ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a literal type of collaboration – literary collaboration – and a specific instance of some collaboration: that between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, who worked together for about a decade, from 1898. Their collaboration took various forms. Ford supplied plots for 'Amy Foster' and The Secret Agent; persuaded Conrad to dictate some of his reminiscences; even wrote pages of Nostromo when Conrad could not meet his deadline. The Secret Agent concerns a foreign embassy conspiring to imitate a revolutionary conspiracy for counterrevolutionary motives. From one point of view, collaboration and conspiracy are antithetical Collaborators bury their differences to work together. Conspiracy, in short, also possesses that radical ambivalence: benign consent or malevolent dissent. Much of Conrad's writing is alert with the anxieties produced by the ambivalences of conspiracy and collaboration; and this is particularly true after the period of collaboration with Ford.
