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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Ford Madox Ford can never quite keep out of it. The more self-effacing he seems, the more his the writing becomes: scenes of preternatural clarity. 'Memory doesn't work like that,' said one critic. Well, Ford's does. 'Truth to the impression' was his aim. How it seemed, how memory took it in, is more alive than how it 'actually' was, whatever that means. Memory is for Ford as for Wordsworth re-creation. His memoirs have the authority of fiction because they are half way between fiction and fact. Return to Yesterday (1931), his most fascinating memoir, follows on Ancient Lights and covers the years from 1894 to the outbreak of World War I - his transition from privileged godson of the Pre-Raphaelites to the great Modern writer and editor he became. Here he evokes England at large, and London in particular, its literary community, the political world of anarchists (the world of his friend Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent). If the Rossettis, Ford Madox Brown, Swinburne and Morris gave their blessing to his youth, it was Pound and Lawrence, Joyce and Rhys, who were blessed by his maturity. C.H. Sisson writes: 'Ford remains a profound influence on the poetry as on the prose of the century, for he found English literature poetical and left it spare.'
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FORD MADOX FORD
Return to Yesterday
Contents
INTRODUCTION
William Morris, the great Victorian poet, artist, designer and social theorist, is pictured at one of his socialist meetings:
Poor William Morris with his enormous mop of white hair, luxuriant white beard and nautical pea-jacket, used to preside at these meetings of his group. […] he walked up and down in the aisle between the rows of chairs, his hands in his jacket-pockets with the air of a rather melancholy sea-captain on the quarterdeck. He disliked the violence that was creeping into his beloved meetings. He had founded them solely with the idea of promoting human kindness and peopling the earth with large-bosomed women dressed in Walter Crane gowns and bearing great sheaves of full-eared corn. On this occasion his air was most extraordinary as he fled uttering passionate sneezes that jerked his white hairs backwards and forwards like the waves of the sea. (Part II, ch. II: ‘Farthest Left’)
The Romantic idealist strides out of the room and the page like one of Joseph Conrad’s isolated seafarers, thwarted and brought down by human imperfection. The picture is precise, amused but sympathetic. Ford uses an apt visual point of reference to image an unworldly idealism which thinks society is an Arts and Crafts design. Morris himself is dramatised as a fallen hero from one of his beloved sagas, his hair and beard, the marks of his nautical grandeur, being transformed into the sea of human frailty in which he is drowning. The Viking captain flees the ship of state.
Return to Yesterday is full of such moments of vision. One of several volumes of reminiscences produced by Ford, the book was published in 1931 and constitutes ‘the history of his own times, telling not only of his own experiences, but of the literary and political movements with which he had come into contact’ (Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life [Oxford 1996], II, 380). Morris makes a brief appearance, as recalled from the writer’s youth. The man who figures largest in these memoirs is the master mariner of letters himself, Conrad, with whom Ford collaborated as both were learning their novelistic trade and to whom Ford attributes most of what he has learnt about the art of the novel. Conrad is described in his early days in England:
In those early days he still had a great deal of the master mariner about him. His characteristic attitude was that, with his hands in the pockets of his coat and his beard pointing at the horizon. He strode, with the rolling gait of the quarter-deck, into a room or on to a terrace. He had the air of a Caliph entering a slave market – as if he could confiscate any of the beautiful slaves or do what he would with the view beneath his eyes. He was an unexampledraconteur. If his ambition in writing was, as he has said, ‘above alI to make you see’ he could in telling stories, in his dusky and affectionate tones and with his singular accent, make you see almost anything in the world. (Part I, ch. IV: ‘Re-Agents’)
That determination in the manner in which he holds his head, jaw jutting towards the horizon, that confidence in the nonchalance with which he negotiates the rolling world – these are caught in Ford’s exact, sharp picture.
As he does so, Ford defines the very method he is using. Conrad’s aim ‘above all to make you see’ is Ford’s too: seeing is not just believing, it is understanding. The essence of the character exists within the image itself, the visual and dramatic moment captured – to adapt Ford’s own metaphor in an essay he wrote on ‘literary impressionism’ – as hard as a tack, hammered firmly but rapidly into place. Conrad, Ford writes later in the book, ‘was the greatest of impressionistic writers and held that truly recorded impressions communicate impressions truer than the truest record of facts’ (Part III, ch. III: ‘Working with Conrad’). This, as readers of Ford’s own novels will know, is the method which illuminates so much of his own fictional writing. Meaning resides in the moment of vision. For example, Dowell, the narrator of The Good Soldier, retains a vivid memory of his wife walking into the baths at Nauheim, dressed in a full blue dress and broad white hat, looking back at him with a little coquettish smile and dark blue eyes: departing in blue. Ford’s method in his memoirs is fundamentally the same. He is seeking, he tells us, to make these people ‘live again in your eyes’ (Part I, ch. II: ‘Personae’). His memories are impressions, a mental reimagining of the past translated into the immediacy of the moment. In the form of reminiscences, Ford says, ‘the narrator should be a mirror’ rather than an actor in the events (Part III, ch. I: ‘Cabbages and Queens’). He is there to reflect the images made by people at their most characteristic and revealing. ‘I am trying to re-constitute for you men that I loved’ (Part I, ch. IV). Like the novelist who, Ford says, ‘must pass unobserved in a crowd if he himself is to observe’ (Part IV, ch. IV: ‘Into the Depths’), the writer of memoirs needs to practise self-effacement, suppressing the self in the service of the scene, the event, the moment. Return to Yesterday partakes of the quality of fictional drama, as The Good Soldier partakes of the quality of autobiographical reminiscence.
