Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 949
Mr George’s speech of exculpation was one of the most marvellous feats of oratorical pathos that could be imagined. Certainly I have never heard on the stage or read in any book anything much more moving. He made no attempt to deny having purchased shares that he ought strictly speaking not to have bought, but he said he had bought them in the usual course of investment and on the advice of his usual financial adviser. He had had nothing to do with any attempts to influence the market. And was, he said, a career of sedulous devotion to the service of his country, to be broken because of a mistake that any one not born to opportunities of great experience in the manipulations of shares might easily make?
As he went on he moved the House to deep emotion. A great many of the members – Mr Balfour was one – were moved to tears. I know that I came very near crying myself and in that matter I was as bitter an opponent as Mr George ever had. After the first five minutes of the speech there could be no doubt that the division would be a triumph for him. And it was. He carried practically the whole House with him.
The Marconi Commission had been a grotesque affair and after the sitting which I have described it was summarily brought to an end. But it did undoubtedly have the effect of restoring English public standards to their earlier strictness. I do not believe that any Minister of the Crown has since bought any shares which could in any way be questioned. The horror of having such a body sit interminably on one’s case must be enough to deter you from the most minute of irregularities.
With such preoccupations and employments I passed my working hours. The second reverse of my medal – if a medal can have two reverses or a lump of amber contain two flies – presented itself when I took my morning walks abroad. When I left my doorstep I would perceive bearing down on me from opposite directions Mrs Gwendolen Bishop and Mr Ezra Pound. Mrs Bishop was a lady of striking appearance – of great beauty, indeed. I think she danced snake dances and made pottery. Mr Bernard Shaw broke up the City Socialist League because he drank champagne from one of her shoes on the premises of that body. But no one could have drunk anything from her shoes in those days for she habitually wore sandals on bare feet. In addition she wore a very short blue skirt. It would be entirely covered by a leopard skin that descended from her shoulders; her head would be bare and she carried a string bag filled with onions. I had as a matter of the merest courtesy to take the string bag. Ezra on the other hand would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring.
Mrs Bishop would fall in on my right, Ezra on my left, and the great Dane would adjust its nose so as just not to touch my heel. So arranged we would proceed up Holland Park Avenue towards Bond Street. I did not mind … much. Sometimes I used to wonder why Mrs Bishop should want to carry – or want me to carry – exposed onions to that fashionable thoroughfare. Indeed I used to wonder why she carried onions away from rather than towards her home which was in the other direction, though I never quite knew where it was. In any case we went on the way in concord, discussing vers libre, the metre of Arnaut Daniel or the villainy of contributors to the front page of the Times Literary Supplement.
Ezra, the most erudite of poetic beings and the most poetic amongst the erudite, danced, fought and swash-buckled his way into my friendship through the medium of the English Review. He once challenged a Times reviewer to a duel because the reviewer had too high an opinion of Milton. I cannot imagine any better reason. The Times at least ought not to be kind to Nonconformists. And he gave a good deal of pain to many worthy and pompous people. But the only thing I have against him is that he never once offered to carry Mrs Bishop’s string bag. And since that is the only thing I have against him during a friendship that has lasted nearly a quarter of a century it may well pass for very little. Ezra was brought to my office by Miss May Sinclair who said she wanted to introduce the greatest poet to the greatest editor in the world. She could invent these courtesies when she wanted to. She must by then have forgiven me for the fireman’s helmet. But she afterwards wrote a book whose villain was a striking likeness of myself, so perhaps she really had not.
There are three people in whose deaths I have never been able to believe. They are Conrad and Arthur Marwood and Mrs H. G. Wells. It seems to me impossible that I shall never drive over to the Pent and ask Conrad some question, or never listen to Marwood encyclopaedically and brilliantly laying down the English Tory law on something or other. And though I shall never again take tea with Mrs Wells I cannot believe it and I should not thank you if you proved the fact to me. I will pay to her my little tribute before going on to Marwood and the English Review.
