Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 975
I do not mean to say that I have been under any temptation to change my temporal nationality. Only from that day I have gone on feeling more and more convinced that my only country is that invisible one that is known as the kingdom of letters. So that, since that day I live in France, where the Arts are held in great honour, and as often as I can I go to the United States, where the greatest curiosity as to the Arts is displayed, I go there, that is to say, when I can afford it and stay until my money is spent. Then I come back to the shores of the Mediterranean, where one can live on a few herbs, and for the greater part of the year, in a soft climate, pass the day and night entirely out of doors! …
The transatlantic review arose almost accidentally, though I have said that when I had been passing through Paris on my way to the Riviera an idea had passed through my mind. It was a vague sense rather than an idea…. It seemed to me that it would be a good thing if someone would start a centre for the more modern and youthful of the art movements, with which, in 1923, the city, like an immense seething cauldron, bubbled and overflowed. I hadn’t thought that the task was meant for me. But a dozen times I was stopped on the boulevards and told that what was needed was another English Review. Then one day, crossing the Boulevard St. Michel, up near the Luxembourg Gardens, I met my brother. I had not seen him for a great number of years. The last time had been in 1916, when I had passed his rather bulky form, in uniform, in New Oxford Street. He had been wounded and I failed to recognise him, khaki making everyone look alike. My companion on that day said that I exclaimed — it was during the period when my memory was still very weak:
“Good God! that was my brother Oliver. I have cut my brother Oliver…. One should not cut one’s brother…. Certainly one should not cut one’s brother! It isn’t done.”
I do not remember to have uttered those words, but I can still hear the ringing laughter that saluted whatever I did say. I ran back along the street after him, but he had gone down the Tube lift before I caught him up.
Now I met him on a road refuge half-way across the boulevard. He said that he wanted me to edit a review owned by friends of his in Paris!
My brother Oliver Hueffer was a gifted and in many ways extraordinary fellow. From my earliest days I was taught — by my father, my mother and himself — to regard him as the sparkling jewel of the family, whilst I was its ugly duckling. My father used to call me “the patient but extremely stupid Ass!”; to discipline my haughty and proud stomach my mother made me surrender to him my rabbits, my tops, my catapults, my stuffed squirrel. My father, respecting the rights of primogeniture, used to give me as pocket money a weekly sixpence and to my brother fourpence halfpenny. My mother, however, used to insist on my equalising the sums, so I never had more than fivepence farthing to spend. That sum was really insufficient to keep me at school in the position that I might have expected…. When we grew to young manhood I could excel him in one thing: I could grow a moustache, which he never could. This used to cause him great heartburnings. And, of course, I could always knock him down, for, owing to his having at the age of six dislocated his hip, he was always slow-moving. But as I seldom wanted to knock him down this was small consolation to me.
From an early age I saw little of him except in his more coruscating moments. When I was about nineteen I was standing on the pavement outside St. George’s, Hanover Square, watching the guests go in to a wedding of some member of the Grosvenor family. My brother got out of a carriage of the Duke of Westminster and handed out one of the bridesmaids…. He was then sixteen and in a military uniform.
Under my grandfather’s reign, after my father’s death, Oliver went through a great series of coruscating avatars. My grandfather had to have geniuses for his grandchildren. Of an evening he would go through our names in turn, beginning with the young Rossettis:
“Olive’s a genius, Arthur’s a genius, Helen’s certainly a genius.” Then he would begin with my mother’s children: “Juliet’s a perfect genius; Fordie is too perhaps. But as for Oliver, I can’t make out whether he’s a genius or mad…. I think he’s both!”
That was high praise. That all his grandchildren should be mere geniuses was a commonplace to him. But that the gods should vouchsafe to him a mad genius — that was almost beyond his most private hopes! …
So, with his aid, my brother, with the swiftness of the succession of the seasons at St. Agrève, ran through the careers of Man About Town, Army Officer, Actor, Stockbroker, Painter, Author and, under the auspices of the father of one of his fiancées, that of valise manufacturer!
My grandfather, with his square white beard and his long white hair cut square, exactly resembled the King of Hearts in a pack of cards. Towards the end of his life he used to paint till far into the night — with his left hand, because his right was paralysed. He would lay down his palette, take off his béret and go up to bed. He would put on his nightcap and carefully lay in the flat brass candlestick his gold watch, chain and seals, and his gold-rimmed spectacles….
One morning a week the early hours would be pierced by his imprecations. He would send for my brother, who would look more than usually cherubic. He would fling his nightcap across the room and shout:
“God damn and blast you, Oliver, what have you done with my watch and chain and spectacles?”
Oliver would say, with an air of ingenuousness:
“Well, you see, Granpa, I had to have a couple of quid for debts of honour, and I knew you would not want me not to have them whilst I did not want to wake you. So I took them down to Attenborough’s. But here are the pawn tickets.”
I think my grandfather was, in secret, rather proud of these exploits. At any rate he never locked his bedroom door….
On coming into his money from our oncle d’Amérique Oliver set up as a wholesale tobacco merchant under the auspices of one of our Virginian cousins. This was appropriate, because our uncle’s money had been gained by tobacco-planting in the South. But he soon gave that up and took seriously to the profession of letters. Under the pseudonym of Jane Wardle he published several books which were very successful — one of them, the Lord of Latimer Street, being enormously so. The Press soon got on to the secret, and compared his books to my own, always preferring his lightness of touch to my “Teutonic” stolidity. He, however, drifted gradually into journalism, and only occasionally wrote books. Sometimes he would deliberately take one of my own subjects — to show that he was more brilliant than I. And, in England, he would always be more successful. I wonder no English publisher has thought of resuscitating his work. It had great qualities of fancy.
He went eventually to New York, as correspondent for one of the great English dailies. There he tried to found a paper on the lines of what in England is called the Yellow Press. I was told the other day by a New York journalist who had known him at the time that he actually did succeed — in 1910 or so — in publishing some numbers of a paper that in every way resembled the Daily News of New York. New York, however, was not ready for such brilliances; the paper died, and my brother went through some hard times….
A little after the outbreak of the late war, the War Office rang me up and a voice said:
“There’s a fellow here who says he’s your brother.”
I said that if he said he was my brother he probably was.
The voice continued rather outragedly:
“But he says he’s a Mexican General….”
I said that if he said he was a Mexican General he probably was.
With a still greater intonation the voice continued:
“But he says he commanded 3,000 men, 4,500 women, and 6,000 children.”
I said that my brother’s enumeration of his troops was absolutely correct. The women cut the throats of the wounded, the children went through their pockets when they were dead. I added that they might grant him a commission with perfect confidence. He served through the war with credit and was twice wounded. I never shall forget the sense of rest that my mother showed when she received the news that for the second time he was in hospital in London. I have never seen greater contentment. She folded up the telegram from the War Office, placed it in the fly-leaf of her novel — it was Wuthering Heights — folded herself deep into her arm-chair and shawl, put on her spectacles, said:
“You know, Fordie, I think you’re perfectly wrong when you say that Heathcliffe is overdrawn,” and so settled down to read for five hours without speaking. It had been many, many hours since she had laid down that work — at page 36.
Two years ago I was sitting on the terrace here, reading the English paper. I noticed that a piece had been cut out. Below the excision I read: “ — imer Street, etc.” Then I knew my brother was dead. I was at the time just finishing a book and at such times I am always depressed and nervous. A finished book is something alive and, in its measure, permanent. But until you have written the last word it is no more than a heap of soiled paper. I fear preposterous things — that one of the aeroplanes that are for ever soaring overhead here might drop a spanner on my head…. Anything…. So a member of my household had cut out from the paper the necrological announcement, hoping to hold back the news till I should have finished the book. But I knew that there had been the words: “He was the author of a number of works which achieved great popularity, amongst the best known being: A Book of Witches; A Tramp in New York; The Lord of Latimer Street, etc.” And these were the exact words …
I will add a curious fact. My brother’s character and temperament must much have resembled my own. He had inherited from my mother and my grandfather a little more of their romantic tendency to take geese for swans — though Heaven knows I too have enough of that. And I got from my father enough of a passion for justness in expression and judgment to rob me of the chance of his undoubted brilliance. So that, in conversation, I am really rather inarticulate, whereas when it came to what is called back-chat he was the most amazing performer that I have ever heard, not excluding Mr. H. G. Wells. But what was singular, was that whenever we were together alone and silent, when one of us broke the silence it was to say exactly what the other had been about to bring out. I have tested this time and again, and it certainly came true seven out of ten times as to the substance of the remark, and five out of ten times as to the actual words. The same sort of, I suppose telepathic, rapport existed between my mother and myself, but not nearly in so marked a degree.
… In 1923, then, my brother stood beside me on a refuge half-way across the Boulevard St. Michel and told me that some Paris friends of his wanted me to edit a review for them. The startling nature of that coincidence with the actual train of my thoughts at the moment made me accept the idea even whilst we stood in the middle of the street. He mentioned names which were dazzling in the Paris of that day and sums the disposal of which would have made the durability of any journal absolutely certain. So we parted with the matter more than half settled, he going to the eastern pavement, I to the west.
Ten minutes after, I emerged from the rue de la Grande Chaumière on to the Boulevard Montparnasse. Ezra, with his balancing step, approached me as if he had been awaiting my approach. — He can’t have been. — He said:
“I’ve got a wonderful contribution for your new review,” and he led me to M. Fernand Léger, who, wearing an old-fashioned cricketer’s cap like that of Maître Montagnier of Tarascon, was sitting on a bench ten yards away. M, Léger produced an immense manuscript, left it in my hands and walked away…. Without a word. I think he regarded me with aversion, as being both English and a publisher.
Ezra led me to the Dôme — a resort I much disliked — and provided me with a sub-editor and a private secretary. The sub-editor was a White Russian, exiled Colonel, an aristocrat to his finger-tips, knowing not a word of English and more nervous than you would imagine that anyone could be. He saw Communistic conspiracies everywhere and, within five minutes, was convinced that I was a Soviet agent. He was a beautiful specimen of his type, but he was starving.
