It Was the Nightingale E-Book

Ford Madox Ford

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

During a Christmas leave in London, Ford Madox Ford attended a party at the French Embassy, 'a heavy blond man in a faded uniform', wearied by years of war, recalled to a longing for the life of a writer. The evening marks the beginning of a new phase of Ford's life, the years of It Was the Nightingale. Ford evokes the literary milieux of London, Paris and New York between the wars with sparkle, wit and energy. Recollections range across time in a subtle and flexible narrative that fuses fiction and memoir. A memory of a dark January day in Paris, in the weeks 'between dog and wolf', when Ford read the news of the death of the novelist John Galsworthy, triggers an exploration of the transition from an entire pre-war world: a ghost had passed, writes Ford, and Nancy Cunard steps forward 'like a jewelled tropical bird'. Here is James Joyce, whom Ford found dull company with his 'thin little jokes'; Ezra Pound playing Provencal songs on the bassoon; Gertrude Stein driving through the streets of Paris with the solemn 'snail-like precision' of a Pharoah. Behind the vivacity other ghosts, too, are always present: men killed and damaged in the war, mental breakdown and betrayal, out of which Ford was to create his best-loved novel, Parade's End.

Leseprobe

FORD MADOX FORD

It Was the Nightingale

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN COYLE

It was the nightingale, and not the lark, Which pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.

Romeo and Juliet

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

A Note on the Text

IT WASTHE NIGHTINGALE

To Eugene Pressly, Esquire

Part One “DomineDirigeNos”

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two “FluctuatNecMergitur”

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Three “EPluribusMulta”

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Index

About the Author

Also by Ford Madox Ford from Carcanet Press

Copyright

Introduction

‘There was never a day so gay for the arts as any twenty-four hours of the early twenties in Paris.’ Ford’s arresting opening promises daylight and gaiety, glamour and art in an eye-witness account by one who is at the very centre of things, at the centre of modernism, the greatest editor of his day:

Paris gyrated, seethed, clamoured, roared with the Arts. Painters, novelists, poets, composers, sculptors, batik-designers, decorators, even advanced photographers, so crowded the boulevards that you could not see the tree-trunks. They came from Tokio, they came from Petrograd; they poured in from Berlin, from Constantinople, from Rio de Janeiro, they flew in locust hordes from Spokane, from Seattle, from Santa Fé, from all the states and Oklahoma. If you had held up and dropped a sheet of paper on any one of the boulevards and had said ‘I want a contribution,’ a thousand hands would have torn you to pieces before it had hit the ground. (p. 259)

We are not let down. Scenes and portraits from Ford’s memoir include Ezra Pound bursting into the office of the transatlanticreview, ‘waving his cane as if he had been Bertran de Born about to horsewhip Henry II of England’; George Moore as a Flaubert bleached with blotting paper (a precise impression of a blurred naturalist); Joyce and Proust discussing not their art, but their maladies until eight in the morning, surrounded by the awed faithful; Gertrude Stein driving through Paris like a pharaoh in her chariot, as well as appearances by Brancusi, Juan Gris, Picasso, May Sinclair, Frank Harris, D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, Wyndham Lewis, ee cummings, and a cast of White Russian colonels and conscientious objectors, impresarios, bootleggers and gatecrashers. Among the new writers whose influx from the Midwest Ford celebrates is Ernest Hemingway, and one might expect from Ford’s opening sentence something along the lines of AMovableFeast, but it is the special quality of Ford’s highly subtle and novelistic narrative that it invites us to consider not just the parade of literary celebrities àla Hemingway, but at what cost such glamour was won as well as the enormities such glamour offered distraction and oblivion from.

In short. Ford digresses, for about one third of the book, and then digresses again and again until we realise that the real point of the book lies elsewhere. Our anticipation of the delights of Paris is left in abeyance as we return to a haunted night of post-war trauma, This is the first of Ford’s trademark time shifts: the entire first part of the book sees Ford not only absent but banished from Paris and France. The very title speaks of the time being out of joint: Romeo’s exultant appeal to Juliet that it is in fact earlier than she thinks is twisted here into a dark praeterition, the narrative reverting to the limbo between the end of the war and the start of the twenties, as a shell-shocked Hueffer surveys the ruins of his career and the end of another low, dishonest decade. The bird is also, of course, that of Keats, and we are also to think of the moribund’s doomed longing for beauty and the South.

ItWastheNightingale should be appreciated for its evocations of Ford’s great contemporaries at the height of their powers and in their full vitality and pomp; but just as striking, and structurally much more important, are its evocations of the great and the dead, the raising up of ghosts. Ford is fascinated with spectral presences of various kinds: the man himself is a kind of cultural embalmer, haunted by war, a compulsive ghost-seer. The whole narrative is triggered by the deaths within a week of each other of Galsworthy and of George Moore. The last sight of Moore is as a ghost (p. 19). Ford’s uniform renders him invisible, something to be resented, although the invisible are of course better placed to observe. The ghost of Conrad in penury is also summoned, while one of the book’s signal revelations concerns Proust’s influence. It is not the Frenchman’s work or life which spur Ford on, rather his death which gave him the impetus to take up a serious pen again and write Parade’sEnd.Nightingale concerns itself with various deaths – those of writers most obviously but also the war’s millions of unindividuated dead, as well as the metaphorical deaths of Ford’s career and reputation (he is at one point, he insists, ‘good as dead as a writer’). These deaths are finally succeeded by various rebirths and transformations, but only after much in the way of pain, distraction and expiation. This is a book of transitions, in which Ford portrays himself as crossing a shadow line between an earlier self and a new embodiment, so that Hueffer becomes Ford, TheEnglishReview becomes the transatlantic, Marwood becomes Tiet jens, and moribund London yields to the various cultural renaissances of Paris and New York (the book is in three parts, each bearing the motto of its governing city).