She had an extraordinarily delicate talent and contributed to both the English and the Transatlantic Reviews while I edited them. I still occasionally meet someone who remembers those stories as standing out from those periodicals. I used to urge her to write more and I still possess a number of pages of her sketches for poems or stories. But she felt that her star rose to be obscured. The little she wrote was exquisite but it was very little indeed. Her achievements as a hostess were as extraordinary as they appeared to be effortless. There can have been very few men or women of talent or distinction in England for whom she had not at one time or another provided delicate and charming entertainment and the number of the unfortunate who had cause to bless her for her care was legion. Her domesticity was conducted with a fierceness of conscience that can never have been surpassed. How she achieved what in one field or the other she contrived to achieve was incomprehensible. Yet she seemed to be always at leisure and always full of humour. I remember that the first time I stopped at Spade House I was sent to take a walk with Mrs Wells whilst Mr Wells wrote. We got as far as Folkestone post-office. Here she purchased a number of stamps, postcards and stamped envelopes that would have seemed to be excessive had she been purchasing a week’s supply for the house of Rothschild. Her other purchases were on a similarly impressive scale. Years after – twenty perhaps – I reminded her of that walk in what was, I should imagine, the last of the few letters I ever wrote her. She replied, yes, she remembered. She had been told that I was a very haughty and ostentatious, disagreeable sort of person. She had therefore made a list of things that could be bought in bulk without deteriorating and had taken me out for the sole purpose of disgruntling me whilst she bought a whole year’s supply of articles necessary in the household. She wrote that she rejoiced to think that she had impressed me. Ah, but indeed she had.
At Winchelsea a little later I had noticed for some time a powerfully built, leisurely man who sauntered about the town and the circumjacent marshes with a lady and, I think, a dog. I do not remember the dog at all so it must have been either non-existent or a fox-terrier, a breed that I dislike for its restlessness. How we became acquainted I do not remember but I do remember very vividly interminable conversations that we had almost immediately after we did meet. There was nothing under the sun that we did not discuss and no topic on which he could not in some minute particular at least correct my assertions. He would wait for a long time and then rather jestingly drop his correction into the middle of a quite unrelated topic. The first time he did this he filled me with a confusion that I can still feel. By a feat of mixing up names of which I am at all times capable I assigned Laura to Ariosto and spoke of Valence instead of Vaucluse as Petrarch’s place of exile. Marwood made no immediate protest, but a long time after we were talking of some parliamentary candidate who had written an extraordinary number of addresses to the electors of the Cleveland Division of Durham. Marwood said:
‘They were about as useful as the stuff Petrarch wrote to Laura in Vaucluse,’ as it were underlining the names a very little.
He possessed the clear, eighteenth century English mind which has disappeared from the earth, leaving the earth very much the poorer. It was not merely that his mind was encyclopaedic, it was that his information was all arranged. I knew Valence and Vaucluse as well as I know most places that I have not inhabited and I knew and disliked the Petrarchan sonnet as well as I know and dislike any literary form. But nothing can prevent my mixing up names. I suppose I inherit the characteristic from my grandfather, who had it to a dangerous degree. I would come in and say to him:
‘Grandpa, I met Lord Leighton in the Park and he sent his regards to you.’ He would exclaim with violence: ‘Leighton! How dare you be seen talking to him? And how dare he presume to send messages to me? He is the scoundrel who …’ I would interrupt:
‘But, Grandpa, he is the President of the Royal Academy…’ He would interrupt in turn: ‘Nonsense. I tell you he is the fellow who got seven years for …’ A few minutes after he would exclaim:
‘Leighton? Oh, Leighton? Why didn’t you say Leighton if you meant Leighton. I thought you said Fothergill-Bovey Haines. Of course there is no reason why you should not be civil to Leighton.’
