Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 978
“So with all that and the dreadful spasms of pain. … And he will have to sell some of his collection….”
As if miraculously, the space between us and the pavement was a swept desert. There was not a car in sight. We strolled across.
Mrs. Foster said:
“He burst into tears…. I was at the telephone. … And when I told him the Doubledays said that Conrad wouldn’t see him…. After all he’d done….”
I said.
“Conrad was afraid to see him…. He was a sick man himself…. And he was told Mr. Quinn had a violent temper…. The publishers advised him not to see him….”
Mrs. Foster said:
“But Mr. Quinn had been so good….”
That evening, before the arrival of Mrs. Foster, in the depression that had followed my rage over the race-horse owner’s proposals, I had said to myself that happiness could only be ensured by the possession of a great deal of money. If you have that, nothing can really touch you…. But, as we reached the kerb, I qualified that dogma…. I said to myself:
“Nothing can really touch you on condition that you do good to nobody….”
I did my best. We walked beside the dim trees. But it was very depressing…. I said, which was true, that the last time I had seen Conrad he had told me he had refused to see Quinn. But he had felt bad about it. He acknowledged that Quinn had been a real benefactor to him. He had sold his later manuscripts to Me —— , I forget the name. He had imagined that Quinn would be enraged about it. He had really a right to be. But the war had been on. Conrad had been afraid of what the German submarines might do. He did not dare to send the MSS. to Quinn in New York and he had been dreadfully pressed for money. Nobody could sell books. And Mr. —— had pressed and pressed, offering very large sums. Beside the MSS. were not really manuscripts — not what books were printed from. They were passages that he had copied out by hand, in order to make a little money. He had had his family to think of…. It was dreadful for a man like Conrad to have to descend to that…. And he had asked me, if I saw Quinn in Paris, to explain all this … about the submarines and the distance. And if necessary to apologise.
Mrs. Foster said:
“Yes. It is dreadful for a man like Conrad to have to descend to that. And Mr. Quinn quite understood. Until Conrad refused to see him…. I do not think you had better talk to Mr. Quinn about it. It was a great misfortune that Conrad ever came to America. Mr. Quinn has never been the same again.”
It was a foretaste of the dreadful mist of cupidity that burst out before poor Conrad’s corpse was cold in its grave. I sometimes wish that authors’ manuscripts could be destroyed at the printer’s sooner than that they should be so dishonoured as articles of barter. But many poor writers would go hungrier if there were none to buy those buckshee products of their agonies. Certainly poor Conrad would have found his grim declining years grimmer and more insupportably anxious, but for the real goodness of poor Quinn. Quinn had bought his manuscripts at a time when they seemed to be of no particular value to anyone else….
… About him in his hotel bedroom there was a sort of air of forlorn majesty. Perhaps that quality attaches to every man who is bound to die very soon — even to condemned murderers. But about him there was a special shade of that quality — as if he had been a disabled eagle. He had the air of a chained eagle waiting for his old enemy, the sun, to rise and find him no longer there.
His first words to me were:
“They will ruin you. You had better let me handle them. I’ll …”
I forget what he said he was going to do to them — something picturesque and destructive. But they were just business men and mystified at that. They had really no idea that I might object to their using my name for the rigging of the markets or the influencing of betting prices. And their naïveté was proved by their imagining that articles in a review devoted to chronicling international art-activities could much help their designs.
I said as much and at that, that forlorn, lean Quixote went, as the saying is, quite off the handle. His imprecations against Messrs. P —— and X —— would have been exaggerated if they had beggared a thousand orphans…. It was, indeed, as if I had been an orphan. He told me over and over again to leave it to him. He would set his French lawyer on the fellows. He would see that I had my review.
I left it to him all right and he dragged me next day to office after office, including that of Mr. P —— himself. Mr. P —— preferred to be represented by a poor devil of an English attorney, whom he employed in his business. Him, Mr. Quinn certainly left miserable….
