Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 684
It was just that. One didn’t rub one’s eyes: one was too astounded. Only, something within one wondered what the devil he was doing there. If he hadn’t seemed so extraordinarily efficient, one would have thought he had strayed, from another age, from another world, from some Hesperides. One keeps wanting to say that he was Greek, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t of a type that strayed: and indeed I seem to feel his poor bones moving in the August dust of Neuville St. Vaast when I - though even only nearly! - apply to him a name that he would have hated. At any rate, it was amazing to see him there; since he seemed so entirely inspired by inward visions that one wondered what he could be after — certainly not the bad dinner, the attentions of the foreign waiters, a try at the Neutral’s money-bag strings. No, he spoke as if his eyes were fixed on a point within himself; and yet, with such humour and such good-humour - as if he found the whole thing so comic!
One is glad of the comic in his career; it would otherwise have been too much an incident of the Elgin marble type. But even the heroism of his first, abortive ‘joining-up’ was heroi-comic. As I heard him tell the story, or at least as I remember it, it was like this:
He had gone to France in the early days of the war — and one accepted his having gone as one accepted the closing of a door — of a tomb, if you like. Then, suddenly, he was once more there. It produced a queer effect; it was a little bewildering in a bewildering world. But it became comic. He had gone to Boulogne and presented himself to the Recruiting Officer — an N.C.O., or captain, of the old school, white moustachios, cheveux en brosse. Gaudier stated that he had left France without having performed his military duties, but, since la patrie was in danger, he had returned like any other good little piou-piou. But the sergeant, martinet-wise, as became a veteran of 1870, struck the table with his fist and exclaimed:
‘Non, mon ami, it is not la patrie, but you who are in danger. You are a deserter; you will be shot.’ So Gaudier was conducted to a motor, in which, under the military escort of two files of men, a sergeant, a corporal, and a lieutenant, he was whirled off to Calais. In Calais Town he was placed in an empty room. Outside the door were stationed two men with large guns, and Gaudier was told that, if he opened the door, the guns would go off. That was his phrase. He did not open the door. He spent several hours reflecting that though they manage these things better in France, they don’t manage them so damn well. At the end of that time he pushed aside the window blind and looked out. The room was on the ground floor; there were no bars. Gaudier opened the window; stepped into the street, just like that — and walked back to Boulogne.
He returned to London.
He was drawn back again to France by the opening of the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral. This time he had a safe conduct from the Embassy. I do not know the date of his second joining up or the number of his regiment. At any rate, he took part in an attack on a Prussian outpost on Michaelmas Eve, so he had not much delayed, and his regiment was rendered illustrious, though it cannot have given him a deuce of a lot of training. He did not need it. He was as hard as nails and as intelligent as the devil. He was used to forging and grinding his own chisels. He was inured to the hardships of poverty in great cities; he was accustomed to hammer and chisel at his marble for hours and hours of day after day. He was a ‘fit’ townsman — and it was ‘fit’ townsmen who conducted the fighting of 1914 when the war was won: it was les parigots.
Of his biography I have always had only the haziest of notions. I know that he was the son of a Meridional craftsman, a carpenter and joiner, who was a good workman and no man could have a better. His father was called Joseph Gaudier — so why he called himself B’jesker, I do not know. I prefer really to be hazy; because Gaudier will always remain for me something supernatural. He was for me a ‘message’ at a difficult time of life. His death and the death at the same time of another boy — but quite a commonplace, nice boy — made a rather doubtful way quite plain to me.
All my life I have been very much influenced by a Chinese proverb — to the effect that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low teahouse. It is a bad proverb, because it is so wise and so enervating. It has ‘ruined my career’.
When, for instance, I founded a certain Review, losing, for me, immense sums of money on it, or when the contributors unanimously proclaimed that I had not paid them for their contributions —— which was not true because they certainly had among them a quantity of my money in their pockets — or when a suffrage bill failed to pass in the Commons; or when someone’s really good book has not been well reviewed; or when I have been robbed, slandered, or abortively blackmailed — in all the vicissitudes of life, misquoted on it, I have always first shrugged my shoulders and murmured that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-shop. It meant that it would be hypocrisy to expect a taste for the finer letters in a large public; discernment in critics; honesty in aesthetes or literati; public spirit in lawgivers; accuracy in pundits; gratitude in those one has saved from beggary, and so on.
So, when I first noticed Henri Gaudier — which was in an underground restaurant, the worst type of thieves’ kitchen — these words rose to my lips. I did not, you understand, believe that he would exist and be so wise, so old, so gentle, so humorous, such a genius. I did not really believe that he had shaved, washed, assumed garments that fitted his great personal beauty.
For he had great personal beauty. If you looked at him casually, you imagined that you were looking at one of those dock-rats of the Marseilles quays, who will carry your baggage for you, pimp for you; garotte you and throw your body overboard — but who will do it all with an air, an ease, an exquisiteness of manners! They have, you see, the traditions and inherited knowledge of such ancient nations in Marseilles — of Etruscans, Phoenicians, Colonial Greeks, Late Romans, Troubadours, Late French — and that of those who first sang the Marseillaise! And many of them, whilst they are young, have the amazing beauty that Gaudier had. Later, absinthe spoils it — but for the time, they are like Arlésiennes.
All those wisdoms, then, looked out of the eyes of Gaudier — and God only knows to what he threw back — to Etruscans or Phoenicians, no doubt, certainly not to the Greeks who colonized Marseilles, or the Late Romans who succeeded to them. He seemed, then, to have those wisdoms behind his eyes somewhere. And he had, certainly, an astounding erudition.
I don’t know where he picked it up — but his conversation was overwhelming — and his little history of sculpture by itself will give you more flashes of inspiration than you will ever, otherwise, gather from the whole of your life. His sculpture itself affected me just as he did.
In odd places — the sitting rooms of untidy and eccentric poets with no particular merits, in appalling exhibitions, in nasty night clubs, in dirty restaurants one would be stopped for a moment in the course of a sentence by the glimpse of a brutal chunk of rock that seemed to have lately fallen unwanted from a slate quarry, or, in the alternative, by a little piece of marble that seemed to have the tightened softness of the haunches of a fawn — of some young creature of the underwoods, an ancient, shyly-peopled thicket.
The brutalities would be the work of Mr Epstein — the other, Gaudier. For Gaudier’s work had just his own, personal, impossible quality. And one did not pay much attention to it simply because one did not believe in it. It was too good to be true. Remembering the extraordinary rush that the season of 1914 was, it appears a miserable tragedy, but it is not astonishing, that one’s subliminal mind should whisper to me, every time we caught that glimpse of a line: ‘It is hypocrisy to search for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-house.’ It was of course the devil who whispered that. So I never got the sensation I might have got from that line. Because one did not believe in that line. One thought: ‘It is just the angle at which one’s chair in the restaurant presents to one an accidental surface of one of these young men’s backs.’ And then a day came when there was no doubt about it. Gaudier was a Lance Corporal in the 4th Section, 7th Company, 129th Regt. of Infantry of the Line. Gaudier was given his three stripes for ‘gallantry in face of the enemy’. One read in a letter:
‘I am at rest for three weeks in a village, that is, I am undergoing a course of study to be promoted officer when necessary during an offensive.’
Or in another letter:
‘I imagine a dull dawn, two lines of trenches, and in between explosion on explosion with clouds of black and yellow smoke, a ceaseless noise from the rifles, a few legs and heads flying, and me standing up among all this like to Mephisto — commanding:’ Feu par salves à 250 mètres — joue — feul’
‘Today is magnificent, a fresh wind, clear sun, and larks singing cheerfully—’
That was it!
But just because it was so commonplace; so sordid, so within the scope of all our experiences, powers of observation, and recording, it all seemed impossible to believe that in that particular low teahouse there were really Youth, Beauty, Erudition, Fortune, Genius —— to believe in the existence of a Gaudier! The devil still whispered to me: ‘That would be hypocrisy!’ For if you would not believe that genius could show itself during the season of 1914, how could you believe that, of itself, inscrutable, noiseless, it would go out of our discreditable world where the literati and the aesthetes were sweating, harder than they ever, ever did after le mot juste or the Line of Beauty, to find excuses that should keep them from the trenches — that, so quietly, the greatest genius of them all would go into that world of misery.
