Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 953
Meredith said, on looking at James’ ‘Jolly Corner’, which led off the prose of the Review:
‘Poor old James. He sets down on paper these mysterious rumblings in his bowels – but who could be expected to understand them?’ So they went on.
With the younger writers it was different. They crowded into my office drawing-room, they quarrelled, shouted. They attended on me like bodyguards when I took my walks abroad. I remember only one dull moment.
Most beautiful and incredibly wealthy ladies who liked to look up to those spirited young creatures and ask them to their dances used to crowd my office. It was rather a handsome large drawing-room in an old house. There were pictures by pre-Raphaelites, old furniture, a rather wonderful carpet. The room was lit from both ends and L-shaped so that if you wanted a moment’s private conversation with anyone you could go round the corner. Miss Thomas, large, very blonde and invariably good tempered, presided over the tea table. Ezra looked after the cakes.
On the dull occasion nothing would go. I had a red-purple velvet divan. It was the gift of my mother so I had to display it. But it was a startling object. On it sat three young men as dumb as milestones. Thomas Hardy remained for the whole afternoon round the corner of that L talking in low tones to the wife of the Bishop of Edinburgh.
The rest of the room was occupied by beautiful creatures who had come specially to hear Thomas Hardy and those young men who sat side by side on that egregious divan. Their legs were stretched out, their ankles were clothed, as to the one pair in emerald green socks, as to the next in vermilion and as to the next with electric blue. Merely to look in the direction of that divan was to have a pain in the eyes. The young men kept their hands deep in their trouser pockets and appeared to meditate suicide. Ezra did not even eat any cakes.
He had the toothache. Next to him was Gilbert Cannan: he had just been served with papers in a disagreeable action. Next to Cannan was Mr Hugh Walpole. He had just published a particularly admirable novel called Mr Perrin and Mr Traill. But he was suffering agonies of fear lest his charming mother who was the wife of the Bishop of Edinburgh and hidden round that corner might hear something that should shock her. I think myself that humorous lady, taking a swallow’s flight into Bohemia, would have liked to be a little shocked.
Gilbert Cannan was in any case the most silent man I have ever known. I used at about that time to take my morning constitutional either with Ezra on the one side of me and Mr D. Z. on the other or between Mr Galsworthy and Cannan. Cannan never once spoke during all those promenades. Or … just once. We used to meet in Holland Street, cross Church Street, walk down the narrow passage going towards Kensington Palace, along the walls of the Palace, past the Round Pond, down the Row and so to the Achilles Statue where we would part.
On one occasion when we were just parting Cannan gave every signs of speaking. He really made a sound. We hung on his lips. We certainly both respected him as a profound thinker and were only too anxious to hear what he might have to say after so long a period of cogitation. It came. It was:
‘I see Kent have beaten Sussex by four runs.’
On one of those walks we perceived the blue-white beard, dark, fierce eyebrows, billy-cock hat and reefer coat of Mr John Burns bearing down on us. He said:
‘Come and have a walk with me, H — . I feel queer.’ He detached me from my companions. It was certainly queer to see him in that frivolous place of cavaliers and parterres and sunlight and low laughter. He stopped dramatically and pointed at a flower bed.
‘The last time I was here,’ he said, ‘walking along in a workingman’s dress a policeman said to me: “This ain’t no place for the likes of you. Out you go …” Now …’ and Mr Burns with another sweep of his arm took in the whole landscape: ‘I planted them pelargoniums… I had that statue of a naked boy put where it is … I had those trees re-arranged. That’s a change …’ It was no doubt true, his ministry having charge of His Majesty’s Parks and a great many odds and ends of administration. But I could not see how he could have planned from memory of the place alone that admirable landscape gardening.
He also – like so many other politicians – expressed unbounded admiration for my work. He once told me that he had written a book about me. I never saw it and hardly believed that he was in earnest. He had at one time the idea that I might help him write his memoirs. That was, I think, after his resignation. I should have liked to do it for he had taken part in a great many extraordinary affairs and his conversation was always very vivid. But the idea came to nothing.
His vitality was extraordinary. I was once huddled up in a fur coat on top of a bus in mid-January with him. He said:
‘You wear too many clothes. As for me you can see everything that I have on and I am as warm as a toast.’ I could see: his billycock hat, his reefer coat, unbuttoned, a waistcoat of the same material as the coat, trousers, a blue shirt with a turned down collar, socks, shoes and a black tie.
I used to go in and see him at the ministry in Whitehall and take him out to lunch at the Mont Blanc whenever I wanted to get anybody a job that he could give or invent. The Mont Blanc was a once rather famous French restaurant – famous in literary circles. Edward Garnett used to give a lunch there every Tuesday at which there attended quite usually Mr Galsworthy, Edward Thomas, Conrad and Hudson when they were in Town, Muirhead Bone the etcher, his brother the master mariner and a whole group of serious and advanced individuals. I was regarded as too Philistine to be very welcome but I used to go there frequently on other days and with other guests.
