Collected Essays (17 page)

It is an exciting story admirably told, and it is one of Mr Pearson’s virtues that he drives us to champion the subject against his biographer (Johnson has the same effect on the reader). For example, this reviewer would like to put in a word which Mr Pearson omits for the poetic quality in Doyle, the quality which gives life to his work far more surely than does his wit. Think of the sense of horror which hangs over the laurelled drive of Upper Norwood and behind the curtains of Lower Camberwell: the dead body of Bartholomew Sholto swinging to and fro in Pondicherri Lodge, the ‘bristle of red hair’, ‘the ghastly inscrutable smile’, and in contrast Watson and Miss Mortsan hand in hand like children among the strange rubbish heaps: he made Plumstead Marshes and the Barking Level as vivid and unfamiliar as a lesser writer would have made the mangrove swamps of the West Coast which he had also known and of which he did not bother to write.

And, unlike most great writers, he remained so honest and pleasant a man. The child who wrote with careful necessary economy to his mother from Stonyhurst: ‘I have been to the Taylor, and I showed him your letter, explaining to him that you wanted something that would wear well and at the same time look well. He told me that the blue cloth he had was meant especially for Coats, but that none of it would suit well as Fresson. He showed me a dark sort of cloth which he said would suit a coat better than any other cloth he has and would wear well as trousers. On his recommendation I took this cloth. I think you will like it; it does not show dirt and looks very well; it is a sort of black and white very dark cloth’; this child had obviously the same character as the middle-aged man who wrote chivalrously and violently against Shaw in defence of the
Titanic
officers (he was probably wrong, but, as Mr Pearson nearly says, most of us would have preferred to be wrong with Doyle than right with Shaw).

It isn’t easy for an author to remain a pleasant human being: both success and failure are usually of a crippling kind. There are so many opportunities for histrionics, hysterics, waywardness, self-importance; within very wide limits a writer can do what he likes and go where he likes, and a human being has seldom stood up so well to such a test of freedom as Doyle did. The eccentric figure of his partner, Dr Budd, may stride like a giant through the early pages of his biography, but in memory he dwindles into the far distance, and in the foreground we see the large, sturdy, working shoulders, a face so commonplace that it has the effect of a time-worn sculpture representing some abstract quality like Kindness or Patience, but never, one would mistakenly have said, Imagination or Poetry.

1943

FORD MADOX FORD

1

T
HE
death of Ford Madox Ford was like the obscure death of a veteran – an impossibly Napoleonic veteran, say, whose immense memory spanned the period from Jena to Sedan: he belonged to the heroic age of English fiction and outlived it – yet he was only sixty-six. In one of his many volumes of reminiscence – those magnificent books where in an atmosphere of casual talk outrageous story jostles outrageous story – he quoted Mr Wells as saying some years ago that in the southern counties a number of foreigners were conspiring against the form of the English novel. There was James at Lamb House, Crane at Brede Manor, Conrad at The Pent, and he might have added his own name, Hueffer at Aldington, for he was a quarter German (and just before the first world war made an odd extravagant effort to naturalize himself as a citizen of his grandfather’s country). The conspiracy, of course, failed: the big loose middlebrow novel goes on its happy way unconscious of James’s ‘point of view’: Conrad is regarded again as the writer of romantic sea stories and purple passages: nobody reads Crane, and Ford – well, an anonymous writer in the
Times Literary Supplement
remarked in an obituary notice that his novels began to date twenty years ago. Conservatism among English critics is extraordinarily tenacious, and they hasten, on a man’s death, to wipe out any disturbance he has caused.

The son of Francis Hueffer, the musical critic of
The Times
, and grandson, on his mother’s side, of Ford Madox Brown, ‘Fordie’ Hueffer emerges into history at the age of three offering a chair to Turgenev, and again, a little later, dressed in a suit of yellow velveteen with gold buttons, wearing one red stocking and one green one, and with long golden hair, having his chair stolen from him at a concert by the Abbé Liszt. I say emerges into history, but it is never possible to say where history ends and the hilarious imagination begins. He was always an atmospheric writer, whether he was describing the confused Armistice night when Tietjens found himself back with his mistress, Valentine Wannop, among a horde of grotesque and inexplicable strangers, or just recounting a literary anecdote of dubious origin – the drunk writer who thought himself a Bengal tiger trying to tear out the throat of the blind poet Marston, or Henry James getting hopelessly entangled in the long lead of his dachshund Maximilian. Nobody ever wrote more about himself than Ford, but the figure he presented was just as dubious as his anecdotes – the figure of a Tory country gentleman who liked to grow his own food and had sturdy independent views on politics: it all seems a long way from the yellow velveteen. He even, at the end of his life, a little plump and a little pink, looked the part – and all the while he had been turning out the immense number of books which stand to his name: memoirs, criticism, poetry, sociology, novels. And in between, if one can so put it, he found time to be the best, literary editor England has ever had: what Masefield, Hudson, Conrad, even Hardy owed to the
English Review
is well known, and after the war in
the Transatlantic Review
he bridged the great gap, publishing the early Hemingway, Cocteau, Stein, Pound, the music of Antheil, and the drawings of Braque.

He had the advantage – or the disadvantage – of being brought up in pre-Raphaelite circles, and although he made a tentative effort to break away into the Indian Civil Service, he was pushed steadily by his father towards art – any kind of art was better than any kind of profession. He published his first book at the age of sixteen, and his first novel,
The Shifting of the Fire
, in 1892, when he was only nineteen – three years before Conrad had published anything and only two years after the serial appearance of
The Tragic Muse
, long before James had matured his method and his style. It wasn’t, of course, a good book, but neither was it an ‘arty’ book – there was nothing of the ‘nineties about it except its elegant period binding, and it already bore the unmistakable Hueffer stamp – the outrageous fancy, the pessimistic high spirits, and an abominable hero called Kasker-Ryves. Human nature in his books was usually phosphorescent – varying from the daemonic malice of Sylvia Tietjens to the painstaking, rather hopeless will-to-be-good of Captain Ashburnham, ‘the good soldier’. The little virtue that existed only attracted evil. But to Mr Ford, a Catholic in theory though not for long in practice, this was neither surprising nor depressing: it was just what one expected.

The long roll of novels ended with
Vive le Roy
in 1937. A few deserve to be forgotten, but I doubt whether the accusation of dating can be brought against even such minor work as
Mr Apollo, The Marsden Case, When the Wicked Man
: there were the historical novels, too, with their enormous vigour and authenticity –
The Fifth Queen
and its sequels: but the novels which stand as high as any fiction written since the death of James are
The Good Soldier
with its magnificent claim in the first line, ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’ – the study of an averagely good man of a conventional class driven, divided and destroyed by unconventional passion – and the Tietjens series, that appalling examination of how private malice goes on during public disaster – no escape even in the trenches from the secret gossip and the lawyers’ papers. It is dangerous in this country to talk about technique or a long essay could be written on his method in these later books, the method Conrad followed more stiffly and less skilfully, having learnt it perhaps from Ford when they collaborated on
Romance
: James’s point of view was carried a step further, so that a book took place not only from the point of view but in the brain of a character and events were remembered not in chronological order, but as free association brought them to mind.

When Ford died he had passed through a period of neglect and was re-emerging. His latest books were not his best, but they were hailed as if they were. The first war had ruined him. He had volunteered, though he was over military age and was fighting a country he loved; his health was broken, and he came back to a new literary world which had carefully eliminated him. For some of his later work he could not even find a publisher in England. No wonder he preferred to live abroad – in Provence or New York. But I don’t suppose failure disturbed him much: he had never really believed in human happiness, his middle life had been made miserable by passion, and he had come through – with his humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing.