James Mizener insists that with ItWastheNightingale and its predecessor, ReturntoYesterday, Ford ‘practically invented a form of fictional reminiscence; it may be a dubious genre but in it he wrote two fascinating books’. The fictional nature of the reminiscence is apparent in several ways. Right from the beginning, as we have seen, the strict temporalities of linear narrative are eschewed in favour of a highly mobile and fluid shuttling back and forth between time zones, so that Ford is left teetering on an uneven kerb stone in Campden Hill for some twenty-four pages, while his consciousness sweeps back and forth over past events and their connections. Maintaining this narrative involves a truth to impression which also borrows much from Ford’s fictional practice. While crossing the road from the Champs-Elysées to the Place de la Concorde, part of Ford’s mind is attending to his companion’s eulogy to the plutocratic lawyer and literary impresario John Quinn, while another is intent on negotiating a way between the streams of murderously speeding cars. The work is also, of course, fictional in the more mundane terms of Ford’s notorious habit of taking liberties with the truth: his knowledge of the work of his fellow novelists seems especially unreliable. Those wishing to tease out facts from fiction should consult Max Saunders’ exemplary biography FordMadoxFord:ADualLife. Many of the versions of events in the volume are contestable, not least by Ford himself in other accounts; yet this is surely to be expected of the author of TheGoodSoldier, in his own way as keen an explorer of the relation between memory, subjectivity and narrative as Proust or Beckett.

In his preface Ford insists that he has tried to write a novel, using besides the time shift, the progressiond’effet and ‘the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action’; this last because, as he points out elsewhere, in a passage which insists on the cognitive separation between life and art, ‘I live in my moment’(p. 96). The evocation of this takes great skill: Ford conceals his art with consummate craft, and his artlessness of voice can be a disguise for the subtlest of effects. In part two chapter two, towards the middle of his book, Ford offers the key to his method, characteristically flattering the reader with the assumption that his best trick is obvious to all:

Of course you must appear to digress. That is the art which conceals your Art. The reader, you should premise, will always dislike you and your book. He thinks it an insult that you should dare to claim his attention, and if lunch is announced or there is a ring at the bell he will welcome the digression. So you will provide him with what he thinks are digressions – with occasions on which he thinks he may let his attention relax…. But really not one single thread must ever escape your purpose.

I am – I may hazard the digression! – using that technique in writing this book. You may think it slipshod and discursive. It will appear to drag in all sorts of subjects just to make up the requisite length. Actually it contains nothing that has not been selected to carry forward the story or the mood.’ (pp. 192–3)

And appear to digress he does: a detail is retrieved, and its destiny is made apparent just when the reader has probably forgotten about it, while a harmless-seeming joke will explode with bitter significance several pages on. Marks of ellipsis contribute to an impression of the haphazard, of the imperfectly remembered along with his deployment of droll understatement and self-deprecation. Even when Ford apostrophises destiny, he does so casually and humorously.

While ReturntoYesterday took us up to 1914, ItWastheNightingale begins on the day of Ford’s demobilisation, seven years since he had written a word and almost as long since he had spoken to a man of letters. He insists at this point that ‘I was not an artist, I was a broken officer’. Another move, or set of moves, takes us from the distinguished artists to the mute and inglorious to the unnamed and unnumbered dead. Regan, the alcoholic journalist, a smashed crow, mangled by being run over, is an example of these; another is the demobbed soldier who is unfairly punished by a new, petty, bureaucratised Britain – both examples of minds and bodies crushed, maimed and bewildered by war and its aftermath. A ceaseless mobility informs this book: conversations are held on the hoof, a trip into the suburbs forms a resolve to break with London and the movement of time shades into an awareness of mutability, conflict and decay. The first part of the memoir charts a shifting but inexorable flow towards the determination to leave behind an England which is no longer home to Ford. While for him ‘every artist is my fellow countryman’, England has its writers on the run, disavowing its artists, leaving its cultural production to foreigners, and happy to settle back to savouring the complacencies of Charles Lamb and Punch. The betrayals and disappointments of this period are announced in a striking, dream-like scene at a party given at the French embassy, where Ford finds himself out of his element:

I stood then alone and feeling conspicuous – a heavy blond man in a faded uniform in those halls of France. Pale faces swam, inspectantly, towards me. But, as you may see fishes do round a bait in dim water, each one checked suddenly and swam away with a face expressing piscine distaste. I imagined that the barb of a hook must protrude somewhere from my person and set myself to study the names and romantic years of the wines that M. Berthelot had provided for us. (p. 7)

Ford is here ‘a fish in not quite the right water’, as he says later on of Galsworthy (one of Ford’s most subtle effects involves the diffusion of apparently casual idiom so as to contribute to a texture of metaphorically rich motifs). Within a sequence of deceptively casual reminiscences a subtle set of oppositions is set up, between artist and commissariat, France and England, wines and spirits. Ford associates himself with the first term of all these pairings: he has been betrayed by Arnold Bennett as France has been betrayed by Lloyd George, and his dreams of returning to Provence are thwarted when the government refuses him a passport. This spectre at the feast has told him that he is ‘as good as dead as a writer’, and he is trapped between two worlds. Nightingale is all about passages from one state into another, Rubicons crossed (another phrase used casually of Gals worthy), and Ford’s genius is to revivify these dead metaphors, actualising and rendering them with all the physically sharp chiselling of impression. Having said that it was the death of Proust which led him to again take up a serious pen, Ford makes this pen actual, something which is physically lost, longed for and replaced by the pen with which Parade’sEnd will be written. In another section, various memories and impressions of the Parisian literary scene are punctuated by the reversion to Ford waiting at the Café de Flore for Joyce, who, we are reminded with a kind of comic inexorability, is getting later literally by the minute. We should take with a pinch of salt Ford’s insistence that he is ‘hazy as to … chronology’ (p. 15). The nightingale appears, disappears, calls, reappears. Such are the narrative’s enfoldings of various time-frames and speeds that the illusion or impression of life is maintained. As William H. Gass has pointed out, impressionism has come to connote the vague and indistinct, while its original sense will have been of a sharp and indelible marking of hard experiences. This sharpness is to be found in Ford’s impressions. A recurrent technique is to have several associative clusters of reminiscence orbiting round an actual, and very physically realised series of instants, such as the crossing of a road in each of the three cities. Besides the negotiation of the Place de la Concorde crossing already described, there is the shift from London’s Campden Hill to another road crossed, at East Fourteenth and Fifth in New York, where Ford and Theodore Dreiser share declarations of each other’s genius. The hesitations of the kerb at Campden Hill (an allusion surely to Proust’s famous uneven paving stone in TimeRegained, set in a place itself significant, representative of the arts at their height in London) occupies a moment in real time, but the associations and determinations are interleaved and strung out over forty pages between first and last mention, going back as far as 1903 and forward to the writer’s present. For Ford, it is axiomatic that the artist has a divine right to existence, and that it is only by its arts that a nation can be saved (pp. 69–70). ‘The rest of humanity was merely the stuff to fill graveyards.’ It is very rare for an axiom to be delivered, as Ford does, in the past tense and with a specified addressee. Thus the axiomatic is naturalised, drained of its willed sense of universal purport.

If the Francophile Hueffer was never to be the most stolid of Englishmen, his ties to the cosmopolis of London, a city whose soul he had once charted, were much stronger, harder to break. The full significance of the moment at the kerb now emerges. He had always been at his happiest when exploring London, or that part of London which was his. ‘But as I extended my foot to make that crossing something snapped. It was the iron band round the heart that had hitherto made it London’s own’ (p. 64). ItWastheNightingale rehearses the physical horrors of war, now haunting London for the first time in 250 years, and presents them powerfully, but it also feeds into Parade’sEnd as being about worry, or as Ford has it, ‘the minor malices and doubts’ and ‘the shadows … alive with winged malices’. Worn out, Ford faces his final moment of destiny at Red Ford, where his life is wagered on the behaviour of shallots boiling in a pot and, saved, he determines to become a smallholding farmer. Just as, comically, he affectionately names his potatoes after great writers of his acquaintance, so the writers in turn are presented as familiar animals: Galsworthy as dog, Moore as wolf. A goat is named Penny because of its resemblance to Ezra Pound. Ford writes a movie screenplay and translates Sophocles for the West End Stage, but loses out through dishonoured cheques and the false economy of not having made a copy of his manuscript.

Moving to France, the burden of quotation from nature falls from him. A lightness of heart intrudes: a contract from Hollywood buys him his pigs; he starts writing again; he changes his name from his original Germanic one now that the shedding of this name is no longer ignobly advantageous to him. Yet for all its anecdotal lightheartedness in places, the work to which ItWastheNightingale remains closest in tone is Pound’s HughSelwynMauberley, marrying a satirical disdain for England’s descent into tawdry cheapness with a bitter anger at the suffering of war and needless sacrifice ‘for an old bitch gone in the teeth/For a botched civilisation’. In the tenth section of the sequence, Pound imagines the pastoral retreat at Red Ford as a kind of grave:

Beneath the sagging roof

The stylist has taken shelter,

Unpaid, uncelebrated,

At last from the world’s welter

Nature receives him;

With a placid and uneducated mistress

He exercises his talents

And the soil meets his distress.

The haven from sophistications and contentions

Leaks through its thatch;

He offers succulent cooking;

The door has a creaking latch

The second book relates the acquisition, at last, of the passport which will allow him to return to his beloved France, a passport accompanied or prompted by the writing of four books. But the ghost-like undertaker-critic still insists that his work looks like it was written in his dressing-gown and slippers, a portrait of the artist which Ford is happy to acquiesce in, for his own reasons. If art conceals art, an image of the artist in dressing gown or surprised in his bathrobe like the emperor Nero, as incongruous as a farmer in evening wear, conceals an ambition to be taken as seriously as any of the modernists:

I am not Picasso. My sympathies are altogether with revolutionary work and with no other. I would rather read work of Miss Stein or Mr Joyce or look at the work of Picasso himself than consider the work of a gentleman who wrote like Thackeray or drew like Apelles. They may write or draw better than either master: I can do without them. But I cannot see that my own work is in the least revolutionary. I go on my way like a nice old gentleman at a tea-party. Occasionally it strikes me that if I change a little my method of sequence in presenting scenes, or shorten my sentences and occasionally put in instead of chasing out all assonances, I may feel a little better. But all over the world there are, I am aware, gentlemen and ladies lamenting that I don’t write as I wrote when I was eighteen or twenty-seven or thirty-six or forty-five. Or even fifty-four. (p. 162)

At the centre of these memoirs is a period of three weeks of which Ford’s memory is completely lost, and it is this blank which forms the seed for his masterpiece, Parade’sEnd, Very slowly, and through waves of interweaving significance, the real purpose of ItWastheNightingale emerges: as a companion volume to Parade’sEnd, reiterating the concerns of the tetralogy with renewed urgency, while supplementing its portrayal of a civilisation in decay with the use of a mobile and relativising first person, as in Proust or as in TheGoodSoldier. The literary geography of Paris is necessary to the work, not vice-versa. Through the shadows of memory the characters of Valentine Wannop and Christopher and Mark Tietjens emerge and take shape, the ideas and themes of Parade’sEnd coalesce. ‘I had two of my principal characters. Proust was dead and I did not see anyone else who was carrying on the ponderous work that seemed to be needed by the world.’ Here the full burden of Ford’s work is pointed out: Ford wants the novelist to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time (p. 180). Further to that. Ford wishes, against his own aesthetic instincts, to write in Parade’sEnd ‘a book with the very grand purpose of obviating all wars’.

ItWastheNightingale closes on a low key, with the death of the transatlanticreview, with its editor dwelling on internationalism, the need to avoid war, the transience of literary fame. Parade’sEnd is seen right through to its publication and reception, always told, as it were, in passing. The final tone is elegiac, telling of resignation and modest probity, aligning the author with his hero Tietjens, the last Englishman, fond of all his countries but always, wherever he is, an expatriate.

John Coyle

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The text is that of the first British edition (William Heinemann, 1934). This incorporates some 120 minor alterations from the first American edition (J.B. Lippincott, 1933). These changes are invariably cosmetic, comprising the correction of misprints, repetitions and other small infelicities, and the substitution of British for American spellings.

TO EUGENE PRESSLY, ESQUIRE

MydearPressly:

You have read every word of this book; thus yon are the only man in the world of whom I can say for certain—or shall ever be able to say for certain!—that he has read every word of it…. To whom can a book be more fittingly dedicated than to its only reader?

I hope you have liked it. If it upholds too noisily for your tastes the banners of the only perfect republic and the only permanent kingdom, forgive that. That is nothing against diplomatists. The Kingdom of the Arts has many subjects who have never employed for expression the permanencies of paper, canvas, stone or catgut, reed and brass. And unless a diplomatist be an artist in those impermanencies, the fates and boundaries of nations, he is no true ambassador. Indeed it is amongst the prouder records of your temporal republic—along with that of France—that it has not infrequently employed and still employs creative artists as its communicating links with other lands. And, since I notice that two of the typed pages of this book have an eagle for their watermark, may I not pride myself on the fact that I thus become, as it were microscopically, a floor-sweeper in the embassy of our lord Apollo, sovereign over Parnassus.

Theysayeverymanhasitinhimtowriteonegood book. This then may be my one good book that you get dedicated to you. For the man’s one good book will be his autobiography. This is a form I have never tried—mainly for fear of the charge of vanity. I have written reminiscences of which the main features were found in the lives of other people and in which, as well as I could, I obscured myself. But I have reached an age when the charge of vanity has no terrors as against the chance of writing one good book. It is the great woe of literature that no man can tell whether what he writes is good or not. In his vain moments he may, like Thackeray, slap his forehead and cry: “This is genius” … But in the dark days when that supporter abandons him he will sink his head over his page and cry: “What a vanity is all this!” … And it is the little devil in human personality that no man can tell whether he is vain or not. He may—as you certainly have every reason to—assert that at least he has a good nose. But if I advanced the same claim? Or a man might limit his boasting to saying that he was a good trencher-man, and yet be vain since he may delight in wolfing down what,in the realm of the haute cuisine, is mere garbage.

I have tried then to write a novel, drawing my material from my own literary age. You have here two adventures of a once jeune, homme pauvre—a poor man who was, once young. In rendering them, I have employed every wile known to me as novelist—the timeshift, the progression d’effet, the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action. If then it is a bad book it is merely because of my want of skill, or because my canons are at fault.

Iwokethismorning,asismyhabit,justbeforedawnandlaylooking,throughthemosquito-net,attheharbingersofdayandthinkingofwhatIwasgoingtowritenow…. Thesewords!Isaw,inthephantasmagoricwayinwhichoneperceivesthingsatdawnwhenone’sthoughtsareelsewhere—somethinggrossdescendingthetrunkoftheoakwhoseboughsoverhangmybed.Fromtherethenightingalehasawakenedmejustbeforeeverydawnforhowlongnow! …Itwasarat,andthenightingale,asitmoved,glideddown,justthreeinchesfromitseyes.

Itseemedafantasticandhorribleconjunction,thatofratandnightingale.Butafterall,allpoetsareatoutswith … letussay,theirbankers.Havingbeen,asyousee,aneditor,Idislikesayingthateditorsareallthesameasrats….

Iwasfilledwithhorroruntilinamomentpeacedescendedonme.Thecatofthehousejumpedfromtherooftoalowerroofandsotothepathbesideme.Andatoncetherewentupthelongwarningnoteofthemaleandtheanswering,croakingmenaceofthefemalenightingalewhenshesitsonhereggs.Theywerethensafe….Itisasfutileforarattotrytoriflethenestofthenightingalewhois nyctalops asforabankertoruinthehomeofapoet.Thebirds,seeinginthedark,willflyattherat’sweakeyesuntilthe discomfltedquadrupedshufflesawaydownthetrunkandthefemalebirdagainsitsintriumphandpeace….Asforthebanker,thepoet—beitBertrandeBornorMr.PoundorMr.Hemingway—willaddresstohimsomeimmortal sirventes orpophimintoanovelsothathewillneveragainholduphishead….

