Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 935
At any rate, then, he had none of that provincialism of the literary mind which must forever be dragging in allusions to some book or local custom. If he found it necessary to allude to one or the other he explained them and their provenance. In that you saw that he had learned in the same school as Conrad and Stephen Crane. And indeed he had.
It has always seemed to me inscrutable that he should have been so frequently damned for his depicting only one phase of life; as if it were his fault that he was not also Conrad, to write of the sea, or Crane, to project the life of the New York slums. The Old Man knew consummately one form of life; to that he restricted himself. I have heard him talk with extreme exactness and insight of the life of the poor – at any rate of the agricultural poor, for I do not remember ever to have heard him discuss industrialism. But he knew that he did not know enough to treat of farm labourers in his writing. So that, mostly, when he discoursed of these matters he put his observations in the form of question: ‘Didn’t I agree to this?’ ‘Hadn’t I found that?’
But indeed, although I have lived amongst agricultural labourers a good deal at one time or another, I would cheerfully acknowledge that his knowledge – at any rate of their psychologies – had a great deal more insight than my own. He had such an extraordinary gift for observing minutiae – and a gift still more extraordinary for making people talk. I have heard the secretary of a golf club, a dour silent man who never addressed five words to myself though I was one of his members, talk for twenty minutes to the Master about a new bunker that he was thinking of making at the fourteenth hole. And James had never touched a niblick in his life. It was the same with market-women, tram-conductors, ship-builders’ labourers, auctioneers. I have stood by and heard them talk to him for hours. Indeed, I am fairly certain that he once had a murder confessed to him. But he needed to stand on extraordinarily firm ground before he would think that he knew a world. And what he knew he rendered, along with its amenities, its gentlefolkishness, its pettinesses, its hypocrisies, its make-believes. He gives you an immense – and an increasingly tragic – picture of a Leisured Society that is fairly unavailing, materialist, emasculated – and doomed. No one was more aware of all that than he.
Stevie used to rail at English Literature, as being one immense petty, Parlour Game. Our books he used to say were written by men who never wanted to go out of drawing-rooms for people who wanted to live at perpetual tea-parties. Even our adventure-stories, colonial fictions and tales of the boundless prairie were conducted in that spirit. The criticism was just enough. It was possible that James never wanted to live outside tea-parties – but the tea-parties that he wanted were debating circles of a splendid aloofness, of an immense human sympathy, and of a beauty that you do not find in Putney – or in Passy!
It was his tragedy that no such five-o’clock ever sounded for him on the timepieces of this world. And that is no doubt the real tragedy of all of us – of all societies – that we never find in our Spanish Castle our ideal friends living in an assured and permanent republic. Crane’s Utopia, but not his literary method, was different. He gave you the pattern in – and the reverse of – the carpet in physical life – in wars, in slums, in Western saloons, in a world where the ‘gun’ was the final argument. The life that Conrad gives you is somewhere halfway between the two: it is dominated – but less dominated – by the revolver than that of Stephen Crane, and dominated, but less dominated, by the moral scruple than that of James. But the approach to life is the same with all these three: they show you that disillusionment is to be found alike at the tea-table, in the slum and on the tented field. That is of great service to our Republic.
It occurs to me that I have given a picture of Henry James in which small personal unkindlinesses may appear to sound too dominant a note. That is the misfortune of wishing to point a particular moral. I will not say that loveableness was the predominating feature of the Old Man: he was too intent on his own particular aims to be lavishly sentimental over surrounding humanity. And his was not a character painted in the flat, in water-colour, like the caricatures of Rowlandson. For some protective reason or other, just as Shelley used to call himself the Atheist, he loved to appear in the character of a sort of Mr Pickwick – with the rather superficial benevolences, and the mannerisms of which he was perfectly aware. But below that protective mask was undoubtedly a plane of nervous cruelty. I have heard him be – to simple and quite unpretentious people – more diabolically blighting than it was quite decent for a man to be – for he was always an artist in expression. And it needed a certain fortitude when, the studied benevolence and the chuckling, savouring, enjoyment of words, disappearing suddenly from his personality, his dark eyes rolled in their whites and he spoke very brutal and direct English. He chose in fact to appear as Henrietta Maria – but he could be atrocious to those who behaved as if they took him at that valuation.
And there was yet a third depth – a depth of religious, of mystical benevolence such as you find just now and again in the stories that he ‘wanted’ to write – in ‘The Great Good Place’… His practical benevolences were innumerable, astonishing – and indefatigable. To do a kindness when a sick cat or dog of the human race had ‘got through’ to his mind as needing assistance he would exhibit all the extraordinary ingenuities that are displayed in his most involved sentences.
I have said that my relation with James was in no sense literary – and I never knew what it was. I am perfectly sure that I never in my life addressed to the Master one word of praise or of flattery and, as far as I know, he called me le jeune homme modeste and left it at that. He did indeed confess to having drawn my externals in Morton Densher of The Wings of the Dove – the longish, leanish, loosish, rather vague Englishman who, never seeming to have anything to do with his days, occupied in journalism his night hours.
