Ford was the grandson of a fine old Pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown, so there was that to be lived up to, or got away from. He was tall, blond, and vacuous-looking in his youth, and as the years passed and he drank more he became very stout. He was compared to a white whale, a behemoth, an English squire, Falstaff, Lord Plush-bottom.
His father was a German musicologist. Ford was educated partly in France and Germany, and he always thought out his novels in French. All his family lived for music, painting, and language. Whatever the disappointments, nothing else could be truly worth the doing. During his whole life Ford worked unremittingly to support himself and others by writing, but he was not a person who could ever make money. In a sense, he scarcely needed it. It was there to be lent, or borrowed, as fate decided. Ford needed luxury (good wine, food, and conversation) but not comfort. In the shabbiest lodgings he could maintain his grand manner.
Ford married in 1894, when he was only twenty years old, and it was in those early penniless days that he met Joseph Conrad, whose ideas stayed with him for the rest of his life. In 1908 he was editor of the influential English Review. In 1909 he left his wife, Elsie, and their two daughters. He was ordered to pay them a weekly maintenance, refused on principle, and spent eight days in Brixton jail. From 1911 onward he lived with the sharp-tongued literary hostess Violet Hunt. She desired to marry him, and he extricated himself with difficulty. When World War I broke out he joined the army (he was over forty), and came back from the battle of the Somme shellshocked. In 1918 he was lucky enough to meet an Australian painter, Stella Bowen, who was prepared to live with him in a remote, rat-infested cottage in Sussex and to bear him a third daughter. In the 1920s they decamped to Paris, where Ford edited The Transatlantic Review, getting contributions from Conrad, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Joyce, Paul Valéry, and William Carlos Williams.
Ford was less lucky in meeting the waiflike Jean Rhys, whose talent he encouraged (he was a great encourager). She described their affair, without forgiveness, in her novel Quartet. As Alan Judd shows in Ford Madox Ford, at all times he was surrounded by friends, who sometimes became enemies, and always he found ways to be hospitable. At fifty-six he found, or was found by, his last lover, the American Janice Biala. He had always been more appreciated in America than elsewhere and lived for years in the United States. But eventually he took his new wife back to Europe. He had been driven, he said, by an overwhelming nostalgia for French cooking. But time had run out. His health declined rapidly on the voyage to France, and he died on 26 June 1939, in a clinic in Deauville, at the age of sixty-five.
Ford conducted his life unwisely. To explain him is exceptionally difficult because he was a shape-shifter, giving a series of contradictory versions of himself to anyone who would listen. For mere facts, he said, he had a profound contempt. ‘What he is really,’ said H. G. Wells, ‘or if he is really, nobody knows…and he least of all.’ At heart he saw himself as the gallantly uncomplaining English gentleman of his finest novels, the victim of ruinous women or of some guileless-seeming manipulator, like the narrator of The Good Soldier. Yet Ford was overcome by little worries; he was prone to nervous collapse; he wept on the shoulders of others. Often he was not taken seriously. His devotion to literature was absolute, but he was, perhaps, a holy fool on a large scale.
The standard biography up till now—though not the only one—has been The Saddest Story, by Arthur Mizener (1971). Mr Judd acknowledges Mizener’s work and follows his chronology, but doesn’t agree with what he calls Mizener’s negative interpretation of Ford. In fact, Mr Judd’s fiercely energetic, absorbing book is in part a defence of Ford against Mizener. It starts unexpectedly with the words ‘There are also the rich in spirit.’ Although he can hardly claim that Ford was a happy man, he refuses to consider him a failure: ‘The point, surely, is that he was a writer. It doesn’t matter what else he was or pretended to be—pig farmer, country gentleman, cook, man-about-town, editor, man of letters, soldier, cricket enthusiast…If anyone was ever sent into the world to be something, Ford was; and he achieved it.’
Ford started by collaborating with Conrad, then turned to light novels and historical fiction. The Good Soldier came out in 1915. After the war came the brilliant Parade’s End tetralogy, then reminiscences, essays, criticism, A History of Our Own Times. Mr Judd covers as much of this as he can, and quotes rather too much of Ford’s tepid poetry.
