Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 937
Armed then with Lord Northcliffe’s promise, Byles went round to Mr Gardiner of the Daily News, the leading Liberal organ of the time. Mr Gardiner was Lord Northcliffe’s chief rival in London journalism of the day. As soon as he heard that the Harmsworth Press had discovered a new genius he determined not to be beaten and promised a column and a half. With that promise my friend went to the Morning Post, the chief Tory paper, not only of that, but of all time. If the Morning Post had any enemies they were the Daily Mail and the Liberal organ. The Morning Post was the property of the Bathurst family and the most scrupulously honest paper in the world. Nothing would have persuaded it to go out of its way to praise a book in which Mr Hervey Bathurst was interested. It despised news and all its foreign correspondence from however far, was always sent by post. But in its lordly and condescending way it patronised letters and was indeed a most valuable literary organ. I remember Mr Ashmead Bartlett going almost out of his mind. He was the Post’s correspondent in Constantinople at the time of the Young Turk rising. The Sultan gave him a unique and amazingly frank interview. The Post refused to pay cable rates for it. But it promised Byles two columns for my book.
So Byles went from paper to paper till he had promises of reviews from all the fifteen principal sheets in the Kingdom. All this was kept secret from me so that on the day of that publication I felt like a cat in a coruscation of fireworks. I could not open a paper, morning or evening, without seeing my name in ‘leaded caps’. And, hardened as I ought to be, I have never got over a feeling of shyness at seeing my name in print. Byles did even better for my next book.
I was singularly in harmony with him as a publisher. He accepted the books that I recommended him to publish and published them as I thought they ought to be published and advertised. I wish he could have gone on publishing me for good. But he met his Waterloo in the battle of the book clubs and I with him. He went to Japan to run a mineral water business dealing in Tan San water. He did this with considerable success but returned just before the war, having quarrelled with the Japanese Government and the proprietors of the spring. The water had a considerable sale on the Coast where there is little or no indigenous mineral water. Its advertising placards became familiar objects on the roadsides of the United States and Byles might have been a rich man for he had considerable interest in the spring. But the war made shipments from Japan to the Coast too costly when they were possible and no more was heard of Tan San.
Byles then tried publishing again but, for a hard business man, was rather simply double crossed. A couple of young men who were starting a publishing business pretended that they had a great deal of capital whereas they had none at all. They engaged Byles as manager and the affair was a disaster for him – and indeed for me. I was anxious to help him as much as possible. I had a very good contract with very good publishers at the time but I broke it in order to give the book to Byles’s firm – for nothing: that is to say without any advance. Byles sailed in with immense enthusiasm to provide publicity for me. The results were almost more painful than with the earlier venture. My book was called Mr – after the central character and Byles hit on the diabolical idea of hiring a carriage and pair with cockaded footmen and a passenger got up to resemble my principal character. This monstrosity drove all over the more aristocratic region of London leaving cards on which was engraved:
Mr ——
Palatial Hall
Hampstead N.W.
I don’t know how that would have worked as publicity. I knew nothing about it. On the day he had done it Byles told me rather nervously that he had adopted an advertising device that I might not like. He added that I must bear up under it. I had to.
That afternoon I went, as I frequently did, to tea at the G. W. Protheros’. I liked Mr and Mrs Prothero a good deal. The Editor of the Quarterly was not exactly my speed, as the saying is – a gentle, bearded, restrained, as if blighted little man. But his conversation was, in a muted key, very entertaining and his comments on public affairs were singularly just and instructed. Mrs Prothero also had great charm of a birdlike type. Dr Garnett being then dead, the Protheros’ household was the one I liked best to visit in London at tea-time.
That day I was received with very marked coldness. After a time Mr Prothero took me into his study and, stroking his pointed little beard, said bluffly that my passion for publicity carried me too far. He produced one of Byles’s cards which had been left at his door. I did not explain the mistake and I never went to the Protheros’ again. I took the view that they ought to have known me better. Or perhaps they did not ask me. I suppose it doesn’t matter. In the event the book was seized by the Sheriff’s Officer because Byles’s firm could not pay its printer’s bills so that it was never actually published.
Byles subsequently became the manager of the socialist New Statesman. He filled the job with energy and distaste – for he was both loyal to his employers and a tremendous Tory. So during the War his was a tortured personality. His last letter to me was rather tart. I was in training at Cardiff and was appointed military prosecutor for the express purpose of prosecuting Mr Bertrand Russell. Mr Russell had been making pro-German speeches in that city. I naturally did not like the job but having been pitchforked into it I set about it conscientiously but with some listlessness. I wrote in due course to Byles as manager of the New Statesman and asked him to supply me with numbers of that paper containing articles on the war by the philosopher. Byles replied that if I wanted aid in that dirty business I had better apply to the police. Fortunately my difficulties solved themselves. I got my last leave notice three days before the trial of Mr Russell which was then postponed and before he was tried I was already at the Front. Byles I never heard from again. He died shortly afterwards. In spite of eccentricities he was as good a publisher as I could want. He had great knowledge of the business side of book producing and great courage in backing his fancies. His honesty was absolute and his sympathy with the idiosyncrasies of his authors can hardly have been surpassed. He got me into a singular number of scrapes – but that is inevitable with a publisher of strong character. I wish, scrapes and all, that he could have gone on publishing me to the end of his days.
He succeeded indeed in very nearly embroiling me with Conrad. Conrad wanted to sponsor a cookery book at a time when I was advising Byles as to the books he published. Conrad wanted £400 very badly at that moment and he insisted that I should make Byles publish the book and pay £400 for it. Byles did not want to publish a cookery book and very curtly refused to pay anything like £400 for it.
Authors have singular vanities as to recipes for cooking. I have my own. I have long wanted to write a cookery book. And I can cook. Once in a New York – say, restaurant, I cooked a meal so admirable that, at its end, not a scrap of the food I had treated remained in the casseroles… But, still more important, I can aver that having cooked for my family lately during a period of ninety days I only once repeated the same dish three times – and then by request of the consumers. There are very few cooks that can make that boast. Nevertheless I have been quite unable to find a publisher for my cookery book.
Yet authors of a certain notoriety invariably believe that, if they will lend their names to, or write prefaces for, volumes of receipts for dishes, their names will give publicity to the compilations. They won’t. Neither publishers nor public will believe that a novelist can know anything about cooking. We are supposed to live in garrets on a little thin oatmeal. But indeed I do not believe that I would allow any novelist save myself into my own kitchen… I once arranged for a third party the sale of a cookery book compiled by George Meredith and his father-in-law, Peacock. They had collected receipts from the Greek Anthology, the Koran, the Thorah, and every likely and unlikely source. Mr Pierpont Morgan bought the manuscript but it never found a publisher.
Conrad’s culinary god-child did, I think, though I never saw it. Unfortunately in rejecting the book Byles put the two letters that he wrote into the wrong envelopes. Conrad was stopping with me at Winchelsea at the time these letters came but I was in town for the day. So Conrad, confidently expecting a cheque for £400 read instead a letter in which Byles asked whether I had gone mad or imagined that he had become a benevolent institution. Could I, he asked, imagine him, the smartest publicity man outside Coney Island giving £400 to one of my highbrow friends whose books had a sale of 2,000 copies – giving him £400 for a collection of papers only fit for – I forget what they were fit for? But I remember my homecoming. Conrad had already written to Byles. His letters could be violent. This one was more than violent. Now he wanted me to return to town at once and horsewhip Byles. When Byles got Conrad’s letter he wrote to me that the only thing I could do was to horsewhip Conrad.
The matter settled itself as far as Conrad was concerned by my offering to guarantee the costs of publishing the book if some reputable publisher could be found to produce it. But no reputable publisher could. Cookery books are difficult to dispose of.
The moral seems to be that one should not have friends who misdirect letters – or other friends who read letters not intended for them. What ought one to do in such cases? Very shortly after that Conrad-Byles affray I was reading my morning letters half asleep in bed when I became aware that I was reading something that was certainly not meant for me. It contained information of singular delicacy and was, when I came to look at the envelope – addressed by a lady I knew well to a man who had just been stopping with me. I don’t know what I ought to have done but I know what I did. I went half an hour later by train up to London. I got some envelopes to match the one I had opened. Then, at one of my clubs I imitated the address of that letter on those envelopes. I managed at last a fair likeness. Then I posted the letter in that envelope. It had thus the London postmark. Then I returned to Winchelsea, and, as soon as the letter arrived, I forwarded it to the addressee.
I might perhaps have spared myself the trouble. A little later that gentleman turned up at my house just half an hour before a big and rather formal dinner that I was giving to celebrities of sorts. He had been invited and had accepted. Now he said with signs of agitation that he couldn’t come. He was very apologetic but assured me that in the end I should much prefer his empty place to his presence. It turned out that he had just been served with a notice of divorce proceedings by the husband of the lady who had written that letter. We had our delicacies in the early days of the century.
My mind keeps harking back to that sarcophagus and its painful memories. I will mark time by dwelling on them so as to fill in the three or four next years when I paid little attention to literary or other mundane matters. There was one pleasure – I used to go round to breakfast with Mr Galsworthy. He lived en garçon in a little converted stable on the other side of the square open space formed by the waterworks on Campden Hill. My house was on the south side, his stable – it was very elegantly appointed – was on the north. We used to play lawn tennis on the great lid that covered the reservoir.
In those days Mr Galsworthy was already writing, but I think as ‘John Sinjon’, in order to spare the feelings of his family. I do not think I ever disagreed with anyone more thoroughly than I did with Mr Galsworthy as to the methods and functions of novel writing – but we disagreed very amiably – at least on my side. I wrote him immense and violent letters on the subject. For all I know they may have annoyed him but he always smiled at breakfast.
Conrad, I imagine, was fonder of ‘Poor Jack’ than of anyone else. Having much the same viewpoint about writing as mine he must have differed as much as I from the author of The Man of Property. But his pleasure when Mr Galsworthy announced by letter that he was coming down to the Pent was too ingenuous not to be genuine. He would jump up from the breakfast table with the letter in his hand and shout up the stairs to whoever was on the upper floor:
‘Hullo … Jack’s coming down… Poor Jack’s coming down … Hurray!’
Poor Jack was the name of one of Marryat’s novels. Mr Galsworthy was not lacking in resources or otherwise marked out by misfortune.
Conrad’s account of his first meeting with Mr Galsworthy always pleased me: it was like one of those fairytales of which there are too few in life. Mr Galsworthy I anticipate will contradict it. I can only vouch for the way Conrad told the story.
Conrad then was first mate of a sailing ship called the Torrens. The Torrens was one of the famous, teak-built, clipper-rigged vessels that carried sea-loving or invalid passengers by way of the Cape to Australia with almost the punctuality of a steam liner. Ninety days out to Sidney Headland, ninety back to the Thames Estuary – that was her schedule and she kept to it. Conrad already had ideas of leaving the sea and making a living by his pen. It was before the days of typewriters. He had already begun a novel, writing trial passages on the fly-leaves and margins of Madame Bovary and L’Education Sentimentale. I used to possess his copy of the latter book. Whilst I was in France during the war someone relieved me of it along with most of my portable property. There was a passage, that was afterwards incorporated into Almayer pencilled on the front and back of the half-title page.
On the Torrens, bound for the Cape, was a young, blond, modest and smiling barrister. He was bound on legal business for the Cape Copper Mines in which he had a family interest. The two young men – Conrad was still in his thirties – confided each to the other that they had literary ambitions. In the starlit silence of the dogwatches Conrad descended to his cabin and fetched up the beginning of his manuscript. That young barrister who seemed to Conrad to possess all the gifts of Fortunatus must have been the first human being to read any of Conrad’s manuscript – on a ship, in the starlight, running down off the coast of Africa. That romance would be almost enough for any one man’s portion! That fortunate being was the author of – The Silver Box.
I say The Silver Box because it was the one of Mr Galsworthy’s writings for which Conrad had the most unbounded admiration. I went with him to one of its later performances and his enthusiasm was so vocal as to cause me considerable shyness. The people in the stalls round us now and then hissed for silence. And indeed The Silver Box is an admirable work. I would give no little to see it again but I suppose I never shall. The dogged determination with which Mr Galsworthy makes point after point always reminds me of a big trout lying in a stickle of a stream on his native Dartmoor. Fly after fly comes down on the water and not one, ever, does the grim speckled being miss. In that play at least you have an object lesson in what Conrad used to call catching a subject by the throat and squeezing the last breath out of it. And the original cast was admirable. I wish I could remember the name of the young lady who played the young lady. I will make the confession that she sat to me – she on the stage and I in the house – for the subsidiary heroine of a series of my novels. The publisher insisted on calling that production of mine a ‘Saga’ when the word surely should have been considered the sole appurtenance of the immensely known Forsyte family. I shall make, later, a few remarks upon publishers … at any rate let me put it on record, as atonement for what it is worth that except for The Playboy of the Western World no play ever gave me so much pleasure as The Silver Box. I mean no play at all.
Another play of its author’s also pleased me very much indeed. That was, Joy. It was not very successful – not one tenth as successful as it should have been for it was full of charm and geniality. It contained one catchword of one character that has remained to me as amongst my most valuable possessions. The story comes back to me as one of agitated matrimonial implications in which a number of characters confide their woes to, and exact sympathy from, a buxom and venerably placid family nurse who has seen them all in their cradles. As each finishes, breathless and a little uncertain of the justifiability of his or her position, the old lady affords them the balm of the same remark: ‘Yours, my dear, is a special case.’
I have for my sins and in the course of a longish life received always unwillingly a great number of agitated confidences. I do not know how many times I have not called to my aid that magic phrase. Confidences are things that one ought not to be called on to receive for they lead almost invariably to misunderstandings. An individual who will confide in one person will almost certainly confide later in two or three more. If he is agitated he will still more certainly do so. Then, though A may be as reticent as the grave, B, C, or D will almost surely commit some breach of the secret. A will be the one that will get it in the neck; I do not think I have ever violated a confidence. I know at least that I have frequently made myself unpopular with members of my family – by reticences at exciting moments. But I was once let down in a most unfortunate way – and just after I had seen Joy.
There was in those days an eminent politician of very wide knowledge and ability. He was then on the verge of a disagreeable affair. He honoured me by a belief, that was perhaps exaggerated, in my knowledge of life and influence in regions where he wanted influence exercised. One day he asked me to go with him to the Zoo. In the reptile house which also contained cages of bright tropical finches he gave me a most brilliant lecture on the protective colouring of birds. It remains now vivid in my mind and has been of the greatest use in helping me to form appreciations of more modern art. On the face of it the birds we were looking at appeared, in their surroundings, astonishingly visible. But they lived at home in tree-tops above jungles and had to fear hawks above all. A finch with a scarlet stomach, sapphire blue wings, an emerald green head and back is a striking object in a dim London building. Seen from above in the tropical rays of an immense sun the effect of the colours in the prismatic coloration of the tree-tops is completely to break up the form of the bird.
