Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 973
So one day — it was on board the Berengaria — I was correcting the typescript of a book I had finished some months before. It was a horrible experience. Partly I had typed the book; partly I had dictated it to a secretary who wrote longhand, partly to another who used a machine, and partly to a third who was a remarkable stenographer. At the time of my final correction the book was about six months old. It is six months after finishing a book that it becomes most like stale fish to you. In ten years’ time you may be wondering how it was you used to be able to write so well! There are these bitter compensations!
The Berengaria rolled towards Paris over the winter seas…. No, I have never been sea-sick! … I slashed at that horrible prose. I cut out miles of passages intended for one or another of those secretaries. As if with a chaff-cutter I cut, into five or six, sentences that, fluidly, I had composed on my new Corona. Time after time I threw that typescript from end to end of the smoking-room at six in the morning. Then one’s head is at its clearest and there is no one to mark your despair…. Even nowadays I almost cry when I see the back of that book and of others written in New York at about the same period. So I have locked all my own books that I possess in a press of which I have mislaid the key….
And then one day, just before breakfast, at the hour most fitted for morning prayer and virtuous resolution, I swore solemnly that I would never write a book again save with a pen. And I never have….
I think it is best to write with a pen — or with a pencil if you dislike the grating of metal on paper. My friends — who are all American and all of whom were born after there were machines with which to write — raise their eyebrows if they happen to see a sheet of my manuscript lying about. They say:
“Oh, you write with a pen!” According to their natures they will become patronising, as if it is because of my great age and growing feebleness that I employ that obsolete instrument. Or they will grow rather cold — as if I were high-hatting them.
But I am certainly not high-hatting them. Even in the age of the triumph and decadence of the machine it is as unreasonable to say that you must use a machine for your art as it would be if one said that a machine is a vulgar instrument not to be seen in the purlieus of a devotee of the muse. It is indeed a matter of expediency alone — a matter of the mechanical difficulty of correction with the machine and of creative difficulty of composition pen in hand. If I had to give advice to a writer, that is the advice I should give: In composing make your circumstances as difficult as possible, but in correcting let not so much as a shadow or a whispered sound interfere between you and your sheet of paper. And erase with bold, remorseless black strokes that hiss as the pen traverses the lines. So you will know virtue…. You will have the fewest possible words on your page.
I have used this digression about the mechanics of writing to indicate the lapse of time that I spent at St. Jean Cap Ferrat, writing away at the first part of my book.
And though I was on the Riviera at the height of the season I did little else but write and take uphill and downhill walks. A Riviera Season is an annex of Coney Island, Blackpool, Hampstead Heath and all the Magic Cities and Luna Parks of a polyglot and “rasta” world. There is, perhaps, no reason why they should not be, these Occidental yoshiwaras. But it seems a pity that they should have chosen for their ephemeral saturnalia the most beautiful, the most legendary and the most nobly historical strip of sea coast in the world. An afternoon at Rockaway Beach or Southend, a couple of days in one of the marble caravanserais that the French call palaces may, on occasion, be salutary. Cela change, perhaps, les idées, as they say here. But more prolonged sojourns must be anodyne — and there are too many refuges from thought already in the world. Jazz-dancing is an admirable and health-giving pursuit. But if you dance jazz in the moonlight on the Acropolis you display indifferent taste and Apollo, god of Harmony and father of Æsculapius, will probably see that your health suffers.
For me, whilst disclaiming any doctrinaire connection with nudism and deprecating sun-bathing as being dangerous to the unskilled, I like to be able to sit in the shade of an olive tree, on a flat rock, extremely lightly clad. And then to think. It seems to me that that is the proper occupation of a proper man. And when Humanity leaves shores where such a passing of the time is practicable or, still more, when Humanity converts such shores into arenas for competitions in dispendiousness and brayings, Humanity makes a mistake and offends the gods. The story of Pompeii, the Riviera pleasure-city of the Romans, sufficiently confirms that view…. But Humanity must make mistakes and there will always remain above the Mediterranean enough flat stones and a sufficiency of the shadows of olive branches….
