Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1040
But that, horrible as it is... for it is horrible to think of us Nordics spreading corruption even along the great oval swathe where once reigned the Golden Age... (and indeed you do taste for a moment some of the peace and joy of that Age when you consume with a tiny glass of Romanée Conti 1929 peas prepared really in the manner of France).
I think we might as well at once set millstones about our necks and seek the deep sea....
But that is not the case worse than that of Philadelphia that I am thinking of. That case strikes me much nearer home. Much, much, alas! nearer home.
§
I have seen in a generation Philadelphia turn from a sleepy town of red-brick houses, marble mounting-blocks, and the Liberty Bell, into the horror of limeworks, gum factories, and poison gas that we passed through to get here this afternoon. (I know, of course, that the city, suddenly conscious that that is not such a good face to present to the traveller, has plans out to turn all that waterside Maremma into Philadelphian forests, pheasant nests, fertile fields, and Philosophers’ walks. But that day is not yet.)
Well, in a generation I have seen the Keystone of the Keystone State descend into that Avernus. But in revenge I have seen the little old New York that used to be good enough for me — the little old city that ended at Fifty-seventh Street so that buffalo roamed in Central Park and Indians reared their tepees in what is now the Spanish quarter on Lennox Avenue.... But I forgot; Professor Cox warned me that it is dangerous to talk of those old days before cellophane.... Anyhow, in that same generation I have seen that little old place become a world centre where the best Africans and Asiatics go when they die, and in which only the most superfine Europeans deserve to live.... So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Baton Rouge!
You will have observed from my prose that I am growing excited.
I am thinking of what I have seen in ten years — not in the course of a generation — on the very shores of the Mediterranean, on the most glorious forehead and frontal of Provence herself.
§
There was a city and port there that not ten years ago was near an earthly paradise. I have known it for about the tale of years of a man in the prime of life and for long my spiritual home has been on its outskirts. It was walled, with real Philosophers’ groves on the fortifications; it had little, old-enough streets; the kindest and brightest of market women beneath avenues of giant plane trees; a genial stationary population of an ingenuous honesty; a floating population of Moors, Arabs, Spaniards, African Negroes, sailors ashore, its crowds being a gay delight. It had a theatre and opera where serious performers performed serious works; it had one of the best classical libraries in the world outside the great centres of world-learning. You could dance there to admirable orchestras. There was a café of august traditions where there met nightly through the season the greatest and most agreeable writers, painters, and dilettanti that France and half a dozen other countries could show. You ate there fairly well — you do not as a rule eat well in Provence. But the material was fresh and not too inferior. In addition, as we knew to our delight, it was the cheapest place on God’s good earth and the most honest and obliging.
It is to-day the dearest and its shopkeepers are as dishonest as the meanest Levantines in the bazaars of Asia Miner and as insolent as... But I cannot think of any people so insolent. It is the only place in the world that has not felt the Crisis.... For, whatever the publicity agents of Pennsylvania may say, I do not believe that her withers are completely unwrung.... Not completely! I remember a few of the things that that Pharaoh-like violinist told me about the state of Pittsburg to-day.
§
At any rate, my spiritual home has become as degraded as the worst back suburb of Pittsburg. As if it were a mining town in boom years its miserable little cement shacks have spread like rashes all over the faces of the solemn mountains; the shady groves along the fortifications have gone; the fortifications have been cleared away, leaving wildernesses of rubble and brick that speculators have surrounded with degraded imitations of sky-scrapers; the once agreeable population has been snowed under by a dull-faced, depressed crowd of industrial workers come from all the corners of the country; the market women are as likely to curse you as to call you — if you are a lady—”my belle”... though they still call you “ma belle” now and then; the theatre is given over to the most vulgar of performances; the famous café has been pulled down to give place to a five and ten; the great plane trees that used to shade and beautify enormously the central boulevard have been cut down.... And, as you remember — for the Press of the World hilariously delighted in it — for three days last year we had mass rioting and bloodshed in our streets. The miserable imported industrial workers were utterly unable to live on their quite respectable wages — they are the highest paid workers in the country — because of the fantastic prices of the commonest necessities for existence. So they paraded with red flags and for three days held the main streets of the town whilst the municipal police ran around in the back streets and bashed in the heads of elderly gentlemen looking in at shop windows and the gardes mobiles caracoled gallantly on their prancing steeds over the bricks and rubble of the empty squares. That, of course, is political. A prudent police force does not interfere with rioters in a city whose municipality may become Communist at the next elections.
§
And what has been more lamentable from my point of view has been the complete deterioration of the countryside for miles around. The skin disease of tawdry shack-villas has, exactly as in the case of Philadelphia, driven out the truck-growers, small producers, and village craftsmen. The village shops have nothing local or fresh to sell; for miles round the city the little shop windows are filled with nothing but canned goods and packet articles exorbitantly priced.
... And the miserable industrial and white-collared trolley-commuters ask nothing better. The women are unable to cook; to bargain; many of them cannot even keep their shacks clean — all these failings being extraordinary in French women.... But this dejected population is nothing. It is not French; it is not Provençal; it is not even moko-hybrid, Italian-Southern French. It is just the pallid-faced, helpless, hopeless spawn of civilization that may be found in the back-suburbs of any industrial city everywhere.... It is true that many of them have radios and some even cheap cars.
§
And this civilization of a countryside that for a couple of thousand years had gone on living the rather voluptuous, easy, careless life of their Roman ancestors has come, as I have said, with the rapidity of gold or oil-rush towns. It has been a really extraordinary thing to watch.
Almost every great city that I have known — Paris, London, Marseilles, Brussels, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Rome — has undergone the process of standardization in a commonplace vulgarity. But with them it has gone relatively slowly. A medieval palace here or there has been pulled down to make way for a cinema; roads have been straightened, clearing away in the process triumphal arches and cathedrals; cafés that were famous centres of intellectual life have been swept away and replaced by department stores unrecognizably resembling the tawdry, cheap store next door; market gardens and great parks here and there in the outskirts of all these cities have gradually succumbed to the skin-disease of commuters’ shacks until one day one has realized that there is nothing left on the face of the earth for miles but that smallpox. And a similar inundation of exorbitantly priced, canned and packet goods has swept away the regional specialties. And most of the inhabitants have radios and cheap cars on the gradual payment system. And even refrigerators in which their stale food may be kept to get still more stale and tasteless and health-destroying. But that process in those other cities has taken a generation. In my spiritual home-town it has gone like a speeded-up educational film. Nordics — say all whoever uttered the word “efficiency” commendatorily. It is difficult to limit your Northern boundaries very exactly — but that would be a sort of shibboleth. We must put beyond the pale — we must draw our wavering Mason and Dixon line remorselessly beneath every tract of the earth where efficiency is an indigenous growth. That would do the trick. That would let in the Rhône valley where you eat better than a god for nineteen francs and keep out Geneva, where Calvin walked by Lake Leman if he ever went out of doors. It would let in Burgundy and Paris and the South Coast and London, and keep out Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Liège, Birmingham, Leeds, and the Black Country. We might let out a little loop line through the forest of the Ardennes and so take in Brussels which has still some lowsy, frowsy quarters and one perfect restaurant and a gallery of nearly perfect Primitives with the best Brueghel and the best Poussin and the best Kranachs in the world... and the best market square.
Then we should draw the line across the Atlantic, taking in the Azores and the Madeiras and the Canaries and landing in South New Jersey. So we should take in Maryland and Delaware and all the land that Messrs. Dixon and Mason considered to be beneath their line — as far South as the Northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Thus we could keep out Pennsylvania where there has been no Crisis. And slipping up through the parts of New Jersey that are below the line, we could loop in Trenton and Rutgers and Princeton because of her spire — and I wouldn’t resent it if you let in the bathing-places on the coast and any truck-gardening-small-producing townships... and Elizabeth because Steevie is buried there... and that filling-station where the bus stopped and there were nice lawns and bright flowers and they were mowing with scythes.... And anywhere else you like until we go over the Palisades and take in New York where — I had almost said: Thank God — the Crisis was about as bad as could be.
Yes, we must get in New York.... I for the moment am bossing this Route, if you please, and I’m damned if I will leave out the only great city that I can inhabit with comfort.... I know that, when it is a matter of climate, the patient New Yorker will insist on my inserting here a note — as to how the steam heating of all the apartments I have had in the course of a generation on Manhattan Island invariably gave up whenever the thermometer went below freezing.... Invariably! And the steam-heating of all my friends in the Village, so that I could never at such times either warm my feet on their radiators or take a bath in their bathrooms.... And how my built-in refrigerator always went off duty whenever the temperature went above 102° Fahrenheit, or we wanted ice-cubes for cocktails or ice water.... And how the Fifth Avenue landlord of my pre-’40 last winter’s apartment spent a fortnight in it with claw-hammers and wrenches and hand-pumps, saying in chorus with his assistant with their strong Armenian accents: “Yes, Mr. Ford. No, Mr. Ford, you’ll haf zum nice eat termorrer. Yes, Mr. Ford; no, Mr. Ford.” And of how... But that is, perhaps, enough of that.
§
How romantically the roof ridge of the old house bulks against the stars now the mist has a little settled. There is a poem by Walter de la Mare which begins:
“‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,”
and ends:
“And how the silence surged softly backwards
After the plunging hoofs were gone,”
and which contains the beautiful lines:
“When he remembered the dark night’s
Inhospitality.”
Well, the house looks like that. It is very old and kindly. But no dark night’s inhospitality for us! We are going to eat baked and boiled and roasted meats and fishes and game off platters of perfumed wood in a long, low, old room where the dark furniture shines in the contending reflections of the candles as still as nuns and the great fire roars and leaps like lions above the logs.