He seems, in fact, prepared to defend almost everything Ford wrote but settles, as he is bound to, for the novels. Between 1906 and 1908 Ford brought out a trilogy, The Fifth Queen, based on the marriage of Catherine Howard and the ageing King Henry VIII. To Mr Judd this is one of the best historical novels in the language. But The Fifth Queen could not hope to compete with bestsellers by people like Rider Haggard or Robert Louis Stevenson, who had said that historical romance should appeal to our ‘nameless longings’ and provide the adult version of child’s play.
That was not at all the sort of thing Ford could do. Conrad and he had agreed that the general effect of fiction must be ‘the effect life has on mankind.’ This Ford believed could be achieved not by either romance or realism but by re-creating states of mind. These, of course, can be deceptive, as they are in The Good Soldier, a story of two married couples and a young girl—well-off, respectable, and supposed to be good friends. Only gradually does it show itself to be what Ford first wanted to call it, ‘The Saddest Story,’ a frightening pattern of love and death. Those who have ‘heart’ are perhaps better human beings, but they are liable to grotesque disasters. A good deal is asked of the reader, who is led through dazzling shifts of time and viewpoint, without hope of finding a final solution, since Ford believed that ‘there is in life nothing final.’
When Mr Judd tells us that ‘it is better to read and re-read Parade’s End rather than read about it,’ it is clear that he himself is something much more genial than a literary critic. He is, in fact, a novelist himself and, on the evidence of this book, a tolerant man, sympathetic to human passions and dilemmas and to commonplace human embarrassments. Accordingly, he is particularly good on the subject of ‘Ford’s women’ (they were known as that). Ford was successful with women, Mr Judd thinks (in a way that astonished James Joyce), because he liked them, and needed to talk to them. They didn’t expect him to provide, but knew he would give. Did he enjoy sex? ‘It may be that what he most sought was the emotional intensity, intimacy and dependence engendered by sexual relationships rather than sex itself.’ The keynote of Ford’s character, as Mr Judd sees him, is generosity. For this all his shortcomings, even his disregard for truth, must be forgiven.
Mr Judd provides his book with few notes and no references, telling us that Ford cared nothing for such things. This, I think, was a mistake, but in every other way he is the reader’s good friend, persuading, lecturing a little, and bringing his subject unforgettably to life. ‘Not,’ he says, ‘that complete understanding is possible; the point is to get as near to it as we can, to know all that can be known in order to stand, if only for a moment, at the edge of what cannot.’
New York Times Book Review, 1991
A Student of Obliteration
An introduction to The World My Wilderness, by Rose Macaulay
Rose Macaulay was born in 1881, and died in 1958. As a young woman she went bathing by moonlight with Rupert Brooke, and she lived long enough to protest, as a well-known author and critic, against the invasion of Korea. The World My Wilderness was published in 1950, when she was thought to have given up fiction, not having written a novel for nearly ten years.
The book disturbed her readers, because it was not what they expected. The most successful of her early novels had been social satires. They were delightful to read, and still are, brilliantly clear-sighted without being malicious (or at least more malicious than necessary) but they took a detached view; humanity was so misguided that one must either laugh or cry, and Rose had felt it best to laugh. The World My Wilderness showed that the power of
ridicule, after all, was not the most important gift she had.
Rose Macaulay herself was most characteristically English, tall, angular, and given to wearing flat tweed caps, or hats like tea cosies—English, too, in her gaiety and wit which, at heart, was melancholic. But almost any conclusion you came to about her would be wrong. From the ages of six to thirteen she had grown up with her brothers and sisters in a small fishing town on the Genoese coast, and this interlude of scrambling about the Mediterranean hills and foreshore was as important to her as all her English education. Again, Rose was often thought to be sexless, or, as Rosamond Lehmann put it, ‘sexless though not unfeminine.’ But in fact she had, at the age of thirty-six, fallen irretrievably in love with a married man, Gerald O’Donovan, and in spite of much heart-searching she never broke with her lover till the day of his death. Both these episodes have a good deal to do with the writing of The World My Wilderness.
