[Conrad, Joseph]--Maupassant, Guy de

8vo, corrected page proofs of the first English edition (each quire stamped "Proof | from | Turnbull & Spears | Edinburgh"), half-title, preface by Conrad with his autograph revisions and corrections including the deletion of the last 18 printed lines and their replacement with 34 lines of revised autograph manuscript (on p.xv and blank p.xvi) , further numerous autograph corrections and emendations by Conrad to the subsequent text of the stories, additional marks by the proof-reader, sewn in contemporary wrappers (lettered "YVETTE" on upper wrapper), some leaves stained, somewhat frayed, wrappers torn

Frederick Wilson, ownership signature on half-title; Sotheby's New York, 15 June 1990, lot 35

Keating 145n

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Maupassant was one of Conrad's most direct and most powerful literary influences, particularly at the outset of his career. Here Conrad substantially revises the end of his preface to the 1904 English selection of the French writer's stories.  Clearly dissatisfied with the conclusion of his preface Conrad partially re-writes some of the existing phrasing but adds significant new portions, to emphasise the artistry and integrity of Maupassant, whom he greatly admired:

"...Maupassant was a true and dutiful lover of our earth... The earth had for him a compelling charm. He looks upon her august and furrowed face with the fierce insight of real passion. His is the power of detecting the one immutable quality that matters in the changing aspects of nature and under the ever-shifting surface of life..."

Conrad's revisions here seem to have been incorporated into the final text. The preface was published separately later by T.J. Wise (Guy de Maupassant, 1919), and it was also included in Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters (1921, see lot 150).

Conrad had corrected the text of a previous English edition of Maupassant's stories, that translated by Elsie Hueffer (wife of Ford Madox Hueffer, who wrote the introduction) published the year before (1903). This was followed by this second selection of eleven stories, translated by his friend John Galsworthy's wife-to-be Ada. The influence of the French writer on Conrad was all-pervasive and it seems cannot be over-estimated; as he confessed to the translator Davray, he was "saturated" with Maupassant (see lot 52). There are, for example, remarkable textual parallels between Conrad's Tales of Unrest and Maupassant's Bel-Ami, between Nostromo and L'Heritage, and between The Secret Agent and Le Cochon de Morin (this being one of the tales Conrad is said to have known almost completely by heart). Conrad's whole use of multiple narrators (in the four tales narrated by Marlow, for instance) seems to have been inspired by the Frenchman; it was then subsequently from Conrad that a writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald was inspired to use Nick Carraway as the first-person narrator of The Great Gatsby.