The figures parade through Ford’s narrative as a series of vivid representations of the cross-currents of the literary world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Oscar Wilde is briefly but unforgettably pictured in Paris after his release from prison, penniless and miserable, haunting the bars of Montmartre, the butt of cruel ‘apaches’ who victimise him and force him to give up his one possession, an ebony walking stick. Ford images the youths as ‘starlings, tormenting that immense owl’, a nightmare of unleashed natural aggression (Part I, ch. III: ‘The Outer World’). Mention of Wilde reminds Ford of an earlier incident from the time of the trial. Ford encounters Dr Richard Garnett, the Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, ‘a queer, very tall, lean, untidily bearded Yorkshire figure in its official frock coat and high hat’. Ford tells him the news of Wilde’s conviction, and Garnett replies, ‘Then that means the death of English poetry for fifty years’ (Part I, ch. III). The insight, hyperbolical but wise, comes all the more powerfully from the incongruously non-aesthetic figure of the Victorian official. Or again, George Bernard Shaw is seen addressing a meeting of socialists in Hyde Park on the subject of ‘The Foolishness of Anarchism’, being heckled by a group who chant the title of his earlier essay ‘Why I am an Anarchist’:
The high skies towered above the trees of the Park; in the branches birds sang. Those fresh young voices mounted to heaven. Mr Shaw’s did not. Every time he opened his mouth that anthem: “Why I am an Anarchist by the Lecturer. One Penny,” began again. (Part II, ch. II)
Youth and nature now are the very picture of innocence and beauty, silencing the old hypocrite. Only, of course, they are not: the voices are those of children at play, but their taunts are knowing and harmful as well as true.
Many of the public figures recalled are from the literary world which Ford knew and inhabited with such relish and energy. But the second part of Return to Yesterday, from which the Shaw scene comes, is mainly about Ford’s memories of political groups and individuals. He remembers Victorian politicians from the time when his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was painting frescoes in Manchester Town Hall. For example, John Bright pays a rapid and unheeding visit to see the work:
He reminded me of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland as he scuttled through the swing doors exclaiming that he was very late. But in a silver and pink way he was very beautiful, with his long white hair and high coloured cheeks. (Part II, ch. II)
The pretentiousness of the politician is wonderfully caught here through the looking-glass of youthful perception. And a magical balance remains: Bright is reduced in the analogy, but somehow comes up, well, bushy-tailed. He may be less important than he thinks he is, but he is rather cute – not something one can say for many politicians. Other political figures are put down in equally delicate ways. Ramsay MacDonald is the type of the journalist who ‘must be able at the shortest notice and with the scantiest of knowledge to identify himself with anybody or anything’ (Part II, ch. II). This says in a few words what weighty biographies take pages to say about politicians and principles, and yet who, least of all Ford Madox Ford, professional man of words and writer on all kinds of subjects, would wish to condemn utterly such a talent?
In the same chapter Lloyd George comes out unequivocally badly. Ford tells a story of a Winchester hotelier who wrote to his local paper that the great Welshman had stopped at his hotel with three ladies who had used the cloak-room without tipping the attendant, and had promised to return for lunch but never did. The local paper printed the letter, and Ford witnessed the result:
Now you might tell Mr George to his face that he was ruining his country and he would be agreeably amused. Or you might tell him that he was a bad man to handle the land question because he doesn’t know that pheasants do not eat mangold wurzels. He will still laugh, if a little on the other side of his face. For once in an impassioned speech about the wickedness of landlords he drew a moving picture of a small farmer ruined by the depredations of the landlord’s pampered pheasants among his poor root-crops. But the flagitious suggestion that he travelled with the sort of ladies who didn’t tip freely – that drove him almost out of his mind! He proposed to use all his powers as Chancellor of the Exchequer to ruin all the landlords of the Three Kingdoms – he threatened to commit the Winchester host to the Clock Tower; he proposed to have him cudgelled by the Liberal Party’s Anti-Suffragette Volunteer Police.
Lloyd George’s over-the-top reaction – enhanced by Ford’s own understatement (‘agreeably amused’, ‘a little on the other side of his face’) – allows Ford to set his personal small-mindedness in the context of his public narrowness, the anti-suffragette stance of the Liberal government. Here Ford gives vent to one of the trenchant expressions of personal opinion which maintain the strong individualism of the speaking voice of a narrator who may not act, but certainly speaks. The government, he says, ‘were also, led by the Rt Hon. David Lloyd George, engaged in assaulting as many women as they could with prudence lay hands on. So I hope no woman has ever, or ever will, vote for Dai Bach.’ Much later, in the ‘Coda’ to the book, Ford records his admiration for the suffragettes, and cites his own pro-suffragette pamphlet, ‘This Monstrous Regiment of Women’, as the only work of his he wishes to mention by name in the book. ‘I will give,’ he adds, ‘in twenty-five words the reason for my conviction. In England of those days the only people who were refused the right of citizenship were children, criminals, lunatics – and the mothers of our children.’ In this occasional quality of determined personal conviction, Return to Yesterday stands apart from the dramatic method of the novels, of The Good Soldier or The Fifth Queen trilogy. As Ford told Victor Gollancz, his publisher, in a letter of 4 July 1931, he sought to give a picture of the times rather than of himself, ‘but egotism will come creeping in’.
More often, however, Ford suppresses his own voice to allow the narrative to be conducted through the voices and, above all, the appearance and actions of others. This is not really a book about Ford’s opinions, however trenchant and significant they may have been. It is, rather, a parade of moments of vision. Such an approach is consistent with the literary creed he describes as being forged by Conrad in those days of collaboration. Conrad it was who pursued the idea that the novel required a new form to set against the conventional emphasis on strong scenes and situations deriving from the needs of serialised publication dominant in the Victorian period. In their work, Conrad and Ford sought to make the novel ‘a rendering of an Affair’, of ‘one embroilment, one set of embarrassments, one human coi1, one psychological progression’ (Part III, ch. IV: ‘Rye Road’). That pursuit of psychological and formal unity is not appropriate to a wide-ranging and variegated set of memoirs such as Return to Yesterday, but in other respects Ford aims at such ‘rendering’, the capturing of the action, the gesture which reveals all to the careful eye.