The private secretary was also a beautiful specimen of his type. He was an English Conscientious Objector, an apparently mild, bespectacled student. He too was starving…. Everyone in the Dôme was starving…. I would have preferred not to have a Conscientious Objector for my private secretary or a White Russian aristocrat for a sub-editor. Indeed, I was not quite certain that I needed at the moment the services of either functionary.
The Russian produced a contract with a printer and several manuscripts by friends — White Russians who recounted their martyrdoms under the Soviet: the Conscientious Objector gave me the MS. of a work of his on German lyric poetry and another on neo-German metaphysics. Ezra beckoned to a slim, apparently diffident young man and to a large-boned undiffident young man. They told Ezra that they had not brought the MSS. he had told them to bring. They had thought I should not like them. I did not catch their names because the avalanche began.
Ezra had gone away with the two young men, in order, he said, that I might have leisure to talk things over with my two collaborators. But there was no chance of talking. I have always disliked the Dôme, mainly because of the facial ugliness of its frequenters. … That only means that the best goods are not always done up in the most attractive parcels. Taken singly I would rather have the society of the ugliest man at the Dôme or the most indigent of the habitués of the Rotonde than with the handsomest and best got up of the drinking at the smarter cafés of the Grands Boulevard. Individually the Dome’s crowd are apt to prove at least keen followers of one art or another. Now and then they will develop into geniuses. But keen followers of the arts and geniuses who have not yet succeeded, have not an usually — or indeed unreasonably — a quality of ferocious resentment that shows itself in their faces. The ferocious resentment of neglect when one is conscious of great gifts or even of only great industry has my entire sympathy, even when that resentment is expressed against myself as capitalist, or for this or that. That has happened to me often enough. But to be pressed close in on by several hundred beings, all, whether geniuses or industrious or merely detrimental and needy — all crushed together, in a fetid atmosphere and an unceasing din — that is apt to disturb my equanimity.
Ezra, however, had insisted on my playing chess with him every afternoon during my stay — my two stays — in Paris, with the result that, bulky and blond, and to all appearances opulent, I must have been extremely well known in those parages. And that occasion was like a riot in the Tower of Babel. The beings that bore down on me, all feeling in their pockets, were of the most unimaginable colours, races and tongues. There were at least two Japanese, two negroes — one of whom had a real literary talent — a Mexican vaquero in costume, Finns, Swedes, French, Rumanians. They produced manuscripts in rolls, in wads, on skewers. They produced photographs of pictures, pictures themselves, music in sheets. Americans expressed admiration for my work; gloomy Englishmen said that they did not suppose I was the sort of person to like their stuff. I was, as a matter of fact, extremely anxious to read the manuscripts. I am always anxious to, and the more battered and unpresentable the manuscript the more hope it excites in me. But I was not to read many of them.
I shared the small sum I had in my pocket between the conscientious objector and the White Russian, and ran away. With that small sum the Colonel bought perfumes and roses for the Princess, his wife. The conscientious objector embarked on a career of martial adventure. I had told him to collect the manuscripts and bring them round to me next morning. Alas!
When I got home, there were manuscripts — nearly a wash-basketful — already there. And awaiting me were a very vocal lady from Chicago and an elegant, but bewildered husband. It was then ten o’clock at night. They stayed till two o’clock in the morning, the husband completely silent, the lady — who was very tall and frightening — threatening me with all sorts of supernatural ills if I did not make my new magazine a vehicle — of course, for virtue, but also for some form of dogma connected, I think, with psychiatry. She offered to subscribe for herself and her husband, then and there.
So there I was with all the machinery of a magazine — sub-editor, secretary, contributions, printers, subscribers….
It had been just before dinner-time that I had met my brother. I had conversed with him in absolute isolation. You could not have greater isolation than a refuge in the centre of the traffic of the Boulevard St. Michel. Yet here was an organisation.
It was as if I had been in one of those immense deserts inhabited by savages who have unknown methods of communication over untold distances. Before I had met my brother I had had no idea of anything so tangible as a Review; certainly not of a Review for which I should have the responsibility. I had just worked myself up to the idea of myself writing. You cannot write and conduct a Review, at least, you cannot write well.
Ezra, however, had had the idea — that someone else ought to take on the job. It was an idea that might have jumped to the eye of anyone in the Paris of those days. Paris gyrated, seethed, clamoured, roared with the Arts. Painters, novelists, poets, composers, sculptors, batik-designers, decorators, even advanced photographers, so crowded the boulevards that you could not see the tree-trunks. They came from Tokio, they came from Petrograd; they poured in from Berlin, from Constantinople, from Rio de Janeiro; they flew in locust hordes from Spokane, from Seattle, from Santa Fé, from all the states and Oklahoma. If you had held up and dropped a sheet of paper on any one of the boulevards and had said: “I want a contribution,” a thousand hands would have torn you to pieces before it had hit the ground…. At least seven must have come even from London….
