Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 950
The dummy of the first number approached completion; I had announced the name of the periodical, The English Review, in the press. It was Conrad who chose the title. He felt a certain sardonic pleasure in the choosing so national a name for a periodical that promised to be singularly international in tone, that was started mainly in his not very English interest and conducted by myself who was growing every day more and more alien to the normal English trend of thought, at any rate in matters of literary technique. And it was matters of literary technique that almost exclusively interested both him and myself. That was very un-English.
A couple of presumably needy journalists, both of very great ability, conceived the idea of making me, who was presumed to be rolling in wealth, pay for the use of that title. They registered it as soon as I had announced it in the press and then asked me to pay a prodigious sum for its use. I offered them half a sovereign a piece. They then published a single-sheet broad-sheet under the title of the English Review. Its letterpress consisted of virulent attacks on Lord Northcliffe and myself, promising extraordinary revelations as to both of us in their next number. I fancy they imagined that Lord Northcliffe was financing the review. The main allegation against myself was that I was a ‘multiple reviewer.’ The charge was true enough but only as far as one book was concerned. That was Charles Doughty’s Dawn in Britain – an epic poem in twelve books and four volumes. I had a great admiration for Doughty, who was the author also of Arabia Deserta, and I read his poem entirely through with a great deal of pleasure. No reviewer in London had leisure for that task. The book looked as if it might go unreviewed, so I asked a number of those gentlemen to let me review it for them. Others, hearing that I had volunteered to do it, also asked me to relieve them of the task. I do not remember how many reviews I wrote: it was a considerable number and some of them were quite long. I pleased myself by finding that I could do them all without once repeating a sentence or even an idea. At any rate I was quite unrepentant. I do not see why you should not write more than one review of a book for which you have a great admiration. I have written several times about Ulysses.
I continued to take no notice of the other English Review. My telephone became a constant worry because those two gentlemen rang me up at all hours of the night asking me to buy the title for sums that gradually descended from a thousand pounds to five. Lord Northcliffe on the other hand applied for an injunction against my rivals in one of the courts – I forget which. The injunction was granted and the other English Review disappeared. The real joke was that I had lent one of those lively persons the money with which he paid for his broad-sheet. At any rate, just before he printed it, I had met him looking very destitute in Fleet Street and had lent him exactly the sum with which he paid his printer’s and papermaker’s bill.
A little later I went to a Trench dinner. A Trench dinner was a Dutch treat presided over by Herbert Trench, the Irish poet. They were agreeable affairs and attended by most of the brilliant people in London. I was only asked to one. On this occasion I was set at a round table with Mr Hilaire Belloc, Mr Gilbert Chesterton, Mr Maurice Baring and Mr H. G. Wells. My politician was at another table with Mr Trench, the Marchioness of Londonderry and other notables.
Amongst all these celebrities I felt nervous. Celebrities are always rude to me. That has been the case from my tenderest years. I can hardly think of one that has not, at one time or another, said rude things to me. I ought to except politicians. I can hardly remember a politician who has not said nice things to me about my books – as soon as he heard that I was a writer. I suppose they learn that when canvassing for votes. Mr Balfour once asked me to send him my books as they came out. I did for years. He always wrote politely thanking me for the volume ‘from the reading of which he anticipated much pleasure.’ The letters were always marked: ‘Not for publication.’
I knew I should not get through that dinner without discomfort. It came. Mr Belloc was late. I had written an article about him a day or two before. It had been published that morning. I had classed him among the brilliant jeunes of the day and had expressed the really great admiration I felt for his wit, sincerity and learning. He hurried in, saw me, stopped as if he had been shot, thrust his hand through his forelock, gave one more maledictory glance at me with his baleful, pebble-blue eyes and then sank wearily into his chair next to Mr Maurice Baring. He looked anywhere but at me and began an impassioned monologue about the misfortunes of historians. They wore themselves out searching for matter in the British Museum Library and other stuffy places; they toiled till far into the night putting the results of their researches on paper. After infinite tribulation they published their books. Then along came the cold-eyed critic.
I forget what Mr Belloc said that the cold-eyed critic did to the historian but I realised that it was my eyes that were frigid in his. In my eulogy of him I had amiably found fault with some gigantic exaggeration in, I think, a book about the Cromwell family. What exactly Thomas Cromwell had done to our co-religionists or how Oliver had sinned against the Church of Rome I forget. Heaven forbid that I should set myself down as good a Papist as Mr Belloc, but I dislike to think of myself as a worse. I consider that there are only two human organisations that are nearly perfect for their disparate functions. They are the Church of Rome and His Britannic Majesty’s Army. I would cheerfully offer my life for either if it would do them any good and supposing them not to be arrayed the one against the other. But I could not see that the cause of the Church was advantaged by gigantically exaggerating the confiscations from which she has suffered any more than it would help the Old Contemptibles to represent them as having been without exception teachers in Sunday Schools. I had said this mildly in my article. As a matter of fact I wished that Mr Belloc would write novels and leave propaganda to the less gifted.