And I will confess to not being as highbrow as all that. I made my excursions from the Villa des Moulins mostly in the company of local French residents. And there were occasions when their frugality disconcerted even me. I found it, for instance, very trying, to sit on a public seat beneath the bandstand on Mentone parade with the Professor of Senatorial rank, and the heiress of Judith Gautier, whilst all the beau monde of the Côte d’Azur butterflied it in the sun around us to the strains of music. For those two insisted that there we should eat hard-boiled eggs and slices of smoked ham from pieces of brown-paper spread on our legs. And, similarly, when going to call, at Antibes, on the niece of Flaubert, in company with the grand-niece of Lamartine and the granddaughter of Turgenev, it was trying to spend more than half the time allotted for our visit in the midst of a small crowd, mostly Anglo-Saxon, whilst these highly-descended ladies denounced the driver of a fiacre who had demanded of me — not of them! — two francs fifty more than his legal fare. But it was worth it, to be within sound of such names. And who knows? That minute attention to a few sous may have been the heredity of the men who paid such minute attention to little, valueless words that they made of their country the cynosure and the glory of the Western World. Artists — witness Cézanne, whose father died a banker — are not infrequently descended from economists. Then why should not the descendants of the greatest artists be economical….
So the year wore on and it became time to drift through Provence northwards to Paris. And, indeed, at that time I still thought that I should end up on the northern side of the Channel. So the drifting was reluctant and as I drifted I continued to write furiously on great sheets of foolscap. For a time I wrote in a great dim old room with alcoves in a great, dim old hotel at Tarascon — the city of the good King René and of St. Martha; the city that I have always loved best in the world…. It would be then May; the jalousies tight-closed against the sun and the nightingales singing like furies….
I have jeered against the nature-love of the English. But I will confess that I am never completely easy unless I have the sense of feathered things near me…. In the garden of the studio that I was soon to occupy in Paris there was, positively, a nest and brood of white blackbirds. And I stayed much longer than I should have in that horrible and dank abode — it was on the site of a temple to Diana. It is not that I have the patience, like Hudson, for spending hours looking at a bird…. But I like to think that one — or two — are sometimes near, creeping through a hedge or a vine. And New York was always a little sad to me, for there seemed to be no birds there except the insupportable sparrow. But one day, a couple of years ago, in the hospitable study of the New York doctor to whom, and his wife, the predecessor of this book is dedicated, I looked aside from my writing and saw, in the vine that trailed down an outside staircase, a couple of birds, creeping and examining each tendril. For all the world as if it had been here in Provence. Both were quite unknown to me. One was as big as — and rather like — the European shrike, grey, with a black head and bill, and the other black and as small as the European tom-tit. It was at the rear of a house in West 12th Street just off Fifth Avenue, and there are neither shrikes nor tom-tits within four thousand miles of those parages. But then I understood why I had been writing rather happily and felt sure that what I was writing would be liked by men of good will.
The nightingale heard from quite near — as I hear no less than three of them at this minute, one being certainly not ten yards away — has a voice of amazing volume for so small a bird, so that how such a quantity of air can come from such a small throat is incomprehensible. Yesterday Mrs. Worthington, the authoress of Mrs. Taylor, said that the first time she heard the nightingale she was disappointed.
I said:
“I suppose you expected to be handed a box of candy and five free tickets for the movies.”
And she answered:
“Well — ye-es! … I suppose I did.”
… I think that is what is the matter with most people who are disappointed. One should not hear the nightingale for the first time — only for the first time of the year! One should be born while a nightingale is singing, and never know when one first realises that it is a nightingale. Then it is as if the bird’s song was a part of oneself. And, when for the first time of the year, you hear through the breathless stillness of the black night down the hill, that amazing bouquet of sounds that are like an incredible spray of sparks from an anvil, and the following intolerably prolonged wail of agony — ah, then you know that, come what may, the year is sanctified for you.
