Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (140 page)
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Authors: Ford Madox Ford
A TALE OF A SMALL CIRCLE
Considered by many critics to be Ford’s most accomplished early novel,
The Benefactor
(1905) tells the story of George Moffat, a mildly successful poet who is the victim of aspiring writers, desperate for a ‘lift up’ into the literary world.
Moffat is abandoned by these aspiring authors once they have had their first success and so due to his naïve and generous nature, he faces financial ruin. Moffat only receives the pity of Clara Brede, a lonely neighbour doomed to the caring of her insane father, the local rector.
It is clearly a work heavily influenced by Henry James’ novels, with such Jamesian traits as extended use of commas, italicised expressions, inverted commas and the ambience of a small circle of literary characters. Nevertheless, the novel has been celebrated for its counterpointing of action, deftly flitting between different characters’ perspectives and the monitoring of interpretations of more than one character in a scene, which Ford uses in this novel successfully for the first time. The subtle shift between physical action, dialogue and thought processes creates a rich reading experience, vividly bringing an otherwise very simple tale to life.
Interestingly, George Moffat, the typically indecisive Fordian character, foreshadows the role that Ford himself would later play in real life.
Ford would go on to help launch the careers of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and many others, much like how Moffat does in the novel.
In the creating of this character, Ford appears to have fashioned a model for his own life, which he then proceded to act out.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
PART I. THE JEWELLER AND HIS STONES.
PART III. THE BLACKENING PEARLS.
PART IV. THE BANKRUPT JEWELLER.
“Oh, I don’t suspect him — What’s his name? Hailes? — of an eye to your spoons,” Mrs. Gregory Moffat said to her husband’s brother; “but I’ve said a hundred times, George, that I don’t see why you should turn your house into an asylum. What claim has he?”
George Moffat said:
“
Everyone has claims of one sort or another,” with his large air of peaceable and majestic obstinacy. He had argued the matter too often.
“Precisely,” Mrs. Moffat snapped in her high, convicting voice.
“
I suppose he writes, or something. You’d do much more good if you did some work of your own” (George made a placid and amused gesture of negation) “instead,” Mrs. Moffat finished, “of wasting all your time and most of your money on these creatures. You know they usually turn out rank impostors.”
She cast meaning glances, first at her husband, then at Mrs. Henwick. Her husband, Gregory Moffat, beamed through gold-rimmed spectacles. He held his head as the very short-sighted do, and seemed on the point of uttering a small joke. He did not. Mrs. Henwick, with the air, not so much of a tiny marchioness as of an enlarged, but still tiny,
marquise,
pointed a little foot at the brilliant carpet. She might have been pointing at it as a proof that George Moffat was still the same. His drawing-room was not up-to-date, yet it was still gloriously sumptuous, and, in a grand way, “artistic.” George had given a unique price for his carpet to one of his Arts-and-Crafts portégés — the two ladies called them parasites, and said they had ruined George.
Mrs. Moffat had not seen her brother-in-law for some years, but she recognised that he remained emphatically the same. He had not aged markedly, though he was beginning to suggest that softening of the outlines that the middle age confers — he was quite turned forty-five. But George was the same, glamour and all. Mrs. Moffat had long since outlived her appreciation of the glamour, but her meaning glances to her companions indicated that she very much acknowledged George’s sameness. Everyone, save those who for the moment were sufficiently new to him to lie under his inevitable and tremendous spell, always indicated that George was the same. They indicated it by glances, shrugs or smiles. Yet it can hardly be said that Mrs. Moffat sighed. George’s famous show house stood just outside a little town right down on the extreme south coast. Mrs. Moffat, in coming to see him, had taken roads that her
chauffeur
had desolately intimated would ruin the entrails of
any
automobile. She had dragged with her her husband, who didn’t express any desire to see his brother, and her friend who had already been mixed up in one of the mysterious broils that seemed always to move in the vicinity of George; she had made a curve of seventy miles on these disastrous south-eastern roads. She herself did not quite know what she wanted of George. Perhaps it was only a curiosity to see how he was
“
getting on” — to see whether it might be practicable to use him at last as a
“
lion.” For all she knew, he might have published something lately, or might be going to do so soon. He had begun his career so well, and the articles that he still very occasionally wrote for the more majestic reviews were received, she believed, with much respect. She knew he had some standing of a desirable, rather donnish kind. The trouble was that you couldn’t tell just where he stood.
She had formulated a mere strategetic idea. She was one of those leading ladies in whose great drawing-rooms new religions are born, and new feminine-social-political and generally-in-the-swim movements serve to make transitory notorieties. It might be a pleasant feature of her autumn campaign if George, reunited to his wife, could be got to figure among her guests. Of his making an impression she had no doubt.
He certainly overwhelmed anyone who was new to him. And Mrs. Moffat could claim triumphantly that all her acquaintance — except her permanent body-guard of the really good people — were the very newest of the very new. They couldn’t possibly have had either time or opportunity to let George’s attractions be exercised and lose their charm.
She would even receive George not re-united to Mrs. George.
There had been nothing piquant about the rupture of her brother-in-law and his wife. Mrs. George had complained of no infidelities. They simply could not get on together. George was said to have acted nobly — to have placed two-thirds of his capital in the hands of his departing wife. Mrs. Moffat knew the truth of this because her husband was Mrs. George Moffat’s trustee. George’s few remaining thousands had continued to pass steadily into the hands of George’s innumerable hangers-on; whilst Mrs. George’s “managing” had as steadily added to her share. She led a determined, forceful life, in a large, bleak, white house, in the recesses of a northern moor, among her own people.
Mrs. Gregory Moffat’s world was a matter of a western hill in Town, and a house in a western county where fourteen gardeners raised things under glass in the season, and ladies, caucus-meetings in the shooting months. She shivered at the thought of Mrs. George’s life, though she recognised the eligibility, for those who could stand it, of her old-fashioned county familydom.
* * *
She looked round George’s drawing room, wondering how in the world he managed to exist. The oak beams of the ceiling — George was understood to have paid a fabulous price for them — remained. But the more noticeable of George’s treasures had vanished. Sir Graham’s famous “Heloise” had departed from above the great open hearth. A number of Grigson-Turner’s pictures of lamp-flames still hung out their green-gold frames, but they were such remarkably premature efforts of that master as to be practically valueless in the sale room. Grigson-Turner had been one of the very earliest of the innumerable strugglers George had helped to fame. Before Grigson-Turner had finally and so lamentably dropped poor George, George had — she could do Turner
that
justice — possessed some really representative third period Turners. But in one of his blazes George had given them to that odious Lamley Smith — to improve Smith’s sense of line, George said. That had, as usual, been just before Smith had become famous, and, as usual, just before his disgraceful treatment of poor George. Smith’s own contribution — George had paid about four times the market value for it — remained. It was the giant oak book-case with carvings rendering bubbly sea-weed. A motto:
“
Troth bideth frendeshepe,” sprawled large red Gothic letters in a diagonal droop across the glass and seriously interfered with the view of the books. It stood in a dim corner of the magnificent room. The white vellum book backs of the poets since become notorious, and the yellow and blacks of the novelists now forgotten nearly three seasons ago, had given place to a number in colours as yet unfamiliar. These represented presentation copies in repayment, mostly of loans from George to the crop of young lions who would roar this year, next year, were just beginning to roar, or might never roar at all. George had the gift for discovering new talent. The pity was that as soon as the men he had helped stood on their own feet they invariably dropped George and generally insulted him.
It irritated her that George himself had never aped them. “Heaven knows,” she thought, “He’s nursed so many litters of lions that he might have caught the trick of roaring.” Yet, for “reception” purposes George’s soft, indefinite, yet most undoubted eminence was well worth having.
George apparently couldn’t and wouldn’t fade. He was always somebody
— the
Mr. Moffat. Even if no one in her large drawing room which overlooked twelve miles of park chimney-tops, and smoke; even if no one knew exactly what George
had.
done, they had at least a feeling that the want of knowledge left them inferior. It was true there were the dangers.
George’s rare visits at Campden Hill had been followed by incomprehensible imbroglios. The affairs sometimes involved families, sometimes whole côteries. On the last occasion her best friend, Mrs. Henwick; Mrs. Henwick’s husband, who normally counted no more than her own; and Mr. Frewer Hoey, her own particular friend, had, as it were, rushed violently to George’s magnet. They evolved three political pamphlets between them — George correcting the “style” — and then parted with all sorts of mutual injuries. The pamphlets had even shaken some of her own “tail.” Yet that George himself had been to blame she was not prepared to advance; it might have been coincidence. George always was a magnet; people generally rushed to him. They as generally quarrelled, but, most frequently, with George himself.
She accepted George’s invitation to stay the night, and sent her husband out to tell the
chauffeur
that he could put himself up at the inn. Left alone with Mrs. Henwick and George, she returned to the charge.
“I really should have thought you would have learned, George, not to pick up these young strays, after all the eye-openers you have had.” Her brother-in-law stirred his considerable form uneasily, and Mrs. Moffat noticed that one of his cuffs was very minutely frayed. It reminded her of Mrs. George’s despairing: —
“He would give the shirt off his back. He’s incorrigible.”.
“My dear Ella,” he got under weigh, “this young man, Hailes, if the matter’s really worth discussing, has a quite genuine talent. He’s, as the saying is, at a loose end. Well, I’m tiding him over. If I didn’t, he’d probably
never
have a chance.” He uttered his slang words with the amused, and as if savouring, air of a man very choice in his language. He could afford to condescend.
George Moffat excused his incorrigibility by his tradition. He was the elder son of Sir Graham Moffat, the late great portrait painter. Sir Graham had left a highly respectable fortune to be divided between George and Gregory, and a sister who had quarrelled with George at a very early period. But Sir Graham had known days of extreme want. He had been one of a brilliant young band who had undoubtedly established a sort of tradition — that of giving lifts to youth and brilliance even at the cost of their shirts. It was all recorded in the biography of Sir Graham by George. The traces of loans, offered more often than repaid, formed a great proportion of Sir Graham’s earlier correspondence, and George, in struggling through the mass of his father’s letters to get material for his book, had had the great tradition constantly before his eyes. And during his childhood George’s father had impressed upon him that you must never lose a chance of helping any lame dog over a style, because you never know what he might not become. But whether that alone was responsible for George’s generosities, was much debated in his family. His sister Mary said that meddlesomeness was at the bottom of his character.
George had attempted to advise her in her first love affair. She had had a slight quarrel with her suitor — about the right of women to vote — and George had given her hints as to how the man should be managed. The first lover, worn out by George’s subtle handling, had accepted an official position on the Gold Coast, and had died there. Unfortunately, he had never had a successor, and Mary had not spoken to her brother for twenty years.
George inherited a reputable fortune from his father. He wrote an official biography, splendid in appearance and notable for its avoidance of delicate topics. The members of the brilliant young band had quarrelled lamentably when they had reached maturity and eminence. Afterwards George found a certain glamour descend upon him, a glamour, if not distinct from that of his father, at least partially his own. His verse was considered to give tone to the best of the magazines and reviews of those old-fashioned days; but he wrote very little, and his writing was so very little an essential part of the man that, as Mrs. Moffat said, hardly any of her own friends knew that he wrote at all.
Tall, with hair that waved away from his forehead, and in his moments of inspiration appeared almost like the wings on a Hermes’ cap; with a chestnut beard that in the early ‘eighties was called Vandyke; with a nose and forehead that might pass as Grecian, yet with an air that one might have mistaken for Southern French, George had married years ago a brilliantly beautiful Scottish girl in the young softness of her strong character. She had appealed to him because the simplicity and directness of her speech and her decision of character made a quaint contrast with her youth and suppleness. Her family accepted him because of the brilliance of his father, who passed his summers on their moors.
On her adolescent eyes George had produced the effect of a godhead. In his father’s studio he had seen all the world sitting for its portrait, and he had splendid anecdotes of the great. He rather disliked the deerstalkers and heather-forest lords, who were his wife’s people, and he carried away to the south his bride and her emotions. Long before then he had selected a unique spot for them to live in. Wickham was a town that had dwindled to a village. Glorious panoplies of history seemed there to moulder and to die tenderly, among the wallflowers on gateways, and ruins that were crumbling and quaint rather than architectural, grand or complete.