“The effect of a tale,” Joseph Conrad wrote in a letter to SS Prawling, “is mostly in the telling of it” (8^th Nov, 1897). The facts of Martin Edmond’s tale, in his wonderful book Marlow’s Dream, are easy enough to summarise. He traces all he can about Joseph Conrad’s voyages to Australia; follows his ships (and, in fascinating detail, their cargo); reads and thinks about his stories; and works up a portrait of the “air of romance” that “still lingered” in the Sydney of Conrad’s days and the one of Edmond’s memory. If you are interested in such things, as I am, you will find much here to delight and instruct. I did. But what of its effects? What of the tale in the telling?

Freud’s term “family romance” refers to those fantasies from childhood, lingering often as half-dreams into adult life, when we should know better, that, really, we are products of quite different parents, different lives, more romantic and grander lineages than whatever it is accident has us navigating in fact. “The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of the parents is,” Freud argues in his essay “The Family Romances” (1908), “one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought by the course of his development.” The fantasy compensations of imagined Princess mums and Rogue Sailor dads are, for Freud, ways of coping our way through this painful liberation, psychic tools with which to work at rewiring the imaginative machinery from parentally dependent to self-fashioning adulthood.

I wonder now, though, as a more-or-less “liberated” adult — as a middle-aged man enjoying relief from hysterical misery in the calm of ordinary human unhappiness — whether there is not also some equally dangerous and treacherous romance fantasy in longing for the return to parental authority. We, each of us, must, after all, lose our parents eventually. That is a universal human experience. The only one worse, when they lose us before we lose them, is awful in other ways but, most of the time, the common unhappiness comes when we realise that, through the normal workings of biology, time, accident, life, these formative relationships will, one day, be ones enacted through memory rather than lived relationship.

Parents can die too early, when we know there was more of life for them, and for us with them, or too late, when their bodies and minds have been damaged beyond use. Both endings are sad in ways that are no less sad for being common and ‘natural’, and both, I suspect, produce many kinds of desires for avoidance and sustaining fiction. The family romance, here, is not a father other than the one we know we have but, somehow, signs of our (already lost, or to-be-lost) father (or mother) elsewhere. Can a family romance be subjected to paranoid close reading, to over-reading? Can we see parents in codes — can we encode them in texts — if we look hard enough?

Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, a poet, translator, Polish patriot and devoted husband, died, broken by exile and grief, before his son was ten. Thirty years later his son remembered him, in a letter to Edward Garnett (20^th Jan, 1900) as

a man of great sensibilities; of exalted and dreamy temperament; with a terrible gift of irony and of gloomy disposition; withal of strong religious feeling degenerating after the loss of his wife into mysticism touched with despair. His aspect was distinguished; his conversation very fascinating; his face in repose sombre, lighted all over when he smiled. I remember him well.

This description, less the religious feeling, is, for my imagination, a portrait of the Martin Edmond I know from his books.

Edmond’s books are full of the search for lost fathers, from his first, The Autobiography of My Father (1992), a loving record of Trevor Edmond, to the “substitute fathers” that are worked into the elaboration of “a myth of” his “own origins” in books on male writers, artists, makers, and wanderers, from painters Philip Clairmont and Colin McCahon to the “unsung” of his “chronicle” to all kinds of figures across the years. The dreamy temperament comes, with this, from a will to romance in place, whether the “dreamy melancholy of those later walks through the grimy realms of the lower town” in Sydney, “as grit and rubbish blew in the streets, traffic snarled and the late sun stretched down the gaps between buildings like beams of liquid gold through dark murky water” or in sketches of Ohakune, Waimarino, Fiji, Malaysia, Auckland.

It was “at a beach called Flint and Steel,” Edmond writes in Chronicle of the Unsung, “when the voices rolling in brought with them an elegy for my father, whose death had already bequeathed me the voice in which I prose these sentences,” a sense of place and a recognition of loss combining, somehow, to make him the writer the book gives its readers.

The terrible gift of irony rescuing this project from maudlinism, or keeping it teetering on the edge of the maudlin, comes with Edmond’s sense for failure. His books forever set themselves tasks they cannot accomplish, and circle that failure. Marlow’s Dream, most recently, tries to “assemble in one place all of the information” its author could “discover about Conrad’s time as a seaman in the Antipodes” while admitting, in its opening pages, that this is a time from which there is a “huge gap in Conrad’s correspondence.”

Who knows what Conrad felt in Sydney? Not Martin Edmond. Not us. The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont (1999) starts out as a biography of the painter and, before its hundredth page, starts explaining why, imagined as that kind of book, it is “fatally flawed.” Dark Night (2011) goes walking with Colin McCahon around Sydney, recreating a journey for which we have almost no record. The Dreaming Land (2015) circles around forms, memoir, autobiography, narrative, it cannot cover. Waimarino Country collects excursions that travel between fact and fiction, certain memory and uncertain projection. The failure, and the need to keep trying to manage these strange quests, and to document their undoing, propels Edmond’s writing.

