Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 979
For a time it was fun. Mr. Bird’s “office” turned out to be exactly what I craved for — a great wine vault on the banks of the Seine in the Ile St. Louis. The ground floor was occupied by his great iron, seventeenth-century hand-press and his formes. In a sort of kitchen he kept the books he printed and the spare copies of the Review. The Review office was in a gallery that covered half the vault. It was sufficiently large as to floor-space, but it was not much more than five feet high, and Miss Reid and I had permanently contused skulls. Every time anybody who looked like a purchaser rang the door bell, we would spring up from our tables. Miss Reid — who is very tall — had then become the Review’s admirably efficient secretary…. And it was fine, sitting there in our swallow’s nest, looking over the Seine to the grey houses on the other bank. The stove below made our gallery sufficiently hot even for a New Yorker like Miss Reid, and far too hot for me, who had most times to sit in my shirt-sleeves. And, across the space occupied by the press, with its gilt eagle atop, we could watch the plane leaves drifting down into the river; and then the thin sifting of snow; and then the young plane leaves growing green again. And then dusty!
And the excitement when somebody bought a copy of a Review! … I never sold anything in my life, but my emotions, when I actually received seven francs fifty for a wad of paper that existed because of the labours of Miss Reid and myself, made me think that to be a shopkeeper must be the most glorious of fates. And there was an old, broken London printer to make and bring me up cups of tea and Mr. Bird bending over his types below…. And the wonderful manuscripts!
For me all manuscripts by unknown writers are wonderful until I open them, and every time that I open one I have a thrill of anticipation. And I may say I have read every manuscript that was sent to either the English or the Transatlantic Reviews, except for a few that Mrs. Foster weeded out in the New York office. Of course, if a manuscript is by an obviously illiterate person, I do not read every word of it: on the other hand I have accepted manuscripts by unknown writers after reading the first three lines. This was the case with D. H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, (Percy) Wyndham Lewis, and H. M. Tomlinson. In the case of Mr. Hemingway I did not read more than six words of his before I decided to publish everything that he sent me. Of course, he had been recommended to me. He was the young man who had been shadow-dancing in Ezra’s studio. In the case of Ezra, in the days of the English Review I read three verses of his Goodly Fere; in that of Mr. E. E. Cummings I had decided after reading ten lines of his that I would open the transatlantic review with the poems he sent me.
There then was the transatlantic review — without capitals. I had no motive in printing the title without capitals. I had seen the name of a shop somewhere on the Boulevard without capital letters and had rather liked the effect. Then, by a mere coincidence, Mr. Cummings’ poems had no capitals. The conjunction made a great sensation. It was, of course, taken to be a display of Communism. We were suspected of beheading initial letters as if they had been kings. The American Women’s Club in Paris solemnly burned the second number of the review in their hall fire, thus giving a lead to Mr. Hitler. Their accusation was that we were not only Communists, but indecent — that, on account of a really quite innocent story in French by my extraordinarily staid friend M. Georges Pillement. But one of the scenes took place in a … bathroom. It seemed to me that it would be better if some American ladies did not read French. It might cause international complications if they set up a censorship in Paris. After I had written that the Club cut off its subscription.
Bringing out the first number was rather hectic. The misprints made by the Russian printers were natural, but their corrections made the pages look like a Soviet battlefield, and their procrastination was without parallel. The White Russian Colonel almost went out of his mind because he read communism into every incomprehensible English sentence. Finally everything was ready except for the proof of my editorial, which conveyed a slight aperçu of the Arts in Paris at that moment. It had cost me a good deal of work. There seemed to be no way of getting this proof from the printers.
The White Russian Colonel now resigned. He said with a great deal of dignity that he would probably starve. But it was inconsistent with his honour to go on taking money from an organ that was now definitely proved to be an agency of the U.S.S.R. I didn’t argue with or even question him. The Soviet Republic loomed enormously large in the Paris of those days, for Paris is an excitable city, and the finger of Lenin was traced to the most unlikely things. Even the mark of a newly-invented rubber boot-heel! It was taken to print a trail, by means of which Soviet agents could follow each other’s movements….
I had nevertheless, within a week, offers of every kind of service from every kind of White Russian noble or army officer or their wives. I refused them.
I was in rather a hole. The only person at the printer’s who spoke comprehensible French or seemed reasonably sane was the manager. He had taken the opportunity to go sick. The rest of the staff who appeared to be mad, flew into frenzies whenever I entered their office. My Russian is very limited, and Miss Reid was afraid to go near that madhouse. As far as we could make out that firm was run by near relatives of Grand Dukes. As soon as Miss Reid or I appeared, one of them would insinuate that another was an Israelite. A free fight would ensue.
About that time Mr. Pound strolled into my studio and said that my secretary was next door and would like to see me. I was a little confused, because I thought that Miss Reid was at the office in the wine vault of the Quai d’Anjou. I had quite forgotten the conscientious objector. “Next door” was the Santé prison.
The ten shillings or so that I had given that studious and bespectacled young man as earnest money had proved his undoing. He had been really near starvation, having been earning what living he did earn as an artist’s model. So, instead of spending the money on a square meal he laid it out on the normal products of the Dôme. That is not a good thing to do.
When he got home he found that his concierge’s lodge had been moved to the other side of the passage: its furniture was quite different and the concierge was a new man. In his own room an aged gentleman was sitting on the bed. The aged gentleman threw him down the stairs. The kindly agent to whom he told this unusual story patted him on the back and recommended him to go home, as a good, spectacled student should.
The young man walked round a block and tried again. Things were worse. The strange concierge blocked the way. The young man knocked him down. … The aged gentleman was still on the bed. This time he held a gun. Outraged by their offences against the laws of hospitality the young man smashed some windows, defiled the staircase, yelled at the top of his voice, and got into bed with the concierge’s wife.
When the agents arrived in great numbers the young man made a spirited attempt to bite off the nose of the sergeant in charge of them. He was carried, spread-eagled, to the Santé. Next morning a kindly magistrate told him he had acted very wrongly. Poets have a certain licence, but his deeds were not covered by that indulgence. The concierge pleaded for him; the old gentleman pleaded for him; the sergeant, who was a poet too, if a Corsican, asserted his conviction that the prisoner was an excellent young man. He had indulged too freely in the juice of the grape — but to indulge freely in wine was in France an act of patriotism.
He was ordered to pay frs. 15 for injuries to the aged gentleman; frs. 12 for the broken window; frs. 5 for the cleaning of the staircase and frs. 9 to the wife of the concierge, all these with sursis — the benefit of the First Offenders Act. He expected to go free and unmulcted.
Alas, a much more dire offence was alleged against him. He had been found to be in possession of a prohibited arm! The weapon was a penknife, three inches long. But the blade could be fixed. It was one of those Scandinavian, barrel-shaped affairs that some gentlemen use for cleaning their finger-nails. The unfortunate young man was remanded in custody.
The kindly sergeant did his best to lighten the irksomeness of the young man’s captivity. He visited him in his cell, declaimed to him his own vocéros and other poems to the glory of the vendetta. He listened with attention to the poems of the young man and to the music of Mr. Pound, who had brought his bassoon and rendered on it the airs to which the poems of Arnaut Daniel had been sung. That sergeant even brought half-bottles of thin wine and slices of the sausage called mortadella. With this he fed the captive. It is good to be a poet in France.
The Higher Court before whom the case was tried was less placable. The poor young man had just, when Ezra visited me, been sentenced to a fine of frs. 4, with frs. 66 for costs and, it having been discovered that as conscientious objector he had been in prison in England, he was sentenced to expulsion from France: — Ezra’s proposition now was that I should pay the fine and approach the authorities with assurance of the excellence of the young man’s poetry and of my conviction that he would no further offend…. I had never read the young man’s poetry and had only seen him for ten minutes at the Dôme, so I knew little about his character. But I perjured myself all right. I did it rather reluctantly, for I dislike the militant sides of the characters of conscientious objectors and, having once seen a man’s ear bitten off by an American trooper, I felt some distaste at the idea that my own nose might leave my face between the teeth of an English poet…. Eventually, on the assurance that the young man was in my service, the authorities decided that as long as he kept that job he might stay in Paris.
I was glad, for I did not like the idea of France expelling poets. So that young man became sub-editor. He assisted me to get out the first number. He made the discovery that what was delaying the printers was the fact that that White Russian Colonel had carried off the manuscript of my article and had never returned it. He had taken it to the General, who was the Chief Organiser of the Counter Revolution in Paris and, between them I suppose, they had puzzled out that my account of the Dadaists, Surrealists, Fauves, Cubists and supporters of M. Gide was a Soviet guide to the houses of White Russian organisers in Paris…. The idea does not really seem so mad when you consider that that General was, actually, a year or so later, “taken for a ride” in the streets of Paris in full daylight — and murdered.
I never saw that MS. again and had to substitute for it something I had written for a sort of prospectus. I am sorry, for, beside the week it cost me, it was, I think, rather a good “constatation” of the ideals of the plastic artists of those days. But perhaps it wasn’t!
The first number of the review came out thus about six weeks later. And even at that it did not properly get out. The printers being apparently unable to pay their papermakers, had bound the two or three copies that they sent to the office in a fairly substantial paper. But for those they supplied to the trade they provided a binding made apparently of white toilet paper. So, two days after the review had been out for notice, I had to face the fact that the trade refused to take it. I had to have it bound all over again. As soon as he saw that cover, enraged cables began to come from New York. Mr. Quinn must have spent more on cables than he spent on the review….
As soon as the first number was out the social life began. It came like an avalanche. I had arranged to give a modest Thursday tea to contributors after the time-honoured fashion of editors in Paris. The broken-down London printer was to make the tea and there would be biscuits, whilst we sat on benches round the press and talked of the future policy of the review. It is a useful function as it is arranged in France.
But you never saw such teas as mine were at first. They would begin at nine in the morning and last for twelve hours. They began again on Friday and lasted till Saturday. On Sunday disappointed tea-drinkers hammered all day on the locked doors. They were all would-be contributors, all American and nearly all Middle Westerners. If each of them had bought a copy of the review we should have made a fortune. Not one did. They all considered that as would-be contributors they were entitled to free copies.
I had to shut these teas down and to admit no one except contributors to the current numbers, and instead of a Thursday tea I gave a Friday dance. I do not mind giving dances. I can think my private thoughts while they go on nearly as well as in the Underground during rush hours — and if any one is present that I like and there is a shortage of men, I dance. I would rather dance than do anything else.
It was during one of these festivals that I had my first experience of Prohibition. I was dancing with a girl of seventeen, who appeared to be enthusiastic and modest. And suddenly — amazingly — she dropped right through my arms and lay on the floor like a corpse. I was, as it were, shattered. I thought she had died of heart disease.
No one in the room stopped dancing. They were all Americans and nearly all from the Middle West. The girl’s mother came from another room and, helped by her brother, carried the girl away. She expressed no particular concern and hardly any vexation. I had never seen a girl — I don’t believe I had ever seen a woman or even a man — in such a condition before.
… Prohibition made these Friday dances noisy and sometimes troublesome affairs. I didn’t much mind. I have a large presence and can overawe trouble-makers as a rule. And I like to see people enjoy themselves, and Heaven knows some of these poor devils needed to enjoy themselves. There was one poor nice boy — without the beginnings of any talent, who had come to France on a cattle boat — to paint. He committed suicide when he found that he would never paint even passably, and I learnt that the sandwiches and things at those Fridays had, for several months, been his only regular and certain food. To some devotees the Arts can be very cruel goddesses.
The dances gradually became burdensome and then overwhelming. In the beginning I had asked about thirty couples, all writers or painters, with one or two composers. On the second occasion there were perhaps forty-five, on the third, sixty…. So they increased. By May, as the tourist season commenced, they became overwhelming. I had to shut them down.
I did it with reluctance. It seemed to me that the review and everything connected with it was — I venture the statement — a burden of public duty laid on me. And the dances, burdensome as they were, gave the review a certain publicity. I do not mean that I was so naïf as to imagine that any of those who danced would afterwards subscribe, and as a matter of fact not a soul amongst all those that came did subscribe to the review. Not one…. But a very large proportion of those who have real merits as artists are painfully shy. They are shy of submitting their work and still more shy of personal contacts. So it seemed to me that if for such shy persons there could be a little, intimate function, they might be drawn from their shells and establish contacts, not merely with those responsible for the review itself, but also with each other. Thus one might evolve an atmosphere of artistic friendliness and intimacy, such as is extremely beneficial to the population of an art centre on its æsthetic side.
In that way the review and its social side-shows did their work. The dances had changed their character almost too soon, the greater number of those who crashed them being not only not artists but having no connection or concern with any Art. Indeed towards the end the dancers were, in the majority, people like State Senators and up-state bankers and publishers, who, passing through Paris, came as it were to a dance straight from a boat-train, made themselves offensive, and caught the next morning’s train for Monte Carlo, Berlin or Vienna. That, of course, froze out all my French friends and nearly all the practitioners of the Arts.
The work, however, had been done, and I do not think that there could ever have been an artistic atmosphere younger or more pleasurable or more cordial than that which surrounded the review offices and the Thursday teas, when they were again instituted. It was now possible to keep them intimate. They were not festivities for State Senators or up-state bankers, and the purely derogatory bringers of manuscripts had by then made the discovery that neither my assistants nor I myself were pigeons easy to pluck. There came to these frugal feasts regularly, Mr. Bird and Mr. Pound, before he set up as a musician and, discovering with startling rapidity that all Frenchmen were swine and all French art the product of scoundrels, shook the dust of Paris from his feet. On most Thursdays Mr. Hemingway shadow-boxed at Mr. Bird’s press, at the files of unsold reviews, and at my nose, shot tree-leopards that twined through the rails of the editorial gallery and told magnificent tales of the boundless prairies of his birth. I actually preferred his stories of his Italian campaign. They were less familiar. But the one and the other being supposed by Ezra, Mr. Robert McAlmon and others of the Faithful, to assist me by making a man of me, Mr. Hemingway soon became my assistant editor. As such he assisted me by trying to insert as a serial the complete works of Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhofen. I generally turned round in time to take them out of the contents table. But when I paid my month’s visit to New York he took charge, and accomplished his purpose at the expense of cutting a short story of Mrs. H. G. Wells down to forty lines — and the London Letter of an esteemed correspondent down to three.
The baroness, too, was a fairly frequent visitor to the office, where she invariably behaved like a rather severe member of any non-Prussian reigning family. So I thought the stories of her eccentricities were exaggerated. Her permis de séjour, which she had somehow obtained from the British Consulate-General in Berlin, expired and she asked me to try to get the Paris Consulate-General to extend it. The Consulate-General in Paris is made up of most obliging people, and I made a date with her to meet me there. I waited for her for two hours and then went home. I found the telephone bell ringing and a furious friend at the British Embassy at the end of it. He wanted to know what the hell I meant by sending them a Prussian lady simply dressed in a brassière of milktins connected by dog chains, and wearing on her head a plum-cake! So attired, she that afternoon repaired from the Embassy to a café, where she laid out an amiable and quite inoffensive lady, and so became the second poet of my acquaintance to be expelled from France. The Embassy discontinued its subscription to the review.