One day Edward Thomas, who was a writer of great delicacy and misfortunes – he died very gallantly in the war – was sadly in need of a job. I went to find Mr Burns and said:
‘Come out and lunch. I want you to meet somebody.’ He said:
‘You aren’t going to take me where I shall meet any damn journalists. They overhear what I say and report it all in their papers.’
I said we would go to the Mont Blanc. He had lately been perpetrating one of his indiscretions. When we got there Edward Thomas came in and I introduced him to the President of the Board of Trade. The customs service looks after our morals; the Board of Trade superintends our Arts.
Mr Burns said, with a tone of deep suspicion:
‘Thomas? That’s a Welsh name.’
Thomas said he was Welsh. I said that I wanted Mr Burns to give him the superintendence of the Welsh Ancient Monuments. Mr Burns said:
‘A Welshman … Well, I suppose a Welshman ought to have that job.’ Then he raised his voice to a perfect roar to say: ‘But I hope he’s not a blank blank blank of a Welshman like that blank blank blank …’ Let us say Dai Bach. Meetings of His Majesty’s Ministers are not love-feasts. There were at least twenty journalists in that room.
Burns was one of the Ministers who resigned on the Asquith Cabinet’s declaration of war with Germany. The last time I saw him was also at the Mont Blanc where he had lunched with me. I said I supposed he had plenty of time to write his memoirs now but I should not be able to help him because I expected to be going to France at once. We talked nevertheless about them and he told me a great deal about his childhood. We parted on the steps of the restaurant. His last words were – and for the first time his voice had a note of sadness:
‘Never resign, H — . It doesn’t pay.’
CODA
On the twenty-eighth of June 1914 I stood on the edge of the kerb in Piccadilly Circus and looked at London. I did not know it but I was taking my last look at the city – as a Londoner. And yet perhaps I did know it.
I was feeling free and as it were without weight. It was a delicious day, the sky very high and bright above the Fountain; the flower-girls had brought with them a perfect mountain of colour. The Circus was blocked and blocked and blocked again with vehicles. The Season had a week to run but was at its height. But I was going that night for a long stay to the birthplace of my great-great-grandfather, Dr John Brown, at Duns in Berwickshire. I was finished with the Season. I was tired out and my private affairs in literature were all arranged for me. I had ‘made my effort,’ as racing people say, during the last six months. I had always held two things. No man should write more than one novel. No man should write that novel before he is forty. I had been forty six months before. On my birthday I had sat down to write that novel. It was done and I thought it would stand. There was to be no more writing for me – not even any dabbling in literary affairs.
The English Review seemed then profoundly to have done its work. Ezra and his gang of young lions raged through London. They were producing an organ of their own. It was called – prophetically– Blast.
One day Ezra and the young man I have called Mr D. Z. took me for a walk. In Holland Street D. Z. had grasped my arm as if he had been a police constable. Those walks were slightly tormenting. Ezra talked incessantly on one side of me in his incomprehensible Philadelphian which was already ageing. That made it all the more incomprehensible. Mr D. Z., dark, a little less hirsute but more and more like a conspirator went on and on in a vitriolic murmur. On this occasion he raised his voice for a little to be heard by me but not by Ezra. Ezra would not have stood for it.
D. Z. said:
‘Tu sais, tu es foûtu! Foûtu! Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact. Your generation has gone. What is the sense of you and Conrad and Impressionism? You stand for Impressionism. It is finished. Foûtu. Blasted too! This is the future. What does anyone want with your old-fashioned stuff? You try to make people believe that they are passing through an experience when they read you. You write these immense long stories, recounted by a doctor at table or a ship’s captain in an inn. You take ages to get these fellows in. In order to make your stuff seem convincing. Who wants to be convinced? Get a move on. Get out or get under.
‘This is the day of Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism. What people want is me, not you. They want to see me. A Vortex. To liven them up. You and Conrad had the idea of concealing yourself when you wrote. I display myself all over the page. In every word. I … I … I…’
He struck his chest dramatically and repeated: ‘I … I … I … The Vortex. Blast all the rest.’ I was reminded of a young lady I once went to call on and who came running downstairs exclaiming:
‘Devil, devil, devil, take them all but me.’
But Mr D. Z. was perfectly right. I don’t mean that I only thought then that he was right. I think it now. Impressionism was dead. The day of all those explosive sounds had come. But louder Blasts soon drowned them out and put back the hands of the clock to somewhere a good deal the other side of mere Impressionism. But, in that moment they were undoubtedly all right. It was in a sense another foreign invasion, like the one with which this book opens. There was hardly a born Londoner in it. D. Z., Ezra, H. D. the beautiful poetess, Epstein, Fletcher, Robert Frost, Eliot were all Transatlantically born from the point of view of London. Henri Gaudier was a Marseillaise. They had all become Londoners because London was unrivalled in its powers of assimilation – the great, easy going, tolerant, lovable old dressing-gown of a place that it was then but was never more to be.