That Ford should attribute the discovery of the method primarily to Conrad is typical of his own self-effacement. Ford’s testimony to Conrad’s influence on him is both moving and characteristically generous:
I owe a great deal to Conrad. But most of all I owe to him that strong faith – that in our day and hour the writing of novels is the only pursuit worth while for a proper man. That was his strong faith and certainly it communicated itself to me. (Part III, ch. II: ‘Pure Letters’)
The supreme importance of imaginative literature derives from its being ‘the only means by which humanity can express at once emotions and ideas’. Ford’s high claims are counterbalanced by both his personal humility in allocating the position of original thinker and genius to Conrad and by his awareness of the place of the artist as an individual. It is a good thing, he proposes at one point, for the artist to be born in London. ‘You acquire very soon the knowledge that you are merely an atom amongst vastnesses and shouldn’t take yourself very seriously’ (Part IV, ch. I: ‘Companies and Kings’). Art is important, but the artist (like the politician) is just one individual among many. Describing Conrad and the American writer Stephen Crane (another who figures largely in the book, the author of TheRed Badge of Courage, about which Ford writes that ‘no more poetic vision of humanity in our late Armageddon was ever written’) on one night at Oxted in Surrey, Ford comments that they ‘were very simple people really. All great authors are. If you are not simple you are not observant. If you are not observant you cannot write. But you must observe simply. The first characteristic of great writing is a certain humility’ (Part I, ch. IV).
Hence some of the best moments in Return to Yesterday occur when Ford punctures the pomposity of his fellow-writers. Henry James, who lived at Lamb House, Rye, close to Ford while he was in Winchelsea from 1901, is a prime candidate for such treatment. The very first chapter contains a fine account of his famously oblique and orotund method of expression as James recounts a visit from Kipling and an unfortunate accident that occurred to the latter’s ‘one thousand two hundred guinea motor car’. James rolls this phrase round time after time in his narration. The scene is nicely ironic. While James is making a wry observation on how Kipling’s discomfiture reveals his materialism, the result of his being a (dread word for James) ‘popular’ writer, Ford’s rendering brings out James’s own foibles, his mannered hauteur, rolling eyes and studied distaste for anything that even resembles vulgarity. But Ford’s narrative is not mocking: James comes across as, in his particular way, witty and sympathetic. Indeed, James appears as both an influential and serious artist, as one who is seeking, like Conrad, to find a form to render the ‘woven symbolism’ of life (Part III, ch. IV), and as a humorous observer. The first chapter testifies to James’s skills in mimicry, particularly of the falsetto voice and physical oddities of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Ford also relays his wickedly nice turn of phrase at the expense of the same poet: ‘He declared that Swinburne’s verse in its flood and noxiousness was only commensurate with the floods of bad chianti and gin that the poet consumed.’
Much of the humour of the book comes from Ford’s perception of the frailties of even those he most admires. He tells the story of the time when Conrad was working in the Pent, Ford’s farm-house at the foot of the North Downs. Conrad took great pleasure at writing at Ford’s desk, which had descended to him from Christina Rossetti. Conrad rejoiced in writing at the very desk where he thought ‘Goblin Market’ had been composed. Unfortunately, Christina Rossetti had been banished to her bedroom by all the male Pre-Raphaelites who claimed to need the room much more urgently than she did. Thus she actually wrote the poem on the corner of her wash-stand. At Winchelsea Ford owned a desk given to his father by Thomas Carlyle. This Conrad refused to use, on the grounds that writing at the desk where The French Revolution had been composed would ruin his style. Alas, the desk had never belonged to Carlyle: Mrs Carlyle had bought it specially to give to Ford’s father from a second-hand dealer in the King’s Road, Chelsea. Conrad’s combative awkwardness is nicely caught in Ford’s account of a literary party he held at which an irate Conrad attacked the editor of the Academy. ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Ford notes, ‘and don’t suppose I ever shall forget the look of polite incredulity of the more august guests. Mrs Humphry Ward looked like a disgusted sheep’ (Part IV, ch. I).
Sympathy, however, is the main characteristic of Ford’s view of people. This is especially so of the ordinary men and women who are the heroes and heroines of Part III, where Ford recounts his life in the countryside between 1894 and 1903. ‘All men’s lives and characteristics are so singular’, he earlier observes (Part II, ch. II), and this section of the book is particularly rich in observed singularity. Old Meary Walker, for example, ‘the wisest and upon the whole the most estimable human being that I ever knew at all well’:
Her face was as large, as round and much the same colour as a copper warming pan. Her mouth was immense and quite toothless except for one large fang, and as she smiled cheerfully all the time, her great gums were always to be seen. Her shoulders were immense and moved with the roll and heave of those of a great bullock.[…] She told me also that her husband had died fifteen years before of the sting of a viper, that his poor old leg went all like green jelly up to his thigh before he died and that he had been the best basket -maker in all Kent. She also told me that we can’t all have everything and that the only thing to do is to ‘keep all on gooing’. (Part III, ch. I)
This reminds one, perhaps, of those best parts of Hardy, where linguistic simplicity reveals a Shakespearean capacity for sympathetic comedy.
