Complete works of ford m.., p.980
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 980
The conscientious objector had had to go. He had worked quite well till Christmas. I sent him to England to do some private work for me and to get a rest. Whilst there he discovered inside himself that I regarded him as an object of charity, and resigned his post in a letter of great expletive violence. I had never regarded him as an object of charity, but as one who was by turns quite useful and a great nuisance. As he had had nowhere to go to after he left the Santé, I had taken him to live with me. His salary was rather small, so he was really under no obligation to me…. He was eventually arrested and conducted to the frontier. I regretted it, because he appeared to be a young man of real talent. He has since pursued the career of a poet and savant in a country bordering on France….
His going severed the review’s last editorial contact with England — except for a day when a young Eton and Oxford boy took over the duties. He didn’t return on the morrow. The duties were pretty hard and without glamour. A bewildering succession of sub-editors then helped me and Mr. Hemingway. They had all been cowboys, so that the office took on an aspect and still more the sound of a Chicago speakeasy, invaded by young men from a Wild West show. The only one whose identity comes back to me is Mr. Ivan Bede, who wore large, myopic spectacles, in front of immense dark eyes, wrote very good short stories about farming in the Middle West, and boasted of his Indian blood and the severe vastnesses that had enveloped his childhood. I take that to be much the same thing as being a cowboy.
Mr. Hemingway had, I think, been a cowboy before he became a tauromachie expert: Mr. Robert McAlmon, the printer-author, certainly had; so had poor Dunning, the gentle poet; even Mr. Bird had been a rancher in his day, and Mr. Pound had come over to Europe as a cattle-hand!
That a great literary movement — for a really great literary movement was there beginning — should have originated in the Middle West, which is usually regarded as the culminating point of materialism, is not really astonishing. It was a matter of reaction, the young reacting violently against the frame of mind of the sires. I went to Chicago some years ago to persuade the father of one of my contributors to permit his son to take up literature as a profession, and to let him have a little money while he made his way. Chicago is the butchering metropolis, and this was a Chicago magnate — not at all a gross or illiterate person — but adamant. I argued with him for some time. I said his son had great talent and might well one day ornament his family and name….
He said — almost pathetically:
“Mr. Ford, on the tombstones of three generations of my family there is a statement that they left honourable records in the trade I follow. Would it not be a dreadful thing if my son had to have on his gravestone the fact that he was a mere ink-slinger? …”
I pointed out that a butcher’s son whose epitaph began, “Dear Friend, for Jesus’s sake forbear …” had for three hundred years conferred on his country and mine, since they had a common origin, the greatest lustre that they could show.
That produced no effect on him. He said that Shakespeare was different. His father was no doubt not a very important butcher. He understood, too, that he had given his father and his family great cause for concern. He himself would rather see his son starve than that he should become a writer…. And starve the boy did for several years in Paris…. Another boy from Chicago, who came to me for encouragement, whose parents had the same pride in their trade, ran away from home and worked his passage to France. He had seen a translation of Gourmont’s Night in the Luxembourg, and when he got to Paris had just enough money and just enough French to take a taxi to the Luxembourg. He spent the night wandering round and round the gardens, seeking for the entrance. He had, of course, a hard time for some while, but he is now, I understand, as a painter, one of the ornaments of his home-town.
I will add as a contrast a story, that I do not remember to have told before, because it lets’me mention a very charming personality…. On my second morning in Chicago during that visit the telephone bell rang. A voice said:
“Mr. F —— , I see you are in this city. I am Mrs. —— . Mrs. —— , don’t you know? The de bunker….”
I said that for years it had been one of my chief longings to hear the voice of Mrs. —— .
She continued:
“I want to tell you something — to give you advice….”
She went on to say that she was Ernest Hemingway’s confidante and adviser, and one thing she begged me … she begged me! … not to call on Hemingway’s father and mother. I should have a most frightful reception. They regarded me as having horns and a tail…. Because I had encouraged Ernest to become a writer. I must promise! … Promise!
I promised and hung up the receiver. Before it was well on its hooks the instrument gave cry again. A voice said:
“I am Hemingway….”
It was so exactly Hemingway’s voice that I exclaimed in astonishment that I had thought he was safe in Paris. The voice said:
“No — not Ernest. It’s his father.” He said that he and Mrs. Hemingway wanted me to stay with them for the time I was in Chicago — because I had given Ernest encouragement to become a writer. He was an extraordinarily gentle, swarthy, bearded man, who should have been an Elizabethan poet-adventurer…. May his ashes know peace!
In any case what I had predicted to myself in my Sussex cottage had by the time of the transatlantic review days become fully true. The Middle West was seething with literary impetus. It is no exaggeration to say that eighty per cent of the manuscripts in English that I received came from west of Altoona, and forty per cent of them were of such a level of excellence that one might just as well close one’s eyes and take one at random, as try to choose between them. It is true that a great proportion of them were auto-biographical in conception, and all of them local in scene. But a just perception of one’s surroundings and of one’s own career forms the first step towards a literature that shall be great in scope. Local literatures are as a rule a nuisance, the writers devoting to local distinctions of speech without interest and to local ill-manners that would be best forgotten, talents that might, in a wider scene, develop comprehension and catholicity. But a wave of literature that in a few years produced — to mention them without appraisal and at random — Mr. Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Mr. McAlmon’s photographic reports on Berlin night life; Mr. Nathan Ash’s Love in Chartres; Miss Katherine Anne Porter’s Mexican stories, side by side with Mr. Glenway Westcott’s Grandmothers; Mr. Davis’s The Opening of a Door; Miss Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s My Heart and My Flesh, and Miss Caroline Gordon’s Penhally — such a wave of literature cannot, whatever else can be said of it, be called parochial…. And I don’t know what else can be said against it.
So that, try as I might, to divide the space of the review into equal portions devoted to French, English and American writings, the preponderating share of its pages went to the Middle West. There was no difficulty in finding French contributions or even French pictures to reproduce — though as a matter of fact most of the reproductions came from the brushes and pencils of foreigners like Picasso, Juan Gris, Brancusi…. The level of literature and the Arts is in France always amazingly high, though from time to time there will be no great outstanding figure. That was the case in the days of the transatlantic review. Anatole France having died unhonoured, Loti forgotten and Proust amidst the lamentations of a people, there were no great outstanding peaks. But outstanding peaks are not of much benefit to the general run of literature. They destroy perspective, so that whilst the public read one applauded book they ignore a hundred others that are as good or better, and thus the community loses. Certainly with the help of M. Jean Cassou, M. Georges Pillemont, M. Ribemont Dessaignes, M. Philippe Soupault, the transatlantic review managed to have as good French pages as anyone could desire who wished to know how good and clear the French writing and the French mind can be.
Thus through no volition of my own, but I daresay partly through the patriotic coercion of Mr. Hemingway, the review was Middle Western as to a little more than half and a little less than one-third French. The remaining sixth, mostly consisting of chronicles, came from the Eastern States, New York, and England.
It was singular how few manuscripts came from England. This can hardly have been due to dislike of the youth of England for myself, for the youth of England knew nothing about me. Nor can it have been due to want of knowledge of the existence of the review, for with a population about equal to that of the Middle West, England consumed a good many more copies of the review. That fact was owing to better distribution. Yet I did not receive from all England one-tenth of the number of MSS. that came from Chicago alone. Of what we did print I remember only a beautiful story by Mr. Coppard, a couple of delicate ones from Mrs. H. G. Wells, a story by Miss Ethel Mayne, and two or three by a lady whose name I am ashamed to have forgotten. I cannot refresh my memory, because my last set of the review was carried away by a gentleman from Chicago. He professed to be a bibliographer, but, though it was some years ago, he has neither made the bibliography nor returned the borrowed set. A full set of the review is now rare and, at any rate until the crisis, was rather expensive…. But those short stories were very good, or I should not after ten years so closely remember them.
I should like to make the note that in my opinion, for what it is worth, the real germ of the Middle Western literary movement is to be found in the Three Mountains Press, Paris, of Mr. William Bird, who worked in conjunction with the Paris Contact Publishing Company of Mr. Robert McAlmon. Mr. Bird, an almost hypersensitive dilettante, when he was printing, produced a series of beautifully-printed specimens of new prose. These books were edited by Mr. Pound and were mostly American. Mr. McAlmon published a number of uglyish wads of printing called the Contact Books. These were nearly all Middle Western in origin, and included Mr. Hemingway’s first work.
These two printing establishments formed a centre and established between young writers contacts precisely that were, in the early twenties, more than invaluable. The young writer may find himself without being actually published, but he cannot do so without contacts with ardent fellows in his art. Neither, indeed, can an old writer. The claim is made on the point of one or another non-commercial publication — including the transatlantic review — that it “discovered” this or that writer because it published his first lispings. It is not for me to deny the service to literature of, say, the Little Review, or, in its more opulent way, of the Dial. But for myself I could not claim that the transatlantic discovered anybody. It would like to have, but the spadework had already been done by the gentlemen and enterprises that I have had the honour above to mention.
CHAPTER THREE.
AFTER THIS I DRIFTED INTO THE SPHERE OF influence of New York as inevitably as a soapsud in an emptying bath drifts towards a plughole. The attraction of that city lies in the fact that, for me, she is the expression of hope. She is the expression of the hope of all humanity. And she is the negation of the thing I hate most — of nationality. New York is not America, because she is the expression of an ideal vaster and more humane. There has been nothing more disastrous for humanity than the conception of nationality. For the sense of race something may be said. But that men living on one side of an imaginary line called a “frontier” should automatically hate people born on the other side of that line is a conception of madness — of the madness that the gods send to people whom they are about to destroy. I was crossing the Rhine at Kehl the other day. On one side of an invisible line the ripples in the water, the fish, the reeds are French — on the other echt Deutsch. It was as curious to remember that as to recollect that in a certain township in Indiana a committee of people called Staubenheim, Racockski and Svendsen are engaged in teaching people called Adams and Whittier … to be American! The Americanisation committee at least is dignified by the one set of names, the list of raw material on which they work contains the others. A certain race-consciousness on the other hand may benefit the individual and help the state. If you can be sure that you are pure-blooded Pole, Jew, Gaul or Anglo-Saxon, you may realise your limitations and try to modify your race-exaggerations, so that you may live in peace with the Franco-Italian-BohemianSlav hybrids that live round you. You may even be conscious of ancient roots, traditions and histories of which to be proud so that, not to shame them, you may become a better and no narrower citizen of a conglomerate land.
For myself I am of such a mixed blood that I have no race-consciousness to help me, and I have as little national consciousness. Only one thing will arouse any national or race feeling in me. It is to hear one national express hatred for another nation. If I hear a Frenchman express contempt, say, for American art, I find myself become excitedly American of New York. Or if an Englishman by his bearing implies contempt for either of the other two nations I go, as the saying is, completely off the handle. Still more, whilst an American is abusing France I shall for that moment find myself actually French, or if the Frenchman abuses England I shall find myself defending my compatriots with a passion of which few indeed of them will be capable. I suppose the only body of men for whom I have anything approaching a settled dislike are the subjects of Mr. Hitler — if it be not the subjects of Mr. Mussolini. And that is because it is impossible not to believe that both nations have designs on France, and one at least against the peace of Poland. Yet if I hear a Frenchman or a Pole uttering diatribes against either nation, I cannot avoid pointing out the terrible nature of the Prussian’s necessities in his dreary and infertile landscape as I point out the glorious traditions of the Italian.
This is in the main because I have a hatred for hatred — the most maiming of all the passions. Murder, back-bite, rob, torture if you will. These are normal human occupations, and may be conducted without loss of self-respect. But to hate is not only to lose your sense of proportion, but to become a monomaniac. It is to curtail your powers. To combat a man or a rat you must understand the nature of the individual or the rodent. Great generals win battles because they know instinctively what is going on in the minds of the commanders opposed to them, never because of hatred! Prussia lost the late war because she completely misunderstood what was passing in the minds of her opponents, and she has handicapped herself for a generation in even the unnamed contest between nations that will for long obtain because she has not understood that though Christendom is vague in its boundaries, yet by the tradition of centuries and the gradual growth of a conscience, a little sense of chivalry has arisen in us. It is centuries since — with deference to a certain club and to the British and American customs services — it is centuries since a civilised body of human beings burned a book. This is because a book is a living thing, and to burn a book whilst taking credit for not murdering the author, is to put yourself outside civilisation. If you burn the author you earn at least some respect for having the courage of your convictions. It is to be reminded once more of Louvain! And what have you done when you have wreaked your hate? … For myself I believe I can say that I never hated a human being in my life — for more than half a day. That is what makes a novelist. He is a person who must not side with his characters, so, in his life, he must not side with himself. Nor even with his own side. He is, therefore, the only person who is fit to rule our world. Or to put it more acceptably: it is only the statesman with the gifts of the true novelist who could teach this world how bearably to run itself. That was proved nineteen hundred years ago. Since then we have not got much further.
I permit myself this little excursion into the field of the moralist, which is one I seldom tread. I have lived a long time and thought constantly about these matters. And I have seen, gradually — at least the Western World veering towards that point of view. So one day these words may find themselves preach ing to the converted.
New York, when I reached there in 1924, seemed more than half-way towards that ideal. I had on landing no sense of crossing a frontier, though I am sensitive to these things, so that if I cross the bridge into Brooklyn I feel myself very sensibly in the foreign. There are, of course, customs and emigration authorities like beads on a string behind the Lady who stands with uplifted torch. But these amiable people — they have never treated me at least with anything but paternal kindness — these people so completely defeat the purpose for which they exist, that they might just as well not be there. For they are there presumably to keep out the undesirable. But the undesirable will always get in by means of forged papers, whereas the desirable are always inconvenienced, and are not infrequently excluded. It is, for instance, obviously better for a state to contain, say, truthful polygamists than lying ones. Yet by the present systems a lying polygamist has only got to deny that he is one and in he will go. Before the polygamist who does not lie there will stand the angel with the flaming sword. But if you know that a man is a polygamist — or a woman a polyandrist — you can always watch them and prevent their obtaining more than their share of life partners. As for smuggling….
I only twice in innumerable crossings smuggled anything. It seemed easy to do — the trouble coming afterwards. In each case the crime was an act of benevolence, by which I in no way profited. In the first place I was taken in hand by a bevy of young things who knew that side of the world far better than I. They insisted that I must smuggle various embroidered articles of attire. I refused to be a party to breaking the law of any country not my own. But at last they forced me to give them the keys of my cabin and my trunks. I had no difficulty in getting through the customs, but the trouble came then. The young people had scattered to cities distant from New York and from each other. They ordered me to forward whatever I found not belonging to me in my trunks. It cost me several weeks of correspondence and forwarding and re-forwarding of parcels. I did not know the English or French names of most of these articles of attire — and as for the American! …
