“This is collaboration if you like!”: Conrad and Ford’s On-Off Collaboration.
I will examine in some detail the working-relationship between Conrad and Ford, which came about as a result of external as well as internal causes. According to Max Saunders, Conrad, in his quest to obtain a literary collaborator had been recommended several literary figures to be a possible co-worker.1 It was, Ford recounts, W. E. Henley who pointed to Ford as a suitable choice for Conrad. A letter from Conrad to Henley bears out the contention that a literary bonding was being mediated between Conrad and Ford, who had been brought together by Edward Garnett. The letter suggested that a projected literary collaboration between them might occur. Henley’s reply had apparently made the claim that the projected collaboration would somehow hurt Conrad’s reputation.2 Although Henley had warned Conrad not to underestimate the dangers of entering into a collaboration with Ford, Conrad wrote in reply:
...and that the material being of a kind that appeals to my imagination and the man being an honest workman we could turn out something tolerable - perhaps. It never entered my head I could be dangerous to Hueffer in the way you point out....3
The kind of objection to collaborative activity is voiced again by another who forsaw the dangers of an established author teaming up with a less well-known one. Literary collaboration was not particularly uncommon when Conrad proposed it to Ford, but neither was it considered the proper way for serious novelists, as Ford was aware: “The critics of our favoured land do 173not believe in collaboration,” he warned.4
Often an unused passage of text is more revealing since its cancellation may have resulted from a desire to suppress. In an unpublished section of Ford’s biography of Conrad of 1924, he withholds a revealingly frank passage of confession about his team writer where he contradicts the argument that Conrad “chose to live on terms of intimacy with a parasitic person” by stating that such an accusation was as damaging to himself as it was to Conrad. Ford continues in the same vein about the choices open to Conrad, defending himself from criticism and showing awareness of the psychology behind co-writing:
…if he chose to consult the person as to the most private details of his personal life and - what is still more important - as to the form and the very wording of his books, - if he chose for this intimacy a person of a parasitic type, he was less upright a man than might reasonably be supposed… And less of a psychologist.5
In the biography Ford alleges that some opponents and critics did not hold the same reverence for his “literary friendship” with Conrad as that which he maintained, but his bond with Conrad had been “for its lack of jealousy a very
beautiful thing.”6 Indeed, Ford took the position that he gave Conrad some benefit as a bonding partner writing: “I was useful to Conrad as a writer and as a man in a great many subordinate ways during his early days of struggle and deep poverty...”7 The "model object" thesis is useful here for it once again highlights the subordination of one writer in regard to another where a writer claims to be the mentor of his partner. Indeed, a critic and friend of Ford, R. Scott-James reveals in an introduction to one of Ford's works, rather unbelievably, that Ford had spiritedly claimed to have taught Conrad English.8 The fanciful Ford made a number of claims about Conrad that simply were not true.
The writers’ wives were involved behind the scenes in the collaborations often to the despair of Ford, who omitted any mention of Jessie Conrad in his memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924). Despite Jessie being desirous of “hoofing out Hueffer”9 and notwithstanding her letter later denouncing Ford in the Times Literary Supplement,10 she wrote complimenting him on his help and assistance during Conrad’s illness:
At this crisis I have nothing but praise for F.M.H. He earned my gratitude and appreciation by the manner he showed his practical sympathy.11
Both Elsie and Violet H. Hueffer, had objected to him contributing to the preface to an edition that Conrad had published on the grounds that he used the surname Ford rather than Hueffer:
On the whole matter of my contributing to this edition you ought, I think to be advised of this: Mesdames Elsie and Violet H Hueffer are about to burst into new and even more violent litigation as to their right to use my abandoned patronymic. As, in the course of this a good deal of mud is certain to be showered over me I do not know whether you ought to associate your name so intimately with mine as these joint prefaces would seem to connote, so that I should be perfectly ready to have you drop out my contribution, but not yours...12
The imbroglio over names suggests that sometimes to be associated with another writer was not always advantageous.