Marwood’s mind connoted and arranged names, verb sounds and cyphers with such accuracy that it was impossible for him to make a slip. I got over my confusion about the Laura affair next day. The Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had just appeared and he had borrowed a copy of the first volume from the village library and covered it with a newspaper jacket so that no one should know that the objectionable volume was in the house. I found him going through the first page with a pencil and note-book. He had discovered thirty-seven errors in that page. In the paragraph about Arminianism alone he had found seven slips, misstatements and inaccuracies in terminology.
He had other and singular gifts: how many I never fathomed. He was a higher mathematician of considerable renown at his University. He was determined not to be Senior Wrangler because he disliked the idea of having a title that he considered ridiculous. The betting at Cambridge was five to one that he would be. He had to sit for that distinction. He deliberately set down five cyphers wrong, wrote them down on a piece of paper apart, and, as he came out tossed it contemptuously to his principal backer, saying:
‘Sorry, old fellow. I’ll shew you how to get what you’ve lost back at roulette.’ He was most interested in the theory of waves which I think occupied the greater part of his mind. But in an off moment he had invented a modification of the martingale that he said was infallible at Monte Carlo. He communicated it to me but warned me not to use it. It needed so much application for its proper working that you were certain to get impatient and plunge, losing all your small gains. I tried it when I was in the Red Cross Hospital at Mentone in 1917. We had leave to go into the Principality after lunch and, if we changed into mufti, might play at the tables as long as we were back in hospital at seven. I played for a great many afternoons from about three till about half past six – and always with the result that Marwood predicted. By a quarter to six I had always won anything from five to thirty pounds. At a quarter past the hour I would be sick to death of the system and would plunge. The atmosphere was stuffy, the occupation too monotonous. One said the equivalent of today’s ‘To hell with it!’ and plumped all one’s winnings on a number. If one won one plumped it all on another number. It went.
It was whilst I was thus passing my time that it occurred to me to wonder what Marwood would have thought about the war and the way it was conducted. In the attempt to realise that problem for myself I wrote several novels with a projection of him as a central character. Of course they were no sort of biography of Marwood. He died several years before the war, though, as I have said, that is a fact that I never realise.
It was the peculiar, scornful, acute quality of his mind that did that for me. I do not know that I ever consulted him over any of my personal difficulties as I invariably consulted Conrad – and indeed, rather often, Mrs Wells. It was much more as if I ‘set’ my mind by his. If I had personal problems I would go and talk to him about anything else. Then the clarity of the working of his mind had an effect on mine that made me see if not what was best to do then what would be most true to myself. In much the same way when I was at Walton Heath during the first days of the war in attendance on Masterman I played a daily round of golf with George Duncan – for a fortnight or so. I was not taking lessons. Duncan paid no attention to me and gave me no hints. I merely paid him for his time. But I played really extraordinary golf for me – with disastrous results for Masterman or any other member of the Cabinet who played against Masterman and myself in the afternoon.
I do not believe that Marwood had much sense of humour, but his dry statements of essential facts were so strange to the greater part of English humanity of his day that he could keep a roomful of men laughing as long as he was in it. He said one afternoon at Rye Golf Club to the Conservative member for that borough:
‘You know,’ – he was speaking as a Tory – ‘We ought to have had Lloyd George to do our dirty work. We have always had to have someone to do our dirty jobs. We had Disraeli and we had Chamberlain. We ought to have had Lloyd George.’ The Conservative member laughed as if he thought Marwood an amiable lunatic. His mind was incapable of making the jump of seeing Mr George as anything but a Radical devil with hoofs and tail.