And then I read:
‘Mort pour la patrie.
‘After ten months of fighting and two promotions for gallantry, on the field, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast. June 5, 1915.’
Alas, when it was too late, I had learned that, to this low tea-shop that the world is, from time to time the Sacred Emperor may pay visits. So I began to want to kill certain people. I still do - for the sake of Gaudier and those few who are like him.
For the effect of reading that announcement was to make me remember with extraordinary vividness a whole crowd of the outlines of pieces of marble, of drawings, of tense and delicate lines at which, in the low tea-house of the year before’s season, I had only nonchalantly glanced. The Sacred Emperor, then, had been there. He seemed, at last, to be an extraordinarily real figure — as real as one of the other sculptor’s brutal chunks of granite. Only, because of the crowd one hadn’t seen him — the crowd of blackmailers,1 sneak-thieves, suborners, pimps, reviewers, and the commonplace and the indifferent — the Huns of London. Well, it became — and it still more remains! one’s duty to try to kill them. There are probably several Sacred Emperors still at large — though the best of them will have been killed, as Gaudier was.
It was whilst I was inside the theatre that I registered, as the saying is, a mental vow that I would pay no attention any more to public affairs. To do so would drive one mad. I decided that I must put my head down under the cloth for the rest of the war. And I think I did so. Except for the occasional duty of writing propaganda — which from that time onwards I did in French — I paid no more attention to the politics of my country or the world. I just did the collar-work of the Infantry Officer until the 11/11,”17. After that, my views being too favourable to France, the Ministry of Information and the censor suppressed or lost in the post my rather excited writings on the Terms of Peace....That would be about three years ago today. It seems a long while...
1 Gringoire is too fond of this word — which he uses in a special sense to indicate persons — mostly reviewers - who do not appreciate the work of himself and his school. In his conversation he introduced at this point a long denunciation of the — Literary Supplement, principally because, whilst purporting to be a literary paper, it devoted, according to him, 112/113ths of its space to books about facts, at the expense of works of the imagination. So he calls that respectable journal a blackmailing organ. Since, however, this is a topic that can hardly interest the non-literary, and since the literary are hardly likely to read these pages, the Compiler has taken the liberty of not reporting these sallies. It may be true that Pontius Pilate is more criminal that the crucified thieves — but it is never politic to say so.
The inside of the theatre was brilliant, formal, a little shabby if you looked closely. Of the performance of Lakme — an opera that I love very much, since the music is soft, moving, and generous - I remember very little. So it must have been a good rendering with no performer in particular ‘sticking out’. The British naval officers were rather funny. And I think it is no left-handed compliment to the composer, Delibes — though it may be to the librettist — to say that my thoughts were elsewhere. The music was just sensuous pleasure; the aspect of the house, spreading round in great lines of polychromatic humanity, more regular than is the case with most theatres in London — more suave and more classical — soothed one after what was certainly an emotional crisis; an escaped danger. For it would have mortified me for the rest of my life if I had burst out under the goadings of the French officers. But, by the Grace of God and the skin of my teeth, I had retained, quite certainly, my aspect of insular phlegm.
Still it had been exhausting — and I was enervated. And then, quite suddenly, it came to me to wonder what was going on outside the theatre — what was going on under the black roof of the night, with the infinitely numerous population of leaves, blades, branches, reeds beside streams, great trees in the woodlands — and with the silent, watchful population of the thickets where the shadows are so extremely deep. I found myself wondering what time of year it was. And I said: the first weeks of September. For that morning I had recollected that, two years before on that day, the Germans had turned back from in front of Paris. Forty-six years before they had won the battle of Sedan.
It was, then, during the first weeks of September. But what happened — in September? One forgot. One had repaired trenches; one had commanded fatigues digging drains round Bn. H.Q., to the left of Mount Kemmel. One had dug so efficiently that, during the first thunderstorm the repaired trenches below were neck-deep in water. All that had passed in ‘the Country’.
But what happened in September? There were no doubt apples on the trees, and, certainly, it was the time of year when many cobwebs, frail nets across the tall grasses on commons or single, brilliant filaments, streamed out and glistened on still, bright days.
There would be plums, too; but what about damsons? Wasn’t it early for them? And how about garden peas? Were they over? And field peas? And would there be an autumn feel in the air?
It was twenty-one days to Michaelmas — and Michaelmas certainly brought the autumn feeling, with touches of vine in the shadow of yellowing plants and the leaves of sunflowers drooping straight down, like unfurled colours on windless days. But in copses, shaves, and spinneys were the leaves on forest trees yet turning? Were roads yet hard and frosty in the morning? And were horses yet sluggish and apt to stumble on roads as they do at the turn of the year and the fall of the leaf?...Time to give ‘em a ball.
The baffled mind seemed to stumble at all these questions. One was in the theatre and having been forbidden by the will to think that what surrounded the great walls with their human lining was a vast black map fringed by conflagrations, the poor mind hung faltering.
It fell suddenly back on contemplating the green nook that — on the down behind Albert - it had reserved for itself. Yes, the mind actually did that. And, across the gilding of the proscenium, across Lakme’s singing the great song of yearning, there hung a slight shimmer of green that intensified itself and took shape like a recumbent oval — And there began to become visible the yellowing, greyish rows of broad beans; a rather ragged hedge and a little stream beyond, level with the grass and fringed with the glistening stems of clumps of rushes that had been cut for thatching stacks. Because it was indeed September.
CHAPTER XI
‘Rosalie Prudent’
One evening the Compiler addressed Gringoire, who was making notes in a seed catalogue, somewhat as follows:
‘Do you remember, oh Gringoire, what it is to awake of a September morning at dawn? Being horticulteur, your first thought will be for the weather: being poète, your first thought will be for your new volume. And the two first thoughts will overlay the one the other, according as chance wills. But the still mist is so reassuring as to the weather that you can put that aside and think only of your volume. The goodly fruits of the earth in the late summer season, the plums, the apples, the quinces; the maize, the marrows, the melons, have yet another day, for sure, of bright, warm sun, of gorgeous, mellow downward shavers of sun. They, surely, shall stand motionless in the warmth.
‘But the poems...oh my poor Gringoire of the dawn: the great, half-finished epic! Ah that! that seemed so glowing too when last night in the golden light of the two candles, in your poor little, rickety salon that yet has a style of its own...you read them to Madame Sélysette...the poor verses that you read so famously to little Madame!... In the dawn, ah, the wolf of the night that says: “Hou...hou” from the mountains has not gone home! Almost you hear his sniffing round the little green door that, because yours is a land of idylls and the innocent, you have left open. One day the wolf with the great, cocked hairy ears, with the long white teeth like razors for their sharpness shall come in. Y ou will hear upon the uncarpeted stairway the pad of the feet; the little thin door will push open, and raised at the foot of your small white bed, you will see the great beast; the huge head; the bloodshot eyes....And Madame, in the other little white bed across the small white room will moan a little in her sleep —
‘All the poor verses: the little lines! How shall they be the barbed wire fence that shall keep the wolf from the door of the cottage? Why, he could push the poor, tindery old walls down with his snout! The poor verses! They halt...or no, they do not halt. We are too good a craftsman for that! But assuredly they do not run. And the publisher! What shall he say? And Madame with such a need of a new gown: it should have been of velvet, puffed in the arms, and slashed to show an undercoat of crushed rose silk. And to tell the truth - your pantalons? How they shine in the seat, like a mirror! And the public! Ah, the grim public that has no taste but for dominoes in the cafés of an evening! How shall they care for the savour of lavender and rosemary in your smaller verses? What, to them, are Melpomene and Mélisande and Maleine and Musidore of your epic! And the cursed “machinery” of the enormous poem! What has become of your great device that was to take the story forward from line 1100 to line 1424? Forgotten! O Apollo! O Euterpe! Forgotten - gone - your brain is failing. Your diet of oatmeal and junket is not enough to water your grey matter with rich red blood. It is all over.,.and the great wolf says “Hou!...hou!” upon the mountains, though the mists are rising. And Madame, you can see, is smiling in her sleep! Ah! When you are suspended by your cravat from the old thorn tree, she will marry the rich son of the apothecary....
