To this day there
are marks of his origins in his style. His periods, more than once, have
an inept and foreign smack. In fishing for the right phrase one
sometimes feels that he finds a French phrase, or even a Polish phrase,
and that it loses something by being done into English.
The credit for discovering "Almayer's Folly," as the publishers say,
belongs to Edward Garnett, then a reader for T. Fisher Unwin. The book
was brought out modestly and seems to have received little attention.
The first edition, it would appear, ran to no more than a thousand
copies; at all events, specimens of it are now very hard to find, and
collectors pay high prices for them. When "An Outcast of the Islands"
followed, a year later, a few alert readers began to take notice of the
author, and one of them was Sir (then Mr.) Hugh Clifford, a former
Governor of the Federated Malay States and himself the author of several
excellent books upon the Malay. Clifford gave Conrad encouragement
privately and talked him up in literary circles, but the majority of
English critics remained unaware of him.
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