Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1036
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For the rest, what I found agreeable and stimulating in Flemington was a certain air of democratic simplicity and rectitude.... And that not only in the court-room whilst the court was sitting.
I don’t know why, at an advanced age, I should suddenly begin to find democratic simplicity and rectitude attractive. They are contrary to my traditions and upbringing and I don’t know that they are not hostile to my intelligence and my instinctive sense of morality. For it is certain that I think that the only things that can save the world are a certain Mediterranean brand of slackening off in every department of life — a slackening off in everything from conscious rectitude and its brother sense of acquisitiveness to the sense of efficiency and the hours of labour worked.... So that it would be dreadful if at the end of great labours and many wanderings I should find myself liking the New England Conscience or States which at present seem to me to be the most detestable things in the world and the source of all our present evils.
It is, of course, a matter of climate and latitude. New England virtues — if there are any — are Northern virtues. They consist of rectitude for the sake of gain, honesty which is only the best policy, continence so that you may creep into the back door of heaven, frugality for the sake of adding to your store. But in the Middle States these things already begin to slacken off, New York city being as civilized as Provence itself although the climate makes people bustle more than is altogether agreeable. And New Jersey is nice in a rather careless, rough-and-tumble way, exhibiting itself in the fact that you can’t go along its roads anywhere for a quarter of a mile without finding yourself being offered country honey, authentic eggs, good-looking apples, homemade, bright dolls. That is nice and companionable and shows you that this State is really full of Small Producers.
So that possibly my suddenly finding myself liking the sterner manifestations of virtue in these parages may be merely super-induced by a subconscious, unawares determination to like everything — almost everything — that is an expression of this Cinderella State that lives between New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.... But I bet that nothing will ever make me remotely flinch in my hatred for both Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. For Pennsylvania, beneath a surface softness and gentility which resembles nothing so much as the intense snobbishness of the county of Devon in England — for, bless my soul, I have known quite charming people who have been socially blighted and personally depressed by not being “called upon” in suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburg — suburbs with names like Wivelscombe and Porlock and with atmospheres resembling that of Exeter Cathedral Close... so that what was the war for?... No, not that war, the War of Independence.
... Nevertheless beneath that surface softness — the verb is coming now — Pennsylvania conceals a corundum hardness that lets her — no, not boast — genteely introduce to your notice the fact that, to-day, in spite of Crisis and everything she still manufactures a fifth of the world’s supply of this commodity. She is fourth among the States for that one, produces more million tons of something else than all the rest of the world put together, owns the Liberty Bell, has reafforested seven hundred and twenty-two million acres, or something like that, and last year killed in those acres six hundred and seventy-two thousand nine hundred and six unfortunate English pheasants.... Though from the size of the collar of the specimen photographed to illustratethat statement, the others, if they at all resembled that specimen, must have been precious old, tough birds.... See how once more virtuous excitement makes the sentences run away from one.... But thank goodness our train is still in New Jersey and one can go on talking equably about what one likes.
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I think what I most look for — or, at any rate, what I most like when I find it on this section of the Great Route, is traces of the Jeffersonian Helleno-Roman public spirit. Culturally, for me, Jefferson is the greatest man that this portion of the Route has produced, if only because he fell in love with the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. (I think we may well include New York City, and the State of New Jersey in the hinterland of the Route proper, with, therefore, equal rights of citizenship.) And Jefferson’s sense of Latin virtues was strong enough to let him preserve his affection for Provence and her hinterland long after New England, shocked at the “excesses” of the French Revolution and of Mossieu Genet, had decided to wipe off from her accounts the items of the services of Lafayette and de Grasse in the day of Yorktown.
It is possible that the spirit of the little towns of the Middle States is more Roman and grimmish than Hellenic-Provençal. The city hall of New York, if almost ecstatically lovely in its surroundings and certainly Mediterranean in its inspiration, is not an essentially Greek manifestation; and the public buildings of the little Jersey towns, if Roman enough, are usually rather grimly bare... though to be sure the touching old pile of Rutgers is as softly aesthetic as one needs... as if under Roman Republican sternnesses there yet beat a sentimental heart.... As perhaps there did.
