Complete works of ford m.., p.885
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 885
The relationship of Karain to the Rescue is obvious. For two years Conrad carried the idea of the novel about with him and then, after the publication of the Nigger by Heinemann in 1898, he definitely sketched the plot of the Rescue to Heinemann himself. On this sketch he obtained one of his advances from that kindly man. Immediately afterwards he began his first draft of the novel....
That advance remained an old man of the mountain for years and years. There were the glorious schemes, for finishing off such and such a book by such and such a date, and then quickly writing two or three stories like Gaspar Ruiz for a periodical that paid great prices, thus getting free for ever of indebtedness!... Then there came always the grim remembrance: “There’s that advance of Heinemann’s on the Rescue....” That no doubt rather hypnotised his will when he attacked, as he constantly did, that particular book. He made at least six separate beginnings of a chapter or a chapter and a half each, with every different kind of arrangement of paragraphs and openings. At last, towards 1906, Conrad, in one of his crises of re-arrangement had got his affairs nearly straightened out. He then once more remembered with despair Heinemann’s advance which, together with the Rescue itself had remained out of sight for four or five years. So the writer said to Conrad: “You’d better give me those manuscripts and let me put together some sort of a beginning for you.” Conrad was then wrestling with the opening chapter of Chance which he expected with any luck to finish, slight affair as it was going to be, in about three months. It was actually finished seven years later.
Openings for us, as for most writers, were matters of great importance, but probably we more than most writers realised of what primary importance they are. A real short story must open with a breathless sentence; a long-short story may begin with an ‘as’ or a ‘since’ and some leisurely phrases. At any rate the opening paragraph of book or story should be of the tempo of the whole performance. That is the règle generale. Moreover, the reader’s attention must be gripped by that first paragraph. So our ideal novel must begin either with a dramatic scene or with a note that should suggest the whole book. The Nigger begins:
“Mr. Baker, chief mate of the Narcissus, stepped in one stride out of his lighted cabin into the darkness of the quarter-deck....”
The Secret Agent:
“Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law....”
The End of the Tether:
“For a long time after the course of the steamer Sophala had been altered....”
this last being the most fitting beginning for the long-short story that the End of the Tether is.
Romance, on the other hand begins:
“To yesterday and to to-day I say my polite vaya usted con dios. What are those days to me? But that far-off day of my romance, when from between the blue and white bales in Don Ramon’s darkened store-room in Kingston....”
an opening for a long novel in which the dominant interest lies far back in the story and the note must be struck at once.
The Inheritors’ first lines are, as has been already quoted:
“‘Ideas,’ she said. ‘Oh, as for ideas...’”
an opening for a short novel.
Conrad’s tendency and desire made for the dramatic opening: the writer’s as a rule for the more pensive approach, but we each, as a book would go on were apt to find that we must modify our openings. This was more often the case with Conrad than with the writer since Conrad’s books depended much more on the working out of an intrigue which he would develop as the book was in writing: the writer has seldom begun on a book without having, at least, the intrigue, the ‘affair,’ completely settled in his mind.
The disadvantage of the dramatic opening is that after the dramatic passage is done you have to go back to getting your characters in, a proceeding that the reader is apt to dislike. The danger with the reflective opening is that the reader is apt to miss being gripped at once by the story. Openings are therefore of necessity always affairs of compromise.
The note should here be struck that in all the conspiracies that went on at the Pent or round the shores of the Channel there was absolutely no mystery. We thought just simply of the reader: Would this passage grip him? If not it must go. Will this word make him pause and so slow down the story? If there is any danger of that, away with it. That is all that is meant by the dangerous word technique.
Tremendous readers both of us, we tried to gather from the books we had read what made one book readable and the other not: English gentlemen of the Palmerston days, there was no nonsense about us: we tried to turn out the sort of book that — from Lady Audley’s Secret to Boswell’s Johnson, and from Midshipman Easy to... Education Sentimentale, the English gentleman might read in his library, with the cedar trees on the lawn outside it — or the flag lieutenant in harbour, during the dogwatches.
We had the intimate conviction that two and only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst. The very worst, securing immediate attention by way of some trick, gradually fade from the public memories; the very best, being solid and ship-shape productions of solid and ship-shape men with no nonsense about them, remain. We attempted then to turn out solid and ship-shape books.
There was really nothing more to it, Conrad being the more solid, the more ship-shape and the more determined of the two, the writer being the more tenacious.... “You have a perfect right to say that you are rather unchangeable,” Conrad wrote not long before his end, “Unlike the serpent (which is Wise) you will die in your original skin.”... That is to say that the writer never made concessions. We elaborated certain principles and the writer saw to it that we did work along those lines: Conrad would occasionally try to rush a position, being worn out by the long drag of work. That is why the ends of his books have sometimes the air of being rather slight compared with the immense fabrics to which they are the appendages. In effect, Conrad was the more determined — to get something done; the writer, more listless, never cared much whether a thing were done or not. He insisted, however, that if it were done it should be done to contract.
It was a combination not really unfortunate. The cases must be rare in which one man of letters can have had at his disposal for a number of years the whole brain of another man of letters of an unpliant disposition. Conrad so had the writer’s. For it was quite definitely the writer’s conviction that the only occupation fitting for a proper man in these centuries is the writing of novels — and that no novel worth much could be written by himself or any other man — at any rate, by himself — before he has reached the age of forty. So till he had attained that age the writer was determined never to attempt the production of anything that was not either a pastiche or a tour de force — just for practice in writing. One must roll one’s hump around the world first.... Thus, rather listlessly and a little disdainfully, from time to time the writer turned out historical novels — which were received with very great acclamations — and books of connected essays that were received with acclamations almost greater. But the writer was not disturbed: a historical novel even at the best is nothing more than a tour de force, a fake more or less genuine in inspiration and workmanship, but none the less a fake. Even Salammbo is that. A book of connected essays... well, it is not a novel! In addition the writer did attempt two pastiches in the manner of Mr. Henry James, written, one of them as a variation on a book of essays to give the effect of a tour in the United States — an international affair. The other was the product of an emotion, as you get over things by writing them down in your diary.
From time to time gentlemen of the Press anxious to depreciate the writer have said that he imitated the work of Conrad. This was not the case. It is a curious characteristic of the work of Conrad that, not only can you not recognisably imitate it, you hardly ever feel even the impulse to do so, and the one writer who really sedulously be-aped the more exotic romances of the author of An Outpost of Progress achieved performances so lugubrious that he seems to have warned off any other imitators of his example. The fact is that Conrad, like Turgenev, is very little mannered; his temperament had no eccentricities that could be easily imitated; his vocabulary was as much the result of difficulties as of arbitrary selection; his cadences were so intimately his own that they were practically unimitable. The writer probably more than any other man must have had opportunities of studying the way prose came to Conrad but the writer does not remember more than three sentences that he ever wrote — apart from sentences that he actually composed for Conrad himself — in which he either consciously tried for some purpose or other to get the cadence of a sentence of Conrad’s, or as to which he felt, after having written them, the satisfaction which he might imagine himself feeling if he had written a Conrad sentence. If the accusation had been of imitation of Mr. Henry James it might have been just enough, though a pastiche is not exactly the same thing as an imitation — being an exercise in the manner of a writer rather than an attempt to make a living by concealed plagiarism....
Still, whatever may have been the writer’s occupations, he was ready to be pulled off them at any moment at the instance of Conrad’s necessities. And this probably was of service to the author of the Rescue.... As regards the opening of that book the writer very well remembers how the re-arrangement was made.... In all Conrad’s drafts the opening was dramatic. In most of them it began with a speech of Tom Lingard’s, one of them with the words: “You’ve been sleeping — you. Shift the helm. She has got stern way on her.” One version even began as far back, in the book as it stands at present, as an interview between Lingard and Mrs. Travers.... Conrad had meant that to be the dramatic opening: in that case he would have had to introduce an immense retrospection giving the biographies of Lingard, of Carter, of the Travers, of Jaffir, of the Malay serangs... of everybody and everything.
On the impracticability of that we both agreed and the writer took the various drafts away to Aldington to study. A good many of the drafts that the writer made opened with a passage of description: “Out of the level blue of a shallow sea Carimata raises a lofty barrenness of grey and yellow tints, the drab eminence of its arid heights,” the writer thinking that a slow passage of geographical significance ought, logically, to open what seemed likely to be a very long book. Then one day it occurred to him to ask: “Why, after all, not have a historical opening and so avoid, later on, the necessity to slow the story down in order to get in the history?” So at the opening, at any rate of one draft, of chapter two, he found the passage beginning: “The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings.”
And all this passage seeming to him to be admirable, beautiful and engrossing prose, it struck him that it might be relied on at once to grip the reader’s attention and to give the note of the coming story. So in the Rescue you have the opening historical passage; the geographical passage and then Lingard’s words:
“‘You’ve been sleeping — you. Shift the helm. She has got stern way on her.’”
II
It might be as well here to put down under separate headings, such as Construction, Development and the like, what were the formulæ for the writing of the novel at which Conrad and the writer had arrived, say in 1902 or so, before we finally took up and finished Romance. The reader will say that that is to depart from the form of the novel in which form this book pretends to be written. But that is not the case. The novel more or less gradually, more or less deviously lets you into the secrets of the characters of the men with whom it deals. Then, having got them in, it sets them finally to work. Some novels, and still more short stories, will get a character in with a stroke or two as does Maupassant in the celebrated sentence in the Reine Hortense which Conrad and the writer were never tired of — quite intentionally — misquoting: “C’était un monsieur à favoris rouges qui entrait toujours le premier....” He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.... That gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need know no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once. That is called by the official British critics the static method and is, for some reason or other, contemned in England.
Other novels, however, will take much, much longer to develop their characters. Some — and this one is an example — will take almost a whole book to really get their characters in and will then dispose of the ‘action’ with a chapter, a line, or even a word — or two. The most wonderful instance of all of that is the ending of the most wonderful of all Maupassant’s stories, Champs d’Oliviers which, if the reader has not read he should read at once. Let us now take a heading. (This method has the advantage that the lay reader who cannot interest himself in literary methods and the Critic-Annalist whose one passion is to cut the cackle and come to the horses can skip the whole chapter, certain that he will miss none of the spicy tit-bits.)
General Effect
We agreed that the general effect of a novel must be the general effect that life makes on mankind. A novel must therefore not be a narration, a report. Life does not say to you: In 1914 my next door neighbour, Mr. Slack, erected a greenhouse and painted it with Cox’s green aluminium paint.... If you think about the matter you will remember, in various unordered pictures, how one day Mr. Slack appeared in his garden and contemplated the wall of his house. You will then try to remember the year of that occurrence and you will fix it as August 1914 because having had the foresight to bear the municipal stock of the city of Liège you were able to afford a first-class season ticket for the first time in your life. You will remember Mr. Slack — then much thinner because it was before he found out where to buy that cheap Burgundy of which he has since drunk an inordinate quantity though whisky you think would be much better for him! Mr. Slack again came into his garden, this time with a pale, weaselly-faced fellow, who touched his cap from time to time. Mr. Slack will point to his house-wall several times at different points, the weaselly fellow touching his cap at each pointing. Some days after, coming back from business you will have observed against Mr. Slack’s wall.... At this point you will remember that you were then the manager of the fresh-fish branch of Messrs. Catlin and Clovis in Fenchurch Street.... What a change since then! Millicent had not yet put her hair up.... You will remember how Millicent’s hair looked, rather pale and burnished in plaits. You will remember how it now looks, henna’d: and you will see in one corner of your mind’s eye a little picture of Mr. Mills the vicar talking — oh, very kindly — to Millicent after she has come back from Brighton.... But perhaps you had better not risk that. You remember some of the things said by means of which Millicent has made you cringe — and her expression!... Cox’s Aluminium Paint!... You remember the half empty tin that Mr. Slack showed you — he had a most undignified cold — with the name in a horse-shoe over a blue circle that contained a red lion asleep in front of a real-gold sun....
And, if that is how the building of your neighbour’s greenhouse comes back to you, just imagine how it will be with your love-affairs that are so much more complicated....
Impressionism
We accepted without much protest the stigma: “Impressionists” that was thrown at us. In those days Impressionists were still considered to be bad people: Atheists, Reds, wearing red ties with which to frighten householders. But we accepted the name because Life appearing to us much as the building of Mr. Slack’s greenhouse comes back to you, we saw that Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render... impressions.
Selection
We agreed that the whole of Art consists in selection. To render your remembrance of your career as a fish-salesman might enhance the story of Mr. Slack’s greenhouse, or it might not. A little image of iridescent, blue-striped, black-striped, white fish on a white marble slab with water trickling down to them round a huge mass of orange salmon-roe; a vivid description of a horrible smell caused by a cat having stolen and hidden in the thick of your pelargoniums a cod’s head that you had brought back as a perquisite, you having subsequently killed the cat with a hammer, but long, long before you had rediscovered her fishy booty.... Such little impressions might be useful as contributing to illustrate your character — one should not kill a cat with a hammer! They might illustrate your sense of the beautiful — or your fortitude under affliction — or the disagreeableness of Mr. Slack, who had a delicate sense of smell — or the point of view of your only daughter Millicent.
We should then have to consider whether your sense of the beautiful or your fortitude could in our rendering carry the story forward or interest the reader. If it did we should include it; if in our opinion it was not likely to, we should leave it out. Or the story of the cat might in itself seem sufficiently amusing to be inserted as a purposed longueur, so as to give the idea of the passage of time.... It may be more amusing to read the story of a cat with your missing dinner than to read: “A fortnight elapsed....” Or it might be better after all to write boldly: “Mr. Slack, after a fortnight had elapsed, remarked one day very querulously: ‘That smell seems to get worse instead of better.’”
Selection (Speeches)
That last would be compromise, for it would be narration instead of rendering: it would be far better to give an idea of the passage of time by picturing a cat with a cod’s head, but the length of the story must be considered. Sometimes to render anything at all in a given space will take up too much room — even to render the effect and delivery of a speech. Then just boldly and remorselessly you must relate and risk the introduction of yourself as author, with the danger that you may destroy all the illusion of the story.
Conrad and the writer would have agreed that the ideal rendering of Mr. Slack’s emotions would be as follows:
