Ford Madox Ford, France and Provence

Ford Madox Ford, France and Provence

International Ford Madox Ford Studies Volume 10 General Editor Max Saunders, King’s College London Editorial Board Bernard Bergonzi, Vita Fortunati, Robert Hampson, Sara Haslam, Samuel Hynes, Thomas Staley, Joseph Wiesenfarth

For information about the Ford Madox Ford Society, please see the website at: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/fordmadoxford-society/ Or contact: Dr Sara Haslam [email protected] Department of Literature, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Or: [email protected]

IFMFS is a peer-reviewed annual series. Guidelines for contributors, including a full list of abbreviations of Ford’s titles and related works, can be found by following the links on the Society’s website. Abbreviations used in this volume are listed from p. 293.

Ford Madox Ford, France and Provence Edited by

Dominique Lemarchal and Claire Davison-Pégon

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

The Ford Madox Ford Society

Acknowledgements The editors and general editor are very grateful to the Laboratoire de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA), Université de Provence, for financial support to cover the cost of illustrating the present volume; to the Estate of Janice Biala and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, for generously granting permission to reproduce Biala’s photographs and art-works; to the Department of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, for letting us consult Ford’s typescript of the article ‘Que Pensez-Vous de la France?’; and to the Hon. Oliver Soskice. We would also like to thank the museums (detailed in the List of Illustrations on pp. 11-12) which have kindly granted permissions to reproduce works in their collections.

Cover illustration: Provence, by Janice Biala: c.1931, oil on canvas, 37 x 25 ½ inches. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Title page illustration: Ford c.1915, pen and ink drawing. © Alfred Cohen, 2000. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3347-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0046-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands

[…] je sens une satisfaction infinie de ce que la France s’étende entre le Rhin, la Manche, l’Atlantique et la bonne ville de Lyon – pour protéger la Provence! Car la Provence est non seulement le berceau et le sanctuaire de notre civilisation, mais elle est, grâce à ses fruits, ses vignes, ses oliviers, ses Alpilles grises, ses rochers trempés de soleil, ses vieux murs blancs, ses touffes de lavande, de romarin, de thym et ses vents embaumés le seul paradis terrestre et abrité que nous voyons de ce côté du néant. J’ai passé presque toute ma vie à errer; j’ai roulé ma bosse un peu partout en Europe occidentale et en Occident transatlantique. Mais je dois toujours revenir aux ombres des platanes et des oliviers pour renouveler mon courage. Et, quand je suis loin, j’en conserve toujours la nostalgie insupportable.

I feel, from the bottom of my heart, infinite satisfaction that France should stretch from the Rhine, the Channel, the Atlantic and the good city of Lyons to shield Provence. For Provence is not only the cradle and sanctuary of our civilisation but also, thanks to its fruits, its vines, its olive-trees, its grey Alpilles, its sun-drenched rocks, its old white walls, its tufts of lavender, of rosemary, of thyme, and embalmed winds, the only shielded terrestrial paradise this side of nothingness. I have spent most of my life wandering. I have travelled all over Western Europe and the transatlantic West. And I always have to return to the shades of the plane and olive trees to renew my courage. When away from them, I feel a melancholy yearning for them. Ford Madox Ford, ‘Que Pensez-Vous de la France’, L’Intransigeant, 5 January 1934; see pp. 33, 38 below.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

11

General Editor’s Preface MAX SAUNDERS

13

An Introduction: Ford and France, Ford’s Provence: Appry la Gair Finny DOMINIQUE LEMARCHAL

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SECTION 1: FORD AND FRANCE Que Pensez-Vous de la France? FORD MADOX FORD

29

‘In Separate Directions’: Ford Madox Ford and French Networks HERMIONE LEE

43

Ford Madox Ford and Valery Larbaud: Critical Convergences GIL CHARBONNIER

57

Poetic Triangulations: Ford, Pound, and the French Literary Tradition CHRISTOPHER BAINS

77

Third Republic French Philosophy and Ford’s Evolving Moral Topologies SAM TRAINOR

85

Maplines: Visions of France in Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy ELLEN LÉVY

107

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CONTENTS

Impressionist Confusion, Dissolving Landscape: Reconstructing Provence ALEXANDRA BECQUET

119

France as Fieldwork, or, Ford the Ethnographer CAROLINE PATEY

133

Ford Madox Ford’s Mirrors to France ROBERT E. McDONOUGH

143

SECTION 2: FORD AND PROVENCE Ford and Provence JULIAN BARNES

153

Letters to and from Toulon: Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound’s Provençal Connections HÉLÈNE AJI

165

In Provence: The Life of Ford Madox Ford and Biala JASON ANDREW

179

Illustrations (between pp. 192 and 193) Ford’s Provence: A Pre-Raphaelite Vision ANGELA THIRLWELL

193

Ford Madox Ford and the Troubadours ASHLEY CHANTLER

203

Reading The Rash Act in the Light of Provence: The Encounter of Ethics and Aesthetics CHRISTINE REYNIER

217

Trusting in Provence: Financial Crisis in The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh ROB HAWKES

229

Going South for Air: Ford Madox Ford’s Provence MARTIN STANNARD

243

CONTENTS

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Ford, James and Daudet: The Charming Art of Touching up the Truth JOHN COYLE

251

Ford’s Thought-Experiments: Impressionism, Place, History, and ‘the Frame of Mind That is Provence’ MAX SAUNDERS

259

Contributors

277

Abstracts

283

Abbreviations

293

Other Volumes in the Series

299

The Ford Madox Ford Society

301

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Cover Illustration Provence, by Janice Biala: c.1931, oil on canvas, 37 x 25 ½ inches. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

1. Painter Janice Biala and Ford Madox Ford, c.1930. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 2. Ford Madox Ford and Biala with the Crankshaws, Villa Paul. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 3. Biala at the Villa Paul, photographed by Ford Madox Ford. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 4. View from our Terrace (at Villa Paul), c.1931. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 5. Town View, Cap Brun, by Janice Biala, c.1931. Oil on canvas. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 6. The Port at Cap Brun, by Janice Biala, c.1931. Oil on panel. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 7. Ford on the Terrace, Villa Paul, by Janice Biala, c.1931. Oil on canvas. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 8. View from Our Terrace, by Janice Biala, c.1933. Oil on panel, 25 ½ x 21 ¼ inches. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 9. The Great and For Ever Impassive Lalanda by Janice Biala, 1934. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches, © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

10. Book cover illustration: Provence, 1935. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 11. Janice Biala and Ford Madox Ford, Villa Paul, c.1934. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 12. King René’s Honeymoon by Ford Madox Brown, 1864, pencil, watercolour, gouache and gum arabic on card, 276 x 186 mm. Tate Britain. 13. Ford Madox Brown at his easel by Cathy Madox Brown, watercolour on paper, 53.5 x 48.2 cm, 1870. Private Collection. 14. Photograph of 37 Fitzroy Square which Ford used as the frontispiece to Ancient Lights. 15. Biala’s drawing of King René’s castle at Tarascon from Ford’s Provence. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. 16. The King of France claims the dispossessed Cordelia, inscribed lower right, ‘FordMBrown Paris/44’, pencil, pen and brown ink on paper, 216 x 280 mm,. Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester. 17. King René’s Honeymoon: Architecture by Ford Madox Brown, 1861, brush & brown ink with watercolour over pencil on buff paper, 44.4 x 31.6 cm. Monogram and date ‘FMB – 61’ lower left. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. 18. The Pretty Baa-Lambs by Ford Madox Brown, oil on panel, 61 x 76.2 cm., 1851, re-touched 1851-53, 1859. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE Max Saunders Ford Madox Ford has as often been a subject of controversy as a candidate for literary canonization. He was, nonetheless, a major presence in early twentieth-century literature, and he has remained a significant figure in the history of modern English and American literature for over a century. Throughout that time he has been written about – not just by critics, but often by leading novelists and poets, such as Graham Greene, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Anthony Burgess, A. S. Byatt and Colm Tóibín. His two acknowledged masterpieces have remained in print since the 1940s. The Good Soldier now regularly figures in studies of Modernism and on syllabuses. Parade’s End has been increasingly recognized as comparably important. Malcolm Bradbury called it ‘a central Modernist novel of the 1920s, in which it is exemplary’; and for Samuel Hynes it is ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’. During the last two decades, there has been a striking resurgence of interest in Ford and in the multifarious aspects of his work. As befits such an internationalist phenomenon as Ford himself, this critical attention has been markedly international, manifesting itself not only in the United Kingdom and the U.S.A., but in Continental Europe and elsewhere. Many of his works have not only been republished in their original language, but also translated into more than a dozen others. The founding of the present series, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, reflects this increasing interest in Ford’s writing and the wider understanding of his role in literary history. Each volume is normally based upon a particular theme or issue, and relates aspects of Ford’s work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Previous volumes have focused on ideas of modernity, history, the city, culture and change, and Ford’s complex engagements with several generations of literary movements. This tenth volume contributes to an investigation of Ford’s various milieux, joining volume 5 on England and Englishness, and anticipating a future volume on Ford and America. It also continues an ambitious multi-volume project initiated by the Ford Madox Ford

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Society to reappraise what volume 6, edited by Paul Skinner, described as Ford’s ‘Literary Contacts’, taken to include not only some of the many writers and artists Ford knew personally (Ford Madox Brown, Ezra Pound, and Janice Biala feature prominently here), but also significant figures he didn’t know but wrote about (as the Troubadours, or Proust, here), or who wrote about him (as did Pound and Valery Larbaud). Ford was steeped in French language, literature, art and culture from an early age. He had them especially from his father, his grandfather, his earliest schooling (much of which was conducted in French), his travels to his extended Hueffer family on the continent, and from his arduous apprenticeship as a novelist with his collaborator Joseph Conrad. This volume is the first extended treatment of Ford’s lifelong contacts with France and French culture. It combines contributions from British, French and American experts on Ford and Modernism. It has two closely inter-connected sections. The first, on Ford’s engagement with France and French culture, opens with an essay he wrote, in French, about France – republished and also translated here for the first time – and includes an essay on literary Paris of the 1920s by the leading biographer Hermione Lee. The second section, on Ford and Provence, opens with an essay on his attachment to the region by the novelist Julian Barnes, and also includes a selection of previously unpublished letters from Janice Biala about her life with Ford in Provence. (In addition to their work included here, Julian Barnes’ and Hermione Lee’ collaboration on a pair of programmes on ‘Ford Madox Ford and France’, broadcast on Radio 4 on 24 and 31 August 2010, also deserves mention.) Most of the essays originated in the conference ‘Ford in France / Ford en Provence’, held in Aix en Provence in September of 2009 by the Ford Madox Ford Society and the Laboratoire de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA), Université de Provence, in collaboration with the Université Paul Cézanne, Institut des études françaises pour Etudiants Etrangers, and organized by the editors of the volume, Dominique Lemarchal and Claire Davison-Pégon. This was the first conference to be held in France on Ford, and was an indication, following the inclusion of The Good Soldier on the syllabuses for the Aggrégation and CAPES, of a renaissance of interest amongst French scholars in his work. It is to be hoped that such attention will also lead to translation of more of his books into French.

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The essays here build on earlier work (some of it in this series) on Ford’s engagement with Flaubert and Maupassant, with Impressionism, with Proust, and with Post-Impressionism. They open up many new lines of enquiry, as in the accounts of figures such as Gautier, Daudet, or Larbaud. The volume is inaugurative rather than exhaustive; part of its value is in suggesting possibilities for future research. Fruitful topics still in need of investigation include Ford’s engagements with earlier writers such as Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Ernest Renan, even Stendhal. Knowledge of Ford’s contacts with French writers in Paris in the 1920s, and of his life in Provence, would benefit from research in the archives and newspapers in both locales. It would be especially good to know more about Ford’s contacts with writers associated with the transatlantic review – such as Jean Cassou, Georges Pillement, or Philippe Soupault – or those he reviewed or discussed in the 1920s and 30s, such as René Béhaine, René Crevel, Jean Fayard, François Mauriac, Paul Morand, Henri de Régnier, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, or Tristan Tzara. Many of the essays exemplify a broader spatial or geographic turn in modernist studies. There is a pervasive attention to Ford’s interest in maps, and to his ways of representing space, landscape, views, and the relationships between places. And there is a corresponding attentiveness to modes of thinking about place: to Ford’s explorations of the cultural, moral and psychological geographies of France (and, by contrast, of England and America); and of how locality acts upon identity, and vice versa. Ford’s France and Provence were places of the imagination as well as the real places he lived in. One theme that emerges surprisingly, perhaps, but clearly in several of the essays, is the extent to which Ford’s imagination of these places was a dream born of war (or re-born from it, since, as other essays show, it was a dream Ford inherited from both his father and grandfather): a reaction to the tragedy of the First World War, and a belief that if Europe was to avoid a return of such horrors, it needed to trust in the local, peaceful civilization represented by the ‘frame of mind’ that was his Provence. Ford’s post-war books on France and the French – A Mirror to France and Provence – together with the pair of novels from the 1930s set in Provence – The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh – are necessarily central to the volume, though many other texts are also covered. This work establishes the co-ordinates against which the presence of French culture elsewhere in Ford’s oeuvre might be

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explored: as for example in his wartime propaganda writing; his poetry; his reminiscences; and also in novels such as A Little Less than Gods, about Marshal Ney and Napoleon’s ‘Hundred Days’, or the late detective fiction set in Paris, Vive Le Roy. Indeed, there can be few major Modernist writers still offering such potential for fresh research. The series is published in association with the Ford Madox Ford Society. Forthcoming and projected volumes will be announced on the Society’s website, together with details of whom to contact with suggestions about future volumes or contributions. The address is: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/fordmadoxford-society/

AN INTRODUCTION: FORD AND FRANCE, FORD’S PROVENCE: APPRY LA GAIR FINNY Dominique Lemarchal Ford was a major internationalist, and in particular a lover of France, its art and culture. He wrote much on France and French literature, wrote in French occasionally, and set several of his books in Paris and Provence, where he spent most of his time from 1922 to his death in 1939. He also edited the transatlantic review from Paris, publishing French writers alongside American and British ones. Some aspects of his engagement with France and the French have been studied, sometimes in earlier volumes of this series.1 Yet the present volume is the first extensive exploration of Ford’s significant and sustained relationship to France. The Good Soldier, Ford’s farewell to England,2 publicized his rejection of his native country as clearly as When Blood Is Their Argument and Between St. Dennis and St. George, his wartime propaganda books, formally announced his adoption of France. All the steps he took after the war to translate these resolutions into a new life for himself as a man and a writer show perfect consistency. Changing names, in a symbolical killing off of his Hueffer self, went according to plan, but not so obtaining a passport to settle down in France3, a rerooting without which he could not complete the reconstructionary process he chronicles in No Enemy. Although the life Ford lived in Sussex with Stella Bowen – and in time their daughter Julie – was possibly happier than the ‘ruined author’ had dared hope for, he worried as the months passed by with still no passport. In It Was the Nightingale, he writes: On the 11th November 1922 Authority granted me a passport that permitted me to proceed to France [. . . .] I don’t think I could have lived, with damaged lungs, through a third English winter. It had seemed to rise up before me like a black wall I could never cross. . . . And America had come creeping in. (IWN 155)

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Beyond the exhaustion and the poor state of his lungs, Ford kept resenting ‘the attitude of the natives’ towards ‘those who returned’ (IWN 64). He felt that he was being treated as if he were a ghost, and despised his country for having ‘no intellectual life’ (IWN 130). Although he idealized France and the French, Ford seems, even then, when desperate to leave England, to have known enough of the literary situation in Paris, of its circles and cliques and quarrels, to understand that starting over there, practically unknown and soon to turn fifty, would be near impossible. Hence his attention to the America that had (like cheerfulness) come creeping in, opening new perspectives, and even paying him for film rights (IWN 133-4). Living in Provence, and finding his emotional and mental nurture there, he saw that he could regularly travel to America where he felt there existed ‘a great background of youth, intelligence and energy in aesthetic pursuits’ (IWN 172) that would respond to his need to be in touch with youth in order to write. He also needed the ‘mirage’ of a new audience to stir his old bones (IWN 172). Ford was also aware that changing his name to Ford Madox Ford and leaving England inevitably involved losing readers there, not to mention probable complications with his publishers. He had made a name for himself in America as a poet, but less so as a novelist, and needed to ensure the regular publication of his books there in case it should be discontinued in England, so that, while he was chasing his large pigs and experimenting with potato plants at Red Ford, it was a combination of Provence and America that his mind was working on. He may have toyed with the idea of writing in French – the Cornell manuscript of his translation of the opening section of The Good Soldier into French testifies to his fluency – but his remark that he spoke French ‘with a bad accent’ but wrote it more easily than he wrote English sounds like a dismissal of the whole idea. Ford could not build a second literary career in France where he scarcely had any literary existence. Indeed, neither The Good Soldier nor The Fifth Queen Trilogy were translated into French and he had not started on Parade’s End yet. Only his wartime propaganda book Between St. Dennis and St. George had been translated and published by Payot, then a young publishing company specializing in History. During Ford’s life in France, only his collaborative novel with Conrad, Romance, and No More Parades had been translated into French, the latter in 1933, as a war novel, surprisingly without any

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mention of the other three volumes, although the publisher was no less than the NRF, i.e. Gallimard.4 Homo Duplex Ford knew he would continue to be.5 Feet firmly planted in his Provençal garden, he would water his aubergines in the company of Julie, ‘la petite Française’, while preparing to sail for New York. Secure in the frame of mind of Provence, his moveable vision of the country that encapsulated all that he held dear, he would set his mind on the work and encounters ahead. Once in New York, he would maintain contact with the earth by growing ‘mustard and cress’ in a ‘cracked soup-tureen’ on his window-sill.6 He never complained and indeed resurrected his writing career, writing superbly again for every one of the last seventeen Provence-inspired years of his life. Having finally received his passport, he left for France and arrived in Paris to hear that Proust had just died. The thought of the literary work yet to be done made it clear to him that, though he was still tired, he ‘should take up a serious pen’ again (IWN 199). So after breathing in some Parisian intellectual air, down to Provence he went. There, to his great relief, he managed, within a few months, to begin Some Do Not . . ., which he finished by the autumn of 1923. And then, quickly, America crept even closer: soon after he got back to Paris, he accepted the irresistible offer of again running a magazine. As with the English Review, Ford’s editorship of the transatlantic review was successful in its literary achievement, but brief. And, as Elena Lamberti has shown, in volume 9 of this series, it was mostly American interests that it served, leaving little space to the French and strongly connecting Ford, for the rest of his life, to the American Scene. 1. The Idea of France The volume is divided into two parts. The first, in which the emphasis falls mainly on France, opens with an article by Ford himself, republished here in his original French, and translated into English and annotated for the first time. The piece Ford sent to L’Intransigeant, published on January 5th 1934 under the transparent title of ‘Que pensez-vous de la France?’ is part of a series of articles by foreign writers living in France, Gertrude Stein being announced as the next contributor. Although the journalist introducing Ford presents the article as resulting from an investigation, he simply borrows from the inaccurate preface to the French version of No More Parades and introduces Ford as ‘le célèbre écrivain américain [sic]’, who has de-

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monstrated his attachment to France in his book De Saint Michel [sic] à Saint Georges as well as more directly by fighting in the trenches’. This calamitous début is followed by Ford’s response to the question which the series posed. He offers a rhapsodic championing of France as the country where he has spent more than half his life, enumerating all the landscapes dear to him, and asking for the protection of Provence in particular as the ‘cradle and sanctuary of our civilization’. He urges the French to waste no time before advertising their crucial contribution to western civilization if the world is to be saved from barbarism, his tone and mood recognizable as the very same alarm that sounds in his last books on culture, Provence and Great Trade Route. Hermione Lee, in this volume’s next essay, catches Ford on 23rd November, 1922, the day he arrived in Paris. Proust’s impressive funeral, discussed by all, including taxi-drivers and waiters, came as reassuring evidence of the regard in which France held her writers. To underline what she calls the ‘remarkable virtuosity of Ford’s social life’, Lee then takes us to the wedding of Katherine Ann Porter and Eugene Pressly in 1933, at the end of Ford’s main Paris years, which he and his companion throughout the 1930s, Janice Biala, attended, commenting that Ford’s presence at the burial and the wedding suggests that he pulled ‘in a separate direction’ from the rest of the Anglo-Saxon expatriates ‘within the inter-war Anglo-AmericanFrench life’. To complement and reinforce Ford’s conception of France and the French, Lee conjures the silhouette of another Parisianized expatriate and great novelist, Edith Wharton, whose love of France and things French runs parallel to Ford’s. Both idealized France, which they loved selflessly, both admired and praised the intelligent enjoyment of life by the French and shared the sense that they were more sophisticated than their Anglo-American counterparts Gil Charbonnier continues in the line of Lee’s remark that, for all his centrality in the Paris Left Bank inter-war scene, Ford ‘does not seem to have become intimate with French writers and artists’. In his essay, Charbonnier underlines that this is not to say that French writers were unaware of him, and produces a counter-example: that of Valery Larbaud (1881-1957), a French poet and English scholar. Larbaud occupied in France a position comparable to Ford’s in London at the time of the English Review, longing like him for an internationalization of the Republic of Letters. It was the poet in Ford

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that interested him, so that, despite his unfailing attention to the English literary scene over more than twenty years, he does not comment on the novels. Charbonnier draws our attention to the Valery Larbaud archives in Vichy, which house a wealth of the periodicals that Larbaud read and which occasionally included reviews of Ford’s prose works, usually blaming him for digressing again and again. Charbonnier looks at Ford’s and Larbaud’s comparable critical approaches as offering a better understanding of the intrinsically international origins of modernism, both men being intent on introducing foreign authors on their respective national scenes. He draws parallels between the English Review and the NRF, poised as they were between tradition and modernity. Larbaud’s extreme, minute attention to Ford’s work is precious to admirers of Ford still working to firmly establish his literary reputation in his adopted country, France. Edith Wharton devoted a book to her observations of the French called French Ways and Their Meaning and it is to a similar taste in Ford that Caroline Patey draws our attention here, noting how frequently Ford adopts the ethnographical terminology that the success of Frazer’s The Golden Bough had popularized. She follows his modes of anthropologizing the French, showing that it adds irony and distance to his observation of his favorite tribe. The semiotics of food is naturally of paramount interest to Ford, as well as the way France is organized into professions and trades. He also approaches such essential community rituals as hunting and fishing. In the end, Patey stresses, Ford’s France, the France he likes, resists homogeneity and coherence. Robert McDonough devotes his essay to A Mirror to France as having received little critical attention although Ford had listed it in 1929 as one the fourteen books of his own he would like included in the collected edition he so desired.7 It is a book which an unrepentant Ford describes ‘as the purest, the most will-less impressionism’,8 not a guide-book in the least, much rather an essay on France as mirrored in his own experience, a mapping of his adopted country that foreshadows Provence, already carrying the conviction that were France and its culture to disappear, the world would be fatally damaged. Fortunately several essays in this volume make up for the lack of attention A Mirror to France may have suffered from in the past: Patey has found in it good examples of Ford’s ethnographical bent, Saunders uses it in his analysis of Ford’s adaptation of his impressionistic tenets to the rendering of places. Becquet also takes it into

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consideration on her way from No Enemy to Provence and beyond. As it first came out in 1926, it is also tempting to see it as a eulogy of the old, non-American world, and a companion-piece to New York is Not America, published in the same year. In his essay on Ford Madox Ford and modernist poetics, Christopher Bains examines the origins of Ford’s modernist impulses, tracing it back to his love of French clarity of expression and ‘le mot juste’. Bains claims that Ford’s aesthetic contribution to Imagism and crucial influence on Pound – particularly his insistence that ordinary language be used in poetry – should be reappraised. Sam Trainor similarly posits Ford as one of the ‘transitional’ figures of modernism the study of whom makes it easier to understand the march of literature. He finds in Ford’s work the characteristic modernist preoccupation with its own transitions, and a demonstration of Ford’s remarkable ability to conjure up vicarious experience in a reader’s mind. Trainor also examines a notion that is crucial to the Fordian universe, that of a changing ‘moral geography’, pointing to the influence – via cultural imitation – of two French thinkers: the mathematician Henri Poincaré and the sociologist Gabriel Tarde. Choosing to re-read Parade’s End in their light, he returns to England and the English and No Enemy, enlightening Ford’s evolution and powers of adaptation as well as his solidity and extreme consistency. Ellen Lévy’s essay focuses on No Enemy, opening on the multiple perception of the landscape that Gringoire, Ford’s persona, has at Mont Vedaigne, a state of mind which foreshadows Tietjens’ distracted perception after the death of one of his men, O Nine Morgan. She then goes along the maplines of Gringoire/Ford’s visions of France as traced in No Enemy, a road into the past and into the superimposed time-zones co-existing in the same space. She lingers over the isolated figure of little ‘Maisie’ trying to find the train to Heaven where she has been told her mother is, and over that of Gaudier-Brzeska, the young French sculptor who was killed in the war before reaching the age of twenty-four, and finally takes up the figure of Madame Sélysette, one of the women whose mastery of domesticity contributes to making France seem a sanctuary, and who can be found in both Ford’s fiction and his memoirs. Alexandra Becquet also turns to those landscapes of No Enemy which saw the near destruction of the poet and witnessed his quasimiraculous reconstruction. She follows the dissolution of the war settings, their transformation into an inner landscape and frame of mind.

AN INTRODUCTION

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She finds in Ford’s progress from the war landscapes to those of Provence, his Garden of Eden, the urge to write in a spirit of objective subjectivity and contends that, beyond the rendering of significant settings, it is the landscape of his own Utopia that Ford is fashioning. 2. Provence: the Heart of Ford’s Country The second half of the volume is more closely focused on Provence. It opens with an essay by the novelist Julian Barnes discussing Ford’s Francophilia in terms of his passionate attachment to Provence. Barnes explores the history of this involvement, and shows how, underneath Ford’s playful descriptions of the local climate and diet, lies a ‘mythic and historic substructure’: a sense of Provence as both an earthly paradise, and also a symbol of the ‘Great Trade Route’ along which civilisation and culture had continually flowed. Barnes quotes Ford’s claim that ‘chivalric generosity, frugality, pure thought and the arts’ are the ‘first requisites’ of such civilisation. He connects this chivalric ideal with Ford’s fascination with the Troubadours, and argues that it permeates The Good Soldier, though in ironic tension with modernity. He also notes how, although the Cathar heresy was crushed in the Albigensian crusade, and the region was subsumed into France, Provence nevertheless managed to infiltrate the dominant culture. Ford’s Provence, he concludes, was more than an ideal lost world; it also suggested a possible future: an ecologically-aware culture of the local, opposed to nationalism and warmongering. The two essays which follow give a pair of intimate portraits of Ford in Provence through letters; the first in his important correspondence with Ezra Pound; the second, in previously unpublished letters from the person with whom most of his life in Provence was lived, the painter Janice Biala. Pound and Ford were good friends from 1909, when they first met in London, until Ford died, and part of their immediate bonding was their shared love of Provence and the Troubadours. To Ford who saw himself as Arnaut Daniel, Pound was always Bertran de Born. They shared the conviction that Provence could transform anything into a work of art, that Provence indeed was a work of art. Hélène Aji shows that Ford and Pound can be seen as artists who wanted ‘to look at life and make patterns of it’ but followed different paths, Ford going in the direction of ‘increasing aestheticization and seclusion from the world’ while Pound ‘insisted on commitment to the point of unreason’.9 However, Aji underlines that, in spite of their drifting apart,

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geographically and ideologically, they shared a fragile relation to truth, and that in Ford’s case, it made for his reshaping of Provence not as a country, but as a frame of mind. It is in the perspective of their relation to Provence that Aji explores their friendship, using their letters from 1924 to 1936, the year of Ford’s last letter to Pound, to highlight their three main preoccupations: a shared love and knowledge of the Mediterranean culture, an absolute dedication to literature and the selfless promotion of writers and writings. She shows that as Ford continued living in Provence, he no longer saw it as ideal or as a dream come true, but as the place where the failure of dreams could be acknowledged, which is something also to be found in the Provençal novels. The correspondence the two men exchanged over the years allows Aji to examine Ford’s and Pound’s literary debates as they appear in the reviews that were published in the late 1920s and early 1930s and to discuss Ford’s major contribution to poetry: his advocacy of the use of ordinary language in poetry. Ford’s friendship with Pound remained steadfast even though he was perfectly conscious of Pound’s ideological drift. In fact Ford used their shared love of Provence to attempt to lure him back into more acceptable political ideas, even trying to get Pound to replace him at Olivet. He never let Pound down and Pound’s obituary tribute and defense of his place in literary history was obviously sincere. Jason Andrew’s essay provides precious excerpts of Biala’s letters, many of which were written to her brother Jack Tworkov (also a painter) to combat the prejudices attached to her choice of living with Ford despite his being thirty years older. These letters offer us another instalment of Ford’s and Biala’s ‘long and passionate dialogue’ which Andrew introduced in volume 8 of this series. Biala describes her contentment in the simple life that she and Ford have made for themselves at the Villa Paul near Toulon. They allow us direct access to episodes of Ford’s and Biala’s life that were to find their way into Provence and Great Trade Route, both collaborative works, Biala’s illustrations of Provence and Great Trade Route coming out as both pertinent and slightly impertinent. She is very defensive of Ford, worrying about his health and their finances, yet fully aware of the beauty of their life. Her voice, that of a radical in politics, in no doubt as to what is looming, can be identified as the supporting voice behind Ford’s when he gives free rein to his fury at Hitler.

AN INTRODUCTION

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Ford always romanticized France. Angela Thirlwell traces his unfailing, unconditional love of France, a France he both knew and fantasized, to the French history and legends learned as a boy from his painter grandfather, from whom he also learnt French. The association, Thirlwell underlines, was so strong that ‘whenever Ford thought about Ford Madox Brown [. . .] he thought about France’, which made him think about his grandfather. In her essay, she focuses on Madox Brown’s repeated re-workings of King René’s Honeymoon as an inspiration that was to reappear in Provence and insists that the years lived in Fitzroy Square after Francis Hueffer’s death imprinted France in Ford’s mind as a spiritus loci long before he actually visited it. It is on Ford’s difficult relation with his father that Ashley Chantler concentrates. In It Was the Nightingale, Ford had acknowledged his debt to him for having passed on his love of Provence and the Troubadours, a debt which Chantler re-examines more closely in his essay, also considering the influence of Francis Hueffer’s The Troubadours on his son’s lyric poetry. He then discusses the link between Ford’s reading of the troubadours, his interest in sentimentalism and the sentimentalism that runs through his poetry. Christine Reynier’s essay investigates the connections and correspondences in the representations of Provence to be found in The Rash Act and Provence. In the latter book, historical Provence comes out an ‘earthly Paradise’ where the arts and thought flourish, whereas the fictionalized Provence of the 1930s which provides the setting of The Rash Act has been damaged and perverted by World War One and the financial crisis following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. As The Rash Act dates from 1933, Reynier follows Sondra Stang’s recommendation to read it in the spirit of Provence, a more inviting book. One of Ford’s intentions in writing the novel may have been to challenge certain Christian values and specifically the dualism of good and evil, guilt and innocence, as an oblique criticism of AngloSaxondom for whom ‘to enjoy is to sin’. She sees the dark girl as an allegory of Provence, and in Henry a modern troubadour, the whole novel then appearing as an exercise in ambivalence and relativism for which Provence provides not so much a setting as a frame of mind. Rob Hawkes equally turns his attention to The Rash Act, reading it together with its sequel, Henry for Hugh, disagreeing with C. H. Sisson’s remark that ‘the Crisis is of no more than incidental importance’ in them. Hawkes focuses on the issue of trust as binding together the two novels’ formal, structural and thematic aspects, an

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issue that is all the more productive as it is central to the experience of modernity, relevant to both the field of finance and that of human relationships as well as to the construction of character in fiction. He takes Cornelia Cook’s contention that Ford meant to go beyond the old realist delineation of character and argues that in the general pull towards abstraction of the time, those novels enact the uncertainties daily faced by modern man.10 The Provençal frame of these novels, he suggests, is important because Provence represents for Ford a setting whose land and culture enable the regeneration of trust after the cataclysms of the Great War and the Depression. Martin Stannard responds to the anger and thundering of Provence, ‘a fighting book by a pacifist’ which offers the gentle Provençal frugality as the only alternative to the imminent apocalypse. It is a rambling book which is fierce in its attack and denunciation of the mechanist culture epitomized by Hitler: both a public, solemn statement of Ford’s eccentric philosophy and a more private exercise giving glimpses of the old writer’s daily life. Stannard insists that, naturally, Provence should also be seen as simply revealing just how important Provence was to Ford, from Ford Madox Brown through Great Trade Route, as an ideal of civilization, art and beauty which runs consistently through his life and work from his childhood to his late celebrations of the French way of life, and his proto-ecological periods of living it himself, frugally, virtually self-sufficient. John Coyle returns to Ford’s idealization of Provence, contending that Ford’s professed love for Tarascon and his knowledge of Daudet’s Tartarin books are a form of recognition that his Provence was in part fantasized. Henry James, who was a friend of Daudet’s, translated the last of the Tartarin stories, Port Tarascon, adding a preface to it in which he equated Beaucaire with extinction, in striking opposition to Ford’s view of Provence as Paradise. The several mentions of James in Provence are indeed much less generous than Ford’s appreciations of the Master in his 1915 Henry James. Indeed, Coyle shows that in the thirties Ford had taken sides for the South and specifically Provence, at the cost of sometimes verging on the comic rather than the sublime. Max Saunders also considers Provence, but rather as an element in the late phase of Ford’s impressionism. He argues that, besides having written books which were impressions of characters and stories, Ford turned his impressionist techniques to places, in ways that can be seen to anticipate the psycho-geography movement of Guy

AN INTRODUCTION

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Debord (a parallel also drawn by Sam Trainor). Provence, where, ‘Truth having no divine right to glamour’,11 freedom of thought could exist, offered the frame he needed for such thought-experiments. Saunders analyses Ford’s attempt at rendering not so much a place as a place in the mind, resulting in a book of ‘mental travel’, the experience of which, Ford suggests, can enlarge and transform the mind. Ford’s burial had none of the grandeur of Proust’s. But in his daily experience of living in France, he was moved by the ordinary gentleness towards ‘poètes’: Here when I’m writing, when I’m finishing a book, the grocer and the butcher and the laundress and the proprietor of the bureau de tabac all learn of the fact through no volition of mine and, if members of my family go through the village they will at every step be stopped by inquirers asking how the work progresses, whether I am bearing up under the strain and how long it will take. (IWN 176)

That may have been an impression, due to Ford’s propensity to take his geese for swans. It does not matter, so long as he felt accompanied, comforted, and he apparently did feel supported, taken seriously, when he was writing in France. He felt that the French understood that writers and artists were producing ‘out of themselves’. France liberated him to write Parade’s End, his best post-war fiction. Once freed from England, he found the space he needed, and wrote larger books, inserting more and more suspension dots, mimicking his own speech and uneasy breathing, blurring the frontier between meditative prose and fiction. Although America provided his critical and commercial success from the 1920s, Ford kept loving France, his ‘belle indifférente’, defending and illustrating her, and returning to her at the end.

NOTES 1

See for example: Harriet Monroe, ‘The Editor in France’, Poetry, 23:2 (November 1923), 90-6; Bernard Poli, Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic Review, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1967; James T. Cox, ‘The Finest French Novel in the English Language’, Modern Fiction Studies, 9:1 (Spring 1963), 79-93; Michela A. Calderaro, ‘Ford Madox Ford: A Provence of his Own’, Annali di Ca’ Foscari, 42:1-2 (2003), 37-48; Richard W. Lid, ‘Ford Madox Ford,

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Flaubert and the English Novel’, Spectrum, 6:1 (1962), 10-19; H. Robert Huntley, ‘Flaubert and Ford: The Fallacy of “Le Mot Juste”, English Language Notes, 4:4 (1967), 283-7; Sara Haslam, ‘An Historian’s Methods?: Between St. Dennis and St. George and the Language of Propaganda’, Ford Madox Ford and ‘The Republic of Letters’, ed. Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti, Bologna, CLUEB [Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna], 2002, pp. 41-9; Max Saunders, ‘Ford and European Modernism: War, Time, and Parade’s End’, ibid., pp. 3-21; and Laura Colombino, Ford Madox Ford: Visione/visualita e scrittura, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2003, translated as Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing, Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. In earlier volumes of International Ford Madox Ford Studies (IFMFS), see W. B. Hutchings, ‘Ford and Maupassant’, IFMFS 2, 2003, pp. 257-70; Dominique Lemarchal, ‘Ford’s Paradoxical Development of the Personal Tone in the Writing of Propaganda’, IFMFS 3, 2004, pp. 917; Joseph Wiesenfarth, ‘Coda to the City’ IFMFS 4, 2005, pp. 131-8; Caroline Patey, ‘Right Bank, Left Bank and an Island: Ford’s Fragmented Ville Lumière, IFMFS 3, pp. 153-67; Paul Skinner, ‘Speak Up, Fordie!’: How Some People Want to Go to Carcassonne, IFMFS 4, pp. 197-201; John Coyle, ‘Mourning and Rumour in Ford and Proust’, IFMFS 6, 2007, pp. 113-20; Sara Haslam, ‘To Cook, or to Paint, in Paris?: Ford in Colour’, IFMFS 8, 2009, pp. 85-96; Jason Andrew, ‘Ford + Biala: A Long and Passionate Dialogue’, IFMFS 8, pp. 215-33; Laura Colombino, ‘Ford, Matisse and the Book of the Dead: The (In)visible Objects of The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’, IFMFS 8, pp. 235-50; Stephen Rogers, ‘The transatlantic review (1924)’, IFMFS 9, 2010, pp. 185-96; Andrzej Gasiorek, ‘Editing the transatlantic review: Literary Magazines and the Public Sphere’, IFMFS 9, pp. 197-214; and Elena Lamberti, ‘Wandering Yankees’: The transatlantic review or How the Americans Came to Europe’ IFMFS 9, pp. 215- 28. 2 See Dominique Lemarchal, The Good Soldier de Ford Madox Ford, Paris: Ellipses, 2005, p. 27. 3 ‘But when at last I was released from service I found myself in a rat-trap. They refused me a passport for France’: Ford, It Was the Nightingale, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1933 – henceforth IWN; p. 24. 4 L’Aventure translated by Marc Chadourne, Paris: Simon Kra, 1926. Reprinted in 1960 by Arthème Fayard publishers, collection Horizon Libre: oeuvres étrangères with an introduction by Max-Pol Fouchet, and subsequently in Livre de Poche, currently out of print. Finies, les parades. . ., translated by Fernande Bogatyreff and Georges Pillement, NRF: Paris 1933. 5 ‘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’: IWN 217. 6 Ford, Great Trade Route, London: Allen and Unwin, 1937, p. 89. 7 See Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, vol. 2, p. 362. 8 Ford, A Mirror to France, London: Duckworth, 1926, p. 18. 9 See Hélène Aji’s essay in this volume: p. 166, and note 7. Ford, Provence, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935 – henceforth Provence; p. 66. 10 Cornelia Cook, ‘Last Post: The Last of the Tietjens Series’, in Agenda, Ford Madox Ford Special Double Issue, 27:4/28:1 (Winter 1989/Spring 1990), 23-30. 11 Provence 65.

QUE PENSEZ-VOUS DE LA FRANCE? Ford Madox Ford

Introduction On 5 January 1934 Ford published an article in French in the newspaper L’Intransigeant under the title ‘Que Pensez-Vous de la France?’ – ‘What do you think of France?’ The original French text is republished below in full for the first time, followed by the first English translation, by Dominique Lemarchal. L’Intransigeant was originally founded as a left-wing opposition daily in the 1880s, but had metamorphosed into a mass-market right-wing paper by the 1920s. Ford’s article was the third in a series launched in 1934, in which leading writers and intellectuals were asked to respond to the same headline question: ‘Que Pensez-Vous de la France?’ He was preceded by the man of letters Maurice Baring, and the German novelist Thomas Mann. Others featured over the following month included Gertrude Stein, Aldous Huxley, Theodore Dreiser, Ivan Bunin, Stefan Zweig, and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, Mann, and Bunin were Nobel laureates; they, like Stein, Huxley, and Zweig, were at the peak of their fame. In short, it was a prestigious series, and deserves to be better known to literary scholars of the interwar period. Ford’s contribution appeared on the front page and continued onto the next page. Ford had been living mainly in France for eleven years when he sent his response to the paper’s question. Much of that time had been spent in Paris, especially in the mid 1920s when he was editing the transatlantic review and writing Parade’s End. But it had been to the South of France that he’d set off with Stella Bowen in 1922 to stay at Cap Ferrat; and they had begun to return to Provence, wintering in Toulon in 1926 and 1927. He returned again with Janice Biala, his last companion, in 1931, and they found the Villa Paul at nearby Cap Brun, which was to be their main home in France for the rest of Ford’s life. He had known both Paris and Provence for as long as he could remember, visiting both as a child, and then as an adult before and during the war.

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Ford’s article follows a similar trajectory. He starts talking about his love for France, but ends with the significance of Provence. The message is that of his later books Provence and Great Trade Route: that civilization is under threat from another outbreak of barbarism; that the values of European civilization, which he takes Provence especially to represent, must be preserved; and that those values of chivalry, frugality, thought and the arts might, if other nations could learn to appreciate them, offer the solution to the menaces of industrialized modernity and militarism. The article’s plea for a propaganda that stresses French achievements rather than outrages and grievances thus illuminates the intention of Ford’s own books of wartime propaganda, When Blood is Their Argument and Between St. Dennis and St. George, books which sought precisely to define the values of French civilization, by discussing its literature, thought-style and way of life, juxtaposed with a Germanic ‘Kultur’ intoxicated with Prussian militarism. Like his postwar books about France discussed in this volume, these were unusual examples of propaganda, espousing the cause not of nations but of the Romance civilization that constantly traversed national borders. The article also sheds light on the book Ford was going to write next. On 1 January 1934 he completed Henry for Hugh, the sequel to The Rash Act, and equally set in Provence and in a location based on the Villa Paul. Four days later the piece in L’Intransigeant appeared. A week after that, Ford was pitching a new idea to his American editor at Lippincott, for the book they would publish the following year as Provence.1 The newspaper piece comments on the degree of condensation needed to fit his views on France into the short space of an article. Provence, and indeed much of Ford’s writing of the 1930s, should be seen as his more expansive answer to the question of his views on France; and as the answer he anticipates at the essay’s close, directed at the (English-speaking) nations across the Channel and across the Atlantic. Ford spoke French from childhood, read French literature continually, thought of French as a stylistic model while writing English, and occasionally wrote in French. He published at least two wartime propaganda pieces in French, and said he’d written a third. He also wrote a French tribute to Joseph Conrad, published less than two months after his death in 1924.2 Ford thought well enough of two of these pieces to reprint them as French appendices to two of his books. Around 1924 he also began a French translation of the novel he was

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proud to have heard described as ‘the finest French novel in the English language’: The Good Soldier.3 The present article is thus of interest as his last known composition in French, dating from nearly a decade later. If one leaves aside the remarkably inventive spelling revealed by his typescript4, Ford’s French is clear and elegant, his use of the structures and cadences of his adopted language both accurate and relaxed; still, he manages to remain close to his native language, his turns of phrase and choice of words unmistakable, sometimes sounding like translations of familiar phrases from his books. To express his attachment to the landscapes which typify all that he loves in France, he lowers his voice – you always hear Ford’s voice when you read him – slows down, punctuating longer, slightly repetitive sentences with adverbs, with a marked preference for ‘infiniment’. He allows himself a few savoury idioms such as ‘j’ai roulé ma bosse’ (‘I’ve travelled’), aptly using such a term as ‘scie’ (literally a ‘saw’, but colloquially, a ‘bore’) to mock the inadequacy and consequent inefficiency of French sentimentalism in propaganda. Summoning all the powers of persuasion he had been credited for when giving lectures as a training officer in the army, he teases and provokes, alternating false-naivety and startling stunts to keep his readers’ attention from flagging. Availing himself of the welcome opportunity offered to try and convince the French that the production of good propaganda is in order and cannot be put off, Ford clearly enjoys telling the readers of the Intransigeant what he thinks of France. Condensed though it is, ‘Que pensez-vous de la France’ fully renders his alarm yet intrigues and entertains with linguistic fluidity, persuasiveness and experience. The services he has been able to render in the past being mentioned, he may obliquely be offering his services once more. He is original, entertaining, and in deadly earnest. French text5 Une Question: «Que Pensez-Vous de la France? . . .» «La France a sauvé la civilisation par ses armes; elle la perpétuera par son exemple . . . » . . . ainsi parle Ford Madox Ford, le célèbre écrivain Américain [sic].’ enquête par Hector Ghilini Le célèbre écrivain américain Ford Madox Ford est un grand et fidèle ami de la France. Il l’a prouvé dans nos tranchées pendant la guerre, et ensuite à la fois par la

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parole et par la plume en écrivant notamment: De Saint Michel [sic] à Saint Georges, émouvant éloge de l’amitié franco-britannique. A part quelques séjours en Amérique, il vit constamment en France, soit à Paris, près du Luxembourg, soit au cap Brun, près de Toulon, dans sa villa ensoleillée où il se délasse d’écrire en arrosant ses tomates. Il fonda et dirigea en Angleterre The English Review où il se plut à découvrir et encourager de nombreux talents nouveaux, collabora avec Joseph Conrad auquel il consacra un livre et fonda à Paris, il y a une douzaine d’années, la Transatlantic Review, qui groupait les écrivains les plus personnels d’Angleterre, des U.S.A. et de la France. Les soixante volumes qu’il a écrits comprennent des pièces de théâtre, des livres de souvenirs, des recueils en vers, des essais et surtout des romans: Return to Yesterday, The Good Soldier, Some Do Not, When the Wicked Man et No More Parades (Finies les parades), livre de guerre sobrement écrit dont l’action se déroule uniquement dans les âmes des personnages; tout le passé défile en eux, interprété différemment par chacun et lui dictant ses gestes, l’action ne dure que vingt-quatre heures: livre à mettre sur le même rayon que Ulysse de James Joyce, et A la recherche du temps perdu, de Marcel Proust. La réponse de Ford Madox Ford est un mélange d’humour américain [sic] et d’amour pour la France.

Vous me flattez en supposant que je puisse écrire ce que je pense de la France en cent cinquante ou deux cents lignes. Car cela prouve que vous avez une haute idée de mes pouvoirs de condensation. J’ai passé presque la moitié de ma vie en France, et beaucoup plus de la moitié de ma vie à penser aux arts, à la pensée et à la vie sociale de ce pays, ce qui veut dire, à aimer avec passion la France! Ainsi, c’est un peu comme si vous exigiez que j’écrive l’histoire de l’univers sur un petit sou. Entre le 4 août 1914 et le 4 août 1915, j’ai écrit au moins trois cents articles et deux livres entiers de propagande pour la France. Et puis, comme M. Herriot a eu l’amabilité de l’écrire jadis : «Ce poète anglais encore jeune mais, hélas! d’âge assez avancé (c’est de moi qu’il s’agit) – a jeté la plume pour prendre l’épée.» Et cela dans le seul but, je vous prie de le croire, d’aider à préserver la France et la civilisation. C’est que je pense que l’existence et la tranquillité de la France sont les nécessités primaires de l’existence de la civilisation même. Il nous faut la Pax Gallica ou nous mourrons. . . Je parle en AngloSaxon. Donc voilà – et en neuf mots6 – ce que je pense de la France. Et puis il y a ce que je sens; sans même le traduire par des mots. . . *** Une supposition – un peu freudienne! Je suis seul sur ma terrasse ici et je ne pense à rien. Vous surgissez devant moi et, pour

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surprendre mes émotions les plus intimes, vous me criez d’une voix d’adjudant: – «Que penses-tu de la France?» Voici, je crois, ce que je répondrais : – J’ai en tête des images (des simulacres) de paysages innombrables et infiniment aimés, des coins de terre infiniment chers, des bois, des étangs, des prairies, des fleuves, des rivières, des champs d’oliviers, des montagnes péniblement ciselées en terrasses jusqu’aux cimes, de vastes plaines labourées avec le soin que l’on prodigue seulement aux êtres qui nous sont particulièrement chers. Tout cela s’étend entre la lumière blafarde de la Manche et les cieux d’azur, la lumière blanche de la Méditerranée, des sombres sapins des Vosges à l’Atlantique grise et houleuse. Ce sol a été tant soigné, tant aimé, que ce pays est devenu bénin, comme quelqu’un qui, se sachant à l’abri de tout mal, peut se montrer toujours généreux, toujours souriant.7 Et si vous me questionniez davantage, peut-être ajouterais-je: Je crois que dans le fond de mon cœur, je sens une satisfaction infinie de ce que la France s’étende entre le Rhin, la Manche, l’Atlantique et la bonne ville de Lyon – pour protéger la Provence! Car la Provence est non seulement le berceau et le sanctuaire de notre civilisation, mais elle est, grâce à ses fruits, ses vignes, ses oliviers, ses Alpilles grises, ses rochers trempés de soleil, ses vieux murs blancs, ses touffes de lavande, de romarin, de thym et ses vents embaumés le seul paradis terrestre et abrité que nous voyons de ce côté du néant. J’ai passé presque toute ma vie à errer; j’ai roulé ma bosse un peu partout en Europe occidentale et en Occident transatlantique. Mais je dois toujours revenir aux ombres des platanes et des oliviers pour renouveler mon courage. Et, quand je suis loin, j’en conserve toujours la nostalgie insupportable. *** Il est possible, Monsieur, que ces sentiments vous soient désagréables, à vous et à la majorité des Français, d’Ile-de-France, de la Dordogne, l’Auvergne, la Bourgogne, le Pas-de-Calais ou la Corse. Mais veuillez un instant patienter et vous souvenir que c’est un étranger qui vous parle! Pour le monde qui entoure la France, la fonction dans le Comité des Nations de ce pays est de conserver en vie et de sans cesse revivifier l’idéal latin et la tradition classique. Pour nous autres, la Provence symbolise la frugalité, la modération, la clarté de pensée, la

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justice d’appréhension de la République romaine. Pour le Français septentrional, le Provençal d’aujourd’hui passe pour un individu qui pue l’aïoli, qui parle un Français de Marius et ne pense qu’aux ‘toros’ dominicaux. Mais en lisant Théophraste, l’on voit que les Tartarins ne manquaient pas à Athènes et que les Romains raffolaient de combats de taureaux. . . et même de chrétiens. Et quant à l’ail, la guerre la plus sauvage qu’ont faite les Athéniens a été contre les habitants de Mégare, et, précisément, parce que les Mégariens, en venant les jours de marché pour vendre leurs produits à Athènes, persistaient à traverser et à piétiner les champs d’ail athéniens. Nous autres, quand nous pensons à la Provence, nous voyons, à travers les Alpilles, le royaume latin et la gent des comtes de Toulouse, les pays de langue d’oc, de Pierre [sic] Vidal, de Clémence Isaure et du bon roi René et le pays de la Maison Carrée, des arènes, des aqueducs, des théâtres, des tombeaux, des basiliques. Le monde demande à la France d’être et de rester une civilisation latine – pour que le monde soit sauvé. Et c’est surtout en Provence que l’on retrouve les traits d’une civilisation latine, ininterrompue depuis le temps où elle était Provincia Romana – la Province de l’Empire, avant tout romaine. *** La France fait très peu de propagande à l’étranger. Trop peu! Et le peu qu’elle fait est très mal fait. Au contraire, les agents des nations ennemies de la France se trouvent partout et dans les situations les plus exceptionnelles. Il m’est arrivé, il y a un an, d’écrire des récits de voyage sur la Côte d’Azur, la Riviera italienne et le Rhin. Ils m’avaient été commandés par une des plus grandes revues des Etats-Unis. J’ai écrit sur la vie des stations balnéaires de la Méditerranée française et italienne, et j’ai dit quelques mots sans importance sur le nombre extraordinaire d’Allemands qui se trouvaient sur toutes les plages entre Saint-Tropez et Rapallo. A mon grand étonnement, – car à l’ordinaire on me laisse écrire un peu ce que je veux en Amérique, – les directeurs de la revue y ont ajouté quelques mots de compliment pour les nageurs boches. De même, au sujet du Rhin, j’ai indiqué, dans mon article, qu’il me semblait que l’état d’âme de la population rhénane, des vrais Sauerlanders, par opposition aux fonctionnaires prussiens, était très peu guerrier. Puis j’ai constaté avec modération les quelques instances

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belliqueuses qui m’avaient frappé entre Cologne et Bâle. (En particulier j’ai été impressionné par les exercices d’entraînement militaire que font, tous les dimanches, au bord du Rhin, les chiens policiers qui sont tous obligatoirement enregistrés, entraînements surveillés par des officiers de l’armée impériale. Et j’ai ajouté quelques mots peu obligeants à l’adresse de M. Hitler qui, à ce que l’on disait, avait inspiré ces organisations.) Mais, le Rhin étant territoire démilitarisé, ces instances ont été assez rares et j’en ai très peu parlé. Néanmoins, les directeurs de la revue ont coupé non seulement mes observations sur M. Hitler et les chiens policiers, mais toutes les autres constatations de militarisme que j’avais faites. Ils ont changé les mots : «J’ai trouvé très peu de traces de militarisme» – c’était avant l’apothéose du Führer – en : «Je n’ai trouvé absolument aucune trace...» et ils m’ont prié de cesser ma collaboration. Le Français devrait se souvenir que chaque citoyen américain qui a dans les veines quelques gouttes de sang allemand a toujours fait une propagande ardente pour le Vaterland et que la presse américaine est en grande partie, et surtout dans le Mi-Ouest [sic], contrôlée par des Germano-Américains. Mais le moment est très opportun, pour une vigoureuse contre-attaque soutenue par la France. Les Juifs allemands new-yorkais qui, grâce à leur espèce d’intelligence diabolique, ont mis la main sur la presse la plus intellectuelle de New York, et qui furent jadis les fils les plus fidèles de l’Allemagne, sont pour le moment tout à fait désorientés par l’attitude d’Hitler. La rare propagande française d’après-guerre qui a été faite jusqu’ici dans les pays anglo-saxons a été très mal faite et surtout très mal adaptée à la mentalité anglo-saxonne. On aurait dit que ses auteurs ne faisaient aucun effort pour tenir compte du fait qu’ils écrivaient ou parlaient à des Anglais ou à des Américains. Et leur propagande consistait presque exclusivement en des larmoiements. Ils parlaient dévastations, souffrances, angoisses, disettes, pertes d’hommes. . . Tous ces mots là ne disent rien à l’Anglo-Saxon. Il ne peut aimer et respecter que le succès, et, pour lui, le mal d’autrui, qui n’est que songe, devient très rapidement une scie... *** La France a sauvé la civilisation par ses armes; elle la perpétuera par son exemple! Voilà comment la France devrait parler aux nations. La France seule, aujourd’hui, se tient debout et fidèle

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dans un monde chancelant; seule la France n’a jamais fléchi dans sa mission civilisatrice. En France seule, vous trouverez la vraie démocratie, un véritable esprit de modération, la vraie clarté classique d’expression et de pensée. Vous n’y trouverez ni très grandes fortunes ni grande pauvreté, ni oisiveté, ni chômage. Vous y trouverez une population instruite, bien élevée, polie, laborieuse, sobre, une vie sociale où l’ostentation ne joue aucun rôle, une culture générale telle que le monde n’en avait jamais vue, une vie dont les aménités sont, même pour les plus pauvres, une récompense suffisante. Et, comme à l’âge des ténèbres, l’étincelle de la tradition classique, de la tradition des arts, des lettres, l’érudition, de la pensée s’est cachée dans les abbayes perdues au fond des vallons de la Provence[. A]ujourd’hui, le feu sacré tremble dans les mains d’une France menacée sur toutes ses frontières par des hordes qui ont pour but de faire renaître dans le monde les folies sadiques, l’ébriété, les manies assassines, l’intolérance, l’obscurcissement, toute l’insanité sanglante du moyen âge. Ce que je pense de la France? Pour que la civilisation occidentale puisse poursuivre son chemin, qu’elle accomplisse sa tâche d’unir tous les peuples dans un esprit de tolérance universelle, de secours mutuel, de fraternité même et de paix, il faut que la France connaisse une tranquillité réelle et il faut que vous l’aidiez à se tenir debout et que vous appreniez de son exemple comment la vie des hommes devrait être menée et gouvernée. Car, si la France tombait devant les envahisseurs barbares et barbarisants, ce ne serait pas que vos enfants et les enfants de vos petits-enfants qui succomberaient sous les fléaux de la famine, du feu, et la pestilence d’une nuit éternelle de l’âme. Ce serait vous-mêmes! Voilà, monsieur, en quelque deux cents lignes, ce que je pense de la France et que je dirais fièrement, et à haute voix, si c’était à moi de le faire, aux nations d’outre-Manche, d’outre-mer et de l’Univers. English Translation by Dominique Lemarchal One Question: What Do You think of France? ‘France fought the war to save civilisation and her example will perpetuate it’, declares Ford Madox Ford, the renowned American writer. Ford Madox Ford, the renowned American writer, is a great and true friend of France who demonstrated the force of this attachment in our trenches and then again in words, notably with From St Michael to St George, a moving tribute to FrancoBritish friendship.8

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Apart from occasional trips to America, he lives in France permanently, either in Paris, by the Luxemburg gardens or in his sun-drenched villa at Cap Brun, near Toulon, where he relaxes from writing by watering his tomato plants. In England, he founded and ran the English Review where he delighted in unearthing and encouraging numerous new talents; and collaborated with Joseph Conrad to whom he devoted a book. Then in Paris, twelve years ago,9 he founded the transatlantic review which regrouped the most personal writers of England, the U.S.A. and France. The sixty volumes he has written include plays, poems, essays and above all novels: Return to Yesterday, The Good Soldier, Some Do Not, When the Wicked Man as well as No More Parades, a soberly written war novel in which action uniquely takes place in the souls of its characters. The whole past unfurls within them, interpreted differently by each one of them, dictating their gestures to them in the space of one day: it is a book to be set next to Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Ford Madox Ford’s answer is a mixture of American humour and love for France:

You flatter me by suggesting that I could write what I think of France in 150 or 200 lines. For that proves that you have a high idea of my powers of condensation. I have spent almost half my life in France, and more than half of it reflecting on the arts, thought and social life of this country, that is to say loving France. So it is rather like requesting that I write the history of the Universe on the face of a ‘sou’. Between August 4th 1914 and August 4th 1915, I wrote at least 300 articles and two whole propaganda books for France. And then, as Mr. Herriot was once kind enough to put it: “This youngish English yet alas ageing poet (that’s me!) discarded the pen to take up the sword” with the only aim, I assure you, of helping to preserve France and civilisation.10 Because I think that the existence and tranquillity of France are the prerequisites of the very existence of civilisation. As an Anglo-Saxon, I say ‘We must have the Pax Gallica or we cannot live’. That, in ten words, is what I think about France as an Anglo-Saxon. Then there is what I feel, without even translating it into words. Here then is a somewhat Freudian conjecture. I am sitting on my terrace, on my own, thinking vaguely. You suddenly appear in front of me and, to catch my most intimate emotions, cry out to me in the forceful voice of an adjutant: – ‘What do you think of France?’ This, I think, is what I would answer: – Pictures (simulacra) come to my mind of innumerable infinitely loved landscapes,11 corners of the earth, woods, marshes, meadows, rivers, olive-tree fields infinitely dear to me, mountains

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painstakingly chiselled into terraces right to the peaks, vast plains ploughed with the care we extend to those that that are particularly dear to us. This all stretches from the dim light of the Channel to the azure skies, the white light of the Mediterranean, from the dark firs of the Vosges to the grey and rough Atlantic. The land here has been so cared for, so cherished, that the country has become benign, like someone who, feeling shielded from all evil, can forever be generous, forever smiling.12 If you question me further, I might add: I feel, from the bottom of my heart, infinite satisfaction that France should stretch from the Rhine, the Channel, the Atlantic and the good city of Lyons to shield Provence. For Provence is not only the cradle and sanctuary of our civilisation but also, thanks to its fruits, its vines, its olive-trees, its grey Alpilles, its sun-drenched rocks, its old white walls, its tufts of lavender, of rosemary, of thyme, and embalmed winds, the only shielded terrestrial paradise this side of nothingness. I have spent most of my life wandering. I have travelled all over Western Europe and the transatlantic West. And I always have to return to the shades of the plane and olive trees to renew my courage. When away from them, I feel a melancholy yearning for them. *** You, Monsieur, and the majority of the French from the Dordogne, the Auvergne, Burgundy, the Pas de Calais or Corsica, may find such feelings unpleasant. Still, bear with me and remember that these are the feelings of a foreigner. In the eyes of the world, the function of France in the comity of Nations is to preserve and unceasingly revivify her Latin ideal and classical tradition. For the rest of us, Provence symbolises frugality, moderation, clarity of thought, and the justness of understanding of the Roman Republic. The French Northerner takes the Provençal of today for a ruffian reeking of garlic, speaking the French of Marius13 and only thinking of Sunday bull-fights. And yet, when you read Theophrastus, you realize that Athens was not short of her Tartarins and that the Romans doted on bull – or for that matter Christian – fights. As for garlic, the most savage war the Athenians ever waged was against the citizens of Megara precisely because the Megarians would tramp across Athenian garlic fields on their way to the market to sell their wares. When we think of

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Provence, the rest of us Anglo Saxons look beyond the Alpilles to the Latin kingdom and the courts of the counts of Toulouse, lands of the langue d’oc, of Pierre Vidal, of Clémence Isaure and of good King René and the country of the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, its arenas, its theatres, its tombs, and basilicas. The world is asking France to be and to remain a Latin civilisation, so that the world may be saved. It is mostly in Provence that one finds features of a Latin civilisation, uninterrupted since the time when it was Provincia Romana – the province of the Empire, Roman above all. *** France diffuses little – too little – propaganda abroad. And the little propaganda that exists is poorly done, although the agents of France’s enemy-nations are everywhere to be found, and in the most remarkable situations. A year ago, I happened to write about my travels on the Côte d’Azur, the Italian Riviera and the Rhineland, for a series of articles commissioned by one of the most popular magazines in the United States. I discussed life in the sea resorts of the French and Italian Rivieras, and put in a few words on the extraordinary number of Germans that could be found on each and every beach between Saint Tropez and Rapallo.14 To my great surprise – since I’m usually allowed to write practically as I want in America – the editors of the journal added a few complimentary words for the Hun swimmers. Likewise, regarding the Rhineland, I indicated in my article that it seemed to me that the frame of heart of the Rhenish population, true Sauerlanders,15 as opposed to the Prussian functionaries, was warlike. Then in a spirit of complete moderation, I mentioned the bellicose manifestations which had struck me between Cologne and Basel. I had been particularly impressed by the military training that the police dogs which have all been registered are given, every Sunday, by the Rhine river, training in sessions that are watched by officers of the Imperial Army. And I added a few not very obliging words about Mr. Hitler who, from what I gathered, had inspired this system. But since the Rhineland was demilitarised, such instances were quite rare and I did not speak much about them. However, the directors of the journal not only edited out my observations on Mr. Hitler and the police dogs, but also all of the other instances of militarism I had noted and they changed the words ‘I found very few traces of militarism’ – that was before the

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apotheosis of the Führer’ – into ‘I found absolutely no trace of…’ and insisted I discontinue my collaboration. The Frenchman should remember that each American whose blood contains a few drops of German blood has always produced an ardent propaganda for the Vaterland and that the American press is, for the most part, and particularly in the mid-West, in the hands of German-Americans. But the time is now ripe for a vigorous counter-attack from France. The German Jews of New York, who, thanks to that diabolical intelligence of theirs,16 have laid their hands on the most intellectual press in New York, and who were once the truest sons of Germany, are for the time being completely disconcerted by the attitude of Hitler. The little French post-war propaganda which has been produced so far in Anglo-Saxon countries has not been well done, and, above all, does not fit the Anglo-Saxon mind. It’s as if its authors were not even trying to take into account that they are addressing English or American people. And their propaganda consisted almost only of lamentations. They were talking of devastations, sufferings, anguish, food shortages, loss of men…17 Such words mean little to an Anglo-Saxon. The Anglo-Saxon can only love and respect success and for him, the sufferings of others are mere ideas and quickly become tedious. *** France fought the war to save civilisation and her example will perpetuate it! This is how France should speak to the nations. Today, France alone stands upright in a world on the edge of collapse; only France has never failed in its civilising mission. In France alone will you find true democracy, the love of moderation, true classical clarity of expression and thought. You will find neither vast fortunes nor dire poverty, neither idleness nor unemployment. You’ll find people who have been taught well, given a good education, who are polite, hard working, sober, a social life where ostentation has no play, a standard of culture to be found nowhere else in the world and a life whose amenities are ample rewards even for the poorest. As in the dark ages, the spark of the classical tradition, the tradition of the Arts, erudition, thought, found refuge in the abbeys of the remotest valleys of Provence. Today the sacred fire trembles in the hands of a France threatened on all its borders by hordes whose aim it is to bring back to the world the sadistic follies, the drunken madness, the murderous manias, the intolerance, the darkness and all the bloody insanity of the Middle Ages.

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What do I think of France? For Western civilisation to go on, for it to accomplish its task of uniting all peoples in a spirit of universal tolerance, mutual help, fraternity and even peace, France has to find true tranquillity and it is one’s duty to help her stand fast and learn from her example about how the lives of men should be led and governed. For, if France should fall to those barbarous and barbarising invaders, it would not only be your children and the children of your grand-children that the plagues of famine and fire and the pestilence of a dark night would attack, it would be yourselves! So here is, Monsieur, in some two hundred lines, what I think of France and what I would proudly declare if I were called upon to do so to the Nations across the Channel, to the Nations overseas and to the Universe.

NOTES 1 2

3

4

5

Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 – henceforth ‘Saunders’; vol. 2, pp. 470-1. Ford, ‘Une partie de cricket’, Bibliothèque universelle et revue suisse, 85 (Jan. 1917), 117-26; repr. as the envoi to No Enemy, New York: Macaulay, pp. 293302. ‘Pon... ti... pri... ith’, La Revue des Idées, November 1918, 233-8; in Ford’s War Prose, Manchester: Carcanet, 1999, pp. 30-5. Ford told Bowen he had written a ‘silly article about Alsace Lorraine’; but neither the manuscript nor published version has been discovered: Saunders, vol. 2 57. Ford, ‘Joseph Conrad’, Journal Littéraire, no. 17 (16 August 1924), 1, 2; repr. as appendix to Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, London: Duckworth, 1924, pp. 251-6. ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’, in The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard, New York: Norton, 1995, p. 5. The only known pages of the translation are the 37 in the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University. See Sondra Stang and Maryann De Julio, ‘The Art of Translation: Ford’s «Le Bon Soldat»’, Contemporary Literature, 30:2 (Summer 1989), [263]-279. The typescript, also kept in the Rare and Manuscript collections at the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University, gives an impression of precipitation. The use of ‘justice’, for example, when one would expect ‘justesse’, would probably have been corrected if the text had been re-read. Ford’s spelling here is consistent with that of his self translation of the beginning of The Good Soldier (see n. 3 above). L’Intransigeant (5 Jan. 1934), 1-2. Ford’s typescript (at Cornell) has been consulted, but the text here follows the published version, which was uncut and barely edited, and includes the paper’s introduction. The only other significant variation is the paper’s italicisation (followed here) of the extended passage on pp. 35-6 where Ford exemplifies the propaganda he advocates. The typescript and

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6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13

14 15

16 17

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published text are identically inconsistent in the use of inverted commas to signal Ford’s hypothetical responses to his editor’s imagined questioning. The text here removes these inverted commas, as not only confusing but unnecessary given Ford’s commentary on the imagined dialogue. Presumably the nine words of ‘Il nous faut la Pax Gallica ou nous mourrons. . .’. This and the preceding paragraph are quoted in Ford’s Provence, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935, pp. 107-8, minus the sentence ‘Tout cela . . . houleuse’. Several of the sentences in the paper’s preamble were lifted from George Pillement’s preface to the French translation of No More Parades that had just appeared: Finies, les parades, Paris, Librairie de la Revue Francaise, 1933, pp. ivi; including errors, such as this garbling of the title of Between St. Dennis and St. George, and the misdating of the founding of the transatlantic review. The repeated description of Ford as an American writer appears to be the correspondent’s own error; though later the same year Ford was telling Janet Adam Smith: ‘So I regard myself, and am generally regarded, as an American writer [. . . .]’: 3 June 1934: Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard Ludwig, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965, pp. 232-3; and he had described himself as a ‘Franco-American’ author the previous year: see Saunders, vol. 2 465. The transatlantic review was launched in 1924, 10 rather than 12 years earlier. Édouard Herriot (1872 –1957), Radical politician, and Minister of Transport, Public Works and Supply when Ford was in France during 1916-1917, he later became Prime Minister three times, as well as President of the Chamber of Deputies. In Mightier than the Sword, p. 280, Ford writes of having done ‘what M. Herriot called “jeter la plume et cingler [sic] l’épée”’. This appears to refer to the otherwise anonymous ‘Avant-Propos’ to Entre St Denis et Saint Georges (Paris: Payot, 1916), the French translation of Ford’s propaganda book Between St. Dennis and St. George, which describes Ford as ‘Ceignant l’épée, il posa la plume qui avait si bien travaillé pour la bonne cause [. . .]’ (p. 6). Ford organised the first half of No Enemy – his fictionalised reminiscences of WW1 – around a comparable sequence of visions of ‘Four Landscapes’. This and the preceding paragraph are quoted in French in Ford’s Provence, pp. 107-8, minus the sentence ‘This all . . . rough Atlantic’; see note 7 above. Marius is the eponymous hero of Marcel Pagnol’s play, first performed in Marseille in 1929 and subsequently adapted for the cinema, in French, by Alexander Korda, in 1931, still under the title of Marius. Ford, ‘I Revisit the Riviera’, Harper’s, 166 (Dec. 1932), 65-76 (revised as Provence, pp. 259-79). This trip was made between 21 July; and 4 August 1932. The Sauerland is an area of hills and forests in the south-east of North RhineWesphalia, midway between Münster, the base of Ford’s German Hüffer family, and Giessen, where he lived from 1910-11. Here Ford is perhaps teasing his partner of the 1930s, Janice Biala, who was herself a Jewish New Yorker. Ford may have been thinking of works such as Pierre Loti’s L’Outrage des barbares (Paris, 1917), which he had translated as The Trail of the Barbarians, London: Longmans, Green, [1918].

