Eight New Holograph Leaves of Lord Jim.
The eight additional leaves containing nine pages of Lord Jim I have discovered at the Henry E. Huntington Library bring both good and bad news. (1) The good news is that they show us Conrad rethinking several very important elements of the characterizations of Jim and Jewel and the central problem of the implications of Jim's abandoning the Patna, The bad news is that the leaves blow a Titanic-sized hole in our understanding of the genesis of the surviving manuscript materials of Lord Jim and their relationship to the first serial publication of Lord Jim in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine between October of 1899 and November of 1900.The eight leaves that make up Huntington manuscript MS HM 12997 (acquired "Sessler, Jan. 1923") are paginated 641, 642, 643 & 644, 645, 646, 647,648, and 649 in blue pencil. The contents of these pages cover part of the final meeting in Patusan among Marlow, Jewel, and Jim just before the concluding Gentleman Brown episode--the final pages of Chapter 33 and the initial pages of Chapter 34 in a 45-chapter book (line 3a on page 373 to line 38 on page 375 of the Blackwood's Serial; line 29 on page 342 to line 26 on page 346 in the Blackwood's 1900 English first edition). At this point in the text, Jewel is terrified that Marlow has come to take Jim back with him to the West: "You make me afraid. Do you--do you want him?" (p. 341). Marlow attempts to reassure her: "'I shall never come again,' I said bitterly. 'And I don't want him....You've got his heart in your hand."' (p. 341). The new manuscript pages cover Marlow's attempt to explain to Jewel why Jim will not return with Marlow.
The first clue to the literary and textual significance of the Huntington manuscript is that the final nine pages of the 407-leaf Rosenbach manuscript also appear on its eight leaves, paginated identically 641, 642, 643 & 644, 645,646,647, 648, and 649 in blue pencil. Interestingly, the contents of the Huntington manuscript and this section of the Rosenbach exactly coincide; thus, the literary significance of the Huntington manuscript depends on their priority. Both manuscripts contain evidence of revision (the Huntington considerably more so), but somewhat surprisingly, the Rosenbach exactly corresponds line by line, page by page to the revised state of the Huntington manuscript, even copying some of the Huntington's errors made in revision (e.g. page 642, end of the page-ending line 10, where Conrad has failed to cross out the "ne--" in "negligently"--the Rosenbach retains the superfluous "ne--" to read "a calm voice encouraged ne-- the very same thing."). This section of the Rosenbach, then, must have been copied from the Huntington manuscript.
Since pages 641-49 of the Rosenbach manuscript are merely a transcription of the Huntington manuscript, it is Conrad's revisions on the Huntington that must provide the evidence for his special interest in this section. While the Huntington manuscript is heavily revised, virtually all of the revisions are stylistic (changing "said" to "entreated" [p. 641, 1. 11] or "playful" to "joyous" [p. 646, 1. 1]) except on the most heavily revised page of all, 642 (see Fig. 1). Here, an entire paragraph has been crossed through as a unit rather than a word at a time, suggesting a change other than and after the simple and progressive revision that we see in the deletion of "too" and then "am" and the change from "other" to "one of" in the paragraph. But not all of the paragraph has been eliminated. The final part of the paragraph reappears almost word for word on the beginning of leaf 643 & 644 of the Rosenbach ms.:
"the very same thing. Did we both speak the truth--or one of us did--or neither?"...Marlow paused, crossed his arm on his breast
Thus the target of the revision is the first part of the paragraph in which Jim reveals his experience on board the Patna to Jewel, a revelation lacking in the Rosenbach fragment:
--'Nothing' he said with a slight start. 'He had told her--that's all. She would not believe him--nothing more. And I do not know whether I am to believe or not. What did he believe? [Huntington ms., p. 642, 11. 12-16]
Conrad, then, initially has Jim tell Jewel about the defining moment of his life, his jump from the Patna, and then changes his mind to delete evidence of Jim's confession.
Conrad's choice here has profound implications for the characterization of Jim and Jewel as well as for the theme of the novel. If Jim does not tell Jewel, then his feelings for her and his own sense of honesty are less than he conceives of them. If Jewel does not know about the Patna, then her inability to understand Jim is a matter of ignorance rather than the problem faced by Marlow and the major problem of the novel: just how does one understand the moral implications of what Jim did? Not telling Jewel reduces this moral ambiguity to ignorance. Interestingly, by the time Conrad produces the earliest printed version of the text in the Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, he has (appropriately in my view) restored in words nearly identical to those in the Huntington manuscript Marlow's statement that Jim had told Jewel plus interspersed considerable rumination on the part of Marlow about the nature of Truth:
'Nothing,' said Marlow with a slight start. 'He had told her--that's all. She did not believe him--nothing more. As to myself, I do not know whether it be just, proper, decent for me to rejoice or to be sorry. For my part, I cannot say what I believed--indeed I don't know to this day, and never shall probably. But what did the poor devil believe himself? Truth shall prevail--don't you know. Magna est veritas et... Yes, when it gets a chance. There is a law, no doubt--and likewise a law regulates your luck in the throwing of dice. It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune--the ally of patient Time--that holds an even and scrupulous balance. Both of us had said the very same thing. Did we both speak the truth--or one of us did--or neither?'... (2)
Subsequent printings revised by Conrad retain the confession. Just as he had done with Marlow's narrative stance in Youth, (3) Conrad wrote one thing, changed his mind, and then went back to his original conception. Without the Huntington manuscript, we would not know that having Jim tell Jewel about the Patna episode was Conrad's initial conception, and we would not know that he changed his mind twice during revision, suggesting the importance of the detail to Conrad.
This additional, yet backward-looking, stage in Conrad's conception of this scene provides a glimpse into the kind of problem the Huntington manuscript represents in sorting out the significance of the holograph evidence in the growth of the text of Lord Jim and Conrad's own statements about that evidence.
Certainly, there is no shortage of Lord Jim holograph, pre-publication material available. (4) The earliest surviving holograph state of Lord Jim, "Tuan Jim: A Sketch," occupies twenty-eight pages (f. 15v to f. 29) of a sixty-eight-page album originally owned by Conrad's grandmother Teofila Bobrowska and possibly given to Joseph Conrad by his uncle Thaddeus Bobrowski. This album was acquired in July of 1925 by the Houghton Library at Harvard (selfmark: MS Eng. 46.5). The text of the "Sketch" corresponds roughly to the first three chapters, with several sections preserved verbatim in the later printed editions. Although Conrad's own word count (kept in the left margin of the album) would seem to suggest that nearly half of the "Sketch" is missing (his word count jumps from 1300 to 3300 on folio 23), the texts of the printed editions exactly follow this section with no omission.
The next surviving state of the text of Lord Jim occurs in three holograph/typescript fragments: (1) 407 holograph leaves paginated 46-81, 90-108, 120-173, 222-240, 308-312, 314-439, 470-492, 494-589, and 611-649 that correspond roughly to the beginning of Chapter 5 to the beginning of Chapter 34 plus seven typescript leaves inserted between leaves 318 and 319 at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia; (2) a single holograph leaf (numbered "8" in pencil in the upper right-hand corner to indicate its place in an exhibit catalog) at the British Library in London (shelfmark Ms. Ashley A456) that is actually the next page (650--though not paginated as are all other known manuscript leaves of Lord Jim) after the Rosenbach and Huntington fragments; and (3) eight holograph leaves at the Henry E. Huntington Library (shelfmark: MS HM 12997) in San Marino, California. The complete manuscript, then, must have been approximately 852 pages long, and slightly less than half of it has survived. The manuscript (particularly t he Huntington fragment) is very rough, with very little punctuation and many deletions and insertions: Conrad himself in a letter of 22 August 1899 to William Blackwood refers to the manuscript as "scrawled" rather than "written." (5) The Huntington fragment poses two very important bibliographical problems whose existence disputes Conrad's own letters about the writing of Lord Jim: (1) since the Huntington fragment is rougher and earlier than the corresponding Rosenbach fragment, is the Huntington manuscript part of a larger and perhaps complete manuscript? and (2) since the Rosenbach manuscript (which lacks acknowledgment of Jim's confession to Jewel) or a copy of it could not have served as copy for the Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (which has the confession), what is the nature of the now certain, but missing, state of the text between the Rosenbach manuscript and the Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine?
Letters from Conrad to Edward Garnett, David Meldrum, and William Blackwood suggest that there was very little revision during the writing of Lord Jim, making the existence of a fragment like the Huntington manuscript, let alone an entire earlier and later manuscript than the Rosenbach, very unlikely. Conrad's letters show that he wrote Lord Jim very rapidly (between 4 June 1898 and 14 July 1900) and that while for the most part he is sending typescript to Blackwoods, sometimes he is in such a hurry to meet his deadlines that he sends manuscript. For example, Conrad writes to David Meldrum on 17 December 1899 that "I send here a MS lot of Jim which would be most of the [Febr.sup.y] instalment. My poor wife is too taken up just now with domestic worries to be able to type for me and I do not want to stop the trickle of copy" (Letters, vol. 2, p. 227).
Fortunately, the physical evidence of the manuscripts and comparison between the formats of the Huntington and Rosenbach fragments make it possible to explain their likely relationship. Both fragments are on the same paper--10 13/16 by 8 3/8 inches, woven, cream-colored, with twenty-nine ruled lines per page and an "Adambury / Extra Strong / Bank" watermark (also the same paper as the single leaf at the British Library); thus, they are not likely far apart in use. Most likely, the eight Huntington leaves were originally part of the then longer Rosenbach sequence (the British Library leaf, corresponding to leaf 650, continues seamlessly and identically from both fragments). At some point after completing leaf 650, Conrad decided to delete Jim's confession to Jewel and extensively revise leaves 641-49. The revised pages were too messy to type from, so Conrad retranscribed them, doing so line by line, page by page so that the retranscribed (and numbered) Rosenbach leaves could be substituted exactly for the earl ier, Huntington ones.
We know from Conrad's letters that most of his holograph was turned into typescript by Jesse for the Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine setting copy, but it is clear that Jesse did not type the setting copy from the Rosenbach manuscript which lacks Jim's confession (nor this segment from the Huntington manuscript which lacks Marlow's ruminations on Truth). Conrad, then, contrary to the implications of his letters, must have revised at least part of the Rosenbach manuscript into another manuscript to serve as Jesse's copy or made the revision himself on the typescript used to set the text for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. What we can now realize thanks to the Huntington manuscript as we try to sort out the relationship between the Rosenbach manuscript and the text in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine is that differences between the two may date to a conception of the novel prior to the Rosenbach manuscript rather than after it and that the Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine text might therefore represent Conrad's earli est as well as his later intentions.
The Huntington fragmentary holograph of Lord Jim, then, provides critical insight into Conrad struggling with the characterization of Jewel and Jim, their relationship, and the effort by Jewel and Marlow to understand Jim's dilemma, plus bibliographical proof that the revisionary work of Lord Jim was greater than Conrad has suggested and that the Rosenbach manuscript may not always represent Conrad's earliest intentions for the novel.
ERNEST W. SULLIVAN II is Edward S. Diggs Professor of English at Virginia Tech, co-editor (with John Stape) of the Lord Jim volume of the Cambridge Edition of Joseph Conrad, a Textual Editor of the Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, and General Textual Editor of Collected Works of Abraham Cowley.
NOTES
(1.) I notified Thomas C. Moser of my discovery of these eight leaves during his preparation of the second edition of his Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim, a Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), and his mention of them on page 247 is the first notice in print.
(2.) Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 168 (Nov. 1900), p. 373a--b.
(3.) See my article "The Genesis and Evolution of Joseph Conrad's 'Youth': A Revised and Copy-Edited Typescript Page," The Review of English Studies, new series, 36 (November 1985), 522-34.
(4.) This essay is not concerned with the holograph textual materials appearing on various proof sheets after Lord Jim was first printed.
(5.) Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, eds., The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 194. Hereafter cited as Letters.
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| Author: | Sullivan, II, Ernest W. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Conradiana |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jun 22, 1999 |
| Words: | 2348 |
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