I agree with J. C. Davies (Letters, May 24) that it would have been welcome had the review of the Cambridge edition of Nostromo (May 10) included some mention of “how the editors dealt with Ford Madox Ford’s claim, in Return to Yesterday (1931), to have written twenty-five pages [of Nostromo] when Conrad was ill”. If Juliette Bretan’s review had ventured beyond the introduction to the textual essay, the answer would have been found. In fact, scarce mention was made of the textual issues which are the raison d’être for a scholarly edition (rather than a critical edition, such as the Norton, for instance). Though it is in other respects a fair and an informative review, it is a pity there was no discussion of the work of my co-editor, Roger Osborne, who contributed 344 of the 455 pages that the edition offers in addition to the novel’s text, which detail the complicated growth of the novel, the revisions to the manuscript and the typescripts, and all the variations to be found between the initial serialization and the first English and American editions.
To answer J. C. Davies’s query directly: Osborne writes, “Ford’s account of his contribution to the composition of Nostromo does not stand up to scrutiny” (p459). There have been two detailed scholarly examinations of Ford’s involvement in the writing of Conrad’s novel, that of John Hope Morey in a PhD dissertation of 1960, which broadly supports Ford’s claims to authorship, and an article by Xavier Brice printed in The Conradian in 2004, which precisely and persuasively refutes them (Ford had also claimed in a letter of 1923 to the American collector George T. Keating that he had contributed about 30,000 words to the novel). While acknowledging the significant nature of the support that Ford offered Conrad throughout the novel’s composition, Osborne sides clearly with Brice. Thirty thousand words amounts to nearly one fifth of Nostromo. That would have been collaboration indeed!
Psychedelics
I was sorry to read that Anthony Iacoboni has known people who had negative experiences using psychedelics (Letters, June 7). Many of us have also known people who were injured playing sports, but that does not mean that every book on the subject needs to foreground their potential dangers.
I, clerk
In a review of the new memoir by Mark Kamine (successful Hollywood producer and frequent contributor to the TLS), Andrew Irwin tells us that the “most pleasing account of fame” occurs not on a film set but in a Manh a t t a n b o o k s t o r e : Kami n e “approaches the till and places his credit card on the counter, whereupon the clerk looks up and ‘asks if I am the same person who writes for the Times Literar y Supplement’” (April 19). That clerk was me. During my many years at St Mark’s Bookshop (which closed almost a decade ago now – I have since become the co-owner of a couple of bookstores o