At any rate, in the inspiriting sunlight over the snow, Flemington was a sufficiently admirable frame for the grimmer Latinities of its be-columned brownish courthouse.... A frame really admirable and appropriate except for the really extravagantly efficient central heating of its houses. Of that I can imagine only a very lightly clad Greek Apollo approving. Me, at least, it kept always gasping for breath with my skin prickling all over and my lungs as if filled with ashes. Except for that the frame was very good.
It has never been my privilege, anywhere, to be received into the homes of what the French call the petite bourgeoisie — the more prosperous artisans, the smaller store-keepers, the lesser but comfortably off functionaries, the retired commuters. At Flemington, however — I suppose because they liked what I wrote about their trial — I rather was so received at one time or another during those long weeks. And I felt at home. There were extraordinarily silent men with harsh, hanging hands and Abraham Lincoln-like faces who sat for hours without moving or speaking in rooms all shining linoleum, bentwood furniture, and tombstone-like sewing-machine cases; and very taciturn hard-featured women bent over stoves or polishing stair-balustrades occasionally smiled rather nicely. And oyster-stew for breakfast.... Yes, whatever they may tell you, when the snow is on the ground they do have oyster-stew for breakfast, in Christmas week in the Eastern sea-board, and so they do in Pennsylvania — Dutch Pennsylvania; and the baked beans and pork. And ham and egg and pumpkin-pie and — even the vegetable plate are all amazingly appetizing on a cold sunlit day when you come in slapping your hands.... And I who never wear gloves!... And beans out of an authentic New Jersey bean pot are... well, I won’t say as good as cassoulet de Castelnaudary, but... No, you shall not make me renier mes dieux.... But, taken in conjunction with Flemington apple-jack, which is the best produced in this continent and as good as almost anything produced in the Department of Calvados, on a snowy day, after a long morning in the court-house... O Lord, as said the author of the Serious Call, it is enough.
(Cassoulet de Castelnaudary is made of white haricots, as new as possible, so that it is best eaten in the autumn when the beans come straight off the vines. They are stewed in mutton broth until just tender, then a piece of goose, a piece of mutton, some truffled liver-sausage in slices, a small quantity of tomato juice, fines herbes, and garlic to taste are added. Then the cassoulet in its earthen casserole is put on the corner of the stove to simmer for hours and hours, for twenty-four if you like, or longer. An hour or so before serving it is grantiné’d — sprinkled with breadcrumbs and grated cheese with little lumps of butter and put into the oven. In the famous inn of Castelnaudary there is a stove that has never been out since the fourteenth century and never without a cassoulet on it.... And is this too not an instance of how civilization has gone along the Great Route — the white haricot having gone from Montpellier to Montpelier, Vt.?)
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So, in that rather stern, frugal atmosphere, I felt myself unclose as do Jericho roses in tepid water. They were kind people.... But, oh yes, stern.
At home in my apartment in New York, either the steam-heating does not work or by setting the thermostat to 65° and opening all the windows when the outer temperature is twelve below zero I can find contentment. And when travelling, in all hotels but one in the city of Philadelphia, I have by the same means hitherto been able to obtain the same end. I remember an almost perfect night in the Blackstone in Chicago — in January. But in my hospitable night-quarter in Flemington my lungs were baked; the skin of my forehead pricked as if with electric sparks. The air was so heavy with a citrous furniture polish that I dreamed that I was home in Provence trying to keep off mosquitoes with a stuff called citrine.... And I ask myself, is it stern and frugal and like Thomas Jefferson to coddle yourself with this luxury of heating? When I know it is going to be cold I induce around me the coldest circumstances that I can contrive and wear a minimum of clothing for a week or so. Thus in trousers, a shirt open at the neck, and a tweed jacket for all clothing, I can sit on the November borders of Lac Léman what time the unfortunate New Yorker with a purple nose goes covered in furs and worsteds and the pencil falls again and again from the nerveless fingers of Biala sketching in the Hall of the Nations.