Conrad and Ford agreed upon a collaboration on Seraphina a novel that Ford had already begun work on.13 Conrad wrote to Ford encouraging him to visit:
Come when you like ... You will always find me here. I would be very pleased to hear Seraphina read. I would afterwards read it myself. Consult your own convenience and (especially) your own whim. It's the only thing worth deferring to.14
Another instance where making objections to collaborating occurred when Conrad wrote to Galsworthy commenting: “I am drooping still. Working at Seraphina. Bosh! Horrors!”15 and again after a further bonding session Conrad wrote that Ford’s visit had left him “half dead and [he] crawled into bed for two days.”16 The effect of bonding was debilitating, if Conrad is not exaggerating, and even a cause of Conrad’s being driven to his bed for rest and recuperation.
The problems and the benefits experienced by collaborators were a confused mixture of good and bad. A clear statement of the closeness of their working styles, despite a frenetic literary environment, appears in Ford’s letter to Olive Garnett:
Conrad has a considerable influence on me; I a considerable influence on him, whether for good or ill in either case there is no knowing. The collaborative work is quite different from either of our personal works, but it takes a sufficiently decided line of its own…Paradoxical as it may sound our temperaments are extraordinarily similar, we speak as nearly in each other’s language as it is possible for two inhabitants of this Babel to do.17
Yet criticism of one another’s writing can become destructive. When Ford read aloud to Conrad the draft of “The Benefactors” he wrote to Elsie (Hueffer) complaining:
I have just finished reading “George” to Joseph who says, naturally, that it’s a masterpiece & then pulls it to pieces from start to finish.18
The comments about the working relationship between Ford and Conrad reveal a less than ideal writing arrangement in which one partner can so trenchantly dissect the other’s work, yet Conrad was seventeen years older than Ford, of course. Indeed a letter of 3 November calls into question the collaboration and suggests that the work was becoming a little too trying for them both. It perhaps indicates that Ford may have lost his way a little and be “struggling through bogs and mires.”19 In a postscript to a letter to Garnett of 3 November, Ford wrote critically of Conrad's moods of depression as being the cause of what he had said:
Don't tell anyone what I say of Conrad... he really did admire your work even at the expense of his own & being subject to fits of acute depression - (ALWAYS in such fits) said what he did.20
The use of capitals here shows that Ford was aware how Conrad’s depressive fits were increasing in frequency. Conrad’s attitude to Ford on the other hand may be gauged from his 1900 letter to Garnett in which he appears scathing of Ford’s almost total efforts at collaboration on The Inheritors. Conrad writes about the reproductive urges of, and the amount of nervous energy involved in bonded writing. He patronises Ford and can scarcely be said to be a fully supportive member of the bonding project, for the hidden motive would appear to be to try to aggrandise himself at the expense of Ford:
All my bits of luck come through you! You must be indeed - as Jess says - the best of men. I consider the acceptce of The Inherors a distinct bit of luck. Jove! What a lark!
I set myself to look upon the thing as a sort of skit upon the sort of political (?!) novel, fools of the Morley Roberts sort do write. This in my heart of hearts. And poor H was dead in earnest! Oh, Lord. How he worked! There is not a chapter I haven't made him rewrite twice -- most of them three times over.
This is collaboration if you like! Joking apart the expenditure of nervous fluid was immense. There were moments when I cursed the day I was born and dared not look up to the light of day I had to live through with this thing on my mind. H has been as patient as no angel had ever been. I've been fiendish. I've been rude to him; if I've not called him names I've implied in my remarks and the course of our discussions the most opprobrious epithets. He wouldn't recognize them. 'Pon my word it was touching. And there's no doubt that in the course of that agony I have been ready to weep more than once. Yet not for him. Not for him.
You'll have to burn this letter - but I shall say no more. Some day we shall meet and then - !21
This letter suggests an uncensored version of collaboration between a distinguished writer and a less well-known one. Conrad appears coolly detached and ironic, as well as making Ford sound overbearing. There is a clear indication of Conrad declaring that he had been "rude" to Ford during their relationship and the amount of effort required to give birth to a male novel. It shows Conrad in revelatory mode ("This is collaboration if you like!"), perhaps, as one commentary suggests, knowing or sensing that Garnett would keep the letter for publication later, as indeed transpired.22
When all was well in their relationship, Ford wrote exulting at the co-operation and harmony between them:
At once, there in the room was Conrad - Jack - ashore! The world was splendid; hope nodded from every rosebud... And, in an incredibly short space of time - say, three hours - at least half a page of Romance got itself written."23
The comments point to the fact that collaboration could be amazingly productive, but at other times objections and disputes were the order of the day as they reviewed their draft manuscripts:
Conrad would howl with rage and I would almost sigh over others that no soul perhaps would have found as bad as we considered them. We would recoil one from the other and go each to our own cottage...24
In a letter to Elsie Hueffer, Ford describes how when travelling on a train to deliver the proofs of Romance, Conrad lay on the floor to complete some corrections. Just then Ford touched Conrad on the shoulder and he (Conrad) jumped at his throat. “To be suddenly disturbed”, wrote Ford, “is apt to cause a second’s real madness”. The episode in the train underlines the difficulty of ever getting to know your collaborator and the blind terror and depth of feelings that can be contained in the bosom of one’s co-writer. Ford commenting upon the incident wrote: “You never know what, at the bottom of the heart goes on in your companion.”25
Because Romance had taken so long to write, Conrad feared that reviewers would criticise their delay, that unfavourable comparisons with other colleagues would be made, and that it would harm their reputations. Writing in 1903 to Ford, Conrad explained:
…but you can imagine yourself what a reviewer would say. The apparent want of proportion will be jumped upon. Sneers at collaboration -- sneers at those two men who took six years to write “this very ordinary tale” whereas R.L.S. single handed produced his masterpieces etc.”26
Conrad suggested that an explanation could be inserted about the facts of the collaboration:
I would not object to an explanatory note - “This novel written from another point of view by F. M. H. in 1896 under the title of Seraphina – became the subject of collaboration with J. Conrad at the end of 1900 after much preliminary discussion and was finished in its present shape in July 1902.
… That’s one way. But of course it does away with our theory of welded collaboration.27
Ford’s biographer, Max Saunders, claims that the editor of Conrad’s letters, F. R. Karl, assumes that Ford could have read this “as a veiled attack upon the whole idea of collaboration and the time ‘wasted’ on an effort which Conrad would have like to renounce.”28 However, claims made about Conrad are not always substantiated in fact and it is unlikely, I feel, that Conrad would have viewed their collaboration as something to reject in this way.
After the collaboration on Romance was finished, it appears that in 1902 Conrad began to feel a sense of loss over working with Ford for he asks him to keep their partnership alive: “I miss collaboration in a most ridiculous manner. I hope you don’t intend dropping me altogether.”29
The relationship between Ford and Conrad broke down in 1909 over specific and personal squabbles, including the financial arrangements to enable Ford to publish Conrad's Some Reminiscences.30 They did not see a great deal of each other after that dispute and spoke less frequently, but seemed on good terms for at least seven years, after the decline of the collaborative project. What had been "a conspiracy against a sleeping world"31 became a cause for some concern. But by 1921 Ford was writing in a more objective tone about Conrad, for when he was requested to contribute a piece on Conrad, he took a more neutral position, saying that he had “written enough about Conrad in the course of a toilsome life” and that “…to tell the truth his later work appeals to me so relatively little that I don’t want to write any more about it. I mean, it’s difficult to do so without appearing, and for all I know, being, ungenerous.”32 Although Ford did, in fact, produce a review, it does demonstrate weariness and a detachment from Conrad that resulted in his wishing to distance himself from his former bonding relationship with him.
Ford had complained to Pinker for two years and then to Pinker’s sons that the Collected Edition (1921) had not mentioned his name as a collaborator with Conrad on Romance and The Inheritors, and told Conrad in a 1924 letter33 that his personal objection to the publication "reads rather like the tangled tale of a lunatic, but I think you will agree that I have some right ... to express some irritation.” 34 Ford’s biographer, Max Saunders, suggests parenthetically that his annoyance was with Eric Pinker, Dent and Doubleday his American publishers. Conrad, too, had complained to Pinker, and characterised Ford as a man "who seems to be suffering from the idea that everybody in the world has insulted him. One would think it a mania if one did not suspect that there is a purpose in it.”35 Indeed, in an unpublished 1924 letter to Conrad, Ford complains that on looking back over his life “I can see nothing to regret except mistaken -- or miscalculated, generosities. These are of course as flagitious as crimes or any other form of dishonour.”36 This tone of regret for having been too generous does not accord well with the remarks of his collaborators that Ford had been over-sensitive to criticism and too aware of irritations to his personal esteem.37
The distancing that had occurred between them can be seen from Ford’s 1923 letter to Conrad where, despite an acknowledgement of their closeness in former collaboration, there is a recognition of their present separateness:
I am much touched by your letter: for it makes a difference to know that we are working - at however great a distance - somewhat in sympathy. You are the only man I ever met with whose literary ideas I ever felt absolutely in accord: indeed I’d go so far to say that you are the only man I ever met who completely understood what literature was & what are the problems of the writer.38
This passage recognises frankly their former accord, gives reference to the closeness of their literary bonding, and acknowledges the problems for writers engaged in collaboration. On balance it appears that the two men had experienced an intensive personal relationship, but it ended in acrimony. However, it would appear from the preface to the novel, The Nature of A Crime, that there had been disputes of both a pleasant and a frantic sort during
their collaboration, as Conrad recalls: “It would be delightful to catch the echo of those desperate, earnest, eloquent and funny quarrels which enlivened those old days."39
Max Saunders points to the fact that intimate male friendships form the basis of many of the plots of Ford’s stories. He concludes that “even Ford himself and Conrad (as portrayed by Ford in his memoir Joseph Conrad ) are all studies of extreme male intimacy.”40 This is probably right, as a reading of Romance (1903) shows that homosocial desire is evident in the discourse. In the novel, pirates are handsome and only scantily dressed, their menace being the only factor which keeps them aloof from sex:
"To this day I remember the beauty of that rugged, grizzled, hairy seaman’s eyelashes. They were long and thick, shadowing the eyes softly like the lashes of a young girl."41
Emphasising a cross-sexual element, the protagonist, John Kemp, notices the jewellery that the naked sailor wears. The brigand, Carlos, seems to have an affection for Kemp that implies a homosocial relationship:
I love you more than a kinsman, Juan… I wish you could come with me. I try to arrange it.42
Just as in Stevenson, a sailor is a constant reference point in homosocial discourse, yet the character’s choice is disguised as normal. The affair between Kemp and the romantic Carlos leads to suggestions of armed fighting:
“Hallo!” He said. “See heeyur, young Kemp, does your neck just itch to be stretched?”43
The naked pirates are threatening and attractive at the same time. The appeal of seamen as erotic figures is well-known, and has been documented particularly in gay fiction.44 The second mate says:
“They’ll do it for yeh”…”You’re such a green goose. It makes me sick a bit. You heven’t reckoned out the chances, not quite.”45
Asking for clarification, the second mate replies that he would reveal
everything to Kemp, and the threat is of murder. Even at the height of danger the attraction of the pirate, Carlos, is magnetic to Kemp and the equation of romance with piracy and the threat to life and limb is apparent. The homosocial and the violent combine:
"I did not want to quarrel. I wanted more to cry. I was very lonely, and he was going away. Romance was going out of my life."46
Kemp, seduced by Carlos, is emotionally affected by his leaving. Carlos explains that one day he will return to find him. Relieved, Kemp is entranced. It appears as if a homosexual seduction has taken place:
He leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek, then climbed away. I felt that the light of Romance was going out of my life.47
Love between men is Conrad and Ford’s solution to the need for adventure in a turn of the century romance novel. The suggested romance is a homosocial bonding partnership, whose removal threatens to take away the fantasy of romantic attraction to a Spanish bandit forever. Romance is capable of several interpretations in the text. It can be a homosexual attraction, the chance of escape from a boring existence with a pedant for a father, and a source of different futures dictated by fate:
It was true, after all, Romance reserved for me another fate, for another sort of captivity, for more than one sort.48
Romance offers possibilties of change and development for the character, and perhaps for the reader. Yet there is heterosexual activity also in the plot. Seraphina, after whom the novel was originally named, a Spanish girl, daughter of the doge, Don Riego, is: “the girl with the lizard, the girl with the dagger!” Kemp loves heterosexually too, and associates Seraphina with two emblems of sexuality -- the lizard and the dagger:
"And with every word she uttered romance itself, if I had only known it, the romance of persecuted lovers, spoke to me through her eyes."49
Kemp is seduced by the knifepoint of her touch and delighted by the feel of her hand. It was “as if she had slipped into my palm a weapon of extraordinary and inspiring potency.”50 Just as in Stevenson and Osbourne, the joint authors engage in the vocabulary of tension and danger, enlivened with homo- and heterosexual activity masked as an overt story of pirates and derring-do in a genre marked by technology and commercialism. They engage in a literary collaboration that moves from intense friendship to hostility, while the collaborated text reveals a suppressed homosocial narrative.
