sake. You know it was always understood the book had to be worked upon thoroughly” (CL3 433). Later, on 18 May, when he had actually received the proofs, he wrote: “The proofs of S.A. have reached me and I have almost cried at the sight. I thought it was arranged beyond doubt that I was to have galley slips for my corrections. Instead of that I get the proofs of set pages! ... In the circumstances after reflecting on the best way of dealing with the S.A. I think I must curtail my corrections as much as possible.” And the next day Pinker got this from Conrad: “When I look at the proofs of the SA I feel exasperated with Methuen. The utter contempt shown for my wishes and my instructions is galling. ... I had hurried the thing on in the hope of having every facility to give it a properly finished shape later on” (CL3 439, 440). We now know that in spite of these protestations, Conrad made major changes in these proofs and added matter: a new episode (Chapter 10) and an expanded ending (Chapters 11–13) made the book version of the novel almost half again as long as the serial version (see figure 13). But the point is that he had planned on using material produced by printers to differentiate the book version from the serial version, and this dependence produced restrictions he found frustrating but, in the event, unavoidable.

Under Western Eyes

The elements found in the production of the serial and book texts of The Secret Agent and the pattern of frustrated control over their texts would be repeated in the next four or five years in various ways. At the end of 1907, Conrad began a story called “Razumov” that, like the “Verloc” that became The Secret Agent, grew into a novel, now known as Under Western Eyes. The composition of this novel was even more irksome and dragged on through 1908 and 1909. One or two occasional pieces aside, the only other real work that occupied Conrad was what became the early instalments of Some Reminiscences, later A Personal Record. Prompted, according to Zdzisław Najder (1983, 341), by remarks in a mainly favourable review of the collection of earlier stories called A Set of Six, the writing and serialization of much of A Personal Record was intimately bound up with the launching of Ford’s English Review, with which Conrad was for a time deeply involved. In this sense, it is a special case and disregarded here. However, A Personal Record and Under Western Eyes clearly got entangled with one another during 1909, as Conrad eked out the manuscript of the novel and tensions between him and Pinker grew, along with Conrad’s ever mounting debts. As everyone knows, the growing strains culminated in a breach between them the next January, as Conrad was completing the manuscript of the novel, and was immediately followed by Conrad’s collapse.
The writing and later revision of Under Western Eyes has lately been so scrutinized in stimulating detail in Keith Carabine’s book-length study that it would be superfluous to attempt to add anything on that subject here. Carabine (1996, Chapter 4) makes a persuasive argument that the revisions Conrad made in the spring of 1910, which included major cuts to the typescript text in order to curtail the role of Natalia and thus prevent the feminine and romantic element from overwhelming the novel’s political dimensions, were necessary artistically, and indeed crucial to its artistic success – a kind of reversal of the creative process seen in The Secret Agent.
More recently Roger S. Osborne, in a PhD thesis at the University of New South Wales, has argued that these changes were made to fit the novel for publication in The North American Review, a different sort of approach that focusses on Conrad as professional author rather than literary artist. This is no place to try to sort out such a complex and important case. But the terms of the debate are very much those that we have now become accustomed to hearing in discussions of Conrad’s later fiction, from Chance onward.
Furthermore, the circumstances in which Conrad made these changes require our attention, for they bear directly on the next two years of his work, up to and including the writing and revision of Chance. When Conrad lost, temporarily as it proved, Pinker’s financial and moral support, he also lost the support of his typists. This may seem trivial, but as a practical matter it was not. A new arrangement replaced that used, in effect, for virtually all of the past decade. Conrad was to deliver finished work before he got paid, or got credit against his debt, for his thousand words: no holograph manuscripts of whatever character – only finished typescripts – would do. Consequently, when in the spring of 1910 he revised, for whatever reason or reasons, the only typescript of Under Western Eyes that existed, he became practically committed to this version of the novel. The heavily revised document went to Robert Garnett, who was then acting as his lawyer on his professional behalf, and Garnett had a fair typescript made from it (CL4 323-24, 328). This became the source of the texts that appeared in The North American Review and The English Review, itself the printer’s copy for Methuen’s first English edition (see figure 14). Although further revisions occurred in most of these forms, they carried on the direction given the work by Conrad on his recovery bed, tucked away in the family’s four-roomed quarters in Aldington over a butchery. A serial version or versions distinct from the book version was practically out of the question, whatever artistic or marketing ambitions he may have entertained. Any revisions would be in printed matter, whether English Review or Methuen proofs. Conrad was the prisoner of his agent, printers, and publishers, if not of his landlord.
This fact, along with the loss of some income because of the curtailed number of words, might help account for the rueful tone of his comment to John Quinn on 25 September 1911 that he had been “cutting down that novel ruthlessly” (CL4 480) and to Galsworthy the next month, while revising A Personal Record and writing Chance: “You know there are about 30000 words more than the printed text. Revising while ill in bed I am afraid I have struck out whole pages recklessly. The other day I looked at the MS: 1357 pp averaging about 120 words per page. There are passages that should have remained. I wasn’t in a fit state to judge them. Well – it’s done now and let the critics make what they can of it” (15 October 1911; CL4 486).

“The Secret Sharer”

What is not widely known, I believe, is an interesting incident that occurred early in January 1910, and that defines fairly precisely Conrad’s situation as writer and author at the time. This is revealed in two letters uncovered by Bruce Harkness and, so far as I know, not noticed elsewhere. At the end of December, just after finishing “The Secret Sharer” and still owing Pinker the end of Under Western Eyes, Conrad apparently slipped up to Galsworthy’s house in west London, without a word to Pinker. Sydney Brooks saw him there and crossed Addison Road to speak to him. He then wrote to Colonel Harvey urging Harpers to make a long-term contract with Conrad. A few weeks later Harvey replied to Brooks sympathetically but negatively about putting Conrad under long-term contract, citing the poor sales of The Secret Agent, Nostromo, and The Mirror of the Sea, and concluding: “I regard Mr. Conrad as a true genius and am proud to see the Harpers imprint upon anything he writes. But, alas, I cannot compel the public to buy and, as you will readily perceive, we have not profited from these publications. ... We have just taken a short story at £100 and were glad to get it on all accounts. But how can I, in justice to my house, do better with respect to forthcoming books than I have indicated?”⁵
The clandestine visit sheds a gloomy light on the state of the relationship between Conrad and his agent at this juncture. It also provides an interesting perspective for Conrad’s comment to Pinker almost two years later that “Various people who ought to know [probably a reference to John Quinn] tell me that Harpers are not doing justice to the possibilities of my work. However they pay decently for stories” (9 November 1911; CL4 501). Soon Doubleday would take up Conrad, promote his career, and become his American publisher in the decade when he achieved some popularity and attained professional prosperity. However, this gets us a year or two ahead of our story.
In the months of 1910 during which Conrad was revising Under Western Eyes and writing the series of stories that preceded the resumption of Chance, he was awaiting the publication of “The Secret Sharer,” bought by Harper’s for the £100 Harvey mentions. The brief composition and revision of this story in December 1909 had deferred the completion of the manuscript of Under Western Eyes and was instrumental in bringing the seething tension between Conrad and Pinker to a boil. In the wake of his breach with Pinker, Conrad found the financial slack taken up by John Galsworthy, and the moral vacuum filled by him, Perceval Gibbon, Arthur Marwood, and others. The typing support was to be given largely by Jessie Conrad, first in the composition of “A Smile of Fortune,” which I shall come to shortly.