If there is one ‘message’ (to put it in distinctly non-Fordian didactic terms) of Ford’s reminiscences it lies in this essential humanity, in the perceived value of each human being’s singularity. Culture, for Ford, is the inverse of snobbery. He tells of the time when, as editor of the English Review, he published some of the early writings of D. H. Lawrence:
When I saw the environment in which Lawrence lived I learned at once the lesson of my life. Prosperity is identical with culture. Here were people absolutely prosperous, not of great means nor yet of very small ones but having sufficient education to expend these means frugally and so as to obtain the greatest amount of rational pleasure out of life. That is the chief function of education. A society, a coterie, a nation, a civilisation so equipped is bound to outlast nations or classes within a nation whose idea of prosperity – nay of culture itself – is that of material hegemony of the world. (Part V, ch. II: ‘Alarums and Discoveries’)
Ford ends Return to Yesterday in 1914, at that moment at which the pursuit of ‘the material hegemony of the world’ was to pull Europe apart. One of the ordinary people Ford describes during his rural years is Ragged Ass Wilson, a clever and talented odd-job man, skilled in all the arts of country living, who worked for Ford at the Pent. One morning Ford found him asleep on an old coffin stool in an ingle-nook that Wilson had spent the previous evening clearing of the bricks with which a preceding owner had blocked it up. Wilson’s attitude in sleep, arms above his head, hammer in one hand, chisel in the other, his legs stretched out before him, came back to Ford later when he saw a photograph of a French territorial soldier asleep in a trench. The image, precise and sharp in all its implicit significance, stretches across time, across nations, and, for readers of Ford, across genres. From the rural world of this part of Return to Yesterday the image speaks to the world of Parade’s End, from Ragged Ass Wilson to O Nine Morgan, the ordinary man blown up in the trenches.
Readers of Ford’s novels will find many traces in Return to Yesterday. The suffragette theme, and playing golf with Liberal politicians, takes us to the early scenes of Parade’s End. Ford’s elegy on his friend Arthur Marwood defines the very essence of Christopher Tietjens: ‘He possessed the clear, eighteenth century English mind which has disappeared from the earth, leaving the earth very much the poorer’ (Part V, ch. I: ‘Revues’). When Ford tells us about Marwood listing errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and his view that ‘nothing worth the attention of a grown man had been written in England since the eighteenth century’, we are clearly seeing the original of Tietjens. Ford’s account of how his plan to write a life of Henry VIII was thwarted by his being beaten to the publishers by minutes intriguingly leads us into his decision to put the material into fictional form in The Fifth Queen. Some blinding impressions could come straight out of that trilogy, as when Queen Alexandra, disappearing after the death of Edward VII, is described being found in Westminster Hall where the king was Iying in state: ‘She was kneeling on the right-hand side of the bier. Mrs Keppel was kneeling on the other’ (Part IV, ch. l). The description of two sisters whom Ford met at a German spa during the period (1903–6) he spent searching for a cure for his nervous illness pitches us right into The Good Soldier. Their name was Hurlbird and they came from Connecticut.
Ford organises these memoirs so that the ‘Coda’ takes him to June 1914 in London, and notes that he has completed the novel he said he would begin on his fortieth birthday (17 December, 1913). This novel, The Good Soldier, is narrated by a man, John Dowell, whose aim is, like that proclaimed by Conrad, ‘to make you see things clearly’. But Dowell actually sees, understands nothing. The dates of the actual composition of The Good Soldier are obscure in the extreme, and Ford may be acting the fabulist here. But ‘truly recorded impressions communicate impressions truer than the truest record of facts’. The impressions in Return to Yesterday are given their final sharpness by the sense that tomorrow will take him to the fields of France, and that the world will never be so clearly seen again.
BILL HUTCHINGS
RETURN TO YESTERDAY
To DR MICHAELAND MRS EILEEN HALL LAKE
MY DEARS, –
It was whilst looking up at the criss-cross of beams in the roof of your tall studio that the form of this book was thought out. Micky had admirably bandaged up my unfortunate foot and you had given up that room to me and there I lay looking up and thinking of Henry James who had been born only a few yards away. So, as I go through these pages I seem to see that criss-cross in your gracious old house and the literary form of the work is inextricably mingled with those Cubist intricacies.
You will say that volumes of memories have no forms and that this collection of them is only a rag-bag. It isn’t really. The true artfulness of art is to appear as if in disordered habiliments. Life meanders, jumps back and forwards, draws netted patterns like those on the musk melon. It seems the most formless of things. One may know that one has lived a life of sturt and strife and will probably die by treachery in the approved Border fashion. But if one is to set down one’s life – for which there is only one excuse – one should so present the pattern of it that, insensibly, it in turn, presents itself to your awareness.
The excuse for setting down one’s life on paper – the only excuse – is that one should give a picture of one’s time. I believe that hardly anyone – and certainly not I – so lives that his personal adventures whether on the high seas or in criticism can be well worth relating. But certain restless spirits roll, as the saying is, their humps into noteworthy cities or into the presence of human notables. So, if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.
I have tried to keep myself out of this work as much as I could – but try as hard as one may after self-effacement the great ‘I’, like cheerfulness will come creeping in. Renan says that as soon as one writes about oneself one poetises a little. I don’t think I do. On the other hand, being a novelist, it is possible that I romance. For about as long as the lives of the two of you young and gallant things together I have gone about the world looking for the person of the Sacred Emperor in low tea-shops – or in such lofty places as your studio. I have seen some Emperors – and not a few pretenders. These and the tea-shops of the Chinese proverb I have tried to make you see. If you sometimes see my coat-tails whisking round the corners you must pardon it. My true intent is only for your delight. Had I the cap of Fortunatus you should not see even so much of me or my garments. The Chinese proverb I have mentioned says that it is hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-shop; they are cynics those fellows – or pessimists. There is really no other pursuit in life. Our geese must be swans.
So this is a novel: a story mirroring such pursuits. If that pursuit is indeed hypocrisy that is the only hypocrisy in this book – but this book is all that homage paid to virtue by one who errs. Where 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!
