The Editor Who Pulled Joseph Conrad from the Slush Pile

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From The Literary Hub:

Edward Garnett’s daily job of ploughing through all the manuscripts submitted to Unwin by authors considerably less accomplished than Ford Madox Ford was generally a pretty thankless task, but just occasionally something was sent in which caused real excitement. Wilfred Chesson initially took charge of the manuscripts as they arrived at Unwin’s office and then passed on a selection to Edward, who did most of his reading at Henhurst Cross. On July 5, 1894, Chesson received a manuscript submitted for consideration for the Pseudonym Library. The author’s name on the typescript was “Kamudi”—the Malay word for “rudder.” This tale of a Dutch trader’s disintegration in Borneo impressed Chesson, who dispatched it to Edward. The story contained many of the elements of standard exotic “romances” of the time, including piracy, elopement and betrayal, but Edward immediately recognized that the narrative had qualities that set it apart from the usual run of Far Eastern potboilers.

Indeed, the manuscript seemed to challenge many of the conventions of such books: there was a distinctly antiheroic aspect to its main protagonist, the portraits of the natives ran counter to prevailing stereotypes, and the narrative’s mordant undercurrent was entirely unlike superficially similar works. The sophistication of the narrative point of view and the evocation of the tropical atmosphere evident in the opening chapter arrested Edward’s attention. He was captivated, too, by the figure of Babalatchi, an elderly, one-eyed statesman, and by a night scene at the river’s edge between the Dutch trader’s Malay wife and her daughter. Having read the manuscript, Edward firmly advised Unwin, “Hold on to this.” He was curious about the author, who he thought at first must have Eastern blood in his veins. “I was told however that he was a Pole,” Edward later recalled, “and this increased my interest, since my Nihilist friends, Stepniak and Volkhovksy, had always subtly decried the Poles when one sympathized with their position as ‘under dog.’” The Pole and the Russians: that early association in Edward’s mind was something he could never entirely relinquish.

. . . .

Edward may have become a little hazy as to the exact circumstances, but his impressions of the author remained razor sharp:

My memory is of seeing a dark-haired man, short but extremely graceful in his nervous gestures, with brilliant eyes, now narrowed and penetrating, now soft and warm, with a manner alert yet caressing, whose speech was ingratiating, guarded, and brusque by turn. I had never before seen a man so masculinely keen yet so femininely sensitive.

Despite his relative youth (he was 26 at the time of the encounter) Edward had already established something of a reputation. Even the mercurial novice author, who later described his initial view of the London literary scene as “as inviting as a peep into a brigand’s cave and a good deal less reassuring” was aware of the Garnett name. “The first time I saw Edward,” he later recounted, “I dare not open my mouth. I had gone to meet him to hear what he thought of Almayer’s Folly. I saw a young man enter the room. ‘That cannot be Edward so young as that,’ I thought. He began to talk. Oh yes! It was Edward. I had no longer doubt.”

The meeting between Edward Garnett and Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski came at an opportune moment for both men. As far as Edward was concerned the year had been blighted by marital tension, mental and physical illness and the further disappointment of his literary ambitions. Korzeniowski, who nine years earlier had anglicized his surname to Conrad, had fared little better. Orphaned at the age of 11, he had subsequently been brought up by his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski. Although he had seen relatively little of Bobrowski after 1874, when he embarked on a career with first the French and then the English merchant marine, Conrad remained close to his uncle, who effectively became his surrogate father.

In February 1894 he received a telegram from Ukraine informing him of Bobrowski’s sudden death. Conrad was in London at the time, where a month earlier he had signed off as second mate on the steamer Adowa.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub