Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 967
I told them they had better not go down. They wore what appeared to be dancing pumps and the most elegant stockings, and woodmen had been hauling timber up the path, which in the best of times was like a small water-course. But they chanced it. Either they must have been good plucked ones or they needed a cook very badly.
It had been long since I had met such creatures. It appeared that they had been at a garden-party at Sir Edward’s. They sank in mud to the knee over and over again, but they persisted and talked to me as if I were a bâtman of their husbands’ regiment, saying once or twice: “My good man….”
They came out of Mrs. Higgins’s cottage. I waited for them outside to show them back over a dry path in my own copse. Mrs. Higgins must have primed them, for I had become for them the poor wounded and broken officer fellow…. It was: “Captain F — —” this and “Captain F — —” that in the best style of ladies bountiful visiting a sick camp.
Then they found that to be a terribly lonely place. What did I do in the long winter nights? … I was ready to be the poor wounded and broken foot-logger if it pleased them…. I said:
“Oh, you know … I … er … smoke a pipe, don’t you know….”
One of them announced herself as Mrs. Major So-and-So of somewhere away to the east on the chalk downs. The other was Miss So-and-So, the major’s sister.
Miss So-and-So said:
“Don’t you ever read a book?”
I said:
“Er … yes … I don’t mind takin’ a read in a book…. Now and then, you know….”
The Mrs. Major said:
“Oh, but you ought to read books…. It’s a good thing to do…. It broadens the mind…. You’ll go rusty if you never read books….”
Two or three days afterwards there arrived in my porch an immense parcel of books. I took it that some paper had had the impertinence to send me books for review, and I did not open the parcel. Someone else did, however, and found a singular assortment of novels. There were works by Mr. Edgar Wallace and Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim, and works of Mr. Archibald Marshall, and Conrad’s Chance and Galsworthy’s Island Pharisees…. And they were accompanied by a card of Mrs. Major So-and-So bearing the words:
“In memory of your kindness…. Do read some of these books. There is something here for every taste. You appear to be quite an intelligent man. It is a pity to let yourself rust….” But what most pleased me was that the parcel contained two novels by Major So-and-So himself.
They were productions of an almost incredible youth and innocence. You would have thought that Major — who had gone through the war in all its horror — had lived all his life in a rose-covered vicarage and the society of blameless milkmaids…. But there was a certain narrative gift, and as far as they went, the subjects were rather ingenious.
So, being in the mood, I sat down and wrote an immensely long letter to Mrs. Major So-and-So — about her husband’s books. I gave him counsel as I have so often given counsel to the innumerable beginners who send me manuscripts or first books. Only I took more trouble. I took those books to pieces and turned them inside out, I suggested alterations, analysed phrases and pointed out where it would have been a good thing to use the device of the time-shift…. Yes, I took some trouble with that letter….
Two days later I got a post-card signed with the initials of the Major’s wife and containing the two words:
“You beast!” and a quotation from one of my books.
But, once started working on the idea of the construction of novels, my mind went on and on…. And communications from America went on dropping in. They came from the East and they came from the West, and they came from in between. They were mostly about my verse. I had thought no one knew that I wrote verse. Then they began to be about my lately published book which had sold a hundred copies in England and had not appeared at all in the United States. One Western University announced that its English class was using that work as a textbook of nineteenth-century literature.
That is not as astonishing as it sounds. I think my book was the only au fond study of Vorticism and Imagism and 1913 vers libre that at the time existed. Those activities of Mr. Pound and his young friends had died in London. But during the war they had sown seeds in New York about West 8th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and in the North-Western University in Chicago and in places like Iowa or Berkeley, Cal…. I fancy those seeds have not yet died there….
As I have elsewhere recounted, there came then a letter and an article about my work from a real Professor in a great Western University. That Don had pursued me through life with the persistency of a sleuth in a moving picture. No word of mine had he left unread: there seemed to be no phase of my life to which he had not applied the microscope. He provided me, moreover, with a full-fledged philosophy, religious views and a disbelief in the Infallibility of the Pope. It appeared that, years before, he had gone up the Rhine as far as Heidelberg on the same boat as myself. “But,” he wrote modestly, “although I have read over a thousand anecdotes by this writer, in not one of them does he mention myself. So I can only imagine that my personality made no impression at all upon him.”
Next came — not by letter, but in person — an intense and very energetic journalist from one of Mr. Hearst’s papers. He professed a knowledge of my work and career, at least equal to those of the Professor of English, but I think he must have acquired it not by hard reading, but, as it were, by the grace of God. He stayed with me for some time, but if I ever, as must be the case with even quite retiring writers, mentioned one of my books it always happened to be one that, by accident, he had not read. I was none the less flattered that one with such varied attainments should even give himself the trouble to imagine he had read me.
There was nothing that fellow had not done. He had fought and farmed and camped in virgin forests and shot grizzlies and tracked down murderers and felled giant oaks and fought desperadoes. Unfortunately my tools did not suit him. He volunteered to drive the mare to the mill for middlings. He came back leading that amiable beast, having overturned the cart into a stream and broken off one of the wheels whilst the middlings melted in the water. I should have thought it impossible to make that mare do anything wrong. You could let off a firecracker under her tail and she would do not more than wag her ears. My friend, however, said he was unused to that sort of harness. In the Far West they drive with the reins crossed…. He professed to share my passion for garlic and pulled up and devoured a large part of my plantation. He told the doctor who administered the stomach pump that the garlic you bought in Avenue A. was different….
But his great achievement was in felling trees. He described with enormous animation to Standing — who regarded him as a fabulous monster! — how he had cut down a hundred of the giant California redwood pines in — I think, an afternoon. Standing said:
“‘Is Lordship would pay him a pretty penny to be ‘is wood-reeve!” and we went to cut some of my oak saplings, about as big as my thigh. Standing and I, when we used an axe, would take it near the end of the helve with the left hand and then, sliding our rights up to the axe-head would use the left for strength in the down stroke and the right for guidance and weight. In that way we usually, with little fatigue, could go on for most of an afternoon. They must have used different axes in California…. My young friend grasped his firmly with both hands at the lowest extremity of the helve. He whirled it round and round his head as if he were giving a display with Indian clubs. Then he let go at the tree. The axe-head glanced off and cut off the heel of his shoe.
Standing screamed! … That elderly, tough, bristling giant of a man gave a high scream like a horse that has broken its back. He went chalk-pale under his week’s bristles and said:
“I could do with a gill of ‘is Lordship’s brandy!”
Then he turned on that young man like one of the grizzly bears he had shot. He described how Jim Selby had cut his leg clean through at the shin and how Jack Wilmot had killed his little daughter standing near him.
“I’ve seen fools!” he said. “But never a fool like you! Do you think a haxe is the teaspoon your mother fed pap to you with….” And on and on and on…. When it came to carrying these logs up the hill he selected — he was the master of the team — the heaviest and longest of all for that hero to stagger under.
“No, Cahpt’n,” he said, when I remonstrated, “Yon one’s felled in Caliyifornyer…. Let’m carry in Old England….”
So Mr. Hearst’s star provided infinite amazement in Sussex. In the end he took down by shorthand my best story and sold it to a London magazine for £16 that I could well have done with myself…. I don’t know why people do things like that to me. I suppose they think I don’t notice….
There came afterwards through the summer a number of, as it were, paler Americans, most of them asking for no more than autographs. And I began to feel as if I must have a large American public…. Years ago, as I have elsewhere related, S. S. McClure had told me that my books would never sell in America because Americans could not tell whether I was or was not in earnest, whilst they would not sell in England because the English knew that I was too damn in earnest.
I began to think that some quality of earnestness must have gotten into my work. It perhaps transcended in that quality what had disturbed hitherto my compatriots…. And I contemplated at last a novel….
