Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1055
Of course, I have always had large vegetable gardens and usually rabbits, cows, or goats for milk, and poultry.
You did not, perhaps, think that was coming. But it was. It is the moral of this book, and the fruit of all my observations of life. So I do not forget it long, and it will keep creeping in.
§
Well, then, here on the Mediterranean, in Malaga bay, as it has been for nearly a fortnight crossing the Atlantic, it is simply Purgatory — with a few dashes of hell to larn us to be toads. If God’s Head Steward or whoever it is that manages those places had set himself to devise the insupportable he could not have done it much better....
I don’t know if I shall be acquitted of snobbery if I say that I have never travelled third class on a ship before.... I don’t care if I am: there are worse crimes.... And I don’t know that I have ever been treated as not a member of the governing classes.... I mean, called “Sir” by policemen and tax collectors and mayors of small towns and people like that. It is a small thing, but one that one misses because it is one’s right.... No, I don’t mean what you mean. I mean that it is we who pay those fellows and they ought to behave as our servants. And, indeed, in most of England, that sort of person when he is on duty, is instructed to say “Sir” to the humblest member of the public, and mostly does so...
I will interpolate that when Marwood and I in the English Review days set about constructing a Tory Utopiawe began by postulating — the industrial system had not then broken down — that every manufacturer when applying to open a factory or to be allowed to keep going one that was in existence must sign an undertaking to pay every one of his employees a real wage of four hundred a year... that is to say a wage that rose with the rise and fell with the fall of prices so that it always had the same purchasing power.... And provide him with enough garden land to supply his family with all their vegetables.... No, Tories do not love manufacturers. They want to get rid of them.
In such communities the functionaries would damn well have to be-Sir every member of the public or lose their jobs and no one would eat anything out of a can.... Four hundred a year was what my father had when he married....
§
Well, on this boat the officials treat the passengers like dogs... and there are no vegetables, even out of cans.... The food is fantastically barbarous; the purser who invented it must have had an imaginative genius. When you look at a specimen bill of fare provided by the publicity department of the company you see that you are to have a wide variety of dishes... roast beef, navarin of lamb printanière, blanquette de veau, gigot de pré salé.... The proper middle-class household food. You think it looks all right and wonder how they can do it for the money.... They don’t.
You sit down to your first meal and discover that the roast beef is braised silverside... which is not too bad. Silverside is not a roasting joint, but it does pretty well for braising, and the cook is pretty good. What follows is not his fault.
For when you come to the next meal and your navarin of lamb you start with amazement at the first taste. It is a sort of navarin all right... but the meat is the same sort of silverside of beef that you had at lunch. And the meat of the leg of mutton is silverside of beef, and the veal is the same thing and the ham with madeira sauce.... All the meat to the end of the voyage.
§
That seems to me to be fantastically stupid. Almost anybody knows that to eat the same meat for thirty meals running must nauseate you.... There may have been some job about it. Someone may have bribed someone to buy thirty thousand pounds weight of silverside. Of course, that would be unanswerable. You can’t expect any ship’s victualler to resist a job.
But I don’t believe it was a job. I believe it was just languor. It was languor that, in all other departments of the ship, made it insupportable. They gave you an apple a day... no doubt to keep the doctor away. But the apples were those immense Californian things smelling so strong of disinfectants that you puke when you hold it near your mouth. Occasionally there would be a perfectly admirable orange. Where that ship came from, oranges are infinitely cheaper than even Californian apples in New York.... That may have been a job again. But I rather think not. I think not. I think it was just languor....
You never saw anything like the commissariat department of that vessel. One of them was epileptic or syphilitic in some stage. He could not speak any known language; he couldn’t write with his shaking hand; he couldn’t count coins... an immensely long young man... apparently gentle. The second in that purser’s office passed his whole time lamenting about his love for a young American school teacher. The purser occupied himself with combing his astonishingly golden hair. If you complained to him gently about the howling boys he shrugged his shoulders slowly and said he had no powers. If you went on complaining he went away to comb his hair somewhere else. If you complained very loudly and rudely he reminded you that he was one of the coloured shirts of the glorious days of 1920.... That was it really.... They were, all those officials, heroes of 1920. Apparently you could get any job on that ship if you were a hero; you could not get any if you weren’t.... And apparently the effort of having been heroes had exhausted them for ever, in body and brain. I imagine the heroic purser asked to order the victuals for his part of the ship. He combs his locks for a long time, looking at the food schedule with exhaustion. He puts at the end of a line asking for thirty thousand pounds of some sort of meat the words: Silverside of beef. The pen falls from his powerless fingers. Someone tells him he has not yet filled in the fruit order. He groans and at the third attempt succeeds in again grasping the pen and writes: “Or...” But finding that he cannot remember how to spell oranges, he crosses that out and writes “Apples.”... And then with immense, heroic effort, remembering that his passengers ought to have some change, writes: “Some oranges too,” and falls asleep.
§
The effects were pretty lamentable. A pleasant young Italian priest attempted to commit suicide on the tenth day.
... Because of the noise. The cheerful, rather jocularly philosophic Montenegrin not very elderly lady, who by the workings of destiny has become as it were the Fuerhrerin of our by now largish party, interrupts herself in giving me lessons in her language to groan that she will never see again her home in the Bronx... the lovely home where in presses she has three hundred sheets all embroidered by her own hands. And she curses the day when she permitted her Italian son and his lovely Jewish partner in life to persuade her to take this voyage to the home of her birth and ancestors.... And the howling boys rush round the diningroom screaming at the tops of their voices.
§
They are the guests of the dictator of the land we are approaching.... We are going to Naples, meaning to take there another coasting boat that will run along the whole water-front from Pompeii to the place from which we started.... Of these young hundred-per-centers there are two hundred on board... invited to visit the home of their parents’ birth. When they came on board they were told to remember that they were under the control of nobody; that nobody could say a word to them. They were accompanied by two priests who passed their time in another part of the vessel and whose only contact or control of those boys was once a day for an hour to make them rehearse a hymn of adoration to the dictator of the land we are approaching.... I was astonished to discover how American I had become when I found hot indignation filling me at the thought that American boys should be taught to sing hymns of adoration to a foreign dictator... and should be exposed to such corruption. Because it was a scandal.
§
So here I sit in this Jewish Heaven — a large, grey, empty cavern whose only occupants are two very old, bearded rabbis disputing in whispers in the shaft of strong light falling from a scupper on the other side of the ship... disputing over the colons and full stops of the Thorah... and hastening to lay their aged bones somewhere within a mile or so of the Wall of Weeping....
In the end it is they who are responsible for the few glimmers of civilization that here and there gleam weakly in our comity of nations. It would probably be too much to concede the claim that my young friends set up... that Christendom exists because an old rabbi in a shawl, like those two old fellows over there, disputed so long over the law that he arrived at the conclusion that mankind will not be saved until every man of it is convinced that he must bestow as much affection upon his neighbour as upon himself.... Yet that piece of illumination that came to the Rabbi Hillel two thousand years ago remains the only glimmer of light in the darkness that surrounds humanity... surrounds Christendom. Nothing else but the complete adoption of that maxim can save us.
I’m not writing as a Christian... not, I mean, trying to convert anybody. I’m not even writing as an altruist. I don’t much care what happens to the world if only I can get off this floating hell and live to get to my garden and plant a row of peas and see their green heads push through the Mediterranean earth from which sprang all that is good in the world.
§
Up on a hatchway in the sun on the deck sit, hand-in-hand, two old people who have been expelled after forty years from the country we have left... and where they have left every soul of their kin and every soul that they know in the world.... They sit there, puzzled, silent, blinking their eyes a little in the whiteness of the sunlight. The howling boys rush all round them, barge into them now and then, stumble yelling over their poor old feet.... It is quite illegal, their expulsion. But some body of officials has arrived at the conclusion that the expulsion of such people will save the country and they have had no one speak for them. They are so old and so cleaned that their skin has a slight lavender tinge, and they have lived so long together that it is as if they had become one person... sitting hand in hand, close together... like the things called lovebirds, an emblem of complete, faithful marital felicity.
... Such objects are rather rare in the world... and rather pretty... and very educational.
They are expelled whilst the howling boys will be welcomed back after they have sung their hymn of adoration to the dictator... to perpetuate a strain of murderers and degenerates.... That, at least, is what I am told they will do... by a school-teacher who has some of them in his class in New York. It is lamentable the tales that he tells of his proletariat pupils.
I am not criticizing in particular the country we have left. The whole world is doing the same sort of thing all the time.... Expelling its images of virtue and breeding such proletariat children.... Even England, which is the only country in the world with a population of any political intelligence, will, at the dictate of some swine of a permanent official, let into her shores and admit eventually to her citizenship any thief, sodomite, gangster, or criminal lunatic who has a thousand pounds in his pocket — that is the regulation — and send back home to be murdered any thinker or honest working man who hasn’t. I don’t say that that is wrong, but it seems to me to be impolitic. If the country of my birth is strong, splendid, inspired to the marrow of her bones with the instinctive love of freedom... if she is all that... and she is and takes it all in the day’s work... and if she is the only country in the world except Palestine and Esthonia who has balanced her budget and emerged from the Crisis and invented a process of canning peas that is really admirable and without chemicals or colouring; and bears written on every second wall and every public convenience, as the patient New Yorker lately remarked when visiting London, the chalked inscriptions: God is Love... and Have you seen Jesus?... if, then, that is the country of my birth she is that because in the past she welcomed every kind of refugee. She learned weaving from Flemings who fled from the Spaniards, lacemaking from the Huguenots, traditions of Protestant uprightness from the Anabaptists of Westphalia... and from a crucified Jew who certainly never had a thousand farthings or any pockets, she learned to write those things on her walls and public conveniences....
So it would seem to be impolitic nowadays for her to exclude Einsteins... and, at the instance of another official, to take upon her to exclude them from part of the Mediterranean littoral. For ninety per cent of the Jews who with songs of triumph are here hastening to Palestine will not be allowed to settle there, and a few will not even be allowed to land.... I think Freedom must have shrieked a little when that temporary official wrote “Parmoor” at the end of that decree.... Peers temporal do not sign their Christian... or even their Fabian... names.
§
Lord Parmoor issued that decree in the name of the land whose very bones are instinct with the love of freedom. Because Lord Parmoor does not approve of the multiplication of small nations (I presume I may criticize the internal and mandatory politics of my own country)... I do.
I believe that the infinite multiplication of small units of populations alone can save the world.... The whole united in such an immense Zollverein or Customs Union that there won’t be any more customs duties anywhere... and only custumals instead of laws and only world conscience to influence the trend of custumals.
§
There are Christendom... and Jewry. I am sitting in Jewry watching two old Jews dispute. An hour ago I was in Malaga Cathedral — a black place — watching a lot of black, unbelievably immobile female figures, kneeling on the stones, telling their beads and now and then fanning themselves. A prosperous gentleman in black, looking like a banker or factory owner, hurried in, genuflected before the blazing altar, sat down at one of the half-dozen masses that were going on and with his lips moving in prayer, pulled out a little folding fan and continued fanning himself with his lips moving.... For a long time.... And then hurried out....
Malaga Cathedral is a fantastic place. It is immense. Still more, its builders had the skill to make it seem infinitely more immense than it is. Michelangelo or Bramante, or whoever designed St. Peter’s at Rome, is usually praised because he has so proportioned that immensity that it seems quite small. That always seemed to me to be a silly sort of trick. The builders of this place knew better. They so builded that the pillars of the great place, soaring into invisibility, seem to enclose the night.... The whole of the night that spreads over the earth.... The whole of human life....
§
The doors of the cathedral are blocked by crowds of cripples so deformed in hideousness that the spectacle is insupportable. They command you to give them alms and they are regarded by the worshippers of God with indulgence, almost with affection. They appear to like to have the poor thus always with them.
The exhibition of modern Spanish art is a shambles. The pictures are without exception literal renderings of sores, bleeding wounds, torments, tortures. Every one of them resembles the Flemish pictures photographically rendering flayings alive, breakings on the wheel, mere beheadings and hangings. Those last were commissioned by Spanish buyers in the days when the Flemings fled to England to make her more moral.... That is perhaps why Malaga suggests Brussels. If one digs below the surface to-day in Spain, one comes on incredible tortures enacted on men and beasts... more on men than on beasts... enacted and then regarded with absolute composure.
I don’t say these things in condemnation. It is not reasonable to condemn the necessary expressions of whole regions of men. All one can do is to regard them as phenomena... and speculate about them. It is impossible to regard this type of cruelty as Sadism. Sadism is quick in action and gets joy out of cruelty. And it would be absurd to put them down, à la Freud, to sex expression... or perverted expressionism. Those manifestations are always either secret or emotional. Spanish inflictions of suffering are like acts of faith performed in public by passionless executioners who are doing their duty. They are the manifestations of tradition, of education... of religion, perhaps.
§
Is it possible, then, that St. Dominic and Torquemada were, in the last resort, inspired by the Rabbi Hillel? It seems difficult to believe, though reason almost insists that you believe it — just as, to reverse the case, reason may insist that you do not believe that there are ghosts in a dark room, or in the immortality of your own soul, yet in spite of yourself you will find it impossible not to believe that a ghost has got in with you or that in your flesh shall you see God.
§
It is not, I think, from the Old Testament that the Spanish Inquisition took its tradition — though St. Dominic undoubtedly did. There was about him a little of the breezy rejoicing in destruction that inspired the prophets of Jehovah... just a little of the gaiety that underlies Jewry.
But the Spanish Inquisitors did not rejoice; they were educated men doing a duty. They descended, then, from Christ... which is what makes it all so queer... and despairing. We have, as I have already said, got men about to the stage when men of all forms of religion can live peaceably side by side. We have at any rate along the Great Route... and indeed in some Nordic parts. Except in Boston, in the Northern States, people do not bash each other much in the name of the Almighty; nor do they in England south of Edinburgh. In Soviet Russia Christians, Jews, and Mohammedan are all equally at a discount — but not because the Soviet authorities prefer Jehovah to Adonai or Allah.
Jews are murdered and mutilated in Rumania, in the Balkan States they are oppressed and hooted at in the streets like Catholics in the Northern Athens; they are murdered by process of law by Mr. Hitler. But there is this advantage about that. When Mr. Hitler had murdered his twentieth thousand Jew quite a dozen Christians wrote to the papers about it. I did myself, but no one printed me. And England actually took action about it — letting the relatives of murdered Jews enter if they had a thousand pounds to show. And on this screaming boat Jews — as perhaps will prove to be the case in Heaven itself — are given a little heaven of their own in which a miserable so-called Christian can take refuge from his young co-religionists.