‘IN SEPARATE DIRECTIONS’: FORD MADOX FORD AND FRENCH NETWORKS Hermione Lee I will start at a tangent, which seems apt for an essay which is going to be concerned with going off at tangents, or ‘in separate directions’. I am working on a biography of the twentieth-century English novelist, biographer and essayist Penelope Fitzgerald, whose tenuous link to Ford Madox Ford is that her first book was a biography of Edward Burne-Jones, who features in Ford’s reminiscences of Ford Madox Brown and his circle. She also gave, in a 1991 review of Alan Judd’s biography of Ford, a succinct and ironical account of Ford: Ford conducted his life unwisely. To explain him is exceptionally difficult, because he was a shape-shifter, giving a series of contradictory versions of himself to anyone who would listen. For mere facts, he said, he had a profound contempt. ‘What he is really,’ said H. G. Wells, ‘or if he is really, nobody knows . . . and he least of all’. At heart he saw himself as the gallantly uncomplaining English gentleman of his finest novels, the victim of ruinous women or of some guileless-seeming manipulator, like the narrator of The Good Soldier. Yet Ford was overcome by little worries; he was prone to nervous collapse; he wept on the shoulders of others. Often he was not taken seriously. His devotion to literature was absolute, but he was, perhaps, a holy fool on a large scale.1

In my research, I have had the good luck to be given sight of many of Fitzgerald’s books, which she annotated and underlined copiously, partly for teaching purposes and partly for her own interest. Among them I found her Penguin copy of The Good Soldier, dated 1981, heavily marked up. One of the sentences she underlines is this one, which comes at the dramatic moment just after Florence has laid one finger on Captain Ashburnham’s wrist, while explaining the Lutheran Protest in the Castle of M –, and just before Leonora’s pulling Dowell away from them, out onto the terrace, to tell him ‘that’s the cause of the whole miserable affair’. The sentence is: ‘It was as if we were going to run and cry out; all four of us in separate directions, averting our heads.’2 Fitzgerald is right to mark this line. Running, crying out, in

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separate directions is one of the powerful images of the novel. Caught inside their minuet, a minuet which is also a prison of screaming hysterics, the five central characters, unable to get free of each other, are also pulling apart into madness, suicide, utter solitude, or the retreat of being merely, boringly, ‘normal’. Ford does this pull towards ‘separate directions’ over and over again in his fiction. In The Fifth Queen, Katharine Howard is hardly ever alone, hardly ever free of the tight mesh of court politics and power-play that hem her in. There is only one scene where we see her sending her attendants away in order to be entirely alone, with fatal results. But she is, also, extremely isolated. In Parade’s End, Tietjens is caught inside his nets of class and society and marriage and family and war, but he is also repeatedly described as alone and lonely, ‘a sort of lonely buffalo outside the herd’, a man living outside his proper time, ‘an extinct type . . . the last megatherium’ terribly exposed but longing above all for privacy: ‘He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book’.3 Ford, too, calls himself ‘the lonely buffalo’, in his letter to his daughter in 1935.4 I want to avoid making the anti-Fordian mistake of reading his fictional characters straight back into his life, as if he were himself ‘an open book’. But I am interested in how the clash which fascinated him – in people who are deeply, inextricably enmeshed in social and emotional networks and are also pulling ‘in separate directions’, or in the direction of separateness – is displayed in his own life. The image of ‘running in separate directions’ can provide a way of thinking about Ford’s life in France, especially in Paris, and here his network can be compared to that of another distinguished expatriate novelist. Two highly socialized events will provide my focus, a funeral and a wedding, one at the start of, and one towards the end of, Ford’s main Paris years. They are both rather surprising events for him to be participating in, and they point to the remarkable virtuosity of his social life, and the big stretch of his international, Parisian relationships. But his connection to both events suggests too that he pulls in a separate direction within that inter-war AngloAmerican-French life.5 The first of these events is Marcel Proust’s funeral at midday on Wednesday 21 November 1922. Ford and Stella Bowen had just arrived in Paris, staying at the Hotel de Blois in the Rue Vavin. Ford went to a lunch at the Paris branch of the PEN club almost at once, to pick up on his connections. Perhaps at the lunch, he ‘elected’ himself

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a ‘representative of English letters’ to attend the funeral. He had not known Proust, but said he was due to have met him on the night he died, November 18th, though this seems unlikely given how ill Proust was.6 Max Saunders quotes a description of him at a literary party, placed between Valery Larbaud and the Duchesse de ClermontTonnerre, when a young woman came in with a stricken face and said, ‘Proust est mort’. Ford wrote, as one in the swim, to his friend the novelist Edgar Jepson, on 25 November 1922: Proust’s death has cast an extraordinary gloom on literary parties – tho he was pretty generally disliked personally. I just missed seeing him & had to content myself with solemnly attending his funeral, which was a tremendous affair, Stella being the only person in the church who did not shake hands with the next of kin. (LF 147)

Stella gave a more detailed account in Drawn from Life. She remembered their being told where and when the funeral would be by a waiter in a café: ‘Imagine’, said Ford, ‘if I asked an English waiter about the funeral of, say, Thomas Hardy, I should discover that he had never heard of the fellow’. She described the church where the funeral took place, Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot (on the right bank, up from the Place de l’Alma) as looking ‘lovely’, full of ‘whole groves of candles . . . draped from top to bottom in black and silver . . . [with] rows upon rows of black veiled windows’. When everyone had to line up to kiss the next-of-kin, she panicked and fled.7 Proust’s funeral was, indeed, an astounding spectacle. Between five hundred to a thousand people followed the cortège, processing with the military honours due to a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur, with bells tolling and black funeral carriages, from Saint-Pierre-deChaillot along the Champs-Elysées to Père Lachaise, to the strains of Ravel’s ‘Pavane pour une infante défunte’. Cocteau – who slipped out of the procession (it was such a long way to walk) and caught a cab to the cemetery – described the mourners as consisting of ‘monocled dukes, princes in bootees, balding ambassadors and brilliantined and coiffed members of the Jockey Club’.8 It was as if all the characters in the last volume of Proust’s novel had been summoned together to walk behind his coffin. Most of literary and artistic Paris was there too: Maurice Barrès, Léon and Lucien Daudet, Maurice Rostand, Vladimir Maiakovski, the Abbé Mugnier, Reynaldo Hahn, Ravel, Man Ray, Martin du Gard, Cocteau and his companion Raymond Radiguet,

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Mauriac, Céline, Anna de Noailles – and, unnoticed by Proust’s French friends, James Joyce.9 Ford may not have met Proust, but he had an interest in him. He had once thought of translating the first volume of A la Recherche.10 He made some jokes about Proust and Joyce in It Was The Nightingale. When he asked Joyce (around 1923) if he could print some of his ‘Work in Progress’ (to be Finnegans Wake) in the transatlantic review, Joyce ‘said it was a pity that I had not been in time to ask that of Proust. He had been told that a single sentence of Proust would fill a whole magazine. Not that he had read any Proust to speak of.’ And he tells a funny story about Joyce and Proust meeting, surrounded by the ‘faithful’, and having not a word to say to each other about each other’s writing, since neither of them had read the other, but then jumping with alacrity into a long mutual discussion of their symptoms and ‘maladies’.11 After Proust’s funeral, Ford used to say that Proust’s death stimulated him to begin Parade’s End: ‘It was his death that made it certain I should again take up a serious pen [. . . .] I think I am incapable of any thoughts of rivalry. There is certain literary work to be done [. . . .] Proust being dead I could see no one who was doing that.’12 (It would be interesting to consider to what extent Parade’s End is a Proustian exercise in social analysis and recuperation of time past. There are certainly episodes in the novels with a Proustian feel; Edith Ethel Macmaster’s salon in Some Do Not . . ., for instance, is reminiscent of Mme Verdurin’s.) But apart from those slight connections, the world of Proust’s funeral procession was not Ford’s Paris world, nor would it ever be. Proust’s funeral was deeply interesting to him not just because of Proust but because it embodied something which Ford recognised, or defined, as quintessentially French. He had always been fascinated by the great public funerals of creative Frenchmen, the way that the ‘tout Paris’ turned out in huge numbers to honour their artists and scientists. (Flaubert’s Education Sentimentale, which Ford read with passion, contains a brilliant and detailed account of Monsieur Dambreuse’s grandiose funeral procession to Père Lachaise in the 1840s.) He more than once imagines the tremendous spectacle of Victor Hugo’s funeral in 1885, alluding to it in The March of Literature (1938) and in the History of Our Own Times. In that book he links Hugo’s funeral to those of Pasteur and Alexandre Dumas in 1895, and says of these occasions that France ‘with her lively sense of death and the

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ceremonies attendant on death’ ‘delights to honour in that way her great men’. He loves the way French newspapers write up the ‘minute accounts of cars, wreaths, guards, pyres, and all the trappings attendant on the Great or the merely distinguished going to their last rest’.13 But in the case of Proust’s funeral, Ford was not part of the ‘tout Paris’; he was a visitor looking on, and most of the people in that procession – with a few exceptions such as Joyce – would not have known him and were not part of ‘his’ Paris. The little fact that he had to ask his waiter where the funeral was tells us how edge-on he was to that French network, even as he notes the fact as a mark of French civilization. Ford was not the only Anglo/American settler in Paris to be both in and out of the many, complex, overlapping networks of Paris life, which are so vivid and dramatic to us in the periods before, during and after the First War, because they have been so much described and were so packed with cultural achievements and excitements. In his introduction to Jean Rhys’s collection, The Left Bank (1927) – written with some care and reserve after the end of their affair, and much more about his own idea of the Left Bank than hers – Ford talks about his sense, from youth onwards, of the utterly separate different quartiers of Paris, and of how ‘immense’ the Left Bank always seemed to him.14 The ‘immensity’ of that small geographical territory is seen, also, in the life of another Parisianised expatriate and great novelist, Edith Wharton. One of the people walking behind Proust’s coffin would have been that well-known American in Paris, the lawyer Walter Berry, Edith Wharton’s closest friend and life’s companion, and also an intimate friend of Proust’s, who dedicated Pastiches et Mélanges to him. But, in spite of that very close link, Wharton took pains never to meet Proust during her Paris years (from 1906 to 1919). The reason she gives for this in her memoir of 1934, A Backward Glance, is not prudishness. Even if Wharton knew that Proust was homosexual, she was used to the sexually ambivalent or homosexual friends of Henry James, and would not have been shocked by flamboyant characters like Robert de Montesquiou (Proust’s Baron de Charlus) or by knowing that some of the leading French cultural figures of her acquaintance (Lucien Daudet, Robert de Flers, Reynaldo Hahn, Robert d’Humières, André Gide, Jean Cocteau) were Proust’s intimate friends or lovers. No, her reason for not wanting to meet Proust – perhaps surprisingly – was that he was a snob. She had been told that ‘the only

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people who really interested him were Dukes and Duchesses, and that the only place where one could hope to find him was at the Ritz’; and this was enough to put her off. This may seem ironic, given how haughty and elitist Wharton could be. But, unlike Proust, who climbed avidly and rapidly into the Faubourg from the middle-classes, and never quite shook off his sense of its glamour, Wharton was not a social snob. She was, though, extremely wary and somewhat disdainful of the youthful international modernists who crowded into Paris from 1918 onwards, and she moved out of her apartment in the Faubourg to rural seclusion in the Ile-de-France (and in Provence) after the war. Wharton did not set foot in the meeting-places where Ford would feel so much at his ease in the 1920s – the famous international Montparnasse cafés like the Closerie des Lilas, the Deux Magots, the Nègre de Toulouse and the Dôme (which Ford always said he disliked, but often visited), the salon of Gertrude Stein or the bookshop of Sylvia Beach. Wharton had nothing to do with the expatriate American writers, like Hemingway or Dos Passos or Cummings, or with the gaieties of Parisian life in the 1920s: Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montparnasse, the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères, Mistinguett and Josephine Baker, La Revue Nègre, Léger and Picasso, cocaine and the Charleston, Chaplin at the cinema, Cole Porter and Gershwin. She was not in sympathy with ‘les Jeunes’, as witness the disastrous and much-described occasion on which Scott Fitzgerald came to tea with her in 1925, a visit she simply described as ‘horrible’.15 Wharton was at her stiffest with Fitzgerald because she would have known that he thought her old-fashioned, as others of ‘les jeunes’ did. Even if she had still been living in Paris in the Rue de Varenne in 1925, it is unimaginable to think of her dancing the night away at one of Ford’s Friday night dances at the Bal du Printemps in the Rue Cardinal Lemoine. The Rue de Varenne is ten or fifteen minutes on foot from the Rue due Cardinal Lemoine or the Boulevard Montparnasse, but a century away in time. Yet Ford Madox Ford and Edith Wharton had some things in common, though they did not know each other. They shared a friendship with Henry James, a devotion to French literature, a belief in France as the most civilized country in the world – which involved them both, in different ways, in a very active war – and similar ideological attitudes to France. The key words and concepts Wharton

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applies to France in books like A Motor Flight through France (1908) or French Ways and their Meaning (1919) are very like the words Ford chooses ten or twenty years later, in books like A Mirror to France (1926), Provence (1935) or Great Trade Route (1937): ‘amenity’, ‘intelligence’, ‘sense of form’, ‘good manners’, ‘finish’, ‘frugality’, ‘economy’, ‘intelligent enjoyment of living’. When Wharton compares France to America, she always says, as Ford does, that France is ‘grown-up’ and America is infantile. French civilization, she says, is ‘so much older, richer, more elaborate and firmly crystallised’ than America. And the most typical qualities produced by that old civilization are ‘taste, reverence, continuity and intellectual honesty.’ Wharton applauds the strict French observances of rules and protocol, the ‘ritual view of politeness’, the ‘pleasure in ceremony and the grand gesture’. She finds an equivalent between manners and taste: in both, there is a sense of ‘fitness’, adaptation and harmony. Her idealisation of French culture – every Frenchman, she seems to say, is at heart a creative artist – suggests some indulgence towards her adopted country. But she has a sharp eye, too, for the French bourgeois investment in thrift and industry, caution and bureaucracy. Wharton, like Ford, despised those Anglo-Saxon travellers who went round the world imposing their own views and expectations on the countries they visited. And, in the war, in the same tone as Ford saying that he would ‘sooner die than not fight’ for France, Wharton declared that ‘If I were dead, and anybody asked me to come back and witness for France, I should get out of my grave to do it.’16 Wharton and Ford, if they had compared notes, would have seen eye to eye on France and Frenchness, even though their French networks went in separate directions. Take Ford’s view of Paris, which he loves as the best example of a great city where ‘closeness to life has been tenaciously maintained’, and where you get ‘the most and the best manual domesticity; the most tolerable cooking; the fewest canned goods and departmental stores; the most petites industries and nonmachine craftsmanship’.17 Paris, particularly from the Left Bank, ‘is infinitely more French than much of France’, Ford claims, because ‘You get here, concentrated, the efficiency, the industry, the regard for the métier, the seriousness, the frugality, and the terre à terre, cheerful philosophy [. . .]’.18 This is like Tietjens (in some though not all things Ford’s spokesman) looking forward to joining the French Foreign Legion: ‘The French he admired: for their tremendous efficiency, for

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their frugality of life, for the logic of their minds, for their admirable achievements in the arts, for their neglect of the industrial system, for their devotion, above all, to the eighteenth century’. 19 Ford prided himself on his inwardness and close knowledge of French culture, art, writing and spirit. He likes to give the impression (for instance in his introduction to Jean Rhys’s The Left Bank) that he spent large parts of his childhood in France. He often used the Dreyfus case as a symbol for individual resistance to oppression. As is well known, Ford is passionate about French literature. He derived his theories of fiction – objectivity, impressionism, ‘progression d’effet’ – from reading French writers as well as from Conrad and James. He wanted The Good Soldier to ‘do for the English novel what [. . .] Maupassant had done for the French’, and he was delighted to have it described as ‘the finest French novel in the English language’.20 He liked it when people told him he was not really English; he liked to say of himself, in France, ‘I am rapidly becoming a French writer’.21 Ezra Pound said of him after Ford died that he was, above all, a champion of ‘French clarity and simplicity in the writing of English prose and verse’.22 Most of Ford’s writing about his life in France persuades us that he is at home there. Even if he missed meeting Proust and cared nothing about Edith Wharton, we tend to think of him as at the centre of all the cultural and social networks of interwar Paris, ‘The Leviathan of the Quartier Montparnasse’.23 Reminiscences, memoirs, collections of letters, and critical books like Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1972), or, more recently, Helen Carr’s The Verse Revolutionaries (2009) which cover the intensely creative and complex groupings of that place and time, always have Ford as a key player. In his inventive reminiscences, he always describes himself in the context of groups and movements and social networks, not in isolation. He thought of himself, and was seen by others, as a mover and shaker, a collaborator, an energiser, and a gregarious participant. Yet he was also, notoriously, peripatetic, rootless, penniless, under-recognised for his work in England (less so in the States), emotionally unstable, often depressed and in trouble, and often disliked. As Penelope Fitzgerald puts it, he ‘conducted his life unwisely’. Some of his most distinguished friends, such as Joseph Conrad and Henry James, became alienated from him, in part because of the notoriety of his private affairs. Some of his literary collaborators or editorial colleagues, like H. G. Wells or Hemingway, fell out with

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him. He was frequently ridiculed or satirised. Both his magazines, though brilliantly edited, rapidly failed financially. For all his centrality in the Paris Left Bank interwar scene, he does not seem to have become intimate with French writers and artists, though there are passing mentions of René Béhaine, whose work he admired, Léon Daudet, Paul Morand and Paul Valéry. The French writers listed by Ford and by his biographers as contributors to the transatlantic review or as acquaintances – Jean Cassou, Georges Pillement, Ribemont Dessaignes, Philippe Soupault, Edmond Jaloux, Benjamin Crémieux, Fernand Léger, Valery Larbaud – are rarely mentioned in his memoirs. The only steady friendships with French individuals seem to have been with the decorator and architect Marcel Le Son and his wife Lucie24 and with Juan Gris’s wife Josette, the model for Marie-Léonie Tietjens in Last Post, ‘frugal, shrewd, astonishingly clean and healthy’, with her Norman housekeeperish beliefs that ‘it is the duty of the French citizen, by industry, frugality and vigilance, to accumulate goods’.25 Compare Ford’s funeral with Proust’s. After Ford died in a clinic in Deauville in 1939, his funeral was attended by three people, Janice Biala, Edward Crankshaw, who came over from Kent, and Lucie Le Son (though nineteen telegrams were sent). Bay leaves and thyme were thrown on the coffin. Because a drunken gravedigger buried him in unhallowed ground reserved for temporary graves, his grave had to be moved after the war, and only then was a headstone put up. It is a far cry from Proust’s Paris obsequies, and suggests a man who lived on the edge of his adopted country, separate from it and unrecognised within it. ‘The gods to each ascribe a differing lot: / Some enter at the portal. Some do not!’26 I promised you a wedding as well as a funeral, and the wedding raises similar questions about the extent to which Ford belonged in any group. Jump eleven years from Ford’s arrival in Paris at the time of Proust’s funeral in 1922, to the spring of 1933. Ford was no better off financially than before; his life with Stella Bowen had ended, though he was on good terms with her and their daughter Julie, and he was living with the painter Janice Biala, still dividing his time between Paris (Rue de Seine) and Provence (Villa Paul, Cap Brun, near Toulon), with interludes in America. He had the tetralogy of Parade’s End to his name and many other publications; the transatlantic review had come and gone. The marriage in question was that of the Southern American

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writer Katherine Anne Porter and her fourth husband, Eugene Pressly, who was working for the American Embassy in Paris. She was 43 and he was 29. They would divorce within five years. Porter had met Ford in America through Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. No two writers and temperaments could have been more different. She was an extremely beautiful, damaged woman from a (retrospectively glamorised) poor white Southern childhood, who had had a hard struggle to get on as a writer of short stories and who was self-destructively slow and procrastinating as a writer. Ford, by contrast, was brought up at the heart of the aristocracy of English bohemia, he was hugely wellknown and relentlessly prolific. Yet they shared qualities. Porter was a self-invented phenomenon who endlessly revised her own past. What H. G. Wells said of Ford could be applied to her too: ‘A great system of assumed personas and dramatized selves’.27 They both loved France, they both changed their partners restlessly and often unhappily. And they admired some of the same writers – one of their links was Eudora Welty, whom Porter recommended to Ford and whom Ford, characteristically, tried to help.28 At the time of the wedding in Paris, the two couples were close. At 11 a.m. on Saturday March 18th 1933, in the Mairie of the Sixième Arrondissement, Porter married Pressly with Ford and Janice Biala as witnesses and Ford’s daughter Julie as bridesmaid, carrying a bouquet of white heather tied with a blue ribbon. Biala hummed ‘Safe in the Harbour of Marriage’. The Mayor of the Arrondissement, with pointed whiskers and a red ribbon across his chest, conducted the ceremony with great formality and then gave the newly-weds a little booklet with directions for the care and feeding of twelve children. Porter commented: ‘Whoever dared to call the French pessimists?’ After the wedding they all went to the terrace of the Deux Magots and sat outside in the sunshine drinking champagne. In the evening Ford, though at the time exhausted and short of money, gave a party in the studio on the Rue de Seine and everyone danced till 3 a.m.29 But the friendship of these two expatriate writers in Paris was shaky and temporary. Porter – always a difficult and temperamental person to have as a friend – came to feel that she had been exploited by Ford. There were disagreements about the possibility of the PorterPresslys (as Ford called them) subletting Ford and Janice’s Paris apartment while they were in Toulon. Ford tried to help Porter’s career by suggesting that she put together a collection of translated French songs for publication, but by the time they came out, published

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by her American friends Monroe Wheeler and Barbara Harrison as Katherine Anne Porter’s French Song Book in 1933, Porter had come to resent Ford’s patronage and changed her mind about dedicating the book to him. Eugene Pressly, in between his Embassy work, spent much of 1933 transcribing and typing up Ford’s memoir, It Was the Nightingale, and Ford’s dedication to the book spoke effusively of Porter’s ‘exquisite short stories’. But Porter would not repay the compliments; she made grudging remarks in later years about The Good Soldier as a work of ‘breathless over-heated frightfully sentimental style’.30 They did encounter each other again when Ford was teaching at Olivet College in Michigan in 1937, but their friendship had faded. After Ford died, though, Porter wrote of him as a kind of hero of letters: she said that he was a man completely committed to his work, who led ‘an existence of marvellous discomfort, of insecurity, of deep and pressing anxiety as to his daily bread; but no matter where he was, what his sufferings were, he sat down daily and wrote, in his crabbed fine hand, with pen, the book he was working on at the moment; and I never knew him when he was not working on a book’.31 Ford, too, had some regrets for their lost friendship. Looking back years later on their time together in Paris, writing nostalgically to Eugene Pressly, he used the phrase from Malory which he had given to Florence Ashburnham in The Good Soldier: ‘And so the city sitteth solitary, and the round table is dissolved’.32 The story of these two remarkable writers crossing paths, and then splitting off in separate directions, suggests how transient and slippery Ford’s international Parisian links could be. In the phrase coined by Hemingway (no friend to Ford), the interwar network in that city was ‘a moveable feast’, for Ford as for others. If Proust’s funeral and Porter’s wedding can stand as two markers of Ford’s Paris life, one at the start and one towards the end of it, one linking him to France and one to America, they point to a life at once gregarious and isolated, central and marginal, at home and in transit. Returning to Penelope Fitzgerald’s annotated Good Soldier, I find the following notes. Dowell is talking, with reference to his life in Nauheim, about having ‘no attachments, no accumulations. In one’s own home it is as if little, innate sympathies draw one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one in an embrace [. . .]’ (GS 27). Fitzgerald annotates: ‘Dowell is homeless, but knows what home is.’ On the

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inside cover of her Good Soldier, she roughs out some essay questions for her students. One of these reads: FMF combines 2 kinds of French novel, the Balzacian (lamb thrown to the wolves with no glimmer of hope) & the Flaubertian (ironic detachment, & yet Flaubert wants to assert that he is human in the same way as his characters). A favourite subject for ‘Frenchifying novelists was Englishness, which must be looked at through alien eyes.

Homeless, but knowing what home is; looking at home through alien eyes; always running in a separate direction. If these were Ford’s essential literary and personal qualities, as recognised by a later and equally fine English novelist, they might give the impression of a sad story. But those are also his virtues. He repeatedly insisted on literature as cutting across borders, and making its own nationality, as, famously, in his manifesto for the transatlantic review in 1923: ‘The aim of the Review is to help in bringing about a state of things in which it will be considered that there are no English, no French – for the matter of that, no Russian, Italian, Asiatic or Teutonic – Literatures: there will be only Literature’.33 He often says this sort of thing about himself: ‘I never had much sense of nationality. Wherever there were creative thinkers was my country’ (IWN 74). It is grandiose and self-flattering, but also admirable. It seems fitting to end with a French and an English quotation as confirmations of Ford’s selfdescription. Max Saunders quotes Ford in a letter of 1922, the year of the move to France, copying out what Ford calls ‘Today’s Great Thought’ from that brilliant, idiosyncratic writer Jules Renard: ‘Oui. Homme de lettres! Je le serai jusqu’à ma mort. . . . Et, si par hasard, je suis éternel, je ferai, durant l’éternité, de la littérature.’34 V. S. Pritchett said of Ford: ‘He was nature’s expatriate, his country was the Novel, he left his baggage in every hotel room.’35

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NOTES 1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Penelope Fitzgerald, A House of Air: Selected Writings, Flamingo, 2003, p. 296. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, Oxford World’s Classics edition, ed. Thomas C. Moser, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 – henceforth GS; p. 53. Ford, Some Do Not . . ., in Parade’s End, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 – henceforth PE; p. 128; No More Parades, in PE 342. Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965 – henceforth LF; p. 241. For the detailed accounts of these events, see Max Saunders’s biography, to which this paper is greatly indebted: Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 volumes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 – henceforth ‘Saunders’. Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford, New York: Harper & Row, 1971; London: The Bodley Head, 1972 – henceforth ‘Mizener’; p. 324; Saunders, vol. 2 125. Mizener 324; Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life, 1941, London: Virago, 1984, p. 89. Claude Arnaud, Jean Cocteau, Paris: Gallimard, 2003, p. 280. Translation by Bridget Patterson. For Proust’s funeral, see George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, London: Chatto and Windus, 1965, vol. 2, p. 363; William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 810; Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 509. Ford, Letter to Pound, 30 August 1920: LF 122. Ford, It Was the Nightingale, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1933 – henceforth IWN; pp. 269, 271. Mizener 325, quoting IWN 180. Ford, A History of Our Own Times, ed. Solon Beinfeld and Sondra J. Stang, Manchester: Carcanet, 1989, p. 172. Sondra J. Stang (ed.), The Ford Madox Ford Reader, with Foreword by Graham Greene, Manchester: Carcanet, 1986 – henceforth Reader; p. 236. For FSF’s visit to EW, see Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Chatto & Windus, 2007, pp. 616-7, and Matthew Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002, p. 229. Ford, A Mirror to France, London: Duckworth, 1926, p. 102. Edith Wharton, ‘Talk to American Soldiers’, 1918, quoted in Lee, p. 458. Ford, Provence, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935, p. 308. Ford, Preface to Jean Rhys’s The Left Bank, 1927, in Reader 236. Ford, Some Do Not . . ., PE 187. Ford, Dedicatory letter to The Good Soldier: GS 3. Ford to R. A. Scott-James, 3 Feb. 1925, LF 162. Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford, London: Collins, 1990 – henceforth ‘Judd’; p. 446. Judd 354. Judd 440. Ford, The Last Post, PE 683, 697. Ford, Some Do Not . . ., PE 22. Judd 6. Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Stories, New York: Library of America, 1985,

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p. 585. 29 Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life, London: Cape, 1983, p. 282; Mizener 416. 30 Givner, op. cit., p. 285. 31 Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Stories 669. 32 Mizener 416. 33 Judd 345. 34 Saunders, vol. 2 128. 35 Quoted by Judd 438.

FORD MADOX FORD AND VALERY LARBAUD: CRITICAL CONVERGENCES Gil Charbonnier Between 1908 and 1930, Ford Madox Ford and Valery Larbaud occupied comparable positions in the literary world. Ford was a poet and novelist when he founded the English Review in 1908, a magazine with a number of links to the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), a review to which Larbaud – himself a poet, a novelist and a specialist of English literature as a critic and a translator – was a contributor. It was thanks to Larbaud that a number of English writers, including Conrad, Bennett and Meredith, were introduced into France, and so came to weigh significantly on the evolution of early twentiethcentury European literature. Larbaud was equally one of the first critics to bring the French reading public’s attention to the English Review and the works of Ford, alluding to them frequently. Re-reading Larbaud in this light thus offers valuable insight into the reception of Ford’s works in France. Larbaud, like Ford, was a key figure in Anglo-French literary exchanges. A necessary starting point when fathoming how close the two writers might have been is to explore the context in which intellectual relations between England and France were being defined around possible means to pursue various expressions of modernity (as the ‘younger generation’ sought to do) without losing sight of classicism as an ideal. The means by which such literary classicism had been redefined and renewed by French writers (the best example being that of André Gide) had clearly influenced English writers such as Richard Aldington, and of course T. S. Eliot. The prominent return of classical tenets was one of the factors then undermining contemporary conceptions of criticism, and my contention here will be that the two authors tackled this crisis by inventing forms of critical discourse that were founded on comparable approaches. Looking jointly at the two writers, one French, one English, can thus offer a better understanding of the intrinsically international origins of modernism.

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Ford and Larbaud: Two Literary Intermediaries Between France and England Critics have often compared T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, founded in 1922, and the NRF on the grounds that Eliot had taken Gide’s review as a model. This should not preclude comparisons between the NRF and the English Review, however, even if Ford, who directed his new review until late 1909, drew his inspiration from the Mercure de France, a choice in keeping with his idealized representation of French culture. The NRF1 and the English Review were launched in the same era, the first issues appearing at almost exactly the same time in the Autumn of 1908. The most striking element is of course the similarities in their critical ambitions. The founders of the NRF (Ghéon, Copeau, Schlumberger, Ruyters, Drouin) who rallied around Gide sought to promote works of contemporary literature that were clearly anchored in the tradition. This meant promoting modern literature that reinterpreted the meaning of classicism. ‘Classicism is the major problem of modern art’, announced Ghéon in the review Ermitage, in December 1904. Openings to the literary avant-garde of the time were restricted by the proviso that no creative anarchy would be tolerated. This meant Gide’s group would foreground rigorous attention to formal matters: the promotion of artistic effort, discipline, ascetic endeavours. Political inclinations were equally to be measured. Whatever the leanings, nothing should deflect from the primacy of form and the autonomy of writing. The ‘modern classicism’ favoured by the founders was also a strain of philosophy which saw literature as the surest means by which to reveal the world and grant self-fulfilment to the individual. Despite these criteria, the NRF did not intend to limit its readership to a small circle, but rather sought to appeal to quite a large audience. As for the English Review, its first vocation was equally modernity, and like the NRF, it did not aim to limit its readership to a chosen few. On the contrary, Ford sought to bring difficult works to the attention of the largest audience possible, along critically exacting lines that were equally defined by literary autonomy. The English Review was also poised between tradition and modernity. It published Edwardian writers (Conrad, Wells, Bennett), writers from the preceding generation of late Victorians, as well as members of the avant-garde, such as Pound, clearly establishing the poised balance between classicism and innovation that was to become the hallmark of the modernist movement. The imagist movement that Ezra Pound

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went on to found in 1912, for example, was clearly rooted in tradition, as Pound asserted in 1913 when defining the general imagist framework: ‘to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found in the best writers of all time’.2 The imagists, starting with Richard Aldington, never saw this position as restrictive; on the contrary it even proved one of the richest sources of their creativity. It was in such a context that Ford defined his editorial project: The only qualification for admission to the pages of the Review will be [. . .] the clarity of diction, the force of the illuminative value of the views expressed. What will be avoided will be superficiality of the specially modern kind which is the inevitable consequence when nothing but brevity of statement is aimed at. (Koffemann 143)

Clarity, feeling and the eschewal of superficiality: it was this firm editorial standpoint that the English Review shared with the NRF. Schlumberger’s comments in the first real issue of the NRF in February 1909 illustrate the point eloquently. While he disparages the ‘technical awkwardness’ of contemporary works, he praises the masterful craftsmanship, the ‘invisible deftness’ of truly successful works: In reaction against works of pure virtuosity, the tendency today would be to see a certain technical awkwardness as the sign of strength and imperious inspiration. One would like to expect nothing but giftedness, and might almost be tempted to declare the sketch superior to the work, since no deliberately thought-out element intervenes to trouble the ingenious language of temperament. As if craftsmanship would not measure up to what a work can, without being arid or overwrought, imply about invisible deftness.3

Another feature the two reviews had in common was their desire to promote the renewal of the novel by enhancing literary exchanges between France and England. The two groups of writers involved with the English Review and the NRF had a considerable role to play in this. The rejected first issue of the NRF in November 1908 included forays into foreign domains, notably publishing a controversial article on D’Annunzio. The real first number in February 1909 included virtually no allusion at all to foreign domains. It is misleading to judge by the initial absence of reference to English literature, however, since the NRF was to prove essential in the diffusion of new novelistic conceptions from both sides of the Channel.

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Gide was in England in the summer of 1910 where, thanks to Larbaud’s connections (Larbaud having begun a thesis on Walter Savage Landor), he met Joseph Conrad, then living in Kent. It was a decisive encounter which strengthened both Gide’s and the founding group of the NRF’s interest in contemporary English novels. Gide would be drawn first to the Edwardians (Conrad, Gosse, Wells, Bennett) then, by the end of the war, to the novelists in the Bloomsbury Group (Woolf and Forster above all). The attraction was mutual: The closest French entity corresponding to Bloomsbury during the era before and after World War I was the group around the Nouvelle Revue Française [. . . .] Bloomsbury, of course, was less cohesive and had no journal, but its members shared with Gide, Copeau, and other French intellectuals a belief in permanent aesthetic values that transcended a particular trend. Gide was in fact often regarded as the French equivalent of the Bloomsbury intellectual.4

On their side, the writers who had founded the NRF saw innovations in the English novel (and likewise the Russian novel) as models in terms of composition which could revive the French novel, which they deemed too classical and too Cartesian in plot construction and in psychological analysis. The English adventure story, in the line of Stevenson for example, proved a source of inspiration for Jacques Rivière when he wrote his famous article in 1913, ‘The Adventure Novel’. Pontigny’s ‘Décades’ – conferences organised by the NRF to which a number of foreign intellectuals and artists were invited – similarly contributed to such Anglo-French exchanges On the English side, and the American too if we include Eliot, the trend was in the opposite direction, and the refined lines of French classicism are what appealed. A number of English writers were attracted by French creations on the grounds that the renewal of classicism put forward formalist ideals defended by contemporary writers. The role of the artist and critic Roger Fry (a friend of Gide’s), an outspoken champion of the French qualities of classicism, is well established, as Maaike Koffeman underlines. It would thus seem justified to consider this facet of the cultural dialogue between France and England as engaged in what would gradually become a laboratory of modernism. Another example, that of Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes (influenced by the Stevenson vein of English fiction) published in 1913 in the NRF, is representative of the exchange of views between writers of the two countries concerning their respective works. The next step is to see how Ford fits into the picture.

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An avid admirer of Flaubert and Maupassant, Ford appreciated both prose writers for their conception of literature with more markedly autonomous form. Between St. Dennis and St. George, published in 1915, expresses his ardent championship of France, voicing his admiration for the cult of form that he had discerned in Flaubert. His enthusiasm can be heard in the passages devoted to Un coeur simple: [. . .] the exact use of words seems to me to be the most important thing in the world. We are, in the end, governed so much more by words than by deeds.5

As a critic of French literature, he sets out by insisting on formal perfection, although the choice of writers presented in the English Review during his editorship was broad, spanning from Paul Bourget to Verhaeren’s poetry. Ford paid particular attention to French prose fiction in the era, publishing Mademoiselle Doucine, a text by Anatole France, in French in January 1909. It is worth noting that the NRF was particularly interested in Anatole France too. The first article in the first issue of the review in November 1908 was indeed focused on him (Jeanne d’Arc et les Pingouins)6 with Michel Drouin praising his style. Each magazine thus included a review of France’s latest work, Conrad being the author of the one in the English Review. Ford proved remarkably astute in his ability to pinpoint the ways in which French authors merged modernism and the classical tradition, as a later article which appeared some years later demonstrates. In this piece, on Paul Morand’s Lewis et Irène published in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine in 1924, Ford adopts a comparative stance, drawing parallels between Morand and Aldous Huxley. The choice of Morand was no mere coincidence, for he was a writer who met all the main criteria set forth by the English Review: subtle modernism in short stories and prose pieces in keeping with traditional features of the genre, as established by Maupassant in this particular case. Ford’s efforts were not wholly repaid, for his reception in France remained tentative. During his lifetime few French intellectuals spoke of him, despite his role as founder of the English Review and his collaborative work with Conrad. In French newspapers of the era, his work is reviewed with mixed feelings. The Valery Larbaud Archive in Vichy, which houses a wealth of French and English periodicals owned by the author, is an ideal site for studying the reception of Ford’s works in France. Larbaud subscribed to the Revue anglo-

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américaine which gave accounts of Ford’s works. The August 1925 issue, for example, includes a review of Ford’s work Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance,7 published the year before. The author of the review, who was also the editor of the magazine, points out that Ford picked up well on how Conrad was ‘tormented by literary perfection with scrupulous probity in the influence of Flaubert and Maupassant’ and his sense of ‘the superiority of the French language as the privileged instrument of prose’. More generally, however, the article is negative in tone. Ford is reproached for being disorderly (‘frankly disorderly and capriciously digressive’) and for lacking reserve: ‘But the echoes of dawning memory in Mr Hueffer are too weighed down by the throbbing pulse of egoism’. In 1930, in the same magazine, still edited by Louis Cazamian, an article signed by A. Koszul passes judgement on Ford’s work, The English Novel, from the early days to the death of Joseph Conrad. The same criticism emerges, disparaging what we might consider that mark of Ford’s genius, namely his art of digression: We might add without being ungrateful to an author who so willingly displays his familiarity with our French literature that it is a book which flouts precision and order in its thoughts too often to please readers in the land of Descartes.8

Ford’s critical principles are misconstrued in the ‘land of Descartes’ because the modernist vision of works they proffer was ahead of its time. Larbaud, as an experienced English scholar, was more discerning, for he was one of the rare French writers and critics to pay homage to Ford. There is only a very limited number of works by Ford in Larbaud’s library in Vichy. He possessed a copy of the French translation of the second volume of Parade’s End (Finies les parades9) which the translator Georges Pillement dedicated as follows: A Valery Larbaud qui doit aimer Ford en amical souvenir (To Valery Larbaud who ought to like Ford, with fond memories)

The modal verb ‘doit aimer’ indicates that in 1933, Larbaud was not yet considered as a great Ford connoisseur. Larbaud also had the Tauchnitz Anthology of Modern English Poetry,10 containing several poems by Ford: ‘To Christina at Nightfall’, ‘The Starling’, ‘Four in

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the Morning Courage’. This work presents a panorama of Ford’s contemporaries often evoked in Larbaud’s articles: Aldington, Chesterton, Joyce, Alice Meynell, Pound, Francis Thompson. . . . In fact, it was mostly Ford’s poetry that interested Larbaud, and he said next to nothing about the prose fiction. Conversely he did much to promote not only Ford’s poetry but also the English Review and the imagists. He was doubtless the first critic in France to announce the creation of the English journal in issue 31 of La Phalange, dated 15 January 1909: The English Review; vol. 1, n° 1, December 1908. The first issue of this review was released in late November 1908. It is published in London by Duckworth & C°, and its list of contributors comprises the foremost names in English literature. This first number contains a poem by Thomas Hardy, autobiographical memoirs by Joseph Conrad, a short story by John Galsworthy, and the first instalment of an as yet unpublished novel by H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay. American literature is represented by a short story by Henry James. In the summary of the month’s events, Joseph Conrad presents the latest novel by Anatole France. All in all, while not a young magazine, The English Review is nonetheless an excellent literary review which La Phalange recommends to all those of its readers who follow intellectual and artistic movements in England.11

The French critic is clearly gauging the importance of the event by taking account of the various writers contributing to the review, aware of its potential significance in English intellectual life and in European literary history. After reading it carefully, he assesses its worth in terms that reflect his own values, conscious of the fine balance sought by Ford’s review to which we alluded above: the English Review was to embrace novelty without severing links with tradition. Twelve years on, in an article providing a panorama of ‘contemporary English poetry’ published in the Revue de France on 15 March 1921, Larbaud gives a precise assessment of the English Review’s historic importance in English letters, two years after its closure: And yet, in England in the beginning of this new literary era (1909), we saw the launch of an important review edited by Ford Madox Hueffer, which was then to play the role that twenty years ago La Revue blanche came to play here: it was the English Review. It nobly served the cause of modern poetry in England. (Ford Madox Hueffer himself was one of the fine poets in the English Review group); but it rose to importance in literary history on account of its novelists.12

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Despite the emphasis laid on the English Review’s leanings in terms of prose fiction, it was as a poet that Ford was seen. For this reason, he remains associated with the group of imagists and his name recurs in Larbaud’s articles on the poetic movement. Larbaud first presents it in an article entitled ‘Jeunes poètes et jeunes revues’, published in the NRF on 1 December 1919. Appearing with a delay of five years, on account of the war, the article evokes the first anthology of imagist poetry: We have long been interested in everything that comes from the Poetry Bookshop, and had the September 1914 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française seen the light of day, we would have read a review of their first anthology, bearing the (French) title Des Imagistes. It was a collection of some forty short poems (most of which in vers libres) by ten or twelve authors, English and American, of whom Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Hueffer were already familiar to literary specialists.13

Larbaud refers several times to the importance of the anthology, a striking example being an article (‘La poésie anglaise contemporaine’) published on 15 March 1921 in the Revue de France: In 1914, some months before war was declared. I found in my in-tray at the Nouvelle Revue Française a small slim hard-bound volume, bright green in colour, entitled Des Imagistes, an Anthology, with ‘compliments from the editor’ and the address of the Poetry Bookshop, written in pencil. Since then, we have seen that the little book marked an important date in the history of contemporary English poetry. It was published in New York, and the poets listed in the table of contents were not all English. There were Americans, as in the anthology of Spanish poetry published six or seven years previously, La Corte de los Poetas. I must say that on that particular occasion, I felt I could recognise a ‘sign’. Certainly, in Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint and James Joyce, one could sense not exactly direct French influences, but the residue of a rich English, American and French literary culture. The little book by Harold Monro shows me that the anthology was the result of conversations which took place at the Poets’ Club (founded in 1908) between members of a group which originally comprised F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme and Edward Storer, and which some years later was joined by Ezra Pound. Assuredly in this group, as in the review Poetry and Drama, it was F. S. Flint who was the interpreter and importer of French poetry. It would be intriguing to know which French poets he brought to the attention of his friends. Rimbaud, Laforgue and Corbière probably; certainly a few writers of vers libres (Verhaeren and Gustave Kahn, whom H. Monro cites – but not Mallarmé who wrote no vers libres despite what Monro suggests (p. 105). What other vers-libristes? Probably Claudel and André Spire. Did he speak to them of the group at La Phalange and La Nouvelle Revue Française?

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Whatever the case, Des Imagistes shows English poetry entering into contact with the French tradition. 14

Larbaud traces the history of the imagists by underscoring the crucial role played by poets like Aldington and Flint in the evolution of English literary modernity: ‘Since then, we have seen that the little book marked an important date in the history of contemporary English poetry.’ He goes on to present the imagists as the bearers of a sort of international literary synthesis radiating with a wealth of influences. Referring more precisely to Harold Monro’s book Some Contemporary Poets, Larbaud again alludes to the imagists. In another article entitled ‘La poésie anglaise contemporaine’, this time published in Les écrits nouveaux in December 1922, Larbaud mentions Ford: Mention must be made of one personality who, unlike Mr Read, has not been eclipsed by Mr Eliot and the Sitwells. I am alluding to Mr Aldous Huxley, who links the ‘Georgians’ and the ‘imagists’ so admirably, using now the regular standing of one, now the short-cuts of the other with good-natured sensibility or erudition that is infinitely agreeable, with lively intelligence and modernism that one is only too happy to admit. Is it not strange then, to find M. Monro giving vent to outspoken commentaries on the subject of Leda or The Defeat of Youth, that last desperate rearing up of the exhausted Georgian thoroughbred? This brings us to the ‘imagists’ whose label defines them, and whose members I listed earlier. (The reader keen to learn more will find a very precise account of the movement in the second part of Mr F. M. Hueffer’s book, Thus to Revisit.) 15

These various mentions of Ford show Larbaud’s assessment of his importance: an eminent role in European literary history when he launched the English Review; a determining position in the creation of the imagist group; a prominent imagist poet; a role as critic of literary history. It is certainly a positive appraisal, but his prose fiction is surprisingly absent. Does this imply that Larbaud under-estimated the value of Ford’s novels? Or is the striking absence of reference to The Good Soldier, for example, yet another case of the book’s reception being largely hampered by the outbreak of war? Whatever the case, Larbaud was usually prompt to acknowledge the most successful modernist achievements. The features of modernist writing that Larbaud praised in his articles, and that he himself experimented with in his own creative texts, from the Journal intime de Barnabooth to Mon plus secret conseil…, are present in Ford’s works. On the other hand, it is impossible to imagine Larbaud, the appreciative reader of Joyce, reproaching Ford for being insufficiently Cartesian in his literature.

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That such a key work as The Good Soldier should have failed to attract his attention is regrettable. It does not undermine their literary proximity in the field of criticism, however, and it is to this domain that we shall now turn. Ford and Larbaud in the Same Field of Criticism A first point of convergence between Ford and Larbaud can be found in their tendency to idealise intellectual relations between France and England. For both writers, their critical approach to texts is steeped in a great love for the other’s country, meaning that to some extent the heart rather than the mind holds sway. Ford was notoriously enthusiastic about France and French civilisation, as evidenced by his essay Between St. Dennis and St. George. While defending linguistic autonomy, he dreams of an intercultural fusion between France and England, in a remarkably modern vision of European cultural integration: And, for my part, if I could have my way, I would introduce a conscription of the French language into this country and a conscription of the English language into France, so that every soul from County Galway to the Alpes Maritimes was transfused with the double civilisation. (BSDSG 205)

Larbaud, meanwhile, harboured a slightly different idealisation of geographical relations, focusing above all on London; enthralled descriptions of the city, for example, form part of the aesthetic dynamics of Poésies de Barnabooth. Provincial England does attract him too, but to a lesser degree, as can be seen in his book Le Coeur de l’Angleterre, a sort of Larbaldian counterpart to Ford’s The Heart of the Country or Between St. Dennis and St. George. Le Coeur de l’Angleterre projects the reader into remote corners of the English countryside and distant villages, with a passing allusion to the artist Ford Madox Brown, Ford’s maternal grandfather.16 As much inclined towards internationalism as Ford, Larbaud equally seeks the ideal means whereby English and French literary culture might intermingle through author-to-author exchanges that would maintain the principle of a ‘living tradition’.17 In this respect, Flint and Aldington’s work would appear emblematic. True to this principle, Larbaud personifies his passion for English letters in the form of a muse, an English muse brought to his mind by a line of verse by Claudel:

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And furthermore, what we clearly see everywhere is the great English muse, such as we can trace her back even to Chaucer, and such as she appears, alive and triumphant in Shakespeare, a peculiar English muse who is so aptly described in the line by Claudel, ‘the great vague madwoman, with her fairy’s face’, amoral, evasive, uncanny, sexually ambiguous, part Imogen, part Titania.18

This English, and more generally Anglo-Saxon muse, is given more childlike features by Larbaud. He sees her, for instance, in the guise of Pearl, the daughter in Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter. It is worth noting that such a personification becomes a source of literary creation. Larbaud conjures up the ‘peculiar English muse’ in the characters of children in his short stories, foremost amongst whom is Queenlier, the heroine of Beauté, mon beau souci. . . We thus see how, for both authors, the same propensity to champion the culture of a country forms the basis of a form of international modernist criticism. In his 1922 column in the NRF and in lectures given at the Vieux Colombier theatre (later developed into the work, Physiologie de la critique) Albert Thibaudet, the arbiter of French literary criticism in the 20s and 30s, defined several categories of criticism, foremost among which were scholarly criticism and creators’ criticism, the category to which Larbaud and Ford belong. The two authors shared a common tendency to write both prose fiction and articles commenting on the new aesthetics. Both had a hand, for example, in the diffusion of Joseph Conrad’s works. Ford wrote novels in collaboration with Conrad, and recalls the experience in his book Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, which over and above biographical aspects, defines certain features of the modernist novel. He did likewise in a wide range of articles.19 Larbaud built up his vision of narrative renewal from readings of Conrad’s novels. It was the author of Chance who had managed to shatter ‘the old carcass of plot’20 and thereby to access a level of reality residing in the deep-seated self-awareness of the character. Larbaud and Ford were equally on the same side when it came to rallying —quite literally – to the defence of Ulysses. It would indeed be revealing to conflate the articles on Joyce that Ford wrote in December 1922 for the English Review (‘Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies’) and for The Yale Review, and the speech Larbaud gave in 1921 on the same author (equally cited in Mousli). Both were aware that Joyce had invented a new analytical form of writing, the genius of

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which came from his ability to render inner life. On a par with Proust, but using different syntactic means, Joyce was probing inner truths and increasing the realm of the human heart. Both men were particularly keen to comment on Joyce, thus showing to what extent they acknowledged Ulysses as a culmination of their own aesthetic ambitions. The extension of narrative time, for example, that we find in the famous Protest scene in The Good Soldier, foreshadows Joyce’s experiments. The staging of psycho-narration in Le Journal intime de Barnabooth equally prefigures breakthroughs by Joyce. In both their creative works and their critical essays tackling the major aesthetic challenges of the novel, Ford and Larbaud proved capable of grasping the contours of novelistic evolution, even as it was taking shape. Another point they had in common was their comparable reaction to what is commonly referred to as the crisis of critical values, as described by William Marx in Naissance de la critique moderne, la littérature selon Eliot et Valéry.21 The eruption of classicism in the sphere of contemporary literature – Valéry’s preface to the La Fontaine poem Adonis for example – brought turmoil to conventional markers of literary criticism. Which criteria should henceforth be taken to assess textual aesthetics? Were the rules and constraints set down by Boileau and Racine still to be applied? The NRF’s false start in November 1909 is attributable to questions on these lines. The founders could not accept a very negative reference to Mallarmé, whom many considered as the master of the old symbolist generation challenged by the neo-classical nationalists from Action française and Jean-Marc Bernard’s Guêpes. For Gide’s classical-modern group, however, Mallarmé was illustrative of classical values too, as Valéry would soon demonstrate. Another offshoot concerned the very object of criticism when, influenced by the question of the aesthetics of writing, literary interests tended to focus increasingly on the primacy of form. Problems of these sorts were exacerbated by preoccupations linked to Bergsonism. By casting doubt on the transparent capacities of language, Bergsoninfluenced studies paved the way to the crisis of representation whereby language, as a value in itself, acquires autonomy. Admittedly the debate concerning the cult of form existed in England too, independent of French debates, but it was rekindled by the question of a classical renewal. T. S. Eliot’s essays are eloquent proofs in themselves. Eliot was aligned with the great authors restoring the literary virtues of the past. A particularly revealing

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example is the article on Eliot’s works by Ramon Fernandez published in the NRF in February 1925. Fernandez presents him as an upholder of ‘severe, sane, authentic classicism’, ‘a hunter of the lofty skies, a corrector of the wrongs of the spirit’ attacking the primacy of affective life’. In a thesis devoted to Larbaud’s English interest, Patrick McCarthy likewise underlines overlaps between English poetry and the French tradition, saying of Larbaud: His tendency to see English poetry through French poetry corresponds to a very real influence of the French on contemporary English poetry and his demand for tradition is akin to the debate in England about where the true tradition of English poetry lay and to Eliot’s belief that the individual poet had need of tradition. 22

Ford’s inclination for authors, English and French alike, but mostly Frenchmen like Flaubert, who draw their inspiration from reflections almost exclusively centred on questions of form and ‘the intensity of the artistic process’ as Fernandez puts it, is no longer a matter of debate. I would still like to recall one example that can be taken as emblematic, namely Ford’s prolonged observation of the Cathedral of Saint-Gilles in the Camargue, and its bas-reliefs: the little bas-reliefs of David and Goliath, that are as exactly proportioned, as decorative, and as impressionist as any Japanese work, on the portals of the Cathedral of St. Gilles on the borders of the Camargue, near Aigues-Mortes. (BSDSG 195)

Such ardent meditation, taking into account every single aesthetic detail before concluding on the perfection of the whole, is an example of Ford’s cult of form. As for Larbaud, preoccupations of this sort are such that his conception of style has remained an essential point of reference in modern and contemporary French literature. The crisis of criticism also went hand in hand with doubts concerning the relevance of the generic divides dating back to the rhetorical tradition. Even more than Ford, Larbaud deemed prose composition to be as strictly disciplined as verse. On the contrary, poetry could embrace the liberties brought by narrative and prose in general, as was the case in Pound’s Cantos for example. Ford and Larbaud responded to these upheavals in their critical works, each with an approach which, I believe, is also comparable. Both authors bypassed the tensions and rifts the crisis triggered by focusing their reflections on the ways a new international strand of

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literary history was taking shape, which would provide the framework for a new critical discourse. In an article published on 15 March 1921 in the Revue de France, Larbaud attempts to identify an American or British author in whom French and English influences were likely to interweave, a guiding principle he defines as follows: But literary history tells an international story, and beyond and above the national tradition, there is the great European and international tradition.23

One might even wonder whether the author he is looking for, capable of uniting several trends in French poetry into one, might not be Larbaud himself. Influenced by the art of Whitman, Larbaud is also a French imagist, as can be seen from the title of one of the poems in the Barnabooth collection, ‘Images’.24 Ford sets out the same synthetic vision of an international textual spectrum. On various occasions, he sketches out the broad outlines in optimistic terms, looking for patterns in the ways new forms emerge that would suggest a superb instance of European dialogism. His article written for the November 1909 issue of the English Review can be seen as a majestic archway beneath which pass the foremost literary figures not only from France and England but from Russia as well: Both Mr James and Mr Conrad are products of the great French school of writers of the eighties. They are thus in the main-stream of that development of modern Literature which beginning with Richardson, crossed the Channel to influence Diderot (we are thinking of his Rameau’s Nephew), and the Encyclopaedists, to issue, as it were, by means of Chateaubriand into that wonderful group whose fervour for their Art drew together Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, the Goncourts and the rest.25

In a more pessimistic vein, Ford deplores how under-represented the Anglo-Saxon world is within European literary trends: There for the hundred years that have succeeded the birth of Flaubert huge, earnest works distinguished by at least mixed motives – such works have been the main feature of European literature from Education Sentimentale to the Frères Karamazoff. To this literature Anglo-Saxondom, or at any rate England, has contributed nothing at all, or nothing of any importance, and because of that Anglo-Saxondom remains outside the comity of civilised nations. So the publication of Ulysses, success or failure, is an event singularly important. It gives us at least our chance to rank as Europeans.26

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The sort of dialogism he suggests is more than a merely synthetic vision; rather, it can be likened to a source of stylistic construction at root level. By implying which authors he has read, Ford evokes the play of influences within a single overall structure that can form the basis of concrete analysis. It is in this vein that he tackles Conrad’s writing (in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance) to weigh up the influences Flaubert had on his style. The accent put on form in an international context thus emerges as a characteristic of the new critical discourse as set forth by Larbaud: And indeed we can sense clearly that the future science of literature, – eschewing any but descriptive criticism, – can have only one end, which is the construction of an ever-growing whole that answers to these terms: history and international.27

For Ford too, notably in the comparison of Conrad and Flaubert, European intertextuality is approached as an equivalent object of study, thus clearly establishing the supremacy of style. We agreed on the axiom: The first business of Style is to make work interesting: the second business of Style is to make work interesting: the third business of Style is to make work interesting: the fourth business of Style is to make work interesting: the fifth business of Style…. Style, then, has no other business.28

In an entry devoted to Francis Thompson published on 1 August 1913 in the NRF, Larbaud defined ‘poets’ criticism’ in reference to Thompson, but also in relation to his own textual practices. The definition holds just as aptly for Ford: It is a poet’s criticism naturally, without method and in all spontaneity, but it is all the better for it. No lists, no note taking, no plan underlies such appreciations. He speaks of his favourite writers as we might of our childhood friends. And this is the best criticism of all. Criticism which seeks to be scientific is often the most ambitious and the most frivolous: too often it takes a writer as a mere pretext for setting out ideas that are unbeknown to the very object being studied.29

On the surface, admittedly, this approach disparages the very sense of order that so pleases ‘readers from the land of Descartes’, but in truth it is grounded on a clear method. This method relies on a particular approach that was dear to Ford and Larbaud alike, and which emerges

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from issue to issue of the English Review and the NRF, namely a form of textual scrutiny that was both meticulous and very personalised. With this method in mind, the two critics occupied similar ground when, for example, they were commenting on the imagists. In one article, Ford quotes from and then comments on a poem by Richard Aldington (‘Au Vieux Jardin’) in glowing terms: ‘And here again is a poem by Mr Richard Aldington that would come exactly into the canons of my school, if I had founded a school.’30 Larbaud would seem to be responding, i.e. describing the ‘canons of [the] school’ of which Ford had dreamt, in an article in the NRF dated 1 February 1920 bearing on Aldington’s collection, Images of War. Like Ford, Larbaud quotes from a poem translated into French, ‘Dédain’, saying, ‘Better indeed to quote, and indeed here is a very characteristic extract from R. Aldington’s work. . .’ There can be no doubting that Larbaud’s ‘canons’ would have appealed to Ford. Larbaud evokes certain similarities (with Landor), refers to its place in the tradition, then asserts: Yet it would be vain to try and prove that Richard Aldington has been influenced by Landor; there is a kinship of spirit, nothing more. For that matter, other influences, more or less direct, have been at work since Landor – via Swinburne and Francis Thompson, – preparing the advent of the contemporary English school, of which Richard Aldington is one of the most noteworthy poets.31

A little earlier, Larbaud had referred to the writing with an enthusiasm that Ford himself would have approved of: ‘[. . .] we find here the same direct, vigorous poetry, steeped in a sort of Hellenism that is part of the tradition of great English lyrics’. Admittedly, Ford insists, somewhat more polemically, on the poets’ youthfulness and their audacity, but the two articles are complementary and from being read together, throw light on the way both Ford and Larbaud endeavour to grasp what Ford calls the new form, halfway between verse and prose: ‘But in vers libre as it is practised today I really think that a new form has been found, if not for the novel, then for the narrative of emotion.’32 Despite these convergences, Larbaud and Ford were hardly acquainted. In his biography of Ford, Max Saunders mentions one occasion when they met, after the death of Proust, but it was a fleeting encounter.33 A more perplexing detail is the mention of Larbaud’s

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name deformed into Lardbug in the Ford/Pound correspondence. It was Pound, who had fallen out with Larbaud, who coined the nickname. Ford replies, ‘I have no idea who Lardbug is.’34 Ford presumably misunderstood the wordplay, for it is highly unlikely that in 1932 he did not know Larbaud, particularly after the battle surrounding Ulysses and Larbaud’s lecture on Joyce translated into English by T. S. Eliot. The writer had even been considered as the French correspondent for the transatlantic review. Had he understood the wordplay, Ford would undoubtedly have leapt to Larbaud’s defence. Whatever the case, the scarcity of biographical anecdotes should not detract from the very tangible critical proximity between the two authors. Translated by Claire Davison-Pégon

NOTES 1

2

3

4 5 6

Literary review founded in November 1908 by a circle of writers around André Gide. Early days were rather chaotic, but the review got off to a better start second time round, in February 1909 once Gide reinforced the team. From that point on, the NRF went from strength to strength, and one century later is still a highly influential journal. Quoted by Maaike Koffeman in Entre Classicisme et modernité, La Nouvelle revue française dans le champ littéraire de la Belle Epoque, New York: Rodopi, 2003 – henceforth ‘Koffeman’; p. 143. This richly documented study establishes insightful comparisons between the NRF and the English Review. ‘Par réaction contre des œuvres de pure virtuosité, la tendance serait aujourd’hui de voir dans une certaine maladresse technique, la marque de la force et d’une inspiration impérieuse. On veut ne rien attendre que du don, et, pour un peu, l’on déclarerait l’ébauche supérieure à l’œuvre, parce qu’aucun élément réfléchi n’y semble venir troubler le langage ingénu d’un tempérament. Comme si justement la maîtrise ne se mesurait pas à ce qu’une œuvre peut, sans desséchement ni surcharge, impliquer d’invisible habileté’. Considérations, NRF, n° 1 (February 1909), 8. M. A. Caws & S. B. Wright, Bloomsbury and France, p. 8, quoted by Koffeman 142. Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915 – henceforth BSDSG; pp. 202-3. A review of two works by Anatole France from 1908: La Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, and L'île des Pingouins.

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7 8

9 10 11

12

13

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La revue anglo-américaine (August 1925), 553, book review signed Louis Cazamian. ‘[. . .] pourrons-nous ajouter sans ingratitude à l’égard d’un auteur qui si volontiers montre sa familiarité avec notre littérature française, un livre qui fait trop fi de la justesse et de l’ordre dans les pensées pour plaire aux lecteurs du pays de Descartes?’ La revue anglo-américaine (April 1931), 366, book review signed A. Koszul. Finies les parades, Paris: Alexis Redier, 1933, translated by Fernande Bogatyreff and Georges Pillement, preface by Georges Pillement. Anthology of Modern English Poetry, Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1931. ‘The English Review, vol. 1, n° 1 (December 1908). – A la fin de novembre 1908 a paru le premier numéro de cette revue. Elle est publiée à Londres par Duckworth et Cie, et réunit, dans la liste de ses collaborateurs, les plus grands noms de la littérature anglaise. Ce premier numéro contient un poème de Thomas Hardy, des mémoires autobiographiques de Joseph Conrad, une nouvelle de John Galsworthy, et la première partie d’un roman inédit de H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay. La littérature américaine est représentée par une nouvelle de Henry James. Dans les chroniques du mois, Joseph Conrad étudie le dernier roman d’Anatole France. En somme, pour n’être pas une revue de jeunes, La Revue anglaise n’est pas moins une excellente revue littéraire que La Phalange recommande à tous ceux de ses lecteurs qui suivent le mouvement artistique et intellectuel de l’Angleterre.’ The article is reprinted in Ce vice impuni, la lecture, Domaine anglais, edited by Béatrice Mousli, Paris: Gallimard, 1998 – henceforth ‘Mousli’; p. 324. ‘Cependant, en Angleterre, au commencement de cette nouvelle époque littéraire (1909), nous avions vu paraître, sous la direction de Ford Madox Hueffer, une revue importante qui a joué alors le rôle que joua chez nous, il y a vingt ans, La Revue blanche: c’était The English Review. Elle a noblement servi la cause de la poésie moderne en Angleterre. (Ford Madox Hueffer lui-même a été un des bons poètes du groupe de la English Review); mais c’est surtout les romanciers qui lui ont donné de l’importance qu’elle aura dans l’histoire littéraire’: Mousli 473. ‘Tout ce qui vient de la Poetry Bookshop nous intéresse depuis longtemps déjà et si le numéro de septembre 1914 de la Nouvelle Revue Française avait vu le jour, on y aurait lu un compte-rendu de la première anthologie sortie de cette maison, et qui avait pour titre Des imagistes (en français). C’était un recueil d’une quarantaine de courts poèmes (la plupart en vers libres) de dix ou douze auteurs, anglais et américains, parmi lesquels Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound et Ford Madox Hueffer étaient déjà connus des lettrés’: Mousli 436. ‘Je vois, par le petit livre de Harold Monro, que cette anthologie était le résultat des conversations tenues au Poets’ Club (fondé en 1908) par les membres d’un groupe qui comptait, à l’origine, F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme, Edward Storer, auxquels se joignit quelques années plus tard, Ezra Pound. Certainement, dans ce groupe, comme dans la revue Poetry and Drama, F. S. Flint fut l’interprète et l’importateur de la poésie française. Il serait curieux de savoir quels poètes français il fit connaître à ses amis. Probablement Rimbaud, Laforgue et Corbière; certainement quelques vers-libristes (Verhaeren et Gustave Kahn, que cite H. Monro – mais non pas Mallarmé, qui n’a pas écrit de vers libres comme semble le dire (p. 105) M. H. Monro). Quels vers-libristes encore? Probablement Claudel et André Spire. Leur a-t-il parlé du groupe de La Phalange et de La Nouvelle Revue Française?

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Quoi qu’il en soit, Des Imagistes nous montre la poésie anglaise entrant en contact avec la tradition française’: Mousli 476. ‘Il faut mentionner une personnalité qui, contrairement à M. Read, n’a pas été éclipsée par M. Eliot et les Sitwell. Je fais allusion à M. Aldous Huxley, qui relie si admirablement les «géorgiens» aux «imagistes», usant tantôt de l’allure régulière des uns, tantôt des raccourcis des autres avec une bonne humeur sensible ou savante infiniment plaisante, avec une vive intelligence et un modernisme qu’on n’est que trop heureux d’admettre. Est-il étrange, alors, de trouver M. Monro se livrant à des commentaires véhéments au sujet de Leda ou de la Defeat of Youth, dernière ruade désespérée du pur-sang géorgien fourbu? Cela nous ramène aux «imagistes» que leur désignation définit, et dont j’ai énuméré plus haut la composition. (Le lecteur que cela intéresse trouvera un compte rendu très exact de ce mouvement dans la deuxième partie du livre de M. F. M. Hueffer intitulé: Thus to revisit’: Mousli 540). ‘The array of pictures consists essentially of Preraphaelites. Burne-Jones (born in Birmingham), D. G. Rossetti, F. Madox Brown and W. Holman Hunt take pride of place. I am little inspired by the doctrines of the school; and the works they produced do not appeal to me’. ‘La galerie des tableaux comprend surtout des œuvres des Préraphaélites. Burne-Jones (né à Birmingham), D. G. Rossetti, F. Maddox-Brown [sic] et W. Holman Hunt y sont largement représentés. Je n’entends pas grand chose aux doctrines de cette école; et les œuvres qu’elle a produites ne m’attirent pas’. Le Cœur de l’Angleterre, Paris: Gallimard, 1971, p. 107. Mousli 472. ‘Et puis, c’est évidemment, partout, la grande muse anglaise, telle que nous la sentons déjà dans Chaucer et telle qu’elle est, vivante encore et triomphante, dans Shakespeare, l’étrange muse anglaise à laquelle s’applique si bien ce vers de Claudel: «La grande femme folle et vague, avec son visage de fée», amorale, évasive, inquiétante, de sexe indécis, un peu Imogen et beaucoup Titania’. La poésie anglaise contemporaine in Mousli 474. This is particularly true of the selections from Ford’s memoir of Conrad reprinted in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank MacShane, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964, headed ‘Impressionism and Fiction’, in which Ford discusses Conrad’s use of ‘progression d’effet’; see. p. 87. Un roman de Joseph Conrad, reprinted in Domaine anglais, op. cit., p. 188. William Marx, Naissance de la critique moderne, la littérature selon Eliot et Valéry, Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2002. Valery Larbaud: Critic of English Literature, Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford 1968, p. 291. ‘Mais l’histoire littéraire est une histoire internationale, et en dehors, et au-dessus de la tradition nationale, il y a la grande tradition européenne, internationale’, p. 472. Larbaud, Barnabooth, Paris: Poésie / Gallimard, édition de 1966, p. 61. Ford, ‘The Critical Attitude: English Literature of Today. II’, English Review, 3 (November 1909), 655-72 (p. 662). See Koffeman 182. Ford, ‘Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies’, English Review, 35 (December 1922), 538-48 (p. 540)

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27 ‘Et on sent bien en effet que la future science de la littérature , – renonçant à toute critique autre que descriptive, – ne pourra aboutir qu’à la construction d’un ensemble toujours croissant qui répondra à ces deux termes : histoire et internationale’, from ‘L’art et le métier’ in Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérôme, Paris: Gallimard, 1997, p. 141. 28 Ford, Joseph Conrad, p. 206 in ‘Impressionism and Fiction’, Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 80. 29 ‘Critique de poète naturellement, sans méthode et toute spontanée, mais d’autant meilleure. Pas de fiches, pas de notes prises, pas de plan, derrière ces appréciations. Il parle des écrivains favoris comme nous parlerions de nos amis d’enfance. Et c’est la meilleure critique. Celle qui veut être scientifique est souvent la plus ambitieuse et la plus frivole: trop souvent pour elle un écrivain n’est qu’un prétexte à exposer des idées étrangères à l’objet même qu’elle étudie [. . .]’: Mousli 197. 30 Ford, ‘Literary Portraits – XXXV.: Les Jeunes and Des Imagistes’, Outlook, 33 (9 May 1914), 636, 653; reprinted in Ford, Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang, Manchester: Carcanet, 2002, p. 152. 31 ‘Mais il serait vain de chercher à démontrer que Richard Aldington a subi l’influence de Landor: il y a parenté d’esprit, rien de plus. D’ailleurs, d’autres influences, plus ou moins directes, ont travaillé depuis Landor, – en passant par Swinburne et Francis Thompson, – à préparer l’avènement de l’école anglaise contemporaine, dont Richard Aldington est un des poètes les plus marquants’: Mousli 443. 32 Ford, ‘Literary Portraits – XXXV. Les Jeunes and Des Imagistes’, Critical Essays, p. 153. 33 Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 125. 34 Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, ed., Pound/Ford : The Story of a Literary Friendship; The correspondence between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and their writing about each other, London: Faber and Faber 1982, pp. 110-11.

POETIC TRIANGULATIONS: FORD, POUND, AND THE FRENCH LITERARY TRADITION1 Christopher Bains While mostly known for his novels, Ford was also a successful poet, critic and editor. He thus had multiple venues open to him to diffuse his thinking, an opportunity he rarely missed in conversations with young upcoming writers. In Canto 82, Ezra Pound recognizes his debt to Ford, whom he considered as one of the principal architects of the modernist movement: and for all that old Ford’s conversation was better, consisting in res non verba, despite William’s anecdotes, in that Fordie 2 never dented an idea for a phrase’s sake[.]