The book’s seventeen-year-old heroine Rose herself described as ‘rather lost and strayed and derelict.’ Barbary Deniston has grown up in wartime Occupied France, only half attended to by her worldly, sensual charmer of an English mother. This mother, Helen, has been divorced from Deniston, and her second husband, ‘an amiable, thriving French collaborator,’ is dead. Meanwhile Barbary and her stepbrother have lived in and out of the house as children of the Maquis, trained by the Resistance in sabotage and petty thieving. Like Auden’s boy with a stone, Barbary has never heard of any world where promises were kept. When she is sent from her fishing village to the respectable Deniston relatives in London, she is doubly lost. Like seeking like, she escapes from pallid WC2 to join the drifters and scroungers in the bombed area round St Paul’s, where ‘shrubs and green creeping things ran about a broken city.’ ‘Here, its cliffs and chasms seemed to say, is your home; here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world.’ Ironically enough she begins housekeeping at once, tidying and cleaning the gaping ruins of a church. She is not a wanderer by nature, it is only that she needs a home that she can trust.
In Rose Macaulay’s earlier novels, notably Crewe Train (1926) and They Were Defeated (1932), there are young girls of Barbary’s sort, precociously adult, and yet clinging for reassurance to childhood. Many have names that could be either masculine or feminine (Denham, Julian, Evelyn), as though rejecting all society’s definitions. All of them are unwilling exiles from some lost paradise. They remember sunshine and freedom, as Rose remembered her Italy. But in this story of the 1940s, the world that Barbary longs for and looks back to is a black-marketing France. The paradise itself is corrupt. And the civilization to which she is packed off is an equally shabby affair. Deniston, the honourable man, is an odd man out in post-war London. His son Richie describes himself as a ‘gentle, civilised, swindling crook’ who by bending the law a little—as all his friends do—hopes to make himself a comfortable life. Barbary is no doubt right, on the beach at Collioure, to examine the word civilization ‘and to reject it, as if it were mentioned too late.’ In any society, she will remain a barbarian. The novel’s painful question is: what have we done to our children?
The war years had brought deep personal trouble to Rose. In 1939 she was responsible for a serious car crash in which her lover was injured. In 1941 her flat was bombed and she lost nearly everything she possessed. In 1942 Gerald O’Donovan died, and Rose entered her own wasteland of remorse. How much could be forgotten, and how much could she forgive herself? In spite of this, or more probably because of it, she is more compassionate in this novel than in any other. To be self-satisfied, to be stupid, to be cruel (Rose had always said) is undesirable, if we are to consider ourselves civilized, but at the same time she was not at all easily shocked. Asked on one occasion by a question-master whether she would prefer death or dishonour she replied: ‘Dishonour, every time.’ And The World My Wilderness is remarkable for the pleas in mitigation she makes for all her characters. Helen has no conscience, it seems to have been left out of her, but she creates pleasure for others. Deniston is stiff, bland and resentful, but his integrity must count for something. Richie is a young aesthete who prefers to withdraw rather than to be too much involved, but then he has been fighting through three years of ‘messy, noisy and barbaric war.’ Mrs Cox, the housekeeper, can’t distinguish—which of us can?—between interference and what, to her, are good intentions. Even Pamela, Deniston’s second wife, wholesome tweedy Pamela (‘all Pamela’s clothes were good, of the kind known as cheaper in the end’), Pamela the young committeewoman, not at all Rose’s favourite kind of person, redeems herself by suffering with dignity. If there is a responsibility to judge these people the author is asking us to share it.
In the same way, every turn of the story brings a different confrontation, genial against sceptical, honourable against amoral, will against emotion, rough against smooth, wild against tamed. And these encounters, too, are left unresolved. In the closing chapters, for instance, Helen comes back to London. At the Denistons’ house she takes command, a supremely inconvenient guest. Her motives, as we have to admit, are generous. But poor Pamela has to hold her own against the sumptuous intruder. The contest of possessiveness, jealousy, and genuine love is so finely balanced that most readers would be hard put to it to say exactly where their sympathies lie. Rose has written the novel in terms of comedy, but all the satirist’s air of knowing what’s best for everybody has gone. Indeed there is, perhaps, no ‘best’ for any of them.
