AustLit

'In an indignant letter, written on 12 December 1918, to S. Nevile Foster, editor of Land and Water, the novelist and former ship’s captain, Joseph Conrad, questions the suitability of the illustration of his story ‘Rescue’, which they were about to publish. He begins by describing himself ‘as an artist in another medium’, and remarking that he had ‘always been treated by his illustrators with a certain amount of consideration … with that loyalty which is due from a conscientious artist to the conceptions of another’. He questions whether the illustrator of ‘Rescue’ has ‘ever seen a yacht’s gig’ (a type of boat)? Or a man standing in one? Or any boat that looked like the one in the illustration? Had he ‘looked with an artist’s eye ever in his life at the leech of a sail, either full or aback, the most definite and expressive line in the world? The whole thing’, Conrad adds, ‘is false enough to set one’s teeth on edge; and of unpardonable ugliness … There are ways of rendering the luminous quality of a tropical night & there was no reason to cram ugliness into the very sky.’' (Introduction(