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In Flemington, at two in the morning, I was awakened by my landlady carrying a flashlight and wearing, I imagine, a yellow flannel head-dress, for she was almost invisible behind the glare she turned on my eyes. And I was told I was freezing to death every one in the house... by having opened my windows. It is true that, to get a through draft, I had also left my door ajar.... Oh, and weren’t Biala and I, in this same State, coming down to Flemington in an air-conditioned train that contained, at a temperature of ninety-six, all the gases in the world except atmospheric air... weren’t we almost thrown off the train by a nearly epileptic coloured attendant backed by innumerable quite epileptic passengers.... Because we had opened a window.... So good-bye, kindly New Jersey.
The scarlet-painted, brick house-fronts of Trenton are all round us.... I have always thought of Trenton as a pleasant, free-and-easy town, full of clubs where warm men all day push pasteboards over green baize.... I may be wrong, but the men from Trenton I have met have always been of that type.... Carrying black bags and hurrying back to Trenton to play auction and drink.... Calvados 1892! That at least is what I wish them.
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The train has jumped over a brook. Biala looks intrepid but depressed; my heart sinks into my gums.
We are in Penn’s State.
“But cheer up,” I say, grasping the time-table. “If we survive, our Wilmington pack-mules shall before night have brought us to the town — outside the borders of this State — where there is one of the most charming little, simple chapels you will ever have seen. Therein sleeps Lee.... And I pray thee, Sir Lancelot, that thou come again to this land and bring Jefferson with thee.... But, in case we succumb, we are, in Pennsylvania, as near the sulphurous region to which Lancelot and Jefferson and the knights of the Round Table did not go... as in any other place.”
V. WHEELS
For Heaven’s sake let us get out of this train and think. I can’t bear these people’s faces.
... I knew that lunch would upset you.
. Where are we? Where on earth are we? I shut my eyes to get through Philadelphia. We might be anywhere.
.. The last station said it was Merian.
.. Marion, Va.? Let’s get out and see Sherwood Anderson.
... No, Merian, Pennsylvania, where the Barnes Collection is. Somewhere near Bryn Mawr. The next station is Paoli.
... Let’s get out there. Esherick will let us sit in his studio in the woods and give us something real to eat out of his garden.
... It would be nice to. But it will keep us longer in Pennsylvania. You say you want to get out of this State.
... No, I’ve come to a conclusion and I want to think back over my reasoning. And I’ve decided that to think about Pennsylvania you have to do so in Pennsylvania. You can’t think of this State when you are out of it. You want to forget it.... And this train is falling into decay. I can’t think where things are falling into decay. I hate success like hell, and Pennsylvania is the brightest jewel on the forehead of the system that is ruining us. The only bright one left according to its publicity writers.
... Sure, it would be nice to sit in Esherick’s studio and have some real food to eat. But you’d better step lively. These trains are so slow you can’t tell whether they’re moving or stopping in a station.
.. Let me make myself plain. I’d rather think where things are succeeding than falling into decay. I used to do a lot of thinking in trains.... Why, I wrote part of the Half Moon — about Hendryk Hudson — on the cars about here. Thirty years ago when I was working on that farm I told you of, near Merian. We’ve just passed it. But then railways were booming. Now they’re dying I want to be shut of them. On a pack mule.... Pack mules will never die.
... Hurry.... Hurry.... Hurry.... You’re forgetting your grip.
... I want to be quite plain. I’d rather be where there’s success and happy people than in a place in decay. I hate the quality of Toulon’s success.... I mean Pennsylvania’s, but I prefer it to crumbling trains. And according to her statisticians Pennsylvania... There is Esherick at the end of the platform.... What did you do with the etching of Dreiser that he gave me? We mustn’t lose that.
... Hullo, Esherick, you look blooming.... What I was saying is that according to her own statistics Pennsylvania is the district that has felt the Crisis less than any other place in the world.... Except, of course, Toulon.
