The Nature of a Crime E-Book

Joseph Conrad

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The Nature of a Crime is likely influenced by major events from the life of Joseph Conrad, most notably his suicide attempt made at the age of 20. In the novel, the narrator finds himself falling deeper into depression as a result of his mishandling of a close friend's trust fund, and is eventually pushed to the point of acceptance of suicide as the only viable option for him to rectify the situation. Conrad's real-life attempt on his life, while not extremely well-documented, is reported to have been a result of falling into debt, similar to the narrator in his novel. The novel also references Tristan and Iseult, a medieval French tragedy about adulterous love. The novel's narrator mentions in one of his letters that he has gone to see a performance of the play. The influence of this traditional story is evident in the novel, as the narrator finds himself writing love letters to the wife of a friend - an action that the narrator acknowledges as improper, further adding to the storm of depression he experiences as a result of his personal actions.

Leseprobe

The Nature of a Crime

by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford

Copyright 1924 Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford).

This edition published by Reading Essentials.

All Rights Reserved. 

THE NATURE OF A

CRIME

BY

JOSEPH CONRAD

AND

F. M. FORD

PREFACE

by Joseph Conrad

For years my consciousness of this small piece of collaboration has been very vague, almost impalpable, like the fleeting visits from a ghost. If I ever thought of it, and I must confess that I can hardly remember ever doing it on purpose till it was brought definitely to my notice by my collaborator, I always regarded it as something in the nature of a fragment. I was surprised and even shocked to discover that it was rounded. But I need not have been. Rounded as it is in form, using the word form in its simplest sense—printed form—it remains yet a fragment from its very nature and also from necessity. It could never have become anything else. And even as a fragment it is but a fragment of something that might have been—of a mere intention.

But as it stands what impresses me most is the amount this fragment contains of the crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time of its origin, the time when the English Review was founded. It emerges from the depth of a past as distant from us now as the square-skirted, long frock-coats in which unscrupulous, cultivated, high-minded jouisseurs like ours here attended to their strange business activities and cultivated the little blue flower of sentiment. No doubt our man was conceived for purposes of irony; but our conception of him, I fear, is too fantastic.

Yet the most fantastic thing of all, as it seems to me, is that we two, who had so often discussed soberly the limits and the methods of literary composition, should have believed, for a moment, that a piece of work in the nature of an analytical confession (produced in articulo mortis as it were) could have been developed and achieved in collaboration!

What optimism! But it did not last long. I seem to remember a moment when I burst into earnest entreaties that all those people should be thrown overboard without much ado. This, I believe, is the real nature of the crime. Overboard. The neatness and dispatch with which it is done in Chapter VIII were wholly the act of my collaborator’s good nature in the face of my panic.

After signing these few prefatory words, I will pass the pen to him in the hope that he may be moved to contradict me on every point of fact, impression and appreciation. I said “the hope.” Yes. Eager hope. For it would be delightful to catch the echo of the desperate, earnest, eloquent and funny quarrels which enlivened those old days. The pity of it that there comes a time when all the fun of one’s life must be looked for in the past!

J. C.

June 1924.

PREFACE

By F. M. Ford

No, I find nothing to contradict, for, the existence of this story having been recalled to my mind by a friend, the details of its birth and its attendant circumstances remain for me completely forgotten, a dark, blind spot on the brain. I cannot remember the houses in which the writing took place, the view from the windows, the pen, the tablecloth. At a given point in my life I forgot, literally, all the books I had ever written; but, if nowadays I reread one of them, though I possess next to none and have reread few, nearly all the phrases come back startlingly to my memory, and I see glimpses of Kent, of Sussex, of Carcassonne—of New York, even; and fragments of furniture, mirrors, who knows what? So that, if I didn’t happen to retain, almost by a miracle, for me, of retention, the marked up copy of Romance[1] from which was made the analysis lately published in a certain periodical, I am certain that I could have identified the phrases exactly as they stand. Looking at the book now I can hear our voices as we read one passage or another aloud for purposes of correction. Moreover, I could say: This passage was written in Kent and hammered over in Sussex; this, written in Sussex and worked on in Kent; or this again was written in the downstairs café, and hammered in the sitting-room on the first-floor of an hotel that faces the sea on the Belgian coast.