Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 971
In the garden of the Villa des Moulins at St. Jean Cap Ferrat I knew that I should have to fall back on the old device of a world seen through the eyes of a central observer. The tribulations of the central observer must be sufficient to carry the reader through his observations of the crumbling world. For the tribulations of the central figure to be sympathetic it would be better if they were supported with composure. That is not essential. It is possible and is sometimes even desirable that your central character should excite sympathy by his weakness. How otherwise could you have Dostoevski? or even Turgenev? or indeed any serious writer?
But the very nature of my subject called for a character of some strength of mind and composure. No one else could have supported at once the tremendous pressure of the war and private troubles of a very dire description. He must have lost the power of cool observation. And my scheme called, before everything, for the power of cool observation in tremendous crises.
My own observation of active warfare had led me to a singular conclusion…. What preyed most on the mind of the majority of not professionally military men who went through it was what was happening at home. Wounds, rain, fear, and other horrors are terrible but relatively simple matters; you either endure them or you do not. But you have no way by which, by taking thought, you may avoid them. There are no alternatives. And when they are not immediately probable, it is singular, in the majority of mankind, how easily they can be put out of the mind…. But what is happening at home, within the four walls, and the immediate little circle of the individual — that is the unceasing strain! … You are tied by the leg: your children may be sick, your business going to rack and ruin; any of the disasters that beset humanity may be happening there…. And you are not even powerless to do anything.
You would think that, out there, in a French dugout, in a tent in support; in an army hut, you would at least be cut off from the anxieties of the everyday world. But you will find yourself a prey to the worst of all anxieties. You can do very little. But you can do a little and the real agony comes when you have to rack your brains over what, within those pitifully small limits, it is best to do. That is torturing.
A man at this point is subject, in his interests at home, to exactly the same disasters or perplexities as his temperament prepares for him in times of peace. If he is the sort of man to have to put up with the treacheries of others his interests at home will suffer from treasons; if he is the man to incur burdens of debt, debts there will unaccountably amass themselves; if he is a man destined to be betrayed by women, his women will betray him exaggeratedly and without shame. For all these vicissitudes will be exaggerated by the more strident note that in time of war gets into both speeches and events…. And he is indeed, then, homo duplex: a poor fellow whose body is tied in one place, but whose mind and personality brood eternally over another distant locality.
It was this stress that I had to take into account when I thought of my central character.
I carefully avoid the word “hero.” I was in no mood for the heroic. My character would be deprived of any glory. He was to be just enough of a man of action to get into the trenches and do what he was told. But he was to be too essentially critical to initiate any daring sorties. Indeed his activities were most markedly to be in the realm of criticism. He was to be aware that in all places where they managed things from Whitehall down to brigade headquarters a number of things would be badly managed — the difference being that in Whitehall the mismanagement would be so much the result of jealousies that it would have all the aspect of the most repellent treachery: in brigade headquarters, within a stone’s throw of the enemy, it would be the result of stupidities, shortage of instruments or men, damage by enemy activities, or, as was more often the case, on account of nearly imbecile orders percolating from Whitehall itself.
These things he must observe. When it seemed to be his duty he would criticise. That would get him, even at the Front, into many and elaborate messes…. So I should get my “intrigue” screwed up tighter and always tighter.
It came then to the choice of rank and social status. He could not be a private soldier, although many private soldiers serving in the trenches were equipped for disastrous criticism of their superiors. But, for the necessities of the intrigue his criticisms must filter through to headquarters. The criticisms of no private soldier, however intelligent, could do that. He must then be an officer of sufficient authority to make reports that would get through at times to the higher commands.
The British Army during the war was, in the officer’s mess, socially divided into quite rigid, if insensibly stages. Theoretically every man wearing H.M.’s uniform is a “gentleman” and, in the mess, the social equal of everyone else. In practice a superior officer is apt to remember that he is superior, and it is just as well for a subaltern to remember it, too. But, on the private, social side, the rigid barriers between class and class that have always subsisted continue to subsist. You may, at mess, sit next to the son of your milkman. He may be a fine fellow of faultless deportment, and as such you will treat and even respect him. But the moment you go to your own quarters — and they may be merely a hole in the mud — the normal civilian hierarchy reasserts itself.
For reasons that I will later dwell upon I did not wish my central character to be merely a “gentleman.” By the time I had arrived at St. Jean Cap Ferrat I had arrived at the stage of finding the gentle man an insupportable phenomenon…. But, separated from and absolutely above the merely gentlemanly class, there is in England another body. They are the Ruling Classes. This body is recruited as a rule from the sons of landed proprietors, old titled families, the sons of higher Army officers and what, in England, one called Good People. They are distinguished by being authoritative, cynical, instructed in the ways of mankind. They are sometimes even educated and not infrequently they are capable of real, cold passions for some person or some cause. It is they who monopolise and distinguish the First-class Government offices — the War and Foreign Offices, the Treasury, the Diplomatic Corps. They are permanent unless they come personal croppers over a woman, or through over-intelligence or on account of financial disasters. As such they are really the Ruling Classes. A politician may rise high and have the aspect of governing, but almost always he is the slave of the permanent officials who control his activities and his utterances…. It is the “gentlemen” of the country who control elections deciding whether the country shall be temporarily Conservative or Liberal … or even Labour. But the Permanent Official is almost always either Whig or Tory and sees to it that the services of the country run along the lines of its ancient traditions…. So at least it was before and during the war — and it was with those periods alone that I meant to deal.
The “Waring” of whom Marwood and I had talked in the railway-carriage between Ashford and Rye had been of pretty good family and, but for his disaster, would still have been in the Foreign Office. But he had taken the affair lying down and, utterly unmanned, was leading the alcoholic existence of one of those poor beings who manage golf or social clubs anywhere between the Riviera and Rangoon. His disaster, then, was alone useful to me.
And, curiously enough, almost before my feet as I stood in Harold Munro’s garden was the villa of a poor fellow who had had almost Waring’s fate. He was a wealthy American who had married a wrong ‘un. She had been unfaithful to him before and after marriage. He had supported these wrongs because of his passion for the woman. At last she had eloped with a ship steward and had gone sailing around the world. The husband being an American of good tradition considered himself precluded from himself taking proceedings for divorce, but he would gladly have let the woman divorce him and would have provided liberally for her. She, however, was sailing around the world and he had no means of communicating with her. Almost simultaneously, after a year or so, he had conceived an overwhelming passion for another woman and the wife had returned…. What passed between them one had no means of knowing. Presumably she had announced her intention of settling down again with him and had flatly refused to divorce him. So he committed suicide….
The dim sight of the roof of his villa below me over the bay gave me then another stage of my intrigue. My central figure’s wrong ‘un of a wife must return to him just after he had fallen for another woman…. The wife, of course, would be upstanding and in a golden sheath gown. Marwood had said she was a thoroughbred with congenital vices — a member of the Ruling Class … but reckless…. The “other woman” would be, equally naturally, the Suffragette.
But my central figure could not commit suicide. He must live his predicament down. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what Marwood himself would have thought of the story — and then what he would have thought of the war. He had died before the opening of hostilities: otherwise his views would have had immense value….
I imagined his mind going all over the misty and torrential happenings of the Western Front — his tolerance for the military even when they were intellectually childish and his complete and vitriolic contempt for the politicians at Whitehall…. Above all for Dai Bach….
It was he who for the first time had said, speaking as a Tory:
“We ought to have had Lloyd George to do our dirty work. We have to have someone. We bought Disraeli: we bought Chamberlain. We ought to have bought Lloyd George!”
… And immediately, on that remembrance, I had my central character. Marwood had died before the war, but his knowledge of the world’s circumstances had been so vast and so deep that, as it were, to carry on his consciousness through those years seemed hardly to present any difficulties. I seemed, even as I walked in that garden, to see him stand in some high place in France during the period of hostilities taking in not only what was visible, but all the causes and all the motive powers of distant places. And I seemed to hear his infinitely scornful comment on those places. It was as if he lived again.
There he was, large — an “elephant built out of meal-sacks.” Deliberate, slow in movement and extraordinarily omniscient. He was physically very strong and very enduring. And he was, beneath the surface, extraordinarily passionate — with an abiding passion for the sort of truth that makes for intellectual accuracy in the public service. It was a fascinating task to find him a posthumous career.
Actually he had had no career after a brilliant beginning. An internal tuberculous condition made it impossible for him to live in a town. So, in the country he followed the career of a philosopher. He had his mysticisms. When he talked of Higher Mathematics it was as if he were listening to the voice of angels. I suppose he saw the ocean round the throne when he considered the theory of waves, and that he saw resurrections when he thought of recurrent patterns in numbers.
He died in the fullness of his strength and no death ever seemed to me to be more regrettable. To the best of my ability I gave him life again, and for me he lives still, in Avignon, and I shall have a letter from him to-morrow.
… I do not have to say that no incident in this book had any parallel in his actual life! He lived the life of a Yorkshire squire that an inherent physical weakness compelled to inhabit the South and to eschew all the privileges of his birth. So he was the Permanent Official turned hermit, but unsoured!
There remained then for me, under Munro’s olive-trees, a final struggle with my courage. This was the question of details. For me, before I can begin a book, it is necessary for me to have got together an immense number of details that might bear upon the circumstances of the story that I am about to relate. It is really quite immaterial whether Army G.S. limbered wagons have brakes that screw down or brakes that act by leverage. It is a million to one that I should never have to mention a G.S. limbered wagon, and the question of the nature of its brake could quite easily be avoided. I have at least skill enough for that….
But what had put me into a panic on that afternoon in Notre Dame was the sudden fear that the quality of my memory might have deteriorated. Usually I can be fairly sure of my memory — particularly for material details and the conversation of other people. What I say myself I forget rather easily and what I write usually goes out of me with astonishing rapidity. All names also go. But the speeches of other people remain to me with singular clarity and so do, say, the details of machinery. So my mind is cluttered up with an amazing amount of useless detail. But to me it is not useless, for without it I should feel insecure. I may — and quite frequently do — plan out every scene, sometimes even every conversation, in a novel before I sit down to write it. But unless I know the history back to the remotest times of any place of which I am going to write, I cannot begin the work. And I must know — from personal observation, not reading — the shapes of windows, the nature of doorknobs, the aspects of kitchens, the material of which dresses are made, the leather used in shoes, the method used in manuring fields, the nature of bus tickets. I shall never use any of these things in the book. But unless I know what sort of door-knob his fingers closed on, how shall I — satisfactorily to myself — get my character out of doors?
So, in that garden above Villefranche bay, I put myself through a regular Staff Examination. I found I knew still every “detail” of Infantry Drill, of musketry practice as set forth in the text-books and could repeat them word for word in English and fairly well in Welsh. I found I still had by heart all the paragraphs of King’s Regulations and Military Law that a regimental officer could be required to know. I went over in my mind every contour of the road from Bailleul to Locre, Locre-Pont de Nieppe, Nieppe down to Armentières — and of all the by roads from Nieppe to Ploegsteert, Westoutre, Dranoutre. And I found that I could remember with astonishing vividness every house left, in September, 1916, along the whole road, and almost every tree — and hundreds of shell-holes!
I will here make a confession. I have always had the greatest contempt for novels written with a purpose. Fiction should render, not draw morals. But when I sat down to write that series of volumes, I sinned against my gods to the extent of saying that I was going — to the level of the light vouchsafed me — to write a work that should have for its purpose the obviating of all future wars.
War to me was not very dreadful. I would, for my personal comfort, far rather go through another similar war than face an eternity of writing endless books. But the desperation and horror that war caused to other people impressed me with such mass and such vividness that I was ready to put my principles behind me…. I was not going to go against my literary conscience to the extent of piling horrors on horrors or even of exaggerating horrors. That policy, in the end, always defeats itself. After you have seen two or three men killed or mangled your mind of necessity grows a carapace round itself and afterwards witnessing the slaying of thousands hardly moves you unless those men belong to your own unit. And the mind of the reader does the same thing…. To read the words of that tablet in Notre Dame excites emotions. I never read them myself without tears in my eyes — and even merely to think of them I find at times unbearable…. But the emotions are those rather of pride than of revulsion. One thinks: “The fine fellows!” or one thinks: “How well they must sleep!” One thinks: “They at least are out of it!” One says: “They at least did not die in vain….”
But it seemed to me that, if I could present, not merely fear, not merely horror, not merely death, not merely even self-sacrifice … but just worry; that might strike a note of which the world would not so readily tire. For you may become callous at the thought of all the horror of “more than a million dead”: fear itself in the end comes to rest…. But worry feeds on itself and in the end so destroys the morale that less than a grasshopper becomes a burden. It is without predictable terms; it is as menacing as the eye of a serpent; it causes unspeakable fatigue even as, remorselessly, it banishes rest. And it seemed to me that if the world could be got to see war from that angle, there would be no more wars….
So it was my duty to be sure of my details. For technical facts as facts I have no respect whatever. Normally I rather despise myself for playing for factual accuracy in a novel. It did no harm to Shakespeare not to know that Bohemia has no sea-coast or even to believe in the fabled virtues of the mandrake. I would just as gladly make such slips as not. But they give weapons to fools and if, in this case, I failed in factual correctness, I should betray the cause for which I was working.
So for two or three days I mooned about, testing my memory as to all sorts of technical facts and geographical minutiæ. I tried myself out on Nordenfelt and Maxim and Stokes guns as on the stoppages of the collection of bits of tin and hairpins that we infantry were given to use as machine-guns — and precious good they were, too! I tested myself as to strengths of units, as to supply, as to cyphers, as to the menus for troops and the stabling of mules. In each case I checked myself by such textbooks as I still had, and in nearly every instance I found that my memory was correct enough.
So one day I sat down at Munro’s grandfather’s campaign-secretaire — it had been on the field of Waterloo — I took up a pen: saluted St. Anthony, who looked down on me, in sheer gratitude for his letting me find my pen at all, and I wrote my first sentence. The scene took the shape it did out of remembrance of how Marwood and I had conversed in the railway carriage between Ashford Junction and Rye, where they play golf. It ran:
“The two young men — they were of the English public official class — sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage.”
CHAPTER THREE.
HAROLD MUNRO’S VILLA STOOD HIGH. IT has always been my fate to have to climb when returning home. Even my apartment in the rue de Vaugirard was on the seventh floor of the beautiful old house that the Senate in its madness is now pulling down. I luxuriate in views, and generally get them before I think of the climb. Even now there is sixty feet difference between the top and bottom of my garden, so that if I have to water the cabbages I have to descend those sixty feet and then climb up again to get the wrench to turn the hose attachment, and then in turn my cigarettes, matches, black spectacles and garden hat…. Thus before I have finished that simple gardening operation I shall have climbed and descended six hundred feet…. I suppose destiny arranges these things for the benefit of what Archbishop Warham in the suppressed preface to the Bible called one’s haughty and proud stomach. It does!