I daresay he took me to be a journalist of a gentle disposition, too languid to interrupt him. Once, after I had sent him one of my volumes of poems, he just mentioned the name of the book, raised both his hands over his head, let them slowly down again, made an extraordinary, quick grimace, and shook with an immense internal joke… Shortly afterwards he began to poke fun at Swinburne.
In revenge, constantly and with every appearance of according weight to my opinions, though he seldom waited for an answer, he would consult me about practical matters – investments now and then, agreements once or twice – and, finally, unceasingly as to his fantastic domestic arrangements. He had at one stage portentous but increasingly unsatisfactory servants of whom, in his kindness of heart, he would not get rid until their conduct became the talk of the Antient Town of Rye.
So, one day he came over to Winchelsea to ask me if I thought a Lady Help would be a desirable feature in an eminent bachelor’s establishment… Going as we seemed eternally in those days to be doing, down Winchelsea Hill under the Strand Gate, he said:
‘H… you seem worried!’ I said that I was worried. I don’t know how he knew. But he knew everything.
Ellen Terry waved her gracious hand from the old garden above the tower; the collar of Maximilian the dachshund called for adjustment. He began another interminable, refining, sentence – about housemaids and their locutions. It lasted us to the bridge at the western foot of Rye.
In Rye High Street he exclaimed – he was extraordinarily flustered:
‘I perceive a compatriot. Let us go into this shop!’ And he bolted into a fruiterer’s. He came out holding an orange and, eventually, throwing it into the air in an ecstasy of nervousness and stuttering like a schoolboy:
‘If it’s money H …’ he brought out. ‘Mon sac n’est pas grand… Mais puisez dans mon sac!’
I explained that it was not about money that I was worried, but about the ‘form’ of a book I was writing. His mute agony was a painful thing to see. He became much more appalled, but much less nervous. At last he made the great sacrifice:
‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I’m supposed to be … Um, um… There’s Mary … Mrs Ward … does me the honour… I’m supposed to know… In short: Why not let me look at the manuscript!’
I had the decency not to take up his time with it… Les beaux jours quand on était bien modeste! And how much I regret that I did not.
The last time I saw him was, accidentally, in August of 1915 – on the fourteenth of that month, in St. James’s Park. He said:
‘Tu vas te battre pour le sol sacré de Mme de Stael!’
I suppose it was characteristic that he should say ‘de Mme de Stael’ – and not of Stendhal, or even of George Sand! He added – and how sincerely and with what passion – putting one hand on his chest and just bowing, that he loved and had loved France as he had never loved a woman!
I have said that I remember only one occasion on which Henry James spoke of his own work. That was like this: he had published The Sacred Fount, and was walking along beside the little shipyard at the foot of Rye Hill. Suddenly he said:
‘You understand … I wanted to write “The Great Good Place” and “The Altar of the Dead”… There are things one wants to write all one’s life but one’s artist’s conscience prevents one… And then… perhaps one allows oneself…’
I don’t know what he meant… Or I do! For there are things one wants to write all one’s life – only one’s artist’s conscience prevents one. That is the first – or the final, bitter – lesson that the Artist has to learn: that he is not a man to be swayed by the hopes, fears, consummations or despairs of a man. He is a sensitised instrument, recording to the measure of the light vouchsafed him what is – what may be the Truth.
PART IV. THE BL — DY WORLD
CHAPTER I. COMPANIES AND KINGS
There is a story which I am never tired – and which I hope I shall never tire, impenitently – of repeating. It belongs of right to Mr Christopher Morley, in one of whose books I read it. A Cockney in Canada was asked by a recruiting sergeant where he came from. He replied: ‘London.’ Said the sergeant: ‘London what? London, Ontario? London, N.Y.? London, Mass?’ ‘London the b — y world!’ the recruit replied with ineffable disgust. That is how it feels to the born Londoner.
I don’t believe I am immensely delighted at having been born in England. But I know that I should feel as disgusted as the recruit if, after accusing me of being English, you should suggest that I was born anywhere but within sound of Bow Bells. To be born there is almost like being born in the United States. At the beginning of the century it would have taken you 247 years walking at four miles an hour to cover all the streets of London on foot. What it would take now goodness knows… A thousand very likely. I daresay it would take no longer to traverse all the main roads of the United States. In any case it is good business to be born in London. You acquire very soon the knowledge that you are merely an atom amongst vastnesses and shouldn’t take yourself very seriously. That is the first lesson the artist has to learn.
