Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International)

by Julian Barnes

  Ford described himself as a ‘sentimental Tory’ who liked ‘pomp, banners, divine rights, unreasonable ceremonies and ceremoniousness’. He presented himself as a rather old-fashioned English officer and gentleman. His grandfather had ‘insisted characteristically that although one must know French with accuracy one must speak it with a marked English accent to show that one is an English gentleman. I still do.’ (But this being Ford, there is a contradictory explanation provided by Stella Bowen: his French sounded English because he never moved his lips enough.) The honourable, chivalric man, trying to do his best in a modern world which fails to recognise his virtues, is a recurrent figure in Ford’s work. And there is a quietly insistent chivalric element underlying The Good Soldier. The two couples at the heart of this story of destructive passion meet for the first time in the hotel restaurant of a German spa town. They find a table to suit them; it is round; Florence Dowell comments, ‘And so the whole round table is begun’– quoting Malory. She and her husband have visited Provence, ‘where even the saddest stories are gay’; and Dowell, the narrator, at one point tells, in his prosy, non-understanding way, the story of Peire Vidal. The Good Soldier of the title, Edward Ashburnham, is presented as an absolute English gentleman forever on a ‘feudal’ quest to help others; his ward, Nancy Rufford, who is in love with him, specifically links him to three chivalric figures of different cultures – Lohengrin, the Chevalier Bayard and El Cid. Dowell, who is in love with Nancy, explains himself with the novel’s famous, high-Romantic line, ‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.’ And at the end of the book, after the great emotional ‘smash’ is over, Dowell revisits Provence: ‘I have seen again for a glimpse, from a swift train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white tower, Tarascon with the square castle, the great Rhône, the immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed through all Provence – and all Provence no longer matters.’

  It no longer matters because its high-hearted truths have been shown to be deluded. Ford may have loved Provence and its golden mythology, but he was also a modern novelist, guided by the emotional truthfulness of Flaubert and Maupassant. He knew that ‘the saddest stories’ nowadays are rarely gay, but just very sad, if not murderously violent; and that any gaiety around is likely to come from misunderstanding and self-deception. He knew also that the human heart is ‘defective’. For all his convincing self-presentation as a moth-eaten old gent – E. M. Forster snootily called him ‘a fly-blown man of letters’, Paul Nash ‘Silenus in tweeds’ – Ford understood the modern world, and the new reality that opposed the past’s lingering myths. After all, in 1913, two years before The Good Soldier was published, he had visited the totemic city of Carcassonne, towards which Dowell and others feel such a romantic impulsion. And what had Ford discovered there? Snow and rabies.

  Ford’s Provence was an ideal lost world, a cradle of civilisation, and a reference point in his fiction. But the region contained more than just the past and present; it also suggested a possible future. In Provence (1935) Ford at one point asks to be regarded not as a moralist or historian, but ‘simply as prophet’. Civilisation is ‘staggering to its end’ and he wants to show ‘what will happen to it if it does not take Provence of the XIII century for its model’. Ford had seen service as a transport officer in the First World War, where he was gassed; and he spent his last twenty years (before his death in 1939) watching the grim chest-beating of nations and ideologies across Europe. He loathed empty-headed nationalism, violence, transnational standardisation, mechanisation, and most of the doings of financiers. He was also a writer, and thus a citizen not of any one country but of the world; and he wondered how that world might emerge from the great smash that was coming, and avoid further smashes. How might the human brute be tamed? Not by bigger groupings, by signing up to yet more overarching -ologies, by exterminating languages and individualisms. Perhaps, he thought, we should become local again, live in smaller communities, learn to avoid the hysterical clamourings of gangs and groups. This was the sort of life he imagined – and had found – in Provence. In The Great Trade Route (1937), he wrote:

  I live in Provence, but I can’t become a Provençal because that, as things go, would be to become French, and I don’t want to become French for reasons that would take too long to tell … No, I want to belong to a nation of Small Producers, with some local, but no national feeling at all. Without boundaries, or armed forces, or customs, or government. That would never want me to kill anyone out of a group feeling. Something like being a Provençal. I might want to insult someone from the Gard if he said he could grow better marrows than we in the Var. But that would be as far as even local feeling would go.