So the nightingales of Tarascon did not disturb my tranquil penmanship, any more than the bird that, five yards from my head, wakes me most mornings a little before five, much harasses me. I do not mind sounds that I cannot prevent when I am writing, though if someone or something over whom I have authority make the smallest sound I can become very nasty indeed! But I can bow to — and forget — the inevitable, so that I can write as well in a railway carriage as elsewhere. But twelve steam organs under my Tarascon window did drive me away at last…. The yearly world-fair at Beaucaire, across the Rhône, lasts two months, and such showmen and gipsies as come from the East spend a preliminary month in the place of that little city where, as I have said, I hope to die.
So I drifted away, rather imprudently, to St. Agrève, a little market town that I did not know, on the highest point of the plateau of the Massif Central. I was recommended to go there by Maître Laurent, the Notaire of Tarascon. Maître Laurent, in spite of living in that crumbling city, is one of the most elegant of men, and in a house that looks as if it must have been mouldering away before the Conquest, has the most perfectly elegant office, the most elegantly shining typewriters, manifolders, dictaphones and secretaries so ravishing in their elegance that you would think that it would be impossible to find them outside the millionaires’ offices round Wall Street.
With him and the Avocat, Maître Montagnier and some long, silent officers of the famous Fourth Cavalry, that was once the regiment of Ney, but is now disbanded, I used to pass all my evenings — except one when, as I have related, I passed some hours consoling a mournful Englishman who had been driven from his home in Ottery St. Mary’s by an elephant. Those evenings were usually tranquil. But now and then Maîtres Laurent and Montagnier would discuss a point in French grammar. Me Montagnier was an Anglophil — the most amazing I have ever met. He wore a cricket cap of the kind worn by professional cricketers in the early ‘eighties; he was extremely short and his figure was exactly that of a cricket ball mounted on two wax vestas. When he was not discussing grammar with the notaire he instructed me for hours on my habits as an Englishman. But when he could get me to his home — and he had the most marvellous vins du Rhône of his own growing, and a cook who would have ravished the palate of Gargantua — but when he got me planted immovably in an arm-chair, he would read me pages and pages of Dickens.
His accent in French was more amazingly Marseillais than was even Conrad’s. I have never heard such an accent. And with exactly that pronunciation he read — or made his unfortunate little daughter read:
“E weell nayvair . . r … re dayser . . r . . re Meestai . r . re Micko … baire . r . e …” the child’s voice would pipe … and:
“Sapr — r — r — isti! Magnifiqu …. ë! R — r — r — avissant … ë! E weell nayvair — r — r — re dayser — r — re ….” her father would roar.
His voice gave the effect of an earthquake and when he discussed what tense should follow the substantive preterite with Me Laurent or asserted that it was just as correct to say “causer à” as to say “causer avec …” all the strangers in the town would rush to that café. I really might have learned some of the nice points of French as it is used in the law-courts, if my whole time had not been given to keeping the glasses on the table. And meanwhile the poor cavalry officers pulled their long moustaches or inspected the spurs at the ends of their shining leggings. I don’t know what they got out of it.
So those two kindly men of the robe advised me to go to St. Agrève. They said I should escape the Tarascon heat. I did. The snow still lay at St. Agrève and, on my second day there I was so badly hit by my old lung trouble, that I almost lost all chance of dying in Tarascon. The year on those Cévennes heights is a very extraordinary and kaleidoscopic close-up. I am no good at estimating or recording heights, but I know that St. Agrève is at a respectable altitude as compared to Mont Blanc, all the Alpine peaks and their eternal snow being visible from there.