This, also, feels to me to do with parents and the family romance. That romance has its abiding sadness, in Edmond’s writing, on his sister’s death especially (revisited, from the Autobiography through to 2020’s Bus Stops on the Moon), and the return to failure is a way, for this reader, anyway, of thinking with and sustaining both the need for a family romance and the recognition that we cannot, really, believe all of that. “Forgetting,” Jacqueline Rose tells us, “is in any case an infinite task. Really to forget something, you have to forget that you have forgotten.” I don’t think anyone can do that about either parents they have lost or parents they are scared still to lose. The telling, and the avoiding of telling, are both interminable.

Conrad deals with this fear, or this recognition of the need to know this fear, in his fiction through a dizzying array of doubles and shimmering stand-in figures and false starts and tales-turning-into-other-tales. Marlow, the Conrad substitute narrator in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, is always at the same time much more (and much less) than a substitute: his willingness “to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly” makes all the knotty strangeness of that novel, just as the unnamed audience in Heart of Darkness sustain his tale without letting us, its reader, ever quite understand its context. Under Western Eyes has an unnamed narrator, a put-upon teacher of languages, wondering at his inability to capture Razumov’s otherness and difference. Writing, for Conrad, was

rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggle may be seen.

If, in the process, it bears traces of this struggle in wayward prose, meandering narration and gnarly tellers then, in Conrad’s imaginative universe, so much the better to make you see. He was a figure, Edward Said put it in his book Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, “hiding himself in rhetoric,” an author of “evasive masterpieces of truly impersonal intimacy.” Both phrases could apply, with equal justice, to Edmond.

All of these are indirections, then, towards an affirmation of Marlow’s Dream as another instalment in this project without end, never properly to be paid up or accounted for, that is Edmond’s writing of dream fathers and imaginative families and maps of ways of thinking of belonging. Conrad figures here with as much energy — from the writer projecting hopes onto him as from his own presence on the page through generous quotation — as Colin McCahon did a decade ago, or Philip Clairmont before him. Conrad is a model writer, for Edmond, because, for him — for both of them, I think — “there are neither angels nor devils, only people in their perplexity, their ambiguity, their grandeur and their despair.”

The telling of the tale prompts in Edmond all of his lovely stylistic tics and reliably strange habits. There is the romance of landscape to conclude, from Luca Antara’s vision of Sydney to Chronicle’s Mirror Lake to Dark Night’s Karioi Lake to, now, a cruise to Hobart. There is the mix of the serious and scholarly with the slightly batty, a dream sequence featuring in Marlow’s Dream the same way a fashionable theory or a dutiful citation would in the work of an academic. There are even friends and relatives from other books, Luca Antara’s dispirited bookseller and his German wife making a fleeting appearance. There is the sense of being “haunted, mercilessly haunted, by the necessity of style” (Conrad’s words, to Edward Garnett, in a letter from March 1898). Sydney figures again, as it should, as the most interesting city in Australasia, in all of its grime and violence.

Conrad told a Polish correspondent, in 1903, that his “point of view is English, from which the conclusion should not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. That is not the case.” Edmond’s point of view, across Marlow’s Dream as across all of his books, is New South Wales, without any suggestion he has become Australian. The occult links between these writers, or their affinities, present themselves in other ways again. There is new material, and new things here to say about Conrad — not easy, after a century or more of academic industriousness and page-turning — and plenty to linger over if you are interested in either Conrad, or Edmond, or fathers, or all three. Or, perhaps, if you want to use this book to think about ghosts — literary, cultural, historical — of your own.

Martin Edmond writes sad books, books that will not let themselves pretend they or their author believes in their sustaining fictions. If a ghost of Conrad motivates parts of this book Edmond tells us too that he cannot know Conrad’s voice, or his dream,

and in that ambiguity is the root of why we write. Not to exult or to mourn, not to try and disentangle dream from reality, fact from fiction; but to bear witness.

Witnessing, I think, reading through this absorbing, elegant, careful example of the art, is always a kind of mourning, and Conrad, an author for whom writing was “the conversion of nervous force into phrases,” the perfect figure to focus Edmond’s ongoing work of mourning.

The “family romance,” writes Freud in the closing of his essay, is not, after all, a liberation from one’s parents. In fact

the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him. Indeed the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and the strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women.

Marlow’s Dream is too serious a work ever to exalt Joseph Conrad, or to ask of his record that it give us the promise of happy, vanished days. And it is too interesting a book to pretend its Sydney has not been many things then and since, not all romantic. But, as part of a decades’ long project of longing and imaginative projection, and a decades’ long project of fidelity to the real and a refusal of full surrender to that longing project, it sustains so much that matters in Martin Edmond’s work. It made me hear, it made me feel and, above all, it made me see.

Martin Edmond, Marlow’s Dream: Joseph Conrad in Antipodean Ports (Melbourne: Index Press, 2024), $35.