Romance

I’m sick today. Sick with the sort of cold that’s inflamed my sinuses to the point that I want to tear them out through the roof of my mouth. My scalp is crawling. My limbs are weak. There are dark patches in my vision when I stand. I’m soothing my swollen tonsils with ice-cream I can’t even taste. Life is grim.

So this might be affecting my response to the odd little book I found in a Kiama secondhand shop the other week. It’s called Romance and was written by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer and a strange and unusual, deeply paranoid story is within its battered red covers. So far, it seems to be about a young Englishman in search of Romance and instead finding conspiracies and treachery in the Caribbean along with people who may or may not turn out to be pirates and priests praying for England to return to the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

The book spends a lot of time describing the physical appearance of people you never hear of again. One man has a “Roman face” with a nose like half a bell. The descriptions of action are very artificial and very visual rather than relying on other senses. Scenes are established as static tableaux vivants complete with lighting effects. I mean, the authors describe the location of candles and the way they highlight people’s features similar to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Maybe “painterly” is the word for this. But if you’re not paying much attention, as I’m not, it’s all very confusing and leads to a deep sense of unease and uncertainty. But perhaps this is intended.

Now my recollection of Ford Madox Ford from reading Bloomsbury biographies is that he was the darkly brilliant genius, working hard as a publisher and journalist, quite a leader in the little band of multi-talented modernists. I guess he dropped the Hueffer during the Great War just as the van Saxeburg-Gothas became the Windsors but it wasn’t something I consciously knew. I did remember that he took Joseph Conrad, a retired Polish adventurer, under his wing and encouraged him to write. At uni I was forced to read Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The three blokes in the mostly female class raved about it and Apocalypse Now but I remember reading in the foreword that Conrad had been unsure about whether to write in French or English and I heartily wished he’d chosen French. (Yes I know he’s a genius; that’s why I’m willing to give him another chance.)

This collaboration is an odd thing though. I don’t know how much of it is Hueffer and how much is the fledgling Conrad testing his themes of the evils of colonialism. The seafaring and Jamaica are probably Conrad but I wouldn’t be surprised if the painterliness and staticness (stasis?) are all Hueffer/Ford’s own work.

I don’t know if anyone reads Ford any more and I think he published relatively few novels considering his reputation. The Good Soldier was set before the Great War and was meant to be revolutionary for dealing with a marriage breakup. I found it dull and quite old-fashioned. But Parades End, a trilogy about a mathematical genius with an unhappy marriage having extreme difficulty coping with the war, was absolutely marvelous. It was very hard going though. I most recently read The Fifth Queen about Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife whom they told me at school was beheaded for adultery. It was a strange book about the clash of Catholicism and the new English Church. Ford’s Katherine is deeply Catholic and has long theological discussions in dark halls with menacing privy councillors. As in Romance, the location of all the candles is specified with great care. I remember being incredibly impressed by her knowledge of theology and the detail of his research. Then I read the foreword that said that Ford’s Katherine was almost nothing like the historical one so I felt very ripped off. Thanks a lot Ford.

So I hope Conrad gets a chance to put some more adventure in this book soon. Otherwise it could get really dull and theological.