Wait a moment before you lift the latch. I want to get off my chest my reason for disliking Philadelphia. If I leave it till we sit with the good meal in us, stretching out our legs to the fire, I shall be in too good a humour to express dislike for anything.... It was this way, then.
To attend those two politicians’ dinners I had to spend two nights in the city — and they were the two most horrible nights I have ever spent in my life... and will be so until I come to make the sea-voyage westwards about which you will presently hear.
I have told you that during those days the thermometer stood at 116° in the shade. The city editors of the local papers, anxious for the credit of their city, reported it as being only 106° — but they were wrong. In any case the nights were much hotter.
I had taken a ground-floor room in an hotel on Walnut Street and — th, because the hotel was recommended to me as having the aspect of an old English coaching hostelry and as being run by a real jolly, cordial old English host.
... And I had been recommended to choose a ground-floor room so as to be able to get out of the window in case there should be a fire.... And in Philadelphia the flanges of the wheels of the trolley cars ran on the granite setts of the streets because the iron rails had been worn away. And they ran on both the main and the cross-town streets every two minutes throughout the night. And my room had windows on both streets. And I am a man who habitually sleeps in the open air. And there was not another room to be had in the city, because of the elections.
To guard against the second night I had bought an electric fan — a thing as yet practically unknown in the city of Brotherly Love. When I ran it it blew the sheets off the bed; when it did not the contrast made the heat even more unsupportable than it had been on the first night. And canned salmon always gives me nettle-rash. And the Reformer who sat next me at dinner had told me a grisly story of how he had stood on the top of the unfinished statue of Penn with another man. And, suddenly turning his head, he had seen the other man with a convulsed face making ready to throw him over the side. So, when I managed to get two-minute naps between the attentions of the nettle-rash and the electric fan and the screaming of the car wheels, I was on the top of the Penn statue, which is on top of the city hall or something high, and a man with a convulsed face and outstretched claws was creeping towards me. And I suffer, anyhow, badly from the maladie des hauteurs. If I knew the English for that I would put it into English.
And in the morning the real, jolly, cordial replica of an old English host tried to charge me forty dollars for the extra current consumed by my fan and, roaring like an old English town bull when I refused to pay, snatched my grip out of my hand. It was all Dr. Talcraft Williams could do to get him to take two dollars and give me my grip.
Dr. Talcraft Williams was one of the kindliest editors I have ever known, though I had made a mistake with him the night before. Walking away from the Reformers’ dinner I said to him:
“It’s very kind of you to have given me the opportunity of seeing some of you politicians at play.” He sprang from my side three feet into the roadway and exclaimed, holding his umbrella on high like a sword:
“If this were not a perfectly new six-dollar umbrella I would smash it over your head for calling me a politician.”
You may open the door now....
How the withered oak-leaves scurry golden along the dark path as the light streams down on them, and how hospitable the long, low, warmly lit room looks! The house is very old. It looks as if the robbers and goblins of the Brothers Grimm had in the old days stolen round it in the darkness with fingers to their lips. But now, in these woods, it would have been Noble Redskins, smoking pipes of peace. Because of the only treaty that was never either attested or broken.... I don’t know. I seem to have made this part of the Land of Modern Miracles rather attractive. And when I look at the map I see that Philadelphia is actually a hair’s-breadth south of the Fortieth Parallel.... What do you know about that!
PART THREE. BELOW THE LINE.
I. BELOW THE LINE
I have said that I always feel gay when I get into Delaware, and I have always got into the South through Delaware — except once when I went through Gettysburg into Virginia. I did not then feel gay at all. Not even the twin Paracletes could do that for me. Because after being impressed by them you go through the battlefield — which for me is the fatal spot of the modern world and you visit the diorama, or whatever it is called — which is pretty grim — and pass the doorstep on which sat on that day the only woman who was killed at Gettysburg. Which is perhaps more grim, though I do not know just why it should be so. The death of one woman more or less does not seem to matter when a world is falling in ruins. Because the fate of humanity was settled by the repulse of Pickett’s charge. Over that field Destiny cried with a loud voice: All aboard for the Industrial System, and Heaven only knows when we shall disembark!
§
But I suppose that to be the one woman killed when a world falls in ruins is to be marked out as a type. There were plenty of women killed and worse by Sherman’s licensed plunderers and one does not much bother about them. They were murdered like anybody else. The other was killed by just a stray shot — in the middle of her domestic operations. So her death makes her a Type — sticking out in the pages of history.
I see her sitting by her stove, a long way from the battle, and not very interested.... I know, of course, that she was not actually stiting by the stove when the rifle bullet entered and made that obscure shack become for ever a locus classicus. She was, I suppose, killed on the stoop that one sees as one slows down a little in passing to get a look at that pathetic ordinariness. But my mind sees her like that because of another woman — in Pont de Nieppe in 1916.