Those young people had done their best to make a man of me. They had dragged me around to conspiracies, nightclubs, lectures where Marinetti howled and made noises like machine-guns. They had even tried to involve me in their splits. Of course they split. The Ezra-D. Z. contingent blasted another contingent led by Mr Nevinson the artist. Those continued I think to call themselves Futurists. I was I suppose identified with the Vorticists. At any rate for years after that every time that Mr Nevinson met me he would say: ‘How fat you are!’– which was supposed to be blasting. Ezra on the other hand – out of affection – used to call me ‘the pink egg’. So they pranced and roared and blew blasts on their bugles and round them the monuments of London tottered.
I went home after that conversation and wrote my farewell to literature – quite formally. It was printed in a short-lived periodical called The Thrush. Thrushes had no chance of making themselves heard in those days. The Vorticists kindly serialised my novel – my Great Auk’s Egg, they called it. The Great Auk lays one egg and bursts. That bird was no louder than a thrush in the pages of Blast.
So I was done with Letters – and with the Left. Of what I was going to do I had little notion. But Provence still called. I had paid a prolonged visit to the neighbourhood of Tarascon just before and chosen my house. I had written a long poem about Heaven which I had placed in the Alpilles, tiny grey mountains just outside the town of Tartarin. That poem had produced remarkable reverberations in America. It was given prizes, crowned with gilt laurel leaves. Leaders were written about it in many of the newspapers of the Eastern seaboard. It was said to have put up the marriage-rates in New York. Poor Elinor Wylie, the beautiful poetess and most beautiful woman, told me that she and her husband, William Benet, had become engaged whilst reading my poem to each other in Central Park.
In England its publication was stopped by the police. Mr Courtney proposed to publish it in the Fortnightly Review but was a little afraid. Masterman took it to the Home Secretary. The Home Secretary said that if it were published he would have to authorise a prosecution. It gave a materialist picture of heaven. God appeared in it. It is against the law for God to appear in England.
That poem was, during the war, published under the auspices of the Ministry of Information – as government propaganda! It might encourage young men who were about to die if they thought they would go to a nice heaven.
Masterman had a good deal of it by heart. Whilst we had been in Germany together he had driven me nearly crazy by quoting at the most inopportune moments – when I was making out a railway schedule or deciphering the bills of our party – by remarking in his solemn and unctuous parliamentary voice:
‘But these there must be in Heaven
… Even in Heaven.’
We had gone up the Rhine from the source to Bingen, crossed over the Eiffel range to Trêves, visited the battlefields of 1870. All the time I was trying to keep Masterman’s nose on the grindstone. He was supposed, with my interpretation, to be interviewing German waiters as to the workings of their Insurance Act. At Metz he asked a waiter what nationality he considered himself to be. The waiter answered:
‘Muss-Preussen’ – ‘Obligatory Prussian.’ After that Masterman was saying on every available occasion: ‘Muss-Preussen – We’re all going to be Muss-Preussens before long, Ford old dear.’
We drove in a horse-drawn landau to Sedan. Masterman had finally struck against waiter-interviews. He wanted to see battlefields. He had a passion for the study of military strategy. I should never have gone to see a battlefield. Masterman knew the position of every battalion of Wurtembergers or Saxons at every hour during the day of the battle.
As we drove back, the coachman from his box called down about half a dozen times:
‘Wollen die Excellenzen durch Frankreich fahren?’ ‘Do the Excellencies wish to be driven through France?’ It was the first time we had been called Excellencies. We travelled incognito. Masterman said:
‘What’s he saying? What’s he saying?’
Wherever a German had been buried in French soil along that border the Prussians had driven out a tongue of land and made it German. The direct road went all through these strips. The apples on a tree in that late July weather might be half German, half French. Masterman said:
‘Before long, Ford old dear, the taxi-men in Piccadilly will be saying: “Do you want to be taken through England or up Oxford Strasse?”’
He had a sardonic humour, that large, sleepy, always smiling, crooked-nosed statesman.
At Metz Station the station master – of the rank of major-general and covered with decorations – was waiting for us at the salute at the foot of the immense flight of granite steps.
He said:
‘Will the Excellencies deign to hurry a little? We are keeping our Constantinople-Berlin Express waiting for them.’
Mrs Masterman had a kodak. She shot it at everything she passed. It was forbidden to photograph anything in the Metz district. She snapshotted policemen, generals on horseback, troops on the march, odd-looking new ditches and mounds, placarded Verboten, and running as if without purpose along hill sides. On the boat before Bingen, the camera had got out of order. It had been repaired in Trêves. When she developed all her films after arriving in London there was not one that shewed anything but the extreme tops of church steeples, the eagles on the tops of generals’ helmets, or the tops of the heads of storks standing over their nests on gables. They used to manage some things quite well in old Germany. They did not want to interfere with the innocent amusements of a British Cabinet Minister’s wife but they had had her camera lens elevated by the repairer.
When we got back to Trêves I went up a hill with Mrs Masterman so that she might photograph the great view, going into France. There was on top of the hill a column and on top of the column a colossal virgin. The view from the top of the column was so immense and impressive that she said Charlie must see it. Charlie did not much like climbing.
