Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 969
Mr. Wells said:
“Fordie knows everything…. He knows which man’s been doped or which is fighting on the cross…. He ought to share his information and not give it to a desperate gambler like May, who will double-cross us all.”
Miss Sinclair said:
“Don’t pay any attention to him…. I am trying to make you see that unless we writers stick together….”
The celebrity called from the other end of the table:
“Haw…. H. G., who’s your omniscient friend?”
Mr. Wells at that time had a little joke about my omniscience, just as he liked to tease Miss Sinclair about her sporting proclivities. He exclaimed:
“That’s …,” and he declaimed my name and titles.
It was as if the celebrity felt something disagreeing violently with him.
He said:
“Good God! Disgraceful! They told me that that fellow …”
I did not hear the end of his sentence, because at the moment there came the news of the result of the fight…. But I fancy “they” had told that fellow that, like everyone else who had served in the war, Mr. Wells’s omniscient friend was in either the workhouse or the gaol. Otherwise that celebrity would hardly have written what he had written in The Times. For to the Londoner it is incredible that you could leave London — even though it is to earn your living on a hogfarm or to idle by the Mediterranean — to the real ingrained Londoner it is incredible that you should leave London except under the stress of poverty or force majeure….
The only results of the great fight that I can remember was that Mr. Sinclair Lewis raked in a great number of banknotes. He garnered them from the tablecloth and stuffed them into his hat. Then he inverted the hatful over the hands of one of the waiters! It was an impressive gesture and gave one to dream of what, in America, may await the novelist who unites, as Henry James would have said, considerable technical ability to an enviable gift of popularity.
CHAPTER TWO.
IT IS TO BE TRANQUILLY OVERWHELMED TO see the Mediterranean just before dawn, stretching out beneath your windows. There will be the grey satin of the sea, the mountains behind, the absolutely convincing outline of Reinach’s Greek villa at the end of Beaulieu Point. And the memory of Greek gods.
As I have said, I do not suppose I retain more than the merest crumbs of classical scholarship…. A couple of hundred lines of the Æneid; a few score couplets of Ovid; the usual tags of Horace, a little Catullus; even less of the Greek Anthology; a few sentences of Xenophon! But my passion for the classics remains. It is one of the greatest pleasures of my life that a legend avers that Ulysses once sheltered in the sea-cave below my garden. If I close my eyes I can see Pallas Athene with shield and spear stand in the sky and brood above her sea. Or if you quote to me: “Saepe te in somnis vidi …” or merely mention to me the name of Catullus, you will have me in such a state that I must leave my writing and walk from end to end of the terrace for some minutes….
But I do not think it is that that has given me my lifelong passion for the shores of this inland sea … nor even the glamour of the poets of Provence in the land that lies behind these coasts…. It is perhaps almost more the tradition of the wonderful country where the bees do work all the year round — the land where the lemon flower blooms…. Or perhaps it is the absolute conviction that the weariness and griefs of humanity came when they put these shores behind them…. Mankind ought never to have left these islands….
I reached Harold Munro’s villa at St. Jean Cap Ferrat on one of the last days of 1922. It was six years since I had seen the Mediterranean, going back to the line from the Red Cross hospital at Mentone…. The Red Cross train had stopped for an hour, at midnight, at Tarascon, and from the high railway platform I had seen the whole of the Camargue and half Provence under snow. That is a thing you will see only once every forty or fifty years…. And I was to see the whole of France under snow — white from Marseilles to Hazebrouck. There a reddish coloration seemed to add itself to the dark landscape.
That would be in February, 1916… I desperately disliked going back to the line. My lungs were in a terrible condition still, and I knew that I had been sent up because of the mistake of a Category Clerk. The depôt authorities who wanted to retain my services had told me as much — but in those days you did not claim exemptions merely on the score of a lung or so…. It was nevertheless hard….
It was then, I think, that I had really taken my farewell of literature. Under the shrouded lamps of the railway bookstall at Hazebrouck I had seen one of my own books. That had filled me with intense melancholy — with overpowering sadness…. The ambition to write dies hard and till then, either through the French publication of my propaganda works or because, even during the first battle of the Somme, I received orders to write this or that, I had retained at any rate some contact with the world of letters. In that ghostly station it was as if the silver cord had snapped.
But I was no sooner installed on those Riviera heights from which one could throw a biscuit on to the decks of the men-of-war in Villefranche bay — and see the octopus and mullet swim beneath those keels … than at once, to invert the words of M. Herriot, this English poet, no longer so very young, threw away the sword and grasped the goose quill. … I wrote the first words of an immense novel….
That climax had begun on the Feast of St. Katherine — the 25th of November, 1922, as I was crossing the square in front of Notre Dame de Paris. It was perhaps not quite the 25th, but I like to think that most phases of my career have begun on or about that feast of a saint for whom I have the greatest admiration. I met, under the shadow of the statue of Charlemagne, a man called Evans. He had been in my regiment, and we stopped to talk for a minute or two. Then we went into Notre Dame and looked at the little bright tablet that commemorates the death of over a million men.
I said:
“Do you remember that 17th September?”
He said:
“Surely to gootness, ton’t I!” He was, of course, Welsh — one of the little, dark, persistent race….
In September, 1916 we had both been rejoining the battalion after sick leave. He came from England, where he had been recovering after a wound in the thigh; I from a place called Corbie, where nothing more romantic had happened than having my teeth fixed, after having been blown into the air by something and falling on my face.
It had been from some date in August till about the 17th September that I had completely lost my memory, so that, as I have said, three weeks of my life are completely dead to me, though I seem to have gone about my duties as usual. But, by the 1st of September I had managed to remember at least my own name and, by the 17th, when Evans and I rejoined the battalion, which had come out of the line and gone in again to the G trenches in front of Kemmel Hill, facing Wyndschaete, I could remember most army matters fairly well.
We had gone down hill in clear sunlight over an atrocious field road. We were sitting on the driver’s seat of a G. S. limbered wagon that held our luggage, going down sharply and barbarously jolted…. Evans said — in Notre Dame:
“Surely to gootness, whateffer, I thocht my powels would drop out when I saw our shells pursting on Wyhtschaete!”
I had felt like that too, as I could assure him. We had commanded a tremendous view of the Salient from our box-seats, where we jolted down between broad fields covered with wheat in shooks and tobacco plants yellowing beneath the sun. And there, on the dark line, under the remaining roofs of the martyred village, in the light of the same sun, came the little white bursts — like cotton pods. It was all going on just as it had always gone on — and as if it had always gone on like that, all our lives…. Yes, I had felt as if my heart were dropping through my bowels.
The wagon had jolted more abominably than ever and I could, in Notre Dame, remember that I had felt beside my right thigh for the brake. The beginnings of panic came over me. I had forgotten whether I found the brake!
I said urgently:
“Evans, do you remember what sort of a brake a limbered wagon has?” Was it a little wheel that you turned round and round? or an iron lever that operated the shoe on the wheel?
Evans could not say whether limbered wagons had any brakes at all.
My panic became worse. It seemed a catastrophe that I could not remember what those brakes had been like. The memory that had chosen to return after Corbie must be forsaking me again…. I could remember that the Germans had dropped bombs on the hospital and that a Red Cross nurse had been killed. … But it was a catastrophe to forget about the brakes. … There were perhaps no brakes….
I exclaimed hurriedly:
“Evans…. Let’s go and have some … oysters!” They were the only things I could think of. Drink would only increase my panic and I wanted to keep my head clear.
We sat for a long time outside the café, on the right of the Place St. Michel, where you look towards the Seine. They used to have very good oysters there, and towards the end of November when the sea grows really cold they are at their best….
