Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (9 page)

So the prose’s dividedness points us directly to the towering either/ors of the story: Ashburnham as good soldier or plundering shit; Leonora as marital martyr or vengeful destroyer; the narrator as honest misprisioner or complicit evader, timid domestic dormouse or repressed homoerotic swooner over Edward Ashburnham; and so on. There is the wider dividedness between social face and inner urging; between emotional expectation and emotional reality; between Protestant and Catholic (this last aspect seems rather underworked: it’s as if the Catholic element is mainly introduced to produce women of exceptional innocence and marital adhesiveness – and thus up the ante when they face the complexities and wiles of sex). Beyond this, the dividedness of the personality between the conscious and the unconscious mind. And beyond all this, the realisation that the answer to either/or may not be one or the other – is Ashburnham a deep sentimentalist, as Dowell
constantly, indeed infuriatingly, insists, or a ruthless sexual predator? – but both. At the end of the novel, Nancy Rufford briefly emerges from deep madness to utter the word ‘shuttlecocks’, which we understand as a brief lucid memory of how she has been treated by the Ashburnhams. It is also the way the reader has been treated, soaring high between opposing bashes.

Ford’s masterpiece is a novel which constantly asks how to tell a story, which pretends to fail at narrative while richly succeeding. It also openly doubts what we easily think of as character. ‘For who in this world can give anyone a character,’ Dowell asks at one point of Ashburnham (typically, there is a creak of the floorboard here as well: ‘give someone a character’ can mean ‘describe’, but also ‘give the social thumbs-up to’). Dowell’s answer to his own question is: ‘I don’t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case – and until one can do that a “character” is of no use to anyone.’ Ford later refined this line in his novel
The New Humpty-Dumpty
, where it comes from the Duke of Kintyre’s mouth: ‘ “Any man,” he said slowly, “is any sort of man, some time or another, you know.’ ” Ford’s approach is to get at character – and, more widely, truth – not just indirectly or contradictingly, but often by way of ignorance.

Some years ago, while writing about Ford, I ran into one of our better-known literary novelists, whose use of indirection and the bumbling narrator seemed to me to derive absolutely from Ford. I mentioned this (a little more tactfully than I have stated it here), and asked if he had read Ford. Yes, indeed he had. Would he mind if I mentioned this fact in my piece? There was a pause (actually a couple of days) before the reply: ‘Please pretend I haven’t read
The Good Soldier
. I’d prefer it that way.’

More recently, I was talking to my friend Ian McEwan, who told me that a few years ago he’d been staying in a house
with a well-stocked library. There he found a copy of
The Good Soldier
, which he read and admired greatly. A while later, he wrote
On Chesil Beach
, that brilliant novella in which passion, and Englishness and misunderstanding, lead to emotional catastrophe. Only after publishing the book did he realise that he had unconsciously given his two main characters the names Edward (as in Ashburnham) and Florence (as in Dowell). He is quite happy for me to pass this on.

So Ford’s presences, and subterranean influence, continue. I am not sure whether calling a novelist ‘undervalued’ helps or not. Perhaps it would do more good just to assume and assert Ford’s value. He is not so much a writer’s writer (which can suggest hermeticism) as a proper reader’s writer.
The Good Soldier
needs The Good Reader.

M
OST FRANCOPHILES, BESIDE
their general attachment to French customs and culture, have an additional fondness for a particular region or city: for landscapists it might be Burgundy, for monument-sniffers the Loire, for solitarists and hikers the Massif Central. Those who want to be reminded of a certain kind of England go for the Dordogne, where the
Daily Mail
is readily available. Many simply choose Paris, which might seem to sum everything up, and where – unlike in London – most people still have regional attachments as strong as their metropolitan ones. Ford Madox Ford lived in Paris off and on throughout the 1920s – editing the
Transatlantic Review
, living with the Australian painter Stella Bowen, having his affair with Jean Rhys, knowing Pound and Joyce and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, having the young Basil Bunting as his office boy. He enjoyed a full literary and social life in the (largely non-French) bohemia of Montparnasse. He once went up in a lift with Jean Rhys and James Joyce; despite his poor eyesight, Joyce managed to notice that Rhys’s dress was undone at the back, and hooked her up. And yet Ford, who wrote a book called
New York is Not America
, also knew that Paris is Not France. For him the real France was a region which official ‘France’ — northern, bureaucratic, centralising – had long ago conquered and attempted to both dismantle and dis-language: Provence.

His passionate attachment to the region came from his father, Francis Hueffer, music critic of
The Times
, who published a book on the Troubadours, and wrote Provençal poetry.
Hueffer knew Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914), the poet at the heart of the revival of Provençal, who in 1854 had set up the Félibrige with seven fellow poets, and an academy to codify the language (the result being the great dictionary known as
Trésor du Félibrige
). According to Ford, his father played chess with Mistral and was received into the Félibrige. According to Ford, the only two things his father taught him were ‘a very little Provençal’ and rudimentary chess. The phrase ‘according to Ford’ needs tacitly applying to much he wrote of an autobiographical nature (and there were eight such volumes), since he had a great contempt for fact and a countervailing belief in the ‘absolute accuracy’ of impressions. His lies grew perhaps ever more extravagant with time. According to Ford, the great chef Escoffier once said to him, ‘I could learn cooking from you’, while Henry James came to him, with tears in his eyes, asking for help with a plot. In
A Mirror to France
(1926), Ford explains how he had attended Dreyfus’s second trial at Rennes in 1899, and that ‘it was in the changing lights and shadows of that courthouse’ that he first ‘began to have a sense of the profound cleavage that was to come between opposing schools of French thought’. In fact, all that time he was busy on the Kentish coast collaborating with Conrad (nor is it remotely plausible that a French military court would have allowed him to be present). Faced with Ford’s multitudinous fabrications, his biographer Max Saunders rightly concludes that it is a question of ‘asking less whether what Ford says is
true
, and more what it
means
’.

Ford’s love of Provence can, however, be accorded the status of both a major fact and a lifelong impression. For some years he and Stella Bowen would head south by the overnight train from the Gare de Lyon. The rich and fashionable (including Florence Dowell in
The Good Soldier
) would take the famous Train Bleu, a privately run, first-class-only operation, whose passengers might dine beforehand at the restaurant of the same name, high overlooking the tracks, for a long time
the ritziest station brasserie in the world. Ford and Bowen would travel second class on the humbler 9.40. Nowadays the TGV from the Gare de Lyon will get you to Avignon in just over two and a half hours; then the city was reached after ten and a half hours, at about eight in the morning, with the ‘urgent muddy Rhône’ beside you and the first streaks of light in the sky. But there are advantages to slow travel, to the sense of changing landscape, to dozing off, and waking up, as Bowen put it, ‘amongst the pale olives, the dark cypresses, the grey rocks and the flat-roofed, flat-faced houses which in spite of their poverty and austerity seem to hold promise of a sweeter life within their dry old walls’.

Quite where Provence began was another of Ford’s variable facts. Sometimes he said it was at Lyon, at other times Valence or Montélimar. Perhaps it depended on when the train jogged him awake. The shape of it was always a triangle, with the Rhône wandering down the middle: a narrow one like a slice of Brie if Provence began at Lyon, a fatter, more equilateral one if it began lower down. The Rhône also divided what Ford thought of as the ‘true Provence’ of the east bank – where are found the three A-list cities of Arles, Avignon and Aix, plus Ford’s favourite town of Tarascon – from ‘the sort of quasi-Provence that contains Montpellier, Béziers, Carcassonne and Perpignan’ on the other side. This reflects the old division between the Empire or east bank and the Royaume or west. Thus, according to Ford, the most famous southern writer of the nineteenth century, Alphonse Daudet, ‘was not a true Provençal’, since he came from Nîmes, which ‘with all its charms’ – the Maison Carré, the bullfights, and ‘one memorable eating place’ – ‘is not true Provence’.

Ford and Bowen were first invited south to stay in the ‘magical’ yet at the same time ‘quite ordinary little villa’ of Harold Monro, founder of the Poetry Bookshop, in the winter of 1922–3. Next they tried Tarascon, from where he wrote
‘Life is so relatively cheap in France … that I shouldn’t wonder if we settled down here for good. Besides, the French make much of me – which at my age is inspiring.’ After a brief diversion into the wilder Ardèche, the Spanish Cubist Juan Gris and his wife Josette suggested Toulon, then as now a navy town, and therefore cheap. Bowen and Ford were similar, according to Stella, in that each was ‘a rolling stone with domestic instincts and a steady longing for a house, a garden and a view’. If they found this anywhere, they did so at Cap Brun outside Toulon, where they spent two winters, and whither Ford returned with Bowen’s successor after they had parted company. In her admirably sane, generous and un-Fordianly trustworthy memoir,
Drawn from Life
, Bowen analyses the spell Provence cast on them:

Life was cheap, and the more so because Ford was an enthusiastic kitchen gardener. He claimed to have studied under the great Professor Gressent in Paris, which is deeply improbable; though he at least read him, learning that ‘three hoeings are worth two coatings of dung’. But he combined science with superstition, never planting on a Friday or a 13th, but always on a 9th, an 18th or a 27th, and sowing seed only when the moon was waxing. He cultivated those Mediterranean items – aubergines, garlic, peppers – later introduced to the British by Elizabeth David. Bowen attests to Ford’s culinary skills, even if he ‘reduced the kitchen to the completest chaos’. He also took to the local wine. The delicate Gris said, ‘He absorbs a terrifying quantity of alcohol. I never thought one could drink so much.’ (Ford, who was a great layer-down of the law, assured James Joyce in a letter that ‘The primary responsibility of a wine is to be red.’) Meanwhile, Bowen discovered a small shop in Toulon selling nothing but different kinds of olive oil, to be tasted from a row of taps on a piece of bread – this at a time when the British were still pouring the stuff not into their mouths but into their waxed-up ears. And Ford liked the way he was treated in France simply for being a writer. Bowen describes the pleasure he felt on receiving a letter which began ‘
Cher et illustre Maître
’. According to Ford, when they moved into their house in Toulon, their landlord, a retired naval quartermaster, was so delighted to have a poet for a tenant that he drove a hundred and fifty miles to fetch him a root of asphodel – because asphodels grew on the Elysian Fields, and every poet must have ‘that fabulous herb’ in his garden. If only Ford hadn’t specified ‘a hundred and fifty miles’, we might be more inclined to believe him.

‘There are in this world only two earthly Paradises … Provence … and the Reading Room of the British Museum.’ Provence was not only itself, but also the absence of the North, where most human vices accumulated. The North meant
aggression, the Gothic, the ‘sadically mad cruelties of the Northern Middle Ages’ and the ‘Northern tortures of ennui and indigestion’. Ford was a great believer in diet and digestion as controllers of human behaviour (Conrad agreed, maintaining that the ‘ill-cooked food’ of Native Americans caused ‘raging dyspepsia’ and hence their ‘unreasonable violence’). South good, North bad: Ford was convinced that no one could be ‘completely whole either physically or mentally’ without ‘a reasonable amount of garlic’ in their diet, and equally obsessed with the malign effect of Brussels sprouts, an item of particular northern mischief. Provence was a place of good thoughts and moral actions, ‘for there the apple will not flourish and the Brussels sprout will not grow at all’. The North was also full of excessive meat-eating, which caused not just indigestion but lunacy: ‘Any alienist will tell you that the first thing he does with a homicidal maniac after he gets him into an asylum is to deliver, with immense purges, his stomach from bull-beef and Brussels sprouts.’ Another of Ford’s charmingly bonkers theories was about the grapefruit. The English translators of the Bible had been misguided in writing that Eve was tempted by an apple. The word they should have been aiming for was shaddock, another name for the grapefruit. Now, in Provence grapefruit grow abundantly, but are scorned by the inhabitants, who might occasionally use a little of the zest in cooking, but would routinely throw the fruit to the pigs. Since Provençals have never eaten of the grapefruit, therefore they have never fallen, therefore they live in Paradise, QED.