2

How seldom a novelist chooses the material nearest to his hand; it is almost as if he were driven to earn experience the hard way. Ford, whom we might have expected to become a novelist of artistic bohemia, a kind of English Murger, did indeed employ the material of Fitzroy Square incomparably well in his volumes of reminiscence – and some people might regard those as his finest novels, for he brought to his dramatizations of people he had known the same astonishing knack he showed with his historical figures. Most writers dealing with real people find their invention confined, but that was not so with Ford. ‘When it has seemed expedient to me I have altered episodes that I have witnessed, but I have been careful never to distort the character of the episode.
The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions.
If you want factual accuracies you must go to . . . but no, no, don’t go to anyone, stay with me.’ (The italics are mine: it is a phrase worth bearing in mind in reading all his works.)

In fact as a novelist Ford began to move further and further from bohemia for his material. His first period as an historical novelist, which he began by collaborating with Conrad in that underrated novel
Romance
, virtually closed with his Tudor trilogy. There were to be two or three more historical novels, until in
Ladies Whose Bright Eyes
 . . . he came half out into the contemporary world and began to find his true subject. It could even be argued that in
The Fifth Queen
he was nearest as a novelist to Fitzroy Square. There is the sense of saturation: something is always happening on the stairs, in the passages the servants come and go on half explained errands, and the great King may at any moment erupt upon the scene, half kindly, half malevolent, rather as we feel the presence of Madox Brown in the gas-lit interstices of No. 37.

Most historical novelists use real characters only for purposes of local colour – Lord Nelson passes up a Portsmouth street or Doctor Johnson enters ponderously to close a chapter, but in
The Fifth Queen
we have virtually no fictional characters – the King, Thomas Cromwell, Catherine Howard, they are the principals; we are nearer to the historical plays of Shakespeare than to the fictions of such historical writers as Miss Irwin or Miss Heyer.

‘The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions.’ In
The Fifth Queen
Ford tries out the impressionist method which he was later to employ with triumphant ease in the great confused armistice-day scene of
A Man Could Stand Up.
The whole story of the struggle between Catherine and Cromwell for the King seems told in shadows – shadows which flicker with the flames of a log-fire, diminished suddenly as a torch recedes, stand calm awhile in the candlelight of a chapel: a cresset flares and all the shadows leap together. Has a novel ever before been lit as carefully as a stage production? Nicolas Udal’s lies, which play so important a part in the first volume, take their substance from the lighting: they are monstrously elongated or suddenly shrivel: one can believe anything by torchlight. (The power of a lie – that too was a subject he was to pursue through all his later books: the lies of Sylvia Tietjens which ruined her husband’s army-career and the monstrous lie of ‘poor Florence’ in
The Good Soldier
which brought death to three people and madness to a fourth.)

If
The Fifth Queen
is a magnificent bravura piece – and you could say that it was a better painting than ever came out of Fitzroy Square with all the mingled talents there of Madox Brown and Morris, Rossetti and Burne-Jones – in
The Good Soldier
Ford triumphantly found his true subject and oddly enough, for a child of the Pre-Raphaelites, his subject was the English ‘gentleman’, the ‘black and merciless things’ which lie behind that façade.

Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap; – an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he never told a story that couldn’t have gone into the columns of the
Field
more than once or twice in all the nine years of my knowing him. He didn’t even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You would have said he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness.

The Good Soldier
, which Ford had wished to call
The Saddest Story
, concerns the ravages wrought by a passionate man who had all the virtues but continence. The narrator is the betrayed husband, and it is through his eyes alone that we watch the complications and involvements left by Ashburnham’s blind urge towards satisfaction. Technically the story is undoubtedly Ford’s masterpiece. The time-shifts are valuable not merely for purposes of suspense – they lend veracity to the appalling events. This is just how memory works, and we become involved with the narrator’s memory as though it were our own. Ford’s apprenticeship with Conrad had borne its fruit, but he improved on the Master.