Doughy
John Sutherland
- The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Vol. VI 1917-19 edited by Laurence Davies, Frederick R. Karl and Owen Knowles
Cambridge, 570 pp, £80.00, December 2002, ISBN 0 521 56195 7
The multi-volume Collected Letters is more of a literary monument than a necessary scholarly resource. The club of 20th-century novelists thus honoured is as exclusive as the strictest Leavisite (if any remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are among the most expensive and least remunerative ventures in the scholarly profession. And (be warned, tyro) the least applauded. Cynical careerists will work out early on that joining an editorial team embarked on a decades-long ‘service-to-scholarship’ enterprise is a dumb move. Particularly in a profession marching to the quickstep of RAE quinquennial assessments and septennial promotion rungs. Academic life, like everything else, is afflicted by James Gleick’s hurry sickness.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 2 · 22 January 2004
From J.H. Stape
Anyone who knows anything worth knowing about Conrad is aware, as John Sutherland (LRB, 4 December 2003) seems not to be, that Frederick R. Karl's 1979 biography is not the standard one. As soon as Zdzislaw Najder's masterly account appeared in 1983, Karl's ungainly, error-ridden tome, poorly received by Conrad scholars, was thrown in the scholarly dustbin. A glance – yes, just that – at Conrad scholarship over the past fifteen years would establish this. But, then, oh my! Judicious argument? Keeping up to date with scholarship? Ferreting out facts? There's no time for such sorry fustian in the world of the canny academic careerist.
And when he pronounces on that topic how convincing Sutherland is. Collected Letters! Humph. How not to do it, m'dear. Choose your horse and ride him. Listen to the whisperings of the vulgus mobile. Yes, right enough, they're little interested in serious things, but, ah, you know, they do control the purse strings. Lift up your eyes to bestsellerdom. No hard spadework needed. Attack rather than argue. Even whip poor benighted old Leavis again. Dead horses don't write letters.
In the pleasant world Sutherland conjures up for the scholar on the make, count on flitting pleasantly from library to library with money bulging in your pockets. Boston today, Sydney tomorrow. Rome for lunch, caro amico? That's the way to do it, mate. But oops, better not do that at all. Archival stuff? Pure bunkum. Email's the watchword. And what delights Sutherland promises here: a future filled with the collected – oh, no, never again that hoary thing! – the selected (on popular principles, to be sure) correspondence of the likes of immortals such as Kingsley Amis.
Better yet, in a world in which Tolkien is the favourite author of every semi-literate in the United Kingdom, someone who can write even worse can't be far from the top of the bestseller list. Jump on him after, of course, you've sniffed the shifting winds of popularity. You'll be the darling of the Senior Common Room. Rapid promotion awaits, maybe even a spot on the telly. And, best of all, well-paid literary journalism, that tried and trusted and oh-so-up-to-date way of showing how really empty your head can be. Little effort involved, of course, and since tempus fugit, if you're lucky, no one will even notice.
J.H. Stape
Co-Editor (forthcoming), <em>The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad</em>, Paris
John Sutherland writes: I am not sure what J.H. Stape's points are, nor do I recognise the me he describes. He describes himself as the 'co-editor (forthcoming) of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad'. The founding and still serving editor of that series, Frederick R. Karl, is described by Stape as the author of a biography which discerning Conradians (excluding, presumably, Karl himself) consigned to the 'scholarly dustbin' (Karl, misguided man, consigned his working papers for the biography to the archives of the University of South Carolina). With a team exuding this kind of editorial harmony and good fellowship I begin to understand why the Conrad Letters have taken so long to complete.