ThenassoonasitwaslightIwentdownintothegardentoplanout,inthepitilessMediterraneandrought,theirrigationoftheday.Thesemi-tropicalplantsandtrees—theoranges,lemons,peppers,vinesandtherestcandowithoutwaterforalongtime.Musk-andwater-melonsmusthavealittlewaterandtheNorthernplantsthatforhissinsthepinkNordichasimportedhere—thepeas,beans,stringbeans,cabbages,carrots,andsuchgross,over-greenmatter,musthaveagreatdealorincontinentlydie.ItwasawholecampaignofirrigationchannelsthatIhadmentallytoarrangeforadaygivenupentirelytowritingandtheaffairsoftheparchedearth.

AsIwentbackupthehilltositdownandwritethisIsaw,drinkingatoppositeendsofmysinkingcistern,thegreatsnakewhoisthreefootlongerthanmysix-footstretchandtheemeraldgreen, vermilion-spottedlizardthatisaslongasmyarm.Ifelt satisfaction.Thesecreaturesoneonlyseesdrinkinginthemagichourbetweendarknessandday.TheylookedatmewiththeirfatefulindifferentglancesasIpassed,andwentondrinking.

Formethegreatsnake,messengerofAesculapiustowhomthecockisowed,representsDestiny,thescarlet-spottedlizard,theimpsofdiscomfortandthelittledevilsofdoubtthatbesetone’sdailypath.Iknowthatwriter’scrampwillmakemehavetolaydownmypenoftento-dayandthe femme de ménage willbemorethanusuallylikeasnakeinthekitchen.ThesearetheremindersthatFatesendsussothatinourbakedsanctuaryourstomachsbenottoohaughtyortooproud….ButIknowthatthegreatsnake willsoonswallowtherat.Itistruethat,being inscrutableandaugust,itwilleventuallyriflethenightingale’snest.ButitisfittingthatLilithshouldruinpoets….

Soyouseethat,todate,thisfairy-talehasfounditsappropriateclose.Thepersonsofthetransatlanticdramaarescatteredbutallactive.You,itistrue,areinPariswithKatherineAnne,andMr.GlenwayWestcottisstillfaithfultothegreatFaubourg;Mr.PoundisProfessorofEconomicsinRapallo;Mr.HemingwayiswritinganovelinKeyWestifheisnotmomentarilyshootinglionsinArkansawordivingtorecoverbottlesofPerrier-Jouetfromasunkenrum-runner.Mr.NathanAshissomewhereintheStateofNewYork;Mrs.RodesisshininglydirectingtheinteriordecoratingofthechiefbutnotcapitalcityofthatState;theconscientiousobjectorisontheothersideofthefrontiernearhere;theWhiteRussianColonelisIdon’tknowwhere;Mrs.FosterisinSchenectady.Andsothecitysittethsolitaryandtheroundtableisdissolved….

Butall,alltheKnights,besure,intheirfastnessesseektheHolyGrail….IreadinthenewspapersthatMr.Pound—momentarilyinParis—announcesthathisopera Cavalcanti—morepowertohis bâton!—willbebroadcastedinamonthorso.Fromtimetotimehewritesalineofpoetry,too.

Thefloodoflaymenwillintheendsubmergeusallanddanceonourgraves.ThelaymanhatestheartistastheatrociousMr.Hitlerhateslearning.IndeedthelaymanregardstheartistasasortofJew.But,tothemeasureofthelightvouchsafed,mylatecomrades shineintheirplacesandmaybecontent.The pogroms willcomebut,evenasHeine,thegreatestofGermanpoets,theyhavelitbeaconsthatposterityshallnotwillinglyletdie.

Ihadintendedtocontinuethisnoveltotheedgeoftheabyssof1929.ButIfoundthatsubsequenteventsaretoovividinmymind.Icannotgetthemintoanyperspective.Moreover,itisinexpedienttowriteoflivingpeopleintheirtoonearpresents.Itisallrighttowriteofamaninhishotyouth.Hewillregardtherecordwithcomplacency,knowingthathehasnownearedperfection.Butwriteabouttheir immediatepresentsandnotonlywillyoufindyourselfinahornet’snest—whichissomuchmynormalsituationthatitwouldleavemefairlyindifferent—buttheywillbedeeplyandreallygrieved—whichwouldbehateful!Ioncesaidtothebeautifulandhowmuchregrettedpoet,ElinorWylie,thatthatdayshewaslookingradiantlybeautiful.Asshewas.Shesaidtomewithfury:

“ThatisbecauseyouthoughtIlookedlikeahagyesterday!”andsheneverspoketomeagain.Thatgrievedmesincesheandherhusbandusedtobeverygoodfriendsofminebecause,shesaid,sheandMr.Benetgotengagedoverreadingoneofmypoems.But—whatwasworse—shewasmortallyhurtbythatremarkand,Ihaveheard,nevergotovertheideathatithadsuggestedtoher.So,formynovelabouttheyearsimmediatelyprecedingsuper-Armageddonyouwillhavetowaitanotherdecade…. Andgladofit!saysyou….

Idon’twonder.Duringallthesemonthsyou,as Benedict,shouldhavebeensquiringKatherineAnnePorter-Presslyto Maxim’s, orthe Moulin Rouge, orthe Chat Noir … Iseeasmileofpoliteironycomeoveryourdiplomat’sinscrutability:butwhatdoIknoworcareaboutthetranspontinenightlifeoftheVilleLumièreto-day!—Insteadyouhaverushedhomefromyourembassyatthedays’endsandhavespentthehourswithKatherineAnneporingovermyminuteandindecipherablescript.ItisascandalandIarealscoundreltohaveletyoudoit…. Youthandbeautyshouldbebetterserved,thoughtheskyfallinonthemanuscriptsofallnovels.