In this essay, I will first attempt to re-examine the running French subtext of Ford’s influence within imagism; secondly, I will make the case for a dialectical tension in his poetics between French realism and aestheticism. Finally, I will suggest how Ford’s thinking might be considered more broadly in relation to French literary history. This last element is particularly complex as Ford’s articulations of Gallic ideas were much repeated by others, Ezra Pound in particular. Ford and Imagism First, a little background on Ford’s role in formulating the imagist aesthetic. In 1909 Ezra Pound meets Ford, who, at the time, was the founder and chief editor of the English Review in London. He reveals himself to be well informed about the literary tradition in France. During this early period for Pound, important in the development of imagism, he gets his information from two major sources: Ford and Yeats. I will come back to these seminal figures in a moment. The ‘forgotten school of images’ is the object of sustained interest from the moment it gets mentioned by Pound in the back of Ripostes (1912). Moving toward establishing a movement, Pound, in an article signed by F. S. Flint, enunciates a certain number of poetic principles. This

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article would lead to the 1913 manifesto ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagist’. While Pound did much of the legwork on imagism, he attributes the idea behind the founding precept of the 1913 imagist manifesto to Ford: ‘Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective’.3 Many critics have tried to establish exactly what this means: Jean Bessière affirms that ‘imagism presents the interesting case of a poetry which supposedly provides something to see without going through imitation’.4 It is, in other words, the reader and poet who access external reality directly. Yet the imagist rule of thumb espousing directness is not without ambiguities. What is the relationship between the word and the thing? Is this directness another step toward the linguistic materiality of language? Or rather, is it advocating the transparency of language, violating linguistic practice to obtain the illusive holy grail of literature, reality itself? More simply stated, what is the relationship of the text to reality? Does it transform or just present? We might remember that the manifesto, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagist’, is more a rejection of a certain type of Anglo-Saxon poetry than a prescription for success; after all, it advises the neophyte poet just to say no to phrases such as ‘dim lands of peace,’ a negative exemplar taken from Ford’s early poem ‘On a Marsh Road (Winter Nightfall)’. Perhaps what Ford and Pound shared most was the conviction that poetry was a craft to be studied and refined from a larger tradition, often citing France as a dominant model. They would remain each other’s most strident critic and greatest champion. Furthermore, Ashley Chantler underscores the fact that Ford’s poetry enjoyed broad support, not just by Pound but by other important players, including Aldington and Eliot.5 To get a more accurate idea of the influential role Ford played, it helps to look at the year 1930, the year of the last imagist anthology. Some fifteen years after the founding of the imagist movement, Ford takes advantage of historical distance to look back upon the movement in the preface to the Imagist Anthology. If his recollections reflect but imprecisely the reality (the historical presence and different aesthetic ideologies of the movement), they tell us that imagism was never composed of homogenous elements, but rather of variegating perspectives. Nonetheless, it is inarguably true that some historical narratives have weighed more than others in literary history. In the preface to the anthology, Ford describes the beginnings of the movement in the following terms:

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It is a little difficult to disentangle Futurism from Cubism and Vorticism and Imagism . . . and indeed, even from Impressionism and Post Impressionism and Dadaism and Hyper-realism. At least it isn’t now. But in those days it was bewildering.6

We can see that it is not only contemporary movements that are confused, but also movements emanating from the nineteenth century and specifically French contributions. To Ford, the marked character of the period resides paradoxically in the principle of entanglement and interplay between the different literary and artistic movements. Indeed, Ford views imagism as being defined more as a historical struggle to set itself apart than as a declaration of artistic newness. This citation certainly suggests that Ford, who puts himself at the center of the origins, was also caught in a vortex of European literary thought. Ford is testifying, as it were, for both himself and Pound who makes no appearance in that last anthology. It is significant that, many years later, it is Pound, again, mobilizing Kenner, who seeks to resolve the question to Ford’s advantage, reviving once again, if only temporarily, his role as spokesman for the group. It is in the essay ‘This Hulme Business,’ that Pound confirms that ‘the critical LIGHT during the years immediately pre-war in London shone not from Hulme but from Ford’.7 While this is probably true, Ford first had to see the light himself, and quite often, that light was coming from France. They had, after all, retained the French spelling in the 1914 publication of Des Imagistes, and Pound, Flint and Ford saw Paris as a zone of enlightenment, as the name of Pound’s newspaper series ‘Approach to Paris’ from the same period in The New Age implies. Clearly, the continuous re-vetting of the historical record by Flint, Pound and other critics fails to give an accurate accounting of Ford’s appropriation of French literary thought. It further highlights the need to integrate French influence more fully within narratives of Imagism and Modernism, as the key players were themselves wellversed in French literary thought. The Realism / Aestheticism Dialectic In lieu of accepting this truncated narrative of genealogy, I propose to look at some possible French sources of Ford’s poetics. Many critics have attempted to map Ford’s influence. Some see it in the representational faculties of language itself, making the case that it is clarity and precision which represent the salient points of Ford’s aesthetic.

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Others, such as Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, see it in Ford’s use of everyday language: Both in his early theoretical writing and in his verse Ford stressed the living language, the language of speech, even dialect and slang, as being the right medium for poetry [. . . .] There is no doubt that Pound was duly impressed by these exhortations and that for several years after meeting Ford he strove in the direction of realism.8

If you take the criticism seriously, you will agree that the influence of Ford has much to do with realism, a movement that arguably reached its apex in nineteenth-century France. Indeed, in ideas on both language and representation, Ford borrowed freely from realist doctrine. On the one hand, Ford’s writing is perceptibly different in many ways from that of early nineteenth-century novelists such as Balzac or Stendhal. On the other, it is true that Ford’s novels retain a certain ‘just the facts, ma’am’ aspect to them, which belies their intrinsic complexity. The aesthetic position that Ford stakes out is similar to what Roland Barthes called ‘the degree zero of writing’ in which writing approaches a less opaque spoken language.9 Barthes saw the degree zero as avoiding literature’s most auto-reflexive impulses. Without a doubt, this writing can legitimately be considered as one of several lyric and narrative modes that make up modernist practice. This use of idiomatic language is significant in both Pound’s and Ford’s writings, as Paul Skinner aptly points out,10 and explains, in part, their shared love of Provence, which they considered the cradle of living language and culture since the time of the troubadours.11 Ford’s first poetic attempts are known to have borrowed heavily from William Morris, Christina Rossetti, and Swinburne.12 Likewise, to understand Ford’s French aesthetic baggage involves coming to terms with competing impulses and his relationship with continental aestheticism. Here is Pound’s version of the genealogical tree: Mr. Yeats has been subjective; believes in the glamour and associations which hang near the words. ‘Works of art beget works of art’. He has much in common with the French symbolists. Mr. Hueffer [Ford] believes in an exact rendering of things. He would strip words of all ‘association’ for the sake of getting a precise meaning. He professes to prefer prose to verse. You would find his origins in Gautier or in Flaubert. He is objective. This school tends to lapse into description. The other tends to lapse into sentiment.13

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Diverse oppositions crystallize when we consider the dialectic presented here by Pound as a choice between the ostensible symbolist Yeats and the inveterate realist Ford. On one hand, we have words that give off meaning through a mechanism of association. On the other, we see the descriptive language, analytical and objective, that one finds in Gautier and Flaubert. We can say that this latter position advocates being as ‘close’ as possible to the poetic object. Yet a triangulation is possible here, given that during this same period, as Max Saunders demonstrates, Ford was making use of impressionism in both its ‘transparent’ and ‘mediated’ modes.14 Insofar as all three movements – Realism, Symbolism, and Impressionism – come out of nineteenth-century France, none should be seen as defining in and of itself Ford’s modernism. Still, these varying genealogies of modernism foreground two key points: Ford’s macro-view of literary activism (movements playing off each other in their drive toward differentiation) and Pound’s reductionist vision of Fordian poetics (his designating of ‘winners’ and subsequent recycling of aesthetic ideas). In both cases, they attempt to explain the elephant in the room which was Ford’s French influence. Narratives such as these have, as Peter Robinson elucidates, ‘the benefit of creating a history of endeavour and of apostolic succession, one to which Ford would also contribute in memoirs that assume a march of modern literature’.15 Clearly the burning aesthetic question of the nineteenth century – the way in which the artist mediates objective reality – had not finished being arbitrated at the dawn of the new century. Integrating Ford’s French Influence Gautier and Flaubert are intriguing choices as the former is mostly known as a poet, while the latter is often described as a realist novelist, malgré lui. In fact, Gautier was prolix in his prose and rather concise in his poetry, considering poetry and prose as the product of two completely separate parts of the brain. Yet as a whole, both Gautier’s poetry and prose often described places and things, and were indeed very material and direct in their essence. Flaubert, of course, was the novelist-poet, passing months writing and rewriting each page, and for this reason he figures prominently in narratives of modernist poetics. In Thus to Revisit, Ford specifically mentions Flaubert as the aesthetic forefather of imagism:

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CHRISTOPHER BAINS The reader is now asking himself: ‘Here is the fellow dragging in Flaubert again. Why? Flaubert wrote a “spicy” novel called Madame Bovary. What has he to do with Vorticism? [. . . .] But had there been no Flaubert in the world perhaps there would have been no English prose – no English poem – of that type. What Flaubert gave to the world was not merely one book – nor five or six; it was a whole habit of mind that is changing the face of the globe [. . . .] The vocabulary that we shall ultimately achieve by the methods of Flaubert and Maupassant – the vocabulary indeed achieved by the Imagistes – will be the vocabulary for both the prose and the verse of the future.16

In many ways, Ford advocates writing as craft, writing stripped down to its most basic formal impulses, establishing the closest relationship possible between word and reality. The hesitation between formal and representational qualities of language lends support to a predominantly dual system of French influence that situates Ford’s reception as playing off aestheticism and realism. This position is clarified by Pound’s analysis of Ford’s contribution to evolving modernist practice: The Cleaning up of the WORD had not got down to orthology or the severities we now read into that term. Aestheticism had not spared wholly our brother. It took Yeats and Symons one way, and Bro. Ford another. Nevertheless the literary historian will err if he tries to start the ‘revolution of the word’ a decade or so later with the emergence of Mr. Joyce’s epigons and jejune admirers. Hueffer’s (Ford’s) succession is not in the new gongorism but in orthology.17

Through the rhetoric of ‘The Cleaning up of the WORD’, we can establish a direct link between Ford, aestheticism and realism. However, this literary housecleaning cannot be separated from reality itself. References to linguistic precision, a fundamental component of modernism, inscribe themselves within the initial sensibilities of ‘aesthetic realists’, such as Gautier and Flaubert, preoccupied with questions of language and representation. This conflation of aestheticism and realism is at odds with Lukács’ characterization in the 30s and 40s of modernist subjectivity as incompatible with realist objectivity.18 On the contrary, the use of the term ‘orthology’, the study of correctness in language, bears witness to both its subjective and objective dimensions. It also speaks volumes to the linguistic and ideological complexity of modernist poetics. While this move by Ford to appropriate the French tradition might be considered by some as reactionary, it is a look to the past to protect a larger literary tradition. This was an idea

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that resonated even more forcefully with Eliot and Pound. As the latter explains, Ford ‘was getting himself despised and rejected by preaching the simple Gallic doctrine of living language and le mot juste’.19 Yet Flaubert, like Ford himself, is hardly a monolithic figure, and finds himself teetering on the cusp of modernist canonization. In accordance with Flaubert’s formal investigations, Hugh Kenner states, ‘Ford’s instinct served him better than his concern for verisimilitude would admit’.20 It might be thus preferable to argue for a more complicated view of Flaubertian influence which takes into account the nineteenth-century novelist’s ground-breaking use of irony, nonstandard syntax and verb tense. This is, in any case, what Marcel Proust saw as Flaubert’s defining legacy,21 and this formal complexity may be the point at which Ford’s experimentation grafts onto Flaubert’s paternal line. Clearly, as Richard Price adduces in his essay on Ford and Basil Bunting, one has to go further than Flaubert’s le mot juste and address Ford’s emotional distance and integration of several levels of language into the narration.22 In the end, the impact of Ford’s rhetoric of stripping down language carried the day in modernist tales of influence. It provided the impetus to carry out radical linguistic experimentation. Yet to reduce language to its most expressive forms does not take away from the complexity of any given work. Paradoxically, the ideal Ford represented to Pound of ‘res non verba’ looms large in le mot juste, as the former is achieved precisely through the latter. It is the hesitation between formal and representative qualities that allows for a plurality of readings of Ford’s work, including multiple narratives of French nineteenth-century influence. The terms in which Ford’s ideas were couched by others testify to the differing visions and political ideologies of Ford’s partisans. His philosophy of literature could be framed constructively as ‘directness’ or more destructively as hygiene. The widespread influence of Ford’s aesthetic thought on English and American writers thus needs to be considered outside the model of national literatures, and beyond rigid definitions of poetry or prose. His presence is as much international as modernism itself, and might be considered within a larger framework of transnational poetics. Unquestionably, his assimilation and dissemination of French literary models revealed his deep-seated passion for France and all things French, of which French literary tradition occupied a significant place. This volume goes a long way in re-establishing his French connections – with France, its people, and its cultural past.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

This chapter develops material from my monograph, De l’esthétisme au modernisme, forthcoming with Editions Honoré Champion. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, London: Faber, 1975, p. 525. Pound, ‘A Retrospect’ (including ‘A Few Don’ts’), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, London: Faber, 1954, p. 3. Jean Bessière, Dire la littérature : points de vue théoriques, Liège and Brussels: Pierre Mardaga, 1990, p. 81. [My translation from the French: ‘L’imagisme présente le cas intéressant d’une poésie qui entend donner à voir sans passer par l’imitation.’] Ashley Chantler, Ford’s Pre-War Poetry and the ‘Rotting City,’ Ford Madox Ford and the City. International Ford Madox Ford Studies – henceforth ‘IFMFS’ – 4, Rodopi, 2005, p. 111. Ford, ‘Those Were the Days’, Imagist Anthology, London: Chatto & Windus, 1930, p. ix. Ezra Pound, ‘This Hulme Business’, in Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985, p. 307. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, Introduction, Pound/Ford The Story of a Literary Friendship, New York: New Directions, 1982, p. xi. Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture, Paris: Seuil, 1953, p. 125. Paul Skinner, ‘Poor Dan Robin : Ford Madox Ford’s Poetry’, Ford Madox Ford : A Reappraisal, IFMFS 1, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002, p. 81. See Joseph Wiesenfarth, “Coda to the City”, Ford Madox Ford in the City, IFMFS 4, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005, pp. 131-8. See R. G. Hampson, ‘“Experiments in Modernity”: Ford and Pound’, Pound in Multiple Perspective: A Collection of Critical Essays, Andrew Gibson editor, London: Macmillan Press, 1993, pp. 93-125. Ezra Pound, ‘Status Rerum’, Poetry (January 1913), in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz and James Longenbach, eds, New York and London: Garland, 1991, vol. I, p. 112. Max Saunders, ‘Ford, The City, Impressionism and Modernism’, Ford Madox Ford and the City, IFMFS 4, Rodopi, 2005, p. 68. Peter Robinson, ‘“Written at Least as Well as Prose”: Ford, Pound, and Poetry’, IFMFS 9, Rodopi, 2009, p. 103. Ford, Thus to Revisit, London: Chapman and Hall, 1921, pp. 160-1. Ezra Pound, Polite Essays, Plainview, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1966, p. 50. See Georg Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann, London, Merlin Press, 1995. Ezra Pound, ‘Harold Monro’ (Criterion, July 1932), in Polite Essays, p. 10. Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1985, p. 271. See Marcel Proust, Sur Baudelaire, Flaubert and Morand, Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1987. See Richard Price, “‘His Care for Living English”: Ford Madox Ford and Basil Bunting’, IFMFS 9, Rodopi, 2009, pp. 115-27.

THIRD REPUBLIC FRENCH PHILOSOPHY AND FORD’S EVOLVING MORAL TOPOLOGIES Sam Trainor

Unfolding Modernist ‘Evolution’ Proponents of creationism tend to badger scientists to turn up what they call a ‘transitional fossil’. Besides projecting cartoon images of fish with legs and fledgling reptiles, their demands are based on a false premise. The near miracles of genetic science notwithstanding, a diachronic quality (like transition) cannot be demonstrated by a synchronic example (like a fossil). Natural selection is not Lamarckian transmutation. For Darwin, no individual organism can undergo or represent evolutionary change. Organisms, with their inherited characteristics, are merely more or less adapted to environments; they survive to pass on those characteristics or they do not. Change is slow and incremental. Speciation occurs over thousands of lifetimes. Transitions are to be found not in a single fossil, but in the fossil record as a whole. Where the aspects of human culture are concerned – morality, æsthetics, language – the opposite increasingly appears to be true. Change within a generation is the sliding scale of modern history. This kind of evolution is faster and more immediately apparent. As they interact, societies and their qualities change quickly, dividing and merging by turns, generating their own ideological environments. People and their activities – their beliefs and desires – are capable of radical evolution in the course of a single lifetime. We watch it happening. The effect of doing so is to reduce the definitive distance between ‘evolution’ and ‘revolution’, and yet the former remains an open-ended curve, where the latter comes full circle. The dynamic and neurotic embrace of a spirit of accelerating evolution might serve as a loose definition of the label ‘modernism’. True to form, and much more conclusively than the ‘Cambrian explosion’, the process that critical history identifies as the onset of modernism has left its share of transitional fossils. French novelists in the first decades of the Third Republic, for example, have deposited a seam of transitional œuvres in

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the strata of our library shelves: Bourget, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Huysmans. . . . It is a cliché, and a potentially misleading one, to call Ford Madox Ford ‘English literature’s best French writer’. The anecdote in his dedication of The Good Soldier to Stella Bowen – about it being ‘the best French novel in the English language’ – seems ironically apocryphal, not least because the work by Maupassant he cites, Fort comme la mort, is such an odd choice as an exemplary roman. It does have its moments: the ironic epiphany of the painter Bertin seeing a Parisian park ‘re-varnished’ by an artist God as the result of a new tragic passion (of which he is not himself aware) is a bravura moment of æsthetic anti-anagnorisis. One cannot help but have a certain sympathy for Oscar Wilde, however, when he dismisses the novel as a ‘lurid little tragedy’.1 After all, his subsequent détournement of its premise, under the uncompromising gaze of Huysmans’s À Rebours, produced that immaculate fake portrait of the artist, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Good Soldier is a different kind of novel to all three and, I would argue, a superior one to either Maupassant’s, Wilde’s or Huysmans’s. In at least one important respect, however, Ford’s writing seems to be even more at home in Gallic company than Wilde’s. His complete works would not be out of place at all if added to the fossil record of transitional specimens in this pre-modern strata of French literature. To nudge my list into the twentieth century . . . Gide, Proust, Ford. . . . This essay, then, will seek to do for cultural evolution what it is unreasonable to demand a fossil do for its biological equivalent. It will attempt to demonstrate the salience of Ford’s writing as exemplary of modernism’s preoccupation with its own transitions (and metatransitions) – with a social, psychological and æsthetic evolution that transforms the very idea of evolution. Ford is not merely a writer in transition, but a writer of, about and via transition. In his fiction, he replays the transformations of thought, society and style he has experienced himself, and he exposes a rare talent for provoking the mimetic reconstruction of analogous experiences in readers’ minds. In order to reveal this quality, the essay will focus on an arbitrary (but crucial) notion in Ford’s writing: the idea of a changing ‘moral geography’ – changing not only in its specific qualities and landscapes, but also in its nature as a concept. In doing so, it will suggest that contemporary French philosophies – via the mechanisms of cultural imitation that one of them describes – had a transformative

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influence on Ford’s writing. For the sake of brevity, it will limit references principally to the work of two key writers: Henri Poincaré and Gabriel Tarde. One is a mathematician, the other a sociologist. The natural text of principal reference in Ford’s writing will therefore be Parade’s End: a series of novels whose mathematician protagonist resists and finally embraces the ‘evolution’ of local and global moral geographies that occurs during the period that spans the build-up to the Great War, the conflict itself and its fragile aftermath. Ultimately, however, the goal is to show what novelists like Ford contribute to the evolution of a broader philosophical culture, rather than what that philosophical culture contributes to Ford. For that we will have to scratch the surface of how his fiction dramatizes psychological, social and philosophical transitions; and, in passing, how it reads in a contemporary French context. ‘The Skeleton Map of a Country’: Moral Geographies (Some Do Not . . .) Between the topographical depictions of the Ordnance Survey (nineteenth-century realism at its most precise) and the topological diagram of Harry Beck’s 1931 Tube Map (a classic modernist text with innumerable imitators), network maps for systems such as railways and telegraph cables have left their own transitional fossils. They are the result of a system-oriented cartography which reduced to a minimum irrelevant details, whilst foregrounding the routes, the nodes and the organisational logic of their superimposed networks. Unlike Beck’s circuit diagram, however, these fin de siècle maps still clung to geodesic projections: representing distances and reproducing the less negligible curves and corners of their intersecting paths. They were not unlike the modern road atlas in conception, yet their intercostal spaces were much less fleshed out. They were known as ‘skeleton maps’. This is what Joyce refers to when he describes Stephen Dedalus – on his return to Dublin as an uneasy flâneur in the second chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Dublin was a new and complex sensation [. . . .] In the beginning he contented himself with circling timidly round the neighbouring square or, at most, going half way down one of the side streets but when he had made a skeleton map of the city in his mind he followed boldly one of its central lines until he reached the customhouse. He passed unchallenged among the docks and along the quays wondering at the multitude of corks that lay bobbing on the

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SAM TRAINOR surface of the water in a thick yellow scum, at the crowds of quay porters and the rumbling carts and the ill-dressed bearded policeman. The vastness and strangeness of the life suggested to him by the bales of merchandise stocked along the walls or swung aloft out of the holds of steamers wakened again in him the unrest which had sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in search of Mercedes. And amid this new bustling life he might have fancied himself in another Marseille but that he missed the bright sky and the sunwarmed trellises of the wineshops.2

This is vintage Joyce. There is an uncanny ambiguity to the irony of the self-conscious cliché. As Dedalus psychologically remaps the labyrinthine city – which his name suggests to be his own design as much as his discovery – Joyce himself retreads the paths of a meticulous internal ‘skeleton map’ of the urban maze from which he is exiled in space, in time, in culture . . . and cannot escape. There are layers of artistic self-admonition superimposed on the effect. The adolescent flight of fancy back to sunny Marseille terraces, and romantic love, is self-evidently doomed to melt and lose its feathers. The fear is that the artistic transcendence of the book’s conclusion might be just as doomed if all it offers is a Minotaur imagination that mopes obsessively about the Dublin of its youth. Perhaps this is to read too much of Ulysses into the earlier work. A Portrait . . . makes the point quite clearly, however: the dream of flight contains the labyrinth as much as the labyrinth the dream of flight. The effect is vintage Joyce, but the style and content reads like vintage Hueffer. Whether intentional on Joyce’s part, or not, it would be hard to produce a better pastiche of Ford’s writing about London. It is unsurprising, then, that we should find a prototype to Joyce’s mental ‘skeleton map of the city’ in Hueffer’s The Soul of London: Daily details will have merged, as it were, into his bodily functions [. . . .] He will have acquired an alertness of eye that will save him from asking his way. On his ‘Underground’ he will glance at a board rather than enquire of a porter; on busroutes he will catch instinctively, on the advancing and shapeless mass of colour and trade announcements, the small names of taverns, of Crosses, of what were once outlying hamlets; he will have in his mind a rough sketch map of that plot of London that by right of living in he will make his own.3

This merging of ‘daily details’ into the ‘bodily functions’ is key to the psycho-geographic effect of naturalization Ford describes. The skeleton map on the ‘board’ is its crucial internode; its engrammatical transposition the moment of metamorphosis. The passage is, however, as referentially unstable and as potentially self-critical as the Joyce.

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This is one of the effects that sets such modernist journeys apart from the flâneur narratives they intertextually retrace. The comparison between the neurological effect upon the rural incomer of travelling the city’s intersecting routes and the reconstitution of the city in the writer’s mind threatens the authenticity of this vision. It is, of course, the impressionist’s immersion of his cognitive functions (and those of the reader) into the remembered ‘daily details’ of a displaced London (with innumerable literary analogues) that generates this fictional city of textual memory. Ford is not merely speaking in the third person about his own remembered experience of the city, but about the experience of writing (and rereading) the metropolis from memory. There is a significant play on words here. It is not a ‘part’ of London – a borough or a suburb – that the incomer ‘will make his own’, but a ‘plot’. Ford understands as well as any writer that story, topography and memory are implicated in each other’s matrices. The impressive non-linearity of The Good Soldier is testament to the confidence of a stylist whose strong topographic sense of narrative permits him to lead the reader in a seemingly aimless, but ultimately memorable route through a garden of forking paths. The moral problem of the ménage à cinq in Nauheim is, in narrative terms, something like the mathematical problem of the seven bridges of Königsberg. Ford, like Euler, provides a negative resolution. Most plots are not so nodally complex, however. They emerge more often from a single route through an environment (spatial or temporal): a commuter’s journey, a character’s biography. Cognitive psychologists theorize that such simple mental ‘plots’ are fundamental building blocks of memory. Schank and Abelson’s ‘Script Theory’, for example, relies upon a notion of ‘cognitive dependency’ that involves a more than analogous relationship between simple narratives of physical movement and what they call ‘dynamic memory’.4 As modern as this work on the internodes of natural and artificial intelligence might seem, it builds upon an architectonics of memory which recalls classical antiquity. Paul Connerton’s How Modernity Forgets leads us briskly through the historical construct: That memory is dependent on topography is an ancient insight. The so-called ‘art of memory’ was located within the great system of rhetoric that dominated classical culture, was reborn in the Middle Ages, flourished during the Renaissance, and only entered upon its demise during the period from the invention of printing to the turn of the eighteenth century. Cicero gave a succinct statement of its operative principle. ‘Persons desiring to train this faculty of

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SAM TRAINOR memory,’ he writes, ‘must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things.’ Accordingly, this ‘art of memory’ was described as a ‘method of loci’.5

For Cicero these loci are stable abstractions; the ‘art’ is an artificial trick instigated by the will (albeit one with a neurological basis that modern psychologists explain in terms of the involvement of the hippocampus). Memory in modernist literature (as both theme and structural principle) is, of course, much less stable and controllable. Proust is the most salient example. His loci of memory have a selfgenerative power. It is as if they literally constitute his memory. Marcel does not mentally retread the road past Swann’s house in an effort merely to recall the proper order of some abstract set of circumstances that make up the memory of his adolescence. Instead, he finds himself retracing the lost footpaths of his past as if by their own will and according to their cognitive geographies. The patterns of abstraction are more complex, more tenuous and more selfconsciously experienced. A similar preoccupation with a dynamic topographic memory influencing the workings of the (literary) mind is found in Ford. The conversation between Christopher Tietjens and Valentine Wannop in the fog contains numerous examples: “If,” she interrupted, “that was really Gran’fer’s Wantways: midland English. ‘Vent’ equals four cross-roads: high French carrefour. . . . Or, perhaps, that isn’t the right word. But it’s the way your mind works. . . .” “You have, of course, often walked from your uncle’s to Gran’fer’s Wantways,” Tietjens said, “with your cousins, taking brandy to the invalid in the old toll-gate house. That’s how you know the story of Grandfer. You said you had never driven it; but you have walked it. That’s the way your mind works, isn’t it?” [. . . .] “Gran’fer’s Wantways is six and three-quarters miles from Udimore; Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters; twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from ‘O’er the mere.’ Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to put church with relic of St. Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: ‘O’er the mere.’ Obviously absurd! . . . Putrid!‘O’er the’ by Grimm’s law impossible as ‘Udi’; ‘mere’ not a middle Low German word at all. . . .” “Why,” Tietjens said, “are you giving me all this information?” “Because,” the girl said, “it’s the way your mind works [. . . .] It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent patterns [. . . .]6

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The intersection of these two versions of ‘the way your mind works’ occurs in such a way, and in such a context, as to foreground the awareness of the other’s topographic consciousness. This is just as true of the intertextual and historical ‘landscape’ in Valentine’s teasing pastiche of Christopher’s way of thinking (which reads like a pedantic note in the annals of a local geographical society) as in Christopher’s more literal reference to Valentine’s youthful walks. Each is retracing their cognitively formative paths. Their uncanny ability to predict the other’s mental ‘plots’ derives from a mutual sensitivity to the unlikely overlaps of two disparate geographies of thought. The disparity is cultural, political and generational. Valentine refers explicitly to Christopher’s ‘obsolescent patterns’. It is not merely his sentimental attachment to the rural lanes of the English countryside that is challenged by her complex irony, but the mental structures which they seem to spawn, and to which – despite having intelligence and perspicacity enough to recognise their obsolescence – he still clings. It is the perfect example of a collision between the modernist topological (parodic, intertextual) imagination of a progressive bluestocking and the parochial imagination of an Edwardian gentleman. And yet it is also a lovely little scene of teasing flirtation. One that will become the foundational memory of an enduring love affair. Part of Ford’s great achievement in these novels is to dramatize the evolution of this love affair as an accommodation of psychological and cultural alterity in various loci (historical and geographical) of a modern European landscape undergoing an analogous evolution. In order to achieve this, Ford must first re-imagine and re-evoke his pre-war homeland. There is nothing particularly unusual about this in the period. Proust, Musil and Joyce all do the same in their contemporary masterpieces. It is perhaps only Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, however, that surpasses Ford’s subtle poignancy in reinhabiting the language and modes of thought of the pre-war period in Some Do Not . . .. The effect relies upon the writer’s ability to revisit his earlier writing. This he does as if re-walking the byways of his youth. The celebrated pathfinding scene in the fog mentioned above – which ends in a portentous collision between the ‘poor old horse’ of the past and modernity in the form of Campion’s motor car – selfconsciously and self-analytically recalls Ford’s most explicit study of memory: No Enemy. This is a work that insists upon the notion of the route-map as the root of recall: not merely in terms of formative content, but also as a structural epistemological image:

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SAM TRAINOR did you ever take a walking tour, or just a long walk and, in bed at the end of the day, perhaps in order to put yourself to sleep, did you ever try to remember every inch of the roads you had covered? Gringoire claimed that in that way he could remember a great many of the roads both of England and France of his boyhood when one walked or cycled a good deal for walking or cycling’s sake. Corners of roads, bridges, highways climbing over the forehead of downs – the road out of Bridport, down into Winchester, from Minehead to Lynton; from Calais over the flats to Arras, from Arras to Beauvais; from Blois to Tours; from Amiens to Albert in 1892. . . . By shutting his eyes, or by looking at something blank, like a sheet of paper, or by not really looking at anything at all, he could, he said, evoke a panorama of any of those roads.7

Bearing in mind how paradoxical it seems for a traumatised partial amnesiac to claim such a prodigious memory, the doubt expressed by the narrator here is understandable. The paradox is crucial to the effect, however. It is the detachment of Gringoire’s superb topographic memory from its emotional, social and spiritual content that the war has effected, leaving his obsessive mind to turn centripetally around four memory landscapes from which there is seemingly no escape. All that remains is the deconstructive metaphor of a remembered landscape as the surface of the rememberer’s head: the shell of a brain that can only recall its own exterior by following the roads that are imagined passing over it: “highways climbing over the forehead of downs.” Is this remembering or dismemberment? This literalized concept of topographic psychology is not only implied in No Enemy. Gringoire himself is quite explicit: ‘I am not so much concerned to describe these landscapes, or to prove the quality of my memory, as to establish the psychological facts about the other four landscapes.’ He had just gone back into memory, without any particular effort – without indeed any effort at all, and the roads were there, like a string unwinding from a ball. (NE 30)

‘Psychological facts’ could just as easily be ‘geographical facts’, and the narrator walks in step: ‘He had just gone back into memory [. . .] and the roads were there’. This was not the first time Ford had written about roads in such an oddly animated manner. Just as Gringoire links the shell-shocked amnesiac Tietjens at the end of Some Do Not . . . to Ford’s own war-torn memory, No Enemy bridges the gap between his writing on the highways and byways of rural England in Parade’s End and in England and the English. In the earlier work, Hueffer had mapped the roads in similarly hybrid terms:

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Level, white and engrossed beneath the sky, as if they too had purposes, as if they too sought some sort of lovers’ meeting of their own, where they intersect at the journey’s end, the great highways run across the green islands. The small by-roads, the sunken lanes, all the network of little veins that bring, as it were, tributary drops of blood, go off from side to side as if they were the individuals of a marching body dropping out to do sentry duty in hamlets off the line of march.8

This is a fine example of the skeleton map vision: the hybrid of a geodesic image with a corporeal metaphor and a strangely animated portrayal of a dynamic flow between internodes as the primary constitutive quality of a network. It is almost uncannily prescient of Parade’s End: the lovers’ meeting ‘where they intersect at journey’s end’, ‘individuals of a marching body dropping out to do sentry duty in hamlets off the line of march’. The most unusually Huefferian idea retraced by Tietjens, however, is the notion of an inherent morality of local geography: each road has its own particular individuality: nay, more, each has its own moral character, its ethics as it were, since what are ethics and morals but the effects of one’s attitude upon the beings who come in contact with us? (EE 132)

The illogicality of that ‘since’ will come as little surprise to most readers of Ford’s work. However cogent and heartfelt the assertion, and the rhetorical question that follows, the link between the two is more than tenuous. As a syllogism it would be laughable. Ford is perhaps a rather untidy thinker, but his talent resides in an acute awareness of the dramatic value of untidy thought. Here, the tenuous link between the two ideas mirrors the tenuous link between thought and landscape, between the memory and the place remembered. This skeleton map is therefore particularly flimsy, and seems all the more precious for its fragility. And we can see what he’s getting at: roads have their own moral character because those who travel along them construct their moral landscapes from the outcomes of their meetings. The post-war Ford may well have considered such a thought to be embarrassingly quaint. The style (‘nay, more’) would certainly have seemed that way, but this does not stop him from retracing the same cartography of moral thought in Tietjens’s doubtful conclusion at the end of the novel’s first section: one has to keep on going. . . . Principles are like a skeleton map of a country – you know whether you’re going east or north. The knackers cart lumbered round the corner. (PE 144)

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It is almost Beckettian black comedy. The term ‘skeleton map’ is rendered morbidly literal by the proximity of the horse’s wounded body. The idea of a topographic network of principles that are mystically attached to a physical locus (with a stable cultural identity) has just been seriously challenged by Valentine Wannop’s caricature of Tietjens’s obsolescent Toryism. His unconvinced and unconvincing determination to keep on going despite all this is the tragi-comic impetus that will allow the tetralogy to progress through the upheaval of the Great War. We cannot help thinking that it is also Ford making himself keep writing. What ensues is, in a very great part, the dramatic evolution of a stubbornly conservative moral geography under the influence of political and psychological forces of modernity which the war reveals to be irresistible. In its place, a relativist and multidimensional moral topology emerges with its own mimetic stylistics. It will be the task of the rest of this essay to suggest that this evolutionary ‘plot’ self-consciously revisits the evolution of the topographical elements of Ford’s own post-impressionist writing (its styles and themes), and that the most salient philosophical origins of this evolution can be traced to French writers like Poincaré and Tarde. Finies, les parades: psychological geometries (No More Parades) The influence of mathematics on modernist literature is perhaps too often taken for granted. The field of theoretical physics seems treacherously familiar to critics. Passing references abound in our metanarratives to things like Einstein’s Relativity and Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy. Somehow this is matched by a paucity of specifics. There are exceptions, of course, especially in regard to the best known of the canonical modernist novels with a mathematician protagonist: Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.9 Musil’s unfinished masterpiece begs comparison with Parade’s End. The fact that the central locus of both groups of novels is a mathematician who is witness to (and in some sense psycho-cultural vessel of) a naïve prewar society that history is about to explode, seems to deserve further investigation. Christopher’s marginalised moralistic perspicacity and Ulrich’s hollowed-out amoral blindness are opposite sides of the same observational coin. Both reveal the Great War to have been an inevitable result of the rapidly evolving cultural and political realities of pre-war Europe, and that the unwitting creation of this violent evolutionary potential had something to do with maths. Beyond

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comparing Christopher Tietjens to Arthur Marwood, however, Ford scholars tend to overlook (forgive the pun) the mathematical angle. This is hardly unjustified. Ford appears, on the surface at least, to overlook the mathematics himself. We do get a sense towards the end of Some Do Not . . . that a shell-shocked Tietjens has lost some precious gift when he confesses to an impotence in the face of ‘the higher mathematics’, but Ford knows better than to insist upon what could be a destabilising irony, given that the author (unlike Musil: a structural expert in both mathematics and irony) had probably never understood it in the first place. The difficult marriage between mathematics and morality is explored in no more depth than the simplistic example of Tietjens’s career-ending refusal to massage statistics. On closer inspection, however, Ford is revealed to be a writer intimately acquainted with – and unusually sensitive to – the psychological and social repercussions felt during his lifetime of the most culturally influential development of modern geometry: Henri Poincaré’s evocation of relative multi-dimensional space. Poincaré’s was not an arcane idea shared amongst a small côterie of savants. On the contrary, it provided the core thesis of the second volume of his successful popular introduction to modern scientific philosophy, Science et Méthode (1908). The linguistic and metaphorical pertinence to Parade’s End of Poincaré’s humanist depiction of three-dimensional Euclidean space (that would be implicitly transcended by an elastic multi-dimensional topology), is arresting. It is worth quoting at length: With each of the blows that may strike us, nature has associated one or several parries [parades] which enable us to protect ourselves [. . . .] It is this complex system of associations, it is this distribution table, so to speak, that is our whole geometry [. . . .] It is this multiplicity of parries, [parades] and the resulting coordination, that is space. Space created in this way is only a small space that extends no further than the reach of my arm; the intervention of memory is necessary to push back its limits [. . . .] We can, if the enemy is too far away, walk up to him first and extend our hand when we are near enough. This is still a parry, [parade] but a longdistance parry [parade]. Furthermore, it is a complex parry, [parade] and the representation of it that we make for ourselves combines the representation of the muscular sensations caused by the movements of the legs, that of the muscular sensations caused by the final movement of the arm, that of the sensations of the semi-circular canals, etc. We have, moreover, to make a representation, not of a complex of simultaneous sensations, but of a complex of successive sensations, following one another in a determined order.10

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Poincaré defines Euclidean space as a cognitive champs de manœuvres (a ‘parade ground’), emergent from the physical realities of the human body and designed to delineate the protective enclosure it inhabits. This is described psychologically by means of an imagined parade de parades (a ‘parade of parries’). With the addition of memory, it extends to become a set of linear narratives (histoires) of projected sensations and counter-sensations that map the axes of bodily extension and movement. At a stretch, we might even want to call it a ‘corporeal textuality’ of spacial perception and memory. He goes on, of course, to insist that this crude bodily delimitation of the idea of space can and should be transcended by a multi-dimensional topological imagination. The brilliance of Poincaré’s vulgarizing metaphor for the distribution table of three dimensional co-ordinates resides in its implicit dramatization of the response in the mind of the resistant reader. The text at once posits a revolutionary idea that rocks the stability of an ideological conception of space, and pre-empts the ideological rejection. The threat that this concept posed to a contemporary world view should not be underestimated. It is Copernican in scope. The imaginatively conservative reader might find himself, just like the person described, rehearsing a repertoire of parries (parades) to defend not just his personal space, but the idea of personal space itself, from this devastating conceptual incursion. Simply put, Poincaré is making the mind-boggling suggestion that we ‘think outside the body’ . . . that we transcend this parade de parades and allow our spatial imagination to open out (to ‘evolve’, in a geometric sense) into the mutable and multidimensional realm of topological manifolds. In doing so, he provides us with a metaphor for the impact upon the individual consciousness of modernity’s philosophical cruxes (emergence, relativity, contingency, pluralism) that seems paradigmatic. There exists no evidence that Ford was directly influenced by a reading of this passage, nor is it likely that a play on parade was premeditated for the title of the second novel.11 Poincaré’s relativity of space would, however, have been practically unblockable as a cultural reference for a literate francophile at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Ford’s sensitivity to the multilingual and etymological complexities of key words like ‘parade’ is undeniable.12 Neither is the influence merely a matter of linguistics or bald intertextuality. The portrayal of Christopher Tietjens in No More Parades is of a precisely

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analogous territorial consciousness under siege. His is a mental space suffering under a perpetual bombardment – not just of literal ordnance, but of military communications, letters, requests for leave, rumours, accusations, challenges, memories and (most importantly perhaps) threatening ideas and doubts. It is also his internal moral geography (its structure, its locality, even its putative solidity) which is besieged. The principles of his skeleton map – the interdictions of those things that ‘some do not’ do – massage figures, commit adultery, demand repayment of debts, mistreat a horse, divorce – threaten to give way under the bombardment. Moral and physical threats are conflated: Divorce leave! . . . Captain McKechnie, second attached ninth Glamorganshires, is granted leave from the 14/11 to the 29/11 for the purpose of obtaining a divorce. . . . The memory seemed to burst inside him with the noise of one of those beastly tin-pot crashes – and it always came when guns made that particular kind of tin-pot crash: the two came together, the internal one and the crash outside. (PE 305)

Each of these repercussive ‘tin-pot crashes’ echoes with moral insubstantiality and political illegitimacy. And yet each one also carries the very real threat – soon to be another strafing memory – of what will happen to that other pathetic cuckold and butt of rumour: O Nine Morgan. Tietjens’s bizarrely grim joke that the soldier’s head may have been caved in by ‘a prize-fighter’s fist’ (PE 310), reveals his preoccupation with a sense of impotence in the face of an unending (metaphorical) bombardment of news from home: a home that can no longer be identified as a stable moral landscape, and to which one cannot expect to return. It also grotesquely evokes the impotence of the feeble human body in the face of a literal (modern, technological) bombardment. Unlike the punches of a prize-fighter, these are blows that cannot be parried. It is as true of the psychological and cultural changes with which modernity assails the conservative mind as it is of the bombs that assail the entrenched body: there are no more parries. Even memory carries the threat of dismemberment. One can find relief only in screaming irrationally over the din. Social Topologies: (A Man Could Stand Up –) The culmination of the assault upon Tietjens’s mental and moral space occurs, naturally enough, in the front-line trenches of the tetralogy’s

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third volume. It is here that he uses the most poignantly fragile, futile and fantastic imagery of Euclidean geometry: Something behind his mind forced him to the conviction that, if his head – and of course the rest of his trunk and lower limbs – were suspended by a process of levitation to that distance above the duckboard on which, now, his feet were, he would be in an inviolable sphere. (PE 543)

David Trotter’s recent examination of Ford’s agoraphobia,13 as mirrored in Tietjens’s fear of the open road in Some Do Not . . . and his withdrawal into himself in No More Parades, would certainly seem pertinent to this fantasy of ‘an inviolable sphere’. Something has changed in this third novel, however. Tietjens has developed a desire to regain the exposed position, to stand again on top of one of the small hills (or terrils) in the area and take the cartographic view. There is a concomitant desire – subtle, nuanced and gradual, but very real – to re-engage with (even to improve) the lines of communication which had previously made him flinch. Ideas, like divorce, which had exploded in him like shells, have been rendered almost plausible by the obliteration of his moral landscape. Thus his agoraphobia begins to evolve into claustrophobia. The threat of bombardment, however, renders such desires almost unthinkable. Aside from the surrealism of its image of levitation, the above quotation inevitably reminds the reader of poor old O Nine Morgan. It is thought that cannot be dis(re)membered. Tietjens’ mind makes the attachment of trunk and lower limbs to the word ‘head’ obsessively explicit, as if wishing his head to be down by his feet might tempt cruel fate into a decapitation. The barrage is doing its demoralizing job. Even Tietjens has become superstitious. Along with ‘strafe’, the word ‘barrage’ provides an insistent, threatening back-beat to the second part of A Man Could Stand Up –. It is an interesting word, introduced into English during the Great War, and seemingly definitive of its attritional, static form of warfare. It derives from a French term, cognate (and virtually synonymous) with ‘barrier’. The idea of the tir de barrage was to pin the enemy down with a wall of artillery fire through which they could not pass: to stop them from advancing or retreating. Like the verb ‘besiege’, it develops an internal antithesis in English that brings it almost into the realm of Freudian ‘primal words’. It means both ‘a barrier to escape’ and ‘an incursion’, and as such acts both to delimit the frontiers of occupied territory and to transgress them.

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The psychological repercussions of the barrage of modernity upon the individual’s mental space are matched, in A Man Could Stand Up –, by social repercussions which demand a little further elucidation from contemporary French philosophy. Gabriel Tarde, the Chair of Modern Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1900 until his death in 1904 (when he was replaced by Henri Bergson), had an influence upon modernist thinking that, I would argue, was hugely underestimated throughout a century that tended to represent him merely as the antithesis to Durkheim. Tarde’s philosophy was much more original. It was, I would argue, as important as Bergson’s. It insisted that psychology and sociology were inextricable: that all thoughts, perceptions and ways of thinking were socially contingent and emergent; and that all societies were constituted as networks of psychological influence. One need only imagine the impact that ideas like those in the following extract might have had upon early modernist artistic and literary movements (like Ford’s impressionism) – and, indeed, note how uncannily pre-emptive they are of postmodernist notions of intertextuality – to accept the potential salience of Tarde’s influence upon his contemporary culture: every act of perception, insofar as it involves an act of memory, which is to say always, relies upon a kind of habit, an unconscious imitation of oneself by oneself [. . . .] if the idea or the image recollected was originally placed in the mind by a conversation or a reading, if the habitual act has as its origin the vision or the knowledge of another, this memory and this habit are simultaneously social and psychological facts.14

Crucially, Tarde’s writing provides us with a cogent explanation of how inventions (innovations, new ideas) of the sort found in his own work can worm their way – via communicative pathways that access the inherent imitative ability of the human mind – into the practices and behaviours of an unwitting culture. In his examples – especially of artistic innovation and changes of morality – Tarde is fond of territorial metaphors of defence and siege which recall both Poincaré’s depiction of Euclidean space and the ‘plot’ of Parade’s End. We should bear in mind that socio-political metaphors like these ‘walled enclosures’ are also analogues of individual consciousness for Tarde: successive artistic inventions have owed their apparition and their fortune either to the change of ideas, or to the change of customs. Tributes to the elders, family blood-feuds, hospitality, bravery; later: work, probity, respect for livestock, or for

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He portrays morality (and artistic vernacular) as a geographically circumscribed metaphor and the means via which a society’s territory is defended. In short, morality and æsthetic taste are both a series of parries. The massive increase in the speed and scope of communication between individuals and groups that characterizes modernity necessarily impacts upon societies’ mores and modes of representation. There is a kind of critical limit – achieved when a sense of mutable moral relativism and plurality becomes so unavoidably evident that the geometry of a moral space defended in such a way is rendered untenable – at which point both the content and the nature of a seemingly permanent moral geography are irreversibly destabilised. There are no more parades. It would be inaccurate to suggest that Tietjens surrenders to such a morally relativist outlook in A Man Could Stand Up –. The fact remains, however, that he comes to some kind of an accommodation with a few of the moral proscriptions he has used to defend his mental geography in Some Do Not . . .: capitalism, divorce, an extramarital relationship. All of these adaptations of his mœurs come as the result of a careful re-engagement with the lines of communication (with home, with the army) that he had previously conflated with the paralytically demoralising barrage. Central to this effect is an embrace of the social contingency of his individual consciousness. This is particularly noticeable in the way he thinks about – and increasingly like – Valentine Wannop. There is a mimetic influence of these two disparate minds upon each other in the tetralogy which (attractively for readers whose own experience of

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mimetic response to the linguistic thought of the authorial other is mirrored) forms the bedrock of their redemptive relationship. It allows Tietjens relief from the claustrophobia of his own mental and moral space in the trenches, and offers him the means to go on after the war. Max Saunders makes the excellent point that Ford after the war becomes, in Bakhtinian terms, a multivocal writer: Ford responds to the complexity of war-torn Europe not by impressing his own designs upon his material, but by rendering the complexity. His fiction does not work to subordinate everything to his voice (as Dowell tried to, but failed); it recreates the play of conflicting voices, volitions, attitudes and viewpoints. His writing exemplifies what the great Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘dialogic’ prose. That is, it not only represents the social world by an interplay between different discourses and idioms, but it also investigates how that interplay gets internalized. A novel – especially a novel which recreates a whole society or a historical phase – will, like that society, be an arena across which echo the voices of the characters, and the discourses of the groupings they represent. But in a profound sense so is the individual subject, who also finds himself or herself in that arena.16

Part Three of A Man Could Stand Up – is testament to this. Just after the oft-quoted passage in which the Colonel claims the worst thing about the war to be the letters from home, and the tragically absurd tableau of Tietjens buried to his waist in earth like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, the reader is treated to a particularly Bakhtinian kind of atonement during the multivocal reunion and celebration of the armistice. It is not merely an aggregate plurality of points of view that characterises this moment of ecstatic communion. There is also a mingling of voices: a mimetic overlap of characters’ perspectives: No one like Fat Man Tietjens. He lounged at the door; easy; benevolent. In uniform now. That was better. An officer, yelling like an enraged Redskin, dealt him an immense blow behind the shoulder blades. He staggered, smiling into the centre of the room. An officer gently pushed her into the centre of the room. She was against him. Khaki encircled them. They began to yell and to prance, most joining hands. Others waved the bottles and smashed underfoot the glasses. Gipsies break glasses at their weddings. (PE 673)

As the scene climaxes, Tietjens is transformed into an elephant (the animal of memory). The style becomes carnivalesque: ‘The man with the eye-glass had stuck a half-crown in his other eye [. . . .] He was swaying slowly. The elephant! They were dancing! Aranjuez was hanging on to the tall woman like a kid on a telegraph pole’ (PE 674).

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Bakhtinian, no doubt, but one might also read a good deal of Tarde into the effect. It is social cohesion as mimetic psychological interaction. For Ford, the kind of imitative mental transference that Tarde understands to be the basis of societal construction is the core experience of an enduring love. Consider, for example, how he writes about his lamented friendship with the man upon whom he claimed Tietjens to have been based: I do not know that I ever consulted him [Arthur Marwood] over any of my personal difficulties as I invariably consulted Conrad [. . . .] It was much more as if I ‘set’ my mind by his. If I had personal problems I would go and talk to him about anything else. Then the clarity of the working of his mind had an effect on mine that made me see, if not what was best to do then what would be the most true to myself.17

This is as close to a perfect example of Tarde’s theory of imitation in practice as one might hope for. It is also a nearly paradoxical appeal to something like French existentialist authenticité (or the related, but not identical, German Eigentlichkeit: ‘what would be the most true to myself’) based upon the mimetic reproduction of another person’s thinking. If we recall that initial encounter between the two versions of ‘the way your mind works(/walks)’ in the fog in Some Do Not . . ., we can see how this Tardean stylistics of mental mimesis has had a characteristically modernist ‘evolutionary’ effect on both characters’ moral geographies. Their mental maps are no longer restricted to individual space, having merged and multiplied into a mutable and multidimensional social topology. Our final step will be to see how this evolution of moral geographies across the tetralogy traces a stylistic transformation in the mœurs of Ford’s writing itself: from the impressionism of the early work to the nuanced dialogic patterns of The Last Post. The Aftermath: mimetic syntheses (The Last Post) It is a matter of regret, perhaps, that the word ‘aftermath’ has nothing to do with mathematics. Historically, and literally, it meant the second crop of hay grass that matures in late summer after the first mowing (math). It would be ready (and called ‘standing hay’) at about the same time one harvests cider apples. It is precisely this crop, therefore, through which the crashingly insensitive and risibly pretentious American, Mrs de Bray Pape, rides at the beginning of the tetralogy’s last book. The scene may well have been included merely to extend

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her villainous credentials as the vulgar, anti-natural force of modernity responsible for the end of Groby Great Tree. I doubt we should ignore the subtler symbolism, though. The figurative use of ‘aftermath’ – to mean the dilapidated state of some temporal or spatial site after a violent upheaval (the upheaval needn’t be negatively inflected; it could be a party . . . a parade) – derives from traditional associations of reaping and mortality. Life struggles back, but – initially, at least – it is less sweet.18 It is the robust and prolifically internodal nature of their rhizomic root-structures that allows grasses to produce two crops a year. Gilles Deleuze is credited with developing the idea of the rhizome as a social epistemological image (and antithesis to the hierarchical icon of the [Groby Great] tree).19 I would argue, however, that such postmodernist growths are simply ‘aftermath’ to the first, crop of modernist writings that focused upon the complex and subtle internodes of social thought. The subterranean influence of this network of ideas – in the fiction, for example, of Joyce and Woolf, and in the social science of Gabriel Tarde – never lost its cultural fertility, even after these particular stems were reaped. Despite its obvious conservatism, The Last Post demonstrates how the mental and moral geography of a group of characters (and of an emergent culture) can be shown to have evolved into a rhizomic topology by means of a stylistics which achieves a comparable effect in the reader’s mind. It comes as a disappointment to many that we should be alienated from Christopher’s thoughts at this point. And yet this is the proscription (abandoning the dominant point of view of the nineteenth-century protagonist) that allows the writing to open itself to a mimetically intertwined epistemic geography that will make new life possible in the aftermath of war. With this one exception, the reader is granted access to all areas: even to the mind of the mute Mark and his previously overlooked petite amie Marie-Léonie. But it is not merely an expansion of the number of mind-styles that we experience. The way they interact has also opened out. Whilst the characters obviously retain their own clear points of view and idiolects, the extent to which their thoughts, words, memories and opinions mimic and respond to one another is remarkable. The dominant mode of Ford’s elastic free indirect style in this novel is flashback as internal memory, prompted and modulated by seemingly irrelevant points of contact or conversation with other characters. This builds on the emergent style of the previous three

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novels, of course. A mind given to long digressions (narrative, discursive, imagistic) in the context of the interpersonal contacts of their everyday lives is a quality shared by Christopher and Valentine. It is perhaps something like Ford’s own experience of life. Often, of course, they are distracted by the memory of the other and of the brief moments they have spent together. Only in The Last Post, however, does this style open itself fully to the wider mimetic networks of a new social psychological topology. Groby Great Tree may be down, but the rhizomic culture it has left behind will nourish the aftermath. It is no coincidence that a network of loving relationships should make the postwar existence viable for this group of characters. As shown above, the link between love and epistemological mimesis is more than a simple matter of coincidence or empathy for Ford. It is something complex and enduring at which these characters have worked, and at which we see them continually working in their transformative musings upon their lives and their relationships. Alain Badiou, in Eloge de l’amour, insists upon this mental ‘work’ of love: There is work involved in love; it is not just a miracle. You have to man the breach, you have to take guard, you have to join up, with yourself and with the other. You have to think, act, transform. And then, yes, as the imminent recompense for this labour, there is happiness.20

The imminent recompense for a reader of Parade’s End is the sense of one’s own mind opened up to new historical possibilities – new moral geographies. It is recompense for the labour involved in re-enacting a radical evolution in social and stylistic mores through which the writer has lived and written. Despite the multiplications and the shifts of focus, at the centre of this matrix we never lose sight of a relationship as apparently unlikely as any Ford himself enjoyed. It is, at every reading, compelling to experience how Valentine and Christopher slowly fall in love on the basis of a mutual appreciation of the depth and value of the same kind of mimetic intellectual relationship as developed between reader and author. Their joint intuition of this love, despite their differences and the tenuous and hostile circumstances – their gradual acceptance of its consequences – is genuinely seductive to the reader. Desire for the protracted consummation is the motor that drives us (or the horse that draws us) through the landscape of social, cultural, moral, political and psychological change, precisely because it so closely resembles the pace and mode of our own succumbing to

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the unlikely charms of the old Edwardian novelist: the ‘dear old mealsack elephant’ . . . the transitional fossil of Anglo-French modernism.

NOTES Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in De Profundis and Other Writings, ed. Hesketh Pearson, London: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 62. 2 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 55. 3 Ford Madox Hueffer, The Soul of London, London: Alston Rivers, 1905, p. 9. 4 Schank, R. C. & Abelson, R., Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum Assoc. 1977. Schank, R. C., Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and People, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 5 Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 4-5. 6 Ford, Parade’s End, London: Penguin, 2002 – henceforth PE; pp. 134-5. 7 Ford, No Enemy, ed. Paul Skinner, Manchester: Carcanet, 2002 – henceforth NE; pp. 26-7. 8 Ford Madox Hueffer, England and the English, New York: McClure, Phillips, 1907 – henceforth EE; p. 154. 9 Notable recent exceptions beyond the realm of Musil studies include Daniel Albright’s Quantum Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Michael Whitworth’s Einstein’s Wake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Allen Thiher’s Fiction Refracts Science (University of Missouri Press, 2005). Jeremy Gray’s Plato’s Ghost (Princeton University Press 2009) is remarkable in taking the opposite perspective, i.e. mathematics in the context of modernist literature and art. 10 Henri Poincaré, Science et méthode, Paris: Flammarion, (1908) 1924, pp. 105-8. Tome II Chap. 1 ‘La Relativité de l’Espace’ II-III. All translations of quotations from the French are my own. References are to French originals. 11 It is worth pointing out that the title of the 1933 French translation of the novel by Fernande Bogatyreff and Georges Pillement seems even more pertinent to the Poincaré quotation than the original English. Finies les parades could mean not simply ‘the parades/parries are finished’ but also that they are finite. 12 See, for example, his extended riff on ‘felicity’ in Between St. Dennis and St. George, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), pp. 203-5. It begins like this: ‘“Un vieux piano supportait, sous un baromètre, un tas pyramidal de boîtes en carton.” [. . . .] it is perhaps only Flaubert who ever paid sufficient attention even to the French language to reach its thorough understanding, and thus to appreciate the value to the world of the mind of Félicité, who for more than forty years was the servant of Mme Aubain of Pont-l’Evêque’. Oddly, the quotation from ‘Un Coeur Simple’ here is precisely the same one used by Roland Barthes in his 1

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demolition of realist stylistics: ‘L’Effet du Réel’, Communications, no. 11 (1968), 84-9. Ford’s use of it actually manages to do a better job of destabilizing the precarious pyramid (that glaring symbol of the moral geometry of freemasonry) of Flaubert’s representation of France. Ford’s vision of the country’s happiest quality – ‘felicity’, itself a kind of realism – seems to emerge exclusively from a whimsical play on words found in a work of fiction. This implicitly calls into question the attempts of realist fiction to hold at bay precisely this kind of ludic imagination. The problem is compounded by the wholesale re-use of the chapter in the postwar A Mirror to France, as if Ford’s rather desperate (and already longsince outdated) plea in 1915 that France should ‘never change’ had somehow allowed its culture to fend off the transformative effects of the war. David Trotter ‘Ford Against Lewis and Joyce’, in Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations, ed. Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 7, pp. 131-49. Gabriel Tarde (1890), les Lois de l’imitation, Paris: éditions Kimé, 1993, p. 81-2. Ibid., p. 375-6. Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, vol. 2, p. 211. Ford, Return to Yesterday, London: Gollancz, 1931, p. 375. It is probably no coincidence that Mrs de Bray Pape’s own self-identification as a second growth is so patently absurd. She believes herself to be the reincarnation of Madame de Maintenon. Her grasp of history is feeble, to say the least. And this has something to do with her apparent lack of pathos and her insensitivity to the other characters’ concerns and ways of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1980. Alain Badiou, Eloge de l’amour, Paris: Flammarion, 2009, p. 70.

MAPLINES: VISIONS OF FRANCE IN FORD MADOX FORD’S NO ENEMY Ellen Lévy The most literal map in Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy is drawn by the soldier-poet Gringoire on the Western Front, atop Mont Vedaigne. A seminal scene in this ‘oblique or displaced autobiography’ (the expression is used by Max Saunders in his discussion of Ford’s book on Conrad),1 the scene allows Ford to set out, through an exploration of the protagonist’s levels of awareness, his theories of perception, hierarchised, multiple, split in this case between the acting intelligence officer doing his map-drawing duty, the soldier subliminally scanning his surroundings for traps and camouflage, the physical man seeking sustenance, the aesthete startled into consciousness of the inappropriate but undeniable beauty of exploding shells. Later, when Gringoire has taken over the narration of his own story from his Boswell-cum-amenuensis, the Compiler, the notion of a topographical map is de-realized, transformed into a survey of mental landscape, in remarks he makes on his failure to communicate with the French Minister to whom he has been ordered to report in Paris. Asked to produce books of propaganda when he is preoccupied with procuring ferrets to control rats in trenches, Gringoire explains: Quand on est poète one requires – one requires a little reëntrant, with water – a little stream, indicated by a wavy line in blue pencil; copses, indicated by dotted-in round o’s with tails to them; rushes, indicated by hieroglyphs like the section of a hairbrush; a gingerbread cottage, for which the symbol is a hatched square.2

For real topography may quickly be submerged, effaced, coloured over by emotion, association, memory, by the distractions of parallel lines of thought – a notion shared by Christopher Tietjens, in No More Parades, when he sees the world ‘as a map [. . .] an embossed map of greenish papier maché’ with the blood of his erstwhile companion, O Nine Morgan, ‘blurring luminously over it’.3 The maplines along which visions of France are traced in No Enemy are, certainly, those of war (front lines, trench lines, mule lines,

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frontiers) and of relations between combatants (in particular, ruptured lines of communication between allies) but also lines of memory (France at peace, France at war) and of genealogy (literary lines that in No Enemy seem to replace any suggestion of personal or familial lineage), as well as the lines of grace and beauty that come to symbolize hope for another kind of post-war world. For one may map a state of mind, as one maps a landscape, map stories, as Robert Macfarlane has suggested, as well as grids,4 trace lines of thought as one traces the traverses of trenches, follow the track of memory as one rides trainlines across a territory. When Gringoire is stationed at Albert, for example, its features play mnemonic tricks on him: his frequently culinary mind-space is invaded by the savour of an omelette enjoyed in the town twenty years earlier, while certain roads in the vicinity bring back boyhood recollections of walking or cycling ‘from Calais to Beauvais, by way of Arras; from Paris to Tours and along the Loire [. . .]’ (NE 63), these routes spinning memories ‘like a string unravelling from a ball’ (NE 30). The attempt to billet men in Pont-de-Nieppe calls up pictures of military training in Wales, an experience that had once, itself, conjured tormented thoughts of fellow soldiers crawling through the ‘immense ribbon of territory’ that the war had scarred and ‘beaten to a pulp’ (NE 65) in a paroxysm of bellicose erasure. In such conflated instances, dimensions collapse in a web of intricate connection: time is spatialized, a road into the past; space temporalized, two time zones, or three, imprinted on a single place. Frontiers give way, just as the demarcation of Flanders and northern France is effaced, with lines of conflict re-drawn, separating, on the one hand, military and civilian populations and, on the other, distrustful military allies.5 When Gringoire is summoned to Paris from the battlefield both these latter rifts are exacerbated. The first is couched in literary terms through a chance encounter with an English officer who has abducted his little girl from her misbehaving mother. Gringoire, who has been reading Henry James at the Front, thinks of the child as Maisie. His growing alienation from civilian interference in the war’s conduct fuses with the atmosphere of intrigue and suspicion in which James engulfed his little heroine who, it is to be remembered, at the culmination of her troubles, dreams, Ford-like, of escaping to the south of France with the step-parent she loves best. On the same trip to Paris, Gringoire notes the reserve, even the taciturnity, of the French officers he meets. Ford had explored the

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potential for such bi-cultural misunderstanding in Between St. Dennis and St. George (1915) in which the French are depicted as a people apart, experienced in invasion, inured for centuries to being the object of their neighbours’ covetousness. In the face of immemorial menace, they endure: For it is because the French peasant, the French farmer, the French handicraftsman, and the French small trader do not expect vast things of life, do not strive after the immense fortunes of the modern industrial system, that they remain so much more largely than any other race, patiently and efficiently working on the acres that saw their births. And it is because these patient, efficient, sober, industrious, and splendid populations remain upon their acres that France will have saved Europe, if Europe is to be saved.6

In No Enemy, the probing of the Gallic temperament continues in a letter written from behind the Lines and highlighted by its double inclusion – in English in the main text and in French in an appendix. (It would also be included in Ford’s 1926 A Mirror to France.) It delineates the disapprobation of a French officer watching a group of Tommies playing a raucous cricket match during a break from combat. The Frenchman thinks it would be better for men so situated to pray and to meditate rather than play. Gringoire is indignant over the officer’s begrudging a bit of relaxation to boys just in from the trenches, but when Ford reviews the episode in A Mirror to France, he alters his judgment: ‘the truth is that the French cannot afford to be thought-free – not ever! [. . . .] As long as they possess Provence or one inch of the shores of the Mediterranean they will always have [. . .] potentially devastating foes’.7 The full measure of such AngloFrench estrangement is taken on the train to Paris and during the interval of an opera performance there. On both occasions Gringoire speaks to French officers in their native tongue, only to be addressed by them in English, an inversion that signals their refusal to engage with him as an intimate. Other trains, however, that crisscross the textual plains of No Enemy bring about the meeting of minds. It is during a journey by train in the company of Lieutenant Morgan, whose death haunts him as O Nine Morgan’s death later haunts Christopher Tietjens, that Gringoire listens sympathetically to an outline of his companion’s life history. Gringoire’s imagination is equally haunted by the tears of a little recruit, who during a pre-war train journey, wept as he travelled from his home in the south to join a regiment in the north. The narration of

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this episode is typically labyrinthine. In it, two train journeys proceed on parallel tracks: in the first, the weeping recruit is consoled by compassionate fellow travellers who, without knowing him, understand his desperation (‘“Ah! Ah! Yes,” said the listeners. – “The marchings are long; the drills difficult; and the rifles heavy.” – “Yes: heavy are the rifles!” – “Ah! Ah! Yes!” – “And the little recruit is away from home [. . . . ]!”’; NE 89); in the second, Gringoire, on a separate journey, as his train nears the little recruit’s hometown of Orange, recalls the earlier episode and surmises, as the southern landscape flashes in picture frames before his eyes, the reasons for the commiseration displayed to the young soldier by utter strangers. Through the text march the bootsteps of strangers less benign: For there was no house in all that landscape whose women hadn’t known the suspense of absences; there was no stack whose builder hadn’t at one time gone, or come back. And there was not one, of all those objects, that did not dread – that for forty years had not dreaded – the hard footsteps, the shames, the violations, or the incendiary fires of conquerors who should come from ‘beyond Lille on the frontier’. (NE 90)

Later, when Gringoire is himself at Orange and looks out from the heights of the Roman theatre, he thinks once again of the little recruit (‘that is how the mind really works’, he comments, ‘linking life together [. . .]’; NE 89) and, at the same time, the tower at Orange is doubled by the balcony of the Opéra de Paris from which Gringoire had gazed at the darkened streets of the capital, seeing beyond them, a vision of the conflagration of war and the faces of his dead companions. Rail-lines may serve as a figure of the nation, their tracks the lifeline of the body social.8 This configuration presents itself gradually to Gringoire, through the trope of a tightly-packed skein unthreading itself. The process begins with the recurring motif of the onion, used to evoke the centrifugal layers of a nation’s hierarchical structures. The minister in Paris, for instance, may be forgiven for knowing little of the conditions at the Front, since he is buried like the heart of an onion, far from the mud of the trenches, beneath innumerable protective wrappings (NE 133). This image opens out, transforming itself into one of receding spatial planes: ‘[. . .] round the Palace of the Sacred Emperor, there must be the Great City, and round the Great City must be La Grande Nation – stretching away and away, for miles and miles and miles. . . .’ – an aposiopesis which leads into a

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metaphor of the nation as ‘twenty-seven hours of railway journey,’ a journey both in space and time: ‘past Etaples, where I had spent years before, long days in chalets amongst the pine wood; past Calais where my grandfather was born [. . .]’ (NE 133). Little Maisie, another centrifugally-placed figure, connects to the rail-line imagery as well when she asks Gringoire how to find the ‘cog-wheel railway’ that will help her reach her mother who, she has been told, has gone to Heaven, a remark which draws from Gringoire the moral that to separate a child from its mother is perhaps ‘a worse crime than crossing the frontier at Gemmenich’ (NE 55), this latter phrase, one that radiates like an obsession through Ford’s work, recalling the frontier passed by humankind on 4 August 1914. Ford’s text presents a network of intertextual connections (to both extra- and intra-Fordian writings), establishing explicitly, for example, its literary lineage in a footnote provided by the Compiler which explains the origin of Gringoire’s name – a nickname, in fact, bestowed by schoolmates, after reading Alphonse Daudet’s ‘La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin’. Daudet’s narrator, an ancestor of Ford’s Compiler, addresses an admonition to his Gringoire, an impecunious poet of uncompromising principle, reminding him that those who refuse to graze in the meadows of conformity will be eaten themselves by hungry wolves. Max Saunders has noted the genealogical line of Gringoire, from the late fifteenth-century poet-dramatist, Pierre Gringore (14751539), transformed by Victor Hugo into La Esmeralda’s unwitting betrayer in Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and resuscitated by Théodore de Banville in his one-act comedy Gringoire (1866).9 This latter Gringoire, although upholding the general rule of the convergence of art and starvation, does manage to achieve conjugal happiness and to articulate a stirring defence of the poet in society. When his beloved, Loyse, expresses amazement that poets seem to content themselves with writing poetry when there are so many more heroic feats that they might accomplish, de Banville’s Gringoire explains: Eh bien, ce qui fait le poète, le voici: toutes ces douleurs des autres, il les souffre; tous ces pleurs inconnus, toutes ces plaintes si faibles, tous ces sanglots qu’on ne pouvait pas entendre passent dans sa voix, se mêlent à son chant, une fois que ce chant ailé, palpitant, s’est échappé de son coeur, il n’y a ni glaive ni supplice qui puisse l’arrêter; il voltige au loin, sans relâche, à jamais, dans l’air et sur les bouches des hommes. Il entre dans le château, dans

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Ford’s Gringoire, too, sees himself as a saviour of humanity through the practice of ‘good cooking, thinking, and the arts’ (NE 51), practices, of course, excelled at by the French. In England, however, Gringoire can only be an eccentric, a member of the ‘XVIIIth Category’ of ‘totally unproductive’ members of society that Ford would wryly enumerate in It Was the Nightingale.11 Gringoire’s companion in his Gingerbread Cottage is Mme Sélysette, a descendant perhaps of one of the title characters of Maeterlinck’s Sélysette et Aglavaine (1896), a wife so devoted that she commits suicide by throwing herself from a tower rather than interfere with her husband’s on-going love-life. The Sélysette of No Enemy is said by her companion to be as loyal as she is good-humoured. A dark-haired beauty of the South, she connects to other continental ladies in Ford’s oeuvre with whom, despite conspicuous differences, she shares certain qualities. Ford had sung the praises of such women in Between St. Dennis and St. George and would do so again in A Mirror to France: women who can trim a hat so well that its feathers do not lose their shape under stress and who, like the Cathedral in Amiens or the city of Carcassonne, symbolize the greatness of a culture that gives ‘attention to details because honour demands that this attention should be given’ (BSDSG 195); women who make domestic life into an art, holding everything that is not done by hand to be suspect, installing, as Valentine Wannop declares in Last Post about her life with Christopher Tietjens, Frugality as a Deity. Although physically and socially dissimilar from Mark Tietjens’ blond, northern Marie-Léonie, Madame Sélysette can produce shandygaffe just as Mark’s helpmeet produces apple cider, she is an adept of potage bonne femme as Marie-Léonie is of the soup that she feeds so lovingly to her paralysed homme, while all the while denouncing the iniquities of English turnips. Such women are in the line of Rosalie Prudent, a re-incarnation in No Enemy of the Rosalie Martin who was portrayed in Ford’s longunpublished ‘Epilogue’12 and of whom a variant appears in A Mirror to France in the person of a washroom attendant who, like Rosalie, lost her husband and two sons in 1914 and who refuses to desert her post in a Paris theatre, despite lucrative incentives to decamp. In No Enemy, Rosalie Prudent (who admittedly is Belgian, not French, but

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who is encountered by Gringoire on the French side of the frontier) embodies the idealized Housekeeper,13 the source of home comforts, the darner of shirtcuffs, patient, stoic, eternal, endowed with the unspoken courage of simple people of heart. Her forehead is glimpsed subliminally as a gleaming triangular patch of light through the dark window of a house near the ruined church of Pont de Nieppe, a motif that links her to the lozenges and ovals, the glowing expanses and the green vignettes of sanctuary which beckon to Gringoire throughout No Enemy. She takes the wet and unbilleted officer into the house, warms him, digs up potatoes for his evening meal, releasing in Gringoire the haptic memory of the feel of warm earth in a night-dug vegetable patch, a warmth he remembers likening to that of a woman’s bosom. Despite her northern provenance, Rosalie is an avatar of ‘Dame Provence,’ the careful housewife, who sits at home with her account books, with ‘in her apron pocket, the one bulb and the sole herbs that cure all indigestions, crises, impulses to massacre. . . .’.14 Such steadfast heroism finds a masculine standard-bearer in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a purveyor of the Line of Grace both in his person and in his art. Integrating into the novel a piece he had written for the English Review15 and which he would re-publish in Thus to Revisit (1921), Ford presents the young sculptor as an Apollo-figure, casting a god-like sunbeam into the dark caverns of English cultural life or, switching mythologies, ‘like the dove in Early Italian pictures’ (NE 106). Gringoire links Gaudier to what is eternal in art, noting in one of his sculptures, the ‘tightened softness of the haunches of a fawn – of some young creature of the underwoods, an ancient, shylypeopled thicket’ (NE 109), tying Gaudier’s art to the spirits of woods that, as Ford says in Provence, ‘were old when Zeus was new-born’ (Provence 85-6). Although Gaudier was killed in battle in June 1915, his memory survives as a sign that the salutary spirit of Art abides, even in the ‘low’ unperceiving ‘teashop’ of an unappreciative and uncultured England. The carved lines of Gaudier’s fawn transmute into the lines of verse which punctuate the text of No Enemy, marking beginning, middle and end, leading to a dénouement which Cornelia Cook has described as a ‘shared reconstruction’,16 the collective recitation of a poem linking past and present, war and peace, conflating a moonlit battlefield and the moon over the fragile sanctuary to which Gringoire has finally attained. His poetry, he declares, must be the barbed wire that keeps the wolf of starvation from his door (NE 114).