I don’t know how much of my writing you have read. It is probably little enough; you have better things to do and be. But it is certainly more than I shall ever read of my own. I am one with the struggling millions who cannot read me. So, if you have read me at all, you may here find things I have written before. Please don’t mind that. Often enough it is unconscious: at my age one does repeat oneself and, since I possess practically none of my own books I cannot refer to them to see what I have written before and I should not have the patience to read them if I had them. But in a number of cases I have done it advisedly to keep the thread of the novel together. Thus one chapter is reprinted from a long forgotten book of mine that was never published in America and part of another is reprinted from a book that was never published in either England or the United States. If I could have rewritten these chapters better I would have done so. As I did not think I could I have let them stand as they were. In certain cases I have here modified details of stories that I know I have told before. That is because in their original form I had to deviate from factual exactitude because I was afraid of hurting feelings. The versions here printed are nearer what actually happened.
So, humbly, gratefully and affectionately, I subscribe myself your mirror to my times. This was begun to the tune of the agreeable noises of West 12th Street and to the taste of the admirable Caribbean confections of your Antiguan cordon brun. It finishes to the rhythm of the sirocco in the ears of sweet corn that I can see agitated in front of the Mediterranean azure. When I have written my name hereunder I shall grill myself an ear or two for my supper. That is pleasure enough. But if the South Wind would change to the West it might over the Atlantic bring you two sailing. That surely would be the proudest sight this poor old mirror has now to reflect and – whatever may be the case with tea-shops – I should surely against the sea of Ulysses see on my terraces sacred and Imperial Personages.
F. M. F.
Cap Brun,
14th July 1931
PART I
LETTERS AND LANDSCAPES
CHAPTER I
COMPOSTELLA AMERICANA
Thinking of Henry James the other day I was led to wonder when I first went to the Antient Town of Rye. Rye is not a Cinque Port but one of the two antiquiora membra of that honourable Corporation, the other being Winchelsea. Thirty years ago or so Henry James lived at Rye. I had a house at Winchelsea.
Still thinking and walking up and down in the tall room of a friend in Greenwich Village I looked at a bookshelf, then took out a dullish-backed book at random. At the bottom of a page were the words: ‘So you see, darling, there is really no fear, because as long as I know you care for me and I care for you nothing can touch me.’
I had a singular emotion. I was eighteen when I first read those words. My train was running into Rye station and I had knocked out the ashes of my first pipe of shag tobacco. Shag was the very cheapest, blackest and strongest of tobaccos in England of those days. I was therefore economising. My first book had just been published. I was going courting. My book had earned ten pounds. I desired to be a subaltern in H.B.M.’s Army. The story was Mr Kipling’s Onlya Subaltern. The next station would be Winchelsea where I was to descend. I had given nine of the ten pounds to my mother. If I was to marry and become a subaltern I must needs smoke shag. And in a short clay pipe to give the fullest effect to retrenchment! Briars were then eighteenpence, short clays two for a penny.
That is my oldest literary recollection.
It is one of my most vivid. More plainly than the long curtains of the room in which I am writing I see now the browning bowl of my pipe, the singularly fine grey ashes, the bright placards as the train runs into the old-fashioned station and the roughnesses of the paper on which there appeared the words…
So you see, darling, there is really no fear…
I suppose they are words that we all write one day or another. Perhaps they are the best we ever write.
The fascicle of Kipling stories had a blue-grey paper cover that shewed in black a fierce, whiskered and turbaned syce of the Indian Army. I suppose he was a syce, for he so comes back to me. At any rate that cover and that Mohammedan were the most familiar of objects in English homes of that day. You have no idea how exciting it was then to be eighteen and to be meditating writing for the first time ‘there is really no fear’ … And to know that those blue-grey booklets were pouring from the press and all England buzzing about them. Alas…
The whole of England has never since buzzed over a book or a writer. I daresay it never will. Those were proud times for England!
Years after – fifteen, I daresay – I was going up the narrow cobbled street that led to the Master’s house at the top of the pyramidal town when I met Mr and Mrs Kipling hurrying down. They appeared to be perturbed.
Conrad and I had gone in from Winchelsea to Rye to hire a motor-car. We must have sold something. In those days the automobile was a rapturous novelty and when we had any buckshee money at all it went in hiring cars. It would cost about £6 to go eighteen miles with seventeen breakdowns and ourselves pushing the car up most inclines.
Conrad had a passion for engineering details that I did not share and he had gone in search of a car as to which he had heard that it had some mechanical innovation which he desired to inspect. I knocked therefore on the door of Lamb House, alone.
Lamb House was a majestic Georgian building of the type that Henry James had gone to England more especially to seek. Its best front gave on to the garden. The garden had an immense smooth lawn and was shut in by grey stone walls against which grew perennial flowers. It contained also a massively built white-panelled pavilion. In that, during the summer at least, the Master usually sat and worked.
In Rye church you could see the remains of a criminal hung in chains. It was that of a murderer, a butcher, who set out to kill a Mr Lamb and killed a Mr Greville. Or it may have been the other way round. Rye Town was prouder of its murderer than of its two literary lights, Fletcher and Henry James, but he always seemed to me to have been a clumsy fellow. Lamb House had belonged to the family of the gentleman who was – or wasn’t– killed. But Henry James most gloated over the other legend according to which the house had been occupied by a mistress of George IV. The king, sailing down channel on a battleship, was said to have been rowed ashore to visit the lady in the garden pavilion. I always used to wonder at the prodigious number of caps, gloves, canes and hats that were arranged on a table – or it may have been a great chest – in the hall. How, I used to say to myself, can he need so prodigious a number of head-coverings? And I would wonder what thoughts revolved in his head whilst he selected the cap or the stick of the day. I never myself possessed more than one cloth cap at a time.