The text itself sometimes reflects the reactions of Conrad to the proposal to collaborate on the novel. When Tomas Castro berates Kemp for failing to take advantage of opportunities to kill their enemies, his reproaches echo Conrad's strong reaction to Ford's rather delicate early draft of the novel. Any writer, Conrad said, "who could take hold of such a theme and not, gripping it by the throat, extract from it every drop of blood and glamour" can only be a "criminal."51 On hearing Ford read aloud from his [Ford’s] first draft, Conrad, who “began to groan and writhe in his chair”, felt that Ford had failed to extract the maximum effect from the potential of the story outline.52
In a letter dividing up, for the record, the accounts of the authorship of Romance, Conrad remembered that the first two parts of the book were largely drafted by Ford, made a bid for the third part as “about sixty percent mine with important touches by you,” and attributed the fourth mostly to himself and the fifth mainly to Ford.53 In a 1901 letter, Ford agreed, emphasizing that what he called “the matchless Fourth Part”54 was all Conrad’s. Both writers re-worked each other’s work throughout all the parts, creating what Ford delineated as “a singular mosaic of passages written alternately by one or other of the collaborators.”55
Romance was eventually published by George Bell and Sons in London and by McClure, Phillips in New York, in March 1904. Macmillan’s reader had declined the novel on grounds that would otherwise normally be considered as qualities. The Macmillan editor referred to “the affectation of the style, the extraordinary minuteness of the details, and the variety, complexity, and breathlessness of the situations.”56 The Macmillan reader also criticised the “unnecessary amount of adventure”,57 perhaps due to Conrad and Ford’s collaborative efforts at the continual depiction of Kemp as a pirate about to be convicted at any minute. The columnist Chris Fujiwara58 claims that the discourse of Romance gives the impression of a contest of styles. The first two parts, he explains, are a slow accretion of vertical effects somewhat reminiscent of Ford’s Fifth Queen trilogy of a few years later. The third part is more tightly and colourfully written. The plot begins to seem coherent and significant. In the fourth part, the clarity of description and the darkness of the metaphysic are quite clearly Conrad’s. If the fourth part is a triumph of Conrad’s genius, the fifth is a wonder of Ford’s neurasthenia, nightmare, and irony, notes Fujiwara. The narrator’s tone is shortened to plaintiveness and exhaustion: “I wanted rest, woman’s love, slackening off.”59 He moves into and out of a nihilistic state. “I realised that what had seemed only a mass of stuffs were human beings all looking at me.”60
Over the course of his trial for piracy, Kemp realises that even a successful result would be pointless; the main aim being his need to narrate the story, and the only thing he can congratulate himself on at the end of his ordeals is his skill as a storyteller. “I had made them see things” he concludes.61 While noticing the highly Fordian emphasis on narration as self-validating, we also hear an echo of this assertion of the creed of “seeing” so familiar in Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’.
HullIt will be helpful tosave stepsonbook4pub3
Section 5 “The softened voice, the eyes suffusing in the starlight, the lingering clasp of the hand”: Stevenson and Osbourne -- An Intensity of Feeling.
It will be helpful to examine the work of a further small number of writers who engaged in this constant collaborative practice. The working relationship between Stevenson and his wife Fanny's son, Lloyd Osbourne, is, perhaps, the most unconventional and rewarding, because it forged a different construction of masculinity. The bonding between Stevenson and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, came to light in the revelations about the preparatory work for the writing of Stevenson's Treasure Island. Stevenson confesses in “The Art of Writing” that it was to be a male-only affair:
It was to be a story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone. Women were excluded.62
They planned the plot and characterisation on the bed. Lloyd remembered being called up to Stevenson's bedroom where he saw "my beloved map lying on the coverlet".63 The novelist and critic Candia Mc William has suggested it was to "counter pain" that this story was written, in an effort to explain the therapeutic nature of reading boys' adventure stories by flashlight at night, under the covers, to counter the pain of adolescence. McWilliam talked in a video production about their "dualism on the counterpain"64 which was
undertaken to escape from bourgeois respectability.65
Their collaboration leaves room for discussion on whether their search for male figures in Treasure Island, as seen in the relationships between Jim Hawkins and John Silver, Captain Flint, Blind Pew and the others reflects a deep-seated need in both for the fathers they lacked. Indeed, most of the novel’s characters are male professional figures, such as the squire, the doctor, the captain, the pirate and the retainers. Characters other than Jim, Trelawney and Livesey are not aristocrats, Their collaboration leaves room for discussion on whether their search for male figures in Treasure Island, as seen in the relationships between Jim Hawkins and
Hullitwillbehelpfultosavestepson.doc
of male twinship mirrors the writing partnerships which led to the production of erotic fiction by homosexual men in collaboration resulting from the repressions which ultimately lead to these discourses.
The homosocial literature I examine deals in different forms of expression than might be expected of writers engaged in the elevating pursuit of collaborative romance writing, and the psychological interpretations which were put upon them indicate a less than ideal nature and motivation. These collaborations appear in the fictional discourse as if they are reflected images from the actual bondings which they had formed, and I point later to a textual strategy concerning collaboration between the person narrating the story and the person reading it as another kind of bonding. There may have been a form of coercion of the young reader by the editors and publishers and his co-option into the adventure, in order for the collaboration to reach fruition in the reader’s home, either by the boy being read to by an adult as a colloquy, over his shoulder so to speak, in a further act of collaboration, or by the novel being read alone which allows for direct participation in the adventure, and for the reader to become part of the narrative.
There were disappointments, disagreements and discords strewn in the path of bonding. It was difficult for artists in the period to express emotions in public, yet, as we have seen, authors were sometimes prepared to exhibit displays of affection and to cause disagreement and objections to each other in letters, reviews, poems and parodies from 1880 to 1915. The making of objections, then, constitutes part of the bonding process, as Lang observed. The effect of such declarations was to bring to the attention of the public the changing nature of masculinities and femininities which were hedged with the patriarchal proscriptions of the period. In doing so authors often rewrote definitions of language that took upon themselves newer sexually charged meanings for writing which, at one and the same time, attempted to obfuscate and to draw attention to its homosocial meaning.
When Lang met Stevenson in Mayfair in the presence of Sheriff MacConachie and dismissed his [Stevenson's] apparel as being outrageous with the remark "My character will stand a great deal, but it won't stand Rosaline Masson, I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Stokes, 1914) being seen talking to a 'thing' like you in Bond Street"66 it was apparent that paternalism could affect the behaviour of males in company, and underlines the importance of clothing as a public statement of male identity. However, there were times when the bonding relations between the writers were characterised by close accord, as we have seen, say, beween Ford and Conrad when the collaboration was characterised as "a very beautiful thing." The issues discussed in this chapter go some way towards an explanation of the reason the response to paternalist models could be considered as both an intensification of and a resistance to, the homophobic repressions of the period.
The male bonded literature develops from the individual's internal struggles. By embroiling emotionally with another male friend and by the act of making objections he actualises his true identity, bonding with the other man and affirming his new moral, political and sexual awareness.67 This is a process of self-realisation. A relationship of two must, it seems, be mutual, which means it requires accommodation, commonality and synergy.
Synergy is the energy that is produced when two forces work together in harmony to release a further force which is even greater then the components of its separate parts. Similarly, when two writers wrote together they created a force for themselves that was the sum of the two parts plus something that derived from their joint-personality; perhaps a third force. But the drawback was that, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, when one man sets out on a dual task it often leads, through delay and vacillation, to the fragmentation of his original plan:
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect...
Among the key conditions needed for true bonding is the shared space where the bonding parties can have equal access and interaction. These shared spaces usually constitute real time access for all bonding partners with one serving as both a "model object" and a guide. A number of examples of one author leading and another author depending on the other were seen in this thesis.
Where the conclusion formed about the bondings is more apparent is in the combination of actions, writings, dedications in texts, parodies and collaborated works of the period. It shows how two writers could form a male bonded enterprise, reflected in their work in duplication of their lives, and carried out over intensive periods of mutual literary activity that produced male adventure fiction of a homoerotic kind.