Accepted by Harper’s in January 1910, perhaps without Conrad’s immediate knowledge – again he might have been out of the loop, though this time deliberately on Pinker’s part – “The Secret Sharer” appeared in the August and September issues much to Conrad’s surprise. In a letter to Galsworthy of 5 August 1910, Conrad called its division between the two numbers a “Beastly shame” and remarked on other features of the August issue “so inept that I feel sick to see myself there” (CL4 354). Yet if we look at its appearance there, we might think the presentation of the story was more than satisfactory and Conrad’s comments but more evidence of his usual proclaimed ambivalence about “all these American humbugs in the publishing line” (letter to Pinker, 22 December 1909; CL4 306). The story was set up in Harper’s usual two-column format, was printed on Harper’s standard text stock, and in each issue was accompanied by two grey-tone illustrations. In the August number, one “picture,” as Ridgway’s would have called it, showed the captain and Leggatt talking together on the poop; the other plate portrayed the conversation between the steward and the two mates at the break of the poop (see figure 15). In the September number, the first illustration showed the two captains at the table in the cuddy with the steward; the second depicted Archbold’s departure. As Harper’s was perhaps the most widely respected magazine of its kind in America at the time, we could well conclude Conrad had nothing to gripe about.
We should look again. In an earlier number, the opening pages of a sea tale by Perceval Gibbon were printed on Harper’s’ better paper and accompanied by more lavish “pictures” (see figure 16). The artist who did the illustrations for “The Secret Sharer” also contributed his own sea story to the August number of Harper’s. Its opening pages elided text and pictures and featured another plate recognizably his (see figure 17). Both the August and September instalments of “The Secret Sharer” followed William Dean Howells’s reminiscences of Mark Twain – complete with pictures of the great men, of the Connecticut mansion, and so on – and preceded lavishly illustrated stories long since forgotten. The last part-page of Conrad’s story fell (physically) on the first leaf of a gathering containing a poem that filled out the rest of the page. This part of the magazine was printed on Harper’s better, slick paper so as to accommodate engraved illustrations cut within columns of text for Arthur E. McFarlane’s “Cut Off in Paris” (see figure 18), which otherwise filled it and which ended in the next gathering before regular text paper resumed. In the September issue “The Secret Sharer” began in a gathering of text (that is, inferior) stock and ran half way through the next gathering, made up of slick paper. Here it was followed immediately by George Harding’s “In Port,” a story given the same kind of special treatment as McFarlane’s the previous month (see figure 19). The last grey-tone for Conrad’s story appeared in-gathering, so to speak, rather than on a separate plate, only because slick paper was to be used for the Harding story with its numerous engravings.
The competition was, however, still stiffer. In both numbers, Conrad’s story was tucked firmly away in the middle of the issue. In contrast, the August issue opened with the immortal “Ysobel de Corveaux” by the equally immortal Brian Hooker, complete with engraved title, in-text pictures, and facing colour plate (see figure 20). The September number began with Marie van Vorst’s “Naples and the Lotto,” which had a more straightforward opening page of text but an equally provocative facing plate (see figure 21). The next story, by one Mary Heaton Vorse on regular text paper, was promptly followed by a lovely colour plate (see figure 22).
So far, this overview of Harper’s publication of “The Secret-Sharer” – with a hyphen, by the way, that is substantive – omits any consideration of its heavily edited text. Two years ago the Society that publishes this journal allowed me to descant on that subject, and it would be bad form to repeat that dirge here. But it is still necessary to run a variation on what will now seem, I hope, like a familiar theme. Conrad largely lost control of the text of this story once he sent the revised typescript of it back to Pinker on either 18 or 19 December 1909. From that typescript Pinker had made a fair typescript that went to Harper’s, whose editor, the redoubtable Henry Mills Alden – “the greatest editor of his age,” according to one writer⁶ – and whose typesetters altered the text in various ways, some serious. When he came to prepare the text for ’Twixt Land and Sea in 1912, Conrad had only tear-sheets of the Harper’s printing available, and though he revised at this stage and corrected some of Harper’s’ errors, a large proportion of them passed into Dent’s first English edition and thus to posterity.
This account of the appearance of “The Secret Sharer” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine is meant to illustrate the kind of commercial situation Conrad faced in the world of the American magazine. Although Harper’s was issued in Britain from their offices in Albemarle Street, no less, its position in American publishing was the important thing. A “popular American magazine with ... something approaching a national audience” when Alden assumed the editorship in 1869, it had grown in “dignity, distinction, maturity, and range” according to one commentator, and continued to appeal to “the solid and respectable citizenry from coast to coast” in America, where it had very wide circulation and was arguably the most influential magazine for decades (Allen, 1950, 14). Robert W. Trogdon tells me that Colonel Harvey had managed to jazz up its contents a bit after taking over the company, but Alden remained firmly in control of editorial matters none the less. They were a formidable team in the New York cultural scene of their day, which set the standard for most of the country then even more than it does now.

“A Smile of Fortune”

The story that followed Under Western Eyes and “The Secret Sharer” in sequence of composition, and that preceded the latter when published in ’Twixt Land and Sea, graphically illustrates the professional wilderness Conrad occupied during the breach with Pinker. In some ways it is central to our present concerns. The composition was vexed, and Conrad discarded his early work on the story, begun at Aldington immediately after slashing the typescript of Under Western Eyes, and replaced it, after moving to Capel House, with a longer version that more fully developed the “sea” dimension of the tale so as to balance the “land” element, the captain-narrator’s romantic entanglement with the provoking and provocative Alice.⁷ Although there were changes throughout the story, including the ending, the main difference was in the story’s opening: the later version provided a longer prelude that developed the captain’s relationship with his chief mate, Mr. Burns, and made the account of the approach to the island four times as long as the original, which survives in the manuscript. The process involved successive typescripts produced by Jessie Conrad and revised extensively by Conrad; the first one, made from the manuscript, was completely discarded as it was such a mess.
All this background would be irrelevant for present purposes had the tale been published in Conrad’s final (that is, revised) version. But it wasn’t. Having finished it at the end of August 1910, Conrad rested from his labours, worried himself about Pinker’s dealings with The English Review over Under Western Eyes, wrote “Prince Roman,” and attempted “The Partner.” Nothing came of Pinker’s effort to place the story in America, and it was weeks before he succeeded in finding an English magazine that would take it. It was a very long story. By the middle of November Pinker had received an offer from the London Magazine that was conditional on the tale being shortened. Conrad fumed and fussed but so managed things that his alterations essentially restored the rejected version of the story present in the holograph manuscript written in May and early June and still in his possession. Whatever Conrad’s artistic objections to the cuts, and they were sound, the fact was that Pinker had already agreed in principle to some shortening before informing Conrad of the offer, and Conrad was more desperate than ever for cash to reduce his debt to Pinker and to place his first work since Under Western Eyes in a way that would avoid further alienating his agent. So he took the fair typescript Pinker had submitted to The London Magazine, replaced its first nine pages with five of new manuscript – based on the original manuscript – performed a similar though more restricted transplant at the end, made various smaller changes throughout the typescript, and returned it to Pinker.
Despite his plans to the contrary, Conrad never managed to get his revised version of the tale into print. When, two years later, he prepared the story for ’Twixt Land and Sea, he did so in tear sheets of The London Magazine. The nine cancelled pages of the Pinker typescript that he claimed to have kept purposely for “re-insertion in” the book edition (CL4 392) have perished altogether and probably had gone missing by June 1912. A composite typescript, with its fair copy of the opening pages that Pinker had sent to Paul R. Reynolds in New York for circulation to American magazines was also not available for one of several possible reasons. The heavily revised pages “1 to 39” of TS1, from which Pinker had that typescript made, had probably suffered a similar fate but were in any case so messy as to be unusable. In short, he was stuck with the compromised serial text produced at the end of 1910, as he continued to labour without the support of Pinker’s typists. For any retyping would have fallen to Jessie Conrad, and she had her hands full of other things.

“The Partner”

Between late August, when he finished “A Smile of Fortune,” and mid-November, when he had to “tinker at it to fit it quite” for what he called its “exalted destiny,” Conrad wrote and revised a “second short story about 10000” words, apparently “Prince Roman,” and began another “in despair” that he had to put aside (CL4 390, 366, 379). This was apparently what became “The Partner,” which he resumed as he was cutting down “A Smile of Fortune” for The London Magazine. Within about three weeks he was acknowledging receipt of a £40 cheque for it from Pinker. “The Partner” would eventually be published in 1915 in Within the Tides, but in 1911 and 1912, it would be a candidate for inclusion in ’Twixt Land and Sea. Meanwhile, it became another Harper’s story. Its relation to “A Smile of Fortune” appears to be intimate, especially certain comments about magazines that appear in one version of it and make interesting reading in light of Conrad’s experience with The London Magazine.
The question of versions of the ending of this story is a repeated theme in Conrad’s correspondence with Pinker during the ensuing months. Having finished “Freya of the Seven Isles,” the next and last of this series of stories, he returned, in early March 1911, a revised version of “The Partner” with “two loose typed sheets to be pinned to the other copy,” requested from Pinker a “clean copy” of “Prince Roman” for possible shortening before magazine submission, and discussed the possible serialization of Chance in The New York Herald (CL4 418-19). The confluence of all these projects was propitious and in a way prophetic, but the tailoring of “The Partner” did not go smoothly. Conrad would enquire of Pinker a few days later about proof of “The Partner” from Harper’s, would send something about shortening it to Pinker for forwarding to Harper’s’ Alden in New York, would talk about preserving “a typed copy for use in book form when the time comes,” and would a little later return proof with additional paragraphs, asking Pinker to dispatch it to Albemarle Street and remarking “We shall have the full text for book form” even if Harper’s would not publish with the added material – all this a few weeks before finally resuming Chance (CL4 420, 423). But the day after the story appeared in the November issue of Harper’s, he was remarking that the text was “sadly mangled in the last 3 pages” and asking whether Pinker had “a typed copy.” Pinker apparently did, for two days later, on 4 November 1911, he thanked him “for type of Partner. I shall add a couple of pages to that story for book form. I wish I could get the text I sent to Harpers. It’s slightly different and in parts longer than the one you have sent me. Could you when (and if) you write to them ask if it[’s] possible to get it?” (CL4 499, 500). It is probably unnecessary to observe that his hope appears to have been disappointed. A different ending to the story did appear in the book form, but apparently as a result of another act of revision in Harper’s sheets (see Dalgarno, 1975). Despite a valiant effort, and one that foretold ultimate success, Conrad once again found his efforts to control the different texts of serial and book form frustrated by his dependence on printed, more specifically printed serial, forms.

“Freya of the Seven Isles”

Something similar happened with “Freya of the Seven Isles,” the story he wrote after “The Partner” and finished before resuming Chance. Begun after Christmas 1910, apparently deferred for a few weeks, and finished on the last day of February 1911, “Freya of the Seven Isles” made the rounds of both English and American editors before being accepted by The Metropolitan Magazine in America and The London Magazine in England. These were not the most desirable venues imaginable, but publication in both countries was still good news. It was during discussion of the story’s placement that Conrad registered his dissatisfaction with Harper’s promotion of his work in America, where he said he had “a reputation.” Earlier, when sending the “corrected typed copy” to Pinker, on 28 February 1911, Conrad had stipulated “no suggestion of alteration or curtailment will be entertained. Not a single word” (CL4 501, 417). This no doubt reflected his recollection of the experience with “A Smile of Fortune”: “Freya of the Seven Isles” was even longer. Having “tried to do a magazine-ish thing with some decency,” as he told Edward Garnett on 29 July 1911, he was perhaps a bit sensitive on the issue (CL4 464).
None the less, both magazine texts exhibit major alterations throughout. The American, for instance, threw out the first three pages of typescript, depriving its readers of an understanding of old Nielsen’s (or Nelson’s) situation in the world and his fear of the Dutch authorities, which contributes to the tension and altercation with Heemskirk and thus to the eventual disaster. They got right to Freya herself. The romantic element (the land) was what mattered; the commercial and social context (the sea) in which it prospered, or eventually failed to prosper, did not. Throughout the English serialization, different cuts appeared, but Conrad, at last, seems to have had some role in these. In May 1912, when returning corrected proof of the story to Pinker, he reported: “I am asking the Editor to send me a revise for myself, to keep. It will save me making the same corrections in the full text on galley slips; and then with a pair of scissors and some gum I can fit in the cut out parts without much trouble, to make a complete text for the book form” (CL5 66). This sounds a bit like school days, and of course it did not happen. Conrad ended up having to try to recover and recreate these readings, apparently in a raw proof, for the text of ’Twixt Land and Sea.⁸ It made for a messy business.

Chance and ’Twixt Land and Sea

Having completed a very long story in about two months, Conrad took two off to recover from the shock, working, as already mentioned, at revising “The Partner” and “Prince Roman.” Then, at the very end of April 1911, he did it. He did what he had been talking about doing since the time of The Secret Agent: he resumed Chance, for real. Once launched Conrad made, for him, very good progress, and less than a year later, he had completed the manuscript. There were the usual dry spells and exasperations, and now and again a rush to get revised copy ready to go to New York, where serialization had begun in January 1912. But there wasn’t the panic he had had with, say, The Secret Agent, and once he was well into Chance he seems to have had Pinker’s full cooperation. Part way through the composition he had regained the support, lost in the crisis over Under Western Eyes, of “the infernal typists employed by the great P.” (to Perceval Gibbon, 19 December 1909; CL4 301), who had already begun to accommodate him, as we have seen, by sending typescripts of “The Partner” and “Prince Roman” for revision. During the work on Chance full working relations were restored.
The tailoring of Chance for the Sunday supplement of The New York Herald and its readers, primarily women, and then again for the first editions published by Methuen and by Doubleday has received the detailed attention of Susan Jones in her book Conrad and Women and need not be repeated here. The nature of the audiences, the marketing and publishing contexts, the publicity campaigns undertaken in America in particular, the major changes Conrad made to the text for the different versions – these are issues that together constitute a comprehensive picture of this important event in Conrad’s artistic and professional life. It may be remarked that even Methuen got caught up in the spirit of things (see figure 23). Although they encased their new Conrad novel in a form that recalled the bindings for The Mirror of the Sea, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes, they provided an arresting dust jacket that epitomized the pitch that was being made to Conrad’s prospective new publics: here’s a new novel by that master of sea stories, Joseph Conrad, with a woman and a romantic situation at its centre. Pick me up and buy me.
The other thing that might be noted, in our continuing concern with documents, is the number of typescripts that survive for Chance. It’s three: that is, three complete typescripts to go along with the manuscript. This is an astounding number, rarely paralleled in the canon and to my knowledge only matched for the much later and shorter “Christmas Day at Sea.” It seems likely that at least one more typescript, which would have served as actual printer’s copy for either the serial or the book, existed. In other words Conrad, back in favour with his agent, appreciating the quite real advantages he had enjoyed for many years, had finally discovered the practical means for controlling the texts of his serial and book versions, independently of what his printers and publishers might do for him, out of their benign good graces.
That does not, however, explain why he had finally hit on this seemingly obvious solution at this time, though we should remember that most discoveries, once made, look pretty obvious. He had to have wanted to distinguish these versions, which cost him some labour and thought. Here we enter the realm of speculation, briefly, one hopes. Some time during the period of his career we have been considering, probably while corresponding with the American collector John Quinn and with Doubleday’s enthusiastic and supportive lieutenant, Alfred A. Knopf, Conrad had come to appreciate that serialization offered more than simple double-dipping in the reading public’s purse. A serial appearance not only supplemented a book publication: it enhanced it. The publicity that greeted the appearance of Chance in The New York Herald helped sell Doubleday’s book, often presumably to the same reader. We are in a small way, now, in the world of current mega-publishing: serial rights, book rights, movie rights, sound-track rights, Macdonald’s rights. However much that might turn our stomachs, the family had to be supported, the grocer paid, and the agent reimbursed.