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

  FORD’S ANGLICAN SAINT

  IN 1927, FORD Madox Ford compared himself to a great auk, that clumsy North Atlantic penguin, hunted to death by the middle of the nineteenth century. The occasion was the reissue of his first masterpiece The Good Soldier (1915) – his ‘great auk’s egg’ – which he had published at the age of forty-one. Even back then, he maintained, he had felt like an ‘extinct volcano’, one who had had his time and was all too willing to hand over to the ‘clamorous young writers’ of the rising generation. But those new voices – Imagists, Vorticists, Cubists – had been blown away by the Great War, and somehow he was still around. And so, to his own surprise, ‘I have come out of my hole again’ to write more books … Such weary, genteel valetudinarianism was typical of Ford. When he died, Graham Greene wrote that it felt like ‘the obscure death of a veteran – an impossibly Napoleonic veteran, say, whose immense memory spanned the period from Jena to Sedan’.

  However, it was and is always a mistake to go along with Ford’s self-presentation. He appeared confused and was often confusing; he would say one thing and probably mean another, only to state its opposite as a counter-certainty not very long afterwards; he was fanciful, unreliable and exasperating. Some thought him simply a liar, though as Ezra Pound charitably pointed out to Hemingway, Ford ‘only lied when he was very tired’. So in 1927, for all his self-dismissingness, he was three-quarters of the way through what would become his second masterpiece: the four-book Parade’s End (1924–8). A novel which couldn’t be further from the work of some superannuated old buffer: in literary technique and human psychology, it is as modern and modernist as they come. And now that the years have shaken down, it is Ford who makes Greene look old-fashioned, rather than the other way round.

  The Good Soldier’s protagonist, Edward Ashburnham, was a version of the chivalric knight. Parade’s End’s protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, is a version of the Anglican saint. Both are great auks making do in a world of modernity and muddle. Tietjens – a North Yorkshireman whose ancestors came over with ‘Dutch William’ – believes that the seventeenth century was ‘the only satisfactory age in England’. He is ‘a Tory of an extinct type’ who has ‘no politics that did not disappear in the eighteenth century’. He reads no poetry except Byron, thinks Gilbert White of Selborne ‘the last English writer who could write’, and approves of only one novel written since the eighteenth century (not that we can read it, since it is by a character in Parade’s End). Both Ashburnham and Tietjens share a streak of romantic feudalism – nostalgia for a time of rights and duties and supposed orderliness. But Ashburnham is better fitted for the modern world, being – beneath his chivalric coating – a devious libertine and not outstandingly bright. Tietjens, by contrast, declares, ‘I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it.’ He is also highly intelligent, with an encyclopedic memory – ‘the most brilliant
man in England’, as we are frequently assured in the opening book, Some Do Not. This may be an advantage in the Imperial Department of Statistics, where he number-crunches for England; but isn’t such a good idea in the world he inhabits.

  There, intelligence is viewed as suspect and chastity weird; virtue as smugness, and saintliness a direct provocation. It is a great audacity for a novelist to begin a long novel with a main character whom very few other characters like, let alone admire. Tietjens is socially awkward, and emotionally reticent to the point of muteness: when, in the book’s opening action, his wife Sylvia, having left him four months previously, asks to be taken back, he ‘seemed to have no feelings about the matter’. He is ‘completely without emotions that he could realise’, and ‘had not spoken more than twenty words about the event’. Later, he is said to have a ‘terrifying expressionlessness’. Men sponge off him for both ideas and money; women on the whole find him rebarbative – ‘his looks and his silences alarmed them’. In the course of the novel he is variously compared to a maddened horse, an ox, a swollen animal, a mad bullock, a lonely buffalo, a town bull, a raging stallion, a dying bulldog, a grey bear, a farmyard boar, a hog, and finally a dejected bulldog. He is also likened to a navvy, a sweep, a stiff Dutch doll and an immense feather mattress. He is ‘lumpish, clumsy’, with ‘immense hands’. His wife constantly imagines him constructed from meal-sacks. Even Valentine Wannop, the spiky suffragette who is eventually to bring this Anglican saint a kind of salvation, initially finds him ‘as mad as he is odious’, with hateful eyes ‘protruding at her like a lobster’s’; she takes him for just another ‘fat golfing idiot’. Still, for all his apparent ineptness, there is one thing always to be said for Christopher Tietjens: he is very good with horses.

  Tietjens’s notions of love and sex – which you would not expect to be conventional – are summed up at one point as follows: ‘You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks to her.’ Which is the exact opposite of one conventional male view, in which ‘chatting up’ with luck leads to sex, and afterwards you wonder what to talk about. (Tietjens’s idea is a less engaging version of what Ford himself believed. As he put it, rather more sweetly, in propria persona: ‘You marry to continue the conversation.’) In Tietjens’s mind, it is ‘intimate conversation’ which leads to ‘the final communion of your souls … that in effect was love’. The sort of woman such an Anglican saint requires should be ‘passionate yet circumspect’. The second adjective is richly inappropriate for Sylvia, who first seduced him, very uncircumspectly, in a railway carriage.

  For Graham Greene, Sylvia Tietjens is ‘surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel’. A wife who is bored, promiscuous and up-to-date, tied to a husband who is omniscient, chaste and antique: there’s a marriage made in hell. Christopher is a mixture of chivalry and masochism (if it hurts, I must be doing the right thing); Sylvia a mixture of recklessness and sadism (if it hurts him, I must be doing the right thing). Christopher believes that a gentleman does not divorce his wife, however she behaves; though if she wants to divorce him, he accepts it. He also thinks of Sylvia as a ‘tremendous discipline’ for the soul – rather as being in the French Foreign Legion would be for the body. Sylvia for her part cannot divorce Christopher because she is a Catholic. And so the couple are bound together on a wheel of fire. And the torments she devises for her husband are of exquisite accuracy. When she was thirteen (we learn only towards the end of the fourth volume, Last Post) Sylvia idly imagined cramming a kitten’s paws into walnut shells; this shows great early skill of a sadic nature. Throughout the novel, she deploys the subtle rumour, the lie direct, and the vicious deed to visit on her husband a series of social, financial and psychological humiliations. Her final act of malignity is the cutting-down of the Great Tree of Groby at Tietjens’s ancestral home – ‘as nasty a blow as the Tietjens had had in generations’. Once, she had watched a fish eagle circling high above a scream of herring gulls, causing havoc by its mere presence; she liked and remembered this as a self-image. Still, for all her apparent viciousness, there is one thing always to be said for Sylvia Tietjens: she is very good with horses.

  Why, you may ask, does she persecute her husband? Or, more particularly, why continue, year after year, when she has many admirers, from young bucks to old generals, fawning on her, seeking both her love and her body? Part of the answer lies in Christopher’s very saintliness: the more he fails to respond and suffers without complaint, the more it goads her. He also infuriatingly attempts to see things from her point of view. What could be more enraging to a soul like Sylvia’s than to be understood and forgiven? And so, every time, she returns to the attack on her great meal-sack of a husband. She loathes him – for his gentlemanliness and solemnity, his passiveness, his ‘pompous self-sufficiency’, his ‘brilliance’ and the ‘immorality’ of the views which that brilliant mind emits. When her confessor, Father Consett, suggests that ‘Tout savoir, c’est tout pardonner’ she replies that ‘to know everything about a person is to be bored … bored … bored!’ Sylvia is bored by marriage, but even more bored by promiscuity. ‘All men are repulsive,’ she assures her mother. And, ‘man-mad’ though she appears, Sylvia treats her lovers with disdain: they are not even worth properly tormenting. ‘Taking up with a man’, she reflects, ‘was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with a man before you said: “But I’ve read all this before.” ’