I thought Evans had been killed the day after we had got back to the line — but he obviously hadn’t. He had been farming in Canada after a very bad wound. He had had a hard time and that, as much as the war, had made him prematurely bald. Bald men are usually fat, but he was thin as it was possible to be, and small, with ecclesiastical features and a rather mournful manner. He was not really mournful, for he had done well in Alberta, and had come to Paris to have some fun and to buy agricultural machinery. He went on talking and talking in his mournful voice — about putting in rail posts, I think, with the frost at 30 below zero…. He fortunately didn’t want to do anything but talk, and my panic grew and grew…. I sat there, watching the crowds of students that go ceaselessly by after the classes of the Sorbonne are over. I sat thinking and thinking till long after Evans had gone — trying to pluck up courage. It would not come.
At last I went to a cocktail party, given by a French writer with an American wife. That party was like death. People sat about with panic-stricken faces, silent. You would have thought that everyone there had lost all his relations and all their fortunes and a war…. Proust was dead. He had died that afternoon. My taxi-driver had said to me as I paid him:
“Paraît qu’il est mort! C’était bien inattendu!” I had thought he had been speaking of Clemenceau, who was sick at the time.
Paris was a stricken city. In every house, in every café, on all the sidewalks people said continually: “It seems that he is dead. It was very unexpected.” They knew that Proust had complained of his health for many years. The whole city knew that. He had adopted fantastic modes of life on account of his health…. But that had been taken to be merely hypochondria expressed in the terms of a great, exotic novelist…. Now — it seemed that he was dead and Paris was a stricken city.
I had seen something like it in London — when Marie Lloyd died. London traffic stopped for half a minute, whilst the paper boys ran down the streets shouting: “Ma-rie dies! Ma-rie’s dead!” But Paris was hushed for three days — and not for a music-hall singer…. At that time, if you said to a waiter: “Where’s the funeral?” he told you, or if, being in deep black, you hailed a taxi, the man, without orders, drove you straight to where Proust lay in state…. At the same time Paris was preparing the paroxysm of hatred that attended the hideously stage-managed last hours of Anatole France…. On the boulevards they hissed: “Ten thousand men of letters are starving whilst they walk the pavements of the city, yet that irreverend dotard who betrayed France has spent upon his prolonged death-rattle a fortune drawn from the pockets of a world that hates France!” … For indeed the fortunes spent on cabling the old man’s last babblings to innumerable papers of a gaping world came from German and Anglo-Saxon coffers. Paris would have let him drift out of life quietly enough but for that.
Proust represented France of that day with a singular intimacy that is not easy for the poor world-at-large to understand. He was the culmination of a school of writers that had been long in coming and, still more, he was the Unknown Soldier of the literature of that decade. Literature enters with an unparalleled intimacy into French life, and the country had a sense of the subterranean and ignored strivings of that steadfast personality — as if, indeed, he had been the personification of the obscure beings who, working subterraneously with small spades in hidden tunnels, had saved France for the world.
I shared the feeling to the full. The death of Proust came to me like the dull blow of a softened club. That statement, I am aware, will read like hypocrisy when I go on to say that I had not read a word he had written. But it is not hypocrisy. I had not read him for a very definite professional reason, but I had heard with avidity all that was to be heard of him. Thus, for a long time I had had an extremely vivid sense of his personality and of his activities…. And, indeed, it added to the blow, that I was to have met Proust himself on the very evening of his death.
Nevertheless, it was his death that made it certain that I should again take up a serious pen. I think those that know my record will acquit me of the implication that might be read into that statement. I had no idea of occupying Proust’s place, and even at that date I still dreaded the weaknesses in myself that I knew I should find if I now made my prolonged effort. I was still tired and I have always been lazy.
I think I am incapable of any thoughts of rivalry. There is certain literary work to be done. As long as it is done I don’t care who does it. The work that at that time — and now — I wanted to see done was something on an immense scale, a little cloudy in immediate attack, but with the salient points and the final impression extraordinarily clear. I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time. Proust being dead I could see no one who was doing that….
I was at the time merely passing through darkly tumultuous and crowded Paris. I wanted to get to my Mediterranean shores and their sunlight and solitary peace. I wanted to hear on the dry rocks the baked wind sift through the tufts of lavender and thyme, amongst which the bees do work the year round…. They really do!
But I stayed in Paris long enough to get a fair view of the literary situation…. One cannot, of course, if one is a working novelist, ever afford to get completely out of touch with the Paris literary situation. I certainly never have. One buys a book here and there. Someone mentions a French name and you store it in the memory. And, during my obscuration, Flint and Pound had kept me terrifically aware of at least the verse situation in Paris. When they were together they quarrelled like giants fighting with the arms of windmills. When they were apart they bombarded me with letters accusing each other of the worst of crimes. But the crimes were all obscurely connected with the merits of Paul Fort and Spire and Claudel and Paul Valéry and Francis Jammes, so that I got a fair view of those poets. Occasionally they would fight about the Dada movement, which was then going strong, or I would learn about Piccabia and Philippe Soupault and Tristan Tsara, and would rejoice to think that at last in the post-war world there existed a noisy and ferocious movement…. I wish a little that one’s friends wouldn’t be so quarrelsome. But they will be at each other’s throats, and when they fight are at least illuminative…. And occasionally Ezra — who has his jealousies — would, on the side, batter me with abuse of Proust…. And I had my view of foreign literary life in Paris through Miss Sylvia Beach. That untiring lady battered me without ceasing. She demanded that I should write innumerable articles about “Ulysses” and, with lance in rest, slaughter all his English detractors. I did! So I had a view of Joyce enthroned with adorers, complete somewhere on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, which is one of the Seven Hills of Paris. And I was brought into contact with Mr. Valéry Larbaud, Joyce’s chief Continental champion….
So I was not completely unaware of Paris’s literary geography. I was, indeed, almost too keenly aware of the activities of the Nouvelle Revue Française and M. Gide, who was not content to be the mere Prince de la Prose of that day.
And I had not been ten minutes in Paris before I was invited to a lunch d’honneur at the Paris branch of the Pen Club. Such functions are always desolate. You sit rigidly at attention between two French eminences. And French eminences never believe that a foreign writer can speak French. So each will have a little paper of notes and once every quarter of an hour each will address to you in English a remark about the writings of Dickens, Thackeray, Sir Hall Caine and Mr. Galsworthy. For the rest of the time they denounce to their neighbours the Nouvelle Revue Française, if they do not belong to M. Gide’s group. If they do belong to M. Gide’s group they denounce with even greater vehemence every one who is not published by the Nouvelle Revue Française…. It has been my good luck to be guest of honour at many such occasions…. I suppose that is because of the million sale of my Entre St.-Denis et St.-Georges during the war. When the French decide to be grateful they are grateful…. Indeed, before I left Paris for the South I had received a contract to write six novels in French. The publisher was not the Nouvelle Revue Française…. I speak French with a bad accent, but write it more easily than I write English.
And, but for the interview with Evans in Notre Dame and the death of Proust, I imagine that I might then have become a French writer. I ask nothing better…. French publishers pay almost nothing. On the other hand, French novels are very short. I should have to contend with the enmity of M. Gide’s group; but I could count on the powerful backing of M. Edmond Jaloux and M: Benjamin Crémieux, who had been my sponsors at that lunch, and of M. Philippe Soupault, the Dadaists, and the other jeunes of that day.
On leaving England I had made up my mind that if I was to earn a living it must be by writing. And indeed before that event I had written and sold a poor, slight novel. Mr. Lucas’s favourite journal had declared it the most amusing novel of that era, and it had been largely on its proceeds that I had been able to come Southwards. I thought that I could with ease turn out similar slight novels for the Paris publisher, and even if I found that impracticable, I had a very pleasant contract with Mr. Duckworth for a further series of novels. So that, if I became a commercial writer I might consider myself safe — as safety goes!