So important had such matters become to Conrad that, in the spring of 1912, with the novel finished and serialization in America a fact, he spent about three weeks of his own time trying desperately to peddle it to Austin Harrison, who had replaced Ford as Editor of The English Review. He offered to “give headings to the chapters – a thing I have never done before in my life – as guides for readers” and said that he “wouldn’t mind, to set you right with the readers, a short note” (28 March 1912; CL5 45). To persuade Harrison to serialize the novel, Conrad had apparently written “a fuller ending for Chance”: a “‘nicer’ ending,” as he called it when sending a copy to Pinker in early April. “I am thinking of the public” (CL5 48–49).
We are accustomed to thinking of the astounding sales success of Chance as a sudden reversal of Conrad’s fortunes in the marketplace. If there’s a thread to this long presentation, it is that some of the factors seen in the publication of Chance reach back to the time he put it on the shelf to get on with The Secret Agent. More specifically, the publication and success of ’Twixt Land and Sea, the year before, heralded the success of Chance and also suggested a turn in Conrad’s fortunes as professional author. The book’s pitch, obviously, was similar: the Eastern seas, again, but in two of the stories at least a prominent place given to women and “romance,” to use the accustomed term. In one of them, of course – the story everyone reads now – women are conspicuously absent, as Conrad noted in his famous letter to Garnett agreeing that “The Secret Sharer” was indeed “it”: “No damned tricks with girls there. Eh? Every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note” (5 November 1912; CL5 128).
In “A Smile of Fortune,” however, a fine balance was struck between the male world of the sea and the domestic world of the land with the enigmatic Alice and her exotic garden at its centre. At least the balance had been finely struck in Conrad’s second version, before the cuts for The London Magazine. Indeed, it is possible to see this tension as central to the story, because at its beginning the captain deplores the need to compromise the “unworldly” and professional life of the sea through commerce with the worldly life of the land and its complex personal relationships associated with business, and at its end he throws up his career, having found he could not avoid such entanglement and could not therefore bear returning to the Pearl of the Ocean. The question was not wholly separate, in fact, from Conrad’s own personal situation at the time, for as he bent over his table to write his manuscript or revise the typescript, Jessie Conrad was labouring at her machine producing more of that typescript, in lieu of the professional drones employed by Pinker. The story was a kind of family collaboration, often too much of one as she intruded her own sense of proper prose into the text and, consciously or unconsciously, suppressed some stimulating details.
In “Freya of the Seven Isles,” that balance between the worlds of the sea and of the land is less in evidence, particularly in the American serial version, as we have seen, and perhaps this might help account for the failure of that story, which Conrad confessed to Galsworthy, after the book was published, puzzled him (letter of 28 October 1912; CL5 122). However, we should note that our perspective on this matter was not wholly Conrad’s later on, nor that of his publishers. When he came to write the “Author’s Note” for the volume, which itself can be viewed partly as a marketing tool, Conrad gave his usual attention to the genesis of the stories and gave “The Secret Sharer” perhaps more than its share of attention. But the last two paragraphs of that very short piece concerned the other two stories exclusively, and in an argument somewhat reminiscent of the longer one about the grisly atmosphere of The Secret Agent and about Winnie, in the preface to that novel, Conrad defended the “cruelty” some found in his third story and concluded: “But I am glad to think that the two women in this book: Alice, the sullen, passive victim of her fate, and the actively individual Freya, so determined to be the mistress of her own destiny, must have evoked some sympathies because of all my volumes of short stories this was the one for which there was the greatest immediate demand” (x).
The terms are interesting ones, and the statement recalls an objective fact (see figure 24). Published on 14 October 1912, Dent’s first English edition was in a second printing, of 750 copies, in November, and a third the next January. On 11 February 1914, while deploring Methuen’s handling of the well-received first edition of Chance, Conrad was moved to remark on Dent’s success in selling nearly 5,000 copies of a book of stories in less than six months “without lying advtist” (letter to Pinker; CL5 348). When Dent came in March to retail their first edition in their series “The Wayfarer’s Library,” a kind of counterpart for current literature to their better-known “Everyman’s Library,” they added a frontispiece to the volume drawn from “A Smile of Fortune.” Later they would mock up for the regular trade edition a lurid dust jacket based on “Freya of the Seven Isles” to which no one, except Robert W. Trogdon, has since paid any attention. As a marketing tool, “The Secret Sharer” was conspicuously absent.
Like Dent’s English edition, the first American edition of ’Twixt Land and Sea, published in early December, was a success, though less immediately. A more handsome book than Dent’s, it appeared in a red cloth binding with Doran’s usual imprint for this period. A personal admirer, like Dent, of Conrad’s work, Doran soon sold his rights to F. N. Doubleday, when Doubleday, Page acquired it and Chance upon opening their campaign to promote Conrad in America. In early August Conrad mentioned to both Pinker and Knopf that he had had a friendly letter from Doubleday himself. The legalities were concluded in September, and Conrad approved samples of Doubleday’s new preliminaries, and perhaps of the binding, in October.⁹ By the end of 1913 Doubleday had the second printing of the American edition, with their imprint, ready for sale, just as they were preparing to publish Chance (see figure 25). Historic as the first of his works issued by the firm that would be Conrad’s American publisher in the years that brought him commercial success, the book featured a ship device that would become a sort of hallmark, and it set the pattern for the series of reprints of Conrad’s works that Doubleday would market during the next decade.
Composed of the story that helped precipitate the breach with Pinker over Under Western Eyes, the story that followed the major revision and redirection of that novel, and the one that preceded the resumption of Chance, ’Twixt Land and Sea stands at a pivotal point in the change of direction that we conceive of as marking the transition from Conrad’s middle to later career. Our assessments of that later career – and perhaps of his earlier periods as well – are no longer conducted on the same bases as they once were. At present, literary and aesthetic judgements, combined with biography and quasi-psychology, no longer rule supreme. Other factors have been introduced as considerations – ranging from such mundane ones as typescripts and their production, through publishing history and what is now called the history of the book and the sociology of texts, to more ethereal matters of cultural history. The problem is looking more complicated, and what once appeared to be a matter of an individual artistic temperament has acquired a collective dimension. The success of ’Twixt Land and Sea, and indeed of Under Western Eyes when compared with The Secret Agent, suggests that the success of Chance might have involved more factors than the nature of that novel, however important that was. In retrospect the year 1910 may have represented a sea change not only for Conrad himself, but for England as a whole, if we are to believe some cultural histories like The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), and the year saw very important changes in America as well. In short, the situation is looking a lot messier, at least for the time being.
We will, I trust, get this question sorted out some time, bearing in mind that though Conrad was, as a professional author, very much of his time, we gather at conferences yearly, and sometimes several times a year, because his work has proved itself relevant to our age. It is one of life’s little ironies that, whereas the public of his day read his works in their historical context, and only the few high-minded attended to their timeless qualities, now we few concern ourselves with that context, while the general reader is interested only because Conrad transcended his time.
In the meantime, I submit, we should not forget that, as the second decade of the twentieth century began, Conrad became more aware of the potential of the American market to contribute to his success as a professional author. Increasingly he saw the potential of serialization not simply to provide a second source of revenue for each work written, but also, and more importantly, to promote his general image as popular author. The nature of the popular audience and the need to appeal to such readers became a central concern. The loss of Pinker’s support in the affair over Under Western Eyes and the difficulty this presented when he was writing and revising subsequent stories brought home to Conrad, as never before, the potential offered by Pinker’s professional typists for controlling the serial and book texts of a given work. This awareness developed during a frustrating period when utter dependence on printed matter in one form or another had shown his various devices for controlling serial and book versions to be vain and futile efforts, and himself to be virtually helpless when dealing with a well-organized printing and publishing trade. With Chance, however, and perhaps the smile of fortune, he emerged triumphant, and that might be one reason that papers like this one get written nearly a century later.

Endnotes