(Photo by John Fraim)
A Romance of the Shallows
Joseph Conrad (1918)
Peace Piece / Bill Evans
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In the full Author’s Note to The Rescue, Conrad mentions the novels written between 1898 and 1918. His greatest novels and short stories. Little wonder one couldt say The Rescue was put on the old creative backburner. But not forgotten.
Like those unfinished projects or experiences in life. In the past few years I’ve returned to them again and again. Some, only half finished. Abandoned? Like the biography of my grandfather. Wrote perhaps a third of the biography and then stopped and went to other projects.
Others might have these unfinished projects of the past to return to. Sometimes these “projects” are people and relationships. But for a writer or artist, these projects are artistic projects. When I push forward into new writing, I often check previous manuscripts or scripts that have not been completed.
When will we learn that racing forward into the future to create something new leaves little time for reflection on the past. Pondering past projects and ideas in one’s life.
Joseph Conrad was in a reflective mood when he wrote the below words presenting his return to an old idea of twenty years previous. Often, wisdom has been found yet not recognized.
On a beautiful metaphor, the old (abandoned) work of art is viewed as a sailing ship with little wind in her sails. Waiting. The author (Conrad) approaches the old work. Conrad expresses this in an edited version of the full Author’s Note to The Rescue.
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Selection from Author’s Note
“Of the three long novels of mine which suffered an interruption, “The Rescue” was the one that had to wait the longest for the good pleasure of the Fates. I am betraying no secret when I state here that it had to wait to precisely for twenty years. I laid it aside at the end of the summer of 1898 and it was about the end of the summer of 1918 that I took it up again with the firm determination to see the end of it and helped by the sudden feeling that I might be equal to the task … The years passed and the pages grew in number, and the long reveries of which they were the outcome stretched wide between me and the deserted “Rescue” like the smooth hazy spaces of a dreamy sea. Yet I never actually lost sight of that dark speck in the misty distance. It had grown very small but it asserted itself with the appeal of old associations. It seemed to me that it would be a base thing for me to slip out of the world leaving it out there all alone, waiting for its fate—that would never come? Sentiment, pure sentiment as you see, prompted me in the last instance to face the pains and hazards of that return. As I moved slowly towards the abandoned body of the tale it loomed up big amongst the glittering shallows of the coast, lonely but not forbidding. There was nothing about it of a grim derelict. It had an air of expectant life. One after another I made out the familiar faces watching my approach with faint smiles of amused recognition. They had known well enough that I was bound to come back to them. But their eyes met mine seriously as was only to be expected since I, myself, felt very serious as I stood amongst them again after years of absence. At once, without wasting words, we went to work together on our renewed life; and every moment I felt more strongly that They Who had Waited bore no grudge to the man who however widely he may have wandered at times had played truant only once in his life.”