Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 731
His feeling for Mrs. Percival had been purely physical: as far as he knew his feelings for the dark girl had been quite intellectual or sympathetic. That was queer, for the one moved as it were in the grey light of cloisters and the other was like a black panther in sunlight....
He knew he had begun to think of his book and the physical seductions of Mrs. Percival at the same moment. That moment had been whilst Jack Percival had been calling him a moron outside the café. In quite fiery resentment he had said to himself as if he were answering that fellow: ‘Ah, you think yourself damn fine because you’ve written some lousy books in slang. You wait! I’ll yet do something that will prove to your wife that I’m as good as you!’ And immediately he had been aware for the first time, of how desirable it would be to mingle his limbs with those of the silent woman on the other side of the tin table top.
His book had been addressed to her. It had consisted of a long argument with her on the subject of gossip. It had been a book about gossip.
They lived amongst crowds of Americans in Paris. And all these people gossiped unceasingly. They seemed to have no other vocations.... And Mrs. Percival shuddered at all that.... It was almost the only thing about her mentality that came back to him. She was normally exceedingly silent. He knew that she liked green and dark blues for her clothing and the music of Debussy and the pictures of Toulouse Lautrec. Advanced but sober works of Art! Otherwise, except that she was deliberate, he knew nothing about her.... But indeed she had rendered their household rather silent. She so disliked gossip that she left practically nothing for him and Alice to talk about at meals. It was no doubt because she thought she had been a great deal gossiped about and had suffered.... Or perhaps she shuddered at the idea that when her relationship with Alice became manifest there would be a good deal of spiteful comment.
There had really been very little talk about her either in Springfield or in Paris.
So he had written his book. It had been astonishing how easily it had come to him. It had arranged itself: a part on gossip in the Classics from Theophrastus to Lucian; a part on gossip in the Middle Ages from Robert of Gloucester to Montaigne; a bewigged part ending with Madame de Sévigné, Horace Walpole and various biographers of George Washington: a final modern part which took in the Yellow Press and the potins of Montparnasse. When he thought how easily it had gone he was astonished that he had not continued as a ‘writer’. Even the Introduction and the Exordium had come easily. In them he had really countered the objections of Mrs. Percival to gossip. He had done it quite consciously, holding one or two arguments with her. He had put down her objections fairly and had contented himself with pointing out that without gossip there would be no knowing anything about the lives people lived. A good deal of gossip was malicious, but most listeners discounted automatically what they had heard. So you got something like the truth.
He had written his closing pages with some feeling. He was already thinking about a novel and realized that he would find it very difficult simply because he did not know enough of how people lived. Then almost simultaneously Mrs. Percival had turned him down; he had left Alice in preparation for the divorce. And the storm about his book had burst upon him.
The storm had been mostly the work of the agile and lewd publisher. Henry Martin had had no idea of writing salaciously. The publisher and the illustrator together had made him appear a sort of Casanova. The publisher had found the title BE THOU CHASTE, the motto on the title page being: ‘Be thou chaste as snow and cold as ice, thou shalt not escape calumny,’ misquoting Othello. The illustrator had decorated the pages with vignettes of revolting lewdness. Mostly they represented nude revels in Montmartre and Montparnasse studios. In addition, the publisher had provided cheap reproductions of the eighteenth century prints of bedroom scenes that you buy for a sou or two at the open-air bookstalls along the Seine quays in Paris. So Henry Martin had found himself a purveyor of pornography.
It might or might not make it better in the general storm the volume aroused, that Henry Martin never received a penny for the book. The publisher had promised him a couple of hundred dollars on publication. This had never even been paid. A month or so after publication, Henry Martin had written to the fellow asking him for the money. He had received no answer. He had not even had a copy of the book. He wrote again more pressingly. Then he had threatened to put a lawyer to work. By that time he had seen a copy of the book in a shop window in the rue de Rivoli. It was surrounded with a band bearing in scarlet letters the inscription: ‘What goes on in Paris studios.’ The full invidiousness of the publisher had burst upon him.... The illustrations! The title! He had all but been sick under the arcades of the rue de Rivoli in the Paris sunshine.
He had communicated his emotions in the letter to the publisher that demanded payment of the sum due on publication. The publisher’s jocular answer had expressed grief at the idea of an author’s taking so commercial a view of his art as to demand payment. He also professed amazement at the idea that Henry Martin should desire to make money out of the book. On his own confession it was a pornographic work. The book was by now in the windows of a great many Paris booksellers. Every time that Henry Martin caught sight of it it was as if he had been kicked in the stomach. His café acquaintances had begun to feign not to see him when he came into those establishments.
A man called Grimaud had attacked him very violently one night. He was a New Yorker of French extraction, a painter with a studio in Montmartre. He accused Henry Martin of having revealed the intimate secrets of his life.... And in addition the secrets of the lives of twenty... thirty... sixty Paris American expatriates. The illustrator of the book had apparently made recognizable portraits of actual American artists and their wives. In depictions of nude debaucheries and recognizably in their own studios.... The fellow with copper hair and a mouth as large as a coal scuttle had been held by two waiters whilst he gesticulated in front of Henry Martin’s table.
Paris-America had however seemed to calm itself. Henry Martin had got himself invited to the weekly lunch of the Anglo-American Journalists’ Association - by a man called Pritel whom he had known as a friend of Mr. Kuhn, a correspondent of a Detroit paper. Pritel, who was an amiable fellow, had introduced him to a number of the correspondents and reporters. Henry Martin had explained with care and moderation that the letterpress of his book was in no way either salacious or personal. He did not even know the illustrator.
One or two men there had confirmed what he said. They had looked at the book and had found it rather dull.
They had been pretty decent about it. Notes depicting Henry Martin’s distress had appeared in one or two English-Parisian papers, one or two London ones and in some Paris letters of papers at home. Three times strangers in cafés had come up to him and commiserated with him as to the misunderstanding. He had been asked to an extremely dull party at a woman’s club across the water. It had been distressing to him because the only people he had known there had been Alice, Mrs. Percival and a man called Josephson from Cincinnati who appeared to be squiring them. They had acknowledged each other’s existence in the coldest possible way. He had been tempted to leave. But he had gone on for an hour listening to a lady with blue-white hair and a bronze-powdered face. She carried lorgnettes and came from Terre Haute. She was writing a book on period furniture.... Mostly as to its effects on morals. It was self-evident, she said, that the curves with which you surrounded yourself and the angle at which you sat or reposed must have an influence on your character. If you sat in a wheel-back Windsor kitchen-chair you would incline to a New England conscience. If you reclined, like Madame Récamier, on a day bed you would lean towards lasciviousness - like all the French. Henry Martin had inclined to believe that there might be something in it.
He had by that time of course separated from Alice and from Mrs. Percival. And he was leading a sufficiently lonely life in a small room in the rue Jacob. He went out for most of his meals. Sometimes he found an acquaintance to talk to him. As often as not he did not. He imagined that some people still avoided him - but he might have been mistaken. A determined maiden lady called Cameron from Dorchester, Mass., upbraided him with having treated Alice badly. She was now attending lectures on law at the Sorbonne but, as a young girl, she had known his mother. Henry Martin had been able to persuade her that it was Alice rather than he who wanted the divorce. After that he sat, most evenings, at the table of Miss Cameron in a café! She had a rather noticeable moustache and occasionally she drank far too many petits verres. Then she became voluble and hoarse-voiced about the wrongs of women. Her usual attendants were a New England Presbyterian minister who, at sixty, had abandoned the ministry and was attending life-classes, an English Colonel who was doing the same, and two very bespectacled young girls who were working at the Bibliothèque Nationale. They sat huddled together for hours in a corner of a rather noisy café....
Paris apparently had forgiven him for BE THOU CHASTE. Springfield had not. By that time Henry Martin was nearing the end of his tether, financially. He had little more than a thousand dollars left. The rest of his money had either gone into housekeeping or into the hands of Alice. For years she had insisted on his making her a large allowance for housekeeping and dress. She had not spent nearly as much and had regularly banked the remainder. She had no doubt timed the divorce to come fairly exactly when his pockets should be nearly empty. He felt no resentment. During the divorce proceedings he had had to go through the formality of an attempt at reconciliation. He had been shut up alone with Alice in a bare anteroom of the Court. Alice had reminded him that he still owed a gas bill that had come in after his departure. The bill had seemed exorbitant but she had brought it with her and there had been no disputing it. She said that she was looking for more economical gas fittings in the kitchen. He had said that, if you could get the electricity people to install a certain type of fixing and a certain meter, electricity was nearly as cheap as gas and much cleaner.
At any rate he had heard so. From a pastry cook from whom he brought his croissants....
To the judge who had asked him why he would not return to his wife he had answered succinctly:
‘J’aime une autre femme....’
The judge had burst out:
‘Ah mais ça... mais ça... C’est un peu trop fort....’ When one has a charming, amiable and gifted lady for one’s spouse one does not say one loves another!
Henry Martin had maintained an obstinate silence. The thing had gone through without further words....
But he had begun to be pinched for money very soon afterwards. He had intended, during the months of separation, to write another book. A novel. But the annoyance connected with BE THOU CHASTE had too much distracted his thoughts. And the fact that he was approaching pennilessness paralyzed him. He presumed that showed he was not an author. Real authors are said to write away more furiously the poorer they are. But he, with all the strength gone out of him, had sat watching Anacondas until they passed their dividend. Then he knew that he was finished.
He had made one effort. He had written to his father asking him to put his lawyers on the publisher. Sangster, a sanguine Paris author, had computed that the publisher must owe Henry Martin five thousand dollars. Louis Trench, also an author living in Paris, but a pessimist, put the probable sum at seven hundred. The actual amount was somewhere, no doubt, between the two. On the lowest sum he would have been able to live for a year. Five thousand would have kept him going for two or three. Because of course with more money in hand he would have lived more largely. Probably with a French mistress.
His father’s answer had been curious. Henry Martin had written that he was reduced nearly to pennilessness.
That, father had answered, was only to be expected. It was unfortunate too that he could not at this juncture be invited to take up again his position of drummer for Pisto-Brittle. Henry Martin could hardly expect to come back to Springfield for a year or two. Unless his hide was tougher than father believed.
Be THOU CHASTE had done that. According to father the book had been reported as a best seller in twenty-seven principal cities of the United States. Springfield, Ohio, considered that that meant that it was being held up to ridicule in twenty-seven of the forty-eight States of the Union. Its most intimate, scandalous and painful affairs were being laid bare to the inhabitants of that vast expanse of territory. The most prominent citizens of Springfield were the most enraged. Public action had been threatened against Henry Martin if he dared to show himself in that city.
It had indeed, the old man said, been taken against himself. Henry Martin seemed to hear him chuckling as he wrote that the Ku Klux Klan had waited upon him. They had told him that if he did not dismiss all his Roman Catholic foremen they would prohibit the sale of Pisto-Brittle in all the villages within a hundred miles of Springfield. The old man had insisted on employing always former inhabitants of Luxemburg as foremen over the boilers in his works. He considered that job as peculiarly suited to the Luxemburgish, phlegmatic temperament. He had several times received from the Klan missives informing him that they objected to this policy of his. Each time he had replied by dismissing a worker whom he suspected of belonging to the Klan and replacing him by an Irish Roman Catholic. So, for a long time, the Klan had left him alone.
Now, he guessed, Henry Martin’s outrage on the city had emboldened them to more open threats. They probably imagined themselves assured of prominent supporters. Prominent women who thought that their avarices, evil speaking or adulteries had been revealed in BE THOU CHASTE had half-publicly incited the Klan to direct action.
‘I don’t suppose,’ father had written, ‘that Springfield, Ohio, is any less chaste than any other American city. But they seem here to have taken the exhortation of your title as being addressed directly to them... and probably as being needed by them. Mrs. Prendergast in particular says that your story of the meanness of her ordering when the Schultz’s were coming to stop over for a week-end can only have been told you by Sylvia Groen. So she has let out a lot of unsavoury hot air about the behaviour of Sylvia and the Younger Married Set.’
He added a little later:
‘Suppose the K.K.K. to be degenerate descendants of earlier He-Men. Told them: “Very well gentlemen. Am aged over the Psalmist’s limit and perfectly prepared to shut down Pisto-Brittle works should city desire it. Might or might not re-open in New York State. Or Luxemburg. Or England. But imagine such very considerable addition to already terrible hunger-lines of unemployed in city might render the corporation disliked. Stated should take that step if evidence should be forthcoming that sale of one packet of P. B. had been hindered by their activities”.’
He said that he had concluded by telling those fellows that his will gave instructions for closing down the works, no member of his family desiring to continue in the industry. His aged body was at their disposal but he still took leave to imagine that his clandestine removal would not be applauded.
He concluded that part of the letter:
‘Do not have to tell you that sale of P. B. has not been interfered with. Nevertheless I’... the ‘I’ occasionally crept in... ‘should not advise your return here in search of a job. You remember how intensely you felt your unpopularity when you were suspected of murdering so-called Huns. And recollect that as you have chosen to jettison your wife she will not be here to make your peace with local Hun-ocracy.’
That was true enough. When Henry Martin and one or two others had returned from the occupation of the Rhine they had found themselves completely cold-shouldered. The local German population had boldly called them murderers and what few people there had been of English or allied descent in the town had already had cold feet about the War. Those ex-heroes had had to avoid even being seen talking to each other for a long time. He remembered that he and a young red-headed dough-boy had wanted to tell each other how queer that all was.... Not to exchange reminiscences of sawmills in the Cevennes and fighting in the Argonne but merely to discuss their present situation!... They were obliged to make a date in a wood ten miles from the city. The red-headed boy’s name had been Adams or Quincy or Lowell. Or possibly all three united. In spite of that he had been forced to leave the city.
Henry Martin had had the mortifying experience of being protected by his wife’s mother. That blaring, Teutonic housewife had proclaimed everywhere that Henry Martin had taken care to be an embusqué as the French called it. He had joined the A.E.F. as a gesture.
... As the majority of the German-born of Springfield had done when they were not over age. Most of the sergeants, top-sergeants and a good proportion of the officers of the local units had in early life served in the German army. But they had all done their damnedest — and then some! - not to be sent into the fighting line. Some of them had even deserted, their absences being covered by sympathizers in the ranks. Henry Martin, the vigorous lady had proclaimed, was then precisely on a level with those of true German origin....
So doors had begun to open amongst the houses of the All-High in the city. At first only Alice had been asked. But gradually Henry Martin had begun to receive invitations. And then the non-German population, seeing that he was received by the principal German citizens, had begun to invite him too.
Henry Martin had borne the ostracism very badly. He would have liked to think that he disliked even more the manner in which the closed doors had been opened to him. That had not been so. He would have liked to think that he was of the heroic mould. But he had accepted admission to Society with relief even at the cost of being proclaimed practically a traitor to his country. He needed, in fact, human contact if life was to be tolerable to him. He had no great friends in Springfield; but then he had never had great friends anywhere.