There, the snow disappears towards the middle of May. Immediately the fields are covered with grass of an amazing emerald green and enamelled with blazing flowers of primary hues, so that the grass disappears. The beasts are let out of their stalls and byres; the birds pair and nest with furious haste and seem to hatch out far faster than in the valleys. The woods are green and filled with foxes; the rivulets teem with otters, trout and crayfish. The shop windows are full of pelts — fox, otter, mole, squirrel, badger. In a moment the hay is cut and the fields are brown: in a moment the same fields are green for the second hay crop. The markets swarm with the different sects — for there are different religious sects in each of the innumerable valleys. There are Macdonaldites, Brunonians, Campbellites, Adventists, Huguenots, Lutherans…. Each of these wears a different headdress…. In a moment the corn is golden, in the next the rays of the sun are white, like magnesian light. They say that here there are more violet rays in the sunlight than anywhere else in the world, except for the Mediterranean littoral. It is perhaps true…. The streets, the houses, the fields, are filled with holiday-makers from Marseilles, Lyons, Valence, Avignon…. It was in the hotel dining-room here that I heard the whole roomful violently debating the respective merits of the styles of Paul Bourget, Barrès and Stendhal. They were all small shopkeepers….
And then — they are all gone. The skies grow heavy; the first flakes fall. The cattle are hurried back to the byres and stalls, which they will not leave again till May. Every garret and every inch of roofspace are crammed with fodder. It falls and falls. The entire earth is bedded and softened by a mantle of soundless white… The living year here lasts from May to the beginning of September. There are, in the hidden valleys, whole families who, snowed up, never set foot outside their houses from September till May. I saw a woman whose husband died in the early fall. They had to live with him there for eight months. They could not get out to bury him….
I was sitting one evening after dinner in the hostess’s private room playing, I think, dominoes, when a familiar voice boomed out from the passage. It demanded a bedroom for less than I could have imagined possible and got it. It was rich, fruity of the soil and oratorical. It went straight up to bed. It was the voice of Mr. Hilaire Belloc. I saw him next morning at the other end of the market talking to a farmer and punching a fat bullock as if he had been a grazier all his life. Before I could get round to him he had gone, and when I got back to the hotel he had left — to my regret….
Some days afterwards I read in the Morning Post a full-page article — I am not sure there were not two. It was all about St. Agrève, and it was signed by Mr. Belloc. It recounted not only all the history of St. Agrève, but the most intimate gossip about its inhabitants and singular details about their habits, clothes, ancestry…. All with profusion and in the admirable writing of that genius. Now Mr. Belloc reached that town a little after nine and left it before seven. So he was there for not more than ten hours, some of which must have been devoted to sleep. How did he do it? …
It became time to get back to Paris, and afterwards to Mr. Belloc’s county of Sussex, where I intended to finish my first volume. I finished it, however, in the studio in the Boulevard Arago — or rather in the pavilion in the garden where the white blackbirds lived…. And I have been a resident of Paris ever since — except for the fact that I have passed the greater part of the intervening years either in New York or here on the Côte d’Azur.
I have said that I do not like Paris. The statement needs qualifying. I detest the Quartier de l’Etoile — the region not so much of the idle rich as of the too industrious rich — the bankers. I dislike all the boulevards built by Haussmann and his imitators. On the other hand I really love the real Quartier Latin, the Faubourg St. Germain, the streets between the Sorbonne and the Panthéon. I can even support the Boulevard Montparnasse, though my Paris ends with the parallel rue Notre Dame des Champs. It is a grey, very quiet quarter, with the gardens of the Luxembourg like a great green jewel on its breast. That I love and I am never quite content if no string attaches me to it. It may be the merest one-room pied-à-terre: as long as I have that I feel a complete man. Without it I sit forlorn. But I do not want to be there too long or too often. The highest thoughts in the world have been thought in those grey buildings and streets, and I find it too tiring to keep that pace. There you may dress like a tramp and no one will look askance at you: but you may never, even to yourself, let your thoughts stray about in dressing-gown and slippers. They must be precise.
