First edition, inscribed: ‘For Geoffrey and Joyce [Bridson] con amore but o at what a distance from Conrad 1964’.

The American poet Conrad Aiken, an old friend of T.S. Eliot from Harvard, and also of Ezra Pound, had bought a house in Rye, East Sussex, in 1923, and lived there for some of the 1930s. It is quite possible that he and the BBC radio producer D.G. Bridson, to whom this copy was presented, crossed paths then – certainly Bridson was in contact with Pound and Eliot – but they became close in the 1940s. In 1960 Bridson was in America on another project and stayed on to line up some ‘Conversations’ with American poets. They met every Monday morning for a month and ‘talked for a couple of hours, by which time Conrad was mopping his brow and calling desperately for the martinis’ (Prospero and Ariel).

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