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Ford uses such locutions as this to pull meaning taut, forcing disparate elements into fruitful conjunction, connecting, doubling back, overlaying, for as any map-reader knows, paths bend, weave, double back on themselves, interlace, meet in nodes of arresting juncture. Thus, in No Enemy, the name Rosalie, used by the troops to designate a bayonet, is bestowed on Gringoire’s symbol of fortitude and compassion. His post-war garden, the symbol of the Frenchinspired horticultural economy that, along with art, will save the world, is evoked in military terms: its lines of plantation are ‘trenches’ (NE 21), its flowers wave stiffly like ‘a battalion on parade’ (NE 13). The safety Gringoire seeks must be ‘a dugout, as proof as possible against the shells launched against [him] by blind destiny’ (NE 135), an image which in its turn calls up the memory of a redoubt that was transformed into a regimental garden. Most strange is an inversion created between the wartime exultation experienced at a moment when Gringoire has escaped what he believed to be certain death, a moment, which recurs in an altered version in A Man Could Stand Up –, when Gringoire strides joyfully through vegetation beneath which lie the dead, feeling as though he were an antique god17 and the despair that the peacetime gardener feels when he realizes that slugs have attacked his seedlings or drought his crops: ‘the worst feeling in the world,’ Gringoire insists, ‘like death’: That is perhaps why farmers are so often passionately disagreeable and apparently unreasonable men. For there is nothing that so much resembles contact with, wrestling with, a personal devil as to awaken one morning and to find that a whole crop of seedlings has vanished before a myriad of slugs. That happens. If you don’t believe it, read White’s “Selborne”. It is loss, ruin perhaps. It is like death: a profound and unforeseen disaster. And your mind personifies the slug as intelligent, malignant, a being with a will for evil directed against you in person. I think that, whilst it lasts, it is the worst feeling in the world. Drought is nearly as bad. (NE 25)

And, of course, there is the Gingerbread Cottage discovered by the soldier Gringoire on Mont Vedaigne and, from that war zone, grown into a vision of desired home. On Mont Vedaigne, as the sun goes down, Gringoire catches sight of the glimmer of the sea beyond Dunkerque in a moment that crystallizes his longing for the sanctuary of English country. In Between St. Dennis and St. George, Ford had described a moment before the war that crosses this vision: breaking through the wall of a house in Kent, making a window, having pierced

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through plaster, brickwork and tile, he stepped back as would an artist from his easel and looking through the newly-formed aperture, saw ‘a most astonishing picture’: – a belt of painfully vivid blue, a belt of painfully vivid pink, and above the pink another belt of blue. And in the belt of pink, which was formed by the French cliffs, there were nacreous markings, for all the world like the little ruddled and bluish shadowings of mother-of-pearl – they were the Cathedral of Boulogne, the houses of Boulogne, and the column that Napoleon I erected to commemorate the invasion of Great Britain. (BSDSG 209)

The mischievous irony of the presence of a monument to Anglo-French strife only adds to the utter miraculousness of the view, since this rare sight of France from the coastal region of England is, for the author, the most beautiful spectacle in the world, producing in him a state of intense emotion, his residences in the southernmost counties of England accounted for, as he recounts in It Was the Nightingale, by the fact that thence he could most easily escape to ‘the land of Nicolette’ of which he had dreamed all his life (IWN 10). Indeed, in an oeuvre which coheres, re-works, returns obsessively to phrases and themes, incrementing and restating them in the on-going exploration and experimentation that was Ford’s writing life, No Enemy seems to form with It Was the Nightingale one of these telling intersections: the former memorializing the tears that are present in things while it creates a paean to a beckoning homeland; the latter expressing the call to the returned soldier and poet who feels displaced in his native land, of a new sanctuary – the sanctuary of la France. No Enemy’s art reposes on such intersections, its webs of interconnection – geographic, communicatory, mnemonic, genealogical – spun across the abyss of war, of exile, of absence, of artistic isolation. A good map, it has been said, should allow for more than one line of contemplation.18 Ford, who took pride in the ‘duplicate cerebration’ with which he was credited by a critic in the New York Times (IWN 143), multiplies the means by which his text, itself the product of pioneering genetic crossbreeding, breeds meaningful patterns that in the end themselves become a form of asylum.

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NOTES Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 180. 2 Ford, No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction [1929], ed. Paul Skinner, Manchester: Carcanet, 2002 – henceforth NE; p. 81. 3 Ford, No More Parades [1925], in Parade’s End, Manchester: Carcanet, 1997, p. 494. 4 ‘Broadly speaking, there are two types of map: the grid and the story. A grid map places an abstract geometric meshwork upon a space, within which any item or individual can be co-ordinated [. . . .] The power of grid maps is that they make it possible for any individual or object to be located within an abstract totality of space. But their virtue is also their danger: that they reduce the world only to data, that they record space independent of being. Story maps, by contrast, represent a place as it is perceived by an individual or by a culture moving through it.’ Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places, London: Granta, 2007, p. 141. 5 Certain associations slip out of chronology altogether, connecting experience to what is immemorial: a group of market women gathered near a stout gendarme brings to mind Chantecleer surrounded by admiring pullets, while the fairytale ‘Gingerbread Cottage’ so incongruously perched near the summit of Mont Vedaigne is inhabited by an old Flemish couple who seem to have stepped out of a weather house. 6 Ford [Hueffer], Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations, London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1915] – henceforth BSDSG; p. 68. 7 Ford, A Mirror to France, London: Duckworth, 1926, pp. 278-9. Although written after No Enemy, A Mirror to France was published earlier. 8 ‘L’imaginaire du train commence à passer par une image concrète très particulière, un dessin, celui de la carte de France avec son réseau de lignes convergente vers la capitale ....’ This ‘système sémiotique graphique’ represents the nation. Philippe Hamon, Imageries: Littérature et Images au XIX Siècle. Paris: Jose Corti, 2001, p. 376. Hilary Mantel speaks of English train tracks as ‘the veins and arteries of the nation’: ‘… is this not the country, this mesh flung over the uplands and river valleys, this net of metal which holds it safe, marked out in points of light?’ Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost, New York: Picador, 2003, p. 108. 9 Saunders, op. cit., p. 623, n. 3. 10 Théodore de Banville, Gringoire, Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1866, p. 55. ‘Well, here is what makes a poet: he suffers all the pain that others feel, all those unknown tears, those soft complaints, those sobs that have gone unheard, find expression in his voice, blending with his song, at the moment that the song, wingèd and quivering, has flown forth from his bosom; neither sword nor scourge can stop it; it flutters away, ceaselessly, forever, in the air and on the tongues of men. It enters the castle, the palace, it bursts out in the middle of joyous feasts, and it says to the princes of the earth: – Hark!’ (my translation). 11 ‘“Travelling showmen, circus performers, all writers not regularly employed on newspapers, tramps, pedlars, all painters not employed as house, factory, industrial, carriage, or sign-painters; all musicians, all unemployable persons . . .” 1

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and, oh, irony! “Gentlemen, independent.”‘ Ford, It Was the Nightingale [1933], Manchester: Carcanet, 2007, p. 243. See Ford, War Prose, ed. Max Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet, 1999, pp. 57-63. This is the term Ford uses to translate Flaubert’s ‘bourgeoise’ from the opening of ‘Un Coeur Simple’. See the chapter entitled ‘Félicité’ in Between St. Dennis and St. George. It is to be noted that one of Rosalie Prudent’s daughters is called Félicité. Ford Madox Ford, Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine [1935], Manchester: Carcanet, 2009 – henceforth Provence; p. 68. Samuel Hynes, ‘The Genre of No Enemy’, Antaeus, 56 (Spring 1986), 131. Cornelia Cook, ‘Constuctions and Reconstructions: No Enemy’, Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 2, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003, p. 204. ‘. . . through the thistles, dusty in the hot sunlight, Gringoire went with immense, joyful strides. He said that he was extraordianarily fit in those days! And an innumerable company of swallows flew round him, waist high, just brushing the thistledown. “They were so near,” Gringoire said, “that they brushed my hands, and they extended so far that I could see nothing else. It is one of the five things of the war that I really see, for it was like walking, buoyantly, in the pellucid sunlight, waist-high through a sea of unsurpassed and unsurpassable azure. I felt as if I were a Greek god. It was like a miracle.”’ (NE 24) Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900, London: Verso, 1998, p. 8.

IMPRESSIONIST CONFUSION, DISSOLVING LANDSCAPE: RECONSTRUCTING PROVENCE Alexandra Becquet Ford Madox Ford was a Francophile to the core. France and the South were part of his existence ‘from the very beginning of life – and no doubt in [his] ante-natal blood’, both maternal and paternal, that is, Ford Madox Brown’s, his mother’s father, and Francis Hueffer’s, his own father.1 Both men, artistically erudite, were passionate exponents of French culture, particularly of the troubadours aspiring to ‘the inseparability of words and music’, while Brown, as a painter, naturally laid stress on the visual arts of the country of his birth too.2 Ford, in turn, endeavoured to celebrate the land he associated with his closest relatives and friends, and with Art through numerous works, in which he either discussed France or chose it as the setting for his fiction, notably his post-war writing. As the volumes copiously show, he profoundly admired French culture, traditions, landscapes, arts as well as artists, and finally claimed that ‘France has to be unchanging or we cannot live’ (MF 29). France was, however, also the stage of World War One for Ford and the site of sublime landscapes in the midst of which he could have died.3 Yet it also forms the backdrop of his multifaceted reconstruction after Armageddon when he followed an itinerary that was at once physical, psychological and artistic. It is first the reconstruction of that man who ‘was a writer, a complete writer – and nothing but a writer’; it is therefore, and possibly first and foremost, the reconstruction of his aesthetics which ‘the war has left […] in an impasse’.4 Finally, it is that of a country where the arts and the mind may thrive again after the global conflagration. This essay aspires to follow Ford’s progress through France, away from Armageddon to Provence, which he started charting in No Enemy, his ‘reminiscences of active service under a thinly disguised veil of fiction’, elaborated in fiction with The Rash Act (1933) and Henry for Hugh (1934), and ended in a return to non-fiction with Provence (1935) and then Great Trade Route (1937).5 While trying to bring out some of the French landscapes which Ford renders in these

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works, I shall reflect (on) his path from the War southwards and beyond. Considering with Max Saunders that Ford’s Weltanschauung is ‘never simply visual’, I contend that these panoramas bear witness to the writer’s struggle to make us see them and to his ultimate success in doing so through writing which reveals his appropriation of place, as the views gradually metamorphose into a personal, Provençal ‘mindscape’.6 The canons of Fordian Impressionism define writing as the rendering of ‘superimposed emotions’ and ‘the record of the impression of a moment’ which necessarily reactivates the memory of another ‘impression of a moment’, which reactivates another such memory and so on.7 While the Impressionist ‘gives you, as a rule [. . .] the fruits of his own observations alone’, these are subjected to his emotions and self since ‘Impressionism is a frank expression of personality’ (‘OI’ 37, 36). Ford’s writing is thus what I would term an objective subjectivity best revealed in the hallucinatory superimpositions that imbue his œuvre. These naturally pervade his landscapes which are refracted through the Impressionist prism to be revealed by it and which, in turn, reveal it. No Enemy, Ford’s sole opus about the war ‘in the form of overt first-person narrative’, offers ‘both in what it describes and what it enacts, a “Reconstructionary Tale”’, especially in its consideration of writing and rendering the conflict.8 Indeed, as the Compiler ‘reflects on and interprets Gringoire’s immediate impressions’, he gives them the textual shape they require to appear as hypotyposes and so be the pictures of Impressionist writing that ‘come out of [their] frame and seize the spectator’ (‘OI’ 48).9 As for Gringoire, he is the ‘poet and Gallophile [who] went to the war’; he and his perceptions therefore dramatize the ways in which the conflict precluded vision – as well as Ford’s trial as an Impressionist artist.10 Besides, Compi’s and Gringoire’s respective narrations, albeit intertwined, create a tension that surfaces not only in the ‘continual struggle of wills’ which the two act out (NE 50) but also in the work’s competing, though sometimes merging, multiple layers of visuality. No Enemy thus offers a comprehensive image of the war and its influence on vision, a complex picture which is forcefully revealed in the treatment of the landscape seen from Mont Vedaigne (NE 37-45). Composed of three moments and a somewhat epiphanic fourth one, the episode condenses the visual aesthetics of the work. The first

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description of the panorama is obviously re-composed by the Compiler, being very organised, aestheticised and minutely detailed (NE 37-8). While it sets the scene, it also anticipates Gringoire’s visions and consequently stands as a reference so the reader is able to grasp their full significance. Indeed, Gringoire’s first perception of the landscape is tellingly succinct: acting as an intelligence officer, he seeks only to register the territory’s elements of ‘topographical value’ (NE 41). He is thus under the influence of the distinctive visual training of the war, encapsulated in military topography and mapping, which implies that ‘he saw without seeing, and memorized without associations’. Nature and architecture are overlooked – literally – to point to the battle grounds that are ‘just names attaching to dark patches in a great plain’, and the countryside becomes ‘merely a congeries of landmarks to be quickly noted and acted on by the practical will’.11 What remains are ‘four cards – like the range cards one makes for musketry’ (NE 40), which hint at the intrinsic violence of such a map, while the landmarks and tools used to produce it mirror the mechanical, detached registering of the panorama. This passage clearly demonstrates how the war precludes sight and determines visuality: by subsuming apperception and the absence of connotations, it unveils a form of visuality directly opposed to the Impressionist artist’s since ‘seeing to’ something hinders ‘seeing’ it (NE 26). Visibility is here unattainable, for names and maps, ‘represent[ing] nothing visual at all’, merely subdue the horrors of the war in meaningless symbols to leave the landscape, as Ford would later put it, another insubstantial ‘embossed map of greenish papier mâché’.12 When the intelligence officer’s task is completed, ‘[Gringoire] looks at the view again, but this time his response is aestheticised’ (Hawkes 165). Little white balls existed on the brown line, the landscape was pale yellow – as it might be the gold of corn fields. The red roofs of a village that he knew to be Wytschaete were brilliant and quiet in the sun – but, on the brown line beneath that ridge the little white balls went on coming into existence – one every half second. (NE 43)

Reminiscent of Ford Madox Brown’s Carrying Corn (1854) and yet still marked by ‘[a] great number of signs of war’ (NE 42), such a visual and artistic perception of the landscape indicates that the Compiler oversees the description again. Here he performs his role of ‘fictional frame’ to the full (Skinner xii): by framing the text and the

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view, he allows the construction of perspective which grants the Impressionist writer the distance from the scene he needs so that he then may ‘by the power of the written word [. . .] make you see’.13 This hypotyposis actually emerges as the epitome of Armageddon in Ford’s writing, in what it represents and how it represents it, as it appears both in this crucial passage of No Enemy and in one of the most arresting moments of No More Parades, significantly placed just before the close of the novel (NMP 493-4). These textual paintings are rendered through Futurist and cinematographic aesthetics, which, as I have argued elsewhere, may be deemed the fittest to present the war and which, significantly, Ford often adopts to depict the conflict’s most impressive landscapes.14 Under the guise of ‘the peaceful dimension of violence’ (Gordon 34) which the allusion to Madox Brown’s painting reinforces, this picture effectively shows the pandemoniac and traumatic force of the war to which ‘Gringoire is still responding [. . .] as a soldier’ (Hawkes 166). In a final decisive break, Gringoire ‘achiev[es] sufficient aloofness of mind to notice the landscape that surround[s] him’ (NE 61). In one of those rare moments when ‘the strain of the war lift[s] itself from the mind’ (NE 14), ‘the landscape ceases to be viewed in military terms’ (Hawkes 166) and his response changes completely: And, after that, it was just emotions. The landscape became landscape, with great shafts of light and shadows of clouds; the little white cottage with the green shutters, a little nook that should be inviolable; the haricots interesting as things that one might plant in a Kentish garden that sloped to the sea. The range of hills was no longer a tactical position. (NE 44)

The ‘temporal complexity of this passage’ (Hawkes 166) mirrors its visual complexity. Not only does Gringoire ‘notice the landscape’ but he sees beyond it. Through it, and in the midst of the conflict, he is able to picture the war’s aftermath and draws the contours of the reconstruction to come. (If Ford often draws on Futurist and cinematographic techniques to represent the war, he aptly uses the pastoral here, as he does in Last Post, to signal reconstruction – which the mode as a rule intimates.) Gringoire’s vision is not merely the visual actualisation of what had so far been ‘an intellectual idea’ or ‘a prayer’ (NE 35, 37). It also corresponds to his circumstances after World War One and is, as one of the four landscapes, ‘part of his immediate self’ (NE 26) and so of his future. Past, present and future coincide in this other, doubtless most significant, instance of Gringoire’s ‘gazing

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through rifts of mist’ (NE 14). Like William Sorrell, the protagonist of Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911) who is shuttled back to 1327 while in a coma, Gringoire is here able to ‘appreciate co-existing scenes’ characteristic of Ford’s pictures.15 For, although the name of the French nineteenth-century pictorial movement is echoed in that of Ford’s aesthetics, the latter very much exceeds the Impressionists’ art and presents a not only visual but also spatial and temporal blend. Whether in fiction or in non-fiction, the reader is thus faced not so much with plain landscapes as with complex holographic compositions that render visions – visions not inspired by the transcendental but informed by the writer’s subjective visual perception. Places truly become Impressionist when portrayed by Ford: he writes about what he calls ‘my France’ (MF 17), ‘my Provence’, ‘my Great Trade Route’; indeed, his treatment of geography and history bears the hallmarks of his aesthetics mentioned above too.16 Although Ford undeniably deals with common sense history, it passes through the unsettling filter of his objective subjectivity. In the dedication of his first memoirs, Ford clearly states that he doesn’t ‘really deal in facts’ for which he has ‘a most profound contempt’.17 Twenty-five years later, he champions confusion as ‘probably the better way to take one’s history’ so as to arrive at an arrangement suited to one’s imagination (Provence 136). Ford thus rejects historical factuality and linear temporality to favour multiple points of view and a simultaneous approach, in line with Henri Bergson’s duration, Albert Einstein’s relativity and Modernist aesthetics. Geography unsurprisingly undergoes the same treatment, as A Mirror to France first demonstrates. Though not adopting French nationality, Ford identifies with Bismarck’s Frenchman who has ‘no knowledge of geography’ while he intends to be ‘a mirror held up to France’ (MF 86, 9). He therefore presents himself as objectively unqualified for the task he has set himself. However, not only is geography ‘intellectual’ for Ford, but a mirror is ‘will-less [. . .] true – and [. . .] misleading’ (MF 10, 9). Ford’s writing is then both dichotomous and ‘Janus-faced’,18 in time as well as in space. It goes ‘backwards and forwards’, just as civilisation is insistently said to move along the Great Trade Route in Provence and Great Trade Route, while the confusion governing Ford’s objective subjectivity reconciles opposites. According to Gringoire’s propaganda – which corresponds to Ford’s Between St. Dennis and St. George (1915), sanctuaries should

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be established in France, where the Gingerbread Cottage is actually located in No Enemy. Yet, the Cottage presents a genuine geographical jumble, straddling the French South, Kent and Germany; it so realizes Gringoire-Ford’s sanctuary as it doesn’t ‘connote any locality’ (NE 35) and comes to be a ‘spiritual home’ (GTR 233), which Provence has always been to Ford. In the opposition between North and South which Ford particularly explores in A Mirror to France, the North looms not so much as a region but rather as a foil to the beauty of the South so that the latter emerges as ‘the only region on the Great Route fit for the habitation of a proper man’ (Provence 20). Indeed, the South is the land of peace and above all civilisation, being ‘its halting place, its shelter and its nourishment’ (Provence 157); it is, in short, everything the North – and the War – is not. Probably for that reason, and since he is instinctively attracted by the ‘Southern magnetic Pole’ (MF 113), Ford shifts South and we follow his progress, from No Enemy through A Mirror to France to Provence, which mirrors his real life journey after the war, from Red Ford through Paris to St Jean Cap Ferrat. From the northern location of Kent remembered in No Enemy, or Yorkshire in Last Post, and pictures evocative of Gainsborough or Constable, Ford’s nook turns into a Matisse-and-Cézanne-like Mediterranean setting, in both fiction and non-fiction, while elaborating on its ‘earlier, English version’. Just as Gringoire’s nook is so rooted in Hansel and Gretel that ‘it is impossible to think of it otherwise’ (NE 7), Henry Martin’s environment for regeneration is deeply grounded in literary and cultural traditions: the opening of The Rash Act is characterized by ‘classical associations’19 while the novel as a whole and its follow-up, Henry for Hugh, are consistently animated by literature – through quotations, writers or works cited, and the two Smiths’ writings – as well as by the ‘cultural ghosts’ of Hugh Monckton’s collection, Ancient Greece or Egypt (Colombino 246, 242-4). Gringoire’s ‘rather hidden spot without a hard road going to it’ (NE 35) has become Henry’s Villa Niké, surrounded by an ‘unintelligent muddle of paths’.20 In the peace of their retreat cut off from the world, both can enjoy ‘a temporary respite from the attentions of [their] friends and of destiny’ (NE 81) – Henry’s being so perfected that he comes to think: ‘. . . he is Destiny’ (HH 295). Since ‘military topography has no symbol’ for such peace (NE 81), both characters are now thoroughly detached from the war, its

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purblind visuality and the crises that stamped the early twentieth century. Ford thus places Gringoire and Henry Martin, like the Tietjens brothers, in the ‘blessed oasis’ he strove for after World War One so they all could be protected against ‘the insupportable madhouse for apes that is our civilisation’ and be ‘passivist, nonresistant, anarchist-quietist or follow whatever counsel of perfection may be vouchsafed [them]’ (Provence 215, 182). Yet Provence isn’t merely a retreat in which to ‘dig [one]self in’ (NE 136). It also offers, in fiction as in non-fiction, a vantage point which becomes one of its distinctive characteristics in Ford’s Provençal landscaping. Indeed, on that promontory over the Mediterranean, we are liberated from shame, absorbed in a meditative state ‘and [think] . . . and [feel]. . . .’ (GTR 396). From there, Ford can, like Gringoire and Henry Martin, see beyond. For, if Ford holds a mirror up to his time, France, or the reader, its value does not rest in its reflective power, which is necessarily restrictive and therefore ‘misleading’ (MF 9). The worth of Ford’s mirror actually lies in its Impressionist potential to reveal what stands beyond it and its surface so that, as the writer contemplates the horizon of ‘the real truth’, he can finally ‘the heavens espy! . . .’ (HH 156). By including both the nook, its enclosure and downward movement, and the promontory, which grants opening and elevation, Provence comes to be a centripetal force, in the image of the lizards on the wall that absorb Ford’s attention, as they will Jeanne Becquerel’s (MF 49-50; RA 233). It reconciles those opposites, as Impressionist confusion does, and finally appears as the eye of the vortex, ‘immutable’ and an ‘earthly permanence’ (Provence 89, 88). Provence then counteracts the world’s intrinsic instability and so allows its reflection. Furthermore, as the country ‘where, Truth having no divine right to glamour, experiments in thought abound’ and where ‘the arts live’ to flourish because they are traditionally respected and thoroughly embedded in life (Provence 65-6, 230), Provence promotes thought and its counterpart, artistic activity. Even the climate of Provence makes the arts prosper as it provides the conditions required by gardening. Not only does it thus enable Ford to be ‘the poorer artist’ and content (Provence 223) but it also allows the development of an art. Indeed, gardening, like cooking, is repeatedly termed an art and is frequently described in the same words as more ‘classic’ ones such as music or painting. Ford forcefully illustrates the status of cookery as an art through Henry Martin’s

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discussion of Jeanne Becquerel’s cuisine which Henry parallels to music, Bach’s fugues in particular, and the painting palette (HH 84-5). Likewise, the author makes a special case for gardening which eventually emerges as an extension of writing, and vice versa. When he declares that ‘[o]ne’s art is a small enclosed garden within whose high walls one moves administering certain manures and certain treatments in order to get certain effects’, his notion harks back to No Enemy, where the parallel is even more potent: Gringoire’s ‘two first thoughts’, as ‘horticulteur’ and ‘poète’, ‘overlay’ and his garden mirrors his epic in the ‘line added to line’, problem and solution.21 Ford’s phrase also echoes The Rash Act in which another distorted quotation from the Song of Solomon (4:12) appears when Henry Martin realizes that ‘he would have to live in a closed circle’, surrounded exclusively by Lamoricière, Jeanne Becquerel and Eudoxie as he reconstructs himself acting as Hugh Monckton, and concludes, musing: ‘Sicut hortus inclosus est soror est conjux. . . .’ (‘Just as an enclosed garden is a sister, so it is a wife’, RA 276-7). So, the nook, circumscribed and hidden, invariably features a garden, which is always enclosed as it is in the Song of Songs. It therefore offers protection, just as his car does to Henry Martin (HH 9), and thus leads to the man’s and the artist’s reconstruction. The landscape itself is in fact a décor which the writer constructs for himself and his own reconstruction after the war: it is at once the result and the source of inspiration, composed by the writer so that he can be immersed in his art and thus practise it. Indeed, it was in a Provençal garden, at St Jean Cap Ferrat, that Ford penned the first words of his ‘immense novel’, Parade’s End (IWN 193). It was in and thanks to Provence that he recuperated from the war since, contrary to that time when the world ‘represented nothing visual at all to [his] intelligence’ (WP 43), the world is now ‘astonishingly visible’ and he is so inspired to ‘write little crisp sentences’ (Provence 139). Besides, sitting at the top of that Provençal promontory, the writer secures the necessary perspective and serenity to peacefully take stock. He can thus come into his own as an Impressionist artist who reconciles opposites and temporalities to stand again ‘in his really proud position as historian of his own time’ (IWN 199). Yet as Provence embraces and weaves together the contrary movements of the nook and the promontory to become a centripetal force, it also brings about ‘the enlargement of the horizons of [Ford’s] world’

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and so comes to be a centrifugal one too (Provence 119). Consequently Ford’s country enables him to muster the reflective power he seeks since it grants him an all-encompassing vision as well as the space and conditions for thought. Indeed, whereas Provence, if only by its title, makes the reader expect a book about the region, Ford describes it as ‘a book of travel’ (24), which it actually is, moving in space and time and so announcing the movements of Great Trade Route. Like Ford’s broadened horizons, the Route itself no longer ends in England but stretches to the United States – even as far as Peru – and is stamped by Impressionist geography: it is an ‘idea’, which knows no geographical limits or consistency, and an ‘allegory’, in the middle of which Provence lies to be forever seen ‘if not with the eyes of the flesh, then at least with those of the spirit’ (GTR 87, 390; Provence 89). As a result, everywhere along the Route is ‘a land like Provence’ (GTR 349), be it the Mediterranean at the Tates’ in Tennessee or a Grimm Brothers’ nook at Wharton Esherick’s cabin in Pennsylvania. Provence finally emerges, immaterial, as one of those ‘imagined scenes [which] rise up between oneself and the objects before one’ (GTR 3). At the close and even in the course of the war, Gringoire, as Ford’s mouthpiece, had already called for the inviolability of the ‘green nook’; that of Ford’s Provence is secured by its immateriality which also marks it as a ‘frame of mind’ that guarantees salvation since it knows no evil (Provence 78). Provence then becomes Ford’s ‘key word’ for ‘a change leading towards [a] redemptive state’ (Wiley 270). It is the cradle of civilisation and a new creed for which Ford rewrites the Holy Writ while he turns the region into a prelapsarian ‘Eden’ (Provence 77). He wants to ‘induce [his] readers [. . .] to settle in [Provence . . .] or at least to model their lives along the lines of the good Provençal and his Eden-garlic-garden’ (Provence 20). He thus tries to rally the reader to his Church and, after Horace and Seneca, to his call for a change of heart and not merely of skies (‘Animam non coleum mutare’, Provence 305). For travelling can take on very different guises, one of which being through time. This is what Ford, in Provence and Great Trade Route, offers the reader who, without moving, travels in history and along the author’s ideal Route. And, as Ford endeavours to erase nations and their boundaries in his writings while ‘projecting [his] Utopia’ (GTR 390-1), travelling too comes to be nothing but an idea, that is, a displacement of the soul leading to ‘the beginning of a State of Grace’ (GTR 86-7) and ensuring

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that civilisation won’t go ‘from Armageddon to Armageddon’ (GTR 108) but will achieve ‘a general return to the frame of mind of the craftsman and the artist’ (GTR 204). So Ford responded to Baudelaire’s ‘invitation au voyage’ and found, by composing it himself, ‘[le] pays qui [lui] ressemble’ and his Muse.22 A multifaceted utopia at the centre of his Great Route and Trade, Provence thus appears as a complex décor the writer dreamt of and perfected throughout his life and works until he could declare out loud that ‘DECORATION […] IS THE SOLE … REASON … FOR … ALL … THE ARTS … LET YOUR LIFE BE DECORATED BY CEZANNE … AND BACH … AND MR POUND and you will be all right’ (Provence 239). In turn, the ‘sole reason’ for Ford’s art is indeed decoration, in the etymological sense: not only the ornament suggested by the Latin root, but also one that is ‘suitable’ – and exceptionally so – from the protoIndo-European base *dek-. Through Provence, Ford thus sets for his reconstruction a décor which suits him and his prose as it harks back to his origins while looking forward to the development of his art. In the land of his forefathers’ artistic passions, Ford meets again with the music, painting and poetry of his youth, the same arts that are intimately intertwined in his writing to create a sensuous prose, the kind Walter Pater, then Conrad and Modernists like Virginia Woolf championed. Thanks to this décor, Ford recovered creativity and could get back to ‘be[ing] a great artist’ since in Provence ‘you [can] afford to look at life and make patterns out of it’ (Provence 225) while for Ford, the essence of Art and so of his own, is to present ‘the whole pattern in the carpet’ (‘OI’ 48). Though characteristic of his writing in general, such patterning is sharpened in the prose of the 1930s, of which Jeanne Becquerel thus becomes quite symbolic: not only does she spend her afternoons contemplating the Mediterranean whilst ‘her eyes [work] things into patterns’ (HH 121), her body and mnemonics also exemplify the Baudelairean world of The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh as well as that of Ford’s latest works where truly ‘tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté / Luxe, calme et volupté’.23 At the end of his travels on the ‘Loop’ of the Great Trade Route, Ford goes back ‘[t]o Nowhere’, as the title of his ‘coda’ chapter announces; a ‘Nowhere’ which, in the last word of the book, is identified as ‘here’: Provence (GTR 360, 408). Following his ‘long planning to return’ (Provence 57) because he has always been ‘an old man mad about Provence’ (MF 208), Ford has thus come back to his ‘refuge in a

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tract of the world where [his] Utopia actually exists’ (GTR 399). Under Provence’s protection and impetus he can emulate Ford Madox Brown and so forever enlarge his artistic horizons by endlessly experimenting so as not to ‘die from the root upwards’ since ‘the remorseless Destiny of Provence desires thus to afflict the world with [his] books’ (Provence 131, 359). Ford’s works about France and particularly Provence are ‘News from Nowhere’. However, they are not just episodes from a fantasized place but the destination of all Ford’s travels, whether physical or artistic. Ford goes ‘backwards and forwards’ along the Great Trade Route and his own itinerary on it: that of his art, through which he creates and actualizes that nowhere; and that of his life, in which he acts out his utopia of the Small Producer with his food coming almost exclusively from his garden (GTR 170-1). Following Voltaire, Ford thus encourages us, if only through his example, to ‘cultivate our garden’ for, while it provides food for our stomach, the garden also and above all brings us food for, and from, thought. Poised at the centre of the Great Trade Route after having magnetically attracted the artist and his art, Provence is the ‘land of dreams and [. . . i]llusions’ (RA 263), an Impressionist utopia for Ford to write in and to write about, and for the reader to experience. It then is not so much the centre as the epitome of Impressionist confusion, being the country of the artist’s (re)construction and the land where the world shall find salvation because: In that country there is room to think. For, though there is little there is a little of everything [. . . .] there is in this territory enough to last a proper man for his lifetime. And he can live a fine life without the agonising wildernesses of worthless Old Masters that make the searching for living painting in the Louvre, the Vatican, the Pitti or even the Metropolitan Museum one long calvary! And as with painting so with poetry, prose, music, myth, religion, history, science – remember Henri Fabre of Avignon! – economics, handicrafts, gardens, seafaring, bulls, crime, and above all architecture, there is in this territory enough. And there is neither mass-production nor the worship of mass-production and Provence is at once the cradle and conduit of that humane, Romance Latinity that alone can preserve from putridity our staggering civilisation and world. . . . (Provence 66)

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NOTES 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8 9

10 11

12

13

Ford, A Mirror to France, New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926 – henceforth MF; p. 114. Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 1: The World Before the War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 43. I am of course using ‘sublime’ in the Burkean, and not the contemporary, sense of the term. Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life: A Memoir, London: Collins, 1941, p. 80. Max Saunders, Introduction to ‘True Love & a GCM’, in Ford, War Prose, ed. Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet, 1999, p. 78. Ford to Victor Gollancz, 1 March 1932: Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard Ludwig, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965 – henceforth LF; p. 204. Though published in 1929, No Enemy was completed in 1919; it is therefore one of Ford’s original attempts to write (about) his war experience and testifies to both his personal and aesthetic trial to do so, as his own comment about withholding the manuscript from publication reveals: ‘It was written, as to one chapter, in the front line, and as to the rest just after peace was declared. I thought at the time that it was too personal to publish at once and determined to keep it for ten years’ (Ford to Eric Pinker, 11 Sept. 1929: LF 187). Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2: The After-War World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 246. Laura Colombino, ‘Ford, Matisse and the Book of the Dead: The (In)visible Objects of The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’, Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture, ed. Laura Colombino, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 8, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009 – henceforth ‘Colombino’; p. 244. Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, Poetry and Drama 2 (June, Dec. 1914), 161-75, 32334. Rpt. in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank MacShane, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964 – henceforth ‘OI’; pp. 41, 40. Paul Skinner, Introduction to No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction, by Ford, 19191929, Manchester: Carcanet, 2002 – henceforth Skinner; pp. ix, viii. Robert Bramwell Hawkes, ‘Destabilising Narratives: Characterising, Plotting, and Trusting in Ford Madox Ford’s Fiction’, Ph.D dissertation, University of York, Department of English and Related Literatures, 2008 – henceforth Hawkes; p. 165. Ford, No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction, 1919-29, Manchester: Carcanet, 2002 – henceforth NE; p. 7. ‘Over a particularly large fir tree’, ‘over an oak’, ‘above a steeple’ (NE 40; italics mine). Ambrose Gordon, Jr., The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964 – henceforth Gordon; p. 32. Ford (pseud. ‘Miles Ignotus’), ‘War and the Mind: II. The Enemy’, 1917. Rpt. in War Prose, ed. Max Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet, 1999 – henceforth WP; p. 43. Ford, No More Parades, 1925, Parade’s End, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002 – henceforth NMP; p. 494. Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, 1897, New York: Doubleday, 1914, p. 14.

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14 For further discussion of Futurist and cinematographic aesthetics in Ford’s war writing, see Alexandra Becquet, ‘Modernity, Shock and Cinema: The Visual Aesthetics of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End’, Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture, IFMFS 8, pp. 191-204. 15 Ford, Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, 1911, New York: The Ecco Press, 1987, p. 303. 16 Ford, Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine, Philadelphia, London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1935 – henceforth Provence; p. 138. Ford, Great Trade Route, New York: Oxford University Press, 1937 – henceforth GTR; p. 14. 17 Ford, Memories and Impressions: A Study in Atmospheres, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911, p. xviii. 18 Max Saunders, ‘Modernism, Impressionism, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier’, Etudes Anglaises, 62:4 (Oct.-Dec. 2004), 422. 19 Ford, The Rash Act, 1933, Manchester: Carcanet, 1999 – henceforth RA; p. 9. Paul L. Wiley, Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1962 – henceforth Wiley; p. 273. 20 Ford, Henry for Hugh, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1934 – henceforth HH; p. 11. 21 Ford, It Was the Nightingale, 1933, New York: The Ecco Press, 1984 – henceforth IWN; p. 144. While drawing on the image of the garden in the Song of Songs, this description of art and its processes in terms of gardening seems to expand on the advice given by Candide at the close of the eponymous novella by Voltaire: ‘we must cultivate our garden’ (Candide ou l’optimisme, 1759, rpt. in Micromégas, Zadig, Candide, by Voltaire, Paris: GF Flammarion, 1994, p. 243; my translation). The French philosopher actually appears in Henry for Hugh as Henry thinks that ‘[i]f there hadn’t been an Aunt Elizabeth one would have had to invent one ... as Voltaire said of God’ (HH 249), thus adapting one of Voltaire’s most famous statements: ‘If God didn’t exist, He would have to be invented’ (‘Epître CIV: A l’Auteur du livre des trois imposteurs’, 1769, rpt. in Epîtres, Satires, Contes, Epigrammes, suivis de Fragments de la Pucelle, Paris: Garnier Frères, 1874, p. 194; my translation). NE 114-5. 22 Charles Baudelaire, ‘L’Invitation au voyage’, Les Fleurs du Mal, 1861, Paris: Folio Classiques – Gallimard, 1996 – henceforth ‘Invitation’; pp. 84-5. 23 Baudelaire, ‘Invitation’ ll. 13-4, 27-8, 41-2 (my emphasis). Henri Matisse’s painting, Luxe, calme et volupté (1904), is known to have been inspired by Baudelaire’s poem. Laura Colombino, to whom I am grateful for having drawn my attention to Baudelaire’s piece, demonstrates how The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh are infused with Matissian light (Colombino 235-41). It thus reinforces my contention that these novels are superlative instances of Ford’s most advanced (because most Provençal) fiction. Ford himself admitted: ‘I consider these two novels are my best books – at any rate they fill exactly my ideas of what a novel should be. Of course the much better known Good Soldier is equally correct in handling, but I think it is relatively rather thin and timid in handling.’ (Ford to George T. Keating, 1 June 1938: LF 295.)

FRANCE AS FIELDWORK, OR, FORD THE ETHNOGRAPHER Caroline Patey Ford’s vision of France encompassed many decades and included numerous regions, with a preference of course for the territory of Provence, which he endlessly charted in his life and works, following routes that led him to experience the country spatially – from Menton to Tarascon, from Carqueiranne to Les Baux – and temporally, in the complex layers of its different cultures, Roman and medieval, romantic or contemporary. As it unfolds from The Good Soldier to Great Trade Route, from novel to essay and Paris to Marseilles, the hexagon is clearly never apprehended as a unity and triggers on the contrary a variety of fantastic, intimate, unexpected and somehow highly original images. Ford’s vision of France is of course that of a lover and of a connoisseur; but it also has a singularity which locates it in some space of its own, semantically, culturally and stylistically. An invitation indeed to chart and interrogate the country that Ford adopted – but nevertheless never adopted him – and explore its geographies, imaginary and real, as they materialize in so many novels and essays. Without forgetting, however, that beyond what Ford wrote and said about France, the modes of his approach to French culture are likely to prove more challenging and revealing; because, cast in the part of the anthropologist engaged in his fieldwork, Ford has left us a unique France whose picture and the part it plays in the writer’s aesthetics and poetics shall be the object of this essay. Playing with Anthropology There is no doubt that the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the new one were saturated with the language, tropes and vocabulary of anthropology, a presence culminating with the huge and lasting impact of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough on the literary imagination of the time: For the writers of the years immediately following the First World War he seemed to offer a way back to intimations of a religious or magical kind. W.

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Though unmentioned here by Frazer’s editor Robert Fraser, Ford is certainly no exception, and he also, like his friends, was quick to capture the anthropological mood of the time and to incorporate it in his work. It shows in his cultural explorations of England and the English, of course, as indeed in his novels, where, directly or implicitly, the great ethnological themes of the time resonate and inform the narrative, whether kinship, rituals or scapegoats.2 Ford’s approach to France is thus framed by the practices and vocabulary of fieldwork and defined, partially at least, by the encounter of the ‘others’ and the interaction between observer and observed;3 a fact made clear by the character of Henry Martin when he considers at the end of The Rash Act that ‘He had gone native indeed. And he was beginning to penetrate the idea of his fellow savages . . .’ (RA 340). The whole novel is disseminated with continued allusions to the ‘customs of the tribe’ which, however droll and seemingly insignificant, let nonetheless transpire the sub-text and vocabulary of anthropology: Any French people would never take a letter from anyone’s hand. They regarded letters with the superstition that savage tribes attach to objects under a taboo. (RA 223)

In A Mirror to France, on the other hand, the essayist is cast in the part of the explorer and re-enacts ironically the feats of so many imperial geographers and conquerors as he adventures in the great, wild country [. . .] towering up into massive, terraced heights, burrowing deep into valleys, stretching out for ever in plateaux enormously on high, opening down into great dales. . . . (MF 151)

A description, incidentally, hardly evocative of French landscape and rather disciplined countryside! In his ethno-anthropological mood, Ford is inclined to ponder on customs which he surprisingly associates with tabus – ‘Beaucaire that still has her fair that has existed every year on the old merchants’ tabu-ground since history began’ (Provence 15) – and ‘Saturnalia’, yet another word of Frazerian derivation, that Ford, incidentally, feels affection for and uses

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repeatedly, in The Good Soldier for instance; thus, the unrestrained celebration of Saturn offers an unexpected similitude for the sour pleasures of the Riviera: So you get an atmosphere of inexpensive saturnalia with an ever-present undercurrent of hatred. The foreigners come seeking a fabulous cheapness, or a fabulous laxness in sexual morality, that have no existence beneath the measly sumach trees with which the Boulevard is planted. (MF 108)

No doubt there is much irony in the way Ford handles some crucial tropes of anthropology, such as the fabulous tale of the invincible white man who becomes the semi-divine ruler of a grateful native people. This basic Eurocentric ingredient of anthropological encounters and analyses is comically re-staged in a Paris market: where the fruiteress was ignorant of the fact that the visit of a charming (English) lady of a dominant race in a motor car and all ought to be regarded as the coming of an angel or other supernatural being bringing with it all sorts of unrealisable blessings and rendering that dark spot of the earth for ever a little brighter. (MF 194)

Nor is Ford ignorant of the political undertones of anthropology, if the smiling market anecdote gives way to a sharp remark on the colonial past and present of England and the well-known British inclination to massacre easily ‘mild, adoring, black, yellow or coffee-coloured races’(MF 194). Anthropologizing the French is thus a way to make fun, with surprising modernity, of the then rarely challenged paternalistic attitude toward ‘primitive cultures’ which invariably informed the works of Malinowski, Spencer and Gillen or Pitt-Rivers and of course Frazer himself. The Customs of the Tribe But in articulating his French journeys in the language of the ethnographer, Ford was also, more seriously, interrogating the issues of identity, community, group, civilization. He was, in James Clifford’s words, posing questions ‘at the boundaries of civilizations, cultures, classes, races and genders’ and no doubt aware that ‘Ethnography decodes and recodes, telling the grounds of collective order and diversity, inclusion and exclusion’.4 No surprise, then, that food should be so central in A Mirror to France and Provence, in true anticipation of the semiotics of food that would become the common wisdom and

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lore of modern ethnology, from Mary Douglas to Jack Goody and Claude Lévi-Strauss: Possibly the nearest relative to a cognitivist account of food has been articulated by structuralist anthropologists. They assume that human behaviour falls into patterns or structures that are similar no matter what the task at hand and that activities such as cooking and eating, and indeed choosing what is considered edible, make most sense when compared with other aspects of a society’s activities and belief systems. In Claude LéviStrauss’s famous trope, for example, ‘raw’ and ‘cooked’ are oppositions that are isomorphic with other binaries (such as nature-culture and male-female), which taken together illuminate the myths and social practices of vastly divergent societies. Mary Douglas considers food as a ‘system of communication’ and she speculates how food might be understood as an art form.5

Since food is definitely a language, it is bound to reveal a good deal about social patterns. Far from revealing sheer indulgence or hedonism, Ford’s lingering on recipes and dishes somehow comes as a pioneering forerunner of approaches and methods still in their prehistorical stage when he was writing. And this certainly applies to the bouillabaisse – perhaps the most famous fish soup of France and indeed a metonymy of Provence – which deserves a long footnote in the essay form of Provence (Provence 33, 34) as well as a hot fictional debate in The Rash Act: Coriander seed is one of the chief ingredients, with saffron, of soupe de poissons [. . . .] ‘Get up and catch the rascasse! The rascasse, the rascasse! [. . . .] You need never be without rascasse’ Eudoxie said [. . . .] ‘As for me I can catch anything else but not rascasse’. Soupe de poissons needs rascasse before everything else [. . . .] I shall call you Monsieur Rascasse’. (RA 304, 306)

In the light and deflated tone of casual conversation, Ford also follows the trail of olive oil cuisine as it changes into butter, pork-fat and then goose-fat cooking in the region of Castelnaudary, a culinary variety that defines the different sub-cultures of Southern France. The apparently frivolous insistence on the sensual (and verbal) joys of cassoulet or pieds de mouton à la ravigote thus doubles into a quest for significant cultural patterns, that Ford, moreover, examines in their structure – the civilization of olive oil – but also in their transformations. Contemporary ethnology and L’école des Annales have taught us that the structures of everyday life have a history and that daily rituals change, an awareness very vivid in Ford who anticipates the dangers threatening local cultures and local food in an era of mass

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production and deplores the growing numbers of ‘rather large restaurants in Paris, the few rather dreadful firms that have numbers of dull branches’ (MF 224). Long before the McDonald invasion and the contrary fashion of slow food, Ford knew that cooking and eating are significant rituals, that food is an idiom in the truest sense of the word and that: Every province in France has its way of speaking, its unique sensibility, its literature, its art. It has its tricks and old recipes and gastronomic traditions. You can’t force people from the south to gorge themselves with butter or people from the north to use olive oil.6

Ford is even aware that food is a language in more than one way and that it is also associated with speech through the shared ground of orality, which somehow establishes an ontological connection between both: ‘[. . .] there is a really sensuous pleasure in uttering a correct French sentence, as there is in eating good French cookery, the pleasures being very nearly akin’ (MF 250). Ethnography yet again sets the tune in Ford’s attempted taxonomy of French society which not only investigates the differences between haute and petite bourgeoisie, but contemplates categories and subcategories of doctors, notaires, avoués (solicitors), avocats, pharmacists, the immense body of civil servants, tobacconists, roadmenders, actors, ménagères: Ford likes specificity. The quest for defining features goes on, entailing the relation between the sexes, the institutions, la police, la bureaucratie; it lingers lovingly on the main characters of the group, frugality foremost among them and, also quite conspicuous, the rituals of the community: They are LA PÊCHE and LA CHASSE! And they indeed must be given capitals. For days before the decreed opening of the shooting season and before the statutory opening of the rivers, the whole of France – the whole of France! – buzzes like bees swarming. All the papers, but all, are exclusively occupied with articles on how to shoot partridges from every possible angle; how it is necessary to aim at six o’clock of an approaching hare; how to clean guns, scour gentles, cook gudgeon, or what is the really chic attire for the sportsman. (MF 166)

Moving between the four fields defined by Franz Boas as the agenda of budding anthropology – physical anthropology, archaeological, social and linguistic – Ford duly fulfils the requisite of the ethnographer.7 Typically, for instance, he relies on grammatical or phonetic

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issues in his pursuit of French identity, as shown by his often humorous and insightful observations concerning the idiosyncrasies and the unfathomable mysteries of the language: There is no discoverable reason why one should say bonnes gens whereas if the adjective follows the word gens it must be in the masculine; the use of the subjunctive is not very reasonable, but it is very lovely; why should you say les Johnson when you mean ‘the Johnsons’? why should an author write ‘mes lecteurs ont bon estomac’? why do you write quatre mille quatre cents when you must write quatre mille quatre cent quinze? (MF 250)

Reconfiguring Geographies and Communities As a result of the ethnographic gaze, in his search for local knowledge – in Clifford Geertz’s words8 – and collective identity, Ford takes considerable liberties with maps and geography. The boundaries of the hexagon, in particular, are entirely re-designed: for a start, France begins with the bookstalls of Quai Malaquais, and ‘is anywhere South and generally West of a line drawn from the cupola of the Institut to the spire of the church in the little marketplace in Menton’, therefore excluding for instance Britanny, which anyway is ‘no more French than the Welsh are English’ (MF 86). However shortened in the North, the country extends beyond the Alps to Milan. To Ford’s geographical anarchy must be added the fact that Paris cannot really be considered part of France: ‘it is astonishing to come into a French country where Paris so absolutely does not exist’ (MF 157-8). Further distortions occur when Ford evokes the ‘times in which France, as it were, seems to come into England’, so that, rather implausibly, Boulogne was once in 1873 ‘so plainly visible from Hastings that the people lounging on the quay where the boats came in were quite plainly to be made out by the naked eye’ (MF 48). A piece of information supplemented by the fact that, according to the writer, it is sometimes possible to read a ‘large-print book on those shores of Kent at night by the flashes from Griz Nez’, a lighthouse on the opposite French coast. This could of course be a joke, but what for sure is quite serious is the substantial ‘frenchness’ of Romney Marsh and the Cinque Ports, as witnessed by local Huguenots names, Venesse, Gasson, Odinots . . . . Ford also predicts a future in which both countries shall be reunited, thanks to the accretion of pebbles and the fact that ‘Dungeness Point moves out to sea and towards France at exactly the rate of one yard per year’(MF 48 and CP 155).

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Though amusing, Ford’s maverick boundaries are not made for jest only; they convey genuine questions about cultural and political identities, made all the more urgent and poignant after the bloodshed of the war. What is under discussion in this re-mapping of France is the very idea of nations, those entities who assume ‘the appearance of malignant and long-toothed ogres’ (MF 233). Out with anything like ‘national’ identity, argues Ford, and in with other types of groupings: There does exist today, fourth-dimensionally looming amidst the welter of mad Governments with clamouring boundaries, another commonwealth whose boundaries are coterminous only with those of the habitable globe. This is the Republic of the Arts and of Pure Thought [. . . .] The Republic of the Arts and of Pure Thought is then the only entity that embraces all nations and all creeds, and whose intimate language is universal. It is not true to say that Charles Dickens wrote English or Mark Twain American: they wrote the language of Turgenev, Heine and Ronsard. (MF 234)

In such a republican society, encounters would take place at noninstitutional level, in clubs, book-clubs, primarily, argues Ford, in those sites that are so common in France where ‘national opinions can be changed except during periods of actual hostilities by quite a few educated people, in cafés and drawing-rooms and casually public places’ (MF 234). National issues have indeed little to do with the nature of the people: the poor normal French citizen, pursues Ford, who knows nothing about colonial military adventures, is ‘bewildered and pained when told that in his heart he is a cross between Napoleon, Attila and the late Cecil Rhodes’ (MF 232). As a powerful antidote to the ‘miserable activities of the politicians and financiers who control our helpless destinies’, the ethnological attitude brings to light new and unexpected aggregations: ‘If you threw three stones, one into Birmingham, one into Lyons and one into, say, Philadelphia, the chances are that the three citizens you hit would [. . .] be as like as three apples from not very dissimilar trees’ (MF 231). Unheeding of geopolitics, Ford daringly enlarges the borders of the country and its people: Before and during the late war I had very strongly the feeling that all SouthWestern Europe, bounded on the North by the populations along both sides of the Rhine from its source to its disappearance in Holland, formed one, Frankish people, the difference between a Rhenish German and a French Flemish being negligible, except that the Rhenish German is much more like a meridional Frenchman in temperament and in the values he attaches to life. And until relatively late days the culture of the United States was so exactly

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Somehow pre-figuring some of today’s burning issues, Ford tackles the question of identity in the light of mixed communities, adding an emphasis on the fact that what is for him the heart of France, Provence, is the most ‘be-emigrated into district of a France that is almost the last refuge of the immigrants of all Europe’. Which is the reason why, in town as in the small farms, ‘you will hear almost as much of North-Italian patois as of the impure Provençal that is the local speech’ (MF 156). Origins are so mixed and borders so flexible and extensible that speaking in terms of race or nation has become irrelevant and certainly useless for one in search of France. Civilization – that big word – has little to do with origins, essence, roots, and more with mixture and multiplicity: [. . .] if I could have my way, I would introduce a conscription of the French language into the Anglo-Saxon country and a conscription of the English language into France, so that every soul from the Golden Gate to the AlpesMaritimes was transfused with the double civilisation. (MF 42)

There are, of course, other alternatives to national communities: the courts of love, possibly, the republic of the arts and pure thought, or, less abstractedly, Les Félibristes, the group gathered around Frédéric Mistral that included Francis Hueffer: So what Mistral had to do – and did – was to form an academy which should codify the language as far as it is good for a language to be codified. He restored to literary uses classical Provençal words and expressions the use of which may have died out in the country round Maillanne. (Provence 160)

Just as precious and significant, however, are the informal and unstable societies, united by conversation in salons or cafés or bistrots, as has been already noticed: In this country, go where you will [. . .] if you speak to the man next to you [. . .] he will know what you mean and will have a point of view if you talk about public questions of the day, about the arts, philosophy, aviation, the election to the Academy [. . .] or where you can get good wine. (MF 254)

Nothing is indeed immutable or institutional in these local identities with which Ford undermines the concept of nationhood: they are on the contrary composite, transitory, unstable and undogmatic

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groupings. And how could it be otherwise since, as Ford tells us, we are all passengers, as indeed were his role models the troubadours, always in travel from one court to the other? Ethnology into Art and Back The gaze of the ethnographer, however, entails more than meaningful political and cultural statements; to some extent, it also defines the form of Ford’s modernism and the character of his aesthetic achievement. First of all because it disrupts, and in radical ways, the idea of a solid and compact self. Enacting the play between observer and observed again and again, Ford reshuffles the cards continuously, anthropologizing the French, but also turning back his gaze towards the English and the Americans, or indeed diagnosing the Parisians from the point of view of the Frenchman of France proper, to whom ‘the Parisian is at once helpless and maleficent. He cannot tell a field of turnips from wheat, he cannot harness a horse’ (MF 159). Pronouns are whirled around – we, you, I, they – and Ford’s self wanders between them and between the groups involved. The modern ethnographer, Vincent Crapanzano writes, cannot fix his vantage point and is therefore a roving perspective:9 so is Ford, endlessly en route from one position to the other, one point of view to the other. It could also be argued that Ford experiences creatively the burden of the ethnographer, whose results are always and necessarily fragmentary; for cultural analysis, writes Geertz, is intrinsically incomplete: ‘And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based [. . .]’.10 Whatever the quantity of fieldwork, Ford’s France actively resists homogeneity and coherence, it courts paradox and contradiction, as in the considerations which conclude the linguistic excursion of a Mirror to France: ‘The Frenchman likes to be pedantic in his language; the French also refuse to be pedantic in their language’ (MF 250). Finally, I wish to suggest that the complexities of ethnographic writing resonate with the eternal question of Ford’s reliability or alleged unreliability and with the multiple and hybrid genres of his works. With his re-invented maps and anecdotes and the often fantastical France he recreates, Ford engages in the mission of the modern ethnographer as defined by James Clifford: ‘Interpretative social scientists have recently come to view good ethnographies as true fictions [. . . .] It is important to preserve the meaning not merely of making,

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but also of making up, of inventing things not actually real’.11 I believe Ford would have willingly mirrored himself in the oxymoron, and that his true fictions of France owe a lot to the double discourse of ethnography and as such still have a lot to tell and to reveal.

NOTES Robert Fraser, ‘Introduction’, in Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion, London New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. ix-xlvi (p. xxxvii). 2 Caroline Patey, ‘Empire, Ethnology and The Good Soldier’, Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 2, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2003, pp. 83-102. 3 This essay concentrates on some of Ford’s French novels and critical writings, including Provence. From Minstrel to the Machine, ed. John Coyle, Manchester: Carcanet, 2009 (1935); A Mirror to France, London: Duckworth, 1926; The Rash Act, Manchester: Carcanet, 1996 (1933), The Cinque Ports: A Historical and Descriptive Record, Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1900, abbreviated respectively as Provence, MF, RA and CP. 4 James Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 1-26 (p. 2). 5 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste. Food and Philosophy, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 129. On the topic of food and culture see also – among others – Jack Goody, Food and Love. A Cultural History of East and West, London & New York: Verso, 1998; and Jean-Louis Flandrin & Massimo Montanari eds., A Culinary History of Food, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 6 Julia Csergo, ‘The Emergence of Regional Cuisines’, in Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari eds., A Culinary History of Food, pp. 500-15 (p. 512). 7 A. L. Kroeber, The Nature of Culture, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987 (1952), p. 147. 8 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology, London: Fontana Press, 1993. 9 Vincent Crapanzano, ‘Hermes’s Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, pp. 51-76 (p. 53). 10 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture, London: Fontana Press, 1993, p. 29. 11 James Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, op. cit., p. 6. 1

FORD MADOX FORD’S MIRRORS TO FRANCE Robert E. McDonough In 1929, as in most years of the 1920s and 30s, Ford Madox Ford was hoping to arrange for a collected edition of his works. In a letter to Ralph Pinker, his agent for British publication, he suggested fourteen works, including a Collected Poems. Of the roughly fifty volumes he was thus excluding, perhaps the omission most difficult to understand was the Fifth Queen trilogy. And perhaps the most surprising inclusion was A Mirror to France of 1926.1 We may suspect that Ford was attached to A Mirror to France because it contained his fullest statement thus far of the essential value of Provence to civilization, a theme he would come back to in Provence and Great Trade Route. In addition, writers have a natural motivation for overestimating the worth of their most recent work; if that is their best so far, they may reasonably hope that what comes next will be even better. Ford felt this impulse at times, and A Mirror to France had been published only three years earlier. But then we should also note that Ford left off the list five of seven works of prose published between A Mirror to France and the end of 1929. Clearly, at least at the time of making the list Ford valued the work more highly than most critics and readers have. Ford’s modern biographers do not like A Mirror to France. In The Saddest Story Arthur Mizener has trouble getting the title right, calling it A Mirror for France (my emphasis) on first mention (325) and in the index (612); he judges that ‘A Mirror to France is not a very good book’ and that the portion of it that is not ‘taken word for word from earlier books [. . .] consists of the unfocused comments and unpersuasive anecdotes Ford produced when he was forcing his imagination’.2 In Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Max Saunders, Ford’s standard biographer, praises the book’s keynote passage, at which I shall look shortly, as ‘brilliant prose’ (Saunders, vol. 2 188) but then does not pass judgement on the book as a whole, unless that omission can be taken as an implied negative judgement. Alan Judd, writing Ford Madox Ford after Mizener and before Saunders, with the intention of repairing some of the harm done to Ford’s reputation by

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Mizener’s perceived disapproval of Ford,3 nevertheless doesn’t like A Mirror to France. He says, ‘It is not a good book: meandering, overconversational, uninspired, repetitive’.4 Ford himself seems to have felt a need to explain and defend: As for its form – I have begun where the spirit moved me and left off when I think that for the time I have written enough. To all writers there comes – at any rate to me there certainly comes – a moment when one’s voice seems to be going on and on . . . and then on. And one starts as if from a dream and says: ‘My God! Can anyone in the world stand any more of this?’ That is a good time to leave off: perhaps one might even cut out a little.5

And yet there is still the fact that Ford wanted A Mirror to France in his Collected Works and the subjective, personal fact that for all its faults it makes enjoyable reading and raises issues that demand continued consideration. In this chapter I will first make the best case I can for A Mirror to France and then briefly challenge it in order to see how much can finally be said in the book’s favour. Let us begin with the keynote passage. Ford explains his title metaphor. Mirrors are of all shapes and sizes and conformations; one will differ in the qualities of its reflections from all other mirrors as much as one man differs from all other men, or as one witness of an event from all other witnesses. Go into any looking-glass shop such as one of a mysterious wizard’s aspect that I lately visited in a medieval-Georgian, utterly Parisian street [. . .]; or go into any big departmental store in whose furnishing department mirrors are displayed side by side, poor things, like slaves in the market. And then look at yourself in mirror after mirror. You will see that, not only do mirrors differ, but that you are capable of being so oddly viewed that you may well have misgivings as to your real self. (MF 7-8)

Ford then lists three contrasting sets of images that ‘you’ might see of ‘yourself’ in various mirrors: you may see yourself ‘with a mouth that grins from ear to ear and central portions of your anatomy that seem to thrust you backwards – or as so elongated that you think that at last a wasting and chronic disease of the liver has you in its grasp’; ‘as having pockets under your eyes and puce shadows’ or as ‘rosy with shiny hair and alert eyes’; ‘as a moderately normal individual in a glass-roofed warehouse with white-hatted mechanics normally rolling and cutting glass on long tables’ or ‘as someone dimly villainous, come to make nefarious purchases of wicked white-

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hatted merchants who writhe over alchemisms in the shadowy depths behind you’.6 When Ford concludes the passage by asserting ‘this writer is a mirror held up to France: as will-less, really, as any rolled surface of quicksilver, as true – and no doubt as misleading. . . .’ (MF 9), we recognise it as one of his defences of impressionism, not so much as the chosen and carefully developed method of a conscious artist but rather as the inevitable condition of human perception and communication. The writer, Ford says, is ‘will-less’, as ‘true’ and ‘misleading’ as any other (MF 9), differing from all others (since he is a mirror) ‘as much as one man differs from all other men, or as one witness to an event from all other witnesses’ (MF 7). Therefore, there is no possibility of seeing or describing a notional France-in-itself, unmodified by anyone’s impressions. Impressions are all we can get and in this book they will be Ford’s; he is the mirror, he is indeed the title character. Of course, a mirror to France for England (and, to a lesser extent, for America) cannot be directly between them, where it would block the view, it must be off to the side and this is in fact Ford’s emotional position. Whenever he includes himself in the first-person plural, he is talking about ‘the English’ or ‘Nordics’ (those from the north) or ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (in which term he includes Americans). Thus he asserts: If it came to a war between France and my own country I should fight for my own country, but if there were a war between France and any other country in the world – or the whole world – I would sooner die than not fight in the French ranks. (MF 102)

This is extravagantly phrased but believable, and while his ultimate loyalty is to Great Britain he does seem more greatly moved at the thought of France under attack. When Ford says ‘France’ he does not refer to the geographic area so named on conventional maps. Ford’s real France extends from the south bank of the Seine through Provence, or as he says, savouring the details, France begins with the bookstalls on the Quai Malaquais and ends with Marseilles. Indeed, if you added to the Left Bank, Marseilles, with Toulouse and Périgord for cookery, Dijon and the Côtes du Rhone for wines and Provence for gaiety, farces, love-making, bull-fights and, of course garlic, you would have France. (MF 86)

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What is the rest of the country that most of us call France? He explains a few pages later that ‘most of the country from the English Channel to Paris is really England – or, if you prefer to put it the other way round, most of the country from La Manche to the South Riding of Yorkshire is really France’.7 It does not matter which way round you put it since whatever that country is, it is not real France. One characteristic of Ford that places him somewhere between England and ‘the real France’ is his own spoken French. He learned the language from his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, who was ‘born in Calais’ and ‘knew French better than English’, but who ‘insisted characteristically that although one must know French with accuracy one must speak it with a marked English accent to show that one is an English gentleman. I still do’ (MF 113). A few pages earlier in the book Ford has told us that in northern (not ‘real’) France the Englishman would not be honored as a saviour of France, and therefore ‘if in the vicinity of the Boulevard Montparnasse I [. . .] let it slip out that I was an Anglo-Saxon [. . .] farewell to any chance of receiving even rudimentary civility’. Fortunately, however, Ford says he ‘can generally pass at least for an Alsatian and get decently treated’ (MF 109). An Alsatian, not an Englishman but not, in Ford’s terms, a real Frenchman either. In between. Having thus identified his real France, Ford can compare it with England and Anglo-Saxondom. He recognizes that England and America have learned valuable things from France (that is, of course, from Provence) but the result of thinking of them together will be to see contrast. In most important respects Anglo-Saxondom is the opposite of France. The French are thrifty and modest in their financial aspirations, conservative in values and way of life, careful about their language, and thus mature; the English are careless in expenditures and worshipful of great fortunes, proud of being modern and up to date, careless about language and expression, and arrested in their growth at about the mental age of an adolescent. In regard to money Ford says that the French are ‘people with adequate means of living who intend to retain adequate means of living but to leave it at that’ (MF 14). A Frenchman wants money not to accumulate money but for the real good things it will purchase.

