Complete works of ford m.., p.939
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 939
Byles held very strongly the view that circulating libraries are the ruin of publishing. I held almost as strongly the view that they are bad for good literature. Byles thought, rightly or wrongly, that the fact that the public can get a new book from the library and read it at the cost of about a penny, prevented the average man from buying books at all and permitted even the rare men who had to read books to buy much fewer. I think that is probably true. The answer of the libraries was that in the case of books at all popular they actually purchased more copies than the publisher could by any means hope to disperse among the general public. That is true too. I have known instances of books of which the libraries had bought 15,000 copies before their publication. But these were practically never books that had any claim to the name of literature. At best they would be romans à clef or clever books dealing with passing topics. And they were of course few. The better book on the other hand suffered very badly. The type of books of which the libraries bought great numbers was one which had immediate appeal as a topic of dinner table conversation. Its readers must have it at once or they would lose such social pre-eminence as chatter about the latest popular novel could give them.
The readers of better books on the contrary are in no such hurry. They will eventually have Conrad and will read him carefully and slowly but they have as a rule a programme of reading and may not be at all ready to read a particular book at the time of its publication. Neither do they immensely object if a copy is not immediately available when they apply to the library for it. At the time of which I am speaking or a little before it Conrad’s books were selling between three and four thousand copies each. Of these the great libraries, Mudie’s and Smith, took as a rule two hundred copies apiece before publication and purchased perhaps fifty copies more between them. The small circulating libraries throughout the kingdom would take perhaps a thousand more. But as these were gradually put out of existence by Messrs Smiths’ railway bookstores or absorbed as branches of Mudie’s, that market gradually closed itself. The general public would slowly absorb the rest of the books which would go on selling for three or four years. That meant to say that Conrad might get, spread over a period of four years, a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds – say seven hundred and fifty dollars – or perhaps two hundred and fifty dollars a year. I once asked one of the managers of Mudie’s how it was possible that they could take say five thousand copies of a work by Miss Marie Corelli and only two hundred of say Typhoon. He said, ‘Well, you see, if we stocked any more of Mr Conrad’s books it would take up more of our warehousing space and warehousing space is one of our heaviest charges. With two hundred copies we can perfectly well supply any demand there is for Conrad.’ I asked him whether that did not seem rather lamentable from the point of view of the corruption of the public taste. He said rather animatedly, No. He could undertake to say that Conrad got distributed by himself and the other libraries to everyone who could possibly be expected to read him. He added that the disproportion of copies sold was startling. But actually the difference between the number of readers of Miss Corelli and Conrad was nothing like so great. He referred to a table and told me that the average number of times each copy of Miss Corelli was taken out was not much more than five. That might count for twenty readers giving her a hundred thousand readers in that establishment. On the other hand Lord Jim had been sent out an enormous number of times, each copy in their possession being always sent out again as soon as it came back until it had to be rebound or finally became too dirty for re-circulation. Then it would have to be replaced. In that way each copy of Lord Jim if it was taken out two hundred and fifty times … but I forget the exact figures. I know that this gentleman said that he thought a book of Conrad’s might be counted on as having twelve thousand readers amongst his own subscribers alone. He pointed out another significant fact that when it came to disposing of second-hand copies that had got too worn for circulation Miss Corelli’s books would hardly find purchasers at sixpence whereas Conrad could not be kept in stock at a couple of shillings.
This was pretty poor hearing for anyone interested in keeping Conrad alive. Byles then had grown alarmed at the increase in the number of circulating libraries and at their insistence on cutting prices. He tried to induce the Publishers’ Association to engineer a combine that should refuse to supply the libraries on terms at least as good or even better than they supplied the booksellers. I did all that I could to back him up with my pen.
The Publishers’ Association was very weak-kneed. Its principal plea for not taking any action was that they could not do so without the consent of their authors. I wrote a number of articles in, I should think the Tribune, to induce my confrères to act upon the publishers. One or two actually took my advice. I think Mr Shaw refused to let his books be supplied to the libraries except at the price at which they were actually sold by booksellers to the public. Byles himself took the drastic step of refusing to supply the books of his firm to the libraries at all. He had of course to obtain the consent of his authors and not nearly all of them consented. The others, however, were boycotted by those libraries. So they did not profit. I of course consented and the sales of my books stopped dead. Byles had counted on the booksellers backing up the publishers and authors who had thus espoused our cause but the booksellers were not minded so to do. Besides, there are practically no booksellers in England. In the city of Avignon with a population of 51,685 there are six first class booksellers’ shops. In the county of London with its then 10,000,000 inhabitants there were not twelve, nor was there one between Bumpus’s, which was the most westerly first class book shop in London, and the Land’s End. Thus Byles had miscalculated the strength of the only support he could expect. That was his Waterloo.
It was also mine. For nearly twenty years after that no book of mine ever attracted any attention in the popular press or sold more than the most meagre number of copies. Byles said that this was due to boycotting by the libraries. I don’t know whether it was or not.