Romance was published in 1903, and shortly afterwards Conrad and I determined to ‘shew ourselves’ – that was Conrad’s phrase – in London. I never understood Conrad’s desire to shew himself with me. It certainly existed. When we had finally decided on collaborating on Romance he insisted on driving the seven miles that separated the Pent from Spade House in order to break the news to Mr H. G. Wells. I suppose he regarded Mr Wells as the doyen of the younger school of writers. Certainly Mr Wells had written of Almayer’s Folly with extraordinary generosity. Anyhow, to my extraordinary discomfort we drove in state in a hired fly, down, down, down to the seashore. When I come to think of it it was not to Spade House that we drove but to a hired villa. The Wells’s were living in it while Spade House was building. The landscape from the terrace of that villa – the shingle, the swains and maidens in bathing garb, the break-water, the as-if-tamed Channel – was exactly that of The Sea Lady. That romance for which Conrad had the most ardent and unrestrained admiration must have been the last novel of Mr Wells’s to be relatively free of sociological speculation. Very shortly afterwards Mr Wells told me that it was his intention to galvanise the Fabian Society into new life. I begged him not to, for I had an admiration at least as ardent and unrestrained as that of Conrad’s for Mr Wells’s work of that period. And I have always considered – and alas, observed – that the work of imaginative writers markedly deteriorates as soon as they occupy themselves with politics.
Mr Wells got back at me by turning up at my cottage at Aldington and advising me not to collaborate with Conrad. He said that I should probably ruin Conrad’s ‘delicate Oriental style’. And, referring to the virulent controversy that was then raging between Henley and Mrs Stevenson he said that I should probably regret the step all my life. I can still see and hear him as he mounted his bicycle by the rear step.
I should like to add a pleasant detail with regard to that literary scrap that in the number of the Pall Mall Magazine which printed Henley’s most outrageous attack on the Shorter Catechist there appeared a collection of obviously fictitious epitaphs. And – as clearly as I remember Mr Wells’s departure – the print of the magazine and the passion-flowers that trailed over the stoep of General Prescott’s frame-cottage at Winchelsea where I read them – I remember my delight at those anonymous fragments. One of them began:
Here lies a most beautiful lady,
Light of heart and step was she.
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Countree…
And after all these years I still remember those verses and feel the same delight of discovery in them. They must have been the first that Walter de la Mare published.
Conrad’s last request to me to stand side by side with him before the public I have already printed in this book… I never understood that desire in him. I don’t suppose he desired to exhibit me tied to his chariot wheels, though I should not have minded. But it occurs to me at this moment that his desire may have been solely for my good. The reader will remember that in a letter I have already quoted Conrad says: ‘Ford has become a daily habit with me,’ and adds that he is astonished because nobody liked me. No doubt he wished, in exhibiting me to his friends, to show that I was not as black as I was painted. I remember his saying to me about that time: ‘Ford, your ruin will be that you cannot suffer fools gladly.’ I daresay it has been.
The house that I took in London presented an appearance of such immensity that when Henry James called his eyes rolled nearly out of his head and he exclaimed: ‘When you do go in for largenesses you do go in for largenesses!’ He was accustomed to finding me in General Prescott’s Winchelsea cottage. That did not contain at the time any one room in which you could swing a cat – whether the cat were the naval instrument of punishment or one of Dr Garnett’s pussies that you held by the tail. I had at that time lent the Pent with most of my furniture – which had descended to me from Christina Rossetti and my grandfather – to Conrad. He used to imagine pleasure at writing at a desk on which she had composed Goblin Market. But as a matter of fact that masterpiece – which contains the first rhymed Free Verse that was ever written in English – was actually composed on the corner of her washing-stand. She used to be banished to her bedroom, the other apartments of her father’s house being needed for Mr Ruskin and the other pre-Raphaelites. They had to have space in which to shout the arguments for primitive and virtuous Arts.
In revenge I had a Chippendale desk at Winchelsea and at that Conrad firmly refused to write. It had been given to my father by Thomas Carlyle. Conrad used to pretend that if he wrote at a desk on which The French Revolution had been composed it would ruin his style. So I had to hire across the road a two-room cottage in which he could write. He need not really have worried. I found in a letter of Mrs Carlyle’s a passage in which she complains of the trouble it gave her to go out and buy that desk as a wedding present for my father, so Carlyle could never have written on it. It came from a second-hand dealer’s in the King’s Road, Chelsea. It cost six pounds – thirty dollars.
It was in the cottage across the road that Conrad re-wrote the latter half of The End of the Tether. A glass kerosine lamp had burst. It had belonged to my grandfather and was no doubt in a mind to revenge itself on the Arts after a too prolonged period of service. So at least Conrad used to say. It was in any case intended for colza oil, which is a vegetable and non-inflammable liquid. So it burst and the flames destroyed Conrad’s manuscript. He came over bag and baggage, horse and groom at once to Winchelsea, driving his old mare, Nancy of the long ears, in his old chaise. He brought such leaves of the manuscript as were decipherable.
We worked at the story day and night, Conrad writing in the cottage. In the house I wrote passages which he sometimes accepted and sometimes didn’t. Mrs Conrad typed – or perhaps I did. His groom – his name was Walter – a fresh-coloured chawbacon of a lad, relieved my groom who was a pasty-faced scoundrel called Ernest – in sitting up all night booted and spurred. The mare remained always saddled. The rest of my household made soup for the exhausted writers.
The occasion was thus tremendous because The End of the Tether was running in Blackwood’s then famous magazine and the sun had better stop than that Maga should appear with an instalment of its serial missing. So that cavalry was kept mobilised at night. At whatever hour the story was finished it must be galloped with to Ashford Junction to catch a mail train to Edinburgh. Blackwood’s was published there.