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A dim studio in which blocks of rare woods, carver’s tools, medieval-looking carving gadgets, looms, printing presses, rise up like ghosts in the twilight while the slow fire dies in the brands.... Such a studio built by the craftsman’s own hands out of chunks of rock and great balks of timber, sinking back into the quiet woods on a quiet crag with, below its long windows, quiet fields parcelled out by the string-courses of hedges and running to a quietly rising horizon... such a quiet spot is the best place to think in.
And let Esherick be moving noiselessly about in the shadows, with a plane and a piece of boxwood, or swinging backwards the lever of his press, printing off his engravings. Or pouring a hundred times heavy oil and emery powder on one of the tables he has designed, and rubbing it off with cloths to get the polish exactly true, and bending down again and again to get the sheen of the light along the polished wood... those are the conditions you need for thought. Because they present to your mind neither success nor failure, but conditions coeval with the standing rocks and the life of man. There have always been craftsmen and the craftsmen have always been the best men of their time, because a handicraft goes at a pace commensurate with the thoughts in a man’s head. The craftsman is a connoisseur; he looks along the wood that he has planed; the table-top he has made and polished; the shoe sole he has just stitched; the back of the book he has just bound. Until it is just so and a little more, he is not content. His device is “make a good job of it,” and scrawled with his broad-leaded pencil on the whitewash of his workshop wall are the words: “By hammer and hand all Art doth stand.” So, if he turns his attention to other things, it is ten to one he will exact good jobs from others. He will have good food cooked to a turn; good, sound wine in a good-looking glass; well-woven cloth for his back; good feathers in a well-stuffed bed... or maybe horse-hair. He will have good stout books that his mind can chew on; he will see that his cathedral climbs beautifully to heaven; that it gives him pleasure with its frescoes, good emotion with its music, and good comfort with its doctrine. He will have done his travelling as a journeyman and have seen that the world is good; now he will sit by the fire to hear what wonders there are still doing in foreign climes, and he will tell such a travelling fellow to bring him at his next coming such a tool from Toledo, such woollens from Bradford, or such and such sweetmeats from Montélimar for his children. And, above all, he will have good government and peace.
Mr. Kipling, apparently thinking that the machinery and middle classes of Pennsylvania were doomed sempiternally to endure, wrote in his hymn to the spirit of the United States of his time:
“The things that truly last when men and time have passed, They are all in Pennsylvania this morning,” or if that is not what the hymn means it is so in tune with Mr. Kipling’s spirit and with the spirit of the dreadful day in which it was written that that might very well be what it does mean. It is the dream of the Technocrat of Mount Kisco; of the Machine that has usurped all human functions, going on and on till all humanity has passed from the earth.
It is not a new struggle this. I remember hearing years ago William Morris arguing with Engels, Marx’s son-in-law, and the joint author with Marx of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. And it might for all the world have been myself arguing with the Technocrat, except that I am not, like Morris, a sentimentalist, and that Engels, unlike the Technocrat, was not a sadist dyspeptic — and that I almost never argue on sociological subjects.
I am not doing it now; I am expressing likes and dislikes and prophesying conditionally. That is to say, that I am asserting that unless the craftsman takes again his position in our society, our civilization of the Great Route will for two reasons pass into chaos. For two reasons: the Machine will break down over its economics and mankind will become effete. We are already half-way there. And what is the good of being a Technocrat dictator if you cannot digest a slice of Thanksgiving turkey? Or have to have your stalled automobile pushed off a ferry by little boys?
It will have to be one or the other; take it or leave it, I don’t care. I shall go on for as long as I live, spending half my activities on my vegetable garden and the other half doing what I am doing now. I am neither sociologist nor politician. I am an onlooker stating the result of conclusions that have taken me half a century to arrive at.... The half-century that has passed since Walter Atterbury and I went sailing to the next State but one.... During those years I have rarely been still for more than three or four months on end. I have rolled my hump along, on mule back, in dog-carts, on liners, in carriers’ carts, on trains, autobuses, army waggons, my feet, looking at things and listening to men talking. And all the while growing something in soup dishes or aware that something was growing itself for me on the slopes above the Mediterranean — or the Channel.... And now putting down what I think about it all.
