Suspense

Suspense

By Joseph Conrad.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Introduction
4. Suspense
   1. Part I
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   2. Part II
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
   3. Part III
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
   4. Part IV
      1. I
5. Colophon
6. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Introduction

In giving to his last, unfinished, novel the name of Suspense, Conrad chose a title even more symbolic than the haunting, breathless air of the narrative suggests. For the threads were snapped when the climax had still to be unfolded, when the characters had yet to come together in the harmony of completed action, and when the whole story hung, as it were, between the darkness and the dawn. The suspense will last forever.

Nobody could even faintly guess how the novel would have ended, though what he has left is itself the length of a considerable book. In that vast canvas, with its atmosphere of political intrigue and human passion, there are endless possibilities. It had almost reached the stage, in its wide, slow sweep, in which fate was about to catch up the people of the drama in a single net, but at the actual moment of the close we are still completely bewildered.

The secret will never be divulged and the title will never lose its appeal. On the day before he died, scarcely an hour before he was seized with his fatal illness, Conrad was speaking to me about Suspense. We had gone into his study after breakfast and, sitting there together, he told me how extraordinarily clear his brain felt, clearer than for months, and how soon he would be able to take up his work again. And by his work, his serious work, he meant Suspense. He had been writing it for a long time⁠—indeed, The Rover was but an interlude suggested by the longer story⁠—and he was anxious to have it completed. “I see five or six different lines of treatment,” he added, with that indrawn expression on his face which showed that he was thinking aloud. I did not press him for explanations; I listened, as I had so often listened before, to his cryptic reveries. In due time, I thought, all will be made clear. I was mistaken.

My own impression is that Conrad regarded Suspense as, in all probability, his final book. I do not mean that he did not talk of other future books, for he did; but I do mean that he felt that death was near, and that he hoped, at least, to finish this long-pondered novel of Napoleonic times. During recent months he had often spoken to me of his death: he was conscious of its approach, and his earnest desire was to round off this last great effort of his imagination.

The wish was not fulfilled, and yet Suspense, with its splendid qualities of creation and atmosphere, is a very different thing from some of the uncompleted works left by men of genius. A fragment⁠—yes; but a huge fragment, full of power and fire, a fragment that will take its place among the recognized masterpieces of this remarkable man.

All his life Conrad was a student of the Napoleonic era. He had absorbed the history, the memoirs, the campaigns of that period with immense assiduity and unflagging interest, and into Suspense he poured the wealth of his acquired knowledge and the force of his coordinating imagination. It reads perfectly as an authentic and vivid recreation of that feeling which overshadowed southern Europe while Napoleon was in Elba, and of the suspense which hung, like a cloud, upon the world. This novel was, in a very special way, the child of his affection. It had been in his mind for years, it took shape gradually, and the very burden of it soothed, with the vision of its concrete emergence, the weariness and ill-health of his later days.

It is tragic to think that he did not live to finish it, but he has left sufficient to turn defeat into victory and to temper our sorrow with an emotion of triumph. And perhaps its very incompleteness adds to the sense of mystery which enshrouds its pages, giving to this mighty fragment a more august significance than could be found in the pellucid beauty of a finished work of art. The exotic, moving quality in Conrad’s gift is brought home to us impressively by his sudden passing away with this last mystery unsolved. He came to us, fully armed for his task, a mysterious figure: he departed as suddenly and as silently; and it seems somehow fitting