By Gene M. Moore, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, Edited by Roger Osborne, with Introduction and Notes by Hugh Epstein.  The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge University Press, 2023). lxviii + 819pp

The addition of Nostromo to the Cambridge Edition marks a welcome and monumental step towards the completion of the project. Nostromo is Conrad’s "greatest" work in terms of its length – his "largest canvas," as he put it – and is also unequalled in thee view range of its ambition to invent and populate a fictitious South American country with its own detailed history, society, politics, and violent upheavals made visible through a panoply of characters and narrative modes. Its shifting mixture of perspectives is also unique in Conrad’s oeuvre, combining omniscient narration with the voices of various characters, some of them nameless and collective, as in Part I chapter 8, which opens with an anonymous voice: “Those of us whom business or curiosity took to Sulaco in these years before the first advent of the railway can remember the steadying effect of the San Tomé mine upon the life of that remote province” (82.1-5). This voice never speaks again in the first person beyond this opening paragraph but blends with the omniscient narration and gives it credibility.

This volume is now the most comprehensive and up-to-date compendium of information about every imaginable aspect of the novel. The editors have done a magnificent job of gathering together and comparing all the extant manuscripts, typescripts, and published versions of the text, establishing their chronological sequence, and selecting as copy-texts those versions that most closely represent Conrad's final judgment with regard to both wording and punctuation. The volume thus offers a thorough and scrupulous implementation of the principles on which the edition is based. The editors provide a comprehensive and meticulous account of the genesis, development, and reception of the novel, including more than two hundred pages of “Emendation and Variation” offering ample opportunity for future scholars to examine Conrad’s many revisions and consider the reasons for them. Explanatory Notes and Glossaries are also included, presenting scholars with as complete a set of materials for understanding the genesis, development, and history of the novel as is imaginable in a single volume.

The Introduction addresses the question of the origins of the novel, examines Conrad’s sources in greater detail, and surveys the popular and critical reception of the novel since its first publication in 1904. Nostromo originated in Conrad’s direct experience of the Caribbean, where he made three voyages and spent some forty weeks in the mid-1870s, including also a gun-running adventure with Dominic Cervoni, who would serve as a model for Nostromo. He visited towns on the coast of Venezuela and the northern coast of Colombia, but there is as yet no evidence that he ever set foot on the west coast of South America where the fictional Republic of Costaguana is located.

For names and details Conrad relied chiefly on travel accounts by British authors, especially G. F. Masterman’s Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay: A Narrative of Personal Experience amongst the Paraguayans (1869) and Edward Eastwick’s Venezuela: or Sketches of Life in a South-American Republic (1868). Eastwick was a man of finance, and his book served Conrad rather as a source for exploring the “material interests” of Costaguana and the social lives of the upper classes, while Masterman’s volume pays more attention to the lives of the common people in turbulent times. Another important source was Conrad’s friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham, who made three trips to South America in the 1870s and who, in 1901, the year before Conrad began work on Nostromo, published A Vanished Arcadia: Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay 1607-1767. As Norman Sherry noted, Conrad’s description of the Casa Gould is similar to a house in Caracas described by W. E. Curtis in Venezuela, A Land Where It's Always Summer (1896); and the character of Don José Avellanos may owe something to that of the traveller Santiago Pérez Triana, the author of Down the Orinoco in a Canoe (1902), whom Conrad met thanks to Cunninghame Graham. Such echoes of passages from other volumes are fully noted in the Introduction or in the “Explanatory Notes,” or in both. The literary echoes of nineteenth-century French authors described by Yves Hervouet, Wit Tarnawski, and Owen Knowles are also included in this comprehensive survey.

Conrad was disappointed with the reception of the novel, although most reviewers praised it for the realism with which Costaguana is introduced in all its vivid complexity. Some readers found it too complex and “overcrowded,” and wished for something more simple and shapely. In the Times Literary Supplement E. V. Lucas declared that much of the first two hundred pages should have been mercilessly cut (lx). Conversely, Edward Garnett felt that “the last chapters are a mistake” (lxii-lxiii), and both John Buchan and Cunninghame Graham agreed with Garnett that the last two chapters describing Nostromo’s death should not have been included in the novel (lxiii). Graham felt that the proper title of the book should have been not Nostromo but Costaguana. Readers generally seemed to feel that the balance between the complex social history of Costaguana and the eventual focus on the heroic character of Nostromo was not ideal, and felt a preference for the one or the other. In an essay published in 1918, Virginia Woolf deplored the novel’s “crowding and suffocating superabundance” (lxv). It was not until the postwar years that critics would come to appreciate the uniqueness of Nostromo as one of Conrad’s masterpieces for its “presentation of society in motion, history in the making” (Arnold Kettle, cited p. lxv). In 1963 Eloise Knapp Hay would celebrate it as a political novel in which character is seen as “politics in action” (lxvi).

The text of this critical edition is an “eclectic” copy-text based on four different kinds of sources: “the extant portions of the manuscript (MS) and dictated typescript (TS1); the surviving portions of corrected clean-copy typescript (TS2); the serial text published in T. P.'s Weekly (S); and the first English edition (E1)” (p. 488). These texts are then emended only in light of later revisions or obvious errors. In addition, ten rejected typescript pages are included in an Appendix, along with the serial ending that Conrad prepared in haste to meet his deadline for the journal Land and Water, which he then rewrote for the first book publication.

The editors bring into focus the uniqueness of Nostromo in representing Conrad’s need to find a new form for the novel, but he also discovered a new method for producing texts in time to meet his serial deadlines. Conrad had dictated early portions of the novel to Ford Madox Ford and to his wife Jessie, who prepared typed versions of his manuscripts; but about halfway through the composition of Nostromo his agent J. B. Pinker arranged for him to hire a professional “typewriter,” Lilian Mary Hallowes, who could take dictation directly with her typewriter and produce typed pages ready for revision. This saved time, and Miss Hallowes would serve as Conrad's loyal amanuensis for the rest of his career.

The texts are thoroughly justified and impeccably presented, with the sole exception of a few minor typos mainly involving the many Spanish or French words: “metre” for French “mettre” (lv.5); “páramos” (á not in italics; 156.17); “tolderiás” for “tolderías” (180.4); “self confident” for “self-confident” (202.11); “baling” for “bailing” (233.15); and “cicalas” for “cicadas” (326.16). It might also have been helpful to include a translation of Porvenir (Future) and an explanation for Entrada de la Sombra (145.37-38); but these are insignificant blemishes on a truly monumental achievement. Nostromo may or may not be “Conrad’s greatest novel,” as the editors assume (xxxi), but there can be little doubt that this is surely Nostromo’s greatest edition.

© 2024 Gene M. Moore