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The Frenchman hunts the sou because the sou will send his son to the Sorbonne and purchase for himself certain solaces but [. . .] he has no mystical or mystified reverence for the large fortune as such [. . . .] The Anglo-Saxon on the other hand with his immense power of being dazzled by ‘records’ has for large amassments of invisible wealth a reverence that completely precludes any consideration of what money can do for the individual. (MF 195)

Ford illustrates the consequent French frugality and English and American extravagance with anecdotes. One of these is at his own expense. Feeling obliged to return the hospitality of a Frenchman who had been very generous, Ford invited his friend to lunch and chose a restaurant where lunch would cost twelve francs rather than the four francs seventy charged at the somewhat better restaurant both of them usually patronised. The friend, horrified, refused to eat at the expensive restaurant and dragged Ford by the arm to the better, cheaper one. Ford tried to explain to him that, in England, persons of similar relationships would act as I had acted every time. The host would for that day put up the pretence that he was accustomed to spending two and a half times as much as he was really in the habit of spending; the guest would assume the air that he was accustomed to eating in such restaurants day by day. (MF 79)

The Frenchman calls Ford’s explanation ‘lunacy’ (MF 79) and Ford concludes the anecdote with a shrug for his Anglo-Saxon readers: ‘There are these unbridgeable gulfs’ (MF 80). Ford also has stories of shopping and kitchen frugality. He says that while the Frenchman in a butcher shop will insist on getting exactly the cut and amount of meat he wants, with all possible fat trimmed off, the Anglo-Saxon will be shamed into accepting ‘enormous, nearly meatless mutton chops’ or ‘not [. . .] less than half a leg of mutton’ when he does not need that much because the butcher insists that ‘[h]e has never been asked by the best families to be cheese-paring in his cuts’ (MF 205). Frenchwomen bargain ferociously to get what they want at the cheapest possible price, but an English or American lady of Ford’s acquaintance was cheated in a Paris fruiterer’s when inferior apples were substituted in her package as she left the store to watch a disturbance in the street. When, outraged, she had her driver take her back to the store and complained bitterly, the shopkeeper merely said, calmly, ‘Well, you weren’t looking’ (193). Ford stops short of approving cheating but does make clear that he

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disapproves, as strongly as the fruiteress did, of carelessness with money and purchases. This frugality is part of a general French (‘real’ French) conservatism. And what has been most important in, but is now disappearing from, Anglo-Saxon civilisation has been learned from France. Our former civilisation of chivalries, learnings, arts, crafts, mysteries, abstract thought, frugalities and individualisms came [. . .] from the shores of the Counts of Toulouse; all these things are to-day threatened by that Mass Production that is the one symbol of our two-branched Anglo-Saxon commonwealths. For who should say that we stand for arts, crafts, mysteries, frugalities, individualisms or any of the rest of it, our contribution to the world having been the white-tiled bathroom turned out by the hundred thousand daily and provided with nickelled fixings and glass shelves? (MF 10)

Thus the two nations have dramatically opposed ideas of efficiency. For the Frenchman it means ‘that personal self-respect that enables him to be in harmony with his own soul as he expresses his soul to himself’ while ‘Our “efficiency” consists firstly in keeping ourselves fit, then in surrounding ourselves with objects that function smoothly’ (MF 246). ‘Thus’, Ford sums up two pages later, whereas the Englishman never grows beyond adolescence, the Frenchman of mature years has directed the whole of his desire for efficiency to a real knowledge of what the life of the adult is and what vicissitudes are likely to meet him during his passage through this world. (MF 248)

Ford attributes this greater maturity of the French to their love of their language, their care in using it correctly so that it becomes a medium in which they can think clearly and exactly. He contrasts his servant with the leaders of England and France: My kitchenmaid, from Alsace though she be, cares more about the speech in which she explains why she has insufficiently drained the cauliflower, and will express herself far more justly and grammatically than the King of England making a speech from the Throne or a United States President issuing a message on Thanksgiving Day. (MF 251)

And French and English children will grow to adulthood or permanent adolescence respectively in the atmospheres of these differing attitudes to language. A French child barely able to walk ‘will have its lisping mispronunciations immediately and carefully corrected for the

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sake of its future’, but the ‘Anglo-Saxon man of education returning from a journey’ will address his son thus: ‘“Hello, Gruffles,” or “Podge,” thus perpetuating the remembrance of a child’s earliest blundering over his own name’ (MF 252). And Ford uses the example of a somewhat older child, bilingual in French and English, to demonstrate the continuation of the process. You will find that such a child of from five to eight of either English or French parentage [He is probably thinking of Julie, his daughter with Stella Bowen] will, as far as speech, gesture and point of view go, be practically as old as you and I when speaking French, but will be practically a baby when speaking English. (MF 249)

Very near the end of A Mirror to France, in Chapter IX, ‘From the Grey Stone’, which he subtitles ‘L’Envoi’, Ford offers his most powerful image of the difference in levels of maturity between France and Great Britain. It is an anecdote from his war service. Having just left the trenches and with shells still passing overhead, Ford and the men under his command ‘with an outfield of thistles and a ground of dust [. . .] were playing cricket, with axe-handles for bats, beef-boxes for wickets, and a tennis-ball’ (MF 276). Nearby stood a French officer of Ford’s acquaintance, ‘unbending, and unexhilarated [. . .] very lightly bending back so as almost to sit on his walking-stick . . . [with] a monocle [. . . and a] moustache, which was cropped to resemble exactly that of the late Lord Kitchener’ (MF 276-7). The Frenchman said, in English, ‘I find that very shocking! To jump about and cry out amongst the dust where have fallen so many men!’ and Ford tells us he replied, ‘Mais, M. le Capitaine! nous venons de sortir des tranchées et cela remonte le moral des hommes!’ (277). Ford says that in another conversation with this Frenchman two years earlier he himself had taken the pro-thought, anti-sport position. Now, writing ten years after the battlefield encounter, Ford believes that the Frenchman had been ‘right – if for the occasion a little grudging’ in his insistence that ‘in the intervals of desperate days perhaps one should pray a little. Certainly one should think. And that is the real lesson of France to the world of abstract thought and the Arts’.8 In making this best case for A Mirror to France I have omitted important criticisms that also deserve to be heard. Thus, I may have made the organisation of A Mirror to France seem more conventional, and perhaps more coherent, than it in fact is by bringing passages from

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all over the book together when they illustrate the same theme. And it must be said that while reading the book one judges that too many of Ford’s transitions have nothing more solid than the stand-up comedian’s ‘And that reminds me’ on which to stand. In addition, Mizener is certainly right that some passages of the book are unpersuasive. A longish treatment of fishing in France, advice on how to find the best possible restaurant, and at least some passages imported from Between St. Dennis and St. George do not really seem to belong in the book. All of these are certainly weaknesses. It might seem that the strongest thing to be said against A Mirror to France is that things have not turned out as Ford hoped. He ‘lost’. However, that America, and probably England and France, are still less frugal, less individualistic, less mature and so forth now than in 1926 is probably not to be held against the book. Ford is using France to make a case against the direction in which England and America are going, as he sees it. He is, to use a term made popular a quarter of a century after his death, counter-cultural. But that he is on the losing (so far) side of history does not mean he is wrong. He is advocating, not predicting. Those who share his values might even say that his case is only the more urgent today. Let him have the last word: [I]f in the world from now on there is to be any of the pleasantness that we loved, any of the virtues that we have held made men and women gracious, the civilisation of France, which stands between those frugal Mediterranean quietudes and our Nordic appetites, must preserve itself. If it does not, there may well be in the world many more machines, many more gilded hotels – but assuredly there will be none of that civilisation of altruism and chivalry which, beginning in that triangle of Provence, has spread pleasantness and light upon the minds of men to the farthest confines of the earth. (MF 57-8)

NOTES 1

2 3 4

The list of works proposed can be found in Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 362. Further references will be noted in the text as ‘Saunders’. Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford, London: The Bodley Head, 1972, p. 348. Intention expressed in conversation. Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford, London: Collins, 1990, p. 366.

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Ford Madox Ford, A Mirror to France, New York: Boni, 1926, p. 19. Further references will be noted in the text as MF. MF 8-9. If we think of Ford for a moment as the mirror he claims to be and if we recall the crushing rate of production he had to maintain in order to support himself and his dependents, then we may well believe that he, ‘poor thing’, often felt like a ‘slave in the market’. Furthermore, if we call to mind the contrasting photos of the slim, pre-War dandy Ford Madox Hueffer and the swollen, post-War Ford Madox Ford, and if we contrast the image of himself Ford presents in his books and letters with what we know to have been held of him by his enemies, we will find that most or all of those contrasting images apply to Ford at one time or another. MF 90. In the course of the final editing of this chapter, Max Saunders has pointed out that there is no ‘South Riding’. It would seem that either Ford was under the impression that the South Riding exists or he was having a joke on some of his readers. MF 278. Ford says, ‘I became converted to this idea whilst writing an anecdote. As on that occasion I was writing in French, I will recapitulate it here since it struck me very much’ (MF 276). I am grateful to Ellen Lévy for pointing out that the French anecdote appears in the ‘Envoi’ to No Enemy, written several years earlier than A Mirror to France but not to be published until 1929.

FORD AND PROVENCE1 Julian Barnes Most Francophiles, beside their general attachment to French customs and culture, have an additional fondness for a region or city which speaks particularly to them: for landscapists it might be Burgundy, for monument-sniffers the Loire, for solitarists and hikers the Massif Central. Those who want to be reminded of a certain kind of England go for the Dordogne, where the Daily Mail is readily available. Many simply choose Paris, which might seem to sum everything up, and where – unlike in London – most people still have regional attachments as strong as their metropolitan ones. Ford Madox Ford lived in Paris off and on throughout the 1920s – editing the transatlantic review, living with the Australian painter Stella Bowen, having his affair with Jean Rhys, knowing Pound and Joyce and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, having the twenty-three-year-old Basil Bunting as his office boy. He enjoyed a full literary and social life in the (largely non-French) bohemia of Montparnasse. He once went up in a lift with Jean Rhys and James Joyce: despite his poor eyesight, Joyce managed to notice that Rhys’s dress was undone at the back, and tried to hook her up.2 And yet Ford, who once wrote a book called New York is Not America, also knew that Paris is Not France. For him the real France was a region which official ‘France’ – northern, bureaucratic, centralising – had long ago conquered and attempted to both dismantle and dis-language: Provence. His passionate attachment to the region came from his father, Francis Hueffer, music critic of the Times, who published a book on the Troubadours, and wrote Provençal poetry. Hueffer knew Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914), the poet at the heart of the revival of Provençal, who in 1854 had set up the Félibrige with seven fellow-poets, and an academy to codify the language (the result being the great dictionary known as Trésor du Félibrige). According to Ford, his father played chess with Mistral and was received into the Félibrige. According to Ford, the only two things his father taught him were ‘a very little Provençal’ and rudimentary chess.3 The phrase ‘according to Ford’ needs tacitly applying to much he wrote of an autobiographical nature

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(and there were eight such volumes), since he had a great contempt for fact and a countervailing belief in the ‘absolute accuracy’ of impressions. Ezra Pound told Hemingway that Ford ‘only lied when he was very tired’;4 but if so, Ford must have been tired a lot of the time. His lies grew perhaps ever more extravagant with time. According to Ford, the great chef Escoffier once said to him, ‘I could learn cooking from you’, while Henry James came to him, with tears in his eyes, asking for help with a plot.5 In A Mirror to France (1926), Ford explains how he had attended Dreyfus’s second trial at Rennes in 1899, and that ‘it was in the changing lights and shadows of that courthouse’ that he first ‘began to have a sense of the profound cleavage that was to come between opposing schools of French thought’ (MF 26). In fact, all that time he was busy on the Kentish coast collaborating with Conrad (nor is it remotely plausible that a French military court would have allowed him to be present). Faced with Ford’s multitudinous fabrications, his biographer Max Saunders rightly concludes that it is a question of ‘asking less whether what Ford says it true, and more what it means’ (Saunders, vol. 2 440). Ford’s love of Provence can, however, be accorded the status of both a major fact and a lifelong impression. For some years he and Stella Bowen would head south by the overnight train from the Gare de Lyon. The rich and fashionable (including Florence Dowell in The Good Soldier) would take the famous Train Bleu, a privately run, firstclass-only operation, whose passengers might dine beforehand at the restaurant of the same name, high overlooking the tracks: for a long time the ritziest station brasserie in the world. Ford and Bowen would travel second-class on the humbler 9.40. Nowadays the TGV from the Gare de Lyon will get you to Avignon in just over two and a half hours; then the city was reached after ten and a half hours, at about eight in the morning, with the ‘urgent muddy Rhone’ beside you and the first streaks of light in the sky. But there are advantages to slow travel, to the sense of changing landscape, to dozing off, and waking up, as Bowen put it, amongst the pale olives, the dark cypresses, the grey rocks and the flat-roofed, flat-faced houses which in spite of their poverty and austerity seem to hold promise of a sweeter life within their dry old walls.6

Quite where Provence began was another of Ford’s variable facts. Sometimes he said it was at Lyon, at other times Valence or Montelimar. Perhaps it depended on when the train jogged him awake.

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The shape of it was always a triangle, with the Rhone wandering down the middle: a narrow one like a slice of Brie if Provence began at Lyon, a fatter, more equilateral one if it began lower down. The Rhone also divided what Ford thought of as the ‘true Provence’ of the east bank – where are found the three A-list cities of Arles, Avignon and Aix, plus Ford’s favourite town of Tarascon – from ‘the sort of quasiProvence that contains Montpellier, Beziers, Carcassonne and Perpignan’ on the other side (Provence 93). This reflects the old division between the Empire or east bank and the Royaume or west. Thus, according to Ford, the most famous southern writer of the nineteenth century, Alphonse Daudet, ‘was not a true Provençal’, since he came from Nîmes, which ‘with all its charms’ – the Maison Carrée, the bullfights, and ‘one memorable eating place’ – ‘is not true Provence’.7 Ford and Bowen were first invited south to stay in the ‘magical’ yet at the same time ‘quite ordinary little villa’ of Harold Monro, founder of the Poetry Bookshop, in the winter of 1922-3 (Saunders, vol. 2 127). Next they tried Tarascon, from where he wrote ‘Life is so relatively cheap in France . . . that I shouldn’t wonder if we settled down here for good. Besides, the French make much of me – which at my age is inspiriting.’8 After a brief diversion into the wilder Ardèche, the Spanish Cubist Juan Gris and his wife Josette suggested Toulon, then as now a navy town, and therefore cheap. Bowen and Ford were similar, according to Stella, in that each was ‘a rolling stone with domestic instincts and a steady longing for a house, a garden and a view’ (Bowen 142). If they found this anywhere, they did so at Cap Brun outside Toulon, where they spent two winters, and whither Ford returned with Bowen’s successor after they had parted company. In her admirably sane, generous and unFordianly trustworthy memoir, Drawn from Life, Bowen analyses the spell Provence cast on them: It is something to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness and frugality of life in the Midi which induces a simplicity of thought, and a kind of whittling to the bone whatever may be the matter in hand. Sunlight reflected from red tiled floors on to whitewashed walls, closed shutters and open windows and an air so soft that you live equally in and out of doors, suggest an experience so sweetly simple that you wonder that life ever appeared the tangled, hustling and distracting piece of nonsense you once thought it. Your mind relaxes, your thoughts spread out and take their shape, phobias disappear, and if passions become quicker, they also lose their power of deadly strangulation. Reason wins. And you are released from the necessity of owning things. There is no need to be cosy. A pot of flowers, a strip of

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Life was cheap, and the more so because Ford was an enthusiastic kitchen gardener. He claimed to have studied under the great Professor Gressent in Paris, which is deeply improbable; though he at least read him, learning that ‘Three hoeings are as good as two coats of dung’.9 He was also unscientifically superstitious, sowing seed only when the moon was waxing, never planting on a Friday or a 13th, but always on a 9th, an 18th or a 27th. He cultivated those Mediterranean items – aubergines, garlic, peppers – later introduced to the British by Elizabeth David. Bowen attests to Ford’s culinary skills, even if he ‘reduced the kitchen to the completest chaos’ (Bowen 67). He also took to the local wine. The delicate Gris said, ‘He absorbs a terrifying quantity of alcohol. I never thought one could drink so much.’10 (Ford, who was a great layer-down of the law, assured James Joyce in a letter that ‘le premier devoir du vin est d’être rouge’: the primary responsibility of a wine is to be red.)11 Meanwhile, Bowen discovered a small shop in Toulon selling nothing but different kinds of olive oil, to be tasted from a row of taps on a piece of bread – this at a time when the British were still pouring the stuff not into their mouths but into their waxed-up ears. And Ford liked the way he was treated in France simply for being a writer. Bowen describes the pleasure he felt on receiving a letter which began ‘Cher et illustre Maître’ (Bowen 101). According to Ford, when they moved into their house in Toulon, their landlord, a retired naval quartermaster, was so delighted to have a poet for a tenant that he drove a hundred and fifty miles to fetch him a root of asphodel – because asphodels grew on the Elysian Fields, and every poet must have ‘that fabulous herb’ in his garden (Provence 228). If only Ford hadn’t specified ‘a hundred and fifty miles’, we might be more inclined to believe him. ‘[T]here are in this world only two earthly Paradises . . . Provence . . . and the Reading Room of the British Museum’ (Provence 215). Provence was not only itself, but also the absence of the North, where most human vices accumulated. The North meant aggression, the Gothic, the ‘sadically mad cruelties of the Northern Middle Ages’ and the ‘Northern tortures of ennui and indigestion’ (Provence 170). Ford was a great believer in diet and digestion as controllers of human behaviour (Conrad agreed, maintaining that the ‘ill-cooked food’ of Native American Indians caused ‘raging

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dyspepsia’ and hence their ‘unreasonable violence’).12 South good, North bad: Ford was convinced that no-one could be ‘completely whole either physically or mentally’ without ‘a reasonable amount of garlic’ in their diet, and equally obsessed with the malign effect of Brussels sprouts, an item of particular Northern mischief. Provence was a place of good thoughts and moral actions ‘for there the apple will not flourish and the Brussels sprout will not grow at all’.13 The North was also full of excessive meat-eating, which caused not just indigestion but lunacy: ‘Any alienist will tell you that the first thing he does with a homicidal maniac after he gets him into an asylum is to deliver, with immense purges, his stomach from bull-beef and Brussels sprouts’ (Provence 224). Another of Ford’s charmingly bonkers theories was about the grapefruit. The English translators of the Bible had been misguided in writing that Eve was tempted by an apple. The word they should have been aiming for was shaddock, another name for the grapefruit. Now, in Provence grapefruit grow abundantly, but are scorned by the inhabitants, who might occasionally use a little of the zest in cooking, but would routinely throw the fruit to the pigs. Since Provençals have never eaten of the grapefruit, therefore they have never fallen, therefore they live in Paradise, QED (Provence 79). But Provence meant far more to Ford than easy living and sound diet; beneath its surface pleasures lay a mythic and historical substructure. Provence was where the Great Trade Route, having run from China across Asia and Asia Minor to Venice and Genoa and along the north shore of the Mediterranean, finally turned north at Marseilles. Then it went: up the Rhone [. . .] inland, by way of Beaucaire and Lyons to Paris; then down the Seine past Rouen to the English Channel which it crossed at its narrowest and so away along the South Coast of England past Ottery St Mary’s to the Scilly Isles where it ended abruptly. . . . (Provence 17)

It brought the flow of civilisation with it – or at least, the display goods of civilisation – and, for Ford, ‘Provence is the only region on the Great Trade Route fit for the habitation of a proper man’ (Provence 20). Of all the towns and cities he loved Tarascon ‘the best in the world’; it was where Good King René held his court, and where, according to Ford, you couldn’t sleep for the noise of the nightingales.14 King René also had a court at Aix-en-Provence, but Ford didn’t like the city – ‘birthplace of Cézanne though it be, and

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though it be the gravest and most stately eighteenth-century town that you will find anywhere’ (Provence 258). The problem was that Aix contained the Parlement, the intermediary through which successive French kings ruled: from there ‘the lawyers of the Parlement . . . fixed on Provence the gadfly yoke of armies of functionaries that have ever since bled and crippled not Provence alone but all the country of the Lilies’ (Provence 258). What does civilisation, as embodied by Provence, consist of? In A Mirror to France Ford gave his answer: [C]hivalric generosity, frugality, pure thought and the arts are the first requisites of a Civilisation – and the only requisites of a Civilisation; and such traces of chivalric generosity, frugality, pure thought and the arts as our prewar, European civilisation of white races could exhibit came to us from the district of Southern France on the shores of the Mediterranean where flourished the Counts of Toulouse, olive trees, the mistral, the Romance Tradition, Bertran de Born, the Courts of Love, and the only really amiable Heresy of which I know. (MF 14)

The period covered runs roughly from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The ‘amiable’ heresy was Albigensianism, whose piety and virtue (and Manichean doctrine) brought its destruction in a Papal crusade led with immense cruelty by Simon de Montfort in 1209-13. The Troubadours – of whom Bertran de Born (c1140-c1215) was one of the most famous – and their Courts of Love continued up to the end of the thirteenth century, though their influence was much curtailed when Provence west of the Rhone was ceded to Louis XI in 1229. Avignon prospered between 1309 and 1408 as the seat of seven popes and two anti-popes, while Good King René (1408-80) presided over the final efflorescence of Provençal culture, after which the region east of the Rhone was in turn ceded to the French King. This whole period came in later centuries to represent a kind of Merrie France – tournaments, chivalry, and courtly love, with wise rulers overseeing peace and human contentment. According to Ford, the first piece of French literature he read as a schoolboy was a rapturous description by Daudet of life in Avignon under the Popes: processions, pilgrimages, streets strewn with flowers, the sound of bells at all hours, ‘the tic-tac of the lace-bobbins, and the rustle of the shuttles weaving the cloth of gold chasubles, the little hammers of the goldsmiths tapping the altar-cruets’ and ‘the under-sound of tambourines coming from the Bridge’:

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For, in our country, when the people is glad, there must be dancing, there must be . . . dancing! And since, in those days, the streets of the city were too narrow for the farandole, fifes and tambourines kept to the Bridge of Avignon, in the fresh breezes of the Rhone and day and night was dancing; was . . . dancing! Ah, happy days, happy city! The pikes that did not cut; the state prisons where wine lay cooling! . . . Never famine, never wars . . . That was how the Popes of the Comtat knew how to govern their people; that is why their people has so much regretted them! (Quoted in Provence 208)

Ford is more idiosyncratic and textured than Daudet in his appreciation of the South. Provence was not just a lost golden land; despite conquest, it was both tenacious and invasive. The extermination of the language had been decreed under Louis XI, François 1er and Louis XIV, but Provençal continued to be spoken for centuries, and was there waiting to be revived and made official once again by the Félibrige. And though France was ‘the first Mass Product in the way of modern nations’ (Provence 258), Provence, despite being crushed and subsumed, had the revenge of the defeated: it infiltrated the dominant culture. The virtues and values of Provence spread up through the remnants of the Great Trade Route, so that France was civilised to the extent that she submitted to this reverse takeover. And Provence was not just a region but also a state of mind – indulgent, fantastical, credulous – and this element fed into those harsh and pragmatic owners up in the North. Ford’s historical and travel writing is vivid, often tendentious, and always personal. His nostalgia becomes blatantly solipsistic, for instance, when he looks at the rewards and public standing of the Troubadour poets. He himself was perpetually impoverished: in 1907 he set what must be some kind of record by publishing six books and also applying to the Royal Literary Fund for financial assistance. How different it was back in the twelfth century: The Troubadour appears as taking the place of the Hollywood star – but of the Hollywood star who should not be only performer but the extraordinarily skilful author and composer of the piece [. . . .] As writer and performer Peire Vidal was the equal of the highest in the land and the terror of noble husbands though but the son of small tradespeople. (Provence 185-6)

This was a key feature of Troubadour art for Ford: it was ‘essentially both democratic and aristocratic’ (Provence 172). By which he meant that the Troubadours might be of humble origin and yet address their love-songs to aristocratic women. But he also meant that this was how all the arts should be: ‘democratic’ inasmuch as anyone could make

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them, and anyone could enjoy them; but made by a process which was ‘aristocratic’ in the sense of being highly skilled, difficult and rare. Ford described himself as a ‘sentimental Tory’ who liked ‘pomp, banners, divine rights, unreasonable ceremonies and ceremoniousness’ (RY 76). He presented himself as a rather old-fashioned English officer and gentleman. His grandfather had ‘insisted characteristically that although one must know French with accuracy one must speak it with a marked English accent to show that one is an English gentleman. I still do’ (MF 113). (But this being Ford, there is a contradictory explanation provided by Stella Bowen: his French sounded English because he never moved his lips enough: Bowen 103.) The honourable, chivalric man, trying to do his best in a modern world which fails to recognize his virtues, is a recurrent figure in Ford’s work. And there is a quietly insistent chivalric element underlying his greatest novel, The Good Soldier. The two couples at the heart of this story of destructive passion, the Ashburnhams and the Dowells, meet for the first time in the hotel restaurant of a German spa town. They find a table to suit them; it is round; Florence Dowell comments, ‘And so the whole round table is begun’, quoting Malory.15 She and her husband have visited Provence, ‘where even the saddest stories are gay’ (GS 17); and Dowell, the narrator, at one point tells, in his prosey, non-understanding way, the story of Peire Vidal. The Good Soldier of the title, Edward Ashburnham, is presented as an absolute English gentleman forever on a ‘feudal’ quest to help others; his ward, Nancy Rufford, who is in love with him, specifically links him to three chivalric figures of different cultures – Lohengrin, the Chevalier Bayard and El Cid (GS 111-12). Dowell, who is in love with Nancy, explains himself in the novel’s famous, high-Romantic line, ‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne’ (GS 143). And at the end of the book, after the great emotional ‘smash’ is over, Dowell revisits Provence: ‘I have seen again for a glimpse, from a swift train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white tower, Tarascon with the square castle, the great Rhone, the immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed through all Provence – and all Provence no longer matters’ (GS 269). It no longer matters because its high-hearted truths have been shown to be deluded. Ford may have loved Provence and its golden mythology, but he was also a modern novelist, guided by the emotional truthfulness of Flaubert and Maupassant. He knew that ‘the saddest stories’ nowadays are rarely gay, but just very sad, if not murderously

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violent; and that any gaiety around is likely to come from misunderstanding and self-deception. He knew also that the human heart is ‘defective’. So, as the novel unfolds, Ashburnham, for all the homoerotic worship Dowell accords him, is revealed to be no Lohengrin but the opposite – or rather, both at the same time; while generous and sentimental, he is also a sex-pest with a conviction for assaulting a girl on a train, a liar, a near-bankrupt, and a squalid blackmail victim. He may even (depending on one’s reading of certain powerful hints) have conceived an incestuous passion for his own daughter. Nowadays, he would probably have found himself on the sex register. Ford, for all his convincing self-presentation as a moth-eaten old gent – E. M. Forster snootily called him ‘a fly-blown man of letters’, Paul Nash ‘Silenus in tweeds’ – understood the modern world, and the reality that opposed its lingering myths.16 After all, in 1913, two years before The Good Soldier was published, he had visited the totemic city of Carcassonne, towards which Dowell and others feel such a romantic impulsion. And what had Ford discovered there? Snow and rabies. Ford’s Provence was an ideal lost world, a cradle of civilisation, and a reference point in his fiction. But the region contained more than just the past and present; it also suggested a possible future. In Provence (1935) Ford at one point asks to be regarded not as a moralist or historian, but ‘simply as prophet’. Civilisation is ‘staggering to its end’ and he wants to show ‘what will happen to it if it does not take Provence of the XIII century for its model’ (Provence 255). Ford had seen service as a transport officer in the first world war, where he was gassed; and he spent his last twenty years (before his death in 1939) watching the grim chest-beating of nations and ideologies across Europe. He loathed empty-headed nationalism, violence, transnational standardisation, mechanisation, and most of the doings of financiers. He was also a writer, and thus a citizen not of any one country but of the world; and he wondered how that world might emerge from the great smash that was coming, and avoid further smashes. How might the human brute be tamed? Not by bigger groupings, by signing up to yet more overarching -ologies, by exterminating languages and individualisms. Perhaps, he thought, we should become local again, live in smaller communities, learn to avoid the hysterical clamourings of gangs and groups. This was the sort of life he imagined – and had found – in Provence. In Great Trade Route (1937), he wrote:

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The old advice about cultivating one’s garden was always moral as well as practical; nor was it a counsel of quietism. As human beings recklessly use up the world’s resources and despoil the planet, as the follies of globalisation become more apparent, as we head towards what could be the biggest smash of all, the wisdom and the way of living that Ford Madox Ford – literature’s good soldier – found in Provence are perhaps even more worth attending to.

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NOTES 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17

An un-annotated version of this essay was first published in the Guardian, 21 August 2010, Review, 2-4, under the title ‘Ford Madox Ford’s passionate affair with Provence’. Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols, Oxford University Press, 1996 – henceforth ‘Saunders’; vol. 2, p. 284. Ford, A Mirror to France, London: Duckworth, 1926 – henceforth MF; p. 112. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, London: Cape, 1964, p. 77. Herbert Gorman, ‘Ford Madox Ford: The Personal Side’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 9:3 (April 1948), 121-2. Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life, London: Collins, 1941 – henceforth ‘Bowen’; p. 92. Ford, Provence, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935 – henceforth Provence; p. 25. Ford to Edgar Jepson, 8 May 1923: Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard. M. Ludwig, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965 – henceforth LF; pp. 149-50. Ford, Return to Yesterday, London: Gollancz, 1931 – henceforth RY; p. 112. Quoted in Saunders, vol. 2 290. Ford to Joyce, 9 March 1931: LF 199. Joseph Conrad, Introduction to Jessie Conrad’s A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House, reprinted as ‘Cookery’, Last Essays (1926) London: Dent, 1972, p. 147. Ford to E. S. P. Haynes, 24 January 1939: LF 309. Provence 78. Ford, It Was the Nightingale, London: Heinemann, 1934, p. 225. Ford, The Good Soldier, London: John Lane, 1915 – henceforth GS; p. 41. Forster to Alice Clara Forster [22 July 1914], Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank, London: Collins, 1983, pp. 210-11. Paul Nash, quoted in Saunders, vol. 2 282. Ford, Great Trade Route, London: Allen and Unwin, 1937, pp. 86-7.

LETTERS TO AND FROM TOULON: FORD MADOX FORD AND EZRA POUND’S PROVENÇAL CONNECTIONS Hélène Aji

Most of the work that has been done on Ford Madox Ford’s complex relations to Provence has been done in terms of the inscription of Provence in the fiction, particularly in The Good Soldier. Two articles, one by James Trammel Cox published in 1961 and another by Stuart McDougal published in 1979, take up the initial remark of Dowell, as he sits to ponder his story looking at ‘the great moon and say[ing]: “Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence!”’1 Both critics comment on the numerous parallels drawn between Edward and the troubadours of Provence, or on a possible comparison between the sufferings of Dowell and those of unloved Peire Vidal. Cox thus links back the reference to Ford’s lifelong love for Provence: This ‘passion for Provence’ should cause the Ford reader no surprise. It is frequently expressed in his non-fiction. In Return to Yesterday, for example, he tells us that it was his knowledge of the dress of the ‘ladies of the Courts of Love’ that occasioned his first visit to the Cranes at Ravenbrook [. . . .] According to Ford, his father was an authority on the poetry and the language of the troubadours and was ‘elected a member of the Félibrige, the Provence Academy for the promulgation of the Langue d’Oc.’ Ford himself is the author of a typically intimate and discursive ‘impression’ of the cultural history of the area in Provence. In the winter of 1925 he lived in Provence and did some of his best writing there in No More Parades.2

In contrast, McDougal attempts to translate it into narratological terms: [Dowell] becomes increasingly preoccupied with the question of how he can order the materials of his art and, by extension, his life into an artistic whole. It is here that the example of Peire Vidal becomes so important. For Peire Vidal, as Ford knew, used the materials of his own life in his poetry to such an extent that the anonymous author of his vida interpreted Vidal’s poetry autobiographically, as did Ford’s friend Ezra Pound in his poem ‘Peire Vidal Old’.3

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In neither case do we find an actual interrogation of what is the common denominator of both interpretations, namely the problematic interaction and impossible reconciliation between life and art, between the irredeemable immersion into the real of chaotic times and the vital quest for beauty. This line of thinking is taken up in two much more recent articles published in Italy: in 2003, Michela A. Calderaro published ‘Ford Madox Ford: A Provence of his Own,’ in which she comments on Ford’s vision of Provence in Provence: From the Minstrels to the Machine with a special interest in the ambivalences of travel writing;4 in 2006, Laura Colombino published an essay in a collective book on Anglo-American modernity and the Mediterranean in which she related Ford’s passion for Provence to the solar myth as found in Primitivist painters such as Gauguin.5 And indeed much of Ford’s interest in Provence coincides with his aesthetic: ‘to look at life and make patterns of it – as did Cézanne at Aix-en-Provence.’6 Now ‘to look at life and make patterns of it’ can be read in two contrasting ways that are embodied respectively by Ford Madox Ford and by Ezra Pound: when the former moves towards increasing aestheticization and seclusion from the world, the latter insists on commitment to the point of unreason. But in both cases the relation to truth becomes fragile, the very persistence of truth questionable and Provence’s patterns more and more correspond, in Ford’s words, ‘not [to] a country, nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind.’7 It is from this perspective that the correspondence between Ford and Pound from 1924 to 1936 can be reconsidered: when Ford was based much of the time in Provence, on Cap Brun, and Pound was becoming the poet from Rapallo; and when Ford attempts to deal with Pound’s idiosyncratic version of Provence and its disturbing political inflections. In ‘Mediterranean Reverie,’ Ford dreams of following the complex shore of the Mediterranean from Toulon to Rapallo, thus physically linking two poets of similar inspiration, if not of similar agendas. One once had friends. The cities swarmed with them. One could go towards any of the cardinal points or between them in any direction to find joyous discussion of things worthy the attention of proper men. That is all done. The world’s arguments are grim – and profitless. It is to me great consolation to let my mind wander along the pink corrugations of these Mediterranean beaches. Their rocks hardly fret at all the blue water, and, when the thoughts have sufficiently but not too far pursued the shore, they shall come on where Ezra

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sits plucking – in the name of poets – figs from the dusty thistles of this world. So all in our civilization is not lost.8

1. A Short Walk around a Friendship If Ezra Pound had but two friends with whom he kept a lifelong correspondence, these are Ford Madox Ford and William Carlos Williams. Because Williams was never so preoccupied with Provence as he was with Spain, and above all with America and the construction of an American idiom for American poets, he never even considered spending more than the occasional month in Europe, a place which in his travel memoir he calls Pagany. Yet he knew Ford and he knew him for his love of Provence, and generosity to fellow poets, as his poem ‘To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven’ (1944) evidences: not only does Williams pay homage to Ford, the ‘heavenly man,’ uncorrupt in his love of ‘flesh,’ ‘drink,’ and ‘whore,’ but above all he does it through a praise of Provence, and through an indirect praise of Ford’s poetry. Indeed, the poem takes up the very title of Ford’s love declaration to Provence, ‘In Heaven,’ and weaves it into the claim for a heaven on earth, which Ford would have made for himself in Provence. Contrary to the Ford/Pound Provençal connections, which we shall examine, the Ford/Williams connection is sensual and materialistic, at the same time an assertion of the worldly pleasures underpinning the intellectual attraction, and perhaps a jab at the pretensions of an intellectualized Provence. In Williams’ poem, Provençal Ford is not in reverie any longer, he is in the world, a man who, for all his love of Provence, used the myths of the troubadours, and of courtly love to undermine as well as construct the characters of Edward Ashburnham and Dowell; to bring out their naivety, in seeing only the ethereal and beautiful in a love that never stays abstract but, once carnal, can prove as destructive as it is pleasurable. Williams’ Ford is rather ‘gross’, as in the last stanza of the poem, but he is in fact the great absentee in the relationship that linked the American poet to Pound. Provence, the fat assed Ford will never again strain the chairs of your cafés pull and pare for his dish your sacred garlic, grunt and sweat and lick his lips. Gross as the world he has left to us he has become a part of that of which you were the known part, Provence, he loved so well.9

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When Ezra Pound mentions Ford in the Cantos, he refers to the ‘Fordie’ who was one of the first people he met in London in 1909, but scarcely to Ford’s connection with Provence or Paris rather than London. And, contrary to the disputes that animated, and occasionally threatened the correspondence between Pound and Williams, the thirty-year friendship between Pound and Ford was, in Brita LindbergSeyersted’s words, ‘without ruptures, quarrels, or serious disagreements’: True, they sometimes disagreed and showed their irritation, be it at an incomprehensible way of writing or at a stubborn unwillingness to take no for an answer, and there were whole aspects of their lives they never discussed, if we are to judge from their correspondence and their writings about each other: family, love, politics. It was indeed a literary friendship.10

Eager to justify, and maybe to overemphasize, the title she has chosen for her edition of the correspondence, Lindberg-Seyersted fails to define what ‘literary’ means in this context. Indeed the letters deal very little with literary issues, or the debates that Ford and Pound engaged in in conversation or through reciprocal reviews of their books. These are sometimes quoted in the Pound/Ford volume but the letters themselves are at first sight of very minor interest. Among the many preoccupations that were common to Pound and Ford, three are more evident: ‘their love for and knowledge of Mediterranean culture; their dedication to literature; and their unselfish and tireless promotion of writers and writing’ (P/F ix). In the letters, what appears most is the business aspect of the relationship, one which started as early as June 1909, when Ford published Pound’s Provence-related poem ‘Sestina: Altaforte.’ Appearing in the English Review, it is Pound’s first poem to be published in a magazine with sizable readership. Thus, despite significant divergence especially on the issue of literary impressionism, Ford is one of the Imagists of the first anthology with the poem from the German period entitled ‘In the Little Old Market-Place’, ‘and indeed if Imagism meant relying on visual and oral perceptions to render states of mind, [Ford] had certainly been an Imagist years before the movement was even heard of’ (P/F xiii). In 1919, in a review of Pound’s Quia Pauper Amavi for the Piccadilly Review, Ford calls him the ‘Bertran of the modern world’ (P/F 29-30), effectively tying together the friendship and the interest in the troubadours of the Provençal world. In the years from 1924 to 1936, when Ford sends Pound his last letter from Cap Brun,

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Pound is moving further and further away from the ideal vision of Provence and Provençal culture which imbues the early poems, some early cantos, and the notes gathered by Richard Sieburth under the title A Walking Tour in Southern France.11 But Ford constantly draws the poet back to this ideal of writing and living, one based on tolerance and intellectual enjoyment. In this respect, his description of Ezra Pound in the memoir Return to Yesterday is significant, since it stresses Pound’s Romance connection. When I first knew him his Philadelphian accent was still comprehensible if disconcerting; his beard and flowing locks were auburn and luxuriant; he was astonishingly meagre and agile. He threw himself alarmingly into frail chairs, devoured enormous quantities of your pastry, fixed his pince-nez firmly on his nose, drew out a manuscript from his pocket, threw his head back, closed his eyes to the point of invisibility and looking down his nose would chuckle like Mephistopheles and read you a translation from Arnaut Daniel. The only part of that verse that you would understand would be the refrain: Ah me, the darn, the darn it comes toe sune!” [. . . .] Where he studied the Romance languages I could not gather. But his proficiency in them was considerable when you allowed for the slightly negroid accent that he adopted when he spoke Provençal or recited the works of Bertran de Born.12

A similar evaluation returns in Ford’s appraisal of Pound in his 1933 ‘Mediterranean Reverie’: I do not recall anyone – not even Peire Vidal – who ever had the rhythmic virtuosity of the poet of Rapallo – or, indeed, his scholarship, erudition in fantastic human instances and invention [. . . .] The ‘XXX Cantos’ make up part of an immense epic history of the world as it centres round the Mediterranean. (P/F 132)

Pound’s viewpoint is however different: in his mind, and in his discourse to Ford, Ford is a businessman of letters, one slowly beginning to unravel as his memoir fails to account properly for the past. Both Pound’s unpublished review in Italian of Return to Yesterday, and a letter directly sent to Ford underline this critical stance of Pound’s: As a reaction against these scoundrels [of the university] young Ford rigidly adopted a kind of antiprecision attitude for the next 40 years. He does not wish to, and perhaps he cannot, express the precise thing, if this thing does not have a corresponding meaning. He persistently falsifies trivial details. This is a danger in itself, but Ford has his own kind of courage. It is a sure way of making pedants angry. It certainly irritates me, and has done for twenty years, but now that I see the explanation it irritates me less.

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HÉLÈNE AJI What does it matter to me, for example, if I was born in Idaho or Montana. The danger lies in this, that it is difficult to know when a detail is, or will be, trivial, and when it can become important.13 ERROR an’ shockin’ error; my dear Fordie There never was an never will be a “horse trolley” vide P; 315.14

2. The Sadness of the Times As a matter of fact, such comments are symptomatic of a more overall discrepancy between the two poets in their approaches to the difficulties of the times. It does not seem purely coincidental that both Ford and Pound should seek some retreat from the world precisely during the 1920s and 1930s; one need not return here to the nittygritty of the Great War’s aftermath, the traumas both poets had to try and cope with, the Depression, and the general topsy-turviness of the geo-political world of the period. However, as Pound finds his ‘heaven’ in fascist Italy, albeit in the small seaside resort of Rapallo, he does not stray from his attempt at publicly and politically dealing with the changes brought about by the new world order. In this respect, his Provence – or his Mediterranean South – takes on a very different complexion from what Ford is after and hopes to find in his Cap Brun retreat. Cap Brun is meant to be an actual transfer from reality into the dreamed world of beauty and purity which Provence has come to mean for him. The paradox lies in the fact that, when one considers for instance the irony of his allusions to Provençal lore in The Good Soldier, in which courtly love, if ideal, is shown as utterly unfit to the realities of man-woman relationships, one is left to wonder to what extent he believes in the efficiency of the Provençal cure. Interestingly enough, the letters between Ford and Pound from 1924 to 1935 are evidence of both a link and a radical separation between the two poets. If Ford clings to Provence, it is not because he forcibly wants to impose his vision of an ideal land and culture, but because he clings to the ‘lies’ of fictionalization at the same time as he recognizes them: why should one be forbidden to dream, and to cling to the dream as a mental refuge? Why could one not try, if not to live this dream, at least to live with it? In her account of those years in the introduction to the selected correspondence, Brita Lindberg-Seyersted thus reminds us that Ford and Janice Biala saw Toulon as ‘their ideal seasonal home,’ where Pound meant his move to Italy as a final exile, a definite divorce from America, and effectively, the rest of the world:

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[Pound] was drifting further and further away from his home country in the sense that he felt less than fully informed about the literary situation over there; he was disgusted with bureaucracy and censorship; he was beginning to be immersed in subjects that he could not discuss with Ford. (P/F 91-2)

When she finds that any discussion of Pound and Ford set in a biographical context must confront two stumbling blocks – Pound’s anti-Semitism and Ford’s distortion of facts, his ‘lies’ (P/F x) – however, one could be tempted to temper this dichotomy. Pound’s options, not only his anti-Semitism but also his blind support of the Fascist regime in Italy and admiration of Benito Mussolini, are not just a stumbling block; they stand for a lasting turn with major consequences for the writings and the aesthetic decisions of the poet as he starts on a wholly didactic, if obscure, trend in poetry as well as in prose. By comparison, Ford’s ‘lies’ are white lies, or rather poetic licenses, which are all in keeping with his initial take on the instability of individual perceptions whereby he acknowledges that any writing is fictional, and that in no case can the agent of this writing be discounted as neutral. In this respect, M. L. Rosenthal’s reading of Ford’s Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine in the volume Ezra Pound and the Troubadours edited by Philip Grover gives us invaluable keys to understand why the letters from Toulon are so matter-of-fact, whereas the reviews are so dreamy and inventive. It maybe also provides clues as to the push to the writing of Parade’s End, ‘this psychological panorama of the collapse of the Edwardian world, and the emergence of a new, more brutal and more banal one’ (P/F 80) that took place at the same time. Ford Madox Ford’s 1935 volume called Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine has all the faults often charged to him. It is wayward, uneven, digressively anecdotal, and egocentric [. . . .] Nevertheless, it is a marvelously suggestive and winning book [. . . .] In it Ford presents himself very much as he would have liked, at age 62, to be remembered: as poet and translator, bon vivant, humane savant, and sensitized carrier of Europe’s embattled artistic and cultural traditions in the face of rampant commercialism. (Rosenthal 111)

Despite its title, Provence is less about Provence and more about Ford himself: yet another of his distorted self-portraits, stemming from the belief that any writing is a form of self-portraiture. The passion then is less for Provence than for ‘the possibility that old dreams can be cherished while their whole underpinning is crumbling’ (Rosenthal 114). Provence is a ‘memory stronghold’ (Rosenthal 113),

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and the interest in the Albigensian heresy does not have the same import for Ford as for Pound: in Pound, the notion of heresy is a licence to fight against dogma but not a warning against dogmas; in Ford, it turns into a claim for the freedom to interpret, to see history in the here and now, to propose alternative truths to the univocal discourse of order. In Rosenthal’s terms again, Provençal tradition is attractive not as a tradition but because it is ‘creatively ritualized’ (Rosenthal 113), thus turned into a reservoir for unending aesthetic recreations. So when Pound writes to Ford, to advise him on how to define his poetic sources as he comments on Cathay, his summary of the Provençal inheritance cannot but jar with Ford’s own re-creation of Provence; to Pound, in a letter written on 30 July 1920, Provence gave ‘Rhyme,’ where China provided ‘Eye,’ and Greece ‘Ear, onomatopoeia, quantity’ (P/F 35-6). Later, in June 1921, from Saint-Raphael, he was to give a bitter description of a Riviera sunset that is loaded with indirect criticism of Ford’s own writing: The sun sets like a blazing barrel head, orange & stage pink. – all the unrealities of the musical comedy stage – being evidently the authentic tradition of some damn mediterranean realist.15

Is Pound here covertly damning Ford as a ‘mediterranean realist’? One is left to wonder, but what is certain is that Pound’s own use of Provence, by the 1920s, is behind him. He may not see any longer how to invest the Provençal material into his present agenda, one marked by prescription and categorization. Ford on the other hand is aging and has come to see Provence not as the place where dreams come true (if he ever saw it that way), but as the place where the failure of dreams, the overall ‘drought’ of the times can be acknowledged, and at least momentarily endured. If Provence, the book, is a travel book, as Michela Calderaro purports, it is the book of a travel towards the resignation and the relief of forgetfulness, and towards an acceptance of irredeemable loss. In this respect the last letter from Toulon to Pound, dated September 1936, tragically marks the acceptance of failure, and the relinquishing of the right to dream: ‘Indeed things are pretty low here and likely to remain so. We are having to give up this place and go and live in one room in Paris’.16 The departure from Provence for the United States and a professorship at Olivet, is a renunciation of the fantasticated source of creativeness, of a land that after giving now fails to provide. The poem

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entitled ‘Vers l’oubli’ thus picks up on the metaphor of the drought, but to stress that the land needs watering to keep on yielding: Provence works as inspiration only so long as the poet nourishes it with his own fictions. We shall have to give up watering the land Almost altogether. The maize must go.17 Well then: We have outlived a winter season and a season of spring And more than one season of harvesting In this land Where the harvests come by twos and threes One on the other’s heels.18

With the end of the Provençal times the sadness of the times cannot be gay any longer, and the return is to menial work, and a debased way of surviving, in which harvests are few and far between. 3. In Lieu of Provence: the Pound/Ford poetic debates As a consequence, Ford and Pound’s Provençal connections can eventually be seen as crystallizing what both united and separated them as poets throughout their careers: the relations between poetry and prose, the question of doctrine, in literature and elsewhere, the issue of history and the contemporaneous past. Of course, these points are mostly absent from the correspondence, as they would have been such bones of contention as to threaten the relationship, but they appear, with increasing acuteness in the reviews that were written in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Poetry and prose Ford has been said for a long time to be a minor poet – and Pound is no mean advocate of the superiority of his fiction over his poetry. It is however to be kept in mind that Ford is one of the first to argue for the use of everyday language in poetry, and to put this to effect in his own poems. He denied any boundaries between the prosaic and the poetic, hence between poetry and fiction – or essay at that. As is often the case, Pound’s official position and his practice seem to be at odds: technical prowess in poetry is seen by him as potentially detrimental to the message the poet wants to convey, since the beauty of the lines might come to obfuscate the seriousness of his subject. On the other

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hand, his poems are so eminently technical, especially in the Cantos, that their topic can be detected only with great difficulty, and the most intense passages are often those that depart from the initial project. In 1927 for the review of Personae, Pound’s collected short poems, in the New York Herald Tribune Books, Ford Madox Ford thus finds himself in the uncomfortable position of defending Pound against the accusations of elitist erudition, while he enumerates the extreme diversity and density of his references: My ears are continually deafened by those who object to the work of Mr. Pound – by those who allege that he is erudite! Just heavens! He is no more erudite than any man of considerable knowledge of the world. In literature it is no matter whether your knowledges arise from an intimate knowledge of life in the Bronx or the Tombs in 1926, or from an intimate knowledge of life in China to-day, in France in the fourteenth century, or in Carthage of the time of Hannibal [. . . .] It would then appear to be merely captious to object to Mr. Pound placing his poems among the troubadours, the Chinese, or in the days of Sigismondo Malatesta. Time – any given moment of time – goes so swiftly and so irrevocably that there is no day that can proudly claim immortality for itself [. . . .] So that it matters very little where or at what date a poet places his poems. What is requisite is that he should be erudite in his knowledge of the human heart. (P/F 85)

To be ‘erudite in [the] knowledge of the human heart’ though, is virtually never on Pound’s agenda, and I have demonstrated on another occasion that even the elegiac end of the Cantos, dedicated to Olga Rudge, is but a decoy.19 It is however very much a part of Ford’s agenda as he plunges into the penumbrae of human desires and motivations in his novels. It is thus also a sign that for the 1933 review of XXX Cantos, Pound asks Ford to advertise his Rapallo concerts rather than the poem, forcing Ford into understating what he actually sees as the important work in poetry.20 Pound’s insistence on having Ford write about the music might be purely opportunistic, but it might also be a way of preventing him from expounding on his major idea, which appears for the first time in his 1914 review of Cathay: the best quality in Pound’s poetry is that it is made of condensed novels. Thus the best Cathay poem, according to Ford is ‘Liu Ch’e’ because it is ‘in reality a tiny novel, and as such is doubly interesting to me who am only a dabbler in verse’.21 And the qualities of the XXX Cantos arise from their ability to apply the novelistic demand of le mot juste set by Ford’s favorite French writer Gustave Flaubert.

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Almost any line of his [. . .] is like the trumpet-call awakening of a good novel. Mr. Pound has, of course, learned a great deal from the novelists – perhaps more from Flaubert than from any other individual, though obviously the Romance and Italian poets of before fifteen hundred and seventeenthcentury English – and the Yellow Press and railway time-tables – have all played their parts with his rhythms. (P/F 132)

Doctrine and freedom The core of the Ford/Pound version of the debate over freedom of thinking and how to be a leader of the avant-garde is to be found in Ford’s review of Pound’s How to Read published in The New Review of April 1932. In it, he rather scathingly attacks the very essence of the project and its modalities. How could Pound, in Ford’s view, have the ambition of teaching how to read, of giving reading lists to potential students of literature, of having a recipe, so to speak, to make up a good poet? The review begins with a probably fictitious account of the pretensions of bourgeois London women, and their ways of only addressing their equals, despising the rest of humanity, and only dealing with insider topics. Ford’s ironical claim to have forgotten all of the conversation overheard as a child but its beginning – ‘We are all married women, aren’t we?’ – builds into a burden repeatedly attacking Pound’s didacticism and the naivety of his generalizations: But, whenever I sit down to write anything sincere and thought about, I find myself still glancing around me and saying: ‘We are all – oh, say Popes – aren’t we?’ Because it is hypocrisy and worse to write anything sincere and thought about for the general. Ezra, then, gives us his notes of a craftsman, and I hope we are all . . . oh, men who have thought with sincerity about one craft or another. (P/F 101-2)

Pound’s doctrinaire stance sits ill with Ford. His use of the Provençal poets in How to Read to construct an all-engulfing theory of literature based on value judgments, and all made to measure for himself, cannot but produce half-baked versions of Pound himself, failing to favour ‘inventors’ to the benefit of ‘imitators,’ to take up Pound’s own terminology: says Ford, ‘if a student of genius studied and exactly conformed to the precepts of the book, we should have half another Ezra’ (P/F 103). It is thus unsurprising that Ford should refuse to review Pound’s ABC of Economics, although the reason might be not so much that he disapproves of his straying away from poetry (after all, the work on the Cantos continues despite the forays into

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economics and politics) as that the text comes as yet another example of the dogmatic spiral in which Pound is caught. It is not good that the general should hear too much truth. We must begin by conceding that it is for human beings that we write. The general should not hear that [. . . .] The fact remains that you must write either for Humanity as a whole or, like Ezra, for a sublimated Ezra-Superman. (P/F 103)

In the end, what Pound finds objectionable in Ford’s literary impressionism is precisely what Ford values, so that the letter of December 1931 sounds as a rebuff, but stands also as a typically Poundian misreading of Ford: However/// that damn wheeze about “impression” impressionist <defencemechanism?> (part of it conducive to virtue) but still; you are better when being scientific (re/ durability of birds), you object to a defect of science namely the failure to examine the evidence.22

Ford is not interested in the evidence, since there might be none anyway: all evidence is proof of what the viewer wants to demonstrate, and not a stepping stone to an as yet unheard-of truth. Impressionism is not a ‘defence mechanism’ that would be part of an overall process of denial. On the contrary, it is what happens once denial is done with and one has come to accept the fallibility of it all. History and time This is why Ford calls Pound’s poetry a ‘Literature of Escape’ in the 1927 review of Personae, at the same time as he sees in him ‘the historian of the world [. . .] who is far more truly the historian of the world than any compiler of an outline of history’ (P/F 85-6). More than commenting on Pound’s poems, and taking a swipe at H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, he is outlining his own conception of history and time: one he strangely shares with Pound but carries out to very contrasting consequences. In the same way as Pound considers history in the present, and hunts down the traces of the old Provence along the paths of contemporary Provence, Ford sees all of history as contemporaneous. However – and this might be the root of the divergence – this pushes Pound to provide an entire re-reading of history in terms of the present, one that leads to subsume past and present under categories that are limiting and, to say the least, questionable. The dogmatic stance exposes the result to the accusation of falsifying and mystifying, where Ford proves more self-aware, and

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able to conceptualize what he is doing to the past. As he comments on Pound as ‘another Bertran de Born’, he also ironically picks up on Pound’s bombastic tone and debunks it: So with his collected poems Mr. Pound sets out, another Bertran de Born, splendidly swaggering down the ages. Another Bertran de Born, indeed, poking out his flame-colored forked beard into the faces, menacing with his cane the persons of the Kings of England, of France, of Navarre and of all the big business and all the meanness of the universe. They will probably hang him as the Kings of France and Navarre and England so nearly did for Bertran at Alta Forte. (P/F 87)

Here the glorious past of Provence, made present, seems a little out of place and exaggerated: the point is not to reinstate this past (one of Pound’s utopian life-works) but to posit it next to the quotidian, as help, as foil, as dream. Thus, in Brita Lindberg-Seyersted’s words: Graham Greene may have been the first to point to similarities in the methods of Ford’s writings and the Cantos. He suggested that it is in their handling of time that a work like Ford’s Provence and the Cantos are similar; simultaneity is essential here. Hugh Kenner has also drawn parallels between Ford’s timeshift technique and the handling of time in the Cantos. Pound’s ideogrammic method can be linked to Ford’s recommendation that in dialogue the speeches of the characters should be juxtaposed, rather than follow each other as answers to the previous speech. (P/F xii)

But one might add that this time-shift technique does not allow in Ford for a blending of the past into the present, and even less for a reducing of the present to an idealized past: if juxtaposition is to be taken for granted, the past is no more than an alternative, optional though desirable fiction. Consequently, Ford’s famed ‘mythomania’, his ‘cavalier handling of facts’, his mixing-up of life and fiction are not just ‘the [. . .] backbone of the story-telling technique of his reminiscences’, nor a negligent disregard for ‘factual truth’ (P/F x). They are the accepted final recognition that truth is relative, and that the dreams we may construct are all that we own. And this should deter us from imposing our will on the world, even in fantasy. It leaves Ford with the perilous task of surviving the everlasting Provençal drought. For this is a corner of France, And this the kingdoms of the earth beneath the sun, And this the garden sealed and set apart And that the fountain of Jouvence. . . . And, yes, you have a heart.23

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NOTES 1 2

3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard, New York: Norton, 1995, p. 15. James Trammell Cox, ‘Ford’s “Passion for Provence”,’ ELH 38:4 (1961), 383-98 (pp. 397-8). In fact it was A Man Could Stand Up – which was begun in Toulon, in January 1926. Stuart Y. McDougal, ‘“Where Even the Saddest Stories are Gay”: Provence and The Good Soldier,’ Journal of Modern Literature 7:3 (1979), 552-4 (pp. 553-4). The ‘vida’ is a brief life of the troubadour. Michela A. Calderaro, ‘Ford Madox Ford: A Provence of his Own,’ Annali di Ca’ Foscari, 42:1-2 (2003), 37-48. Laura Colombino, ‘Negotiating with Gauguin’s “Solar Myth”: Art, Economy and Ideology in Ford Madox Ford’s Provence,’ Caroline Patey, Giovanni Cianci, Francesca Cuojati, eds, Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean. Milan: Cisalpino, 2006, pp. 51-64. Quoted in M. L. Rosenthal, ‘Round about Ford Madox Ford’s Provence,’ Philip Grover, ed., Ezra Pound and the Troubadours, Gardonne: Fédérop, 2000 – henceforth ‘Rosenthal’; pp. 111-22. Ford, Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938, p. 66. Ford, Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang, Manchester: Carcanet, 2002 – henceforth CE; p. 296. William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, 2 vols, New York: New Directions, 1988, vol. 2, p. 96. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, ed., Pound/Ford, London: Faber, 1982 – henceforth P/F; p. vii. Richard Sieburth, ed., A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound among the Troubadours, New York, New Directions Books, 1992. Ford, Return to Yesterday, New York: Liveright, 1932, pp. 373 ff. Pound, ‘Appunti: Return to Yesterday. Memorie di Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford’ (1931): P/F 97. Pound to Ford, Rapallo, 27 December 1931, P/F 100. Pound to Ford, 4 June 1921, written from St Raphael: P/F 55. Ford to Pound, Toulon, 6 September 1936: P/F 140. Ford, ‘Vers l’oubli [L’oubli – Temps de sécheresse],’ Selected Poems, ed. Max Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet, 1997, p. 150. Ford, ‘Vers l’oubli [L’oubli – Temps de sécheresse],’ Selected Poems 153. See Hélène Aji, ‘Melancholy in Lieu of Recantation: Ezra Pound’s “Drafts and Fragments”,’ EREA, 4.1 (Spring 2006), 37-42. Half of ‘Mediterranean Reverie’ is almost exclusively devoted to the programme of Pound’s concerts, and praise of his qualities in fields other than poetry. Ford, Outlook, 33 (9 May 1914), 636, 653: CE 153. Pound to Ford, Rapallo, 27 December 1931: P/F 100. Ford, ‘Vers l’oubli [L’oubli – Temps de sécheresse]’, Selected Poems 154.

IN PROVENCE: THE LIFE OF FORD MADOX FORD AND BIALA Jason Andrew The American painter Janice Biala (1903-2000) met the English novelist Ford Madox Ford (1987-1939) on May Day, 1930. Their union led to the collaboration in which Biala provided the illustrations for two of Ford’s last books, Provence (1935) and Great Trade Route (1937).1 The following is a selection of edited quotations and letters of Biala, many of them to her older brother Jack Tworkov, as read on the occasion of the Ford Madox Ford International Conference in 2009 in Aix-en-Provence. An introduction for each letter was offered and was followed by a reading of the letter by renowned choreographer and performer Julia K. Gleich, who like Biala herself, is an American expat., though living in London. This presentation of Biala’s letters coincided with an exhibition of the artist’s work. The exhibition, the first of its kind brought together selected works from Biala’s early career as well as drawings for Provence and Great Trade Route. The exhibition also featured works for Portraits of Cities, an unpublished collaboration.2 Many of these works had never before been seen publicly. Photographs of both writer and painter completed the exhibition. BIALA: ‘If you want to know our life, there is Provence and The Great Trade Route’. These books provide the greatest insight into the life that was Ford and Biala’s. Their travels, their loves, their extensive dialogue, art, culture and life. Their artistic collaboration began almost immediately upon their meeting on May Day, 1930. BIALA: ‘Ford’s writing a libretto with my help for George Antheil’s next opera.’3

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Biala wrote just three months into their meeting. The young American painter at 27, and the old British writer, 57, had more in common with each other than one would imagine. Ford was all but adrift and Biala was a wandering soul. •

See plate 1 – Painter Janice Biala and Ford Madox Ford, c. 1930

BIALA: ‘It’s conceit on my part to say it, but [Ford] says it’s so, we’re very like each other aside from looks.’ Their life together was a ‘long passionate dialogue’.4 BIALA: ‘and we were bored with and resented any interruption to it. Ford used to say that when you didn’t know what to say to your partner at breakfast – it was the end of a marriage. That never happened to us – there wasn’t enough time for all we had to say to each other.’5 Twelve days into the New Year, 1934, and having submitted to his publisher, Lippincott, the manuscript for Henry for Hugh, Ford wrote to the managing editor, Jefferson Jones, proposing a new idea for a book.6 Ford’s new book would take the title of his ‘earthly Paradise.’7 Provence. ‘[. . .] sometimes when I shut my eyes and think of my own personal Utopia,’ he says in it, ‘I imagine myself in a whitewood hut on one of the harsh, bare, sunbaked hillsides of Provence . . .’.8 But most of all ‘This is a book of travel,’9 he adds: his travels with Biala, impressions of places, reminiscences of his life, histories revisited, and new stories to tell. Ford spent the summer of 1934 writing Provence. But for Biala, the story of Provence began in January 1931 when she travelled with Ford to the South of France for the first time: BIALA: ‘We’re in Toulon now and I don’t believe for a minute you’d find Europe a dying civilization if you came to France.’10 At first, they stayed in Stella Bowen’s old attic studio11 on the quai du Parti, but then they found the Villa Paul and made it their home – one with a garden and a view. ‘Ford had, of course acquired a home that

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was picturesque but entirely without amenities,’ wrote Stella Bowen.12 But no matter, writer and painter fell quickly into routine. BIALA: ‘Ford is well (knock on wood) he is writing what he considers his best book and I’m so full of ideas about painting that I can’t sleep at night.’13 Letter to Jack, 23 June 1931: BIALA: ‘Our garden is supplying us with all the fruit and vegetables we need, which is a perfect god send. I bought 6 little chickens the other day which are very pretty but perfect devils. We spend our entire day chasing the bastards in an effort to keep the cat from getting them, and one of them’s been gotten to-day [. . . .] If those damn chickens ever grow up to be minced chicken on toast I’ll be a tired and grey haired woman. I am now going in for ducklings which Ford swears are more intelligent.’ For all her anxieties about Ford’s health and their financial situation, Ford and Biala had nearly a decade of happiness at the Villa Paul: • • •

See plates 2 and 3 Plate 2 – Biala and Ford with the Crankshaws, Villa Paul Plate 3 – Biala at the Villa Paul (photo by Ford)

BIALA: ‘Dear Jack when you know Ford you won’t talk about his terrible superiority in age. It is true he is about 25 years older, maybe less, but he is not in his dotage by any means. I admit it sounds fantastic, especially since you haven’t seen his belly which looks pregnant with triplets, but I am terribly in love with him [. . . .] For he is as young as you and I are mentally, and physically he is a colossus [. . .] I’m in such fear [about the news] of [my relationship with Ford] reaching our parents [. . . .] I suppose even you thought I’d sold myself to the devil when I mentioned Picasso and Matisse and so forth [. . . .] If it’s any consolation to you to know, however, Ford is not impotent etc and has all the proper reactions of a man [. . . .] Perhaps I ought to send a circular letter to all my friends about this.14 Letter to Jack, 16 October 1930:

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BIALA: ‘Not the least of my troubles is the fact that Ford may die and leave me alone [. . . .] that is the penalty of living with someone twice your age, too, you’re afraid he may die any minute. Never the less that is a cruel and barbarous thing that two people cannot be left in peace or allowed to love each other because one is much older than the other. But I might have been just as cruel and just as barbarous.’ For Biala, Provence and its idyllic life contrasted to her worldly problems. Even though she was living in her utopia with her perfect match, she suffered from bouts of depression – missing her relationships in New York, struggling to resolve her involvement with Ford and building a life in France. Biala’s life with Ford and life in Provence was a double-edged sword, filled with beauty and richness but also frugality and worries. Letter to Jack, 30 November 1931: BIALA: ‘If one had no worries like the kind I’ve had here – how happy one could be. Do you know we’ve been living on $4 a week and still not so badly? Of course we couldn’t have done it but for the fact that we grow our own vegetables, but then we have six (not very magnificent) rooms, and a garden but with the finest view in the world (we are on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean) and a private path down to the sea; for exactly $10 a month. •

See plate 4 – ‘View from our Terrace (at Villa Paul),’ c. 1931

We pay $2 a month extra for our furniture. We have a large garden in which we are growing artichokes, tomatoes, corn, carrots, beans, watermelons, mushmelons, squash [. . . .] We have a cherry tree, several pear trees, almond trees, fig trees, orange and lemon trees, peaches, apricots [. . . .] We have every imaginable flower, and thousands of roses. For pleasure we pay 2c carfare into Toulon, and drink 6c worth of beer in the café where I’m writing [the Grand Café de la Rade], which, if the beach in Provincetown were paved, and where the houses were there were cafés and shops, you would have almost the same view, that is the harbor and commercial ships – and we watch the world go by [. . . .] So you see, for a poor painter, this is the place to be.

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Our landlord, who is a nice admiral in the French navy, on hearing Ford was a poet, went 200 miles in his car to another part of the country to find Ford an asphodel plant, because he said all poets should have the asphodel in their garden.15 You can’t imagine a nice admiral in America having anything but contempt for a poet, can you? And he gives me his rarest flowers so that I can paint them. So you see, even if European civilization is effete, it is still better for people like us to live here, where we are considered if possible a little more than human, than in America where we are a little less. And don’t think one gets so softened by this enervating civilization that one does not work. I work harder then I ever did in my life, house work, shopping, gardening, typing and I painted several quite good pictures in 2 weeks. Bohemianism is a career itself. It takes too much out of you if you want to do any thing else [. . . .] But that’s how life is. Ford says he’s a very tolerant man, but I must wash my face at least once a week. And he hangs up all my clothes.’ Letter to Jack, 13 February 1932: BIALA: ‘[I’m sorry I haven’t written] You see we were terribly miserable for some time [. . . .] Our troubles were mostly financial – and how! We really half starved for about six weeks and the worst of it here is, that there is no one to borrow even 5 francs from. And then the day your letter came some money turned up and we were invited to the country for the weekend by a Frenchman with whom Ford has had a cooking rivalry for years and what food we had! We made up for the six weeks in those two days. But I give the palm to Ford just the same. We’d have been dead of hunger if Ford couldn’t make a wonderful dish out of a few beans and a crumb of bread [. . . .] Letter to Jack, 9 April 1932: ‘I’m writing this in a café right in front of the harbor and it is most beautiful. The sea is unbelievably blue and it is full of boats and the [street] is crowded with sailors, it is a pity to be so depressed. But I never did think nature was enough.’ • • •

See plates 5, 6 and 7 Plate 5 – Town View, Cap Brun, by Janice Biala, c. 1931. Oil on canvas Plate 6 – The Port at Cap Brun, by Janice Biala, c. 1931. Oil on panel

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Plate 7 – Ford on the Terrace, Villa Paul, by Janice Biala, c. 1931. Oil on canvas

Biala’s brother Jack came for a visit in the summer in June 1933. Concerned that Jack might travel such distance and be disappointed upon arrival, Biala sent him a panicked letter while he was aboard the Ile de France: ‘The only thing I’m afraid of is that you might be bored here with us. We lead such very quiet lives, and the few people we see are so uninteresting. It seems very exciting to me, where the stew burning is a great catastrophe and the figs ripening a day soon a great festival etc, but perhaps it’s not what you’re spending so much money and coming so far to get. But if you get tired of it and when, we’ll arrange to the best of our ability that you see whatever you want to see in the best possible conditions.’16 Ford was just as apologetic about their life style. Regarding the possibility of his nephew Peter visiting, Ford wrote to his sister, Juliet: ‘We should like to have him very much and I should think it might be good for him to lead the frugal life of the Provençal peasant – which is what we very emphatically do… We live almost completely in the open air. I get up at five or five thirty, most days; water the garden; work; breakfast about eight, when Janice graces the scene. Then we both work till lunch; take a siesta till half past three or four; work in the garden till dinner and go to bed between half past nine or ten… I personally do not go off the estate – two acres… he can have a room correctly furnished in Louis Philippe mahogany with frescoed walls, but we sleep in the open air under a light roof and I should think it would be good for him to do the same. We live very frugally indeed, mostly on things out of the garden, our conversation is mostly about painting, writing and gardening, with intervals devoted to Mr. Hitler… the sun shines all day; it never rains; the nights are cool; the dawns exquisite…’17 •

See plate 8 – View from Our Terrace, by Janice Biala, c. 1933. Oil on panel, 25 ½ x 21 ¼ inches

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Provence had its place for long days and long conversations – its history of intelligent thought. And at the time, politics was always a topic close to everyone. From Provence they seemed to have the perspective of the world. BIALA: ‘It’s curious about communism that I never told you that since I’ve been in France, I’ve been violently communistic. I don’t know why exactly, I suppose it is a thing that is subtly stealing on the world. The trouble is that I, at any rate, am a coward on account of the suffering that it will bring before it is established. All the people that must starve before they will bring themselves to do it [. . . .] For the first time in my life I read every newspaper in sight and I’ve become the most violent politician. I wonder if in America, it is realized as well as in Europe that it is Hoover and America who have been the ill keepers of the peace. You can’t imagine what hatred there is here for Americans, especially this year [. . . .] Anyway in the last few days the newspapers have been saying that the depression this year will be aggravated.’18 Letter to Jack, 18 August 1932: BIALA: ‘Several months ago we were invited by the only lady in Paris who still keeps a salon to come and hear the Duchess de Clermont Charente talk on Russia. The lady is about the most aristocratic family in France, she being a Grammont. She spoke in the most moving and enthusiastic way about the Soviet. She ended up by saying that all through Russia the working man is really and truly happy. That the Russian revolution is a huge success. She said in France, obviously we weren’t ripe for it yet. At this same meeting was Rappaport, the leader of the French Communists, Tardieu19 the Prime Minister, innumerable academicians, artists and writers. The meeting, in this extremely elegant salon ended in a free fight (I was on the side of Russia), but I couldn’t make out which party won. [. . . .] It seems to me, with all the incredible fear and suffering of the last few years, that the Americans couldn’t reelect Hoover, that they couldn’t let their rotten governments go on, that there couldn’t be so much fraud and people getting rich on the money collected for the unemployed, that Mr. Hoover still couldn’t veto a bill to provide a dole for the unemployed. It

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couldn’t happen in Europe. And that’s why I wonder whether there will be a revolution in America. We would dearly love to see one, and would both certainly come to join it. But every real American I’ve met here, is either against communism, though thoroughly bitter about the American government as it is, or, like Ezra Pound, asks if there is anyone of intelligence among the American communists. [. . . .] I said to Ford, what do you think about a revolution in France? He said it might come any minute – but it certainly has a better chance of having one, than America has. That surprised me very much. I had an impression that France would never go communist, there was almost no need for it. All the south here is communist, we live under a communist mayor etc. There are beautiful model workmen’s villages all around here. There is no crisis here. There’s enough work, food and wine for everybody. They’re incredibly lazy and it’s impossible to get anybody to do anything for you, for love or money. [. . . .] We were in Italy a few days. They seem badly hit there but still there’s no comparison. Of course there wherever we went we saw black shirts, pictures of Mussolini stenciled on every wall wishing him long life, and we never mentioned him by name. It was too dangerous. But Ezra said he’d done some good. Germany of course is evidently growing fascist with the unspeakable Mr. Hitler as head. [. . . .] Ford is seriously gardening and feeding our eight chickens with the idea of the revolution before him. With Love, Janice P.S. The first real signs of revolution send us a cable. We’ll come! BIALA: ‘I agree with Ford implicitly that intellectual clarity is the only thing that will save mankind [. . . .] So I think Ford [is a better communist than you or I] since in the truer sense of the word he works for mankind. And you New York intellectuals who have suddenly got religion – when they are sincere it is only a surface sincerity and it works very well for the better [. . . .] All the cruelty and misery of the world comes from lack of imagination and so I think that only the freeing of the imagination will save us and that, only art can do. And that, incidentally, is

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why I hate Germany because they have a mind for facts and facts always lie.’20 As a writer, Ford made a craft of mixing facts with fiction when telling a story. Truth, at times, played second fiddle to the overall importance of an impression. His reminiscences interlace real life and imagination. However in many instances, and as Biala’s letters prove, Ford’s stories played very close to truth. A Bouillabaisse Party the couple attended in August of 1932 made it into the pages of Provence: BIALA: ‘Yesterday we came back from an overnight trip from Cassis, which is eight miles from Marseilles. We were invited there by a Frenchman, Le Son and his American wife. They were camping there, and every year, the day before they left, they gave a bouillabaisse party [. . . .] Well, we went to the party. The other guests were a fisherman and his wife, a pig dealer of about 80 (who to reach us walked twenty-five miles over the mountains taking five hours to do it), his daughter and son-in-law who helped him raise the pigs, the chef from a neighboring hotel with his wife, children and father. They were all peasants, and aside from the diamonds they wear, they were dressed exactly the way they dressed to do their work in. Nothing picturesque. We swam, then cooked the meal all of us together (I forgot to say the fisherman, Marius, rowed us over in his boat to a cove some distance out, of the most unimaginable and fantastique [sic] beauty, it was all enclosed with mountains as high as skyscrapers and much the same shapes). The old man, the pig dealer, makes the most wonderful wines, he having enormous vineyards, not a bottle of which he would sell if you gave him its weight in gold. He brought about fifty bottles of it (we only drank about twenty-five). The dinner consisted of bouillabaisse which is at least two meals in itself, then a wonderful paté made out of chicken livers and truffles, and enormous roast chicken, salad, then a cylinder of the local cheese which is made of goats cream and is very sweet, over which you pour sugar, and the French version of apple jack, about fifty years old. Then there was ice cream with biscuits, then Spanish melons and the local peaches. After that coffee and liquors. The meal lasted four hours, the old man wouldn’t let me stop eating for a moment. Every time I stopped he threw another

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fish onto my plate and said we were weaklings. He said he was what he was because he ate a lunch like that everyday of his life, but in the evenings he drinks only milk mixed with water, and to prove to me how strong he was he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder. He was shorter than I, thin as a lathe and strong as steel. Then the cook sang the Pastoral which they’ve sung every Christmas since Christ. Everybody joined. They had beautiful voices and sang in Provençal. And it wasn’t what is called church music or even religious. It was about how Joseph looked for a room in the inn and they said there wasn’t a single room etc. It was exactly like a legend of their own village speaking of things they all knew, and both the music and the words were like that. It made it all the more real, that in Cassis it is impossible to get a room in the summer, and we ourselves had slept the night on very sharp rocks by the sea for that reason. I hate Christianity, but this was a fairy tale and very moving. Then the Cook sang Manon, and his father recited something about the war of 1870, and we would have sung for them if they’d been at all interested. Finally we all left in the boat, mostly because Ford and I had to return to Toulon to feed the chickens.21 In the Spring of 1934, Ford and Biala visited London. Biala, like many of the great artists found café life synonymous with creativity. Ford recorded this dialogue in the pages of Provence: BIALA: ‘Let’s go quickly to a café so that I may get down my impressions while they are new…’ Biala said of Ford’s Great View down Whitehall, it was her first dusk in London. ‘A café!!!’ wrote Ford, “Don’t you know that there are no cafes in London? Besides, I’ll be damned if I let you be seen in a café if there was one…Don’t you realize that you are supposed to be illustrating a serious book? . . . A moral one. . . .’ BIALA: ‘But if London does not provide cafés for her artists how can she expect to have any art? . . . Or any letters? Or any civilization? Or anything?’22

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Upon their return from London to Provence via Paris, Dijon, etc., they were told that if they took a quick bus to Nîmes they could catch a bullfight. It would be Biala’s first. Captured by the scene she drew the mise à mort in situ. Ford, in retrospect, published a vivid account in Provence chapter 11. •

See plate 9 – The Great and For Ever Impassive Lalanda by Janice Biala, 1934. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches

And then there was the episode with the mistral appearing in the closing scenes of Provence: ‘The mistral sure is the wine of life . . . Our treasurer’s wallet was flying from under an armpit beyond reach of a clutching hand . . . Incredible humour; unparalleled buffoonery of a wind . . . The air was full of little, capricious squares, floating black against the light over the river . . . Like a swarm of bees: thick . . . Good fellows, bees . . . .’23 Biala recounts the scene in a letter to Jack, 9 April 1932: ‘Coming down here we stopped in Provence thinking we’d have a short holiday and the very first day the Mistral (it is a terrific cold wind, just the opposite of the Sirocco), blew my purse out of my hand, and all our [. . .] money out of my purse. And I see our holiday and a months living sailing over the Rhone to be eaten by fishes I suppose. And that is an example of our every day luck. When it isn’t man it is God who jips24 us out of anything we’ve got. For my sins I suppose.’ Ford, of course, joked ‘for months at the thought that some astonished housewife cleaning fish might have found a thousand-franc note in its belly.25 •

See plate 10 – Book cover illustration: Provence, 1935

Ford finished Provence at the end of August and mailed the manuscript on 3 September 1934. BIALA: ‘We’re nearly dead with fatigue over our mighty labors’ On the following day, Biala wrote to Jefferson Jone, Managing Editor of Ford’s publisher J. B. Lippincott:

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BIALA: ‘We’ve sight-seen nearly every place mentioned in the book, Ford is nothing if not consciencious [sic]. And we’ve worked what seems to me every minute of the time since we got back. Letter from Jefferson Jones, 17th September 1934: Dear Mr. Ford: The manuscript of PROVENCE, with Biala’s drawings arrived a few days after my last letter to you. One of our editors has just finished reading the book and he was enchanted with it. As for the drawings, we are delighted with the originality of them and are sure that the combination of the text and the drawing will produce a fascinating volume.