From the beginning of the period of which I am talking – from 1907 to 1914 – I worried myself with the idea that I ought to have a periodical of my own. Lord Northcliffe had wanted me to run one under him. That had not impressed me so much. But, when the Transatlantic press Napoleon urged me to adopt the same position under himself, I had had serious thoughts of doing something of the sort. S. S. McClure had sketched out a programme for a journal that should consist as to half of pure literature and criticism and as to half of muck-raking. If he had suggested giving me the opportunity of doing something of the sort in the United States I daresay that I should have stayed there for good. But I could not see that the employment of the muck-rake could do any good in political England and there were a number of monthlies in America all devoted to imaginative literature and technical criticism. I cared nothing about politics. If McClure had proposed to set me up in a periodical that was half political of either camp and half aesthetico-critical – in England – I daresay that I should have accepted his offer. But he said that English party politics meant nothing to him and that he did not, as a foreigner, think himself justified in taking part in them.
There entered then into me the itch of trying to meddle in English literary affairs. The old literary gang of the Athenaeum-Spectator-Heavy Artillery order was slowly decaying. Younger lions were not only roaring but making carnage of their predecessors. Mr Wells was then growing a formidable mane, Arnold Bennett if not widely known was at least known to and admired by me. Mr Wells had given me Bennett’s first novel – A Man From The North. Experimenting in forms kept Conrad still young. Henry James was still ‘young James’ for my uncle William Rossetti and hardly known of by the general public. George Meredith and Thomas Hardy had come into their own only very little before, Mr George Moore was being forgotten as he was always being forgotten, Mr Yeats was known as having written the ‘Isle of Innisfree’. It seemed to me that if that nucleus of writers could be got together with what of undiscovered talent the country might hold a Movement might be started. I had one or two things I wanted to say. They were about the technical side of novel writing. But mostly I desired to give the writers of whom I have spoken as it were a rostrum. It was with that idea that I had returned from America. England, I knew, would always regard me as, rather comically and a little suspiciously – too damn in earnest. The others it might listen to and I might slip a word in now and then.
The nature of the periodical to be started gave me a good deal of thought. To imagine that a magazine devoted to imaginative literature and technical criticism alone would find more than a hundred readers in the United Kingdom was a delusion that I in no way had. It must therefore of necessity be a hybrid, giving at least half its space to current affairs. Those I did not consider myself fit to deal with. I knew either nothing about them or I knew so much that I could not form any opinions. The only public matter as to which I was determined to take a line was that of female suffrage.
I dallied with the idea for some time. Then I came across the politician who had insisted on telling me his life history. I do not remember if he approached me or I him. At any rate we quickly came to an agreement. He was a virulent Tory of the new school and he wanted an organ of his own. He was to provide half of the capital necessary which we agreed was to be £5,000, I the other half. He was to edit half the magazine which was to be a monthly, I the other half. Being a business man as well as a politician he was to manage the business affairs of the concern, I to see to its make up, proof-reading and other details of publication. It was a good arrangement. I liked him very much. He was too brilliant to like me extremely but he tolerated me more than he tolerated most people. He had an exaggerated idea of my omniscience and political influence.
I had arranged with the house of Duckworth to publish the review and had commissioned a number of stories, poems and critical articles. He came to me one day and said he could not supervise the business affairs of the concern. That was rather a heavy blow because I knew enough about business to know that I should make a muddle of that side of it. I sighed, cabled to Byles who was then in Japan to come back and take on the business of the review, and consented to continue the enterprise. A little later my friend came to me and said that he could not undertake to do half the editing. A General Election was in the offing; he had neglected his constituency; he would have to go perpetually into the North to kick off footballs, open flower shows, subscribe to fox-hounds and utter verbal coruscations. He suggested that I might find someone else of his school of thought to direct the political policy of the review; I sighed again and consented. For that Marwood was indicated. He was an Old, rather than a New Tory and he was incurably indolent. But he consented to suggest from Winchelsea the sort of article that should go into the review and in most cases to indicate the writers who should be invited to contribute. My political friend proposed in fairness that if so much of the labour was to fall on me he should increase the amount of capital that he found whilst I should retain my full half share of the control of the periodical. I was glad of that because I had lately had rather serious financial reverses.