The poor fellow was exactly like the sweated Cockney clerks of Dickens’s London, old, broken, with a back nearly bent double, and it was not the affairs of the review that worried him. He did not like his employer, and his employer soon afterwards got rid of him. No: it was the sight of Mr. Quinn that made him miserable. He was a lawyer — and he himself was a lawyer…. But Quinn was enormously wealthy, and passed for being enormously powerful, even in Paris. And that poor fellow could not scrape together enough to pay for his monthly bottle of hair-dye!
Mr. Quinn was not the first very wealthy man I had met, but he was the first I had gone about with for any time. It was impressive. As a supposedly great poet I am always treated with distinguished deference wherever I go in Paris. Anybody announcing himself as a poet will receive the same treatment. But to go about Paris with Quinn was to see the doors of palaces, banks, offices, fly open as if propelled by gunpowder…. And before him, even the poets prostrated themselves, and inflexible notaries departed from the routines of their lifetimes. It was as if he carried about with him the power to make you see fairy tales….
He appeared, and at once the poor poets saw their one chance — if he would only glance at them — to realise then their material dreams. The rich refurbished their ideas of fantastic business operations that should make them as Emperors. The starveling London lawyer precipitated himself before him and offered, firstly to become his Paris or London correspondent, then to sell Mr. Quinn his law library….
It was not so much Quinn’s reputation for wealth. I do not think he was ever a very wealthy man, and at that time some fantastic litigation in Scandinavia had considerably impoverished him. His professional income must have been very large, and out of that he bought the items of his collection and distributed his largesses. But even his legal income he jeopardised in fighting lawsuits for oppressed poets…. It was thus his personal prestige, his fame as the maker of extraordinary combinations and the impatient insolence with the powerful that made up his singular aura and his power to force people to act against their wills….
He once broke a date for lunch with me. I met him a little later with his notaire, my friend, the inflexible Maître L —— . They were carrying golf-clubs. At an hour when the Law Courts were open, they had been playing and lunching at Versailles! Some time later, Maître L —— having been of considerable service to me — or at least, having put himself to considerable trouble: for no one can be very useful to you if you have any contacts with French commercial law — I asked him to play golf and lunch with me at a club of which I was an honorary member. I rather dislike golf, which seems to me to be a futile occupation for a grown man who, if he wants to be in the open, would be better employed cultivating a melon patch. But I was ready to sacrifice myself; a lawyer who would play golf whilst the courts are sitting must be a golf-maniac indeed!
Me L —— froze me. He was an inflexible, hard-fleshed and silent man, with an always indignant glance. He asked me if I took him to be mad. What spare time, he said, indicating his magnificent and piled desk — what time had he to spare for the distractions of the imbecile? When, doing violence to his feelings, he tore himself from his desk in the small hours, he spent an hour or two in reading poetry or other imaginative literature. A man must keep himself abreast of the Arts and the Thought of his time…. But golf! That derivative for the half-witted.
I reminded him that I had seen him at three in the afternoon, in the rue St. Honoré, carrying golf-clubs. … His brow cleared as he realised that I had not been trying to insult him.
“Oh, that!” he laughed…. “That was to please that infernal tyrant, old Quinn. The man could force a cat to take to swimming or an elephant to eat beef-steaks…. But I can assure you I have never felt so painfully deranged….”
My own association with Quinn was not very fortunate. He forced me to do things that I knew would turn out to be unfortunate and to avoid courses that I felt convinced would be propitious…. With his legal keenness he discovered that Messrs. P —— and X —— had put themselves in the wrong — I think by agreeing, before witnesses, to my terms, and he proposed to me to begin a whole series of lawsuits, that both he and Me L —— assured me would land at least one of them eventually in prison. That I did firmly refuse to do. It is completely against such principles as I have to take the law against any man — for it is obvious that if any one wrongs me his necessity to do so must be greater than my need for redress.
The Company in the meantime took action, in order to forestall any that I might take. They ordered me to hand over the editorship and office of the Review to two gentlemen they named, and threatened to sue me for the 120 frs. that they had advanced me for salaries. I took absolutely no notice, and two or three days later I saw Mr. Frank Harris and a gentleman in the worst Derby hat I have ever seen. They were making their way, rather gingerly, between the rose bushes of my garden pavilion. They were coming to take possession of the perfectly empty bedroom which I had taken for an office.
I was always afraid of Mr. Frank Harris. I was conscious of being a just man, but he affected me with a sense of the supernatural, as if he could mysteriously work with hidden powers, so that I committed crimes whilst I slept. I had known him with his high colour, his buffalo-horn moustache and his voice of a town bull that was weeping over a sentimental novelette — had known him in the days when he had with infinite brilliance edited the Saturday Review. Later, whilst I was editing the English Review, he trepanned me into lunching with him at the Savoy. All through that meal he advanced arguments to me to force me to print a story of his, so salacious that I thought that if I published it the front of the English Review office would become purple. In a case like that — it is the only one — I can be adamant. I will not print anything I do not want to print. Mr. Harris went on interminably with his persuasions and even threats. He pointed out that a touch of salaciousness would make the Review infinitely livelier. Moreover, the ordinary man craved for salacious literature. His story would increase tenfold the circulation of the Review. But the great argument that his fruity and cavernous voice brought out again and again was that I was the only editor in the world who would have the courage to print his story.
In his pauses for breath I told him over and over again that I had the greatest possible admiration for his gifts and that I considered — and it was true! — that some of his short stories were with the best in the English language. But he went on and on, pleading until I got really frightened — as if I should wake up one day and find, in spite of myself, that story in the Review.
Suddenly, however, he changed his tactics, and my near-hypnosis cleared away. He hammered the table with his fist and shouted:
“By God, I know why you won’t print it! By God, I know….”
Everyone else in the Grill must have heard him. I had a strong suspicion that that was what he wanted, and that the scene was staged for the benefit of Colonel Harvey, then Pierpont Morgan’s representative, and afterwards American Ambassador. Harris knew that I knew the Colonel very well as Editor of the North American Review. He was two tables away, and I had spoken to him as we went in. Harvey was, indeed, meditating putting some money into the English Review. But it eventually came out that he proposed to have a say in the contents of the Review. I declined rather reluctantly. I could not consent to let it become an organ of the Morgan interests in England. But I liked the Colonel and believe, contrary to the usual opinion in the United States, that he was one of the best ambassadors that country ever sent to the Court of St. James’s. He had not the courtly vacuity of Mr. Whitelaw Reid or the moral impressiveness of Mr. Page, but he had a keen sense of public affairs, and without the diplomatic lip-service of the other ambassadors or too great a show of Anglo-philism, managed to get round more than one difficult corner in the relations of the two countries. I have told elsewhere the story of the curious literary adventure I had with him in Brighton.
Harris banged and banged on the table and shouted:
“By God, I know…. It’s because you think I’m a financial bad hat. Not safe! Not fit to be trusted! By God, I’ll show you….”
He called at the top of his voice:
“Here, head-waiter … Maître d’hôtel. Whatever you call yourself. Tell the manager I want to see him. Et plus vite que cela!”
The manager hurried to the table.
Harris said:
“Go at once and look at my account and tell me what I owe you….”
When the manager came back he said:
“Four hundred and seventy-three pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence!”
Harris shouted:
“Four hundred and seventy-odd pounds, that’s what I owe you, is it?”
The manager said:
“That’s what you owe us, Mr. Harris.”
Harris shouted:
“And how much credit will you give me?”
The manager said:
“Unlimited credit, Mr. Harris.”
Harris became magnificent. He fairly roared:
“And to how many men in London will you say that — that you will give them unlimited credit?”
The manager said:
“We have to be very careful about giving credit, Mr. Harris….”
I am bound to say that that display made me still more frightened of Harris. If he could thus hypnotise a Savoy Hotel manager, what wouldn’t he be able to do to me? …
It was this redoubtable figure who was approaching my hide-hole through the rose bushes. Since his Savoy Hotel days he had fallen on worse times. He said he had himself set up as a hotel-keeper. He professed to have spent millions on a magnificent palace on a Riviera rock in the Mediterranean. To discover that there was no way of reaching it except at low tide in very still weather! … There are no tides in the Mediterranean, but I was none the less afraid of Mr. Harris. He must have been in low water indeed to want the editorship of the Company’s Review.
I saw him enter, dubiously, the passage about ten yards away that led to that abandoned bedroom, and I gave orders that if he knocked on my door it was on no account to be opened to him. But he drifted away without calling on me. That was the last I heard of that Company. Its Review never saw another number.
Then, of course, Mr. Quinn proposed to finance a different Review for me.
I was very doubtful and apprehensive. I had no doubts of the bona fides of Mr. Quinn, but I very much doubted if his tyrannous nature would not betray him into interfering a great deal more with the Review than at the moment he thought he would. On the other hand he would be in America and I in Paris. But what frightened me most was the thought of having to manage the business affairs of the Review. I am a very good business man when it comes to other people’s affairs. I know the ins and outs of printing, publishing, and business-editing a review as few others do. But when it comes to managing my own affairs, I am worse than hopeless. I do not manage them at all, and if they have any chance of becoming complicated at all they become incredibly complicated.
Mr. Quinn, still pathetically conscious of his notion that I was an honest man who had been struggling with knaves, was determined that I must have my review. And I was convinced that at that juncture some such review was a necessity. It is the greatest blot on the face of Anglo-Saxondom that it has never been able to support a review devoted entirely to the Arts. Anglo-Saxondom consists of four hundred million subjects, citizens and variously coloured dependants, yet it cannot find ten thousand to display a glimmering of interest in what differentiates man from the brute creation. It seemed, therefore, my duty, if there was any chance of the existence of such a periodical, to do all I could to bring it into being.
Mr. Quinn appeared to smooth away most of the difficulties. The French business affairs he said Me L —— would manage; the American branch he would manage himself. Then Mr. Gerald Duckworth, who had published the English Review, consented to take over the London side. Mr. Duckworth was one of my oldest friends; he had been losing money over my books for over thirty years, and I would have trusted him with my purse, my life and almost with my reputation — that being the last thing one should entrust to anyone not an archangel or a deaf-mute…. I consented at last. It seemed to me that if Mr. Quinn put his extraordinary powers of organisation into the American side of the business the fortunes of the Review were made.
We came to an arrangement. I stipulated that I was to find 51 per cent of the capital and should hold 51 per cent of the shares. I had no doubt of Mr. Quinn’s integrity, but I did not know anything about his heirs or assigns. I also stipulated that neither he nor I should touch any of the profits of the Review, if it made any profits. It did not seem to me decent that either he as Mæcenas or I as writer should benefit by the labours of artists. He stipulated the Review should be turned into a limited company according to French law. It was this that really proved the undoing of the Review. The charges for founding and registering that company exhausted nearly half our original capital, and the exasperation and minute formalities insisted on by Me L —— caused me more labours and loss of time than all the rest of the Review together.
On the face of it the Review should have prospered. The costs of production in Paris were ludicrously small; contributors, aware that the proprietors were not to make any profits, worked at the tiniest of rates; even distribution was very cheap, and office expenses were almost nothing as compared with those of any journal in London or New York. All out, a copy cost between two and three cents, and was sold to the public for fifty! … You would have thought that there must be a fortune in it…. Alas, I have not yet succeeded in liquidating the debts it caused me to incur. I do not suppose I ever shall.
