ABSTRACT
In Doubletalk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration, Wayne Koestenbaum asserts that all collaboration between male writers is a sublimated form of homosexual contact. “Collaborators express homoeroticism and they strive to conceal it. . . . [B]luntly stated,” he continues, “men who collaborate engage in a metaphorical sexual intercourse, and . . . the text they balance between them is alternately the child of their sexual union, and a shared woman” (3). It’s probably impossible to know whether Koestenbaum’s theory applies, in a literal sense, to Conrad’s collaboration and relationship with Ford Madox Ford, but the first part of Romance (1903) certainly resonates with homoerotic desire. The hero is a poor young nobleman who seeks adventure in the West Indies and then gets far more than he bargained for. John Kemp marries the girl, Seraphina, in the end, but he has to wade through blood and survive a treason trial to get her. Kemp is a deliberately conventional hero-naïve, powerful, and too straightforward to understand the intrigue that quickly ensnares him. His sexuality seems equally conventional; one look at Seraphina and he loves her extravagantly. The rest of the novel is impelled forward (though none too quickly) by their need to escape, their separation, and Kemp’s desperate efforts to recover her.