  And this too, in a way, is her husband’s fault. Their relationship is not just about the infliction and the bearing of pain. Key to an understanding of Sylvia are those rare moments when Ford, a profound psychologist, allows us to consider that Sylvia is more than just a vengeful spirit possessed by evil. However infuriating Tietjens might be, however ‘immoral’ his views, he is the only truly mature man she has been with, the only one whose conversation can hold her: ‘As beside him, other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up.’ So he has spoiled her for all other men, and must be punished for it. The more so because he is the only one who can still move her. In the middle of France, in the middle of war, when a venomous old French duchess seems about to derail a wedding, Tietjens, applying intelligence, practicality and his ‘atrocious’ old-fashioned French, talks the woman down. Sylvia has been watching, and: ‘It almost broke Sylvia’s heart to see how exactly Christopher did the right thing.’ Two and a half novels later, when Tietjens is living with Valentine Wannop and Sylvia has almost reached the bottom of her bag of torments, she imagines confronting her husband’s mistress: ‘But he might come in, mooning in, and suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy – oh, adorable – face of stone.’ That ‘oh, adorable’ says it all. As far as Sylvia can love, she loves Tietjens; and her rage at him is a function of sexual passion. She still desires him, still wants to ‘torment and allure’ him; but one of the Anglican saint’s conditions for her return to the marriage is that he will not sleep with her – a torment in riposte.

  As all this suggests, the emotional level of the novel is high, and often close to hysteria. There is scarcely a character in the book – except, perhaps, Marie-Léonie, the Frenchly practical mistress of Christopher’s brother Mark – who is not described at one time or another as being mad, or on the verge of madness. Only one – Captain McKechnie – seems positively certifiable, but for most, ‘normality’ means a kind of nerve-strained semi-madness. We might expect, for instance, that Valentine Wannop, the emotional counterweight to Sylvia, the virgin to her adulteress, who shares much with Tietjens – they are both Latinists with ‘bread-and-butter brains’, both ‘without much of the romantic’ to them, both lovers of frugality – that she at least would have a healthy mind in her undoubtedly healthy body. But even she finds her nerves constantly on edge and her mind slipping: her head ‘seems to contain two balls of strings being separately unwound’. At one point, she barks an order to her own panicky thoughts: ‘Steady the Buffs!’ The mind at
work is like a regiment under fire, and about to relocate; but where is it going, and who is leading it, and will it survive?

  The middle two volumes of the novel are spent at the Western Front. Other, more conventional novelists might have set the madness of war against the calm and balm of love and sex; Ford knows more and sees deeper. War and sexual passion are not opposites: they are in the same business, two parts of the same pincer attack on the sanity of the individual. It is not at first obvious the extent to which Parade’s End is saturated with sex – with memories of it, hopes for it and rumours about it. (The novel is masterly on the workings of gossip, and the way it gets poisonously out of hand. By the fourth volume, the rumours about the Tietjens brothers have grown to the point where the pair of them are viewed as ‘notorious libertines’ and Mark said to be dying of syphilis. The objective reader can count the number of women the brothers appear to have slept with in their entire lives: three between the two of them.) The central emotional and sexual vortex is that involving Sylvia, Christopher and Valentine. But the lives of lesser characters, even those who are specks at the periphery of the reader’s vision, are also endlessly disrupted and twisted by sex. There is O Nine Morgan, who applies for home leave because his wife is having an affair with a prizefighter; Tietjens, having heard that the boxer will kill Morgan if he turns up in Wales, refuses the request. So, instead of being beaten to death, O Nine is blown to bits in the trenches: sex gets him either way. Elsewhere, sergeants’ wives take up with Belgians; a cook ruins his career by going AWOL because of his ‘sister’; an RSM wants a commission because the ‘bad boys’ who ‘monkey’ with his wild daughter back home will be more careful if she’s an officer’s daughter; while Captain McKechnie keeps getting home leave to divorce, and then not divorcing (‘That’s modernism,’ growls General Campion). Sylvia’s brusque view of the military is that ‘You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women.’ She regards the war as an agapemone (a place where free love is practised), and as ‘an immense warlock’s carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties’.