Ford and Biala’s Provence was published by Lippincott in March 1935. Provence remained at the center of Ford and Biala’s time together. •

See plate 11 – Janice Biala and Ford Madox Ford, Villa Paul, c. 1934

The Villa Paul continued to be their retreat until Ford’s death. Biala remained in love with both Ford and Provence for the rest of her life. She returned to live in France after the war. Biala was always at home wherever her easel was, and mostly, France was where the easel sat, with Provence forming the heart of her memories there. Letter to Jack, 29 May 1932, 7 a.m: BIALA: ‘[. . .] things are better here Ford is working very hard finishing his novel [. . .] and he’s feeling well. The weather was better for the last two weeks but yesterday and today it’s raining. And its miserable here when it rains. All the houses around here are built against the heat and this house in particular is built not only against the heat, but against being lived in at all so that on wet days it’s living in a small pup tent. Just the same I wish you were here. I think you’d love it. It’s the most fantastically beautiful country you ever saw. Love, Janice.’

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NOTES 1 2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Biala also designed book covers for several of Ford’s books: The Rash Act, Henry for Hugh, It was the Nightingale, and Provence. The exhibition was curated by Jason Andrew; supported jointly by the Université Paul Cézanne, the Université de Provence, the Laboratoire d’études et de recherche sur le monde anglophone, the Ford Madox Ford Society, the Conseil Général des Bouches-du-Rhône, the Communauté du Pays d’Aix, the Norte Maar art foundation. Installation assisted by Julia K. Gleich, Quentin Langley, Norman Jabaut, and Thomas Pégon; mounted in collaboration with the Estate of Janice Biala and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Letter to Jack, 9 August, 1930. The composer George Antheil (1900-59), who described himself as ‘The Bad Boy of Music’, is best-known for his futuristic collaboration with Fernand Léger, Ballet Mécanique (1924). Letter to Arthur Mizener, 3 October 1968, currently at the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, and quoted with the Library’s permission. All the other personal letters by Biala quoted in this essay remain in the Estate of Janice Biala, New York. Her letters are quoted with the permission of the Estate. Biala also used the phrase in her interview with Sondra Stang in Stang, ed., The Presence of Ford Madox Ford, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981, p. 222. Letter to Arthur Mizener, Paris, 3 October 1968. Ford to Jefferson Jones (of Lippincott), 12 January 1934: Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965, pp. 230-1. Ford Madox Ford, Provence, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935 – henceforth Provence; p. 19. Ford Madox Ford, Your Mirror to My Times, ed. Michael Killigrew, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, pp. 385-6. Ford, Provence, p. 25. Letter to Jack, 16 February 1931 (J. Tworkov / American Express Co. / Paris / France; to Jack Tworkov / 258 East 4th Street, New York City / Etats Unis). Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 378. Bowen, Drawn From Life: A Memoir, London: Collins, 1941, pp. 191-2 Letter to Jack, 30 November 1931. Letter to Jack, 26 September 1930. Ford’s version of this episode, in Provence 228, is discussed by Julian Barnes on p. 156 of this volume. Letter to Jack, 2 June 1933 (Mr. Jack Tworkov / a board “Ile de France” arrivant le 24 juin/Le Havre / 3 ème classe). Ford to Juliet Soskice, 9 July 1934: Oliver Soskice. Letter to Jack. 9 April 1932. André Tardieu, President of the Council of Ministers (1929-32), Democratic Alliance, served three terms. Letter to Jack, 18 October 1933 (Mr. Jack Tworkov / 222 East 15th Street, New York City / Etats Unis).

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21 Letter to Jack, 18 August 1932. Ford describes this experience in Provence: ‘It is not two years since I was privileged to attend one of these occasions . . . I owed the privilege not to the fact that I am poète but to my local reputation as a chef who can dispute as to the correct preparation of bouillabaisse through a whole afternoon and far into the evening. These rehearsals are kept rather secret and are held in the calanques, the inland arms of the sea between the wine-red cliffs of the promontory near Marseilles. So they can only be approached by water’, p. 167. 22 Provence 24. 23 Provence 358. 24 To jip or gyp: slang for to cheat. 25 Sondra J. Stang, The Presence of Ford Madox Ford, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981, p. 198.

1. Painter Janice Biala and Ford Madox Ford, c.1930. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

2. Ford Madox Ford and Biala with the Crankshaws, Villa Paul. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

3. Biala at the Villa Paul, photographed by Ford Madox Ford. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

4. View from our Terrace (at Villa Paul), c.1931. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

5. Town View, Cap Brun, by Janice Biala, c.1931. Oil on canvas. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

6. The Port at Cap Brun, by Janice Biala, c.1931. Oil on panel. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

7. Ford on the Terrace, Villa Paul, by Janice Biala, c.1931. Oil on canvas. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

8. View from Our Terrace, by Janice Biala, c.1933. Oil on panel, 25½ x 21¼ inches. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

9. The Great and For Ever Impassive Lalanda by Janice Biala, 1934. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches, © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

10. Book cover illustration: Provence, 1935. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

11. Janice Biala and Ford Madox Ford, Villa Paul, c.1934. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

12. King René’s Honeymoon by Ford Madox Brown, 1864, pencil, watercolour, gouache and gum arabic on card, 276 x 186 mm. Tate Britain.

13. Ford Madox Brown at his easel by Cathy Madox Brown, watercolour on paper, 53.5 x 48.2 cm, 1870. Private Collection.

14. Photograph of 37 Fitzroy Square which Ford used as the frontispiece to Ancient Lights.

15. Biala’s drawing of King René’s castle at Tarascon from Ford’s Provence. © Estate of Janice Biala, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

16. The King of France claims the dispossessed Cordelia, inscribed lower right, ‘FordMBrown Paris/44’, pencil, pen and brown ink on paper, 216 x 280 mm,. Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester.

17. King René’s Honeymoon: Architecture by Ford Madox Brown, 1861, brush & brown ink with watercolour over pencil on buff paper, 44.4 x 31.6 cm. Monogram and date ‘FMB – 61’ lower left. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

18. The Pretty Baa-Lambs by Ford Madox Brown, oil on panel, 61 x 76.2 cm., 1851, re-touched 1851-53, 1859. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

FORD’S PROVENCE: A PRE-RAPHAELITE VISION Angela Thirlwell Whenever Ford thought about his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, the great Victorian artist, he thought about France. And whenever he thought about France, he thought about his grandfather: an exaggeration perhaps, but an exaggeration in the spirit of Ford himself. From the windows of his grandfather’s house at 37 Fitzroy Square, he had, he said, his ‘first view of life’.1 His notions of France and Provence were rooted in childhood memories of figures from French legend painted by his grandfather. At Madox Brown’s home, young Ford first met his ‘courtesy-aunt’, the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ poet, Christina Rossetti, so formidable that he took refuge behind his grandfather’s easel: She frightened me a good deal, I suppose because of her Latin-Hellenic origin and particularly because of her fluting, exact voice and dark, always inwardsmiling eyes. She moved one hand towards me presumably to draw me towards her. That frightened me out of my life so that I ran behind the easel [. . . .] When I emerged she called me ‘her dear young connection’ with the air of enjoying a holy joke. (Provence 144)

A drawing of Christina by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, exists in a private collection which shows her dark, inward-smiling eyes, and also alludes to her subtly forbidding presence.2 Christina Rossetti ‘only rarely saw the sun and never felt the mistral’ but in Ford’s imagination, ‘her whole life of writing poems on the corner of her Bloomsbury washstand was one long obsession of longing for that South that begins after you have passed Valence – entre la Mer et la Durance. . . .’ (Provence 145). Her jewel-like images sprang from the secret gardens of courtly love and ‘glowing tapestries’,3 from the poetry of the Troubadours and medieval metrical romances: Raise me a dais of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes,

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ANGELA THIRLWELL In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me.4

In Ford’s imagination, Christina Rossetti in her gloomy London home was thinking always ‘of south walls on which the apricots glow’ (AL 60). For him, she was the ‘hundred-times great, grandchild of Dante, who was the son of all the writers of Provence’ (Provence 146). The picture on the easel, behind which Ford hid from Christina Rossetti, was Madox Brown’s King René’s Honeymoon: Architecture, a subject he returned to over and over again, in many media and in many versions. •

See plate 12 – King René’s Honeymoon by Ford Madox Brown, 1864, pencil, watercolour, gouache and gum arabic on card, 276 x 186 mm. Tate Britain

In an 1864 watercolour version, medieval King René is locked in embrace with his new wife, Jeanne de Laval, but surrounded by architectural drawings. He is lost in reverie, surveying plans for his new castle at Tarascon, the city Ford said, he ‘always loved best in the world’.5 The incident and the picture marked Ford’s first knowledge of his Pre-Raphaelite inheritance, forever entwined with the Provençal courts of love. King René had been made popular in England in 1829 by Walter Scott’s novel, Anne of Geierstein, although Scott gives no account in it of the honeymoon. At the lower edge of the picture, just legible is an inscription upside down on the architectural plans, in medieval French or Provençal, ‘Voici le chastel du Roy René’. Ford’s father, Frank Hueffer, had lectured and written on the Troubadours,6 and even produced an opera about Guillem de Cabestanh called The Troubadour,7 but it was Madox Brown who provided the indelible visual image. He made Provence sing in Ford’s mind before he ever set foot in its sunshine. After the death of his father in 1889, young Ford’s adolescence was spent in his grandfather’s London house and studio overlooking Primrose Hill, where he heard French and absorbed a witty, anecdotal, visual way of writing narrative. Before Ford found his spiritual and actual home in France with Janice Biala, the French roots of his painter-grandfather entwined themselves into his consciousness. France was a spiritus loci before it was ever a real place for Ford: ‘Provence is not a country, nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind’ (Provence 66). Later he recalled that he had been ‘reared

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amongst the tumultuously-bearded great of the mid-Victorian era’8 exactly as his mother, Cathy, exquisitely painted Madox Brown, her father and Ford’s grandfather, with a tumultuously cascading beard, seated in a garden at his easel. •

See plate 13 – Ford Madox Brown at his easel by Cathy Madox Brown, watercolour on paper, 53.5 x 48.2 cm, 1870. Private Collection

And in 1934 when Ford was writing Provence, he was doing so in the shadow of his long-dead grandfather, and his most prestigious home at the hub of London’s Bohemia at 37, Fitzroy Square. •

See plate 14 – photograph of 37 Fitzroy Square which Ford used as the frontispiece to Ancient Lights

When Ford walked the streets of London, suffused by nostalgia for Provence, he trod in the footsteps of the Pre-Raphaelites. He saw Provence from London, and London from Provence. King René’s Honeymoon was first designed by Madox Brown for one of the panels of a decorated oak cabinet, commissioned by John Pollard Seddon from William Morris’s London firm of decorative arts, in order, appropriately, to hold Seddon’s architectural drawings.9 Other panels were painted by Rossetti and Burne-Jones, but the initial idea to illustrate King René’s honeymoon was Madox Brown’s.10 Seddon had stipulated that the cabinet should ‘realise the unity of the several fine arts and their accessories’.11 The arts illustrated were architecture, in Madox Brown’s King René; painting, and sculpture by Burne-Jones; and music by Rossetti. They were romantically linked in ‘the old spirit of chivalry’ symbolised by the imaginative construct of King René’s honeymoon. When Madox Brown showed the study in his landmark retrospective exhibition in London in 1865, Gladstone visited the show and shook him by the hand. Madox Brown introduced the picture in his pioneering Catalogue: King René was titular King of Naples, Sicily, Jerusalem, and Cyprus, and father of our celebrated and unfortunate Margaret [of Anjou], Queen to Henry VI [of England]. [King René] was poet, painter and architect, sculptor, and musician; but most unfortunate in his political relations. Of course, as soon as married, he would build a new home, carve it and decorate it himself, and talk

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It was an image that leapt back and forward in time for Ford: Ah, the Courts of Love of Provence and the Troubadours! . . . I imagined them shining in the sun before a castle keep. The ladies all aware with their hennins and steeple-crowned hats, and their knights in rose-garlanded tilting helmets sat about in red plush armchairs, manicuring – I can’t imagine why – their finger nails and discoursing of le gaie sçavoir – the gentle Science. . . . (Provence 56)

A romantic vision of old Provence meshed in Ford’s mind with his memories of a London childhood. ‘And I am hardly exaggerating when I say that all my travelling has always been one long planning to return’ (Provence 57). For Ford, Provence was a complex place of advance and reverse nostalgia. • See plate 17 – King René’s Honeymoon: Architecture by Ford Madox Brown, 1861, brush & brown ink with watercolour over pencil on buff paper, 44.4 x 31.6 cm. Monogram and date ‘FMB – 61’ lower left. Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

A strongly swirling pen and ink drawing is Madox Brown’s earliest known study for the cabinet, and shows a pre-aesthetic movement vision of medieval history entangled with myth. King René was famous for his passionate espousal of the arts, and indeed he does seem to be more interested in his T-square and the architectural plans lying at his medieval foot than in his new wife. Erotic passion is indicated only by the Queen who, in an ecstasy of shut eyes, tenderly presses her husband’s head towards her kiss. By contrast, King René’s gaze is directed away from his bride. He clasps a pair of cold adjustable architectural dividers rather than his loving bride. His mind is on the new castle he will build, not on his recently contracted marriage. Art takes aesthetic precedence over every other consideration in his mind. He is secretly smiling at the thought of the castle he will create. By contrast, Biala’s rendering of King René’s bastide at Tarascon is crisply stripped of any narrative or commentary. •

See plate 15 – Biala’s drawing of King René’s Bastide, Tarascon from Ford’s Provence

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Madox Brown’s concept of his medieval subject had been essentially Pre-Raphaelite. For one of the principles of Pre-Raphaelitism was to re-interpret the medieval. In Rome in 1845-6, Madox Brown had met the German Nazarene artists, Overbeck and Cornelius, whose linear, neo-medieval art prefigured the English Pre-Raphaelites, and they opened his eyes to ways that modern art could make the medieval new again. In the spirit of the Nazarenes, Madox Brown’s huge picture, Wycliffe Reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt, painted in 1847-8, anticipated this key aspect of Pre-Raphaelite art.13 It was a contemporary take on medievalism; it made the medieval modern. In a similar way, King René’s Honeymoon would re-make medievalism over a decade later. Wycliffe was shown in London in 1848, the same year that Millais, Hunt and Rossetti discovered they shared a passion for early Italian artists who pre-dated Raphael, such as Giotto, and founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Friendship with Rossetti who came to him for painting lessons projected Madox Brown into the circle of iconoclastic young artists. They were a protest movement, in defiance of conventional art, epitomised by the Royal Academy. The Pre-Raphaelites loathed the sombre tones of Victorian painting, which they famously derided as ‘slosh’, with Sir ‘Sloshua’ Reynolds as their chief hate-figure. They wanted to open the eyes of their audience on to a pristine day, with minute attention to detail, and to achieve a brilliant clarity, unseen since the luminous Italian Primitives. So they painted their subjects exactly as they saw them, as Ford said, ‘hair for hair or leaf-spore for leaf-spore’ (AL 59). They achieved this brilliance by a painstakingly slow technique, using tiny brushes on a wet, white under-wash. Using these labour intensive methods the Pre-Raphaelites painted real people with dirty toe-nails, and chose uncompromisingly modern subjects, such as fallen women, adultery and illegitimacy. Although Madox Brown championed radical ideas in art and politics, he never formally joined the Brotherhood. He was an ‘unofficial’ Pre-Raphaelite, a role that suited his sense of personal geography. Considered a quintessentially English artist, in fact he was born in France, where he spent the first twenty-five years of his life, and received his early art training. Later he enrolled at the Academy of Bruges under Albert Gregorius, who himself had been trained in the Paris atelier of the neo-classical painter, Jacques-Louis David. Madox

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Brown went on to train in the then French-speaking international art school of Antwerp, under the history painter, Gustave Wappers. The medieval interior of Antwerp Academy, once a monastery, still looks today much as it did during Brown’s student days in 1839-40. After his youthful first marriage in 1841 to his English cousin, Elisabeth Bromley, the two lived in Paris, from where Brown looked back across the Channel to English culture and worked obsessively on the English subject of King Lear. In one of his sketches for this dramatic series, the King of France, on the extreme right, and in the ‘right’, claims Cordelia, the British princess unjustly cut off by her father, King Lear, slumped on his throne. •

See plate 16 - The king of France claims the dispossessed Cordelia, inscribed lower right, ‘FordMBrown Paris/44’, pencil, pen and brown ink on paper, 216 x 280 mm. Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester

Thus France/England/France was the interior pendulum of Brown’s life as it became the interior pendulum of Ford’s. When they were in France, they thought of London. When they were in London, they thought of France: ‘I sit with equanimity in a Nordic attic of a grey city; but the equanimity exists because I am composedly sure that I shall again see Provence [. . . .] I shall always see it as I see it here in spite of the fog and the tumult,’ said Ford (Provence 90-1). London had been a mere ‘suburb of Kingston-on-Thames’ he remarked, tongue-in-cheek, ‘still lost in the mists outside civilization’ when Provence had already enjoyed a sophisticated culture (Provence 95). Madox Brown retained the French language and French friends all his life. His socialist views were so close to the Communards in 1871, that he employed an anarchist exile, Jules Andrieu, to teach French and Latin to his son, Oliver. Through the Andrieu connection, it is likely that Rimbaud and Verlaine attended Madox Brown’s London salon for the intelligentsia.14 Among the glamorous personalities invited to his parties during the early 1870s, the only ban was on Royal Academicians, Madox Brown’s bêtes noires. Ford remembered: ‘He hated all Academicians, all Cabinet Ministers, all Officials, all Tories, all Whigs and the Times newspaper [. . . .] All Academies – except the Académie Française – were anathema’.15 Like Rimbaud and Verlaine who brought France with them when they came to London, Ford saw Provence through a prism. He saw it refracted through the eyes of a Northern European in general,

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and a Londoner in particular. London is as much the protagonist of his Provence as Provence is itself. And behind London, animating the child who was father of the man, father of the writer, lay the metropolitan art movement of Pre-Raphaelitism, as revolutionary in its way as the year that gave it birth, 1848. Provence, the book Ford eventually wrote, was as beguiling as those old Pre-Raphaelites. It was an extraordinary hybrid: part travelogue, part history, part cookery book, part memoir, part scholarship, part nostalgia, part autobiography, part fiction, part philosophy, part celebration of Ford’s last love affair with Janice Biala, part fantasy, part humour, a cultural crusade and a completely engaging act of selfindulgence that was an authentic expression of his true voice. Provence, noted Ford with insight, is ‘more personal than most of my other books’.16 And as he wrote to his New York editor, Howard Lowry, ‘I always entangle the subject as much as possible’.17 Half-way through Provence, Ford walks down Fitzroy Street in London, re-living his grandfather’s artistic past. Somewhere between Charlotte Street and Oxford Street in his mind’s eye, he remembers ‘a colour shop where my grandfather used to buy such paints as he did not mix for himself. . . . And of all the acres of the faded gumminesses that, under the guise of British art’ were then being displayed in Burlington House ‘my grandfather’s Work, the Last of England and the Pretty Ba’a Lambs are the only pictures that have not so hopelessly faded [. . .]’ (Provence 152). English Pre-Raphaelitism pre-dated both French Impressionism and the Aesthetic Movement, pioneered by Whistler. Madox Brown pre-dated the Impressionists. He did one significant thing that they did – but he did it before they did, especially in Pretty Baa-Lambs. The picture was a landmark not only in English but also in European painting. For Madox Brown was the first artist to paint figures in a landscape, ‘almost entirely in sunlight,’ from life, en plein air.18 In doing this in 1851, he was not only ahead of, or contemporary with, some members of the French Barbizon school, but by almost 20 years, he also anticipated Monet, who did not bring his ladies out into the garden until 1869. •

See plate 18 – The Pretty Baa-Lambs by Ford Madox Brown, oil on panel, 61 x 76.2 cm., 1851, re-touched 1851-53, 1859. Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

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In his crystalline image of Pretty Baa-Lambs, Madox Brown practised charged colours, electricity by friction, in the first picture to challenge the usual narratives of Victorian painting. With its deliberately teasing title, Pretty Baa-Lambs refused to tell any conventional narrative. Madox Brown said the picture had been misunderstood when it was first exhibited back in 1852. ‘I was told that it was impossible to make out what meaning I had in the picture.’19 In fact, he had totally rejected any notion of meaning, either symbolic, moral or even literal. Instead, he presented the viewer with a provocative image, a witty combustion of high realism and extreme artificiality. Painted according to Pre-Raphaelite principles of realism, it showed an apparently modern mother in fancy-dress, exhibiting the extreme affectedness of wearing eighteenth-century dress in the nineteenth. It seemed to be a contemporary take on traditional religious pictures of the Virgin and Child, yet it implicitly recalled MarieAntoinette playing at shepherdesses at Le Petit Trianon. It was a topsy-turvy world. This modern virgin was no virgin but a young woman, Emma Hill, who dared to ‘live in sin’ with the artist and father of her child. If meaning is irrelevant, as Madox Brown explained, the painting can be seen as a modern experiment. The inter-relationship of shapes and colours almost approaches an abstract, although Madox Brown realistically depicted every droplet of sweat on the sunburnt faces. Bold greens, blues and pinks assaulted the Victorian viewer with almost a pop art shock and immediacy. Madox Brown was ahead of his times, pointing the way forward to suggestive and non-narrative pictures such as Millais’s Autumn Leaves,20 to the later aesthetic movement epitomised by Whistler, and to the French Impressionists, whom he considered ‘geniuses’.21 Provence, I suggest, is a work of Impressionism. ‘Writing as it today is practised’ thought Ford, ‘is a sort of pointillisme. You put point beside point, each point crepitating against all that surrounds it. That is what Ezra [Pound] means by ‘charged’ words. They are such as find electricity by f[r]iction with their neighbours’.22 Point beside point, colour crepitating against colour was the radical technique Ford had observed and absorbed in his grandfather’s oeuvre. Being brought up in a studio, cheek by jowl with some of the most iconic canvases of all Pre-Raphaelite art, was a founding experience of Ford’s life. His late composition of Provence was

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infused with memories of London, his grandfather and with PreRaphaelitism. Old worlds opened up new worlds, and were enriching and enlarging for Ford. In Provence he felt: a singular emotion of the enlargement of the horizons of my world. It is much as when from the coast of Kent I suddenly see France, [exactly as his grandfather had looked back from Kent to France, the land of his birth] or when on the dock at Calais I notice a Pullman car labelled Warsaw, Budapest and Constantinople. . . . A sense of enlargement. . . . And in Provence the feeling is peculiarly vivid. (Provence 121)

NOTES 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

Ford, Provence, London: Allen & Unwin, 1938 – henceforth Provence; p. 143. ‘Christina Rossetti’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, coloured chalks on blue-grey paper, 785 x 655 mm, September 1866, see Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971, Cat. No. 429, Plate 410, now Private Collection. Ford, Ancient Lights, London: Chapman & Hall, 1911 – henceforth AL; p. 60. ‘A Birthday’ by Christina Rossetti, 1857. Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 volumes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, vol. 1, p. 130. Francis Hueffer, The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages, London: Chatto & Windus, 1878. Douglas Goldring, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: A Record of the Life and Writings of Ford Madox Ford, London: Macdonald, 1948, p. 22. Saunders, vol. 2 523, from the doctoral oration given by the Olivet College Orator, Dr Akeley, in honour of Ford, 19 June 1938. King René’s Honeymoon Cabinet, oak with painted panels, 1862, is in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Century Guild Hobby Horse, ed. A. H. Mackmurdo, 1888, III, p. 158. Stephen Wildman, Visions of Love and Life: Pre-Raphaelite Art from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Alexandria, Virginia: Art Services International, 1995, exhibition catalogue, p. 196. Ford Madox Brown, The Exhibition of WORK, and other Paintings, London: 1865 – henceforth Exhibition; p. 13. Wycliffe reading his translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt by Ford Madox Brown, oil on canvas, 119.5 x 153.5 cm, 1847-8, now at Bradford Art Gallery. ‘Through the Andrieu connection’: see The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870-1873 ed. Odette Bornand, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 195, WMR’s diary entry 4 May 1872, and see Bornand’s note 1 referring to the probable connection made by Jules Andrieu between Oliver Madox Brown and the French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine in 1872. See also discussion in V. P. Underwood’s Verlaine et l’Angleterre, Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1956, p. 84.

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15 Ford Madox Hueffer, ‘Nice People’, Temple Bar, November 1903 – henceforth ‘Nice People’; p. 572. 16 Saunders, vol. 2 373. 17 Saunders, vol. 2 492 and 653, note 8. 18 The Pretty Baa-Lambs by Ford Madox Brown was painted ‘almost entirely in sunlight’, Exhibition 7. 19 Ibid. 20 Autumn Leaves by John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 104.3 x 74 cm, 1855-56, Manchester City Art Gallery. 21 ‘Nice People’ 573. 22 Saunders, vol. 2 425 and 638, note 8.

FORD MADOX FORD AND THE TROUBADOURS Ashley Chantler God knows that the lesson we learn from life is that our very existence in the nature of things is a perpetual harming of somebody. Ford Madox Ford, Ancient Lights

Understanding Ford Madox Ford’s relationship with the troubadours is not easy, mainly because of his complex relationship with his father, Francis Hueffer, but also with his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, and Ezra Pound; to put it another way, because of what Ford calls in Provence (1935) the ‘skirmishes in the sempiternal war between youth and age’.1 Through Guillem de Cabestanh,2 I hope to shed some light. In A Mirror to France (1926), Ford says that, as a boy, he was taught by his father ‘a very little Provençal, by means of the poems of Guillem de Cabestanh’,3 and in It Was the Nightingale (1933): ‘From my father I must have acquired my passion for Provence [. . . .] He […] was for ever sighing for the country of Guillem de Cabestanh’.4 Hueffer had completed Der Trobador Guillem de Cabestanh: Sein Leben und seine Werke (1869) for his Ph.D., published The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages (1878), and had, as Ford tells us in Provence, ‘written […] the libretto for an opera called “The Troubadour” [1886]. This at our tender ages my brother and I were duly taken to see, and the opera centred round the loves of Cabestanh and the lady and the blood and the cup’ (Provence 52). Regarding Hueffer: ‘I don’t know how my father did it. He was far too much of an English gentleman to suggest that we should read his books – the famous one on the Troubadours, the other about the Music of the Future and the rest. But somehow there got through to me the impression that one of the poems [‘Li dous cossire’] of Guillem de Cabestanh who was my father’s favourite hero and poet […] was the most beautiful poem in the world’.5 This is supported by Hueffer in The Troubadours, who says that ‘Li dous cossire’ is ‘one of the most beautiful and most impassioned lyrics ever penned’.6 In Provence, Ford gives us his own translation of its opening:

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It is one of Guillem’s canzoni: ‘The poetry of the troubadours divided itself sharply into two genres: there were the canzones which hymned to love and the sirventes which told narratives or expressed invective – which, in part, were poems written with a purpose’.7 In The Troubadours, Hueffer uses Guillem as ‘the representative of the lovesong proper’ (Troubadours 148). Regarding Ford’s translating of the poem: ‘I cannot have been more than eleven or twelve […] – certainly I was not more than twelve, because by that time my father was dead and I have never looked at his book or the poem of Cabestanh again’ (Provence 52-3). (Ford was in fact fifteen when Hueffer died, in 1889.)8 The Provençal original that Ford prints certainly seems not to have been transcribed from The Troubadours, given the number of substantive variants between the two (the first version is Ford’s): Li dous cossire Quem don amors soven Domnam fan dire De vos mas vers plaszen Pessan remire Vostre cors car é gen Cui eu desire E cui non fasz perven (Provence 53)9 Li douz cossire Qem don amors soven, Domnam fan dire De vos maint vers plazen; Pessan remire Vostre cors car e gen, Cui eu dezire Mas qe non faz pervan (Troubadours 358)

When working on The March of Literature (1938), however, Ford probably referred to his father’s book: for Marcabru’s ‘A la fontana del vergier’, for example, Ford seems to transcribe Hueffer’s original

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version.10 He then supposedly gives the literal translation by ‘the author’s father’ (ML 283), but actually gives his own: At the orchard fountain Where the grass is green near the gravel In the shade of a tree belonging to her home In the beauty of white flowers And the song of the nightingale I found alone without companion One who had no taste for my company. (ML 283)

Hueffer’s version is: At the fountain of the orchard Where the grass is green near the gravel In the shade of a tree indigenous In the beauty of white flowers And of new song familiar I found alone without companion Her who not relished my conversation. (Troubadours 364-5)

Ford thus appears to let his father speak, his father ‘a master of the poetry and language of the troubadours’ (IWN 119), ‘the Great Authority’ (Provence 133), but actually silences him, or at least circumvents him. My father was a man of an encyclopædic knowledge and had a great respect for the attainments of the distinguished. He used, I remember, habitually to call me ‘the patient but exceedingly stupid donkey.’ [. . . .] He was [. . .], I believe, in his day the greatest authority upon the troubadours and the romance languages, and wrote original poems in modern Provençal.11 In [my father’s] bringing-up, such was the attitude of parents towards children that it was the duty of himself and his brothers and sisters at the end of each meal to kneel down and kiss the hands of their father and mother as a token of thanks for the nourishment received. So that he was after his lights a mild and reasonable man to his children. Nevertheless, what I remember of him most was that he called me ‘the patient but extremely stupid donkey.’ (AL ix)

Helen Rossetti, Ford’s cousin, ‘remembered her stays with the Hueffers as made unpleasant by “old Franz’s bullying of the boys”’,12 something which Ford ‘never complained of’,13 but he certainly makes it clear in Ancient Lights (1911) that his father’s actions were cruel and scarring. Immediately after the first reference in the book to his nickname – the repetition itself is telling14 – Ford writes: ‘God knows

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that the lesson we learn from life is that our very existence in the nature of things is a perpetual harming of somebody’ (AL ix). For several reasons, this is saddening, but at least in its honesty goes beyond Philip Larkin’s ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’15 as it embraces everybody, including the author. Before the translation in Provence of ‘Li dous cossire’, there is a strange reminiscence, in part about Guillem, in part about Hueffer. To get some sense of it, it is necessary to skip ahead, to where Ford writes: The husband of Bérangère des Baux made no bones about taking the easiest way [of getting revenge on the man in love with his wife], slaying Guillem de Cabestanh and giving his wife the poet’s heart to eat and his blood, with perhaps a zest of pamplemousse [grapefruit], to drink. Bérangère was faced with a difficult problem in etiquette. . . . What should you do when you discover that you have unwittingly become philochthonous? She took the easy way out and declaring that so sweet were that meat and that wine that none others should ever pass her lips, she threw herself from the highest point of Les Baux into the Camargue. And the wine that grows on that spot is to this day called Sanh Del Trobador.16

For Ford, the ‘moral’ of the story is that ‘in Provence you circumvent rather than overcome difficulties, since love obtained by a philtre can never be much else than an ersatz – a synthetic – passion’ (Provence 82). Earlier, immediately after a passing reference to ‘the wine called Sanh del Trobador, the blood of Guillem de Cabestanh’, Ford writes: ‘Years ago, when I was a little, little boy in London, before my father died, we had a great and mysterious garden’, which is then described as if in a fairytale: ‘it had gloom, romance, immense trees with sticky leaves, an end wall a hundred and twenty feet high’; Jerusalem artichokes made ‘year in year out a forest as black and mysterious as the one in which Nicolette met the woodcutters’ (Provence 50). Ford used to climb into a coal-hole ‘in order unknown to my father to read the adventures of Jack Harkaway’. Similarly, in Ancient Lights Ford recalls meeting, as a boy, Thomas Carlyle: But he is almost confounded in my mind with a gentleman called Pepper. Pepper very much resembled Carlyle except that he was exceedingly dirty. He used to sell penny dreadfuls which I was forbidden to purchase, and I think the happiest times of my childhood were spent in a large coal-cellar. Into this I used to lock myself to read the exploits of Harkaway Dick [. . . .] There were all these things that were jumbled up in my poor little mind together. I

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presume I should not remember half so vividly the story of Carlyle and the author of Wilhelm Meister [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe] if my father had not afterwards frequently jogged my memory upon the point. (AL 41)

Back in the garden, Hueffer gives ‘Ike the Duck’ some claret, which prompts a dream-like description of the troubadour’s blood: ‘I see it shining in its chalice in the hand of Bérangère des Baux across the shadows and mysteries of that garden. . . . But sometimes the Blood of the Troubadour will be dark purple in the scarlet glass with the emerald green stem from which my father drank’ (Provence 51). After an appearance by Micky, the rabbit, a ‘wicked old devil’: Guillem de Cabestanh [. . .] appears to me over in the far shadows [. . . .] And he stretches out his hand towards the chalice that is offered him by Bérangère des Baux [. . . .] It was of course wrong historically for the lady to offer the chalice to the troubadour because it was really she who drank the poet’s blood from the chalice. . . . But that is how it comes back to me – the chalice and the blood shining against the end-wall for all the world like the Sangréal of Parsifal. . . . Indeed I may well have mixed up the two legends, for my father, besides being the greatest Parsifal-fan in the London of his day, was a great champion of English music and had written for music of Sir A. C. Mackenzie the libretto for an opera called ‘The Troubadour.’17

Through the claret and the glass, Hueffer becomes strangely linked with Bérangère des Baux, who acts incorrectly – ‘wrong historically’ – in Ford’s memory. The strange psychodrama is shot through with the forbidden and the transgressive: finding a place to read forbidden penny dreadfuls; the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, lovers who have been forbidden to marry by Aucassin’s father;18 Guillem’s desire and Bérangère’s offering of the chalice. The memory thus links to the poem, specifically the final line of Ford’s translation – ‘I crave but may not taste’ (Provence 53) – a link that Ford prompts us to make: ‘across the projection of the dark garden that my memory gives me there seems to depend, in letters of light, that poem and the translation of it I made’ (Provence 52). As young translator, Ford ‘becomes’ the troubadour. Guillem was for the young Ford one of the ‘most important and glamorous figures of my horizon’, ‘my life’s hero’ until the age of fourteen (Provence 54, 59). He was, like Hueffer, a formative figure, and ‘Lis dous cossire’ a formative poem, with its sentiment that love is complex – both ‘pleasant’ and ‘fever’ in Ford’s rendering – and that desire is complicated, sometimes impeded, by others and by what one can and cannot do, or at least by what one should and should not do,

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by ‘etiquette’. Bérangère, for Ford, also introduces a concern with passion as ‘ersatz’ and passion as true, or ‘francha’ (‘genuine’) as the poem puts it later (Troubadours 359). These subjects recur throughout Ford’s poems about love, restless meditations as he waits for a woman with a ‘heart’ he can be at one with: Oh passing lonely souls we sons of men! My Rome is not your Rome: my you, not you Oh passing lonely. . . . For, if man knew woman I should have plumbed your heart; if woman, man Your me should be true I. . . .19

Despite the importance for Ford of Guillem and the other troubadours – ‘I began in my young days and under the serious and rather awful auspices of my father by regarding the troubadour as occupying an enormously important part in the poetic cosmogony’ (Provence 59) – Ford is curiously silent about them in his early nonfiction. Then, in March 1909, while eminent editor of the English Review, he met the young Ezra Pound: ‘I guessed that he must be rather hard up, bought his poem [‘Ballad of the Goodly Fere’] at once and paid him more than it was usual to pay for Ballads’.20 By July 1909, Pound had agreed with the Regent Street Polytechnic to give a series of twenty-one lectures, which, for financial reasons, he agreed to turn into The Spirit of Romance (1910).21 His well-researched study does not refer to Hueffer’s The Troubadours, even though for his chapter on the troubadours he worked in the British Museum22 and no doubt discussed it with Ford. In Provence, Ford states: ‘Pound [. . .] is the greatest living authority – or at any rate the best living writer – on the Troubadours’ (Provence 169). By specifying ‘living’, Ford does not completely negate his dead father’s authority, but ‘living’ keeps Hueffer very much dead and, given the earlier references in Provence to Hueffer’s book and libretto, illustrates, presumably unintentionally, that the young will eventually, inevitably win the ‘war between youth and age’ (Provence 135). The repetition also reminds, though, that all ‘youth’ will become ‘age’, les jeunes Great Auks.23 Ford’s statements are both assertive and humble. By 1912, Ford had dedicated his books to a wide range of people; family members include: his sister (The Feather – 1892), Ford Madox Brown (The Shifting of the Fire – 1892), his mother (Ford Madox Brown – 1896), his daughter (The Inheritors – 1901), his mother-in-law (The Soul of London – 1905), and two Hüffer aunts

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(Privy Seal – 1907, and An English Girl – 1907).24 Ford’s first poetry collection, The Questions at the Well (1893), is dedicated to his soonto-be wife Elsie Martindale; his second, Poems for Pictures (1900), to Edward Garnett. The Face of the Night (1904), From Inland and Other Poems (1907) and Songs from London (1910) do not carry dedications. High Germany (1912), however, carries the following: TO THE MEMORIES OF MY FATHERS ‘IN MEMORIAM AETERNAM ERIT JUSTUS; AB AESTMATIONE NON TIMEBIT’25

The eleven-poem, fifty-six-page volume captures a poetically invigorated, and at times wonderfully angry and witty, Ford. It opens with the reflective ‘The Starling’ – ‘It’s an odd thing how one changes . . .’26 – but also contains ‘Canzone à la Sonata (To E. P.)’, the brilliantly splenetic ‘Süssmund’s Address to an Unknown God’, ‘In the Little Old Market-Place’, which was reprinted in Des Imagistes (1914), and the impressionist masterpiece ‘To All the Dead’, where the ‘cranky’ Pound appears.27 The collection, then, contains some of Ford’s best poems, thanks, in part, to the energising influence of Pound. That Ford chose to dedicate the book to his father and grandfather, not ‘E. P.’, is notable. Like Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown is a formative figure in Ford’s youth connected negatively in his memory with the troubadours. In Provence, Ford recalls a wide-ranging argument that starts with him teasing the elderly Madox Brown. When Ford spots various errors in statements by his grandfather about Provençal history: ‘I had him then’ (Provence 132). He assaults his grandfather with the ‘facts’. Madox Brown ‘stood there silent. Once or twice he dug the end of his vine-stock into the tiles of the hall . . . You see, he considered that he had a sort of divine right to be an authority on Albigenses, Waldenses, the Courts of Love, the Good King’ (Provence 133). During the row, Ford is not only questioning Madox Brown’s ‘authority’, he is suggesting that Madox Brown is ignorant. Ford is not ‘the patient but extremely stupid donkey’ (AL ix): he is like his patronising father. In A Mirror to France, Ford invites a link between himself and Hueffer: he recalls his father teaching him ‘a little chess – over which he called me “the patient but extremely stupid donkey”’, and that Hueffer ‘would say that if he were a sensible man he would give up his work and pass the rest of his life in Maillane playing chess with Frédéric Mistral for whom he had a great affection. . . . And now, fifty

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years after or so, here I sit planning how to pass the rest on my life in St Rémy de Provence [. . . .] Just to sit there for good and play chess, say, with Mr. Pound who is the living remplaçant of Mistral’ (MF 112, 113). The important difference between Hueffer and Ford, and Ford and Pound, though, is that Ford never bullied Pound. Ford’s now infamous ‘roll’ on the floor might be read as bullying. In August 1911, Pound showed Ford a copy of his Canzoni (1911): And he felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling (physically, and if you look at it as mere superficial snob, ridiculously) on the floor of his temporary quarters in Giessen when my third volume displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejeune provincial effort to learn, mehercule, the stilted language that then passed for ‘good English’ in the artistic milieu that held control of the respected British critical circles, Newbolt, the backwash of Lionel Johnson, Fred Manning, the Quarterlies and the rest of ’em. And that roll saved me at least two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely, toward using the living tongue (with younger men after me), though none of us has found a more natural language than Ford did.28

But did the ‘roll’ actually happen?29 (If the anecdote was Ford’s, its reliability would certainly be questioned.) It is a bizarre thing for an adult to do. There are two known primary mentions of the ‘roll’ and both of them are by Pound over twenty years after the Giessen visit: the first is in the 1939 obituary, quoted above, the second in ‘Olson’s Notes on Pound’, the appendix of Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St Elizabeths (St Elizabeths [sic] federal-run psychiatric hospital, Washington DC, where Pound had been committed in December 1945).30 Olson, who visited Pound over a period of two and a half years, first on 4 January 1946,31 notes him recalling how: ‘F[ord] rolled on the floor, with his hands over his head, trying to teach me how to speak for myself.’32 In Giessen, and after, Ford undoubtedly gave Pound frank, and ‘francha’, advice about his poetry. In a letter much closer to the time of the visit, Pound refers to the ‘respect’ he has for Ford and how Ford ‘struggled’ (battled, argued) with him, as a poet, ‘in germany’ [sic];33 and, later, in a letter to Ford, to ‘the blessings conferred upon me in 1911 by your lecture of, let us say, Aout 7th of that year’.34 Whether Ford ‘mocked’ his friend, as

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Pound’s most recent biographer suggests,35 with a ‘roll’ on the floor or otherwise, is unlikely.36 To return to Ford’s memory of his youthful mocking of Madox Brown: I do not think that there is much of my life that I would care to change if I could. But that at least is a memory I should be glad to be rid of. It was, I suppose, a sufficiently familiar sort of skirmish in the never dying religious warfare that goes on between youth and age.37

In or around 1910, with Pound as the new ‘authority’ on the troubadours, Ford a major presence in literary London, a mentor to Pound, and a ‘significant and revolutionary’ poet38 finally free of the Pre-Raphaelites, Ford is, if not free of his looming forefathers, then at least self-assured and distant enough to be able to acknowledge, without anecdote, ‘THE MEMORIES’ of them. Ford’s previous poetry volumes had all closed on a solemn note about death or change; High Germany, however, concludes with a toast: ‘Take up your glasses. “Prosit!” to the past / To all the Dead!’ (HG lvi). Ford’s memories of Hueffer and Madox Brown would, of course, continue to haunt him until he died, but High Germany seems to mark an important step in Ford’s ‘relationship’ with them, especially with his father. It is indeed an ‘odd’, but also sometimes heartening, ‘thing how one changes . . .’. *** In his introduction to Carcanet’s Selected Poems (1997), concerning the sentimentality that appears in various poems throughout Ford’s life, Max Saunders notes correctly: ‘If his emotions occasionally make us wince, it is because they are naked, not draped in cliché; it is because he is not afraid to express emotions we have generally been taught not to express’.39 In The March of Literature, Ford refers to ‘the almost stickily sweet stanzas of Quillem de Cabestanh’ (ML 278). I think it can be argued that Ford’s fearlessness at expressing certain emotions is rooted in part in his youthful reading and translating of Guillem, who, like Christina Rossetti, stands against ‘poets like Tennyson or [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti’: ‘one suspected [them] always of posing, [. . .] of giving not so much what they intimately liked as what they regarded as appropriate for a poet to like’,40 of being ‘ersatz’ rather than ‘francha’.

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In ‘On Heaven’ (1914), Ford’s extended pose of a poem that attempts to find an aesthetic way around Violet Hunt to Brigit Patmore,41 the speaker, sitting at a café ‘in a little town near Lyons’ – ‘in the Alpilles, tiny grey mountains just outside the town of Tartarin’ (RY 313) – tells us: And the old, old woman touched me on the wrist With a wrinkled finger, And said: ‘Why do you linger? – Too many kisses can never be kissed! And comfort her – nobody here will think harm – Take her instantly to your arm! It is a little strange, you know, to your dear, To be dead!’ But one is English, Though one be never so much of a ghost; And if most of your life [has] been spent in the craze to relinquish What you want most, You will go on relinquishing, You will go on vanquishing Human longings, even In Heaven. (Selected Poems 100-1)

Many of Ford’s most personal and insightful poems about love are, in part, about trying to understand not only the loved one but also who ‘one is’ and how one is viewed, and about trying to be ‘francha’ even though one is often constrained by ‘etiquette’ (Provence 82). His masterpiece in that regard is Buckshee (1931; 1936), his final poem. ‘It is a tragic story, tragic in the sense that all life is fundamentally tragic, of love fulfilled’.42 Before he added ‘Latin Quarter’ (1936), retitled as ‘Coda’, Buckshee ended in Provence, at Ford and Janice Biala’s Villa Paul on Cap Brun.43 It concludes with the speaker saying to his partner: For this is a corner of France, And this the kingdoms of the earth beneath the sun, And this the garden sealed and set apart And that the fountain of Jouvence. . . . And, yes, you have a heart. (Selected Poems 154)

Towards the end of his poetic career, back in a garden, Ford was finally a ‘true I’, finally at peace with ‘That pleasant fever’, if not, one

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assumes, completely at peace with the memories of his youthful ‘skirmishes’.

NOTES Ford, Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine, ed. John Coyle, Manchester: Carcanet, 2009 – henceforth Provence; p. 135. 2 Guillem’s birth and death dates are not certain, but it is probable that he died in 1212; see Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (ed.), Appendix 1, The Troubadours: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 285. 3 Ford, A Mirror to France, London: Duckworth, 1928 – henceforth MF; p. 112. 4 Ford, It Was the Nightingale, ed. John Coyle, Manchester: Carcanet, 2007 – henceforth IWN; p. 122. 5 Provence 52. On Hueffer as ‘an English gentleman’, see n. 16, below. Hueffer’s ‘other’ book was Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future: History and Aesthetics (1874). 6 Francis Hueffer, The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages, London: Chatto and Windus, 1878 – henceforth Troubadours; p. 158. 7 Ford, The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1947 – henceforth ML; p. 273. 8 In A Mirror to France, Ford writes: ‘I can remember scores, if not hundreds, of the lines of Cabestanh, along with the rough translation I made, certainly before the age of fifteen’ (MF 112). 9 In A Mirror to France, Ford gives: ‘Li dous cossire quem don Amors soven / Domnam’ fan dire de vos mas vers plaszen, / Pessan remire vostre cors car e gen / Cui eu desire e cui non fas parven. . . .’ (MF 112). There are more than twenty extant manuscripts of the poem: Miriam Cabré, ‘Italian and Catalan Troubadours’, The Troubadours: An Introduction, p. 134. 10 Hueffer’s version: 1

A la fontana del vergier, On l’erb’es vertz jostal gravier, A l’ombra d’un fust domesgier, En aizement de blancas flors E de novel chant costumier, Trobei sola ses companheir Cela que no volc mon solatz. (Troubadours 364) Ford’s version is identical, except for: ‘vergier / On l’erbées’ (ML 283). In Robert Kehew (ed.), Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 44, the opening stanza is given thus: A la fontana del vergier,

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11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

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On l’erb’es vertz josta·l gravier, A l’ombra d’un fust domesgier, En aiziment de blancas flors E de novelh chant costumier, Trobey sola, ses companheir, Selha que no vol mon solatz. Ford, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections, London: Chapman and Hall, 1911 – henceforth AL; pp. 41-2. Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford, London: The Bodley Head, 1972, p. 526, n. 8. Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996– henceforth ‘Saunders’; vol. 1, p. 32. Ford also quotes the nickname in MF 112. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, 1990, p. 180. Provence 82. Regarding ‘etiquette’, Ford recalls, at the end of IWN, an incident with his father ‘off Bonn, on the Rhine steamer’. The young Ford breaks his ‘breakfast egg on the edge of a glass’: ‘My father, who for an English gentleman was an English gentleman, let out one roar. I can still see my egg and glass flying through the porthole into the sunlit Rhine. . . . When he had recovered himself he explained that no one who expected to grow into an English gentleman could do anything else with his breakfast egg than delicately to slice off its top with a knife and extract the contents with a tea-spoon [. . . .] So for years I had a “complex” of my father’s provision’ (IWN 345). By ‘philochthonous’, I think Ford means ‘a lover of that which is in the earth’, or ‘a lover of the dead’. The Guillem story Ford recounts is one version (perhaps Ford’s version) of several; as Hueffer explains: ‘I have traced no less than seven different versions of Guillem’s life in the Provençal language preserved amongst the MS. collections of the libraries of Rome, Florence, and Paris. All these purport to be authentic biographies of the poet, and all agree in the main incidents of the story, differing, however, in details, and even in the name of the localities and persons concerned’ (Troubadours 160). Ford refers to the story and ‘Li dous cossire’ in a footnote in Violet Hunt, The Desirable Alien: At Home in Germany, London: Chatto and Windus, 1913, pp. 228-9. In Canto IV, Ezra Pound refers to the eating of ‘Cabestan’s heart in the dish’ and the subsequent suicide: The Cantos of Ezra Pound, New York: New Directions, 1996, p. 13. Provence 51-2. Hueffer was the author of, among other writing on and translations of Wagner: Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future: History and Aesthetics (1874); Richard Wagner (1881); Wagner’s Parsifal: An Attempt at Analysis (1884). See Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Twickenham: Senate, 1998, p. 20: ‘All through [the story] one feels the influence of that faint air of overwrought delicacy, almost of wantonness, which was so strong a characteristic of the poetry of the Troubadours’; quoted by Ford in Provence, p. 143. For more by Ford on Aucassin and Nicolette, see ML 354-61. Ford, ‘Views’ (1910), Selected Poems, ed. Max Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet, 1997 – henceforth Selected Poems; p. 45.

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20 Ford, Return to Yesterday, London: Victor Gollancz, 1931 – henceforth RY; p. 292. On the genesis of the poem and the supposed controversy after its publication in the English Review, see: Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists, London: Jonathan Cape, 2009, p. 201; Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974, pp. 83-4. 21 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work: Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 100. 22 Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, p. 89. 23 ‘I regarded myself as the Eel which, having reached the deep sea brings forth its young and dies – or as the Great Auk I considered that, having reached my allotted I had laid my one egg and might as well die’: Ford, ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard, New York and London: Norton, 1995, p. 4. 24 Information taken from David Dow Harvey, Ford Madox Ford: 1873-1939: A Bibliography of His Works and Criticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962, pp. 4-36 passim. 25 ‘Aestmatione’ should read: ‘aestimatione’. The quotation is adapted from part of the ‘Requiem Mass’: ‘In memoria æterna erit justus, / ab auditione mala non timebit’ (‘He shall be justified in everlasting memory, / and shall not fear evil reports’). In IWN 121 Ford writes: ‘My father, however, represents for me the Just Man! . . . In memoriam aeternam erit justus, and I do not believe he can ever have faltered before any judgement-seat. He was enormous in stature, had a great red beard and rather a high voice. He comes back to me most frequently as standing back on his heels and visibly growing larger and larger. . . .’ In The Good Soldier, Dowell says: ‘It is simply my business to say, as Leonora’s people say: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, domine, et lux perpetua luceat per eis. In memoriam aeternam erit. . . .”’ (p. 53). 26 Ford, ‘The Starling’, High Germany: Eleven Sets of Verses, London: Duckworth, [1912] – henceforth HG; p. ix. 27 HG xl. For a discussion of ‘Süssmund’s Address to an Unknown God’ and ‘To All the Dead’, see: Ashley Chantler, ‘Ford’s Pre-War Poetry and the “Rotting City”’, Ford Madox Ford and the City, ed. Sara Haslam, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005, pp. 120-3; Chantler, ‘Image-Music-Text: Ford and the Impressionist Lyric’, Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture, ed. Laura Colombino, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009, pp. 78-81. In ‘Status Rerum’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1:4 (Jan. 1913), 126, Pound writes: ‘Mr. Hueffer has rarely “come off.” [. . . .] His last leaflet, High Germany, contains, however, three poems from which one may learn his quality. They are not Victorian. I do not expect many people to understand why I praise them. They are The Starling, In the Little Old Market-Place and To All the Dead.’ 28 Ezra Pound, ‘Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford; Obit’ (1939), Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship, ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, New York: New Directions, 1982 – henceforth P/F; p. 172. Canzoni was Pound’s fourth volume, if one excludes A Quinzaine for This Yule, a pamphlet self-published by Pound (1908), and Provença: Poems Selected from Personae, Exultations, and Canzoniere of Ezra Pound (1910).

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29 Several critics and biographers seem to take Pound literally; see, for example: R. G. Hampson, ‘“Experiments in Modernity”: Ford and Pound’, Pound in Multiple Perspective: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Gibson, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 98-9; Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 201-2; J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris: 1908-1925, University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990, p. 74. 30 For further information, see Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, pp. 531-69. 31 Catherine Seelye, Introduction, Charles Olson, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St Elizabeths, ed. Catherine Seelye, New York: Grossman, 1975, p. xv. 32 Olson, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound, p. 107. 33 Pound to Dorothy Shakespear [9 May 1913], Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters: 1909-1914, ed. Omar Pound and A Walton Litz, London: Faber and Faber, 1985, p. 226. 34 Pound to Ford, 26 May [—], quoted in Mizener, The Saddest Story, p. 216. 35 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound, p. 112. Regarding the ‘roll’, Moody asks: ‘if the master felt the errors so strongly, why had he published four of those “canzoni” in his review?’ (p. 112). In the January 1910 issue of the English Review, Ford had published the first three poems of Pound’s volume: ‘Canzon: The Yearly Slain’, ‘Canzon: The Spear’ and ‘Canzon: To Be Sung Beneath a Window’. (‘Canzon: Of Incense’ was probably accepted by Ford but was published in the April 1910 issue, edited by Austin Harrison.) Why did Ford publish them? Presumably to help Pound financially, as he had done previously with ‘Sestina: Altaforte’ (June 1909), ‘Ballad of the Goodly Fere’, ‘Nils Lykke’ and ‘Un Retrato’ (October 1909). Furthermore, January 1910 to August 1911 is a long time in Ford and Pound’s fast-growing friendship; in Return to Yesterday, Ford writes: ‘In a very short time he had taken charge of me, the review and finally of London’ (RY 291). On Ford and Pound’s ‘literary friendship’ and the ‘roll’, see: Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford, pp. 200-2; Max Saunders, ‘Ford/Pound’, Agenda, 27:4/28:1 (1989/1990), 93-102. 36 On Ford and Pound’s ‘constructive criticism’ of each other’s work, see Saunders, vol. 1, 342-5. 37 Provence 134. Regarding the incident, Saunders writes: ‘In his fiction and his life [Ford] was – even from his youth – to identify with the old being mercilessly attacked by the young, as if trying to exorcize that shameful memory’: vol. 1, 47. 38 Ezra Pound, ‘The Prose Tradition in Verse’ (1914), P/F, p. 21. 39 Max Saunders, Introduction, Selected Poems xii. 40 Ford, The Critical Attitude, London: Duckworth, 1911, p. 179. 41 See Saunders, vol. 1, 395-7. 42 Kenneth Rexroth, Introduction, Buckshee, Cambridge, Mass: Pym-Randall Press, 1966, p. xxi. 43 On Villa Paul, see Saunders, vol. 2, 378-81.

READING THE RASH ACT IN THE LIGHT OF PROVENCE: THE ENCOUNTER OF ETHICS AND AESTHETICS Christine Reynier Harold Bloom famously wrote that ‘[t]here are no interpretations but only misinterpretations’.1 Henry Martin’s misadventure in The Rash Act2 illustrates this statement: he writes a book on gossip in literature, from the Classics to the Yellow Press and modern Montparnasse, which is sold as a porn book, the editor being responsible for the choice of the title, Be thou Chaste, and the lewd illustrations. Similarly, ‘[w]hen Ford tried to define [The Rash Act], as a matter of practical necessity to publishers and the like, he was inclined to make out’, as C. H. Sisson writes in his introduction, ‘that it was a novel of the Great Depression’,3 thus suggesting that it might be about another topic. The Rash Act is certainly a deceptive novel or should we say, a typically Fordian one, and in the author’s own words, ‘my best book – more, that is to say, like what I really wanted to write than anything I have yet done’, even if critics have tended to disregard it for a long while.4 Indeed, like an anamorphosis, it can be read along various lines, autobiographical lines first, as Max Saunders suggests,5 or Moser before him, since it focuses on Henry Martin’s identity crisis and desire for identification with Hugh Monckton. It can also be read as a novel of the Great Depression as Ford himself suggested to his editor and more widely, as a post-war novel. What I would like to argue is that The Rash Act, published in 1933, constantly anticipates Provence which was written just after the novel and published in 1935.6 Reading Provence helps us in return to understand better The Rash Act which emerges as a complement to it, rather than standing in opposition to it, as Anthony Burgess suggests, and the novel reads in the end as a hymn to Provence. Provence is a central presence in The Rash Act. It is the place where Henry Martin plans to commit suicide off the exterior port of Toulon;

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where he is the victim of an accident on his sailing boat, during the trombio; where he exchanges roles with Hugh Monckton before spending a fortnight convalescing in a villa in Saint Mandrier, there reminiscing about his post-war days in Paris, his stay in the Cévennes during the war or his youth in Springfield, Ohio. Whereas Springfield embodies the New England conscience – as Philadelphia does in The Good Soldier – and Henry’s father’s material success in the candy business, the Cévennes, Paris and Provence are connected with failure. In the Cévennes, Henry fails to become a hero, spending the war years there in a sawmill with a poet, the syphilis Inspector, and a lover, Félicité, and failing to take part in the war itself. In Paris, his marriage with Alice breaks down; he fails in his attempts at becoming a writer and suffers severe financial losses. In Provence he fails to commit suicide; fails to behave responsibly with Hugh, unable as he is to respond to his anxiety and to prevent him from committing the rash act; and he fails to behave honestly with Hugh, preferring to exchange passports with the deceased rather than reporting his death. On the face of it, Springfield and the United States of America stand for nineteenth-century values, the old secure world (where, for instance, a ruined person like the lady Henry meets in a bus, would immediately start looking for a job instead of committing suicide);7 whereas France and Provence stand for the twentieth-century post-war world, for doubt, failure, financial losses, the absence of passion and the loss of values – what the Lost Generation embodies.8 Provence in The Rash Act may therefore be seen as decadent, as Anthony Burgess suggests when he writes in an article published in The Observer, reproduced on the back cover of the 1982 Carcanet edition of the novel: ‘The action takes place in the French South which Ford loved, but man no longer sustains the tradition of myth and history which that region once represented . . . Here in The Rash Act we have the death of morality and responsibility’. As such, it is the very opposite of the Provence Ford admires in his later book, thirteenth-century Provence, the Provence of the troubadours – an idealised Utopian land. However things may be more complex and the opposition not so straightforward. As Sondra Stang writes: ‘Puzzling and on the whole disregarded, [The Rash Act and its sequel Henry for Hugh] gain in clarity and sense if they are read in the spirit of Provence and Great Trade Route’.9 Although she stops at a reading of The Rash Act as an

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‘allegor[y] of metamorphosis, of the possibilities of self-renewal’ (Stang 68), I would like to read the novel, as she does, in the spirit of Provence. In The Rash Act, Provence is the place where crime is possible, where Henry can swap identities with Hugh, where everybody knows about it and yet says not a word about it. It is a place where Henry can be nursed by two ‘light women of a certain class’, then known as ‘des poules’. It seems to be an immoral place. There, selling ‘snow’ is not regarded as an offence by Henry who says: ‘that girl had lately come out of prison after six months. She had been engaged with others in selling “snow”. . . . It was not on the face of it a repulsive offence. . . .’ (RA 73), neither infidelity nor crime is shocking for him either: ‘He was no kind of criminal. He did not suppose he would mind being a criminal. He simply wasn’t one!’ (RA 45). Henry therefore seems to be totally deprived of all moral sense. However choosing a narrator who fails to see the dividing line between good and bad or right and wrong (and who ironically enough since he is American, fits Provence) may well be for Ford a way of challenging Christian values – all those that revolve around the ideas of good and bad, like guilt and innocence – values that, as he will show in Provence, have been instrumental in the massacre of the Albigenses and eventually, in the destruction of Provençal civilisation.10 Just as Provence will be said in the 1935 book to flout the ten commandments (‘Life is there one long breaking of commandment’: Provence 79), Henry is ready to kill himself, to steal, to lie and to have impure thoughts. Neither Provence nor Henry have any notion of sin, sin being related, according to Ford, to Anglosaxondom for whom ‘to enjoy is to sin’ (Provence 79). Similarly, notions held high by the French and that helped them to build their nation at the expense of the Provençal region, are taken to task in The Rash Act: patriotism especially, through the shady doings of Mr Kuhn during the war that ‘cure [Henry] of all respect for the louder virtues. . . .’: Perhaps for all virtues! It – and all the enterprises connected with it – seemed to be like a vast smudge across the landscape of his life. . . . He could almost mark the very moment when the sunshine of virtue – and of vice – had gone out of it [. . . .] But it had marked the last glow of conscious patriotism in him. (RA 53-4)

So that patriotism appears to be, as in Provence, ‘the meanest of all the virtues’ (Provence 249). Provence thus comes out as a place of

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resistance to what Ford refers to as Anglosaxondom, Puritan values, but often designates with the broader term Christianity – what we could call dominant Western values. In that respect Provence is seen to be unchanging: in the early 1930s, it goes on resisting Christian values, so-called virtues and categories as it did in the thirteenth century. In Provence, Henry Martin can both live on Hugh’s money as a millionaire and lead a humble life with light women ‘of a certain class’: he can be both ‘aristocratic and democratic’ (Provence 172), thus respecting the ambivalent codes of the troubadours’ times. Provence is certainly a place of crime and corruption but also a place where Henry finds a friend in Hugh and love with the dark girl; it is both a place of despair and a shelter where Henry recovers from his traumatic experience and his financial losses. It is both a place of corruption and of immense beauty as the landscape seen from his boat or from the villa in Saint Mandrier shows. If seen through Ford’s glasses, Provence in The Rash Act comes out not as sinful and decadent but as ambivalent, indulgent, tolerant and unconventional, as it has always been, according to Ford who, in Provence, writes: ‘The sublimities of the North become [. . .] pleasant absurdities, the South making for ever of our Nordic virtues a continual reductio ad absurdum’ (Provence 79), ‘Indulgent Provence has no vested interests and there illusions do not matter’ (Provence 64). The enduring nature of Provence is signified at the outset of the novel through the description of the Mediterranean as immutable, reaching back to mythological times, smiling ‘with the heartless smile of syrens’ (RA 10) and the boat Henry can see in the distance is like ‘one of the thousand ships that Helen’s face had launched and Homer catalogued’ (RA 9). Finally, Provence, which will be described in Provence as ‘mysterious and beautiful’ (Provence 5) as a land of sensuality, of passion and emotion, as a cure to depression (Provence 40), as a land of frugality and humanity (Provence 66), is epitomised in the novel in the figure of the dark girl. The latter is depicted as a passionate creature (RA 245), beautiful and sensual; she spends six months in prison for selling drugs yet is respected by the whole town, including her cousin the policeman; she sees through Henry’s stratagem without denouncing him (RA 314). She is as mysterious and ambivalent as Provence. She is also endowed with a mythical dimension, being a tragic figure as well as a syren and a seducer like

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Circe the enchantress. Like Provence, she is cosmopolitan. Born in New York while her French father was working for the Consulate General of the city, she is a ‘hybrid’ as all Provençals have always been since they are the fruit of the encounter of countless invaders and natives; as a hybrid, she also combines beauty and artifice (running as she does a beauty parlour), nature and culture or instinct and education, tradition and modernity. She also goes fishing for rascasse, a major component of the bouillabaisse Ford evokes with gusto in Provence. She is connected with taste, another form of sensuality, as well as with a humble form of life, agreeing right away when Henry suggests they should live on a modest income. She is a variation on the figure of the kitchen gardener that plays an important part in Provence (Provence 27). On the whole, she stands out as an allegory of Provence. She is also coupled with Jeanne Becquerel and together the joint figures of the dark girl and the white, nacreous one point to the ambivalence of Provence. With Henry, these two antithetical and complementary figures make up a love triangle, a modern ironic version of the triangular relationship of troubadours’ times, in Peire Vidal’s tale, for example, except that here the beloved and honoured one is not a lady but a man. In The Rash Act, rather than being simply a geographical setting, Provence comes out as a ‘frame of mind’, thus meeting Ford’s definition of Provence in the book of the same name: ‘Provence is not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind’ (Provence 64). Provence is used to defend such values as tolerance, unconventionality as well as cosmopolitanism, passion, sensuality, frugality or humility, the very values Ford will associate with the region in his later book. In the end, Provence in The Rash Act appears to be an ethical frame of mind rather than a moralising one – the very standpoint the narrator will adopt in Provence when he writes: ‘Every day and in every way I get more ethical and more ethical and more ethical’ (Provence 58). Because Provence has suffered many invasions and has early been under the sway of the French, it has long been confronted with problems akin in a way to those the Western world discovered with the Great War. It has had to cope with violence, massacres, the irrational and arbitrary decisions of Churches, with blind tyrannical power and force. It has also learnt how to resist the other, how to decipher what the alien power presented as virtues and values and see

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through them (for example, for Provence, Louis IX is not a saint but the exterminator of their civilisation: Provence 202). It has also drawn on its own culture to resist the alien power. Provence, described at length in Provence and endowed by Ford with a history worthy of the name11 becomes in The Rash Act an epitome of the post-war world, the various problems it has to cope with, and especially the existential ones it struggles with. Just as Ford teaches us in Provence to look at the history of the region from an odd angle, he leads us in The Rash Act to look at the war and the post-war world differently, thus performing the task of the novelist as ‘ambassador’ that he delineates in Provence (57). For example, he asks such questions as: is it heroic to be trained and sent to the warfront or does it simply amount to ‘being fattened’ to be sent ‘to the slaughter-house’ (Provence 296)? Is it more heroic to have, as Hugh has, a scar on the face made by a cavalry sabre while attempting to save France or to have one made by the spar of a leisure boat one struggled to save, as Henry did? Although Henry is trying halfheartedly to persuade himself that he has been heroic in his struggle with the storm, and although his uncertainty is perceptible, were it only through constantly recurring irony, the reader is led to ponder over the similarities between Henry and Hugh’s actions and think again about what heroism means and amounts to. Or again Ford asks: is it immoral to use insider information to trade and make money as M. Lamoricière does or is it just a way of saving Henry? In many different ways, Ford leads us to reconsider our values: what is success? What is failure? What is heroism? What is corruption? Is a man who saved the nation and who is led to commit suicide because of the unbearable wounds he suffered in the war better than an anti-hero, a failure who survives? Is selling drugs bad? Is closing one’s eyes on crime, as the policeman or Eudoxie do, wrong? Ford makes us doubt our certitudes about our own values and society. He does not assert crime is better than innocence or the reverse, irony being there to deflate all assertion; he simply shows the dividing line is not firm and good is not always the opposite of bad, thus introducing relativism and pointing to the limits of morality. In that way he retrieves the frame of mind that Provence was before it became French. Reading the 1935 book together with the novel makes the role of Provence in The Rash Act clearer. It is a world where ‘the proper man of today’ that Henry is in many respects, can only doubt. For ‘the

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proper man of today’, as Ford went on to write in Provence, Christian creeds are only legends, ‘[h]is religion in fact, like that of the gentle people who were destroyed at the battle of Muret [. . .] is a product of doubt’ (Provence 299-300). As for Provence, it is a world that should not be judged and appraised through the usual conventional standards. What is perceived as contradictory and incompatible in the Western world is not in Provence which can go beyond dichotomies and combine opposites. What would be dismissed as ambivalent and negative is taken for granted in Provence. A particularly telling example, taken from Provence, will illustrate this: [The Provençal] permits his women and his children to go to mass regularly; attends as a rule the chief feasts in his church because it suits his regulated taste for festivals [. . . .] But, young or old, he will vote for the election of the atheist negro mayor who will prohibit processions in his town. (Provence 300301)

If Provence were to be summed up in one word, it would be the word Henry uses about it in The Rash Act, ‘malice’ (RA 287), provided we understand the word, as Ford often leads us to do, in its modern French meaning of ‘mischievousness, impish or naughty’ rather than its English one.12 This frame of mind is both illustrated and enacted in The Rash Act through the choice of a specific narrative discourse and form, which are the very images of Provence and its ‘malicious’, or rather ‘malicieuses’, ambiguities. The Rash Act is indeed a long third-person monologue where an anonymous narrator sets Henry at a distance only better to recede into the background and let him step in so that his free direct discourse literally invades the page with its numerous exclamations, questions and quotations of remembered bits of dialogue. After a while, the reader tends to forget the impersonal voice of the narrator and remember only the focaliser, all the more so since Henry’s specific plight suggests that the usual distinction between narrator and focaliser is here but an image of the character’s divided personality and alienation. In that way, we could say that Henry and the narrator are one. Through Henry’s voice, we can hear the reported words of Hugh Monckton, of Henry’s father, of Alice, M. Lamoricière, Jeanne or Eudoxie, so much so that Henry’s monologue reads or sounds like a

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polyphony, what Woolf called, when writing about The Waves, ‘a gigantic conversation’,13 but a silent one. Both the voicelessness of Henry, due to his traumatic accident, and the necessity of taking stock of the past after the trauma, account for his silence. Silence is also what enables Henry to relate to the dark girl whereas spoken conversation amounts to a mock-dialogue when Henry and Hugh talk at cross-purposes during the fatal night. The silent conversation that Henry carries on in his mind is a way of letting the other in, of communicating with him or her in an ethical mode. Such a silent conversation reads as a literary transposition of Provençal conversation that goes on in cafés and has, according to Ford, ‘moulded civilisations’ (Provence 58). It is a humble form that suits the new posture of Henry – a millionaire who does not know whether he is still one or not and who has taken to a modest way of life in a decrepit villa – who thus comes to resemble Ford’s ideal writer, the humble craftsman or ‘skilled workman’ Ford evokes both in Provence (227) and in his essay ‘On Impressionism’.14 Like Provence which does not know dividing lines between opposites, Henry, in his interior monologue, is both reliable and unreliable. He poses as a victim and acts as a manipulator just as Dowell does in The Good Soldier. He takes on Hugh’s identity and acts as a dissembler, the very definition of the ironist, while claiming his innocence. Destiny constantly makes fun of him and he appears as the scapegoat of the author at the same time as he is the object of a deep sympathy on his part. The reader is consequently tempted to adopt an ironic stance and distance towards him while empathising with him, thus becoming, like Henry himself, a prey to doubt. On top of that, Henry imagines his own death and stages it, wanting to think, as Malcolm does of the first Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, that ‘nothing in life became him like the leaving of it’ (RA 75): There he stood on high amongst the applause of a world [. . . .] Taking his call. He was not wrong in calling it that. An author took his call when the curtain came down at the end of his play. And the curtain had come down on the end of his tragedy. Of that he was both hero and author. (RA 188)

Henry is both ‘hero and author’, thus sending back the image of Ford who is both the author of the novel and in some way, its hero, through Henry’s dual tormented personality. As ‘hero and author’, he also adopts the double art of writer and performer of the troubadours

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described in Provence (186) and stands out as a modern troubadour, an ambivalent figure modelled on Provence. The silent conversation Henry carries on is structured along four parts or acts, each divided into three or four chapters or scenes (with two chapters only for the last part). The narrative hovers between a Greek tragedy (the tragedy of suicide) with the dark girl and Jeanne Becquerel acting as a chorus (RA 258), a variation on Macbeth, the references being numerous, and a mock-tragedy (Henry failing to commit suicide) or a comedy (comic scenes being introduced, for instance, when Henry is saluting the sun, ‘bow[ing] to the right; to his left; before him. As if he had been an Oriental saluting the sun’; RA 188). And as in a baroque play – and as in Macbeth – illusion and delusion, and the irony that goes with them, are paramount. Like a stage-manager or a painter, Henry makes us see the scenery: the Mediterranean at dawn, on a stormy day or beautiful girls framed within open doors. His discourse is set to the music of recurrent mottoes or motifs such as Saltavit. Placuit. Mortuus est that create a specific repetitive rhythm. In these various ways, the narrative that oscillates between the sublime and the grotesque15 and combines various literary and artistic genres, could be said to be structured, as Provence is according to Ford, like an opera16 or a modern version of the performing art of the troubadours. This original art form certainly has an impact on the reader; it makes her feel Henry’s anxiety, doubt or love; it makes her see the beauty of the sea or the dark girl in Cézanne-like or possibly, Matisselike pictures;17 it makes her hear the music of the text, through Henry’s hesitations, the blanks and pauses in his discourse or its repetitive rhythm. Through direct presentation, the narrative solicits our senses and retrieves the sensuality characteristic of Provence and of the ideal art Ford is after. As he would write in Provence, ‘the motive of the artist [is] always sensual and never representational’ (Provence 232), thus stating explicitly what he wrote in more Kantian terms in his early essay ‘On Impressionism’.18 Through the operatic structure or simply, if we don’t want to push the comparison too far, through the sensuality of his writing, the narrator gives pleasure to the reader as the boy dancer did in the Roman Theatre at Antibes: ‘Saltavit. Placuit. Mortuus est’ (RA 35), the motto of the novel which is also the motto of Provence. And he

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turns his art into ‘an offering’, thus meeting the aim of art defined by Ford in Provence (232). Through these choices, the author makes tangible in a fictional writing the frame of mind that Provence is, according to him, the very frame of mind he would explore in his later book. The history, the values and the beauty of Provence are inextricably intertwined with the aesthetic choices of the writer, in other words, ethics and aesthetics are brought together. On the whole, challenging values and dichotomies, changing the reader’s outlook on the world, creating silent conversation – all these elements, now regarded as constituting some of the main tenets of Modernist literature, are here presented by Ford as creating a new form of novel anchored deep in the Provençal tradition. In the seclusion of the villa, far from what Ford calls that ‘insupportable madhouse for apes that is our civilisation’ (Provence 215), Henry leads a quiet frugal life in which he can labour, if not his own ground, at least his own soul.19 Ford thus retrieves in his fiction the Provence of old, before the Aix Parliament was founded and the Kings of France took over, while creating a character who is both the ‘proper man of today’, a prey to doubt and uncertainty, as well as the ideal ‘malicious creator’, the modern troubadour. Reading The Rash Act together with Provence proves enlightening. It appears that drawing on Provençal history and literature, Ford turns what are, for him, Provençal ethics, into a modern original aesthetics. The Provençal frame of mind not only stands in The Rash Act for a way of life for the future, as it does in Provence,20 but also for a way of writing for the future.