Rose Macaulay liked to insist that ideas for novels came to her as places—‘backgrounds’ would hardly be a strong enough word for them. In The World My Wilderness (if we take the ‘respectable, smoke-dark houses’ of London as a kind of negation of place) we have three of them—Collioure in the South of France, Arshaig in the Western Highlands, and the wilderness itself. Each corresponds to its own moral climate. Collioure is described in the most seductive terms. ‘The cool evening wind rustled in the cork forest, crept about the thymey maquis; the sea, drained of light, was a wash of blue shadow, sparked by the lights of fishing boats putting out for the night’s catch.’ By day, the Villa Fraises offers serene warmth and relaxation for all comers, but always with a hint of excess. The garden is ‘crowded,’ Helen ‘lounged her days away,’ the most striking of her pictures is ‘a large nude who was a French mayor, reclining on a green sofa with a blue plate of strawberries in his hand; the flesh tones were superb.’ Arshaig is equally beautiful, but austere, with misty dawns and steel-pale water, and at the shooting lodge are a whole family of Barbary’s relations, ‘formidably efficient at catching and killing Highland animals.’ But in saying this Rose reminds us that there has also been killing and hunting—of men as well as animals—in the forests of Collioure, ‘savageries without number,’ from the days of the Saracens to the Gestapo and the Resistance.
And on the beach there Barbary and Raoul had stood watching the fish in the nets as they struggled, leaped and died.
Barbary herself becomes a creature of the wilderness, the ruins of the city of London. In 1950 the rubble was still lying where it had fallen, carpeted with weeds and inhabited by rats and nesting birds. The whole area fascinated Rose—how much, can be felt in the lyrical opening to Chapter Eighteen. To her they were the new catacombs. ‘I spent much of today in the ruins round St Paul’s, which I like…part of my new novel is laid in this wrecked scene,’ she wrote to Gilbert Murray.1 Many people must still remember, as I do, the alarming experience of scrambling after her that summer (she made no distinction of age on her expeditions) and keeping her spare form just in view as she shinned undaunted down a crater, or leaned, waving, through the smashed glass of some perilous window. Foxgloves, golden charlock, and loosestrife were flourishing everywhere they could take root in the stones, but Rose did not sentimentalize over the wild flowers. It was not man’s business, in her view, to abandon what he has won from nature. She was studying obliteration.
Descended from hist
orians, trained as a historian herself, she makes the ruins into something more than a metaphor for Barbary’s desolate state; they give the novel a dimension in time. They are still alive with the indignation of all the generations who have lived and done business in the city, or worshipped in its fallen churches. ‘The ghosts of churches burnt in an earlier fire, St Olave’s and St John Zachary’s, the ghosts of taverns where merchants and clerks had drunk’ all haunt their old precincts, even under the midday sun, so do the long-dead clerics and shopkeepers themselves. When Barbary is on the run, the phantoms of five centuries of London crowd together to watch, from their vanished buildings, the pitiful end of the chase. They are not sympathetic, they want her caught. History, as might be expected, is on the side of authority.
At the end of the book Richie is seen alone on the brink of the ‘wrecked scene,’ and the squalor in front of him makes him feel sick. He reflects that ‘we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones’, quoting The Waste Land, from which Rose took one of the novel’s epigraphs (she wrote the first one herself).2 But The Waste Land is also a fitful quest for spiritual healing, and Richie, in the end, takes the track from Moorgate Station ‘across the wilderness towards St Paul’s.’ This is one of several hints in the book of a religious solution, or, at least, of curiosity about one, even though Barbary and Raoul perceive that ‘if there is anything, there must be hell. But one supposes there is nothing.’
The World My Wilderness is, in fact, not a pessimist’s book—heartfelt, yes, but pessimistic, no. However faulty the main characters may be, there is one striking fact about them; their mistakes are not the result of caring nothing about each other, but of caring too much. It is because he still loves Helen that Deniston fails to forgive her, and Helen herself learns in the end not only how much she loves her daughter, but a way to help her. ‘She must have sunshine, geniality, laughter, love; and if she goes to the devil she shall at least go happily, my little savage.’ This is probably the best that Helen can do. And if the inhabitants of this earth, in spite of the mess, the slaughter and the desolation they cause, can give up so much for each other, they must be redeemable. In the last resort, Rose Macaulay thought so. And she was, as her novel shows, too much interested in human beings to lose faith in them.
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