The affair ended dramatically in nothing, for before ending his monologue Mr Belloc suddenly burst out to someone whom I could not see at the chairman’s table beside us:
‘Our Lord! What do you know about Our Lord? Our Lord was a gentleman.’
After that I escaped notice in the shadow of Mr Chesterton. Mr Chesterton and Mr Belloc were one on each side of Mr Baring. They occupied themselves for some time in trying in vain to balance glasses of Rhine Wine on the skull of Mr Baring. That gentleman comes back to me as having been then only a little less bald than an egg. The floor and his shirt front received the wine in about equal quantities. But he did not seem to mind. Something I said about the two Russians of the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria set him corroborating their stories and telling amazing stories of his own about the Russian Court. He had been, I think, Secretary to the Embassy in St. Petersburg.
Suddenly Mr Belloc was at me again. He said that I would not dare to print in my review any article that he sent me just as it stood. I said I would. He repeated that I would not and I that I would. He was in those days almost as vigorous a muck-raker as S. S. McClure and hardly anyone had the courage to print him in his more coruscating moments. I may say that I did print his article but, since it contained the most amazing accusations against bishops, keepers of the Crown jewels, West Indian Governors and other apparently unoffending and unimportant beings, I made the printer black out the names and functions of everybody concerned. Those pages of the review startlingly resembled newspapers in Russia after they had received the attention of the censor. They startled Mr St. Loe Strachey, the Editor of the Spectator, to some purpose. He confused my English Review with the broad-sheet promoted by the two journalists and supposed that either I or Mr Belloc intended to threaten the owners of the blacked out names with exposure in another number if we were not bought off. Solemnly and weightily he protested against this growing tendency in British journals. He seemed to me to be a mild and doting old gentleman, so I wrote to him amiably and told him that he had accused me of being a blackmailer and would he kindly refute himself in the next number of his journal. He did so and wrote me a very agitated letter, saying that he had meant nothing of the sort. He did not say what he had meant.
That Trench dinner, different as it was from the Trench dinners that we afterwards ate, came also to an end. I was going towards the Piccadilly Tube. It was pouring and Mr Belloc was begging me not to believe that he was in fact the light-hearted being that he appeared. Actually he was filled with the woes of all the world.
I was beginning to assure him that from then on I would regard his as a figure of the deepest tragedy. We were just turning into the Tube Station when my politician, ex-fellow editor and business manager, came running up rather breathlessly and caught hold of the arm of mine that Mr Belloc was not imprisoning. He said:
‘Fordie, I’m very sorry. I can’t find my half share of the capital for the review.’
I said:
‘That will be all right.’ He disappeared and I went on assuring Mr Belloc of my appreciation of his pessimism.
It appeared subsequently that my friend was suffering from the same financial disaster that had hit hard not only myself but many other people. It was the case of a disappearance abroad with an expensive young woman of a man the bearer of a very honoured name in whose faith too many had reposed their trust. He subsequently committed suicide.
There seemed to be nothing to do but to close down that periodical, pay off the contributors whom I had already commissioned and realise my dream of retiring to a little farm in Provence. I had of course to tell Marwood who was by that time as enthusiastic about the review as he could be about anything.
He agreed with me. There was nothing to do but to shut it down. He made a good many caustic remarks about Young Tories in general and my friend in particular. I disagreed with him. That politician was no more guilty than I. Marwood, however, was certain that he had never intended to find the money.
I returned from Winchelsea to Aldington where I had by now bought a cottage. There remained, it seemed, nothing for it but to emigrate to Provence and there seemed to be nowhere else to emigrate to. As the world then appeared to me I could support living in London if I had the review. Without it, I couldn’t.
I was writing to a friend I had in Tarascon – a notaire – to ask about small farms that might be for sale in his neighbourhood. It was a Sunday. Marwood was suddenly on the terrace. He was pale with indignation and brandished a crumpled newspaper. He panted:
‘You’ve got to carry on that review.’
I had never seen him agitated before – and I never did again. He must have got up at four that morning to catch the train from Winchelsea to Aldington.
The newspaper announced that the Cornhill Magazine had refused to print, on the score of immorality, a poem of Thomas Hardy called ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’. All the other heavy and semi-heavy monthlies, all the weeklies, all the daily papers in England had similarly refused. Marwood said:
‘You must print it. We can’t have the country made a laughing stock.’ He was of opinion that the rest of the world must guffaw if it heard that Hardy could not find a publisher in England. Marwood was accustomed to say that nothing worth the attention of a grown man had been written in England since the eighteenth century. Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion and the Jacobean poets were his reading. He made a great concession to modernity when he read Maine’s Ancient Law and Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. Yet there he was mad to spend several thousand pounds in order to publish one poem by a modern poet who as poet was hardly known at all. For, of course, he found the money that hadn’t been found by my other friend.
That was my Sunday morning tragedy. But for that I should have been saved a great deal of labour, a number of enemies. I should have been, now, twenty years instead of only six months, a kitchen-gardener in Provence.