It was, however, the coming of the Middle West that gave me the final tilt towards Literature and away, alas apparently for ever, from hogs! … I will here interpose a note on the marketing of hogs. For it was hogs that made Chicago what she was, and it was in the end Chicago, with its North Western University, that tipped my scale away from them. The wise student of agricultural markets will tell you — as you could very well tell him! — that to make money by hogs you must buy when the market is low and market when it is high…. That is easy, but, alas, I have never had money to buy with when the market was low, only when, as in this case, it was at its very apex! Though my hogs increased in girth and progeny, in exactly the same progression the market fell. Thus when at last I sold I broke exactly even, my considerable herd of swine fetching almost to a penny what my original two or three pedigree beasts had cost in 1919. So that, if we put the pork and hams that we ate and sold against what we bought in the way of food for the hogs, I had lost only my time and labour. This, though it might have disappointed another man, was eminently satisfactory to me, since it was the money brought in by those beasts and other stock that let me eventually make my break-away to Provence. So Anna and her sisters and descendants proved to be money pigs. But for them I should have frittered away both my time and my money. Moreover, the labour spent on them in the open air had enormously improved my health, and robust health is a necessity for any very large literary undertaking!
Letters then, had for some time been coming to me from the North Western University. I guessed it to be — as indeed it was! — a regular nest of singing birds. And there was about those letters from the unknown a certain freshness at once of outlook and expression…. My old bones stirred….
Then came several agreeable young men and then a letter from Mr. Cunninghame Graham introducing other young men from the Middle West. That immense region appeared to hear of that incomparable writer of English and noble horseman at about the same moment as it heard of myself. The letter giving the name and address of one of these young men I immediately lost, and although I remembered the young man’s name I could not for the life of me remember the address, except that it was near either Earl’s Court or Gloucester Road station on the Underground. Mr. Graham’s letter had been so generous in praise of the young poet, that I addressed two letters to him in that neighbourhood, the one being addressed simply: “Near Earl’s Court Station,” and the other “near Gloucester Road.” His Majesty’s intelligent post-office promptly delivered the first into the hands of Mr. Glenway Westcott and returned the second to me.
So destiny and the mail service conspired to make me write. For if Mr. Westcott had not paid me a visit of some duration, I do not think that I should have taken seriously again to writing. He was himself charming, intelligent in the extreme and a delicious poet just having his first affair with the muse. That in itself was good enough. But, in addition, he gave me an idea of a great background of youth, intelligence and energy in æsthetic pursuits. It was as if a sort of French Romantic movement that in its æsthetic aims alone was not specifically romantic — as if a great stirring of æsthetic life were taking place on the shores of those Lakes. I saw indeed, even then, that it must be from there that an initial spurt towards new literary life must come — if it was to come from anywhere. Here was a vast country of new and hitherto unknown intelligences. And it was the one great tract in the Western World that had remained at once unstirred and unwearied by the late war. It was virgin soil indeed.
I must make the confession of selfishness that it was rather in the light of a possible audience than as a ground to produce masterpieces that I viewed that new public. If one is to write one must have at least the mirage of an audience, and I could not see anywhere else in the world any body of men that could, by the light of the wildest optimism, be expected to give me any kind of suffrage. These young men seemed already to have accepted my ideas.
That in England I should ever have any hearers I knew to be impossible. More or less consciously for me to be in touch with youth is a necessity if I am to write, so that I have gone on writing until my hair is as white as it ever will be and still it is usual for critics to write of me — usually with distaste — as belonging to the Younger School. But in England at that date there appeared to be no youth — outside the workhouse or the gaol. The young men that I saw were charming and well-mannered, but the charming and well-mannered are no audience for me. Indeed, there seems to be about me something repellent to the well-bred English mind. I presume I am too much in earnest!
And the few contracts I had with literary London were not such as to inspirit me. Conrad wrote, as I have said, that for two years he had not earned a penny by his pen. Mr. Cunninghame Graham wrote that he had no readers at all. My own work had not sold a hundred copies in England…. And there was Mr. Coppard….