NOTES 1 2 3 4

5

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 95. Ford, The Rash Act (1933), Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1982 – henceforth RA. C. H. Sisson, ‘Introduction’, RA 1-6 (p. 4). Ford, letter to Caroline Gordon, quoted by Sisson, RA 1. See for example, Robert Green, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. See Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. See also Moser who deals at length with the theme of the

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double in The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Ford Madox Ford, Provence, Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1979 – henceforth Provence. ‘So he had said to the fortyish lady next him in the bus. “What would you do if you found yourself on the roadside here. Without a cent!” [. . . .] “Do?” she had answered. “What should I do . . . I should find a job!’” (RA 33). ‘They were said to have been so disturbed in their equilibrium by the distortions of the late war that they had no sense of the values of life’ (RA 48). ‘Resolution was the note of the nineteenth [century], mental confusion of the twentieth’ (RA 32). Sondra J. Stang, Ford Madox Ford, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977 – henceforth ‘Stang’; p. 68. Ford writes, for example: ‘the Albigenses saw that the first use to which Christianity was put was their extermination’ (Provence 307). Ford writes: ‘the Provençal civilisation obviously did not receive much tenderness at the hands of the historiographers’; and further on: ‘Provence [. . .] is the one country in the world of which no history has been written’ (Provence 124, 164). A ‘feeling of hatred for somebody that causes a desire to harm them’ (OED). Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (1953) London: Triad Grafton Books, 1978, January 16, 1930. See Ford, ‘On Impressionism’ (1914) reprinted in The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard, New York and London: Norton, 1995, p. 264-74. This is also a meeting point between Bloomsbury and Ford, Virginia Woolf having written an essay entitled ‘Craftsmanship’ about the art of writing, Leonard Woolf also praising Conrad as a craftsman in his essay on the writer. On this subject, see my analysis of Ford’s essay in ‘“De l’impressionnisme” comme première définition du modernisme’, Les Grands mouvements littéraires, ed. C. Reynier, Paris: Michel Houdiard, collection Essais sur l’art 1, 2009, pp. 106-13. A good example is Henry’s mistake about the date of his planned suicide: ‘It was to-day, Sunday, August 16th. . . . He had taken it to be the 15th . . . the feast of the Assumption. . . . It stood there on the Calendar’ (RA 184). ‘The Novel, as Mr Wells long ago told me, can very well be based on the structure of the Sonata! [. . .] Well, for this book I have chosen the larger form of the Opera’ (Provence 67). On this subject, see Laura Colombino, ‘Ford, Matisse and The Book of the Dead: The (In)visible Objects of The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’, Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture, ed. L. Colombino, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, pp. 235-50. Included in GS 265. Ford writes: ‘I want a civilisation of small men each labouring two small plots – his own ground and his own soul’ (Provence 121). Ford writes: ‘Humanity [. . .] can only be saved by achieving for itself and within itself the frame of mind that can exist only south of Montelimar’ (Provence 78).

TRUSTING IN PROVENCE: FINANCIAL CRISIS IN THE RASH ACT AND HENRY FOR HUGH Rob Hawkes In the summer of 1929, trade on the New York Stock Exchange was booming. In the three months from the end of May to the end of August, share values increased by almost twenty-five percent.1 On 3 September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached what was then an all-time high of 3812 and, the following month, Yale University economics professor Irving Fisher declared: ‘Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau’.3 Fisher’s optimism was soon revealed to be disastrously misplaced: in the final week of October came the Great Crash, which sent share values plummeting. Between 23 October and 13 November prices fell by almost forty percent,4 and they continued to fall for the next three years as the major western economies plunged into the Great Depression. The Dow Jones reached its twentieth-century low of 41.22 in July 1932 and it did not regain its 1929 peak until November 1954.5 It was also in July 1932 that Ford Madox Ford described his latest novel as ‘the beginning of a trilogy that is meant to do for the post-war world and the Crisis what the Tietjens tetralogy did for the war’.6 Although Ford never completed the intended trilogy, The Rash Act was published in 1933 and was followed by a sequel, Henry for Hugh, in 1934. Given the intensity of the economic turmoil raging at the time the novel was written, and given the explicit link between text and context drawn by Ford, it is perhaps surprising that, in his introduction to the 1982 Carcanet edition of The Rash Act, C. H. Sisson asserts that ‘the Crisis is of no more than incidental importance’ in the novel.7 This essay argues, on the contrary, that financial crisis is of crucial significance in The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh. If we were to take Ford’s statement as the starting point for a reading of these two novels, we might begin by asking the question: what was it that the Tietjens books did for the war that these later novels would do for the Depression? There is, perhaps, a wilful ambiguity to Ford’s comment, since it leaves the question remarkably vague and invites a plurality of

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possible answers. One way of approaching the question might be sought in It Was the Nightingale, which appeared in the same year as The Rash Act, and in which Ford describes the Parade’s End tetralogy as founded on its author’s aspiration for ‘the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time’.8 If ‘what the Tietjens tetralogy did’, for Ford, was record the physical, mental and social devastation of the First World War as contemporary history then we might expect to view The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh in similar terms, as bearing witness to the economic devastation wrought by the Wall Street Crash. However, neither series of books could be described as conventional social realism. Both exhibit formal properties – such as the time-shift and interior monologue – which mark them out as modernist works, and both centre on protagonists whose function has been described as allegorical rather than strictly representative: Tietjens stands for an outmoded chivalry, Henry Martin for the disillusionment of the interwar years.9 Nevertheless, whilst it might be difficult to determine precisely what Ford meant by the comparison between these novels, my contention here is that, at the very least, the connection Ford makes between financial crisis and The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh cannot and should not be dismissed as incidental. Sisson’s rejection of the Crisis as a significant issue in The Rash Act is based on the suggestion that Ford associated his book with the Great Depression simply out of a need to ‘define it, as a matter of practical necessity to publishers and the like’ (RA 4). This, of course, does not deny that the Crisis is part of the novel’s background, yet Sisson maintains that the importance of The Rash Act lies in a set of essential ‘themes’ that transcend the arbitrary details of its setting and context: What really make this book what it is are the themes which invoke all of Ford’s deepest loyalties and uncertainties: the relationship between Henry Martin and the impeccable and casual Hugh Monckton he would like to have been; the appreciation of certain characteristics in women; the sense of the remaining solidities of European civilisation [. . . .] (RA 4)

Similar arguments have been made about Parade’s End: that it is ‘really’ a tale of social transformation, or a quest narrative, and that the First World War is of similarly incidental importance.10 Nevertheless, one of the most striking aspects of Ford’s œuvre is the way so many of his books operate to destabilise certainties about

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‘what really makes’ them what they are – or what they’re ‘really’ about – since they frequently defy the expectations of readers by transgressing and undermining the boundaries between genres. While much of Ford’s writing might be described as unstable in terms of genre, however, Ford was preoccupied, particularly during the 1930s, with the preservation of what Sisson describes as ‘the remaining solidities of European civilisation’. France and especially Provence – where the events of The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh take place – embody these solidities for Ford and in the Crisis novels Provence provides a setting for respite and recovery from two kinds of storm, one literal and one financial. In Provence (1935), Ford describes the ‘Great Trade Route which, thousands of years before our day [. . . .] bore civilisation backwards and forwards along its tides’.11 The most important of the ‘civilising influences’ carried by this route is ‘the frame of mind that is Provence’ (Provence 13). Provence itself thus stands for certain enduring, civilising values, not least of which is a respect for the arts exemplified by the story of the boy of Antibes who danced and gave pleasure, a story which also resounds throughout The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh: of all the beautiful and mysterious motives and emotions that go to make up the frame of mind that is Provence the most beautiful, moving and mysterious is that of the Northern Boy of Antibes. The boy danced and gave pleasure, died two thousand years ago and his memorial tablet set into the walls of Antibes [. . .] sets forth those salient facts of his life [. . . .] (Provence 49)

Furthermore, for Ford, the Provençal character itself is ‘founded on shrewdness, frugality, and infinite pawky knowledge of the vicissitudes that beset human lives’, and elsewhere he observes that ‘nothing earthly is in the absolute sense immutable. But for all working purposes, Provence is’ (Provence 42, 89). It is for these qualities of endurance and immutability that Ford most values Provence. Sisson is surely right to point to Ford’s concern with the remaining solidities of civilisation, but it is precisely the context of financial turmoil and crisis that makes the permanence of Provence all the more necessary. The Rash Act tells the story of Henry Martin Aluin Smith, a ‘down-and-out’ American who has lost his money in the wake of the Great Crash, and Hugh Monckton Allard Smith, a British millionaire. The two men meet in a Provençal nightclub on the eve of the day when both have planned to kill themselves. What is more, they look

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very much alike, and while one man succeeds in his suicide attempt, the other fails, allowing Henry Martin to assume the identity of the dead Hugh Monckton. These are two characters, therefore, who have almost identical names, appearances, and plans, and who are in the same place at the same time. The only major difference between them is financial: one is rich, the other poor. Furthermore, throughout both novels almost every character is obsessed by money. The pivotal meeting between Hugh Monckton and Henry Martin involves a loan followed by an offer of insider information allowing Henry to profit by trading in ‘Monckton A’ shares and, indeed, the final justification of Henry’s impersonation of Hugh is the need to protect the share price of the Monckton car company. David Ayers gives a neat summary of Henry Martin’s relationship with money: Henry Martin’s immediate problem is financial. He is cut off from his father’s wealth by his rejection of the family business. What he did possess has come to him through his mother. Much of this has been drained from him by his now estranged wife [. . . .] The wife, Alice, is now divorcing him at the point of his final ruin, which has been brought about by the Wall Street Crash and the general depression. An ill-advised investment has destroyed what little means he had and, rather than get a job, Henry Martin opts for suicide, as did numerous ruined speculators in the aftermath of 1929.12

The importance of financial concerns in terms of what happens in the two novels would seem to be quite clear. However, as curious as Sisson’s dismissal of the Crisis might appear in view of these plot details, there is an even more fundamental issue which binds together the novels’ formal, structural, historical and thematic aspects, which underpins the concern with financial crisis, and which Ford both derives from and develops beyond the Crisis: this is the issue of trust. Trust, and especially the problematics of trust at times of social and economic upheaval, is fundamentally bound up with the experience of modernity. For the sociologist Anthony Giddens, modernity is characterised by the removal of social relations from the immediacies of context, due largely to what he describes as ‘disembedding mechanisms’. These are divided into two categories: ‘symbolic tokens’ and ‘expert systems’: All disembedding mechanisms, both symbolic tokens and expert systems, depend upon trust. Trust is therefore involved in a fundamental way with the institutions of modernity. Trust here is vested, not in individuals, but in abstract capacities.13

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Trust is also a palpable necessity in view of the wholesale ‘reflexivity’ of modernity, which guarantees that all knowledge and all forms of action are constantly open to revision: the Enlightenment project of replacing arbitrary tradition and speculative claims to knowledge with the certainty of reason proved to be essentially flawed. The reflexivity of knowledge operates, not in a situation of greater and greater certainty, but in one of methodological doubt. Even the most reliable of authorities can be trusted only ‘until further notice’.14

It is this ‘principle of radical doubt’ which underpins the need for trust since, as Giddens points out, there would be no need to trust anyone whose thoughts were known and whose actions were entirely predictable.15 Significantly, for the purposes of my argument, the most important of Giddens’s ‘symbolic tokens’ is money, and for this reason a consideration of the nature of money serves to reveal the essential characteristics of modernity itself. In a recent book tracing the history of modern finance, The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson argues that: The intangible character of most money today is perhaps the best evidence of its true nature [. . . .] money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. And it does not seem to matter much where it is inscribed: on silver, on clay, on paper, on a liquid crystal display.16

The centrality of trust in modern social life is thus exemplified by the system of money and, as the history of the Wall Street Crash and its aftermath makes clear, a breakdown of trust in financial institutions leads rapidly to profound and devastating economic turmoil. In The Rash Act, Henry Martin’s trust appears to have been irrevocably eroded, not just in finance but also in financial advice. As we discover in the first part of the novel, the final stage in his ruin has come about due to the advice offered to him by his friend Mr Kuhn’s ‘famous uncle’: The great man had said: ‘Buy Anacondas at 115. They will go up to 135 by Christmas. Sell out and buy New York Central Bonds. You’ll be settled for life. If that’s what you want. . . .’ [. . . .] The bottom of the world had fallen out. The last penny of his mother’s legacy had gone. He had sold all his shares in the drug-store and followed that advice. Two years and ten days ago. By Christmas, 1929, Anacondas had been at 95. Now they were 13. (RA 78)

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There is, of course, no suggestion of any deliberately malign intent in this advice: Kuhn’s uncle, we may presume, is as convinced of the reality of the permanently rising stock market as Irving Fisher was. Indeed, the date of this conversation ‘two years and ten days ago’ is in August 1929, at the height of the boom. However, the description here of the crash which followed as like ‘the bottom of the world’ falling out deserves to be taken seriously, not just because it has destroyed Henry Martin’s finances, but because it has destroyed the very capacity which enables individuals to operate in the modern world: trust. This fact is underscored later, during Henry’s disjointed conversation with Hugh in the millionaire’s hotel room. Aside from the differences in their fortunes, the ability to trust emerges as another key difference between the two characters: He had never had anyone to talk to [. . . .] But now he had Henry Martin to talk to. . . . He felt instinctively that Henry Martin was someone he could talk to. . . . Damn the fellow. . . . Someone he, Hugh Monckton, could trust in. . . . You couldn’t trust in anyone. . . . (RA 133)

At this point in the novel Henry Martin’s consciousness is magnificently rendered as it ranges over reminiscences of his past and is continually interrupted by Hugh Monckton’s interjections in the present. Here we simultaneously hear Hugh expressing how ‘instinctively’ he trusts Henry, alongside Henry’s inner voice, damning Hugh and lamenting the fact that: ‘You couldn’t trust in anyone’. A few pages later, when Hugh advises Henry to buy Monckton A shares, and even offers him money with which to do so, Henry replies: ‘Ah! I once had financial advice from a millionaire in the inner ring. It cost me my eye-teeth and then some’ (RA 140). The critical point here is that Henry’s mistrust is expressed in general rather than particular terms: he does not mistrust Hugh Monckton per se; what he mistrusts is financial advice from millionaires. Hugh’s response to Henry’s mistrust is also fascinating: ‘You’d think you regarded me as a confidence-trick man’ (RA 143). Hugh’s now outdated turn of phrase reminds us of the original meaning of a ‘con’. It is not simply a deception, but one utterly dependent on first securing the trust of the victim. The problematics of trust in The Rash Act, however, run much deeper than Henry Martin’s financial problems. His past, as we

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discover through his reminiscences throughout the novel, has been marked by a series of betrayals and disappointments. Each time he commits himself to a person, vocation, or course of action his faith turns out to be misplaced: when he seeks to prove himself as a courageous soldier he ends up in charge of a canning factory; when he tries to become a writer he is swindled by his publisher; when he marries, his wife leaves him taking most of his money with her – perhaps the clearest demonstration of a link between financial and emotional betrayal. His father’s slogan, ‘Hitch your wagon to a star!’ also becomes a signal for the continual bursting of Henry Martin’s bubble (RA 35). It is the constant undermining of Henry Martin’s trust in his own enterprises that leads to the feeling of ‘ineffectualness’ that motivates his intention to commit suicide: He was walking along the pier . . . towards suicide. Suicide is an act of despair. Still more it is a confession of ineffectualness. Yet it calls for resolution. . . . No, he had never been wanting in resoluteness. . . . Then. . . . It was as if he was not all of one piece. It was perhaps that. (RA 32)

Henry Martin’s feeling that he is ‘not all of one piece’ is the critical point here. Later on, Henry Martin remarks of his father that: ‘His character did not hang together’ (RA 57), an observation that he might just as well have made about himself. These novels have often been read in relation to the issue of identity construction, and for several critics this issue has a metafictional aspect. It is worth noting that the successful operation of character in any novel itself depends on trust. We need to believe in a character and in order for us to do so that character needs, precisely, to ‘hang together’. However, there is an even broader sense in which fiction and finance can be seen as profoundly interrelated in terms of their dependency on forms of belief. In a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Gold Bug’ (1843), Marc Shell notes that in mid-nineteenth-century debates about the legitimacy of paper money in America, ‘comparisons were made between the way a mere shadow or piece of paper becomes credited as substantial money and the way an artistic appearance is taken for the real thing by a willing suspension of disbelief’.17 Sara Haslam also makes an explicit link between self-construction and finance, remarking that in The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh: ‘financial transactions become a metaphor for social transactions’. Furthermore, in these texts: ‘Money changes hands easily; identity follows where it

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leads’.18 Therefore, as Henry Martin traces the inexorable fall in the share value of ‘Anacondas’, he is stripped of the last vestiges of a character that hangs together. That something akin to a universal breakdown in trust should follow in the wake of a major economic crisis is, of course, borne out by the history of the Wall Street Crash. The late twenties saw what John Kenneth Galbraith, in his classic study The Great Crash 1929, calls ‘a great speculative orgy’. Galbraith argues that the reasons why such a speculative boom should have taken place at this moment are difficult, if not impossible, to pin down and yet he suggests that in such circumstances the prevailing ‘mood’ matters far more than interest rates or the supply of credit: Speculation on a large scale requires a pervasive sense of confidence and optimism and conviction that ordinary people were meant to be rich. People must also have faith in the good intentions and even in the benevolence of others, for it is by the agency of others that they will get rich [. . . .] Such a feeling of trust is essential for a boom. When people are cautious, questioning, misanthropic, suspicious, or mean, they are immune to speculative enthusiasms.19

Galbraith also points out that while the circumstances surrounding a boom are characterised by confidence and optimism, the reverse is true for a depression: ‘Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise’.20 In his ‘inquiry into the meaning of money’, Frozen Desire, James Buchan remarks, in similar terms: ‘For money to serve you, you have to believe in it; if you doubt it a moment, it vanishes, like a ghost. What happened at the turn of the 1930s was that Americans lost faith in money’.21 This returns us to the notion of trust as formulated by Anthony Giddens: Trust exists [. . .] when we ‘believe in’ someone or some principle [. . . .] Trust, in short, is a form of ‘faith,’ in which the confidence vested in probable outcomes expresses a commitment to something rather than just a cognitive understanding.22

Trust, faith, belief and confidence, then, do not only provide the fuel for an economic boom; they are fundamental to the operation of monetary systems and they provide the material for much of the plot and thematic structure of The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh. Furthermore, they underpin the fundamental connections between

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money, identity and character that are central concerns within these texts. In The Good Soldier (1915), John Dowell describes his wife Florence as representing ‘a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a banknote represents a certain quantity of gold’.23 It is intriguing to note that the possibility that England might abandon the gold standard – the system whereby a banknote really did represent a quantity of gold – is continually referred to throughout Henry for Hugh. When Henry Martin hears that the ‘Match Emperor’, Mr ‘Hrrrrooocher – or Kreuger’, has warned Gloria Malmström of this imminent possibility, he exclaims: ‘Off the gold standard! England!’ The incredulity with which he said it astonished him [. . . .] The Lady said reasonably: ‘Well, you know, Posh, it’s not so long since you yourself said – and certainly your poor father was firmly of opinion – that the only thing that could restore the North of England manufacturers would be precisely if we went off the gold standard. . . .’24

Indeed, it transpires that not only was Hugh Monckton in favour of ending the gold standard, he had been predicting the crash and the subsequent crisis for years: It appeared that in Indianapolis four years before Hugh Monckton had prophesied for Mr. Old-Smith a financial collapse of Wall Street. It bringing in its train the financial and industrial ruin of most of the countries of Europe and other Continents. He has based his prediction on the fact that at that time the United States had mopped up nearly all the gold in the world. (HH 217)

Given the analogy drawn between banknotes and fictional characters in Ford’s earlier novel, Henry for Hugh’s references to gold must be regarded as more than arbitrary plot points. Once again, this underscores a link between character in the novel and the nature of money. For Dowell, Florence’s ‘personality of paper’ can at least be seen as a representation of something ‘real’ with a value that is relatively fixed. In The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh, identity itself becomes exchangeable and, like money after the abolition of the gold standard, it can only be stabilised by the trust of others. Henry is able to become Hugh because others trust and believe that is who he is. In the review essay ‘Going Beyond Modernism’, which remains one of the most suggestive responses to The Rash Act and Henry for

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Hugh almost thirty years after its publication, Cornelia Cook argues that, in these novels, Ford takes a step ‘beyond modernism’ by rejecting conventional notions of character: Hugh Monckton Smith is not only a character, but an idea of character effectively killed off by The Rash Act – narrowly that of earlier Ford heroes, broadly that of the humanist basis of realist fiction [. . . .] The visible public image of Monckton stability and prosperity, ‘he’ is necessary to preserve both in the midst of global financial collapse. This aspect of character is what can easily be occupied by the look-alike Henry Martin Aluin Smith. On that recognition the novel’s plot, its subtle questioning of the primacy of the subjective self, and its valediction to the commitments of an earlier humanist modernism are built.25

Cook reads this rejection of ‘humanist modernism’ in the light of Ford’s assertion in The English Novel (1930) that in the modern novel and the modern world ‘it is not individuals but enterprises or groups that succeed or fail’.26 A few years later, in It Was the Nightingale (1933), Ford imagines the possibility of a novel without individuals: ‘I sit frequently and dream of writing an immense novel in which all the characters should be great masses of people – or interests [. . . .] without the attraction of sympathy for a picturesque or upright individual’ (IWN 195). In terms of our discussion of trust and finance, I would argue that what Cook describes as Ford killing off the ‘humanist basis of realist fiction’ should be viewed as inextricably linked to Henry for Hugh’s preoccupation with gold and the gold standard. Indeed, Jean-Joseph Goux draws an even broader connection between the end of the gold standard and the explosion of nonrepresentational art: Was it purely by chance that the crisis of realism in the novel and in painting coincided with the end of gold money? Or that the birth of ‘abstract’ art coincided with the shocking invention of inconvertible monetary signs, now in general use? Can we not see in this double crisis of money and language the collapse of guarantees and frames of reference, a rupture between sign and thing, undermining representation and ushering in the age of the floating signifier?27

If Goux is right and the historical convergence of economic turbulence and financial crises with the modernist and postmodernist trends in literature which Ford engaged in, developed, and encouraged in others was far from coincidental, then the centrality of trust and finance, in

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terms of character, plot, theme and structure in Ford’s last series of novels, must be viewed as issues of major significance. The final aspect of the issue of trust I would like to examine here returns me to the problem I alluded to earlier of identifying, in Sisson’s terms, ‘what make[s] the book what it is’. In a particularly suggestive passage from an essay entitled ‘The Origin of Genres’, Tzvetan Todorov describes genres as ‘“horizons of expectation” for readers and as “models of writing” for authors’.28 In other words, genre operates as a force which both shapes the text in terms of its production, and shapes the reader’s ‘faith’ in the type of experience the text will provide. That is to say that readers generate expectations about the kind of experience the text will provide and place a kind of faith in the projected satisfaction of these expectations. It is a particular feature of many of Ford’s works, however, that we are profoundly unable to stabilise expectations of this kind, and are unable therefore to trust his texts.29 This is particularly true of The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh. As noted earlier, the temptation to read Ford’s description of The Rash Act as ‘meant to do for [. . .] the Crisis what the Tietjens tetralogy did for the war’ in the context of Ford’s notion of the novelist as ‘historian of his own time’ is a strong one. However, running counter to the aim of recording contemporary history is the framework of the prince and the pauper fairytale upon which the texts rely.30 Many critics have commented on the demands the far-fetched plots of these novels place on the reader’s credulity.31 As Laura Colombino remarks, this is a story ‘whose implausibility cannot be denied, considering the absurd coincidences upon which the narrative is based’.32 Intriguingly, the revelation, that comes in Henry for Hugh, that the two almost identical men are distant cousins seems, paradoxically, both to increase and to diminish the text’s plausibility – it perhaps explains on the one hand why they look alike, but makes their apparently chance meeting all the more improbable. Nevertheless, reading the novels as a kind of fairytale negates these problems. On the other hand, if Ford’s story is a fairytale how can it also be a rendering of contemporary history? Adding to the complications, Ford described Henry for Hugh as ‘an inverted detective story’.33 And adding a further twist, the formal features of the texts – such as the time-shift and the interior monologue – mark these out as modernist novels, but modernism is commonly associated with a rejection of conventional realism and with the desire to wake up from the nightmare of history.

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Even if there were space here to attempt to resolve these issues, however, to do so would be to disregard one of the most fascinating sources of energy in these texts. Indeed, the generic instability of these novels, like so many of Ford’s works, enacts the problem of trust that we all encounter in our daily negotiations with the modern world. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest one sense in which Ford’s attempt to document the history of the Crisis might be reconciled with the fantasy world of the fairytale. In 2009 the British Academy posted a letter to her Majesty the Queen on its website offering an explanation as to why the ‘credit crunch’ had not been foreseen. It explains that although concerns had been raised about the risks being taken in the global economy, most people had been ‘convinced that banks knew what they were doing. They believed that the financial wizards had found new and clever ways of managing risks.’34 In his book Galbraith refers to ‘the magic of the investment trust’ and ‘the gods of the New Era’.35 Gods, wizards and magic: economic discourse appears saturated with the language of fairytales, and hence Ford’s combination of the two might not have been so very far-fetched after all. Although trust is a major problem in these novels, both for the reader and for the characters within the fiction, Ford presents Provence as the site where it can be rediscovered and renegotiated in Henry for Hugh: a land whose abundance conduces not to excess but to frugality; a land whose imaginative fertility has enriched civilisation rather than aroused mistrust. Having exchanged identities and begun the process of reconstructing himself, Henry Martin is at last able to start believing in himself, and he finds, in Eudoxie, someone else who believes in him, and in whom he can trust: He said gravely: ‘I owe her my reason . . . My life too, if you like!’ It came back to him suddenly how, the moment Dr. Grouault had taken the bandages off his face in the crude light of the hotel room, Eudoxie had given a little start. She alone of the whole lot of them had recognised that he was not Hugh Monckton! Certainly, if she had given him away at that moment it might well have affected his reason. And he might have died if they had suddenly turned him out – as an impostor. He had been pretty bad then. He said with the same gravity: ‘Certainly she made me the man you see . . . what is left of me.’ He ended slowly: ‘I would trust her with my honour and my life. To the end of the world. To the last day of time!’ (HH 142)

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NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929, London: Penguin, 1975 – henceforth ‘Galbraith’; p. 91 Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers who Broke the World, London: Windmill Books, 2010, p. 348. Quoted by Galbraith 95. Maury Klein, Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. xiv. James Buchan, Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money, London: Picador, 1997 – henceforth ‘Buchan’; p. 243. Ford, letter to Ray Long, 2 July 1932, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965, p. 208. C. H. Sisson, ‘Introduction’, in Ford, The Rash Act, Manchester: Carcanet, 1982 – henceforth RA; p. 4. Ford, It Was the Nightingale, ed. John Coyle, Manchester: Carcanet, 2007 – henceforth IWN; p. 180. See, for example, Marlene Griffith, ‘A Double Reading of Parade’s End’, Ford Madox Ford: Modern Judgements, ed. Richard A. Cassell, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972, 137–51; and David Ayers, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’, Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal, ed. Robert Hampson and Tony Davenport, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 1, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002 – henceforth ‘Ayers’; 159–83. Max Saunders observes that Parade’s End has been read variously as ‘a Bildungsroman; an account of the rehabilitation of the isolated Tory; a critique of the ruling class; a novel of social change; a resurrection myth; or even a Christmas pantomime’. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 211. Ford, Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine, ed. John Coyle, Manchester: Carcanet, 2009 – henceforth Provence; p. 13. Ayers 162. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, p. 26, original italics. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 83-4. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 33. Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, London: Penguin, 2009, pp. 30-1. Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1982, p. 6. Sara Haslam, ‘The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh: A Fordian History of SelfConstruction (or: Where Is [M]Other?)’, History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writing, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 3, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004, p. 127. Galbraith 187–8. Galbraith 153.

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21 Buchan 241. 22 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 27. 23 Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard, New York and London: Norton, 1995, p. 83. 24 Ford, Henry for Hugh: A Novel, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1934 – henceforth HH; pp. 147–8. ‘Mr. Hrrrrooocher – or Kreuger’ is a reference to Ivar Kreuger ‘The Match King’, whose fraudulent business enterprises have recently been compared to those of Bernard Madoff. See Ron Chernow, ‘Madoff and his Models’, The New Yorker 85:6 (23 March 2009). I would like to thank Alexandra Becquet for pointing out this connection to me. 25 Cornelia Cook, ‘Going Beyond Modernism [Review of The Rash Act]’, in Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard A. Cassell, Boston, Massachusetts: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987, p. 145. 26 Ford, The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, Manchester: Carcanet, 1997, p. 126. 27 Jean-Joseph Goux, The Coiners of Language, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage, Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994, p. 3. 28 Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Origin of Genres’, Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff, Harlow: Longman, 2000, pp. 199-200. 29 For further discussion of the issues of trust and genre in Ford’s writing see Robert Bramwell Hawkes, ‘Destabilising Narratives: Characterising, Plotting, and Trusting in Ford Madox Ford’s Fiction’, Ph.D Diss., University of York, 2008. 30 For discussion of the strains of fairytale and romance throughout Ford’s oeuvre, see Samuel Hynes, ‘Ford and the Spirit of Romance’, Edwardian Occasions: Essays on English Writing in the Early Twentieth Century, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, 71-9; and Timothy Weiss, Fairy Tale and Romance in Works of Ford Madox Ford, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. 31 See, for example, Robert E. McDonough, ‘Escape from Englishness: The Rash Act and Henry For Hugh’, Ford Madox Ford and Englishness, ed. Dennis Brown and Jenny Plastow, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 5, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006; and J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Works of Ford Madox Ford with Particular Reference to the Novels’, M.A. Diss., University of Cape Town, 1963. 32 Laura Colombino, Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing, Bern: Peter Lang, 2008, p. 185. 33 Ford, ‘Synopsis of As Thy Day (Henry for Hugh)’, in The Ford Madox Ford Reader, ed. Sondra J. Stang, Manchester: Carcanet, 1986, p. 269. 34 Tim Besley and Peter Hennessey, letter to Her Majesty The Queen, 22 July 2009. Accessed via British Academy. 21 August 2009. 35 Galbraith 82, 115.

GOING SOUTH FOR AIR: FORD MADOX FORD’S PROVENCE Martin Stannard To say that Ford overstated things might be something of an understatement. It would be easy to dismiss his Provence1 as the work of a book-mongering litterateur past his first (and second) youth, manufacturing a vision of history that is entirely subjective to the point of being unhinged. ‘This’, he writes, ‘is a book of travel’ (Provence 25) but anyone buying it in 1935 hoping for a travel book would have been disappointed. There are no adventures; there are no confrontations with primitive peoples (other than those from London and New York); there is no introduction as to how best to move around contemporary Provence, its hotels or cheaper establishments, its restaurants, art galleries, theatres, vineyards, indigenous culture. Instead we have quite a lot about London, slabs of indigestible Dark Ages history, obscure references to the Courts of Love, conversations with a disguised Janice Biala, and disquisitions on whatever, apparently, tumbles into the writer’s name-dropping mind in order to fill paper. As a literary structure, if we are peering at it through the lens of the realist, or supposedly documentary, travel book so popular in the 1930s, it looks ramshackle. In fact, it is not. It is, rather, a modernist parody of the realist travel narrative, playing with its conventions as the products of a bankrupt epistemology, and rewriting them as impressionist autobiography and cultural history. It presents a psychological journey. Ultimately Provence here is Ford and, as John Coyle subtly suggests, the whole tumultuous account is something of a love letter not only to Provence but also to Biala who is, as the illustrator, co-author of this work. Everything he stands for as a ‘migratory’ artist is epitomised by this small triangle of land, this ‘earthly paradise’ (Provence 18, 19). It stands against mass culture as a kind of objective correlative of cultural value. The book is in three parts: ‘The Great Trade Routes’, ‘Provence Seen from the North’, and ‘Mise À Mort’. It moves, then, from Ford’s theory about cultural transmission via the Great Trade Routes and a discussion of London where part of the book is being written in 1934,

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to an analysis of the history and culture of Provence, and finally to death, as it were, in the afternoon amid the glories of the bullfight. For if this account is about Life and how best to live it, it is also about Death, about finishing in style, not alienated and fragmented but integrated and whole, vigorously pursuing one’s pleasures to the very edge of the grave. Ford’s Trade Routes theory is in part the romanitàs of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: the idea that in order for a country to consider itself ‘civilized’ it must have been colonised by the Romans. Ford, however, an unconventional Catholic, expands this to include anyone who transmitted ‘Latinity’ from the South to the North and he regards the Caesars as ‘gangsters’ (244). ‘Latinity’ here can mean many things beyond the transmission of the Latin language and colonial culture. It signifies a way of life that welcomes the artist in its outdoor cafés, listens to poets reciting in its places, produces good, cheap food and wine from a peasant culture still rooted in the landscape of smallholdings. It is presented as the reverse of dictatorial: a hierarchical counter-culture resistant to patriarchy. In this work, as in several others by experimental writers of the 1930s (Evelyn Waugh, the Sitwells, Norman Douglas, D. H. Lawrence) the North is a negative term, the South, positive. The ‘Cold Northerner’ (Provence 231) represents a wintery, repressed and exhausted culture. The North, ‘from which comes all evil’ (269), breeds the neuroses of the Gothic, militarism, nationalism. The author ‘hate[s] Germany as a disturber of the world’ (325) but by ‘Germany’ he means North Germany. The ‘South and Middle Germans’ he finds capable of ‘infinite conscientiousness, kindliness, love for the arts, domestic self-respect’ (325). And there is for Ford a clear geographical line to be drawn here separating these two Germanies. It runs from ‘Hamburg to Frankfurt on the Oder’ (325), just as there is a clear line between north and south Europe ‘that begins after you have passed Valence’ (141). Provence is the region through which the Great Trade Routes passed back and forth carrying the ebb and flow of civilization. The Italian language, he believes, was formed there through Petrarch (142 and 156-57) and Provençal itself is presented as an infinitely flexible dialect, the language of the Troubadours and of the polytheistic, heretical Albigenses. Provence has had, in Ford’s view, the ‘only real civilization that the world has yet seen’ (164), hybrid, cosmopolitan, colourful and subversive of the apparatuses of other colonising states. It loves verse and poets. It offers a pacifist, peasant’s-eye view of the grander worlds, impatient with priests,

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popes, military rulers and authority generally: slow-moving, passionate, well-balanced, qualities epitomised by its cooking and diet. In the South there is no winter. Set against this is London, the scene of Ford’s confused youth as a Wunderkind amid the children of the Pre-Raphaelites. At that time, London epitomised cultural certainty for him. Fifty years later everything has changed. Post-war, post-‘Prufrock’ and modernism, London is like ‘a vast narcoticised body thrown across the valley of the Thames and from there into what soiled remotenesses!’ (Provence 147). It is a city of ‘docile’ and ‘kindly people’ (161), governed by ‘the spirit of hesitation’ (300), ‘be-drizzled’ (120), ‘stupidly misgoverned’ (161), ‘one vast blunder’ (161), ‘a Gargantuan ragbag’ (188). It ‘steam-rollers out the individualities of its aliens’ (264), this great ‘careless, sinful, brown, sooty place’ (25) typified now not by its former grandeur but by its debased mass culture, its football mania and advertisements. The second chapter opens with Ford walking Biala up to ‘the third step of the left-hand entrance-staircase of the National Gallery’ to introduce her to ‘the only Great View in London or the British Empire’. But there is no longer a view reaching down Whitehall and across to the Mother of Parliaments. It has been obliterated by pink, illuminated advertisements for an ‘anti-bilious specific’ (23). London is presented as brainwashed, without emotions (188), its citizens lobotomised by the First World War and drifting helplessly towards the next through economic and psychological depression. Ford sits in his room, irritated by the music (implicitly from First World War veterans) intruding from the street, tormented by memories of being a Catholic during that war while preparing to commit murder on the battlefield (297-300), depressed by the dullness of his home city, financially ruined like everyone else of his class by the Wall Street Crash six years earlier, suffering from a ‘[v]iolent claustrophobia’ (289) and yet, somehow, determinedly, almost madly. hopeful. This is, he admits, a prophetic book: I am going to point out to this world what will happen if it does not take Provence in the thirteenth century for its model. For there seems to be a general – and universal – impression that our Civilisation – if that is what you want to call it – is staggering to its end [. . . .] There have stolen away from us, unperceived, Faith and Courage; the belief in a sustaining Redeemer, in a sustaining anything; the Stage is gone, the Cinema is going, the belief in the Arts, in Altruism, in the Law of Supply and Demand, in Science, in the

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MARTIN STANNARD Destiny of our Races. . . . In the machine itself. . . . In Provence there is every Sunday a Mise à mort that is responsible for the death of six bulls. In the world outside it one immense bull that bears our destiny is at every hour of every day slowly and blindly staggering to its end. (Provence 255-6)

Echoes of Yeats’s slouching beast are unmistakeable. In the background the apocalyptic forces of communism and fascism are splitting a world suffering a nervous breakdown. Mutilated soldiers still sell plush toys from trays in London’s streets. Everything is unstable and ersatz. Nothing can be known any more, or at least trusted: In my day we had King, Lords, Commons, the Book of Common Prayer, the London County Council, the Metropolitan Police, the Home Secretary – and Christ Jesus who died to make us and our vast empire what we were. Now all these first attributes of Londonism are as dim as figures seen through the steam from a kettle-spout. And the Saviour Himself, if His crucified arms seem to spread across the whole London sky as never before they did, is nevertheless dimmed too, like a Byzantine Pièta from which the gold-leaf should have been removed by the attrition of the ages [. . . .] You say: That is the work of the War . . . But, good Lord, there have been other wars that were followed by no such collapses. (Provence 121-2)

The book wrestles with this issue. ‘You cannot’, Ford writes, ‘have vast organisations without faith – and Christianity as a faith died a few days after the 4th of August, 1914 . . .’ (Provence 297). In his lodgings, in the borough of Marylebone, SW1, at the very heart of what should be civilization, he feels he is in Sodom and he knows very well that the problem is bigger than a loss of faith in gentlemanly institutions or even in the link between patriotism and Christianity. When he writes ‘In my day we had King, Lords, Commons . . .’ he is referring, not without irony, to his days of childhood innocence. No one reading the Fifth Queen trilogy, The Good Soldier or the Tietjens tetralogy could doubt that Ford had analysed the collapse of his culture’s epistemology twenty years earlier. He had always done a nice line in cultural Rubicons. But in 1934 he was confronting something quite different: not merely the change from one reality to another but the movement from the West’s last grasp on reality into the totally artificial, the move perhaps from the modernist consciousness to the postmodern in which any sense of essential value or meaning is lost in endless anteriority. It reminds one of Orwell’s late work and in particular, Coming Up For Air (1939).2

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The typescript of Provence has the title: ‘Provence: A Paralleling of Civilisations’, and several alternatives: ‘From the Courts of Love’, ‘The Great Trade Route’, ‘Nothing Good Comes from the North’, ‘That Sweet Land’, and ‘From Minstrels to the Machine’. Although only the last appeared in the final book, replacing ‘A Paralleling of Civilisations’ as the subtitle, all were relevant. The Great Trade Route followed Provence as the second volume in what was intended to be a trilogy. The former was not, Ford insisted, the book of a meditative gentleman who stands before ruined temples and pours out mournful soliloquies on old unhappy things but [. . .] the testament of a man usually of action who has spent a long life [. . .] fighting both literally and metaphorically [to] advance [. . .] the cause of good letters.3

And the same might be said of Provence. It is a fighting book by a pacifist. Written at a time of imminent apocalypse, it writes against the Northern mechanist culture epitomised by Hitler. Written in the North by a Northerner who feels exiled from his natural home in the South, Provence can appear erratic. There is as much here about London, about Ford’s childhood and young manhood in that city, about actresses or writers he has known (Mrs Patrick Campbell, James, Conrad), about the room in which he is composing, as there is about Provence. And when he does get round to talking about his ostensible subject, he tends to offer dry history which only picks up when it becomes unreliable. Provence, nevertheless, is always there, moving through everything like a benevolent ghost. It links Ford to his childhood and to his difficult relationship with his father; it links him to Modernism and to Ezra Pound, to Catholicism and to the popes of Avignon, to romanitàs and to his beloved Latinity; it links him to a civilization whose people are all in some sense hybrids and artists, a commonwealth of poets. Quite often, perhaps crucially, it links him to the preparation of good food, for this is a book about cultural indigestion. When he states that ‘there is no hope for us unless we reform the cooking at least of our rulers’ (69), he is not joking. As in Coming Up For Air, the whole domestic environment of the Western middle classes is seen to be artificial and deadly: In our over- gas-, steam-, or oil-heated apartments, fighting in our climates that are unfitted for human life, the endless chills on the liver, nights without sleep and four-in-the-morning horrors, we shall go on getting grosser and ever

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MARTIN STANNARD more gross, further and further away from Latinity and plunging deeper and deeper into mass-production, ruin, reaction and massacre. . . . When we have finished burning all Jewish books we shall burn all ‘foreign’ books, each in his own nation. And then we shall burn all books. It shall be night from Pole to Pole. . . . Only in one sunlit triangle of the earth to the right of the Rhone […] the frame of mind which is Provence shall sit keeping her sheep on the sun-baked rocks, amidst the unnumbered tufts of pot-herbs. (Provence 69)

Where in Orwell the myth of essential purity and integration is located in sex and Englishness, in Ford we find it in cooking and Provence. But in both it is a rural myth, the simplicity of the countryside and the individual, the small producer, set against the anonymous battalions of the mechanical, rational, functional society, the totalitarians of right or left. And both writers concentrate on food to symbolise how the natural has been silently adulterated. Orwell, typically, dramatizes discomfort and physical revulsion as a kind of cultural nausea: ‘Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it’s hauled out of a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube. No comfort, no privacy. Tall stools to sit on, a kind of narrow ledge to eat off, mirrors all round you.’ This scene is set in an Americanised milk bar in which the first-person narrator George Bowling bites into a Frankfurter and the novel’s two dominant symbolic motifs – bombing and fishing – collide. Fishing represents a nostalgic, pastoral ideal associated with peace, privacy, integration and individualism. Bombing is its opposite and epitomizes the modern, fragmented world with its midnight knocks on the door and its rubber truncheons. Here the Frankfurter is not filled with meat but fish. It is ersatz: ‘Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth’ (CUFA 27). In Provence, London’s cooking is tasteless and a civilization may be judged by its cooking. ‘All that it is to-day safe to say,’ Ford states rather unsafely, ‘is that the civilized races are those that use spices and cook their food, barbarism being denoted by the eating of barely singed meat or matter out of tins’. A ‘diet without spices’, he instructs us, ‘causes indigestion’. Indigestion causes ‘religious and homicidal mania’ which in turn produce wars designed to take possession of another nation’s spices. The Provençaux, being self-sufficient in these commodities, have therefore been exemplary pacifists, allowing their more bullish neighbours to rage back and forth across their territory with their greed and their creeds, and only once having ‘issued from their own boundaries in an aggressive war’ (Provence 163).

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Presumably this is a nonsensical view based on little or no evidence but if we can allow Ford this flight of historical fancy and move on to the core of what he has to say, we find that it is what all good chefs and dieticians say today: that food should be cooked in season and not preserved, that it should be locally sourced, that one’s diet should be balanced with plenty of fresh vegetables and fruit and without too much red meat. The matter of physical and cultural health is a matter of taste. You lose the sense of taste for authentic food at your peril, for with that goes the power of cultural discrimination generally and your attachment to the land. There are scenes in this book with a Christ-like Candide-Ford labouring in his garden while polite gentlefolk interrupt his work and attempt to dissuade him from wasting his time on hoeing and watering. It is a matter of rootedness and integration, of good taste rather than luxury, of knowing where things come from if you want to know where you are going. One could imagine Ford becoming a favourite with eco-critics because, allowing for exaggeration, he still has much of interest to say to our fouled-up twenty-first-century civilization. Indeed, his message has become increasingly pertinent. Provence, however, was not, he insisted, a back-to-the-land diatribe – of which there were many in the 1930s. It was, like Coming Up For Air, a pacifist reaction against the seemingly inevitable Second World War. In its way it predicted the Holocaust, and the terrifying sense of apocalypse that followed it with the advent of the atomic age. The stakes, he was sure, were high and, under the circumstances, we might forgive Ford’s hyperbole and gratefully accept the insights. It is both a statement of his home-spun (but intriguing) philosophy and a private, somewhat painful, exploration of his entry into old age. In 1935, when it was first published, he was sixty-two and had only four years to live. It is true that there is nothing of the ‘meditative gentleman’ about Provence. Its voice is vigorously eccentric and often amusing, whacking away at the philistines. But that confident rhetoric articulates anxiety, Ford’s own decline paralleling the final Decline of the West. With Europe on the brink of another global catastrophe, he cannot have been entirely confident that the spirit of the Troubadours and a diet of good vegetables would hold back the tides of barbarism. Nevertheless, he gives us Provence, the place that has survived all darknesses and remained colourful, a guttering beacon of hope for the survival of taste – and therefore of freedom. He gives us, in effect, himself. When the Mistral blows his

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savings away at the end of the book it is in one sense a disaster, altering his plans completely. But in another, it is presented as absurd, the civilized adults of his party immediately transformed into children snatching at banknotes in a hopeless paper chase. It is, of course, a metaphor, as the Mistral wind and Mistral the poet are metaphors. The wind of the region is like the breath of God. It changes everything suddenly. It is both an invigorating memento mori and a reminder to seize the day. Money matters here, but not much. The depression at the heart of this book has nothing to do with Wall Street. It is produced by a cultural alienation that Provence, and Provence, resist.

NOTES 1

2

3

Ford Madox Ford, Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine, Philapelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938; reprinted ed. John Coyle, Manchester: Carcanet, 2009. All page references are to Dr Coyle’s edition. George Orwell, Coming Up For Air, London: Gollancz, 1939; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962, p. 25. Hereafter cited as CUFA in references in main text. Ford’s letter to Sir Stanley Unwin, 28 October, 1936; quoted in Frank MacShane’s D.Phil. thesis, ‘The Literary Career of Ford Madox Ford’, Oxford, 1955, pp. 277-8, and referenced by David Dow Harvey, Ford Madox Ford: 18731939: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962, p. 83.

FORD, JAMES AND DAUDET: THE CHARMING ART OF TOUCHING UP THE TRUTH John Coyle The dual title of the conference – ‘Ford in France/Ford en Provence’ – which gave rise to this collection, draws our attention to the fact that Ford came to value Provence and the Midi as a nostalgic idealisation of France as a whole. Central to Ford’s ideal of France is Provence, and central to his evocation of Provence is the town of Tarascon. Ford imagines it as an ideal literary homeland, and in It Was the Nightingale he calls it ‘the city that I have always loved best in the world’.1 The city – town rather, in English – is treasured by Ford for its romantic, literary and cultural associations; the troubadours above all, but also the romance of Aucassin and Nicolette. More surprisingly, though, Ford makes extensive allusion to Alphonse Daudet’s comic creation Tartarin of Tarascon. This essay will examine Ford’s relationship with Tartarin, which is one of identification mixed with dissociation, as a means of exploring how Ford’s travel writing responds to that of both Daudet and one of Daudet’s English translators, Henry James. Ford’s idealization of Provence continues a culturally lucrative tradition started off by Daudet’s more famous Lettres de mon Moulin (1869), particularly in his self-conscious representation of the remote south for consumption by a northern metropolitan public. Yet Ford’s selection of the Tartarin stories complicates the issue by introducing an element of broad comedy to the romance of Provence. As Ford reminds us, Daudet himself earned the resentment of the Tarasconnais for his burlesque portrayal of the town and its inhabitants in his three works.2 Tartarin is as much caricature as character, a Don Quixote, the author suggests, in the skin of a Sancho Panza. He is a corpulent fantasist, the facts behind whose dreams are shabby, etiolated. His African explorations result in a catalogue of disasters, the exotic natives encountered mostly turn out to be confidence tricksters of European origin, and the fauna he meets are the stuff of cartoons: a

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lopsided camel and a lame, blind and toothless lion are part of this menagerie, while the climactic scene of the novel is a high-speed chase between an overaffectionate ostrich and Tartarin’s homebound train. This is emphatically not the stuff of romance. Tartarin’s three books of adventures take him successively to Algeria, to the Alps and to a South Sea island in pursuit of a South Sea bubble. The important thing, then, about Tartarin is that Provence is not enough for him. He repeatedly leaves Tarascon, and returns from his adventures at best only partially cured of his delusions which, we learn early on, are nourished by literary influences: the chronicles of the great explorers like Cook and Bougainville, and the adventure tales of Fenimore Cooper. Safely ensconced back in Tarascon, Tartarin the storyteller is at liberty to embroider his own tales for the amusement and admiration of his small-town circle, who are altogether tolerant of his exaggerations. Where adventures are supposed to take place in exotic lands, it is only in Tarascon that they are really possible, because it is there that they are believed in. Early on in the first Tartarin story, in fact, Daudet suggests explicitly that Provence is a country where one finds a greater tolerance towards embellishments of the truth. A sceptical reader apostrophises Daudet and the following dialogue ensues: «Mais alors, votre Tartarin n’était qu’un affreux menteur. — Non! mille fois non! Tartarin n’était pas un menteur... — Pourtant, il devait bien savoir qu’il n’était pas allé à Shanghaï! — Eh! sans doute il le savait. Seulement ...» «Seulement, écoutez bien ceci. Il est temps de s’entendre une fois pour toutes sur cette réputation de menteurs que les gens du Nord ont faite aux Méridionaux. Il n’y a pas de menteurs dans le Midi, pas plus à Marseille qu’à Nîmes, qu’à Toulouse, qu’à Tarascon. L’homme du Midi ne ment pas, il se trompe. Il ne dit pas toujours la vérité, mais il croit la dire... Son mensonge à lui, ce n’est pas du mensonge, c’est une espèce de mirage. Oui, du mirage!... Et pour bien me comprendre, allez vous-en dans le Midi, et vous verrez. Vous verrez ce diable de pays où le soleil transfigure tout, et fait tout plus grand que nature. Vous verrez ces petites collines de Provence pas plus hautes que la Butte Montmartre et qui vous paraîtront gigantesques, vous verrez la Maison carrée de Nîmes — un petit bijou d’étagère —, qui vous semblera aussi grande que Notre-Dame. Vous verrez... Ah! le seul menteur du Midi, s’il y en a un, c’est le soleil... Tout ce qu’il touche, il l’exagère!... Qu’est-ce que c’était que Sparte aux temps de sa splendeur? Une bourgade... Qu’est-ce que c’était qu’Athènes? Tout au plus une sous-préfecture... Et pourtant dans l’histoire elles nous apparaissent comme des villes énormes. Voilà ce que le soleil en a fait...

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Vous étonnerez-vous après cela que le même soleil, tombant sur Tarascon, ait pu faire d’un ancien capitaine d’habillement comme Bravida le brave commandant Bravida, d’un navet un baobab, et d’un homme qui avait failli aller à Shanghaï un homme qui y était allé?» ‘But according to that, this Tartarin of yours is a terrible liar.’ ‘No! A thousand times no! Tartarin was no liar.’ ‘Yet he had to know that he had never been to Shanghai’ – ‘Well, of course, he knew that. Except’ – ‘Except listen to this! It’s about time we understood each other once and for all about this reputation for lying which Northerners cast at Southerners. There are no liars in the Midi, no more at Marseilles than at Nîmes, or Toulouse or Tarascon. The Southerner does not lie: he gets things wrong. He does not always tell the truth, but he believes he does. His lie is not a lie as such, more a kind of mirage. Yes, a mirage! And if you want to understand what I’m saying, you should go to the Midi, and there you’ll see. You’ll see this devil of a country where the sun transfigures everything, makes everything larger than life. You’ll see that those little hills of Provence, no bigger than the Butte Montmartre, will seem gigantic to you; you will see the Roman temple at Nîmes – a mere sideboard ornament – which will appear grander than Notre Dame. You’ll see... Ah, you see, if there is any genuine liar in the Midi, it’s the sun. Everything it shines on, it exaggerates. What was Sparta in its days of splendour? A mere hamlet. What was Athens? A small town at best; and yet in history both appear to us as enormous cities. That’s the sun’s doing. Are you surprised, then, that the same sun, shining on Tarascon, should have the power to change Bravida the retired quartermaster into brave commander Bravida, to change turnips into baobabs, or change a man who had nearly been to Shanghai into one who actually had been there?’3

In line with Daudet’s distinctions, Tartarin deludes himself rather than trying to delude others by inflating his exploits overseas. His selfdelusions are typical of the tourist or expatriate who persuades himself that he is more at home in foreign lands than he actually is, and who encounters inevitable disappointment and occasional humiliation when he is treated, quite properly, as an outsider. The tourist then compensates for this exclusion by confirming his exoticism to his advantage on more familiar ground, by returning home and renewing his boasts about being most at home when he is abroad. Following this pattern we might suggest that behind Ford’s invocations of Tartarin lies a hint of recognition that Provence, for all the happiness he found there, may at the same time be his own misconstrued land of adventure, and that dissatisfaction with one’s homeland and consequent yearning for a new and distant spiritual home may be subject to laws of relativity. So if Provence represents a

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mythical South for Ford, there will always exist points further south. Just as Ford brings London to Provence, Tartarin brings a Provencal, Tarasconnais eye to the exotic elsewhere. Ford would be aware of the relativism of his southward drift, just as Pope knew of a similar effect when travelling in the opposite direction. But where th’ Extreme of vice, was ne’er agreed: Ask, where's the North? at York ’tis on the Tweed, In Scotland at the Orcades, and there At Greenland, Zembla, or the lord knows where. No creature owns it in the first degree, But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he.4

In other words, what sets Ford off on his journey from London to Tarascon is similar to what impels Tartarin to discover new worlds in North Africa and Polynesia, while further to this there is of course the painful corollary that the true inhabitants of exotic lands will regard the traveller and would-be settler as no more than a tourist, self deluded, gullible. At the end of his stories Tartarin of Tarascon has to return to his hometown where only bluster can conceal the ultimate failure of his wanderings. The author of The Good Soldier, among many other things a story of travel as means to emotional evasion, would not be entirely heedless of these resonances, or unaware of the irony that in his adopted country he had few literary associations of any consequence, remaining dependent on the English speaking world, on both sides of the Atlantic, for his audience. Ford is then also concerned with this extra, Transatlantic dimension of displacement, and this emerges in Chapter 4 of Provence, where he invokes Henry James as ‘the Expatriate’, and in the same sentence as ‘the author of Daisy Miller’.5 In Daisy Miller as elsewhere in James’s work, Europe appears not only as the touchstone, in Italo Calvino’s words, by which America measures itself,6 but also as a site of reinvention and disorientation. James was a friend and associate of Daudet, and translated the last of the Tartarin stories, Port Tarascon, another colonial adventure which takes our hero to Polynesia, related with a broad, rollicking humour for which James is not exactly renowned. His introduction to Port Tarascon echoes Daudet’s indulgence towards Tartarin’s liberties with the truth, while also rehearsing once again the North/South oppositions exploited by both Daudet and Ford:

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We must praise, moreover, not only the evocation of the sonorous and sociable little figure of Tartarin himself – broad of shoulder and bright of eye, bald of head, short of beard, belted on a comfortable scale for all exploits – but the bright image of the wonderfully human little town which he has made renowned, and in which the charming art of touching up the truth – the poor, bare, shabby facts of things – is represented as flourishing more than anywhere else on earth. A compendium of all the droll idiosyncrasies of his birthplace, Tartarin makes them epic and world-famous, hands them down to a warm immortality of condonation. Daudet has humorously described in a ‘definitive’ preface (just as he alludes to them in the opening pages of Port Tarascon) some of the consequences, personal to himself, of this accident of his having happened to point his moral as well as adorn his tale with the little patch of Provence that sits opposite to Beaucaire by the Rhone. Guided in his irrepressible satiric play by his haunting sense of the French ‘Midi’, his own provoking, engaging clime, it was quite at hazard that in his quest of the characteristic he put his hand on Tarascon. What he wanted was some little Southern community that he could place in comic and pathetic, at times almost in tragic, opposition to the colder, grayer Northern stripe in the national temperament. Tarascon resented at first such compromising patronage. She shook her plump brown shoulders and tried to wriggle out of custody.7

Towards the end of his preface James sounds a less indulgent note. Tarascon, he insists, was inordinately fond of glory, and it was this love of glory at bottom that dragged it across the seas, where it speedily became conscious of a greater need for flannel than its individual resources could supply.8 His final reflection on Tartarin’s fate is, in cadence and sentiment, more fitting of The Ambassadors than of Daudet’s burlesque. ‘There is nothing left for Tartarin than to retire to Beaucaire, and Beaucaire, of course, is extinction.’9 Ford’s Provençal paradise is, for James, a provincial hell. When James is mentioned in Provence many years later we have a sense of an old debate being reopened, on Jamesian ground as it were, with the suggestion that the American is twice removed from the Provençal source of Literature. Bodies of water, whether the Rhone, the Channel or the Atlantic, ‘form barriers for lightnesses’ (Provence 139). Ford’s very sentences (and, by extension, those of James) suffer from being written in London, where they come out ‘as backboneless as a water-hose’, while he insists that ‘when I get back to Provence the world will be astonishingly visible. I shall write little crisp sentences like silver fish jumping out of streams’ (Provence 139). Always a fish out of water, Ford agrees with Daudet on the transformative power of the Southern sun, but his emphasis is

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different: the South makes everything lighter rather than bigger, buoyantly comic rather than sublime. Mingled in with Ford’s comments on how figures of Norse and Germanic legend become the much more delicate stuff of romance is a reminder of his own Germanic roots in the person of his Wagnerian father who, Ford insists, was invited to take up a university post with the Félibristes of Frédéric Mistral. According to the alternative history which this opportunity would have enabled, Ford/Hueffer would himself then have been born in the Midi. The sublimities of the North become, amongst the orange-coloured, sun-baked rocks south of Montélimar, pleasant absurdities, the South making for ever of our Nordic virtues a continual reductio ad absurdum. Fafnir, the spouting Eddic dragon is there translated into the Tarasque, a spiked, moon-calf monster of osier and tarpaulin, gamboling around the footsteps of St Martha as she walks the cobbles of Tarascon. Grettir the strong is there Tartarin, and Brünnhilde, Nicolette whose feet were so white that the daisies they brushed look like coal. (Provence 79-80)

When Ford returns to Henry James, after a typical digression, the note of rivalry with the ‘passionate pilgrim from Washington Square’ is more pronounced. Ford opposes the Provençal idea of a paradise which must be inclusive of a type of wantonness with the repressed paradise of James’s great good place. James’s connection with Provence is hard to fathom, his appreciation of Aucassin and Nicolette wanting, his whole aesthetic sense, it appears, twisted and burdened by moralising. ‘Into what queer blind alleys will moralizing lead you’, remarks Ford, his insinuations flitting and darting like particularly mischievous fish, as he reflects on James’s own censoriousness toward Pater. More than this, the American’s style is found wanting, since he has not embraced Tarascon as Ford does: At any rate I imagine that if Mr James had sat habitually in the sun before the Café – de Paris, of course, not du Commerce – and had discussed French as spoken in the law courts instead of morals and manners at the tea-table of Mrs Humphrey Ward . . . well, in that case, I imagine that his sentences might have been more like little silver fish. And the history of London might have been different. (Provence 144)

James is consigned to London lives and manners, even though he has, as translator of Port Tarascon over four decades previously, done at least as much as Ford to put Tarascon on the map. Ford also passes over James’s own exercises in the genre of travel writing, especially

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the example of A Little Tour in France. Originally published under the title En Province in 1883-1884 as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly, this book recounts a six-week tour James made of many provincial towns in France, West and South. The first book publication was in 1884. A second, extensively revised and illustrated edition was published by William Heinemann in London in late October 1900, the same month in which Ford published his own, more expensively illustrated volume, The Cinque Ports. Given this coincidence, the serpentine ambiguities with which James writes to Ford when the latter offers to send a presentation copy of his volume is perhaps easier to understand. (Max Saunders suggests that James had probably joked with Ford about not being able to afford The Cinque Ports.) My Dear F. M. Hueffer, I am overwhelmed by your letter, touched by your sympathy, and almost appalled by your munificence:– in the light, that is, of my fear that my crude pleasantries, my reckless and accidental levity on the subject of your brave Book may have seemed (while you evidently sought, or waited, but a pretext for kindness) to put a kind of pressure on you in respect of my deprived state. I thank you none the less cordially, but I feel embarrassed and confused; as if I were really inhuman to consent to receive from you an offering of such value [. . . .] For the rest I respond very gratefully to the charming things you tell me in relation to your so friendly acquaintance with things of mine. I’m delighted, this sentiment and this history – which you so happily express – exist for you; and only a little alarmed – or a little depressed – as always – when my earlier perpetrations come back to me as loved or esteemed objects. I seem to see them, in that character, shrink or shrivel, rock, dangerously, in the kindly blast, and threaten to collapse altogether. I am always moved to say ‘Wait’ – but I suppose I ought really to be thankful about anything that helps you to wait.10

James’s evasions here are perhaps typical of his relations with Ford – and Ford’s licence with the truth left him and many of his fellow writers embarrassed and confused. Yet in his remarks on Tartarin there is a rueful acknowledgement of the complexity of such a type: [H]is perfect candor and his tremendous lies, his good intentions and his perpetual mistakes, present to us a kind of eternal, essential ambiguity, an antagonism which many fallible souls spend their time trying to simplify.11

Provence is in the end a melancholy work, charged with all the ironies of its author’s displaced situation. Its optimism is essentially nostalgic, while its claims for cultural authority are undermined by the wildest generalisations. Like Tartarin, and like its own author, it quixotically

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seeks to reassert the values of chivalry in belated times, putting a brave face on extinction.

NOTES 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Ford Madox Ford, It Was the Nightingale, ed. John Coyle, Manchester: Carcanet, 2007, p. 225. Tartarin de Tarascon (1872), Tartarin sur les Alpes (1885), Port Tarascon (1890) Aventures prodigieuses de Tartartin de Tarascon, in Daudet, Oeuvres, Texte établi, présenté et annoté par Roger Ripoli, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1986, pp. 486-7. My translation. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle 2, ll.211-20. Ford Madox Ford, Provence, ed. John Coyle, Manchester: Carcanet, 2009 – henceforth Provence; p. 138. Italo Calvino, ‘Henry James, Daisy Miller’ (1971) in Why Read the Classics? Translated by Martin McLaughlin, London: Penguin, 2009), p. 165. Henry James, Translator’s Preface, Port Tarascon, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1891; henceforth Port Tarascon; pp. 2-3. Port Tarascon 6. Port Tarascon 7. James to Ford 16th May 1901. Quoted in Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, vol. 1, p. 135. Port Tarascon 7.