When I was admitted into his presence by the astonishingly ornate man-servant he said:
‘A writer who unites – if I may use the phrase – in his own person an enviable popularity to – as I am told – considerable literary gifts and whom I may say I like because he treats me’ – and here Mr James laid his hand over his heart, made the slightest of bows and, rather cruelly rolling his dark and liquid eyes and moving his lower jaw as if he were rolling in his mouth a piquant titbit, Mr James continued, ‘because he treats me – if again I may say any such thing – with proper respect’ – and there would be an immense humorous gasp before the word ‘respect’ – … ‘I refer of course to Mr Kipling… has just been to see me. And – such are the rewards of an enviable popularity! – a popularity such as I – or indeed you my young friend if you have any ambitions which I sometimes doubt – could dream of far less imagine to ourselves – such are the rewards of an enviable popularity that Mr Kipling is in the possession of a magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car. And, in the course of conversation as to characteristics of motor cars in general and those of the particular one thousand two hundred guinea motor car in the possession of our friend… But what do I say? … Of our cynosure! Mr Kipling uttered words which have for himself no doubt a particular significance but which to me at least convey almost literally nothing beyond their immediate sound … Mr Kipling said that the motor car was calculated to make the Englishman …’ – and again came the humorous gasp and the roll of the eyes – ‘was calculated to make the Englishman … think.’ And Mr James abandoned himself for part of a second to low chuckling. ‘And,’ he continued, ‘the conversation dissolved itself, after digressions on the advantages attendant on the possession of such a vehicle, into what I believe are styled golden dreams – such as how the magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car after having this evening conveyed its master and mistress to Batemans Burwash of which the proper pronunciation is Burridge would tomorrow devotedly return here and reaching here at twelve would convey me and my nephew William to Burridge in time to lunch and having partaken of that repast to return here in time to give tea to my friend Lady Maud Warrender who is honouring that humble meal with her presence tomorrow under my roof … And we were all indulging in – what is it? – delightful anticipations and dilating on the agreeableness of rapid – but not for fear of the police and consideration for one’s personal safety too rapid – speed over country roads and all, if I may use the expression, was gas and gingerbread when… There is a loud knocking on the door and – avec des yeux éffarés …’ and here Mr James really did make his prominent and noticeable eyes almost stick out of his head … ‘in rushes the chauffeur… And in short the chauffeur has omitted to lubricate the wheels of the magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car with the result that its axles have become one piece of molten metal… The consequence is that its master and mistress will return to Burwash which should be pronounced Burridge by train, and the magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car will not devotedly return here at noon and will not in time for lunch convey me and my nephew William to Burwash and will not return here in time for me to give tea to my friend Lady Maud Warrender who is honouring that humble meal with her presence tomorrow beneath my roof or if the weather is fine in the garden…’
‘Which,’ concluded the Master after subdued ‘ho, ho, ho’s’ of merriment, ‘is calculated to make Mr Kipling think.’
‘Rye,’ say the women of Kent, ‘is the sink-hole of Sussex and Sussex is the sink-hole of England.’ That is because Rye was once a great mercantile and naval port and Sussex a great maritime county. The men from adjacent Kent, as is the case with men from the hinterlands of Hongkong or San Francisco or Aden or Cardiff, would go into Rye and get among the bad gels, Saturday nights. They also say when counselling their daughters: ‘Ye see yon man, ’a cooms from Soossex, ’a sucked in silliness with his mother’s milk an ’s been silly ever since. But never you trust a man from the Sheeres!’ The Sheeres are the Shires – all the rest of England – Hampshire, Wiltshire, Devonshire, Buckinghamshire, Shropshire. So it is Kent and Sussex against the Rest, as cricketers say.
It is great attraction to strangers and foreign settlers when places have these prominent rivalries. You feel really settled when you can despise a neighbouring city, and James living at Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, was infinitely a Sussex man when he met that true Man of Kent, Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski, who lived at Pent Farm, Postling, Kent. In just the same way he was inordinately a Rye man two miles away in Winchelsea. I can still see his sturdy form as arrayed in a pea-jacket which nobly enhanced his bulk, wearing one of his innumerable cricket-caps, emphasising his steps and the cadences of his conversation by digging his cane into the road he stumped under the arch of the sea-gate up the hill into Winchelsea, lugging behind him on a ten yard leather lead his highly varnished dachshund, Maximilian. The dog would gyrate round his master. Mr James would roll his eyes: he would be slightly out of breath. There would be a gentle snifter of rain: he only, for reasons I will later explain, came to Winchelsea in the late autumn and winter. In the great square, round the great half fallen church the rain would run in light drifts. He would dig his cane point into the grass between the cobbles and exclaim: ‘A Winchelsea day, my dear lady. A true Winchelsea day … This is Winchelsea … Poor but proud.’ Waspishly patriotic we would point to the red-roofed pyramid across the Marsh and exclaim:
‘That’s your Rye. It’s pouring there …Rye…Not rich but dirty.’
These were the only occasions on which we stood up to the Master. And he never heard. He would scuttle off towards tea, dragged forward by Maximilian who scented the little hot buttered tea-cakes called fat rascals.
We would have tea in a frame house. It might have been Canaan, New Hampshire. The house had been built in 1782 by General Prescott, the first Governor-General of Canada … In exact imitation of a Canadian frame house, just as the fat rascals were exactly like the little hot biscuits you get in farmhouses, now, in Tennessee. The General had been homesick for Canada.
Winchelsea had that North American feature. It had others. The streets were all rectangular, like those of New York, and the houses in blocks. That was because it had been built all of a piece by Edward III in 1333. He had planned it, ruling squares on a sheet of vellum, after the sea had drowned Old Winchelsea on the flats below. It is exhilarating to stand in the heart of a town and gaze out into the country. I have felt the same exhilaration in both Winchelsea and New York. It is fascinating to be able, on Fifth Avenue, to see on the one side the Palisades and on the other the cross-street giving a view of the sky above the East River. In Winchelsea, standing in the heart of the town you could see on the one hand the green heights of Udimore, on the other the Marsh and the sea, and before your face, where the broad street ended in nothing, the red pyramid of Rye with its flashing weathercock a-top.
In the church were pews built of wood brought back from Plymouth by the Mayflower. That is the story. The wood was said to be tulip wood. Certainly it was no local wood and I found on seeing the tulip-wood panels of the offices of the S. S. McClure Co. in East Twenty Third Street, New York, that those panels much resembled the wood. That would be in 1906. Someone told me the other day that tulip wood is too soft for interior decorations, but in Sam McClure’s office it was very pretty. The softer body of the wood had, I believe, been burnt out, leaving hard, as it were, lace-patterns, like the fibres of skeleton leaves. The wood of the pews had the same lacey ridges. It is said that the mariners of the Mayflower had brought the timber back from the New England woods as souvenirs. When I lived in Winchelsea the wood was rapidly going back – to New England, Missouri, Wisconsin, Seattle, Spokane and Winchelsea, Mass. In addition a dim-sighted Early Victorian Rector – the same who had the fourteenth century stained glass broken out of the windows because it prevented his reading the words of ‘Lead Kindly Light’ – had had most of the pews removed from the chancel to make way for deal missionary-chairs. So between the purblind ecclesiastic and the sharp penknives of the souvenir hunters, remembrances of Plymouth were waning in the Antient Town.
There were, however, a number of Plymouth Brothers there. They used to pray for my conversion – from literary pursuits. It was queer, of a Sunday afternoon, to hear oneself prayed for by name.
I cannot now remember whether I met Henry James before Conrad but I think I did. I remember at any rate that I felt much younger when I at last went to see him than I did when Conrad first came to see me. I was in those days of an extreme shyness and the aspect of the Master, bearded as he was then and wearing, as he habitually did in those days, a great ulster and a square felt hat, was not one to dissipate that youthful attribute. I must have been seeing him in the streets of Rye on and off for eighteen months after Mrs W. K. Clifford had asked me to go and see him. The final pressure put on to do so had by then become considerable.
The adoration for Henry James amongst his relatively few admirers of those days was wonderful – and deserved. And I imagine that his most fervent adorers were the Garnett family of whom the best known member is today Mr Edward Garnett, the publisher’s reader who first advised a publisher to publish Conrad. In those days it was Dr Richard Garnett whose reputation as Principal Librarian of the British Museum was world wide. He had a number of sons and daughters and, for a long time, I was in and out of the Garnetts’ house in the Museum courtyard every day and all day long. Their hospitality was as boundless as it was beneficent.
The public opinion, as it were, of the younger Garnetts must have had a great effect in shaping my young mind. In one form or other it made for virtue always – in some members for virtue of an advanced and unconventional type, in others for the virtues that are inseparable from, let us say, the Anglican communion. The elder Garnetts at any rate had a strong aversion from Catholicism.
Mrs W. K. Clifford, a by no means unskilful novelist of those days, had put pressure upon me to go and see James. She was, I think, his most intimate friend. He corrected the manuscripts of almost all the books of Mrs Humphry Ward, an act of great generosity. Of Mrs Ward he always spoke as: ‘poor dear Mary’ with a slightly sardonic intonation. But I remember his saying several times that he had a respectful, if he might so call it, affection for Mrs Clifford. Therefore, when the Master, for reasons of a rather painful disillusionment, decided to leave London almost for good, Mrs Clifford was greatly concerned for his health and peace of mind. She urged me very frequently to go and see him so that she might be posted as to his well or ill-being. I remained too shy.
Then, hearing that James was almost permanently fixed at Rye, the young Garnetts who knew that I paid frequent visits to the next door town began to press me in their turn to call on their cynosure. Their admiration for him was so great that merely to know someone who knew the Master would, it appeared, ease their yearnings. They admired him above all for his virtue. None of his books so much as adumbrated an unworthy sentiment in their composer; every line breathed of comprehension and love for virtue.
For myself, I disliked virtue, particularly when it was pressed between the leaves of a book. I doubt if, at that date, when I was twenty-three or four, I had read anything of his, and the admiration that was wildly showered from Bloomsbury in the direction of Rye made me rather stubbornly determined not to do so for some time. I daresay I was not a very agreeable young man. But unbounded admiration quite frequently renders its object disagreeable to outsiders. Boswell must have alienated quite a number of persons from Johnson and I have known a great many distinguished figures that would have been better off without surroundings of awed disciples who hushed roomsful when the genius gave signs of desiring to speak. James suffered a great deal from his surroundings.
My resistance broke down eventually with some suddenness. James, who was always mindful of his health, had written a distressing letter to Mrs Clifford – about his eyes, I think. Mrs Clifford had influenza. She sent me three telegrams the same day begging me to go and see the Master and report to her. I sent him a note to ask if I could visit him, mentioning that Mrs Clifford desired it.
I do not imagine that Mr James had the least idea what I was, and I do not think that, till the end of his days, he regarded me as a serious writer. That in spite of the fact that subsequently during whole winters we met almost daily and he consulted me about his most intimate practical affairs with a touching trustfulness in my savoir faire and confidence in my discretion. He was however cognisant of my ancestry and of the members of my grandfather’s and father’s circles – whom he much disliked. He thought them Bohemian. I, on the other hand, considered myself as belonging, by right of birth, to the governing classes of the artistic and literary worlds. I have said that I was not an agreeable young man.
I don’t mean to say that I talked about my distinguished relatives, connections or family intimates. But I am now conscious that I acted and spoke to others as if my birth permitted me to meet them as equals. Except for the King and my colonel on parade I do not know that I ever spoke to anyone except on that basis. On the other hand I never spoke even to a charwoman on any other. I have, however, always had a great respect for age if accompanied with exceptional powers.
I certainly felt not infrequently something like awe in the presence of James. To anyone not a fool his must be a commanding figure. He had great virility, energy, persistence, dignity and an astonishing keenness of observation. And upon the whole he was the most masterful man I have ever met.
On that first occasion he was bearded, composed and magisterial. He had taken the house of the vicar furnished and had brought down his staff of servants from de Vere Gardens. At lunch he was waited on by his fantastic butler. The fellow had a rubicund face, a bulbous red nose, a considerable paunch and a cutaway. Subsequently he was to become matter for very serious perturbation to his master.
His methods of service were startling. He seemed to produce silver entree dishes from his coat-tails, wave them circularly in the air and arrest them within an inch of your top waistcoat button. At each such presentation James would exclaim with cold distaste: ‘I have told you not to do that!’ and the butler would retire to stand before the considerable array of plate that decorated the sideboard. His method of service was purely automatic. If he thought hard about it he could serve you without flourishes. But if his thoughts were elsewhere the flourishes would return. He had learnt so to serve at the table of Earl Somebody – Brownlow, I think.
At any rate James seemed singularly at home where he was. He was well-off for a bachelor of those days when £400 a year was sufficient for the luxurious support of a man about town. You might have thought that he was in his ancestral home, the home itself one of some elegance in the Chippendale-Sheraton-Gainsborough fashion. He had the air of one of the bearded elder-brother statesmen of the court of Victoria, his speech was slow and deliberate, his sentences hardly at all involved. I did not then gather anything about the state of his eyes.
He was magisterial in the manner of a police-magistrate, civil but determined to receive true answers to his questions. The whole meal was one long questionnaire. He demanded particulars as to my age, means of support, establishment, occupations, tastes in books, food, music, painting, scenery, politics. He sat sideways to me across the corner of the dining table, letting drop question after question. The answers he received with no show at all of either satisfaction or reproof.
After the meal he let himself go in a singularly vivid display of dislike for the persons rather than the works of my family’s circle. For my grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, and for my father he expressed a perhaps feigned deference. They were at least staid and sober men, much such as Mr James affected and believed himself to be. Then he let himself go as to D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, Swinburne, my uncle William Rossetti, Holman Hunt, the painter of the Light of the World, Watts Dunton and all the rest of the pre-Raphaelite circle. D. G. Rossetti he regarded with a sort of shuddering indignation much such as that he devoted, subsequently, to Flaubert – , and for much the same reason. When he had called on Rossetti the painter had received him in his studio wearing the garment in which he painted, which James took to be a dressing-gown. It was a long coat, without revers, like a clergyman’s, and had extremely deep vertical pockets. These Rossetti used for the keeping of his paint-rags.
For Mr James the wearing of a dressing-gown implied a moral obloquy that might end who knows where? And he deduced from the fact that Rossetti received him at tea-time in what he took to be such a garment that he was disgusting in his habits, never took baths, and was insupportably lecherous. He repeated George Meredith’s account of the masses of greasy ham and bleeding eggs which Rossetti devoured at breakfast.
He mimicked the voice and movements of Swinburne with gusto. He let his voice soar to a real falsetto and jerked his body sideways on his chair extending his hands rigidly towards the floor below his hips. He declared that Swinburne’s verse in its flood and noxiousness was only commensurate with the floods of bad chianti and gin that the poet consumed. He refused to believe that Swinburne in those days, under the surveillance of Watts Dunton, drank no more than two half pints of beer a day. And he particularly refused to believe that Swinburne could swim. Yet Swinburne was one of the strongest salt water swimmers of his day. One of Maupassant’s contes tells how Swinburne’s head with its features and hair of a Greek god rose from the sea beside the French writer’s boat three miles out in the Mediterranean and how it began gloriously to converse. And so conversing Swinburne had swum beside the boat to the shore. No doubt Maupassant had his share of a poet’s imagination. But Swinburne certainly could swim. He was also a remarkably expert skater.
My Uncle, William Rossetti, Mr James considered to be an unbelievable bore. He had once heard that Secretary to the Inland Revenue recount how he had seen George Eliot proposed to by Herbert Spencer on the leads of the terrace at Somerset House. The Inland Revenue headquarters is housed in that building and the philosopher and the novelist were permitted by the authorities there to walk as a special privilege.
‘You would think,’ Mr James exclaimed with indignation, his dark eyes really flashing, ‘that a man would make something out of a story like that: but the way he told it was like this’: and heightening and thinning his tones into a sort of querulous official organ Mr James quoted: ‘“I have as a matter of fact frequently meditated on the motives which induced the lady’s refusal of one so distinguished; and after mature consideration I have arrived at the conclusion that although Mr Spencer with correctness went down upon one knee and grasped the Lady’s hand he completely omitted the ceremony of removing his high hat, a proceeding which her sense of the occasion may have demanded…” Is that,’ Mr James concluded, ‘the way to tell that story?’
I did not again see Mr James, except in Mrs Clifford’s drawing room, for several years. Then, when I had settled into residence in General Prescott’s frame house, I went to see him with Conrad when we went to hire the automobile.
CHAPTER II
PERSONAE …
Winchelsea stands on a long bluff, in shape like that of Gibraltar. Two miles of marsh separate it from Rye. Once it was sea where the Marsh now is: one day it will be so again. When it was sea all the navies of England could ride in that harbour. And the Five Ports and the two Antient Towns provided all the navies of the king of England. As against certain privileges. A Baron of the Cinque Ports can still drive through all toll-gates without payment and sell in all markets toll-free.