Butthereisthis:WhilstyousatquietathomeKatherineAnnehaswrittensomemoreofher exquisiteshortstones.Thuswhatyouth,beautyandthenightclublostonthefugitiveswings,Literaturehasgainedforherroundaboutsthatareeternal….

Andthereisthis,too …Idaresaythat,inthecourseofthisnovelIhaverenderedhumanityasratherchequered.Peoplewhooweonealittle gratitudeoralittleconsiderationnowandthenfallshort.One’sewelambwillshowtheterribleteethofthelambinTurgenev’sstory…. Butyouhavedonethatheavyandmonotonouswork—Idarenotsay“fortheloveofGod”—butthenwithoutanyfainthopeofanyreturn.ForwhatreturncouldIpossiblymakeyouexcepttosubscribemyself

Withinfinitegratitude,

FORD MADOX FORD.

CAP BRUN

ON THE FEAST OF ST. EULOGIUS

MCMXXXIII

PART ONE

“DOMINEDIRIGENOS”

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

THERE WAS NEVER A DAY SO GAY FOR THE Arts as any twenty-four hours of the early ’twenties in Paris. Nay, twenty-four hours did not seem sufficient to contain all that the day held of plastic, verbal and harmonious sweets. But I had a year or so to wait before that ambience was to enfold me. I begin with the day of my release from service in His Britannic Majesty’s army—in early 1919.

Naked came I from my mother’s womb. On that day I was nearly as denuded of possessions. My heavier chattels were in a green, bolster-shaped sack. All the rest I had on me—a worn uniform with gilt dragons on the revers of the tunic…. All that I had once had had been conveyed in one direction or the other. That was the lot of man in those days—of man who had been actively making the world fit for … financial disaster. For me, as writer I was completely forgotten and as completely I had forgotten all that the world had before then drummed into me of the art of conveying illusion to others. I had no illusions myself.

During my Xmas leave in a strange London I had gone to a party given at the French Embassy by M. Philippe Berthelot, since ambassador himself and for long principal secretary to the French Foreign Office. I swam, as it were, up the Embassy steps. Then I was indeed a duck out of water…. The party was given for the English writers who with the implements of their craft had furthered the French cause. And there they all were, my unknown confrères. It was seven years since I had written a word: it was almost as many since I had spoken to a man of letters. Unknown faces filled the considerable halls that were misty under the huge chandeliers. There was a fog outside…. Unknown and queer!

I cannot believe that the faces of my British brothers of the pen are really more pallid and misshapenly elongated than those of any other country or of any other sedentary pursuit. But there, they seemed all unusually long, pale, and screwed to one side or the other. All save the ruddy face of Mr. Arnold Bennett to which war and the years had added. He appeared like a round red sun rising from amongst vertical shapes of cloud….

But I was not on speaking terms with Mr. Bennett and I drifted as far from him as I could.

Just before the Armistice I had been summoned from my battalion to the Ministry of Information in London. There I had found Mr. Bennett in a Presidential chair. In my astonishment at finding him in such a place I stuttered out:

“How fat you’ve got!”

He said:

“You have to write about terms of peace. The Ministry has changed. France is not going …”

We immediately disagreed very violently. Veryviolently! It was a question of how much the Allies ought to secure for France. That meeting became a brawl. Sir W. Tyrrell got introduced into it at first on the telephone and then personally. He was then Secretary to the Foreign Office and is now British Ambassador in Paris. I have never seen any look so irritated. The chief image of that interview comes back to me as a furnace-hot flush mounting on a dark-bearded cheek. And Mr. Bennett lolling back augustly in his official seat like a marble Zeus on a Greek frieze. I suppose I can be very irritating, particularly when it is a matter of anyone who wants, as the saying was, to do France in the eye. That responsible diplomat uttered language about our Ally! I should think that now, when in his cocked hat he passes the sentry at the door of the Elysée, he would have little chills if he thought of what he then said. I on the other hand had come straight from a company of several million men who were offering their lives so that France might be saved for the world.

When he had stormed out I asked Mr. Bennett if he still wanted my article about the terms of peace. A Chinese smile went over his face. Enigmatic. That was what it was.

He said:

“Yes. Write it. It’s an order. I’ll have it confirmed as such by the Horse Guards if you like.”

I went back to my regiment where, Heaven knows, the work was already overwhelming. I wrote that article on the top of a bully-beef case in between frantic periods of compiling orders as to every conceivable matter domestic to the well-being of a battalion on active service. The article advocated giving to France a great deal more than Mr. Lloyd George’s government desired to give her. A great deal more! As I have said elsewhere, that article was lost in the post—a fate that must be rare for official documents addressed to a great Government department. A week later I received through my Orderly Room an intimation that, as an officer of His Britannic Majesty’s Army I was prohibited from writing for the Press. And I was reminded that, even when I was released from active service, I should still be an officer of the Special Reserve and a paragraph of the Official Secrets Act was quoted to me. I could not think that I was in possession of a sufficiency of Official Secrets to make that intimation worth while, but at that point I had understood Mr. Bennett’s queer smile.

I like what the Boers call slimness and usually regard with pleasure acts of guile attempted against myself. I fancy it must make me feel more real—more worth while!—if a Confidence Trick man attempts to practise on me. But at that party at the Embassy I felt disinclined to talk to Mr. Bennett. Dog should not, by rights, eat dog.

But patriotism and the desire of Dai Bach’s Government to down the French covered in those days hundreds of sins in London town. DaiBach—David darling!—was the nickname given to the then Prime Minister in the Welch Regiment for which in those days I had the honour to look after many intimate details. It pleases me still to read the “character” that decorated my Soldier’s Small Book on my resigning those duties:

“Possesses great powers of organisation and has solved many knotty problems. A lecturer of the first water on military subjects. Has managed with great ability the musketry training of this unit.”

I notice on the day on which I begin this book that Mr. George has attained the age of seventy and that his message to humanity is stated as being, on that occasion, that what is needed to save the world is men who know how to save the world. I could almost have thought that out for myself….

I stood then alone and feeling conspicuous—a heavy blond man in a faded uniform in those halls of France. Pale faces swam, inspectantly, towards me. But, as you may see fishes do round a bait in dim water, each one checked suddenly and swam away with a face expressing piscine distaste. I imagined that the barb of a hook must protrude somewhere from my person and set myself to study the names and romantic years of the wines that M. Berthelot had provided for us.

Their juice had been born on vines, beneath suns of years before these troubles and their names made fifty sweet symphonies…. It had been long, long indeed, since I had so much as thought of even such minor glories as ChâteauNeufduPape or Tavel or Hermitage—though I think White Hermitage of a really good vintage year the best of all white wines. … I had almost forgotten that there were any potable liquids but vinsdupays and a horrible fluid that we called Hooch. The nine of diamonds used to be called the curse of Scotland, but surely usquebaugh—which tastes like the sound of its name—is Scotland’s curse to the world … and to Scotland. That is why Glasgow on a Saturday night is Hell….

A long black figure detached itself from Mr. Bennett’s side and approached me. It had the aspect of an undertaker coming to measure a corpse….. The eyes behind enormous lenses were like black pennies and appeared to weep dimly; the dank hair was plastered in flattened curls all over the head. I decided that I did not know the gentleman. His spectacles swam almost against my face. His hollow tones were those of a funeral mute:

“You used to write,” it intoned, “didn’t you?”

I made the noise that the French render by “!?!?!”

He continued—and it was as if his voice came from the vaults of Elsinore….

“You used to consider yourself a literary dictator of London. You are so no longer. I represent Posterity. What I say to-day about books Posterity will say for ever.” He rejoined Mr. Bennett. I was told later that that gentleman was drunk. He had found Truth at the bottom of a well. Of usquebaugh! That was at the other, crowded end of the room.

That reception more nearly resembled scenes to be witnessed in New York in Prohibition days than anything else I ever saw in London. It must have given M. Berthelot what he would call unefièreidéedelaMuse, at any rate on Thames bank.

Eventually Madame Berthelot took pity on my faded solitariness and Madame Berthelot is one of the most charming, dark and witty of Paris hostesses…. Etexaltavit! …

A month or so later I might, had it not been too dark, have been seen with my sack upon my shoulder, approaching Red Ford.

That was a leaky-roofed, tile-healed, rat-ridden seventeenth-century, five-shilling a week, moribund labourer’s cottage. It stood beneath an enormous oak beside a running spring in a green dingle through which meandered a scarlet and orange runlet that in winter was a river to be forded. A low bank came down to the North. At the moment it loomed, black, against the bank and showers of stars shone through the naked branches of the oak. I had burned my poor old boats.

My being there was the result of that undertaker’s mute’s hollow tones at M. Berthelot’s party. I had told Mme Berthelot, to her incredulous delight, that as soon as the War was finished I should go to Provence and, beside the Rhône, below Avignon, set out at last as a tender of vines and a grower of primeurs. In the lands where grow the grapes of ChâteauNeufduPape, of Tavel and of Hermitage! That had of course been the result of seeing those bottles on the long buffet. For years and years—all my life—I have wanted to live in that white sunlight and, at last, die in a certain house beside the planes of the place in Tarascon. I cannot remember when I did not have that dream. It is the whiteness of the sunlight on the pale golden walls and the castle of the good king René and, across the Rhône, the other castle of Aucassin and Nicolette….

But when at last I was released from service I found myself in a rat-trap. They refused me a passport for France.

I cannot suppose that Mr. George’s government feared that with my single eloquence I should be able to stampede the Versailles Congress into giving France the whole of both banks of the Rhine from Basel to the Dutch frontier. But that singular interference with the liberty of a subject had that aspect—as if they were determined that no Briton should speak for France….

A queer, paradoxical rat-trap! If I cannot say, like Henry James, that I love France as I never loved woman, I can lay my hand on my heart and swear that I have loved only those parts of England from which you can see and most easily escape into the land of Nicolette. And, what was queer, whilst I had been the chained helot that the poor bloody footslogger is supposed to be, I had crossed over to France more times than I can now remember and had passed more time than I can now like to remember in parts of Picardy and French Flanders that I should have been very glad to get out of. Now I was free…. But I was chained to the kerbstone on which I stood, forbidden to make a livelihood and quite unfit to stand the climate in which I found myself.

I paid of course no attention to my being forbidden to write. I did not believe that even with the Defence of the Realm Act at its back Authority could have enforced that prohibition. I was quite ready to chance that and did indeed chance it…. If you have been brought up in England you find it difficult to believe in the possibility of interference with your personal liberty though if, outside that, Authority can hamper the Arts it will hamper the Arts….

But the spectre at M. Berthelot’s feast had told me that I was as good as dead as a writer; I had no one to tell me anything to the contrary, and I was myself convinced that I could no longer write. I had proved it before Red Ford received me.

Some queer lunatics I had been with in the Army had started a queer, lunatic, weekly review. They had commissioned me to write articles on anything under the sun, from saluting in the army to the art of Gauguin and the eastern boundaries of France. I had written the articles and those genial lunatics had received them with wild—with the wildest—enthusiasm. They had also paid really large sums for them. But I knew that they had been the writings of a lunatic.

At the same time a certain Review had asked me to write for it. I had been pleased at the thought. That Review still retained at any rate for me some of the aura that it had when Lord Salisbury who wrote for it had been known as the master of flouts and jeers, and some of the later aura of the days when, under the brilliant editorship of Frank Harris, it had been written for by Mr. Bernard Shaw, Max, Mr. H. G. Wells—and indeed myself.

So I went with pleasure to the office, to find the extremely dingy editorial room occupied by a plump, little, grey man, who welcomed me uproariously. I do not remember his name, but I know that he too seemed to me to be a lunatic. He was both querulous and noisy.

He exclaimed:

“You’re the man I want. You’re the very man to explode all this bunk and balderdash.”

I said: “!?!?!?”

“All this bunk and balderdash,” he repeated. “This heroism in the trenches legend! Explode it! We know it was all nothing but drunken and libidinous bean-feasting. Show the scoundrels up! Blow the gaff on them. You’ve been in it. You know!”

It was the first sound—like the first grumble of a distant storm—the first indication I had that the unchangeable was changing, the incorruptible putting on corruption. Over there we had been so many Rip van Winkles. The —— Review, the Bank of England, the pound sterling, the London County Council, the Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen along with the Marylebone Cricket Club—these things had used to be indubitable and as sure as the stars in their courses. And as unquestioned had been the thin red line!

Alas! I continued to regard that fellow as a lunatic, until, slowly, I realised that his frame of mind was common to the civilian population of London and of the world from Odessa to Seattle. It seemed to me that he was mad to want to turn his Review of all papers into an organ of what in my innocence I took to be pro-Germanism. So I declaimed to him the one ethical axiom that seemed to be still unshaken. Dog, I said, doesn’t eat dog. I might have partaken of drunken and libidinous orgies, but I was not the man to blow the gaff on them…. And I was so sure that he could not succeed in his wild project that I offered to write for him some articles on campaigns that I had not witnessed. I have never been able to make up my mind as to whether or no it was proper to write for organs of whose policy one disapproves. Your name may appear to endorse their mischiefs. But you may counteract some of their bad influence and at least you may occupy some space that otherwise might be given over to working evil. I suppose too that I wanted to try my hand at writing. I am not incorruptible!

He was disappointed, but he accepted my offer.

I had been for the whole period of the war on the Western front, with my nose so close to the grindstone of affairs that, as soon as I had any leisure, I really thirsted to know something about the events of war and of the world outside my own three inches on the map. So I read everything I could lay my hands on about the Hindenburg victory at Tannenberg. Then I wrote an article about what I had read. It was of course a bad thing to do.

I went to the office of that journal to correct the proof. That rotund grey ball of a man was fairly bouncing in his shadows with all his feet off the ground over a long, narrow white slip of newsprint. It ran across and fell over the edge of the table in front of him…. I had thought it right to put into my article something about the sufferings that must have been undergone by the Russians and even by the Germans in those terrible marshes where hundreds of men went to their deaths. It seemed to me that though it might be immoral to suggest that my own comrades had found the trenches anything but gas and gingerbread—for of course on the playing fields of Eton and elsewhere one learns that one must never applaud one’s own side—it might be licit at least to say that the men of our Enemy and of our Ex-Ally had had a bad time…. I learned there that I was wrong. I was so wrong that I was propelled out of that obfusc office as if by a soda-water volcano. It was shouted at me that I was never to come there again.

In the outer, sub-editorial room, very slim, tall and sempiternally youthful, Mr. Stuart Rendal was depressedly holding up a long white slip. My article seemed to pain him as if it had been a severe neuralgia. I for my part was depressed to think that anyone, tall, slim and with the gift of eternal youth, should serve as wage-slave under that explosive little ball of suet. And it was still more depressing that it should be a gentleman and scholar like Mr. Rendal…. As if we had not rendered the world free for heroes!

When I had last seen him he had been the all-powerful editor of the Athenæum. I had always disliked the Athenæum, for its grudging omniscience, its pomposity, its orthodoxy and its hatred of the new in letters…. But that an editor of that awful sheet should “sub” it for such an atomy was as if one should see an ex-president of the United States selling papers outside the White House. And with a sense of comradely affection I said:

“Is that article really so awful, Rendal?”

He said miserably:

“You used, you know, to write fairly. Not really well, but at least grammatically.” But this writing was rotten. When it wasn’t rotten it was incomprehensible. He exclaimed: “What’s the ‘Narw Army’? Is Narw the name of a general or a river? I can’t make head or tail of it.”

I drifted slowly away in mute sign that I accepted his stricture. It was true enough. Whilst my thoughts had been working over that piece of writing they had seemed to me to have broken backs…. When a snake has its back broken the forepart glides ahead in waves, the rest drags in the dust….

A few days later—or a few days before—for I am hazy as to this chronology—the other, lunatic paper had ceased its hilarious career. Just after that earthquake, I paused with one foot off the kerb at the corner of the Campden Hill waterworks, nearly opposite the stable in which, thirteen years before, I had used to breakfast with Mr. Galsworthy. I was about to cross the road. But, whilst I stood with one foot poised in air, suddenly I recognised my unfortunate position….