CHAPTER II. ALARUMS AND DISCOVERIES
I must run cursorily through the years from 1911 to the last days of peace in 1914. Too many controversial matters began to appear. The end of yesterday was at hand and I am not one to write controversially – or not at this moment. The sea is too smooth and blue; the sunlight too bright and the islands across the bay too gay. And I have really nothing against anyone.
The English Review duly appeared and was a source of a good deal of amusement and some profit to certain people and of a good many worries to myself. They are not yet even ended. The other day in Chicago an editor-professor introduced me to an audience largely consisting of editors and editresses. He said I was the greatest editor the world had ever seen. It will take me a long time to live that down. The editresses in particular have said worse than hang of me ever since.
Our first two numbers were made up, perforce, of works of the then Distinguished. After that we tried to let the Distinguished drop gradually out so as to publish the unpublished. We published contributions of one sort and another by Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, D. G. Rossetti – posthumously – Swinburne, Anatole France, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, W. H. Hudson, W. B. Yeats and even President Taft. Of the then youngish – speaking in terms of the career – we published Mr Wells’ Tono Bungay serially in four numbers and a short serial of Mr Arnold Bennett in two, as well as Messrs Galsworthy, Belloc, Chesterton and others of then similar standing. Then what I wanted came. I think the only work of an unpublished author that we had secured before going to press for the first time was The Mountain by Stephen Reynolds. Reynolds was a most original figure. He lived with a fisherman somewhere in the West and appeared in London usually in the garb of the trade of Peter. He wrote a book called The Poor Man’s House which was a success, and died much too young. I had engaged him as sub-editor before the review started, but he did not last long. He knew nothing about sub-editing, was of too independent a nature and became afraid of London. He would have been a very great writer could Fate have seen her way to spare him. His books are full of faults and arrogances. But a young writer’s future work will deteriorate if his first books are not full of faults and arrogance. I have found that an invariable rule. On the whole I should say that his death was the greatest loss that has befallen English literature for many years.
Then came Ezra, led in by Miss Sinclair. His Odyssey would take twelve books in itself. In a very short time he had taken charge of me, the review and finally of London. That will appear later. When I first knew him his Philadelphian accent was comprehensible if disconcerting; his beard and flowing locks were auburn and luxuriant; he was astonishingly meagre and agile. He threw himself alarmingly into frail chairs, devoured enormous quantities of your pastry, fixed his pince-nez firmly on his nose, drew out a manuscript from his pocket, threw his head back, closed his eyes to the point of invisibility and looking down his nose would chuckle like Mephistopheles and read you a translation from Arnaut Daniel. The only part of that albade that you would understand would be the refrain: ‘Ah me, the darn, the darn it comes toe sune!’
We published his ‘Ballad of the Goodly Fere’ which must have been his first appearance in a periodical except for contributions to the Butte Montana Herald. Ezra, though born there in a caravan during the great blizzard of – but perhaps I ought not to reveal the year. At any rate Ezra left Butte at the age of say two. The only one of his poems written and published there that I can remember had for refrain ‘Cheer up, Dad!’
As a reaction against a sentiment so American he shortly afterwards became instructor in Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania. His history up to the date of his appearance in my office which was also my drawing-room comes back to me as follows: Born in the blizzard his first meal consisted of kerosene. That was why he ate such enormous quantities of my tarts, the flavour of kerosene being very enduring. It accounted also for the glory of his hair. Where he studied the Romance languages I could not gather. But his proficiency in them was considerable when you allowed for the slightly negroid accent that he adopted when he spoke Provençal or recited the works of Bertran de Born.
His grandfather I understood was an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency in the time of Blaine, his father assayer to the Mint in Philadelphia, a function requiring almost incredible delicacy of touch. His grandfather, as was the habit of millionaires in the America of that day, made and lost fortunes with astonishing rapidity and completeness. He had promised to send Ezra to Europe. Ezra was just making his reservations when his grandfather failed more finally and more completely than usual.
Ezra therefore came over on a cattle boat. Many poets have done that. But I doubt if any other ever made a living by showing American tourists about Spain without previous knowledge of the country or language. It was, too, just after the Hispano-American war when the cattle-boat dropped him in that country.
It was with that aura of romance about him that he appeared to me in my office drawing-room. I guessed that he must be rather hard up, bought his poem at once and paid him more than it was usual to pay for Ballads. It was not a large sum but Ezra managed to live on it for a long time – six months, I think – in unknown London. Perhaps my pastry helped.
Shortly after the arrival of Ezra a young woman wrote to me from Nottingham. She said she knew a young man who wrote admirable poems and short stories. He was too shy to send them to me himself. Might she send them?
In that way we came to publish the first writings of D. H. Lawrence. They were some of his poems and a magnificent short story called ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. In Lawrence I knew at once that we had a writer of the highest genius and solidity. I do not think that he ever surpassed his first two books, The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers, but that must be largely a matter of taste. What is certain is the authenticity of his gifts. He suffered from the second of the two major perils that lie always in wait for the English novelist – the first being the desire to establish a claim to gentility. That did not trouble Lawrence. He was the son of a Nottingham coal miner and knew that there was nothing better that one could be.