I am writing this chapter, as I have said, as a dreadful lesson in how not to manage a literary career. I don’t exactly know what the moral is. I think it a duty for every author who is at all prosperous to take an interest in the politics of book producing – for the sake of his less fortunate confrères and for the sake of literature itself. But if he does so he will probably be ruined. I think it is the duty of the novelist to pay some attention to the public affairs of his day because in the end it is to the novelist that the public must go for its knowledge of life. And if the novelist is to have and to convey that knowledge he must of necessity mix in public life. In that way too he is very likely to come up against one Lord Northcliffe or another and to have his ruin accelerated and increased. I do not think that I have any regrets except the regret that I had at the time of having upset Lord Northcliffe. As I have said I liked him as a man for his ingenuousness, his buoyancy, his boyishness and for the fact, naturally, that he did his best to be of service to me. I don’t think I ever resented his afterwards trying to be of disservice to me. That sort of thing is all in the day’s journey. And if I had it all to do over again I do not see how I could now act differently.
But if I had to advise a literary aspirant as to his career and if he said that it was his career that interested him and that he was coldly uninterested in any other aspect of the literary life I should speak as follows:
‘Your ideal of a career should be that it should leave you as is the case with all littérateurs of eminence in England, on top of a hill at some distance from London and particularly at a distance as considerable as possible from all other littérateurs. There you should lead the life as nearly as possible resembling that of a country gentleman as your comfortable means should allow to you. You should surround yourself with a retinue of body surgeons, consulting physicians, eminent attorneys-at-law, handy men to do what dirty work you have and a small cloud of devoted females to do the same. You will thus create around yourself an air of mystery, respectability, and even of awfulness. All your life until reaching that stage should have been devoted to that progress. You should have eschewed as you would shrink from soiled underwear all personal publicity. I am aware that this last course is not recommended in England and still less in America. Personal publicity is usually considered to be the first thing at which a writer should aim. But when you consider that at least half and very likely 80 per cent. of the personal gossip about an author is likely to be detrimental you will I think see that though you gain on the swings you will lose a great deal more on the roundabouts. That at least is my conviction. And if you will consider the authors who together with some literary value have achieved great sales in both England and America you will see that the majority of them have been of extremely retiring dispositions. In my time they have been George Meredith of Box Hill, Thomas Hardy of Dorchester, Conrad of Postling, Arnold Bennett of Somewhere in Essex, Mr Kipling of Burwash, pronounced Burridge, my dear lady, Henry James of Rye, Mr Galsworthy of Somewhere in Devonshire, and one or two others. All these gentlemen have been … gentlemen. They have as far as possible avoided the public eye, they have deprecated personal publicity, they have mixed very little in public affairs and of them very little was known during their careers towards eminence except for their photographs. And a good photograph gives the public quite as much information as is necessary concerning an author’s personality, Who’s Who filling in all the other desirable blanks. You will perceive by glancing through my list of names that they include nearly all the great permanent sellers of both Great Britain and the United States. There are of course writers in America who have achieved great sales by means of permitting their publishers to indulge in orgies of publicity concerning their personalities, tastes, vicissitudes, earlier appearances in the bankruptcy and the police court and the like. But these instances are so relatively recent that it is too early to say whether they will have any permanence. And my views on the subject are immensely strengthened for me when I consider the Past. It is authors of whose personality very little is known whose books are widely read. Of Shakespeare we know nothing, of Homer less, of the writers of the Bible nothing at all. On the other hand Dr Johnson, who was, when he chose to be, a magnificent author is completely swamped by Boswell’s Life and for one person who reads the poems of Shelley probably a hundred read one or other concoction of chatter about Harriet. The fact is that people read consciously or unconsciously as much out of curiosity about the life and person of an author as for any other reason. If they can get that curiosity satisfied outside the author’s books they surely won’t read the books.’
I shall write a little more on the subject of other aspects of the literary career in a later chapter.
CHAPTER III. SOME CURES
From 1903 to 1906 illness removed me from most activities. The illness was purely imaginary; that made it none the better. It was enhanced by wickedly unskilful doctoring. In those days I wandered from nerve cure to nerve cure, all over England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium – but mostly in Germany. I suffered from what was diagnosed as agoraphobia and intense depression. I had nothing specific to be depressed about. But the memory of those years is one of uninterrupted mental agony. Nothing marks them off one from the other. They were lost years.
One single picture comes back to me. I had been trying a nerve cure on the Lake of Constance. I had taken ninety cold baths and thirty tepid soda-water douches in thirty days. I was so weak that, even if the so-called agoraphobia had not interfered with my walking I should hardly have been able to get about. I had determined to pull myself together and had gone to Bâle to write a life of Holbein.
I wrote it in the house of a Swiss professor. He had lost his only daughter and could not bear the silence of his immensely tall, gloomy, ancient and crowstepped house. He had filled it with clocks – every imaginable type of Swiss clock. There was thus a continual ticking, striking, chiming and cuckooing whilst the poor man continually wept. The noise of the clocks was not disagreeable but the gloom of the house was profound. I worked in a room high in the gable. The upper stories of the houses in that street jutted forward so as to come very close together. Immediately opposite me lived a chimney sweep. He was jet black all over, wore a top hat and carried behind his back a ladder and sacks of soot. His apartment which I could see into contained a baby and a blonde pink and white young wife. Apartment, baby and wife were all spotless. On the edge of the window-sill was a little green and white fence with fuchsias in pots behind it. On one side of the window hung a canary in a cage, on the other a goldfinch. The chimney sweeper never came home till dusk. By then the lights would be lit behind a white blind. Then the silhouette of the sweep, framed by the window; in the black house-front that, itself a silhouette, stood out with crockets and crowsteps against the dark sky and the immense stars.
He would stride joyously into the room. His shadow would catch the shadow of the baby from the invisible cradle and, top hat, ladder, sacks all bobbing, he would throw the baby up to the ceiling, again and again and again. I used to hang out over my window-sill and wonder why God had made it impossible to transfuse one’s soul into another being. If only I could have made mine enter that chimney sweep’s body whilst his was absent in sleep! His could no doubt have found a home.
I gave up Holbein and Bâle and went down the Rhine to a Kaltwasser-Heilanstalt that seemed to me the most horrible of all the monstrous institutions that had tortured me. They fed you there on pork and ice-cream. On the Lake of Constance they had fed me on dried peas and grapes – one grape every quarter of an hour – for sixteen hours out of the day. The director of the Kaltwasser-Heilanstalt was an immense, thin man with a long grey waterfall of beard through which he passed his fingers as if cautiously before he ever made a remark. He usually wore black spectacles. In the effort to prove that my troubles had an obscure sexual origin he would suddenly produce from his desk and flash before my eyes indecent photographs of a singular banality. He expected me to throw fits or to faint. I didn’t.
In Austria, in an institution that is now even more famous than the Rhineland K.W.H.A. they had attempted to demonstrate the same thing with much the same primitive means and with similar unsuccess. One day my soul straightener had a ray of hope.
I had a friend in England who had had a child. He wanted me to be its godfather: I could not because he was Anglican. But I wanted to send the child a christening cup. As I had been going to the institution I had been into several jewellers’ shops but could not see the kind of cup I wanted. At last, near the Kärntnerthor I had seen a very pretty, delicate cup in gold. I thought that silver was de rigueur for christenings. I was not certain that I could afford the gold one. I wondered if I could not have that golden cup reproduced in silver.
I was thinking about the golden cup in the ante-room of the nerve-specialist where I had to wait a long time and felt extremely melancholy. He put his head suddenly around the door and asked menacingly:
‘Uber was speculieren Sie?’
I said innocently and without premeditation:
‘Eine goldene Tasse, Herr Wirklicher Geheimrath!’
His face lit up with the pleasure of cross-examining counsel who had caught out a hostile witness.
‘Kurz und gut,’ he said, ‘you are suffering from …’ some sexual disorder or other. As a matter of fact I was suffering from a slight fluttering of the heart which, after periods of intense overwork and fatigue, caused – and indeed does still cause – me to feel slightly faint for a second or two. This will naturally sometimes happen in the street. The result therefore a little resembles agoraphobia which is in effect a disease of the will-power and may be attributable to sexual disorders – but which equally well may not.
Those were the early days of that mania that has since beset the entire habitable globe. I went in those three years to nineteen specialists, all of them famous in their nations and some world famous. Not one of them examined my heart; everyone diagnosed my trouble as agoraphobia; sixteen or seventeen of them attributed it to sexual abnormalities and treated me for them. I am however bound to say for the Austrian practitioner that I explained to him exactly why I was thinking about a golden cup. He then abandoned his theory. I ought to say that, in those days – and I daresay it still is – a golden cup was regarded by those enthusiasts as a symbol of something improper. I use the last two words on purpose. I suppose the choice of the emblem is a hit at the Holy Grail.
The result of the efforts of these specialists was to reduce me in weight to nine stone two – 128 lbs. I am exactly six foot in height. When I went to New York next year the Herald had a caricature of me subscribed as: The Animated Match.
The Rhineland Kaltwasser-Heilanstalt was the last institution of the sort that I endured. It was a vast, gloomy building, the former palace of a Kurfüst of sorts. I was fed on pork and ice-cream and salad made with lemon juice and white of egg, Oil and vinegar are said to be exciting – sexually. Three times a day I had alternately a boiling shampoo and a fliessende Fussbad – a foot-bath of iced water forced against the feet in a stream running ninety miles an hour. The Dr Kaltwasser-Heilanstaltiger Medizinrath had by then come to the conclusion that my trouble was due to defective circulation. The blood had to be forced to my head by boiling it and then back to my feet by the reaction from their being frozen. It was a good idea but I lost weight. Then complete sleeplessness came to add itself to my pleasures.
My mother came out to me. She had been warned by the Geheimrath and members of my family who resided in the town overshadowed by the Heilanstalt that my case was desperate. For four nights running she read to me from Boswell’s Johnson – through the entire night. She read on even when I dozed off.