FORD’S THOUGHT-EXPERIMENTS: IMPRESSIONISM, PLACE, HISTORY, AND ‘THE FRAME OF MIND THAT IS PROVENCE’ Max Saunders

Introduction: Impressionism and Subjectivism From the very first paragraph of Provence, Ford sounds the note that echoes repeatedly through the book (as it does through this volume). What he is writing about is something he calls ‘the frame of mind that is Provence’.1 That paradoxical phrase, equating a place with a mentality, intimates that his Provence will not be what readers of topographical books might expect. It defines Provence against such expectations. But the private, nebulous nature of the ‘frame of mind’ it opposes to them, means that it is easier to say what it is not than what it is. It is thus worth pausing on the negative definitions before trying to describe the book in its own terms. It isn’t going to be a book about Provence as a place; about its geography; though that certainly comes into it. It isn’t going to be a book about Provence’s history; though that comes into it too. Nor is it going to be a study of Provence’s art, literature, and culture; though these are also covered in detail. A work combining all of these topics might sound like a guidebook. But although it does contrast the cafes of Tarascon, describes castles, cuisine, and views, and gives various snippets of advice to travellers, it isn’t at all systematic or exhaustive. Just as its content is easier to describe negatively, so is its form. It certainly isn’t organized like a guide book, which would arrange information by particular areas, towns, and sights. It doesn’t take the form of impressions de voyage, organized as a narrative of one or more particular journeys (though travel is a prominent theme). Nor is it structured as the memoir of the author’s life in the region, like Perfume from Provence, Lady Winifred Fortescue’s best-seller from the same year as Ford’s book; or, much later, Lawrence Durrell’s Casear’s Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence (1990); or Peter Mayle’s more commercial A Year in Provence (1991). Ford mentions (but doesn’t name) the house he lived in with Janice Biala near Toulon –

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the Villa Paul, on Cap Brun. But it is to comment on the frescoes painted, he says, by the landlord and his wife; and to comment on the landlord himself – a ‘retired naval quartermaster’ – being so enthusiastic to be letting the house to a writer as to ‘drive a hundred and fifty miles to fetch [Ford] a root of asphodel’, because ‘all poets must have in their gardens that fabulous herb. . . .’ (Provence 228). One needs to read Stella Bowen’s memoir, Drawn from Life, to learn that she and Ford had previously taken rooms in a hotel for two winters, then lived in a studio on the quay.2 Like Perfume from Provence, or Caesar’s Vast Ghost, Drawn from Life describes finding somewhere to live, and the author’s daily life there. Some details of Ford’s time at the Villa Paul with Janice Biala, and their struggle to grow their own vegetables, get into his Buckshee poems.3 But while Provence gives glimpses of Ford in cafes and restaurants, at bullfights, and discusses local customs, it doesn’t cover the domestic detail that takes up much of Fortescue’s book, and the beginning of Durrell’s: getting to know the locals – especially builders and a gardener in Fortescue’s case; finding an inexpensive cottage for the summer, and wintering in the chateau of a nearby friend and drinking companion in Durrell’s.4 To understand what Ford’s book on Provence is, we need to consider what he means by ‘the frame of mind that is Provence’; to ask what it means for him to approach Provence as a ‘frame of mind’. To do that, I suggest, we need to consider the relationship between place and Impressionism in Ford’s writing.5 He began to think of his writing in terms of Impressionism from about 1904 – when working on his earliest successful topographical book, The Soul of London. He described Conrad as an Impressionist in 1909, and began to describe himself as one from about 1913 – when he was writing The Good Soldier.6 He continued to develop his ideas about Impressionism through the 1920s (especially in Parade’s End, and Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance); and indeed, it was something he never stopped considering. In many ways his work from the 1930s offers some of his most thorough and profound thinking about the nature of Impressionism: not just in the books primarily concerned with writing and writers, like Portraits from Life (Mightier than the Sword in the UK) or The March of Literature; but also in the other two late books that are so hard to categorise: Provence and Great Trade Route. One productive way to categorise them would be to see them as books extending Ford’s Impressionism to places rather than to characters or stories. Ford’s writing about France is especially bound up with

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Impressionism – unsurprisingly, given Ford’s understanding of the genealogy of literary Impressionism originating mainly with French writers, especially Flaubert and Maupassant. He described his wartime pro-French propaganda as ‘the impressions of a man who has spent the great part of his life in recording impressions with an extreme exactitude [. . .]’.7 And he continued to position his post-war writing about France in terms of his Impressionist aesthetic. He describes A Mirror to France as ‘the purest, the most will-less impressionism’.8 And, as we shall see, Provence has a comparably farreaching, if less explicit, relation to his ideas of Impressionism. Thus to understand the question of ‘the frame of mind that is Provence’ in terms of Impressionism, we need to consider what Fordian Impressionism does to place, to space, and to the histories of places. The phrase Ford used when describing these late works was to call them books of ‘mental travel’.9 Where travel books are about places, mental travel books might be said to be about the frames of mind that those places represent, or produce. Yet arguably the writing of place – and especially of place as the space of cultural history, as in Ford’s accounts of Paris or Provence – represents a major challenge to Impressionism. Impressionist theory privileges individual perception, sensation, consciousness, memory. The techniques of literary Impressionism lend themselves to the representation of individual subjectivities; especially fictional ones, whose reality is not subject to empirical validation or social consensus. But what happens when Impressionist writing turns to the social realities of space, history, culture? Even where there isn’t consensus about the meanings of these things, there is perhaps agreement about the disagreements. Whereas the tendency of Impressionist writing is to reduce everything, including place itself, to subjective impressions. Can Impressionism of place ever escape from this implied solipsism of its theory? Is there anything to stop place itself always being swallowed up by the (Impressionist) mind framing it? Certainly Ford is explicit about how the Provence he describes is a very personal one: particular to him, to his autobiography: I am giving you my Provence. It is not the country as made up by modern or German scholarship. It is the Roman Province on the Great Trade Route where I have lived for nearly all my spiritual as for a great part of my physical life. (Provence 138)

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Impressionism is especially liable to being criticized as pure subjectivism (or, as it is sometimes called, ‘emotivism’): the objection being that what it gives us tells us nothing objectively true or useful about something out there – a specific place on a map, called Provence, which we could visit; but that instead it expresses the state of mind, the subjectivity, the emotional state, of the Impressionist.10 Ford’s Provence might be supremely interesting to him. But according to the anti-subjectivist critique, its only interest to us can be what it tells us about Ford’s internal world; not what it tells us about Provence. You could observe that Ford anticipates this objection, and indeed neatly counters it, by claiming that ‘modern or German scholarship’ – i.e. that on which we might base any claims to objective, publicly shareable knowledge about Provence and its history – gives us something at least as ‘made up’ as his own projections. Yet at the same time, by saying he has lived on the Great Trade Route for ‘nearly all’ his ‘spiritual life’, and for longer than he has lived on it in his ‘physical life’, he acknowledges a fantasmatic element: Provence, or the Trade Route, are places he has been to in his mind, regardless of whether he has actually been there in person. Which again seems to jeopardize such books’ truth-claims about places. What is his Provence to us? Can a book like Provence offer us anything other than Ford’s fantasy of place? The answer to such a question seems to be yes and no. If such a book can offer us more than a fantasy of place, it is not exactly by stopping place being reduced to impressions. Rather, as in Ford’s best Impressionism, it is by turning Impressionism inside out; by looking precisely at how our relationship to place is constituted by and through impressions; at how it is only through the impressions that we all have, and choose to share, that a public and/or contested sense of social reality becomes possible. In other words, what such books tell us about isn’t just a state of mind peculiar to Ford; but what his peculiar states of mind can show us about how all of our minds work when they realize places. Ford demonstrates a playful awareness of these issues, articulating them through a radical version of how societies understand themselves and their locations: one which can even be seen as anticipating later theoretical ideas about ‘psychogeography’ and the historiography of ‘mentalités’.

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Space In Chapter III of Provence, for example, Ford describes the gloomy ‘great and mysterious garden’ he played in as a child in London – it was at Brook Green, in Hammersmith (Provence 50). He mentions his father’s book on The Troubadours, and his libretto for Sir A. C. Mackenzie’s opera The Troubadour about Guillem de Cabestanh (Provence 51-2). In Ford’s imaginative memory the world of the troubadours gets superimposed on the impression of the garden: And indeed, when I think of the Sanh del Trobador – the Provence wine called Troubadour’s Blood – I see it shining in its chalice in the hand of Bérangère des Baux across the shadows and mysteries of that garden. (Provence 51)

He then goes on to describe the neighbourhood: Why, behind that hundred foot black wall, was a glamourous [sic] wicked district called The Mews where, we were given to understand, lived a blasphemous and dishonest crew called hansom cabmen. (Provence 52)

‘There it was always sunshine’, he continues: The brightest sunshine my eyes have ever seen. . . . I suppose that was because the Mews faced on the great open space that was the Great Western Railway’s shunting ground [. . . .] Nevertheless for me the Court of Love, the great court of all, still, when I have not my thoughts under control, sits in the fore-court of that gentleman’s coachmans’s Mews. . . . I knew, you see, that those Courts were held – ‘holden’ I should then have said – in great, open, stony, sunlit spaces, before the white tower of some great celebrity and that fore-court was the only place I knew of as supplying all those necessary features. . . . And after all a Lord Mayor’s coachman is surely a great enough celebrity and that was what the father of my friend was. (Provence 54-5)

‘At any rate, now you can understand why I so much love Provence’, the chapter ends (Provence 55). The London garden, and its walls and its views are the scene of his first mental journeys to Provence, and thus his impression of Provence is superimposed on them; and vice versa, when he imagines Provence later on, the memory of the London garden is superimposed on it. At first it seems like an irony – and at London’s expense – that instead of chivalric knights it has cabmen; and instead of the courts of love, a railway yard. But there’s a hint of something else in the figure of the Lord Mayor’s coachman, who does stand as a modern equivalent of the knight of a feudal lord; and a more

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important hint, in the cabs, coaches and trains of Ford’s London, of the travel to come, and especially the travel to Provence that will prove a leitmotif. That image of the two views, of Provence and Hammersmith, superimposed on each other, recalls Ford’s best-known image of Impressionism, from the 1914 essay ‘On Impressionism’, of: those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass – through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.11

And that is the effect Ford describes Provence as having; as standing for. He describes how his ‘first sight of Provence’ was: the most memorable sensation of my life and what makes my every renewal of contact with those hills where grows the first olive tree of the South almost as memorable. It is as if one wakened from a dream of immortality to the realisation of what is earthly permanence. And, ever since I first had that sensation in a train hastening through the dawn I have had two existences – a Provence life that was persistent and a life of other regions on the Great Route that were for ever changing. . . . (Provence 88)

Ford’s ‘Provence life’ could be said to have been ‘persistent’ in the sense that he made repeated returns to the region since the time he describes when, as a child, he stayed in Monte Carlo with his wealthy uncle (Provence 259). He was certainly back in the South of France in 1913 with Violet Hunt; there again in 1916-17, recuperating in a hotel in Mentone after his shell-concussion at the Somme; and again in the winter of 1922-23, with Stella Bowen, when they rented Harold Monro’s villa on Cap Ferrat, and decided to stay in France; and he returned regularly to stay in Toulon throughout the 1920s and 1930s.12 But there’s a glimpse of something much stranger going on, in that image of having two existences. For it also suggests that his ‘Provence life’ persisted even when he wasn’t there; a ‘frame of mind’ offering through it a double perspective on whichever other place he might be in. At one point he locates himself as writing about it from London: ‘the territory of sempiternal fog in which these words are being written’ (Provence 94). Such books of mental travel are written by the opposite method to that of guide-book writers, who tend to write their descriptions in situ, while they can see the detail, describe

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the view, remember the facts. But it’s as if Ford needs to be away from somewhere to be able to see it in the way he needs to in order to be able to, or to want to, write about it. Just as he ends New York is Not America by writing, in the ‘Envoi’, about New York from a sunny square in Toulon, so, when in foggy London and the South of England, he writes about Provence: ‘we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other’.13 The image of the face reflected in the window in the earlier essay is said to be appropriate because it reflects what ‘life is really like’. Our mental and physical lives feel split off from each other, so we respond to images of multiplicity. Here the vision of Provence (no doubt already superimposed with his childhood imaginings, even if his first actual sight of it) is what produced the dual feeling. This is saying more than that his returns to Provence gave him a more persistent connection with it than he had with anywhere else. The view of Provence doesn’t just reflect his mind; it changes it. So, as we shall see later, he is also thinking not just about how the mind affects space, but how space affects the mind. Time It also affects the sense of time, of history, of biography. For how to write the biograpy or autobiography of someone with two lives? I’ve argued elsewhere that Ford oscillates between two models of superimposition when he discusses Impressionism: superimposition in space, as in the image of the window; but also in time, as in The Good Soldier, or his memoir of Conrad, when he moves backwards and forwards, juxtaposing impressions from several different stages of an intimacy.14 Provence – like his novels and memoirs – combines both modes. In the first chapter of Part Three, Ford recalls a train journey in Sussex the previous year. As he looks out of the train window at the Downs, he superimposes upon the scene images of France: ‘somewhere quite other’. It makes for disconcerting reading, because just when the images of restaurant menus, Mediterranean bathers, and so on, become so vivid as to feel unmediated, Ford then returns us to the Sussex train: ‘I had arrived at that point in my reflections when the train entered Pulborough station’ (Provence 278-9). Like the superimposition of the London garden and the courts of love, this is another image of the way impressions (and indeed trains) transform place/space; for how the mind changes the world. Which is an

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empathetic device for readers, since we too are in the position of reading about Provence (most of us, most of the time) from outside it. But it is also a superimposition of times. ‘My reminiscences in the train as we began to reach downland were of course two or three years old’, he says (Provence 273). His ‘reflections’ don’t reflect himself at the time of looking out of the train window; nor do they reflect ‘a face of a person behind you’ except insofar as the person behind Ford was his past self. The ‘somewhere quite other’ in this case is seen in the frame of his mind’s eye – or rather, his memory’s eye. As Sara Haslam suggests, the somewhere is also a some-when quite other.15 What’s more, the act of remembering is itself narrativised as remembered; the device thus superimposes two memories, of two different places and times, each both different in turn from the time and place of writing (and, we might add, the time and place of our reading of them). Provence, like all Fordian Impressionism, is also about what Impressionism does to time and to history. Provence, he says, is: the one country in the world of which no history has been written; but that is not to say that she is one of those happy lands that have no history. It is merely that the history is so bewildering that no one human brain has yet been able to take it all in. (Provence 164)

And he adds: ‘To get any pattern at all out of these confusions it is necessary to go through them several times from different angles’ (Provence 165). Which of course is exactly what the narratives of The Good Soldier or Parade’s End do. Think of how, in the latter, say, Christopher Tietjens has to keep going over the problems in his marriage; the question of his child’s paternity; of his father’s death or suicide. In part this bewildering confused-ness results from another kind of superimposition we might call the ideological or imperialist, when a locale’s history is rewritten by the victors in its most recent conquest: ‘I would write no more of the public history of Provence’, says Ford: ‘for the real history of the country went underground at the death of King René when Provence fell to the King of France [. . .]’ (Provence 258). But Ford’s Impressionism makes history psychologically complex too. Take the tortuous passage concluding the story of Ford’s remorse for correcting his grandfather, who had equated the Albigenses with the Waldenses (both killed en masse as heretical). Ford

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recalls confessing to a priest in Paris that he can’t believe or ‘compass the idea of’ the third person of the Trinity. So he speculates that without it ‘you would be left with the belief in two first causes, the one vengeful, the other infinitely forgiving’. And that though this effectively positions him with the Albigenses, it also enables a reconciliation between them and Roman Catholicism (at least as practised by Ford’s tolerant confessor). There would then be no reason, says Ford, ‘why one should not, if one were Romantic, confuse [. . .] the Albigenses with the Waldenses. It is probably the better way to take one’s history’ he says (as if it were tantamount to choosing how to take one’s brandy) – because, as he goes on to explain, ‘if one can fuse the Albigenses into the Waldenses there is no reason why one should not like the Waldenses – which is a good thing to do because they were slaughtered saints or at least brave men’ (Provence 136-7). Such ‘fusing’, he implies, would make people better, more tolerant, citizens. This might be worrying to historians, or to anyone hoping to learn about history from Ford’s book. What to an Impressionist might seem ‘fusing’ of different individuals, groups, doctrines, is confusing to others. I’m not saying that that is exactly how Ford deals with history in Provence. The book is dense with lucid historical information. And though Ford jokes about how little time he had in libraries to look it up, so we might wonder whether he isn’t excusing having made it up, it certainly creates the impression of being very erudite and knowledgeable about the subject – though doubtless professional historians would find much of it debatable, discredited or mythic. One might say that the entire architecture of Ford’s Provence is founded on just such a willed disavowal of historical authority. Near the start he says of the book that ‘in the end, it is about the Courts of Love that the Troubadours held in the little castle of Roumanille [. . .]’ (Provence 21). And just before he describes his early imaginings of those courts, in his London garden, he mentions his father’s book – ‘the famous one on the Troubadours’, he calls it; and which Ashley Chantler shows elsewhere in this volume to be an important presence in Provence (52). Ford doesn’t actually say he read the book; merely that his father ‘was far too much of an English gentleman to suggest that we should read his books’; and that Ford himself ‘cannot have been more than eleven at that date – certainly I was not more than twelve, because by that time my father was dead and I have never looked as his book or the poem of Cabestanh again (Provence 52-3).

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Which rather suggests he did look at it earlier. It’s a puzzling passage, because Ford was fifteen when his father died, not twelve; and one might expect even an Impressionist historian to be more accurate about the cardinal facts of the story of himself. But also because Francis Hueffer’s book, which Ford is suggesting he somehow assimilated, perhaps by looking at it before he was 12 or 15, devotes a whole chapter to the Courts of Love, but concludes it by saying: ‘A prettier picture moreover can hardly be imagined than that drawn by many old and modern writers of an assembly of beautiful women sitting in judgement on guilty lovers, and gravely deciding knotty points of the amorous code’. But, he pronounces: ‘the only drawback is that, like so many other pretty and quaint pictures, it has no counterpart in the reality of things; not as far, at least, as the south of France and the times of the troubadours are concerned’.16 Whether Ford had read the book or not, or had remembered any of it if he did, isn’t the point. It’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t have been aware of his father’s demythologizing scepticism about Provençal legends. As Chantler suggests, Ford’s remembrance of his father looms over his lifelong fascination with Provence. Yet we must set against this Madox Brown’s imaginative investment in the same stories, which Angela Thirlwell brings out so well in her essay in this volume; and Ford’s substitution of the lore of the grandfather for the law of the father. It isn’t just that Ford superimposes his grandfather over his father. His Impressionist history superimposes one set of stories over other versions of history that contradict it; versions which themselves (like his father’s demythologizing take on the Courts of Love) consist of a superimposition of their history over the received legends. As with the superimposing of places and times, it’s as if Ford needs this mis-match or gap or shift between different versions of events to be able to see them clearly. It is something other than binocular vision, since that conflates different views of the same thing to construct a three-dimensional image. What Ford offers is closer to what Slavoj Žižek calls a ‘parallax gap’. Parallax, as Žižek explains, normally describes an optical effect: ‘the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight’.17 He uses the idea metaphorically to describe the relationship between ‘two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible’.18 But, as Nick Hubble has shown, Žižek means more than a

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mere shift of perspective (as when, in the classic example of parallax, you hold your finger in front of your nose, closing one eye and then the other to make the finger appear to move): the added philosophical twist is that the observed difference is not simply ‘subjective’ but that the ‘“epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself’ (Žižek 17). That is to say that what is revealed to us is the object’s non-coincidence with itself, its parallax gap. Žižek’s main point [. . .] is that it is the parallax gap or shift – the difference seen in the object as a result of the shift of perspective – which constitutes the Real, rather than either a presence or an absence.19

It was something comparable to this sense of radical self-contradiction that Ford wanted to convey in his characters; and his places. Such arguments might offer him a way off the anti-subjectivist hook. But they risk making things worse, revealing that the whole book as he conceives it is founded on a fantasy of Provence. One could object that at least it’s not a private, solipsistic fantasy; since what Ford is doing is returning to the traditional folklore of the place, and championing that over an evidence-based historical method he associated with oppressive Germanic academicism. To put it like that might make it sound perilously like a form of nostalgic escapism from contemporary history. But it is, rather, to begin to suggest why it might have appeared a necessary approach to advocate in the 1930s. This become clearer when we consider the further arguments Ford proposes as the ‘moral’ of his book. He means far more by the idea of ‘the frame of mind that is Provence’ than simply that all places and histories are mental constructs. This particular ‘frame of mind’ also represents the form of civilisation to which he grants a supreme value. Apart from Periclean Athens, he says, Provence produced ‘a local civilisation’ that ‘has been the only real civilisation that the world has yet seen’ (Provence 164). He even argues that it is Provence, not Rome, that is the source of Romance culture: ‘And it was to the frame of mind that was Provence far more than to Italy itself that is due the Latinity that today alone redeems our northern civilisations from barbarism’ (Provence 101). In other words, whatever its truth as historical fact, as an idea, or set of ideals, the ‘frame of mind’ is the source of that chivalry, altruism, art, thought, and culture, that he sees as having characterized the West until the twentieth century. That is why Provence matters to Ford, and that is the Provence he wants his book to convey.

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Such a view will seem problematic to many contemporary critics. Though it might account for European conflicts, it’s damagingly Eurocentric; and oddly contradicts Ford’s idea of a ‘Great Trade Route’, since the notion of Provence as the origin of civilisation seems at odds with that concept of culture as mobile: Oriental goods and knowledges travelling West, as well as European ones travelling East. His historical argument seems to become even more impressionistic when he identifies these values even more specifically with the Albigenses, when he says they created ‘the last civilised state and creed that Europe was to know’ (Provence 129) – a claim which also, given the Church’s verdict on Albigensism as heresy, shows Ford explicitly distancing himself from Roman Catholicism. Yet the significance for Ford of Albigensism isn’t merely antiquarian or nostalgic. For – surprisingly – he claims that the contemporary predicament of post-war Europe somehow recapitulates that of the medieval Albigeois: ‘the whole Western world once the war was finished plunged into a sort of Albigensism’, he writes, arguing that the involvement of the churches in the war produced a spiritual crisis – which throughout Provence he describes in terms of hesitation, negation, or lack of belief (Provence 298-300). ‘Faith, in short, died after the war’, he writes: ‘every sort of Faith [. . .]’ (Provence 308). So the frame of mind has come round again in modern Europe. From one point of view, as Martin Stannard demonstrates in his essay here, this is a warning: that contemporary European civilisation seemed on the brink of annihilation again, as indeed it did in 1935. And that what was being threatened was freedom of thought, of expression, of experiment. That is, the Albigensian heresy represents for Ford a scepticism about dogma; an assertion of the human right to disbelieve, or to believe differently, to make things up: ‘What I – and civilisation – most need is a place where, Truth having no divine right to glamour, experiments in thought abound’ (Provence 65-6). We tend not to think of Ford as conducting experiments in thought. But if we do, we can make better sense of much his writings about places and cultures: That is what I mean when I say that Provence is not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind. To find yourself in harmony with the soul of Provence you have to be of a type that will not be pained when someone says that Mistral was a greater poet than Goethe – or that the Maries, after the Crucifixion, came to and settled in the country round Tarascon.

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Indulgent Provence has no vested interests and there illusions do not matter. (Provence 64)

Thus if the history of Provence offers a warning, from another point of view it is a warning to which ‘Provence’ itself is, paradoxically, also the solution: a frame that can contain the maverick, the paradoxical, the counter-intuitive or counter-factual. In other words Provence is for Ford the spiritual home of Impressionism. For Impressionism too, is founded on a scepticism about facts, which corresponds to the Albigensian scepticism about dogma. And he poses this in a trope which is itself Impressionist. For to say Provence is a frame of mind is more than just a claim about how place and history are mediated by impressions; it is also, itself, precisely that kind of sweeping statement that characterises the Provençal for Ford, and thus also the Impressionist. Furthermore, Provence’s frame of mind is equivalent to a version of Impressionism which fosters the fictional. Provence represents to Ford a space where stories such as those of the courts of love might be entertained. Mind A dogmatic anti-subjectivist might still remain unconvinced, objecting that such an argument merely shows that Ford falsifies place, history, and now culture; or asserts fantasmatic versions of these things against what Francis Hueffer called ‘the reality of things’. Confronted with such an empiricist demand, Ford might appear like the protagonist of Alphonse Daudet’s Les Aventures Prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon (1872): a mental traveler if ever there were one, who identifies as gullibly with the heroes of boys’ adventure stories as did Emma Bovary with the heroines of sentimental romance. Daudet ridicules Tartarin as self-aggrandizing fantasist. That Ford resented Daudet’s treatment of the Provençal might signal that he took the satire personally, as one to which he might himself be vulnerable.20 But a more generous interpretation would be that he felt Daudet’s mockery had the effect of foreclosing a more valuable kind of imaginative relation to place, culture and history. To understand what this might be, we must now turn to the third and final part of the answer to the question of whether Ford’s Impressionism can tell us about anything other than his subjectivity, by looking more closely at the role of the mind in the ‘frame of mind’ that is Ford’s Provence.

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To talk of ‘experiments in thought’ is perhaps to summon up the ‘thought experiments’ that were key to the New Physics in the early years of the twentieth century.21 One of the central and strangest tenets of Relativity is the idea that as we move, time, space and matter all change or bend. Ford’s Impressionism might seem to offer something metaphorically equivalent, in its claim that place and history appear different in the frame which each observer’s mind places round them, according to the observer’s own history or movement. But it is also relativist in another sense, which is more concerned with the laws of mind than of matter, and is perhaps more germane to Ford’s books of mental travel. This is the idea that, just as the mind alters space and time, conversely, space and time alter the mind. Or should. . . Because Ford makes it clear he wants the frame of mind that is Provence to improve everyone’s frame of mind. This aim becomes explicit in the last chapter, when he considers how Western ideals of Christian brotherly love and Enlightenment egalitarianism have in practice been circumscribed by parochial prejudice: Christianity, the distillation of the Mediterranean spirits of Judaism and Hellenism, gave us the injunction that we must love our neighbours as ourselves. The Boston tea-party led to the declaration that all men – except niggers, Jews and Catholics – are born free and equal and that every man is as good as his neighbours – and better. (Provence 313)

Loving our immediate neighbour, or respecting the freedom of members of our own ethnic group, have historically proved alibis for hating and enslaving the other – as Ford’s disconcerting introduction of the labels of potential bigotry there insinuates. His remedy is an unbounded liberalism: The maxim that will save the world will – if the world is to be saved – be found in the ultimate discovery that you must love your neighbour better than yourself and that, all men being born free and equal, every man’s neighbour – and in particular niggers and the Mediterranean races – is as good as oneself . . . and better. (Provence 313)

But the way he develops the idea turns it into something more than a pious and ineffectual hope, when he connects it with the psychology of travel:

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That is what is meant by the Latin schoolboy tag that I have chosen as epigraph for the conclusion of this book. . . . You must, when you travel lay more stress on changing your soul and your cuisine than on covering the roads of the world beneath the skies. . . . (Provence 313)

The Latin tag – actually it provides the title for the chapter, and the page header running through it – is: ‘Animam non coelum mutare’. This appears to adapt Horace’s words ‘caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt’ (‘those who run across the sea change their sky or climate, but not their state of mind’).22 Where the Horace might be interpreted as saying that if you’re the restless type, it’ll take more than a change of scene to change your restlessness, Ford turns the main verb into an infinitive: ‘mutare’ instead of ‘mutant’; but also turns Horace’s phrase around: ‘to change the mind, not the sky’, instead of ‘they change the sky, not the mind’. This makes it more like an injunction to let the experience of travel make its impression on the mind; to suggest that the point of travel is not to export your mind-set to colonise the world, but to let your impressions of the world alter you. From one point of view it is indeed a moral argument, and is offered by Ford as the moral of the book. He ridicules travellers with a provincial frame of mind, criticising unfamiliar cultures for their differences from Britain or America.23 Such mind-sets must be changed, he argues, if wars are to be avoided. But the point isn’t just that the mind must be changed in order to travel; it is that it is changed by travel – including ‘mental travel’. Ford gives as an example an encounter in which physical travel inspires mental travel: To come suddenly on a Saracen tower on a lonely hillside, amongst the rosemary and thyme of the Alpilles or amongst the great congeries of towers Roman and mediæval of the great outer walls of Carcassonne is to feel a singular emotion of the enlargement of the horizons of my world. It is much as when from the coast of Kent I suddenly see France, or when, on the dock at Calais I notice a Pullman car labelled Warsaw, Buda-Pest and Constantinople . . . A sense of enlargement. . . . (Provence 118-19)

This takes the cliché of travel broadening the mind and turns it inside out. The sense of enlargement is produced by the imagination of travel – ‘mental travel’ – in two senses: Ford imagines the Saracens (like the Romans before them) travelling to Provence; but the movement circulates in the other direction too, as the cultural history of Provence takes his mind somewhere quite other – to the Middle East, or to

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Rome, just as the sight of the Pullman takes him on a mental journey along its route. Such sights enlarge Ford’s mind; double it, because they enable him to be in one place with his mind also somewhere quite other. Provence is thus already a palimpsest of travel and mental travel, but Ford himself has to travel to Provence to have such experiences, and to revisit them mentally in his writing, making the palimpsest even more intricate. It is where Ford writes about the mental effects of places in this way, that we might thus see him as a precursor of the psychogeography movement of Guy Debord and his associates, concerned with the psychological effects of spaces or routes on the mind.24 That too had always been the subject of his fictions, since characters don’t just have impressions on their travels, but are affected by them, traumatized by them, transformed by them. And this, ultimately, is the important thing Ford’s Impressionism about places can give us; and which provides the best answer to the anti-subjectivist critique of such Impressionism. His impressions of Provence, or the Great Trade Route, aren’t just symptomatic of his particular or peculiar mind-set; and thus merely a projection of his autobiography.25 For they also register the power of places, cultures, works of art, to transform a mind-set or mind-frame – or even a mind. According to this reading, subjectivity is as Impressionist as anything else: unstable, liquid, indeterminate. It might be objected that just as it doesn’t give us much by way of objective knowledge about Provence, nor can such writing give us objective knowledge about its writer. But hello: welcome to our postmodern world. . . . The imagination of travel, then, is the thing that Ford puts his faith in as being able, if any thing is able, to reduce prejudice between cultures and nations and races. His travel books aren’t just the projection of an idiosyncratic personality, but an analysis of how that personality has been produced by its encounters with different localities, civilisations, histories, arts and cultures. The experience of being brought up with ideas of Provence, and reading about it and imagining it, and then visiting it, have all had their effect on Ford’s mind. Impressions of travel, whether physical or mental, then, make up the mind. You could say that’s why so much of his travel writing is about literature. In Provence it’s the writers who have made him see Provence: the Troubadours, Mistral, Daudet, Pound. And he says that

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it was his reading – of Daudet (Provence 208); of the Troubadours as a child – that made him write this book. Ford saw writing, too, as offering a sense of mental enlargement: ‘The word “author” means “someone who adds to your consciousness”’.26 Writing and reading are themselves forms of mental travel; which may appear to collapse categories as they shift between, and superimpose, peoples and places and times. But they do so in order to expand the mind. The frame of mind which is Provence is produced by art: writing, poetry, opera, wine too. Because it is the frame of mind which is also that of the aesthetic. He writes in Provence that: ‘the authentic note of the great poet is to modify for you the aspect of the world and of your relationship to your world’ (Provence 161). That’s certainly what Ford’s mental travel books do. And the agile way he puts it there captures the agile way his prose does it, changing not only how the world looks, and the stories it tells, but our relationship to these things. And in doing so, it changes us, alters our egos, too. Or it should. Because Ford’s Provence is not just the place, but what centuries of other minds have made of it, it is inter-subjective. Provence may have framed his mind; but its frame of mind isn’t bounded by Ford’s mind. To this extent, what initially seems intensely personal may also appear surprisingly impersonal.

NOTES 1

2 3 4

5

Ford, Provence, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935 – henceforth Provence; p. 13. Also see pp. 50, 64 (‘Provence is not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind’), 101. Bowen, Drawn from Life, London: Virago, 1984, Ch. 6, ‘Toulon’, pp. 134-49. See Ford, ‘L’Oubli –, Temps de Sécheresse’, Collected Poems, New York: Oxford University Press, 1936, pp. 306-10. Cap Brun is mentioned on p. 310. The Honourable Lady Fortescue, Perfume from Provence, London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1935; see the chapters ‘Building’, ‘My Garden’, and ‘Housekeeping’. Durrell, Casear’s Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence, London: Faber, 1990, pp. 3-4. This essay is part of a larger project on Ford and Impressionism, and follows from my recent work on travel and also race in Ford’s work. See ‘Ford Madox Ford and Nomadic Modernism’, in Transits: The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American Modernism, ed. Giovanni Cianci, Caroline Patey, and Sara Sullam, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 77-100; and ‘“All these Fellows are Ourselves”: Ford Madox

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6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25

26

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Ford, Race, and Europe’, in Len Platt ed., Modernism and Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 39-57. Ford (as ‘E. R.’), ‘The Critical Attitude: English Literature of To-day: II’, English Review, 3 (Nov. 1909), 655-72 (p. 660). Ford, Between St. Dennis and St. George, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915, p. 34. Ford, A Mirror to France, London: Duckworth, 1926, p. 18. ‘You might call it a book of mental travel’, Ford wrote of Great Trade Route to his publisher Howard Lowry, 18 March 1936; 4 June 1935: quoted in Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 – henceforth ‘Saunders’; vol. 2, p. 492. For a philosophical discussion of subjectivism, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London: Duckworth, 1981, who uses the alternative name, ‘emotivism’; Chapters 1 and 2. Ford, ‘On Impressionism: I’, Poetry and Drama, 2 (June 1914), 167-75 (p. 174). See Saunders, vol. 2, passim. Ford, New York is Not America, London: Duckworth, 1927; see p. 241. Saunders, ‘Modernism, Impressionism, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier’, Études Anglaises, 57:4 (Oct.-Dec. 2004), 421-37. Sara Haslam, ‘“These fragments I have shored against my ruins” – Memory and Modernism: Ford’s Fictions’, in J. W. Rademacher, ed., Modernism and the Individual Talent: Moderne und besondere Begabung, Münster: LIT, 2002, 15662 (p. 160): ‘Those are places of time as well as of space [. . . .] Somewhere else can also be sometime else.’ Francis Hueffer, The Troubadours, London: Chatto and Windus, 1878, Ch. 27; p. 292. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2006, p. 17. Ibid., p. 4. Nick Hubble, ‘The Origins of Intermodernism in Ford Madox Ford’s Parallax View’, Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations, ed. Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, vol. 7, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008, pp. 167-88 (pp. 169-70). See for example Provence 25-6. Also see John Coyle’s discussion of Ford and Daudet in this volume. The term had been available in English since at least 1897; it was Einstein who did much to popularize it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment#cite_note-0; accessed 13 March 2011. Horace, Epistle 1.11.27. See for example Provence 324. See Saunders, ‘Ford Madox Ford and Nomadic Modernism’. Ford also airs this criticism in New York is not America, imagining a reader’s objection: ‘You will say that this is mere autobiography. Well, it is mere autobiography – of an angle of a human being. . . .’; pp. 9-10. Ford, Introduction to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, New York: The Modern Library, 1932, xvii.

CONTRIBUTORS HÉLÈNE AJI is Professor of American literature at the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre. In addition to a number of articles on Modernist and contemporary American poetry, she is the author of Ezra Pound et William Carlos Williams: Pour une poétique américaine (L’Harmattan, 2001), William Carlos Williams: Un plan d’action (Belin, 2004) and a book-length essay on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (Armand Colin, 2005). Recently she edited L’impersonnel en littérature (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), an issue of the European Journal of English Studies on ‘Reading the Modernist Past’, and a volume on modernist little magazines and politics (to be published by Presses Universitaires de Rennes in 2011). JASON ANDREW is the manager of the Estate of Janice Biala. Since 2004 he has curated exhibitions of the artist’s work and lectured on her life. A free agent of sorts, he has worked in and around the New York art world, forging partnerships with artists and collectors, curators and museums, dancers and choreographers, actors and directors. He is a patron of young artists and consultant to collectors. He specializes in the field of Post War American Art and frequently lectures on the creative imagination and its relationship to the various disciplines of Art. Along with choreographer Julia K. Gleich, he is the founder of the arts group NORTE MAAR whose mission is to create, promote and present collaborations within the disciplines of visual, literary, and the performing arts. His imaginative projects include exhibitions of visual art and unique performances of dance. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. CHRISTOPHER BAINS is an Assistant Professor of French at Texas Tech University. He completed his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in French and Comparative Literature. His dissertation, De l’esthétisme au modernisme, will be published with Editions Honoré Champion. He teaches courses in literary theory and French nineteenth-century prose. He recently finished a book chapter, ‘The Early Years of The Paris Review’, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in a collective anthology on Modernism and ‘Little Magazines’.

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JULIAN BARNES, born in Leicester, England, in 1946, is the author of two books of stories, three collections of essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain, and ten novels. His most recent work is Nothing To Be Frightened Of, an exploration of death, religion, and family. In France, he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 2004 he became a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In England his honours include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He has also received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the San Clemente literary prize. He lives in London. ALEXANDRA BECQUET is a Teaching Fellow at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She has been working on Ford since 2005. In her Masters dissertation, she concentrated on Ford’s descriptive and visual writing in The Good Soldier and Parade’s End. Her work now focuses on Ford’s aesthetics and techniques for the translation of the arts into his fiction and in their relation to artistic movements – late 19th and early 20th century in particular, their interartistic dimension and the Modern(ist) research on the Gesamtkunstwerk. She has given talks and published articles on Ford’s writing, notably “Modernity, Shock and Cinema: The Visual Aesthetics of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End” in volume 8 of International Ford Madox Ford Studies, and “Ford Madox Ford, Composer: An “Impressionist” Outlook on the Great War” in Mutations and Adaptations: The 20th Century, a collection of essays she co-edited. ASHLEY CHANTLER is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester. His publications include Heart of Darkness: Character Studies (Continuum, 2008) and, as co-editor, Translation Practices: Through Language to Culture (Rodopi, 2009), Studying English Literature (Continuum, 2010), and Literature and Authenticity, 17801900 (Ashgate, 2011). He is currently editing Romance by Conrad and Ford for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, coediting Ford Madox Ford: An Introduction (Rodopi), and working on Ford’s poetry. GIL CHARBONNIER has the Agrégation in modern French literature, and a doctorate in French Literature from the Sorbonne University. A Senior Lecturer at the University Paul Cézanne Aix

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Marseille III, he works on early twentieth-century French literature, focusing on stylistics. His most recent publication is entitled: ‘La polysyndète chez Valery Larbaud’ (Polysyndeton in the works of Valery Larbaud), L’information grammaticale, n° 128, January 2011. JOHN COYLE is Head of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His editions of Ford’s It Was the Nightingale and Provence are published by Carcanet. He is currently working on a book about Proust and Anglophone writers. CLAIRE DAVISON-PEGON is Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the Université de Provence, specializing in the role and dynamics of translation in European modernism. She is also a freelance translator. Since 2009, she has been the President of the French Virginia Woolf Society. ROB HAWKES is a Visiting Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University College. He has taught previously at the Universities of York and East Anglia and completed his Ph.D on Ford’s fiction at the University of York in 2008. His publications include ‘Personalities of Paper: Characterisation in A Call and The Good Soldier’, in International Ford Madox Ford Studies 7, ‘Visuality vs. Temporality: Plotting and Depiction in The Fifth Queen and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes’, in International Ford Madox Ford Studies 8, and a review of International Ford Madox Ford Studies 6 in Modernism/modernity. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War and co-editing Ford Madox Ford: An Introduction. HERMIONE LEE is the President of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. In 2003 she was made a Companion of the British Empire for Services to Literature. Her many publications include widely acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. Last year, her two-part radio series in dialogue with Julian Barnes, tracing Ford’s life in France, was broadcast on Radio 4.

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DOMINIQUE LEMARCHAL is a Senior Lecturer in contemporary English literature and translation at the University of Angers, France. She has worked on Ford’s autobiographies and published a study of The Good Soldier de Ford Madox Ford, (Ellipses, 2005). She is currently concentrating on getting Parade’s End published in French for the centenary of the Great War. In Angers, she also works with the Anthony Burgess Centre and the Journal of the Short Story in English. ELLEN LÉVY is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Toulouse II. She has studied the novel, English and American, from the eighteenthcentury to the present. She has also been particularly interested in autobiographical literature and has written on a wide range of authors from James Boswell to Philip Roth. ROBERT E. McDONOUGH is Emeritus Professor of English at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio. He has published several essays in International Ford Madox Ford Studies, and another on It Was the Nightingale in the proceedings of the “Englishness/Anglicité” conference held in Dijon in 2007. He has also published two collections of poetry, No Other World (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1988) and Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press, 2008), as well as numerous poems in anthologies and little magazines. CAROLINE PATEY read English and Comparative literature in Paris (Paris III), Dublin UCD and the Università degli Studi, Milan, where she now teaches English literature. Her research has oscillated between the two poles of Renaissance and Modernist Studies and recently become increasingly comparative in scope and methods, focusing on visual and textual modernity in Ford, Woolf, Conrad and Eliot following the trail of anthropology and literature, and also concentrating on urban culture and literature, in the works of James, Conrad, Ford, and Isherwood. She has investigated the intersection between museums and literature, having co-edited The Exhibit in the Text: The Museological Practices of Literature (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2009) and edited the Italian translation of Sir John Soane’s Crude Hints towards an History of my House (Per una storia della mia casa, Palermo, Sellerio, 2010). She has also promoted a research project on literature and nomadism and co-edited the proceedings of the related conference, Transits. The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American Modernism (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2010).

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CHRISTINE REYNIER is Professor of English Literature at the University of Montpellier III. She has published on Woolf as well as on other major modernist writers, edited books and journals on Virginia Woolf (Journal of the Short Story in English, Special Issue on Woolf 50, July 2008) and published a study of Woolf's short stories, Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She is the editor, with J.-M. Ganteau, of Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Montpellier III, 2005) and Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Montpellier III, 2010). She has translated Ford Madox Ford’s essay ‘On Impressionism’ into French (Essais sur l’art 1, Houdiard, 2009), has an article on Ford coming out soon (‘Musing in the Museums of Ford’s Provence’) with IAWIS and her ‘Ford Madox Ford, médiateur de la Méditerranée’ can be accessed at http://www.paroledechercheurs.net/spip.php?rubrique371. MAX SAUNDERS is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 volumes (Oxford University Press, 1996), the editor of Ford’s Selected Poems, War Prose, and (with Richard Stang) Critical Essays (Carcanet, 1997, 1999, 2002) He has published essays on Life-writing, Impressionism and a book entitled Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is the general editor of International Ford Madox Ford Studies and was founding chairman of the Ford Society from 1997 to 2007. He was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2008-10 to research the To-Day and To-Morrow book series. His annotated critical edition of Ford’s Some Do Not . . . was published by Carcanet in 2010. MARTIN STANNARD is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester. He has published extensively on Evelyn Waugh, including The Critical Heritage (1984), followed by a major biography in two volumes (1986 and 1992). His Muriel Spark: The Biography appeared in 2009 and he has also published on a wide variety of modern authors, on textual criticism, biography, autobiography, and letters. In 1995, he edited the Norton Critical Edition of Ford’s The Good Soldier. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association.

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ANGELA THIRLWELL read English at St. Anne’s College, Oxford and lectured for the Faculty of Continuing Education at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is now a biographer, the author of Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown, Chatto & Windus, 2010, Pimlico paperback 2011, and William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis, Yale University Press, 2003. (Lucy Rossetti, née Madox Brown, was Ford Madox Ford’s ‘half-aunt.’) She is also the editor of the Folio Anthology of Autobiography and The PreRaphaelites and their World. She has written ‘The Game of Life’ a character study of Ford Madox Brown for the catalogue accompanying the major exhibition, Ford Madox Brown: PreRaphaelite Pioneer, opening in October 2011 at Manchester City Art Gallery, and going on to Ghent in 2012. SAM TRAINOR is an Anglo-French writer, originally from Birmingham, who now lives and works in the Nord-Pas de Calais, the region of France which provides the setting for most of Ford Madox Ford’s war writing. His multi-genre novel, The Birmingham Quean was published in 2009. The first part of it is available in an interactive version online at www.samtrainor.com, with various other examples of his work. He currently teaches English at Lille III University, and besides his own fiction and poetry is also working on a philosophical exposition of counterpoint, a collection of short articles on anglicismes, and new English translations of Gabriel Tarde.

ABSTRACTS HÉLÈNE AJI, ‘“Letters to and from Toulon”: Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound’s Provençal Connections’ Starting from the narratological implications of Ford’s ‘passion for Provence’, this essay attempts to clarify the complexity of this passion through a comparison with Ezra Pound’s own interest in Provence. The correspondence between Ford in Toulon and Pound in Rapallo covers the critical years 1924-36: a time of deep historical mutation, and of the rise of Mussolini’s totalitarian regime in Italy. As Pound enters the ideological spiral of promoting fascism, Ford seems to retreat into the dream land of Provence. However, this retreat is no resignation, since the beauty of Provence provides him with the power to recognise the relativity of all things, the ephemerality of truth, and the persistence of impressionism as a literary as well as existential mode. Ford’s Provence is a way of survival, then, in a world of delusions and dangers. It also allows us to make out the discrete cracks in the Ford/Pound friendship, along the lines of poetics, ideology, and historicism. JASON ANDREW, ‘In Provence: The Life of Ford Madox Ford and Biala’ Janice Biala (1903-2000), a significant artist of the twentieth century, was a representative of American Bohemia in France recognized for her sublime assimilation of the School of Paris aesthetic and American abstract expressionism. She was Ford’s last companion, whose arrival in Paris in 1930 marked the beginning of an extraordinary life of passion and adventure. Ford played an influential role in the development of many writers, poets and artists. His presence was no less critical to the maturity of Biala as painter: he provided first-hand access to the many originators associated with the rise of Modern art and literature. Their partnership was truly mutual, as she became his greatest champion, a commitment that continued beyond his death. This chapter presents a selection from Biala’s letters, describing her life with Ford in Provence. It continues the story told in Andrew’s essay in volume 8 of this series, covering the beginnings of their relationship.

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CHRISTOPHER BAINS, ‘Poetic Triangulations: Ford, Pound and the French Literary Tradition’ This chapter re-examines the running French subtext of Ford’s influence within imagism and makes the case for a dialectical tension in his poetics between French realism and aestheticism. Bains suggests that Ford’s poetics might be considered more broadly in relation to French literary history. This last element is complex as Ford’s articulations of Gallic ideas were much repeated by others, Ezra Pound in particular. JULIAN BARNES, ‘Ford and Provence’ Most Francophiles have an attachment to a particular region. Though Ford lived on and off in Paris, it was Provence that represented for him the real France. His love of Provence was aroused by his father, who was an expert on the Troubadours and knew Frédéric Mistral. Ford and Bowen were invited to Cap Ferrat. They stayed in Tarascon, and also in the Ardèche. Later they took a studio in Toulon, where Ford would later settle with Janice Biala at Cap Brun. Provence for Ford meant an absence of Northern aggression, which he saw as resulting from a Northern diet. But there was also a mythic and historic substructure. Provence was the point where the ‘Great Trade Route’, bringing the flow of civilization, turned north, flowing up towards Paris and the English Channel, though, Ford joked, it ‘ended abruptly’ at the Scilly Isles. The civilization Provence represents for Ford is an ideal of chivalry and artistic flowering. Though its Albigensian heresy was crushed and the region was subsumed into France, it nevertheless infiltrated the dominant culture. The Provençal chivalric ideal is seen to permeate The Good Soldier; though in tension with modern realities. Barnes concludes by arguing that Ford’s Provence was more than an ideal lost world; it also suggested a possible future: an ecologicallyaware culture of the local, opposed to nationalism and warmongering. ALEXANDRA BECQUET, ‘Impressionist Confusion, Dissolving Landscape: Reconstructing Provence’ This essay invites the reader to follow Ford’s itinerary from Armageddon’s landscapes in the North to the décor of Eden in the South. From No Enemy to the Provençal works – Provence, Great Trade Route, The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh, it focuses on the

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visual, spatial and temporal aesthetics Ford displays in his panoramas and which bear witness to his reconstruction after the war. It shows how holographic hallucinations, Impressionist confusion and subjective objectivity inform Ford’s landscapes showing Ford not as a renderer of landscapes, but as the landscaper of his Provençal utopia. ASHLEY CHANTLER, ‘Ford Madox Ford and the Troubadours’ Through Ford’s writing on the troubadours, especially on Guillem de Cabestanh, and his translations of their poetry, this essay offers new insights into his complex relationships with his father, Francis Hueffer, his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, and one of les jeunes, Ezra Pound. The sentiment of the chapter’s epigraph, from Ancient Lights (1911), echoes throughout: ‘God knows that the lesson we learn from life is that our very existence in the nature of things is a perpetual harming of somebody’. The essay concludes by suggesting that the sentimentality in various poems written throughout Ford’s life is rooted in part in his youthful reading and translating of Guillem. GIL CHARBONNIER, ‘Ford Madox Ford and Valery Larbaud: Critical Convergences’ The purpose of this essay is to study the French reception of Ford’s works of fiction and critical thought in France at the very beginning of the 20th century. Valery Larbaud (1881-1957), a novelist, poet, essayist and critic, was among the first French writers to pay marked attention to Ford. A distinguished English scholar, he wrote several articles to direct the attention of the French public to the writers Ford was publishing in the English Review, to new novelists and poets, the Imagists particularly attracting Larbaud’s attention. By establishing a parallel between the modern classicism which was advocated and promoted in the English Review and the NRF, and underlining similarities in the critical approaches of Ford and Larbaud, Charbonnier’s analysis seeks to highlight the European dimension of modernism in literature. JOHN COYLE, ‘Ford, James and Daudet: The Charming Art of Touching up the Truth’ Ford’s celebration of Provence as a literary idyll through its association with the troubadours is well known, but in Provence he

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also invokes the burlesque figure of Tartarin of Tarascon, ‘a Don Quixote in the skin of Sancho Panza’. The essay suggests that for Ford, Daudet’s comic character serves as a reminder of the melancholy displacements inherent in travel writing, whereby the traveller may be driven to exaggerate to his compatriots the extent to which he is more at home elsewhere. Henry James, who translated one of the Tartarin books, provides a third co-ordinate to Ford’s writing of exile. FORD MADOX FORD, ‘Que Pensez-Vous de la France’ Ford’s 1934 essay for the newspaper L’Intransigeant, responding to the question ‘Que pensez-vous de la France?’ is reprinted here in Ford’s original French, annotated, and translated into English, for the first time, by Dominique Lemarchal. Ford offers a rhapsodic championing of France as the country where he has spent more than half his life, enumerating all the landscapes dear to him, and asking for the protection of Provence in particular as the ‘cradle and sanctuary of our civilization’. He urges the French to waste no time in producing more effective propaganda about their crucial contribution to western civilization if the world is to be saved from barbarism. Ford’s tone and mood here anticipate the alarm that sounds in his last books on culture, Provence and Great Trade Route. ROB HAWKES, ‘Trusting in Provence: Financial Crisis in The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’ In July 1932, Ford described his latest novel as ‘the beginning of a trilogy that is meant to do for the post-war world and the Crisis what the Tietjens tetralogy did for the war’. Although Ford never completed the intended trilogy, The Rash Act was published in 1933 and was followed by a sequel, Henry for Hugh, in 1934. However, in his introduction to the 1982 Carcanet edition of The Rash Act, C. H. Sisson asserts that ‘the Crisis is of no more than incidental importance’ in the novel. This essay argues that, on the contrary, the financial crisis is of crucial significance in The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh, and that there is an issue which binds together the novels’ formal, structural, historical and thematic aspects, and which underpins the concern with economic crisis: that of trust. It is no coincideence that Ford chose his beloved Provence as the staging post for the regeneration of trust that was necessary in the aftermath of the Great Crash.

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HERMIONE LEE, ‘“In Separate Directions”: Ford Madox Ford and French networks’ This essay juxtaposes a funeral and a wedding by way of considering Ford’s life in Paris, and his relations with American and French writers. When Ford arrived in Paris he heard Proust’s impressive funeral being discussed by all, including taxi-drivers and waiters – reassuring evidence to Ford of the regard in which France held her writers. Lee juxtaposes Ford with another Parisianized expatriate and novelist, Edith Wharton, whose love of France and things French runs parallel to his, though they participated in different networks of British, American and French writers. To underline what she calls the ‘remarkable virtuosity of Ford’s social life’, Lee then takes us to the wedding of Katherine Ann Porter and Eugene Pressly in 1933, at the end of Ford’s main Paris years, which he and his companion throughout the 1930s, Janice Biala, attended, commenting that Ford’s presence at the burial and the wedding suggests that he pulled ‘in a separate direction’ from the rest of the interwar expatriates in ‘AngloAmerican-French life’. These encounters, she concludes, represent Ford’s Paris life, for all his inwardness with French culture, as ‘gregarious and isolated, central and marginal, at home and in transit’. DOMINIQUE LEMARCHAL, ‘An Introduction: Ford and France, Ford’s Provence: Appry la Gair Finny’ The purpose of this introduction is to show how vital it was to Ford, after the war, to leave England, where he felt he could no longer breathe, and to settle in France for good. As a critic and editor, he took full advantage of the intellectual feast that was Paris in the 1920s, but Provence, being the ‘frame of mind’ he wanted to be in, was where he needed to be. There he could labour his two plots – his own ground and his own soul. This he could only do in Provence provided he made regular trips to America where his literary future lay. The present volume shows how crucial the Provençal civilization was to his intellectual and emotional balance, all the more so as in the face of mounting barbarism he saw Provence as the only possible defence for Western civilization. The introduction explains the organization of the volume in two interrelated sections, the first on Ford and France, opening with an article Ford wrote in French in the 1930s, the second on Ford and Provence, opening with an essay by the novelist Julian

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Barnes. After summarizing the individual chapters, Lemarchal suggests that Ford’s life in France inspired a second, post-war, flowering of his literary career, enabling Parade’s End and also his expansive, personal late books of reminiscence and cultural impressions. ELLEN LÉVY, ‘Maplines: Visions of France in No Enemy’ In keeping with its generic hybridity, Ford’s No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction weaves together perceptions of England and France before, during, and after the First World War. This essay traces visions of France at war and at peace as they emerge in this autobiographical fiction. Through ‘lines of communication’ – literary, historic, artistic, mnemonic and cartographic – Ford’s Gringoire and his recording Compiler spin webs of contrast and association that capture impressions, emotional and critical, of the war in France, its conduct, and its aftermath. France’s high culture, its outlook as a society long inured to conflict, the remoteness of its ministers from the reality of the Front Line, the resignation of its humbler victims, the destruction of its landscape, natural and human, and the persistence of hope for sanctuary – these and other themes are mapped through the complexities of the narrative. The book’s method, its impressionistic layering of memory and motif, its multi-voiced narrative, its meandering byways of thought, allowed the author to reconstruct his life as a writer, the book itself becoming a crossroad in his oeuvre, looking back to images drawn from his earlier work and anticipating the great tetralogy and the memoirs of his later years. ROBERT E. McDONOUGH, ‘Ford Madox Ford’s Mirrors to France’ Although Ford Madox Ford wanted A Mirror to France included in the Collected Works he was planning, his modern biographers have not thought as well of it. Ford presents himself as the title character, the Impressionist mirror who will show France to England and America as well as that can be done. Ford’s ‘real’ France, which he insists only begins at the south bank of the Seine (everything North of that, he considers, might as well be English) and then runs south to the Mediterranean is a land of thrifty, conservative, well-spoken and mature people. Anglo-Saxons (the English and Americans) have the opposite weaknesses to the French. Because the French care for only enough money to purchase the things they need to live as they wish to

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live, they have the time to reflect, to construct a way of living suitable for an adult. Anglo-Saxons, with their worship of immense fortunes, have time for nothing but the attempt to become wealthy themselves. At the end of the book Ford maintains that if ‘any of the virtues that we have held made men and women gracious’ are to survive, France will have to defend them against England and America. CAROLINE PATEY, ‘France as Fieldwork, or, Ford the Ethnographer’ This chapter explores the modes of Ford’s vision of France, focusing on his ‘essay’ production – Provence, A Mirror to France – but also touching upon some of his narrative work – The Good Soldier and The Rash Act. Patey assesses both the quality of Ford’s position in relation to the culture of the country, and the nature of his gaze. In search of the ‘native’ culture, Ford somehow moves in the beloved hexagon as the anthropologist engaging in fieldwork. Not unlike Malinowski in the Trobriand islands, his analysis follows an ethnographic agenda: concentrating first on the ‘space’ of the tribe (France starts south of the Quai Malaquais in Paris), then on its food, on its social structure (from haute bourgeoisie to peasantry) and finally on its rituals: political, verbal and visual. The chapter argues first that the ethnographer’s paradoxical position towards his object (partaker/observer) accounts for the singularity of Ford’s renderings of French country and society, a rendering poised between orality and written language, distance and closeness, scholarship and daily life; and also that the ‘ethnographic’ mode informs the poetics of much Fordian narrative. CHRISTINE REYNIER, ‘Reading the Rash Act in the Light of Provence: The Encounter of Ethics and Aesthetics’ The aim of this chapter is to investigate the connections between Provence (1935) and The Rash Act (1933), through their own representations of Provence. In Provence, Ford gives his own version of the troubled history of Provence and privileges thirteenth-century Provence, the Provence of the Troubadours and poetry. Historical Provence comes out as an idealisation of Provence as an ‘earthly paradise’. This version of Provence is contrasted with Provence as it is represented in The Rash Act, a fictional tale set in the 1930s. Provence

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has been transformed in the 1930s, through the agency of World War One and the Crash; however ‘transformed’ does not necessarily mean ‘perverted’. Although on the face of it Provence has decayed, there are enduring trends that can be found, as this paper argues, in the ethics of Provence – the ‘frame of mind’ Provence is. And in the end, Provençal ethics meet Ford’s aesthetics since, drawing on Provençal history and literature, the author turns what are, according to him, Provençal ethics, into a modern original aesthetics. MAX SAUNDERS, ‘Ford’s Thought-Experiments: Impressionism, Place, History, and “the frame of mind that is Provence”’ This chapter considers Provence in terms of Ford’s later Impressionism, extending critical discussion of that mode from characters or stories to places. The writing of place – and especially of place as the space of cultural history, as in Ford’s accounts of France – represents a major challenge to Impressionist theory, which privileges individual perception, sensation, consciousness, memory. Saunders examines what happens when Impressionist writing turns to the social realities of space, history, culture; and asks whether place itself must always be swallowed up by the mind framing it. Ford, it is argued, demonstrates a playful awareness of these problems, while countering them with a radical version of how societies understand themselves and their locations. Ford’s emphasis on Provence as a ‘frame of mind’ is seen to anticipate the psycho-geography movement of Guy Debord, and the historiography of ‘mentalités’. Provence, where, ‘Truth having no divine right to glamour’, freedom of thought could exist, offered the frame Ford needed for such thought-experiments, in what he called ‘mental travel’, and which he suggests, can enlarge and transform the mind. MARTIN STANNARD, ‘Going South for Air: Ford Madox Ford’s Provence’ Ford insisted that Great Trade Route was not ‘the book of a meditative gentleman who stands before ruined temples and pours out mournful soliloquies on old unhappy things but [. . .] the testament of a man usually of action who has spent a long life [. . .] fighting both literally and metaphorically [to] advance [. . .] the cause of good letters’. The same might be said of Provence, a fighting book by a pacifist. Written

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at a time of imminent apocalypse, it opposes the Northern mechanist culture epitomised by Hitler. Partly written in London, by a Northerner who feels like an exile from the South, this book can appear erratic, rambling, spewing out words. When he does get round to talking about his ostensible subject, he tends to offer dry history lessons which only pick up when they become unreliable. Provence, nevertheless, is always there, moving through everything like a ghost. It links Ford to his childhood and to his difficult relationship with his father; it links him to Modernism and to Ezra Pound; it links him to Catholicism and to the popes of Avignon, to romanitàs and to his beloved Latinity; it links him to a civilisation whose people are all in some sense hybrids and artists. Quite often, perhaps crucially, it links him to the preparation of good food, for this is a book about the culturally digestible and its opposite. It is both a public statement of his ramshackle (but intriguing) philosophy and a private, somewhat painful, exploration of his entry into old age. But beneath that confident rhetoric we catch echoes of anxiety, Ford’s own decline paralleling the final Decline of the West. ANGELA THIRLWELL, ‘Ford’s Provence: A Pre-Raphaelite Vision’ Whenever Ford thought about his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, the great Victorian artist closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, he thought about France. And whenever he thought about France, he thought about his grandfather: an exaggeration in the spirit of Ford himself. His notions of France and Provence were rooted in childhood memories of French history and legend painted by his grandfather. Ford was inspired by the suggestive treatment of Madox Brown’s repeated re-workings of King René’s Honeymoon. Although considered a quintessentially English artist, Madox Brown was born in France where he received his early art training, retaining the French language and French connections all his life. After the death of his German father, young Ford was brought up in his grandfather’s house and studio where he heard French and absorbed a witty, anecdotal, visual way of writing narrative. With reference to Madox Brown’s paintings and to Ford’s autobiographical writings, especially Provence, this chapter explores what Ford owed to the French roots of his paintergrandfather and how France was a spiritus loci, ‘a frame of mind’, even before it became a real place for him.

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SAM TRAINOR, ‘Third Republic French Philosophy and Ford’s Evolving Moral Topologies’ This essay examines Ford’s extension of the effects of a collapse in the mimetic and moral conventions of the French naturalist roman de mœurs at the end of the nineteenth century. This is seen as part of a wider crisis in the representational mœurs of art, science and politics during the period of the German Empire: a crisis which begins to conceptualize relations between elements of a referential system as entirely emergent from and contingent upon that system. The classic example in language is Saussurian signification, in mathematics it is Gödel’s ‘incompleteness theorem’. There are many more. The central analogy in this paper is the replacement of Euclidian topography with the topology of non-Euclidian space in the work of mathematicians like Henri Poincaré. That the fogbound mind of Christopher Tietjens, then, should identify the obsolescent structure of ‘principles’ in a prewar nation as ‘the skeleton map of a country’ – which will implicitly be replaced by a pure topology of mutable and non-hierarchical vertices (a ‘rhizome’ in Deleuzian terms) – is seen as a metaphor for the stylistic revolution in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century French novel (Huysmans, Bourget, Maupassant, Gide, Proust, etc): from naturalist mimesis to artificial emergence; from social topography to psychological topology. It is perhaps the evocation of an intertwined morbidity of the sexual mœurs of a society and of the mimetic mœurs of its art – a morbidity which implies the paranoid perception that the former are decadently, even suicidally, emergent from the latter – which Ford traces to Fort comme la mort. This then, might be what Ford was trying to do for the English novel: to make the roman de mœurs the roman qui meurt . . . and thereby, paradoxically, to breathe new life into it.

ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviations have been used for works cited several times, whether in the text or in the notes. The list is divided into two alphabetical sections: works by Ford and by others. A full list of abbreviations to be used in future volumes can be found on the Ford Society website. (i) Works by Ford AL

Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911)

BSDSG

Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations (Hodder and Stoughton, 1915)

CE

Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002)

CP

The Cinque Ports: A Historical and Descriptive Record (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1900)

CW

Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank MacShane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964)

EE

England and the English, ed. Sara Haslam (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003)

GS

The Good Soldier (London: John Lane, 1915); Oxford World’s Classics edition, ed. Thomas C. Moser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Norton Critical edition, ed. Martin Stannard (New York and London: Norton, 1995)

GTR

Great Trade Route (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937; London: Allen and Unwin, 1937)

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ABBREVIATIONS

HG

High Germany: Eleven Sets of Verses (London: Duckworth, [1912])

HH

Henry for Hugh (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1934 [published only in USA])

IWN

It Was the Nightingale (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1933; London: William Heinemann, 1934; ed. John Coyle, Manchester: Carcanet, 2007)

LF

Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965)

MF

A Mirror to France (London: Duckworth; New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926)

ML

The March of Literature (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939, 1947)

NE

No Enemy (New York: Macaulay, 1929) [written 1919, published only in USA in Ford’s lifetime]; ed. Paul Skinner (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002)

Nice People [Anon.], ‘Nice People’, Temple Bar, 128:5 (November 1903), 564-78 NMP

No More Parades, 1925, in Parade’s End, ed. Max Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002)

OI

‘On Impressionism’, Poetry & Drama, 2 (1914), 167-75, 323-34; reprinted in Frank MacShane, ed., Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford (Lincoln: Nebraska, 1964) pp. 33-55

PE

Parade’s End (one volume edition of all the Tietjens novels: Some Do Not. . ., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up –, and Last Post) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950); the same pagination is used by later Vintage, Penguin and Carcanet editions

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295

Provence

Provence (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938; Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1979; Manchester: Carcanet, 2009, ed. John Coyle)

RA

The Rash Act, 1933 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1982, 1999)

Reader

Sondra J. Stang (ed.), The Ford Madox Ford Reader, with Foreword by Graham Greene (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986)

RY

Return to Yesterday (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931); ed. Bill Hutchings (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999)

SDN

Some Do Not . . . (London: Duckworth, 1924)

Selected Poems Selected Poems, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997) TR

Thus to Revisit (London: Chapman and Hall, 1921)

WB

When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915)

WP

War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999)

(ii) Works by Others Ayers

David Ayers, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’, Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal, ed. Robert Hampson and Tony Davenport, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 1 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002)

Bowen

Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life (London: Collins, 1941)

Buchan

James Buchan, Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money (London: Picador, 1997)

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ABBREVIATIONS

Colombino Laura Colombino, ‘Ford, Matisse and the Book of the Dead: The (In)visible Objects of The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’, Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture, ed. Laura Colombino, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 8 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009) CUFA

George Orwell, Coming Up For Air (London: Gollancz, 1939; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962)

Exhibition Ford Madox Brown, The Exhibition of WORK, and other Paintings (London: M’Corquodale and Co., 1865) Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (London: Penguin, 1975)

Gordon

Ambrose Gordon, Jr., The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964)

Hawkes

Robert Bramwell Hawkes, ‘Destabilising Narratives: Characterising, Plotting, and Trusting in Ford Madox Ford’s Fiction’, Ph.D dissertation (University of York, Department of English and Related Literatures, 2008)

IFMFS

International Ford Madox Ford Studies

Invitation

Charles Baudelaire, ‘L’Invitation au voyage’, Les Fleurs du Mal, 1861 (Paris: Folio Classiques – Gallimard, 1996)

Judd

Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford (London: Collins, 1990)

Koffeman

Maaike Koffeman, Entre Classicisme et modernité, La Nouvelle revue française dans le champ littéraire de la Belle Epoque (New York: Rodopi, 2003)

Mizener

Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (New York: Harper and Row, 1971; London: The Bodley Head, 1972)

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297

Mousli

Valery Larbaud, Ce vice impuni, la lecture, Domaine anglais; suivi de pages retrouvées, ed. Béatrice Mousli (Paris: Gallimard, 1998)

P/F

Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (ed.), Pound/Ford: the Story of a Literary Friendship: the Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and Their Writings About Each Other (London: Faber and Faber; New York: New Directions, 1982)

Port Tarascon Henry James, Translator’s Preface, Alphonse Daudet, Port Tarascon (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1891) Rosenthal

M. L. Rosenthal, ‘Round about Ford Madox Ford’s Provence,’ Philip Grover, ed., Ezra Pound and the Troubadours (Gardonne, Fédérop, 2000)

Saunders

Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)

Skinner

Paul Skinner, Introduction to Ford, No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002)

Stang

Sondra J. Stang, Ford Madox Ford (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977)

Troubadours Francis Hueffer, The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878) Wiley

Paul L. Wiley, Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1962)

International Ford Madox Ford Studies Other volumes in the series: 1. Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal, ed. Robert Hampson and Tony Davenport (2002) 2. Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders (2003) 3. History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth (2004) 4. Ford Madox Ford and the City, ed. Sara Haslam (2005) 5. Ford Madox Ford and Englishness, ed. Dennis Brown and Jenny Plastow (2006) 6. Ford Madox Ford’s Literary Contacts, ed. Paul Skinner (2007) 7. Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations, ed. Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore (2008) 8. Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture, ed. Laura Colombino (2009) 9. Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing, ed. Jason Harding (2010)

Future volumes are planned on Ford and America; on the Edwardian Ford; and on Parade’s End. Please contact the General Editor if you would like to contribute to one of these.

THE

MADOX SOCIETY Ford c. 1915

©Alfred Cohen, 2000

Registered Charity No. 1084040

This international society was founded in 1997 to promote knowledge of and interest in Ford. Honorary Members include Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Samuel Hynes, Alan Judd, Bill Nighy, Ruth Rendell, Michael Schmidt, Sir Tom Stoppard, John Sutherland, and Gore Vidal. There are currently over one hundred members, from more than ten countries. Besides regular meetings in Britain, we have held conferences in Italy, Germany, the U.S.A, and France. Since 2002 we have published International Ford Madox Ford Studies; a series of substantial annual volumes distributed free to members. Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal (2002), Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity (2003), History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings (2004), Ford Madox Ford and the City (2005), Ford Madox Ford and Englishness (2006), Ford Madox Ford’s Literary Contacts (2007), Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations (2008), Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture (2009), and Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing (2010) are all still available. Future volumes are planned on Ford’s pre-war phase, and on Parade’s End and the First World War. If you are an admirer, an enthusiast, a reader, a scholar, or a student of anything Fordian, then this Society would welcome your involvement. The Ford Madox Ford Society normally organises events and publishes Newsletters each year. Future meetings are planned in Glasgow, London and Germany. The Society also inaugurated a series of Ford Lectures. Speakers have included Alan Judd, Nicholas Delbanco, Zinovy Zinik, A. S. Byatt, Colm Tóibín, and Hermione Lee. To join, please see the website for details; or send your name and address (including an e-mail address if possible), and a cheque made payable to ‘The Ford Madox Ford Society’, to: Dr Paul Skinner, 7 Maidstone Street, Victoria Park, Bristol BS3 4SW, UK. Telephone: 0117 9715008; Fax: 0117 9020294 Email: [email protected] Annual rates: Sterling: Individuals: £12 (by standing order; otherwise £15); Concessions £8; Euros: €15.00 (by standing order; otherwise €20.00); Concessions €8.50. US Dollars: Any category: $25 For further information, either contact Paul Skinner (Treasurer) at the above address, or Sara Haslam (Chair) by e-mail at: [email protected] The Society’s Website is at: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/fordmadoxford-society/