Ford Madox Ford – Page 9 – Reconstructionary Tales

Seeing again, making it new

Inheritors

Re-reading an early Ford Madox Ford work recently, I noticed that, while my scrappy and often baffling notes from the previous reading ran to little more than a page, I now have something over ten pages of extracts, cross-references and occasionally more general comments. Should I be impressed or anxious? Was it admirably thorough or mildly deranged? Clearly, this reader had changed substantially in the intervening period and, to that extent, the book itself was changed. Curious, since it had seemed stable enough in its hard covers, more than a century old.

Yet – how stable, exactly, even at the most basic level? It was written by Ford Madox Hueffer, who would subsequently become (in 1919) Ford Madox Ford, in collaboration with Joseph Conrad, who had become a British subject in 1886 and was previously known as Konrad Korzeniowski. It was written when work on their initial collaborative venture, Romance, was already well-advanced but was completed and published first; an unsteady hybrid of science fiction, political satire and roman à clef, it concerned itself with nefarious dealings in a country—‘Greenland’—which was clearly in Africa and, pretty obviously, the Congo Free State of the rapacious King Leopold II of Belgium. As Ford recalled it more than twenty years later: ‘The novel was to be a political work, rather allegorically backing Mr Balfour in the then Government; the villain was to be Joseph Chamberlain who had made the [Boer] war.’[1]

Conrad_1904

(Joseph Conrad, 1904)

Stability. A key word for those that have followed, with bafflement or appalled disbelief, the mad pantomime of British politics over the past few months. In The Inheritors, we find: ‘I became conscious that I wanted to return to England, wanted it very much, wanted to be out of this; to get somewhere where there was stability and things that one could understand.’[2] Cue a pained smile. ‘Permanence? Stability? I can’t believe it’s gone’, a later Ford narrator lamented.[3] Of course, it was—it is—always already gone. . .

In any case, I find it an intriguing and curious business, this revisiting—of a place, a person, a painting, a book, a film, a piece of music—and finding it so changed. It’s commonplace and banal, yet enduringly mysterious and fascinating. There are, to be sure, many thousands of pages of philosophy, psychology, biology, neurology, physics, optics and more, devoted to just this phenomenon. We’re increasingly comfortable with the idea that the observer alters what is observed, that the slightest shift in position or perspective alters the thing seen. Some of us saw the intriguing 1974 Alan Pakula political thriller, The Parallax View, with Warren Beatty and Paula Prentiss, and looked up the meaning of the title. (‘Parallax, you see. Observed from different angles, Gestalts alter.’)[4] Fifty years before that, in 1923, Wallace Stevens published ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’.

Parallax_View_movie_poster

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying. [5]

A goodly proportion of those thousands of pages, though, can probably be reduced to just two words of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, panta rei, everything flows, flux and change as the essential characteristics of the world.[6]

T. S. Eliot used two quotations from Heraclitus to preface Four Quartets, the second of them translated as ‘The way up and the way down are one and the same’. Eliot wrote of being ‘much influenced’ by Heraclitus when younger and thought the influence a permanent one. The quotations were, he said, ‘a tribute to my debt to this great philosopher.’[7]

In Little Gidding, the last of the Quartets, Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.[8]

See it again but know it for the first time.

Stanley Spencer wrote of his celebrated painting, The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard: ‘The resurrection is meant to indicate the passing of the state of non-realization of the possibilities of heaven in this life to the sudden awakening to the fact. This is what is inspiring the people as they resurrect, namely the new meaning they find in what they had seen before.’[9]

The Resurrection, Cookham 1924-7 by Sir Stanley Spencer 1891-1959

(Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard, 1924-1927, © Tate Gallery)

That ‘awakening’ is, again, indissolubly linked to the familiar or, at least, to that which has been seen before. Much of Spencer’s art is ‘religious’ but very idiosyncratically so, ‘visionary’ rather, an art constantly linking back to his feelings about the village of Cookham and its people, his childhood and familial memories and sensations revisited, recaptured and reworked.

Time slips and eddies. We return, retrace, revisit and see again, in thought, in dreams, in conversation. Memories lose their edges, become indistinct, bleed into others. We can’t always predict what has taken root in the mind or the nerves, what doesn’t need to be consciously recovered, what can be held and turned in a glancing light and mysteriously made new.

I could not draw a map of it, this road,
Nor say with certainty how many times
It doubles on itself before it climbs
Clear of the ascent. And yet I know
Each bend and vista and could not mistake
The recognition, the recurrences
As they occur, nor where. So my forgetting
Brings back the track of what was always there
As new as a discovery.[10]

References

[1] Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), 133.

[2] Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 106.

[3] Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915; edited by Max Saunders, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13.

[4] Hugh Kenner, ‘Joyce on the Continent’, in Mazes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 114.

[5] Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 92, 94.

[6] ‘All things are a flowing,/ Sage Heracleitus says’, Ezra Pound wrote, adding: ‘But a tawdry cheapness/ Shall outlast our days.’ See Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, edited by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 186.

[7] The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 907. John Fowles offers: ‘The road up and the road down are the same road’, in The Aristos (London: Pan Books, 1968), the ‘original impulse’ for the book and ‘many of the ideas’ in it having come from Heraclitus (214).

[8] The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Volume I, 208. Another faint connection for John Fowles readers: this is the first marked passage in the poetry anthology which Nicholas Urfe finds on the beach, in The Magus (London: Pan Books, 1968), 60.

[9] Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 226, citing the Spencer collection in the Tate Archives, reference TA 733.3.1.

[10] Charles Tomlinson, ‘The Return’, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2009), 413.

Ford Madox Ford’s Fourth of August

Ford Madox Ford, 1915

The Good Soldier: Ford in 1915 by E. O. Hoppé: National Portrait Gallery via New York Review of Books

4 August commemorates not only a flurry of artistic birthdays—Shelley, Pater, W. H. Hudson, Knut Hamsun, Louis Armstrong—and a clutch of significant dates for relatives of artists—the wedding of D. H. Lawrence’s sister Ada, the birthday of Stanley Spencer’s sister Florence, the birthday of Violet Hunt’s sister Venice, named after The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin, her godfather—but, probably above all else, Britain’s 1914 declaration of war, Sir Edward Grey’s ultimatum to Germany having expired.

‘All that was left was to wait for midnight (eleven o’clock, British time). At nine o’clock the government learned, through an intercepted but uncoded telegram sent out from Berlin, that Germany had considered itself at war with Britain from the moment when the British ambassador had asked for his passports.’[1]

On the day that war was declared, the Bradford Daily Argus ‘suggested that “it will be in the kitchens that the pinch will be chiefly felt but that difficulty may be overcome by deleting the more dainty dishes”.’[2] An admirable prediction but, as things turned out, a little wide of the mark.

For readers of Ford Madox Ford, there are supplementary significances. In The Good Soldier alone, he mentions 4th August sixteen times; in other writings he refers to it more than a dozen times, frequently in conjunction with the name of the village of Gemmenich, the point at which German troops crossed the Belgian border that morning

blast1

The recurrence of the date in The Good Soldier is a well-established mystery. The novel was published in London and New York by John Lane, in March 1915. The first section of the novel, then still entitled ‘The Saddest Story’, had appeared in the June 1914 issue of Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex. Tantalisingly, although the published section includes one mention of ‘August’, the excerpt ends a chapter and a half before the novel’s first specific reference to 4th August, which comes at the very beginning of Part II of the published text.

We can’t be sure, and are unlikely to become so, exactly when the novel was finished. It seems likely that a coincidental mention of 4th August was, in the course of revision, and after the war had started, made central to the novel, as noted by two of The Good Soldier’s most recent editors.[3] As Martin Stannard remarks elsewhere, ‘Trying to reconstruct the textual history of a Ford novel is like trying to establish the details of a dream.’[4]

There are dreams enough in The Good Soldier. Early on in the novel, the narrator, in a wonderful passage, proposes to ‘imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.’[5] (As usual, I’m tempted to analyse and comment upon almost every word here with the possible exceptions of ‘at’ and ‘a’, though I’m not sure that even those can safely be left unexamined.) Spoken rather than written, an illusion maintained until very near the end (‘I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months after the words that end my last chapter’).[6] Intriguing, then, to find this:

‘But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist.—Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly. And I tell you I see that thing as clearly as if it were a dream that never left me.’[7]

Carcassonne

Carcassonne, late 19^th century: Fonds Eugène Trutat, via Wikipedia

And this, the wonderful conjunction of the specific (‘Carcassonne’) and the indefinite (‘some people’):

‘I don’t mean to say that I sighed about her or groaned; I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.

Do you understand the feeling—the sort of feeling that you must get certain matters out of the way, smooth out certain fairly negligible complications before you can go to a place that has, during all your life, been a sort of dream city?’[8]

Yes, suffice to say that there are plenty of mysteries and diversions in this short novel other than the date of its completion or its repeated reference to 4th August.

References

[1] Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August and The Proud Tower, edited by Margaret MacMillan (New York: Library of America, 2012), 155.

[2] Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 23.

[3] Ford, The Good Soldier, edited by Max Saunders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxxviii-xl; edited by Martin Stannard, second edition (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2012), 192-193 and ‘Textual Appendices’, 216, 220.

[4] Stannard, ‘The Good Soldier: Editorial Problems’, in Robert Hampson and Max Saunders (eds), Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 147.

[5] The Good Soldier, edited by Max Saunders, 18.

[6] The Good Soldier, 178.

[7] The Good Soldier, 89. The phrase ‘to make you see things clearly’ is a reference to Joseph Conrad’s ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”’, in Typhoon and Other Tales (New York: Signet Classics, 1962), 21.

[8] The Good Soldier, 97. See my ‘“Speak Up, Fordie!”: How Some People Want to Go to Carcassonne’, in Sara Haslam, editor, Ford Madox Ford and the City, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 4 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 197-210.

‘Here shall he see no enemy but winter and rough weather’

Marie_0009

(Our house in Queen’s Avenue, Singapore, 1960s)

‘It was a day in that season when the sun bolsters a fallen wing with a show of soaring, a day of heat and light. Light so massive stout brick walls could scarcely breast it when it leaned upon them; light that seemed to shiver windows with a single beam; that crashed against the careless eye like rivets.’[1]

No, never hot like that here; in any case, our weather is reverting to a more typical summer temperature: around 23C today (73.4F), after several instances lately of the level tipping over 30C. I noticed a few days ago that Arizona had registered 48C (118.4F) and wondered briefly how life forms other than cacti, rocks and sand could function in such heat, before recalling that people manage such temperatures well enough in large parts of the world: if anything, we’re the odd ones out, given our ‘temperate maritime’ climate. Then, too, I remembered landing at Tehran airport in nineteen sixty-something, when the temperature was in the region of 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the tarmac was sticking to our shoes.

Years ago, when I started researching the literature and history of, roughly, the 1890-1939 period, I would peer into the indispensable Annual Register. This told me that, in 1911, the thermometer at Greenwich reached 97F on July 22. I remember it mentioned the USA, ‘the intense heat of the summer, repeatedly passing 100F in New England and the Middle West’. On 9 August, the temperature over much of England reached 95F. at South Kensington it was 97F and at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, 100F – ‘the highest shade temperature ever registered in England’. That English summer was generally the hottest since 1868 and the sunniest on record, though those particular records only dated back thirty years.[2] Nowadays, we can point to Faversham, in Kent, in 2003: a champion 38.5C (101.3F).

Kenner

(Hugh Kenner)

Why 1911 in particular? Well, Ford Madox Ford published four books that year—though he did exceed that total on more than one occasion.[3] Also, I was intrigued by the unadorned assertion by Hugh Kenner that the summer of 1911 ‘was the hottest since 1453.’[4] Unadorned but not unreferenced: ‘Ford’s hyperbole’, Kenner’s note reads, ‘but Marianne Moore, in Paris with her mother, remembered that heat for 50 years. “One of the hottest summers the world has ever known.”’[5]

Ford’s hyperbole, no doubt, though the claim actually occurs in a book credited to the novelist Violet Hunt, Ford’s then lover. He does, however, contribute an introduction and two chapters, together with numerous footnotes in which he ‘corrects’ her statements. ‘So you have here a book of impressions,’ Ford writes in his introduction, carefully registering his admiration for ‘the kindly, careless, inaccurate, and brilliantly precise mind of the author’.[6]

VH_FMF_Selsey

(Ford and Violet Hunt at her cottage in Selsey)

Why 1453? Any personal significance as far as Ford is concerned escapes me for the moment. But it’s certainly a significant date in world history: the French victory at the Battle of Castillon effectively brought to an end the Hundred Years War, while the Byzantine Empire also came to a close when Constantinople fell to the forces of the Ottoman Empire.

As to the hot weather—though one person’s sweltering day is another’s mild one—while I get a bit twitchy in anything much more than twenty degree heat these days, as a child in Singapore, in a tropical climate, with a consistently high temperature (somewhere between high twenties and low-to-mid thirties Celsius, I’d say), together with very high humidity—and three times the average UK rainfall—I was fine. Fine? I was just dandy. In the afternoons, while the British civil servants worked in airy offices with huge ceiling fans and memsahibs lay on their beds under mosquito nets until it was time for tea, children my age rode their bicycles for miles or played cricket on concrete pitches. The weather was what it was and people acclimatised and adapted to it.

So it’s partly a matter of age; and partly that, while people will still remark on unusually hot or cold weather, for the most part, it’s accepted as something that can’t be changed and must be put up with. And in literature, it often becomes a metaphor for what is simply there. So Private Williams, in Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye, ‘accepted the Captain as fatalistically as though he were the weather or some natural phenomenon.’[7] Arnold Bennett’s Sophia ‘had accepted Gerald as one accepts a climate.’[8] And in D. H. Lawrence’s story about a fateful relationship between a Prussian captain and his orderly, ‘the officer and his commands he took for granted, as he took the sun and the rain.’[9]

Given the ending of that story, it was a little too much taken for granted, a little too much accepted. If in doubt—resist.

References

[1] Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989), 259.

[2] Annual Register, 1911, Part II, 29, 31, 32, 62.

[3] 1907, 1913 and 1915.

[4] Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 80.

[5] The Pound Era, 567. Kenner cites Moore’s interview in Paris Review, 26 (Summer-Fall, 1961), 46.

[6] Violet Hunt, The Desirable Alien, with two chapters by Ford Madox Ford (London: Chatto & Windus, 1913), 294, x.

[7] Carson McCullers, The Complete Novels (New York: Library of America, 2001), 390.

[8] Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908; Harmondsworth, 1983), 361.

[9] ‘The Prussian Office’, in D. H. Lawrence, The Collected Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence (London: William Heinemann, 1974), 91. With unfortunate timing, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories had been published on 26 November 1914, less than three months after the outbreak of war.

Vale, Ford Madox Ford

FMF-via_Arts_Desk

‘I am the Knight of London, your Majesty.’

‘London, London; where’s that?—I’ve never heard of it.’

‘London is the capital city of England.’

‘But where is England?’ she asked.

‘I had thought that every one had heard of England,’ he said. ‘However, as no report of England has ever reached your ears, I will tell your Majesty. The British Islands, of which England is one, are a set of small islands off the west coast of Europe. They are composed of England, Scot—’

But here the Princess interrupted him.—The Brown Owl (1891)

The only satisfactory age in England! … Yet what chance had it to-day? Or, still more, to-morrow? In the sense that the age of, say, Shakespeare had a chance. Or Pericles! or Augustus!

Heaven knew, we did not want a preposterous drum-beating such as the Elizabethans produced—and received. Like lions at a fair…. But what chance had quiet fields, Anglican sainthood, accuracy of thought, heavy-leaved, timbered hedgerows, slowly creeping plough-lands moving up the slopes? … Still, the land remains….

The land remains…. It remains! … At that same moment the dawn was wetly revealing; over there in George Herbert’s parish…. What was it called? … What the devil was its name? Oh, Hell! … Between Salisbury and Wilton…. The tiny church…. But he refused to consider the plough-lands, the heavy groves, the slow highroad above the church that the dawn was at that moment wetly revealing—until he could remember that name…. He refused to consider that, probably even to-day, that land ran to … produced the stock of … Anglican sainthood. The quiet thing!

But until he could remember the name he would consider nothing….

He said:

“Are those damned Mills bombs coming?”—A Man Could Stand Up— (1926)

Ford Madox Ford, novelist, poet, critic, editor, Englishman, Londoner and European (born in Merton, Surrey, 17 December 1873; died in Deauville, 26 June 1939).

Dawn chorus and aubades

Woken by the bird chorus at 04:15, I note that it’s a new record for this month, having previously been woken at 05:15 and 04:45. They’ll be waking me the previous evening before too long. Since we are still, so to speak, between cats, we have—with curious logic—set up a bird table in our small back garden. The regular visitors are blackbirds, blue tits, and beautiful—if omnivorous and scavenging—magpies, plus the occasional sparrow. Perhaps this dawn choir is an expression of avian gratitude.

Magpie_rspb.org

(Magpie via https://www.rspb.org.uk/ )

There was a distinct dawn-related genre in Provençal troubadour literature: the aube or aubade, poems or songs announcing, or in praise of, the dawn—though the Troubadour poets sometimes lamented the dawn’s arrival since it meant the parting of the lovers.

The appeal of first light (or, sometimes, darkness) has endured. Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ begins: ‘I work all day, and get half-drunk at night./ Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.’[1]

The first stanza of William Empson’s fine ‘Aubade’ runs:

Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.
My house was on a cliff. The thing could take
Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row.
Then the long pause and then the bigger shake.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.[2]

(Nine more stanzas with just a bare handful of run-on lines; also a quite intricate pattern of repetition.)

Empson_via_New_Directions

(William Empson via New Directions Publishing)

Ezra Pound’s second book, A Quinzaine for this Yule, was dedicated to ‘The Aube of the West Dawn’; he wrote and translated several aubades.

In No More Parades (the second of the volumes of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End), Sylvia Tietjens has turned up at the Rouen base camp where her husband Christopher is charged with moving troops up the line.

He added: “I shall have to be up in camp before four-thirty to-morrow morning. . . . ”
Sylvia could not resist saying:
“Isn’t there a poem . . . Ah me, the dawn, the dawn, it comes too soon! . . . said of course by lovers in bed? . . . Who was the poet?”
[ . . . ]
[Tietjens] then said in his leisurely way:
“There were a great many poems with that refrain in the Middle Ages…. You are probably thinking of an albade by Arnaut Daniel, which someone translated lately. . . . An albade was a song to be sung at dawn when, presumably, no one but lovers would be likely to sing. . . . ”
“Will there,” Sylvia asked, “be anyone but you singing up in your camp to-morrow at four?”[3]

The lines that Sylvia quotes are most likely from Pound’s ‘Alba Innominata’, a translation based on the anonymous Provençal poem, ‘En un vergier sotz fue’. Its five verses and ‘Envoi’ all end (apart from one slight variation) with the line ‘Ah God! Ah God! That dawn should come so soon!’[4]

Lark_in_Morning_

Ford and Pound had met in April 1909, through the novelist May Sinclair, and Pound’s third volume, Personae, appeared in that same month. His first important periodical publication in this country was in the pages of the English Review, edited by Ford: ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, in the issue of June 1909. ‘Alba Innominata’ was included in Pound’s next volume, Exultations, published in October 1909.

At the end of 1920, Pound and his wife Dorothy moved to Paris and, in late 1922, Ford and Stella Bowen also moved to France, first to St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, then Paris. In early 1925, they took a cottage in the village of Guermantes, about an hour’s train travel from Paris. No More Parades was begin in October 1924 and, in that same month, Pound and his wife Dorothy moved permanently to Rapallo, in Italy

Six years after his novel was published, Ford would recall Pound’s early years in London when the poet, ‘looking down his nose would chuckle like Mephistopheles and read you a translation from Arnaut Daniel. The only part of that albade that you would understand would be the refrain: “Ah me, the darn, the darn it comes toe sune!”’[5]

References

[1] Larkin, Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite (East St Kilda: The Marvell Press and London: Faber, 2003), 190.

[2] Empson’s poem is taken from Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950), 157.

[3] Ford, No More Parades (1925; edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2011), 134-135.

[4] Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations (New York: Library of America, 2003), 120; and see Richard Sieburth’s note, 1262.

[5] Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 388.

‘You can almost live upon a view. Almost.’

On 8 May 1923, Ford Madox Ford wrote to his partner—and mother of his third daughter, Julie—the painter, Stella Bowen. He was in Tarascon where he and Bowen had moved late the previous month; she was in Paris.

Stella_Bowen_Paris_1920s

(Stella Bowen; photographer unidentified: Australian War Memorial via Wikipedia)

Stella—an absolutely key figure in Ford’s story—was born Esther Gwendolyn Bowen in North Adelaide, 16 May 1893, (she died in 1947), and moved to England in 1914 after the death of her mother. She studied at the Westminster School of Art and was acquainted with a number of leading painters and writers before she met and fell in love with Ford. Their daughter Julie was born in 1920. Stella later wrote: ‘Julie had a troublesome birth in a London nursing home on November 29th. There seems to be a conspiracy of silence about the horrors of childbearing and a pretty legend that the mother forgets all about it as soon as it is over. The hell she does!’[1]

Ford and Bowen had left Sussex—and England—in late 1922, going firstly to Paris, then on to the Villa des Oliviers, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, owned by the poet and editor Harold Monro, who had rented it to them for just £7 a month. They reached the villa on 20 December: ‘perched between Nice and Monte Carlo’, it boasted a spectacular view.[2] ‘You can almost live upon a view’, Bowen later remarked of Coopers at Bedham, the Sussex cottage they had left behind. ‘Almost.’[3]

stellabowen-drawnfromlife

Stella had spent a couple of weeks with Dorothy Pound while Ezra was rooting about in archives in Rimini, researching the Malatesta Cantos. Joining the Pounds in Florence, she also saw paintings in Assisi, Arezzo, Cortona and Siena. Later that spring, Stella took painting lessons in Paris, where she saw the Pounds again and her confidence was badly shaken by Pound’s criticisms of her work and her views on painting.

ford-joyce-pound-quinn

(Ford, left, in Paris in 1923, next to James Joyce, Ezra Pound and the American lawyer and art collector John Quinn)

‘Let us begin with Ezra,’ Ford wrote to her. ‘His criticisms of yourself you simply should not have listened to: they arise solely from a frantic loyalty to W.[yndham] Lewis—and no doubt to Dorothy. He is in fact singularly unintelligent on the aesthetic side of any art—at any rate in conversation. It is only historically that he is sound about anything.—Of course if it doesn’t depress you too much it’s a good thing to listen to gramophonic records of Lewis’s dicta (in wh. Lewis himself doesn’t for a moment believe): but if you do get depressed by it, just don’t listen.’ A little later, he added: ‘Darling: I assure you that you have all the makings of an artist; the only thing you need being a certain self-confidence. If you would attain to that you would see that, even in your work as it is, there is the quality of serenity—of imperturbability’.[4]

Bowen_Villefranche_1923

(Villefranche by Stella Bowen, painted in Cap Ferrat, France, 1923: oil on wood panel 34.6 x 26.7 cm; private collection via Australian War Memorial)

Pound and Ford were, and remained, friends for thirty years, from their first meeting in April 1909 to Ford’s death in June 1939. They disagreed on a great many literary and artistic matters (among others), a state of affairs clearly indicated by a letter of August 1911 that Pound sent to his parents once he’d reached home after spending time with Ford in the German town of Giessen: ‘Back here at last. I had very little time to myself while with Hueffer, not that there was much work done, but we disagree diametrically on art, religion, politics & all therein implied’.[5]

Ford_Pound_Rapallo_1932

One other striking feature of this brief period in the Ford-Bowen relationship is just how unusual this sojourn in Italy and the weeks in Paris were for Stella. Until Ford began travelling frequently to the United States (around 1926 onwards), they were rarely separated but Bowen had very little time to devote to her own art, either producing it or studying other examples of it, always having to balance the two other major and time-consuming responsibilities in her life. One was caring for Julie and running the household—because the second, inextricable from the first, was enabling Ford to work: and a big part of that was keeping worries and problems, especially financial ones, away from him. It was not simply a matter of sexual politics—Ford was, in many ways, though not all, ahead of his time in this area—but rather that, firstly, the only money they earned was from Ford’s writing; and then, during these years, Ford was still suffering the after-effects of shell-shock and ‘the nerve tangle of the war’[6] which had impaired his memory. He was about to establish himself, or re-establish himself, as a major writer, with the publication of Some Do Not. . ., the first volume of his masterpiece, Parade’s End; but he was not there just yet. So Stella’s career suffered, certainly in those years, a casualty of Ford’s own: but with so little money available, and with a young child, it was not an easy situation to resolve. Ford was always highly supportive of Stella’s painting but, frequently shielded from anxieties—and thus enabled to work—by Stella’s efforts, he couldn’t quite see why she found it so difficult to do so.[7]

Stella_Bowen_SelfPortrait_c.1928

(Stella Bowen, Self-portrait, painted in Paris, c. 1928, oil on plywood,
45 x 36.8 cm, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, gift of Suzanne Brookman, the artist’s niece, 1999)

It was a busy day for Ford, that 8 May 1923. He also wrote (from the splendidly named Hotel Terminus in Tarascon) to his friend and fellow-writer Edgar Jepson, about the novel he’d recently completed, The Marsden Case, enclosing a copy of the book. ‘I hope you’ll like it. I believe that, as “treatment,” it’s the best thing I’ve done’.[8]

Fascinating and accomplished as that novel is, Ford was about to outstrip it to a remarkable degree. The MS of Some Do Not. . . ‘is inscribed as having been completed in “Paris 22.9.23”’—and it was published just over six months later.[9]

References

[1] Stella Bowen, Drawn From Life (1941; London: Virago Press, 1994, with a new introduction by Julia Loewe, Ford and Stella’s daughter), 73.

[2] Most of the Fordian biographical details (here and elsewhere) come from Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, two volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); here, II, 122-123, 127.

[3] Bowen, Drawn From Life, 78.

[4] Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, edited by Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 196, 197.

[5] Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and Joanna Moody, editors, Ezra Pound to his Parents: Letters 1895-1929 (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 257. Ford Madox Hueffer changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in June 1919.

[6] To H. G. Wells: Letters of Ford Madox Ford, edited by Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 154.

[7] There’s a great deal of interesting material on Stella and her relationship with Ford, including some rare images, in the recently-released documentary, It Was the Nightingale: The Unreliable Story of Ford Madox Ford, from Subterracon Films, produced by Paul Lewis, who also co-directed with Ryan Poe, with sound and film design by Kelley Baker: see http://www.subterracon.com/it-was-the-nightingale.html

For more on Stella, see Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky’s Lunch (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and Joseph Wiesenfarth, Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, Janice Biala (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), particularly strong on Stella’s painting. See also the Australian War Memorial site devoted to the retrospective exhibition of Stella’s work, Stella Bowen: Art, Love and War: see https://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/stella/

[8] Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 149.

[9] Ford, Some Do Not. . . (1924; edited by Max Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2010), lvii, lix, lxxxi.

A Note About Names

This blog’s name derives from the novelist (and poet, critic, editor, autobiographer, art critic) Ford Madox Ford, whose work occupies a good deal of my time. The subtitle of Ford’s No Enemy is ‘A Tale of Reconstruction’. Written for the most part in 1919, after Ford had left the British Army and was living in Sussex, it was finally published in 1929 in the United States: a British edition had to wait until 2002. The book is about the ‘reconstruction’ of a writer recovering from the stresses of the First World War: its writing helped reconstruct Ford himself. But in the year before its American publication, Ford published Last Post, the fourth and final volume of his postwar masterpiece Parade’s End. Last Post is also a ‘tale of reconstruction’, of the novel’s central character, Christopher Tietjens, but also of a version of England.

The word ‘tale’, apparently of Germanic origin, derives from the Old English talu, ‘telling, something told’. Like ‘story’, it can mean a fictitious rendering or an account of events or experiences. Those writers who use ‘tale’ to describe their work tend to be those whose material is slightly more exotic or fantastic: Dinesen, Kipling, Conrad. (This is the sort of generalisation that is both reckless and enjoyable to make.)

The entries here will conform, very roughly, in proportion to my conversations in an average day—about thirty per cent literature, thirty per cent politics, forty per cent the other stuff: food, wine, sex, television, film, paintings, work, friends, family, cats, gardens—with a bit less politics and a lot less personal stuff. Since a significant proportion of my political comments these days (at least in the privacy of my own home) consists of obscenity and pronounced astonishment at the general state of affairs in the contemporary world, a diminution of this seems advisable, politic even. As for the other stuff, since I don’t really share the widespread contemporary indifference to personal privacy, that will be subject to fairly rigorous selection.

So mainly literature; almost certainly; probably.