I don’t know what made Mr. Coppard come and stay with me…. Or perhaps I do. My old friend the —— Review, under a new editorship, was pursuing the very admirable policy of preserving in what it published a reasonable balance between creative and what is called “serious” writing. I bought it one day at a bookstall, and came upon a piece of work that made me at once see that a new force existed in England. It was a story by Mr. Coppard relating how, when he was nearly starving, he had bought some bananas. I had never till then heard of Mr. Coppard…. Then I saw other stories by that writer, and I became convinced that England possessed a short-story writer as great as any there ever had been. Of that opinion I remain….
I happened to have tried my own hand at a short story. I was never any good at that form. I need length — and as often as not quite preposterous length — to get an effect. But as I was convinced I could not then write anything competent, I thought I might as well try that form as any other. I did not feel proud of that story — but if one is to live one must have some illusions as to work one has just finished, and I sent it to the —— Review. I added to my accompanying letter some sentences of admiration for Mr. Coppard’s stories, and said that I should be obliged if the Editor would get someone in his office to send me Mr. Coppard’s address.
That story came back with astonishing promptitude. By the post-mark on the stamp I could see that it could not have been in the office of that journal for more than ten minutes…. It had been time enough for someone to write on the printed slip of rejection a message to the effect that the writer would have imagined that I could have told from inspection of the columns of the Review that that journal demanded at least a glimmering of technical ability in the short stories that it printed. He added that they never gave the addresses of their contributors to outsiders.
I understood that whoever wrote that could not have liked me much. I fancy — but indeed I know — that he talked about what he had written to one or other of the amiable young men about Fleet Street who had been down to see me. At any rate a day or two later the young man in question wrote to me to say that Mr. Coppard would consent to honour me with a visit if I would write and invite him.
Then Mr. Coppard came. I have said that he produced on me the impression of a gipsy. I had taken him, from his writings, to be Irish or Welsh, but he was neither, and, with his exquisite perception of form, he could not be English like myself. So I formed in my mind the conviction that he must be a gipsy and that conviction gained immensely when I met him, dark, lean, hard in physique as in intellect, and with piercing dark eyes under a deep hat-brim, sitting on beech-logs, and giving out all the wisdom of an ancient and cruel world.
From what he chose to relate of his biography — of how, from being employed as a little boy by a kindly sweating tailor, he came at last to be secretary of the local branch of the Fabian Society in Oxford, and met the more intelligent of the undergraduates, all the while working in an electric-light bulb factory and reading unceasingly Conrad and other writers in that day unknown — I gathered that this real prophet had met with very little honour in the country he had honoured by his birth. It was not merely that for an extended space of time he had had practically nothing but raw grated carrots to eat in a lost cottage in a damp corner. I had lately — and at times frequent enough before and since I have — been through sufficient experiences of lost, damp cottages and little to eat to know that such vicissitudes do the writer himself little but good. I am not one of those who believe that the writer should have knowledge of millionaire yachting on the Ægean or Palace Hotels on the Côte d’Azur. I would rather pass my life in the dampest of damp hovels and nothing is more deleterious for a writer than to devote serious attention to the fixings of a Blue Train. If in short he cannot imagine for himself what happens in yachts, palaces and drawing-rooms he may as well not start out on the career of writer…. But it is bitter bad for a country that it should have a writer of the genius of Mr. Coppard and let him live in lost cottages on a diet of grated carrots. It proves itself to be a country that no writer will love and that all will leave as soon as they can. I care, in fact, very little about the personal vicissitudes of artists. Hardships will kill some but make men of more. But I will, if I can, live in a country where the arts are at least enough honoured to get their practitioners, again at least, lip service…. Here, when I am writing, when I am finishing a book, the grocer and the butcher and the laundress and the proprietor of the bureau de tabac, all learn of the fact through no volition of mine and, if members of my family go through the village they will at every step be stopped by inquirers asking how the work progresses, whether I am bearing up under the strain, and how long it will take. My landlord will travel to distant forests to get me a root of asphodel, because all poets must have asphodel! … Why, only yesterday, there was living in that village a poet — American, not even French. Because of the fall of the dollar he left precipitately. His landlady was at a loss to understand his departure, and when told that the reason had in fact been nothing but pennilessness:
