Complete works of ford m.., p.886
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 886
“A scrawny, dark-brown neck, with an immense Adam’s apple quivering over the blue stripes of a collar erected itself between the sunflower stems above the thin oaken flats of the dividing fence. An unbelievably long, thin gap of a mouth opened itself beneath a black-spotted handkerchief, to say that the unspeakable odour was sufficient to slay all the porters in Covent Garden. Last week it was only bad enough to drive a regiment of dragoons into a faint. The night before the people whom he had had to supper — I wondered who could eat any supper with any appetite under the gaze of those yellow eyes — people, mind you, to whom he had hoped to sell a little bit of property in the neighbourhood. Good people. With more than a little bit in the bank. People whose residence would give the whole neighbourhood a lift. They had asked if he liked going out alone at night with so many undiscovered murders about.... ‘Undiscovered murders!’ he went on repeating as if the words gave him an intimate sense of relief. He concluded with the phrase: ‘I don’t think!’”
That would be a very fair rendering of part of an episode: it would have the use of getting quite a lot of Mr. Slack in; but you might want to get on towards recounting how you had the lucky idea of purchasing shares in a newspaper against which Mr. Slack had counselled you.... And you might have got Mr. Slack in already!
The rendering in fact of speeches gave Conrad and the writer more trouble than any other department of the novel whatever. It introduced at once the whole immense subject of under what convention the novel is to be written. For whether you tell it direct and as author — which is the more difficult way — or whether you put it into the mouth of a character — which is easier by far but much more cumbersome — the question of reporting or rendering speeches has to be faced. To pretend that any character or any author writing directly can remember whole speeches with all their words for a matter of twenty-four hours, let alone twenty-four years, is absurd. The most that the normal person carries away of a conversation after even a couple of hours is just a salient or characteristic phrase or two, and a mannerism of the speaker. Yet, if the reader stops to think at all, or has any acuteness whatever, to render Mr. Slack’s speech directly: “Thet there odour is enough to do all the porters in Common Gorden in. Lorst week it wouldn’ no more ‘n ‘v sent a ole squad of tinwiskets barmy on the crumpet...” and so on through an entire monologue of a page and a half, must set the reader at some point or other wondering, how the author or the narrator can possibly, even if they were present, have remembered every word of Mr. Slack’s long speech. Yet the object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists — even of the fact that he is reading a book. This is of course not possible to the bitter end, but a reader can be rendered very engrossed, and the nearer you can come to making him entirely insensitive to his surroundings, the more you will have succeeded.
Then again, directly reported speeches in a book do move very slowly; by the use of indirect locutions, together with the rendering of the effects of other portions of speech, you can get a great deal more into a given space. There is a type of reader that likes what is called conversations — but that type is rather the reader in an undeveloped state than the reader who has read much. So, wherever practicable, we used to arrange speeches much as in the paragraph devoted to Mr. Slack above. But quite often we compromised and gave passages of direct enough speech.
This was one of the matters as to which the writer was more uncompromising than was Conrad. In the novel which he did at last begin on his forty-first birthday there will be found to be hardly any direct speech at all, and probably none that is more than a couple of lines in length. Conrad indeed later arrived at the conclusion that, a novel being in the end a matter of convention — and in the beginning too for the matter of that, since what are type, paper, bindings and all the rest, but matters of agreement and convenience — you might as well stretch convention a little farther, and postulate that your author or your narrator is a person of a prodigious memory for the spoken. He had one minute passion with regard to conversations: he could not bear the repetition of ‘he said’s and ‘she said’s, and would spend agitated hours in chasing those locutions out of his or our pages and substituting: ‘he replied,’ ‘she ejaculated,’ ‘answered Mr. Verloc’ and the like. The writer was less moved by this consideration: it seemed to him that you could employ the words ‘he said’ as often as you like, accepting them as being unnoticeable, like ‘a,’ ‘the’ ‘his’ ‘her,’ or ‘very.’
Conversations
One unalterable rule that we had for the rendering of conversations — for genuine conversations that are an exchange of thought, not interrogatories or statements of fact — was that no speech of one character should ever answer the speech that goes before it. This is almost invariably the case in real life where few people listen, because they are always preparing their own next speeches. When, of a Saturday evening, you are conversing over the fence with your friend Mr. Slack, you hardly notice that he tells you he has seen an incredibly coloured petunia at a market-gardener’s, because you are dying to tell him that you have determined to turn author to the extent of writing a letter on local politics to the newspaper of which, against his advice, you have become a large shareholder.
He says: “Right down extraordinary that petunia was — —”
You say: “What would you think now of my...”
He says: “Diamond-shaped stripes it had, blue-black and salmon....”
You say: “I’ve always thought I had a bit of a gift....”
Your daughter Millicent interrupts: “Julia Gower has got a pair of snake-skin shoes. She bought them at Wiston and Willocks’s.”
You miss Mr. Slack’s next two speeches in wondering where Millicent got that bangle on her wrist. You will have to tell her more carefully than ever that she must not accept presents from Tom, Dick and Harry. By the time you have come out of that reverie Mr. Slack is remarking:
“I said to him use turpentine and sweet oil, three parts to two. What do you think?”
Surprise
We agreed that the one quality that gave interest to Art was the quality of surprise. That is very well illustrated in the snatch of conversation just given. If you reported a long speech of Mr. Slack’s to the effect that he was going to enter some of his petunias for the local flower show and those, with his hydrangeas and ornamental sugar-beet, might well give him the Howard Cup for the third time, in which case it would become his property out and out. He would then buy two silver and cut-glass epergnes one to stand on each side of the Cup on his sideboard. He always did think that a touch of silver and cut glass.... If, after that you gave a long speech of your own: after, naturally, you had added a few commonplaces as a politeness to Mr. Slack: if you gave a long speech in which with modesty you dwelt on the powers of observation and of the pen that you had always considered yourself to possess, and in which you announced that you certainly meant to write a letter to the paper in which you had shares — on the statuary in the façade of the new town hall which was an offence to public decency.... And if in addition to that you added a soliloquy from your daughter Millicent to the effect that she intended to obtain on credit from your bootmakers, charging them to your account, a pair of scarlet morocco shoes with two-inch heels with which to go joy-riding on the Sunday with a young actor who played under the name of Hildebrand Hare and who had had his portrait in your paper.... If you gave all these long speeches one after the other you might be aware of a certain dullness when you re-read that compte rendu.... But if you carefully broke up petunias, statuary, and flower-show motives and put them down in little shreds one contrasting with the other, you would arrive at something much more coloured, animated, life-like and interesting and you would convey a profoundly significant lesson as to the self-engrossment of humanity. Into that live scene you could then drop the piece of news that you wanted to convey and so you would carry the chapter a good many stages forward.
Here, again, compromise must necessarily come in: there must come a point in the dramatic working up of every scene in which the characters do directly answer each other, for a speech or for two or three speeches. It was in this department, as has already been pointed out, that Conrad was matchless and the writer very deficient. Or, again, a point may come in which it is necessary — in which at least it is to take the line of least resistance — to report directly a whole tremendous effort of eloquence as ebullient as an oration by Mr. Lloyd George on the hymns of the Welsh nation. For there are times when the paraphernalia of indirect speech, interruptions and the rest retard your action too much. Then they must go: the sense of reality must stand down before the necessity to get on.
But, on the whole, the indirect, interrupted method of handling interviews is invaluable for giving a sense of the complexity, the tantalisation, the shimmering, the haze, that life is. In the pre-war period the English novel began at the beginning of a hero’s life and went straight on to his marriage without pausing to look aside. This was all very well in its way, but the very great objection could be offered against it that such a story was too confined to its characters and, too self-centredly, went on, in vacuo. If you are so set on the affair of your daughter Millicent with the young actor that you forget that there are flower shows and town halls with nude statuary your intellect will appear a thing much more circumscribed than it should be. Or, to take a larger matter. A great many novelists have treated of the late war in terms solely of the war: in terms of pip-squeaks, trench-coats, wire-aprons, shells, mud, dust, and sending the bayonet home with a grunt. For that reason interest in the late war is said to have died. But, had you taken part actually in those hostilities, you would know how infinitely little part the actual fighting itself took in your mentality. You would be lying on your stomach, in a beast of a funk, with an immense, horrid German barrage going on all over and round you and with hell and all let loose. But, apart from the occasional, petulant question: “When the deuce will our fellows get going and shut ’em up?” your thoughts were really concentrated on something quite distant: on your daughter Millicent’s hair, on the fall of the Asquith Ministry, on your financial predicament, on why your regimental ferrets kept on dying, on whether Latin is really necessary to an education, or in what way really ought the Authorities to deal with certain diseases.... You were there, but great shafts of thought from the outside, distant and unattainable world infinitely for the greater part occupied your mind.
It was that effect then, that Conrad and the writer sought to get into their work, that being Impressionism.
But these two writers were not unaware that there are other methods: they were not rigid in their own methods: they were sensible to the fact that compromise is at all times necessary in the execution of every work of art.
Let us come, then, to the eternally vexed seas of the Literary Ocean.
Style
We agreed on this axiom:
The first business of Style is to make work interesting: the second business of Style is to make work interesting: the third business of Style is to make work interesting: the fourth business of Style is to make work interesting: the fifth business of Style....
Style, then, has no other business.
A style interests when it carries the reader along: it is then a good style. A style ceases to interest when by reason of disjointed sentences, over-used words, monotonous or jog-trot cadences, it fatigues the reader’s mind. Too startling words, however apt, too just images, too great displays of cleverness are apt in the long run to be as fatiguing as the most over-used words or the most jog-trot cadences. That a face resembles a Dutch clock has been too often said; to say that it resembles a ham is inexact and conveys nothing; to say that it has the mournfulness of an old, squashed-in meat tin, cast away on a waste building lot, would be smart — but too much of that sort of thing would become a nuisance. To say that a face was cramoisy is undesirable: few people nowadays know what the word means. Its employment will make the reader marvel at the user’s erudition: in thus marvelling he ceases to consider the story and an impression of vagueness or length is produced on his mind. A succession of impressions of vagueness and length render a book in the end unbearable.
There are, of course, pieces of writing intended to convey the sense of the author’s cleverness, knowledge of obsolete words or power of inventing similes: with such exercises Conrad and the writer never concerned themselves.
We used to say: the first lesson that an author has to learn is that of humility. Blessed are the humble because they do not get between the reader’s legs. Before everything the author must learn to suppress himself: he must learn that the first thing he has to consider is his story and the last thing that he has to consider is his story, and in between that he will consider his story.
We used to say that a passage of good style began with a fresh, usual word, and continued with fresh, usual words to the end: there was nothing more to it. When we felt that we had really got hold of the reader, with a great deal of caution we would introduce a word not common to a very limited vernacular, but that only very occasionally. Very occasionally indeed: practically never. Yet it is in that way that a language grows and keeps alive. People get tired of hearing the same words over and over again.... It is again a matter for compromise.
Our chief masters in style were Flaubert and Maupassant: Flaubert in the greater degree, Maupassant in the less. In about the proportion of a sensible man’s whisky and soda. We stood as it were on those hills and thence regarded the world. We remembered long passages of Flaubert: elaborated long passages in his spirit and with his cadences and then translated them into passages of English as simple as the subject under treatment would bear. We remembered short, staccato passages of Maupassant: invented short staccato passages in his spirit and then translated them into English as simple as the subject would bear. Differing subjects bear differing degrees of simplicity: To apply exactly the same timbre of language to a dreadful interview between a father and a daughter as to the description of a child’s bedroom at night is impracticable because it is unnatural. In thinking of the frightful scene with your daughter Millicent which ruined your life, town councillor and parliamentary candidate though you had become, you will find that your mind employs a verbiage quite different from that which occurs when you remember Millicent asleep, her little mouth just slightly opened, her toys beside the shaded night-light.
Our vocabulary, then, was as simple as was practicable. But there are degrees of simplicity. We employed as a rule in writing the language that we employed in talking the one to the other. When we used French in speaking we tried mentally to render in English the least literary equivalent of the phrase. We were, however, apt to employ in our conversation words and periphrases that are not in use by, say, financiers. This was involuntary, we imagining that we talked simply enough. But later a body of younger men with whom the writer spent some years would say, after dinner: “Talk like a book, H.... Do talk like a book!” The writer would utter some speeches in the language that he employed when talking with Conrad: but he never could utter more than a sentence or two at a time. The whole mess would roar with laughter and, for some minutes, would render his voice inaudible.
If you will reflect on the language you then employed — and the writer — you will find that it was something like: “Cheerio, old bean. The beastly Adjutant’s Parade is at five ack emma. Will you take my Johnnie’s and let me get a real good fug in my downy bug walk? I’m fair blind to the wide to-night.” That was the current language then and, in the earlier days of our conversations, some equivalent with which we were unacquainted must normally have prevailed. That we could hardly have used in our books, since within a very short time such languages become incomprehensible. Even to-day the locution ‘ack emma’ is no longer used and the expression ‘blind to the wide’ is incomprehensible — the very state is unfamiliar — to more than half the English-speaking populations of the globe.
So we talked and wrote a Middle-High-English of as unaffected a sort as would express our thoughts. And that was all that there really was to our ‘style.’ Our greatest admiration for a stylist in any language was given to W. H. Hudson of whom Conrad said that his writing was like the grass that the good God made to grow and when it was there you could not tell how it came.
Carefully examined a good — an interesting — style will be found to consist in a constant succession of tiny, unobservable surprises. If you write: “His range of subject was very wide and his conversation very varied and unusual; he could rouse you with his perorations or lull you with his periods; therefore his conversation met with great appreciation and he made several fast friends” — you will not find the world very apt to be engrossed by what you have set down. The results will be different if you put it: “He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking.”
Or, let us put the matter in another way. The catalogue of an ironmonger’s store is uninteresting as literature because things in it are all classified and thus obvious: the catalogue of a farm sale is more interesting because things in it are contrasted. No one would for long read: Nails, drawn wire, ½ inch, per lb....; nails do., ¾ inch, per lb....; nails, do., inch, per lb.... But it is often not disagreeable to read desultorily “Lot 267. Pair rabbit gins. Lot 268, Antique powder flask. Lot 269, Malay Kris. Lot 270, Set of six sporting prints by Herring. Lot 271, Silver caudle cup... for that, as far as it goes, has the quality of surprise.
That is, perhaps, enough about Style. This is not a technical manual, and at about this point we arrive at a region in which the writer’s memory is not absolutely clear as to the points on which he and Conrad were agreed. We made in addition an infinite number of experiments, together and separately in points of style and cadence. The writer, as has been said, wrote one immense book entirely in sentences of not more than ten syllables. He read the book over. He found it read immensely long. He went through it all again. He joined short sentences: he introduced relative clauses: he wrote in long sentences that had a gentle sonority and ended with a dying fall. The book read less long. Much less long.
