Finding a Form (13 page)

In 1913, when Ford wrote about impressionism for the magazine
Poetry and Drama
, he again revealed a bias in favor of temperament. For the mere purveyor of facts he has but ironic praise.

(Ford, who should never be trusted alone with a trusting reader, manages to vulgarize his tone when talking of the journalist, slip a little Latin in when speaking of Mr. Hudson, as well as introduce a slyly sufficient description of false sea-buckthorn into his allegations of insufficiency, revealing a good deal about his own temperament along the way.)

The ordinary public world of the naive realist, or the positivist’s more accurately formalized and measured one, is rejected on behalf of doubt and dissolution, in favor of a movement into memory, a memory frail and shaken. It is not simply that Locke’s blank
tablet is replaced by a mind which, in typical Kantian fashion, actively participates in the construction of experience; it is rather that each individual is encouraged to draw, as personally and privately as possible, the peculiar features of his phenomena. It is not the vertical or transcendent significance of things depicted that matters anymore (once the painting of a woman with an infant in her arms was the painting of a mother and her child who were the Virgin and baby Jesus, who are the mother and son of God and represent the arrival of redemption and one’s only shot at salvation); neither is it the representation of the things themselves that counts (a jug, a table, a woman at a window) or the homey horizontal connections (with rug and floor and furniture store); nor is it the realization of the conditions of observation that is of central interest (sunlight, haze, rain)—the halo of regard. Although it is expected that the eye and its object will remain, it is the viewer, and neither viewing nor the view, that predominates; the emphasis is not upon experience, with all its affinity for the external world, but upon consciousness and its inveterate habit of self-regard.

This pattern of development is by no means confined to painting or even literature. If Gaston Bachelard is right, the sciences seem to follow the same course. This tendency doesn’t stop with Ford’s impressionism either, but continues in a kind of recursive arc that contains too many stages to be simply called dialectical. However, let’s examine Ford’s case first, before looking at the epistemic loop.

Ford likes to argue by example, and perhaps his best-known one occurs in his book on Conrad (
Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance
, Boston: Little, Brown, 1924, pp. 192ff). It concerns a Mr. Slack, and tells us how, in 1914, Mr. Slack erected a greenhouse and subsequently painted it with Cox’s green aluminum paint. Some years back, Ford imagines, we were witness to this event, which may have transpired over several weeks. Nothing is that continuous in memory, and our mind will naturally break this nevertheless small affair into still smaller portions, some of which will really belong outside it altogether. “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.” (This is the application of Impressionism #2 to Impressionism #5.) We associate rather freely with the event in order to remember its date (as if anyone would normally care): “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.” Then we recall that soon after, we saw Mr. Slack in the company of a pale, weaselly-faced fellow whom we shall later be able to say did the work. (There is just a dash of Impressionism #7 here.)

To remember Mr. Slack is to remember much more about him than his appearance on that occasion. He is the Mr. Slack of that moment, of course, but he is also Mr. Slack as we knew him before, as well as the Mr. Slack he will be afterward—each image at rest in our memory as if our encounters made up his bones. (“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 whiskey you think would be much better for him!”)

Here comes Mr. Slack with Weasel-face in tow. Mr. Slack points at the wall of his house—here, there—and Weasel-face touches his cap. (We have been, in this fashion,
shown
his civility—or we have been shown his servility, depending upon our point of view.) At this point our mind slips into the slough of its customary narrow personal concerns as, the implication is, it always does, especially when it is occupied with memories that have no particular magnetism of their own. Mr. Slack is momentarily forgotten while we remember how our daughter Millicent was behaving at the time (“Millicent had not yet put her hair up”), or possibly misbehaving (“… 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”). Indeed, memories without a strong emotional charge, like this one of Mr. Slack, are easily pushed aside by more
powerful ones with which they have had the bad luck to be associated; on the other hand, the powerful ones are often unpleasant, so that other mental forces must be brought up in order to drive them off and let Mr. Slack occupy a more peaceful stage.

Beyond our little cottages and half-lots, however, peace is not the play, and although our context in this example is neighborly and familial, and although the fact is not invited in by Ford himself (who is, nevertheless, and in part because of this discretion, a habitual slyboots), we cannot fail to realize that war was declared during the first week of August 1914; that General Max von Hausen’s Third Army was massed opposite Liège—soon to be beleaguered and then destroyed—the city whose bonds we were so fortunate as to hold; that the narrow circle of our concerns tells upon us, especially, perhaps, on Mr. Slack, whose name is a poor one to wear during wartime.

Now imagine Monet being asked to paint this kind of impression.

By this method any occasion is dissolved into its elements (act, agent, object, qualities, and temporal successions—first this, then that); its various modes of apprehension are marked off (detailed close-ups, distant overviews, vague general effects); and all of these are stirred about, apparently higgledy-piggledy, until not only order but many actual bits are utterly lost. This mess is mixed with all sorts of memories and associations, some longer and more detailed than the central memory itself. The writer then rebuilds the event, as it were, by means of sidelongs and fractures, obscure details and elaborate digressions, surprising omissions and untoward simplifications.

The fit is loose, but this method more nearly resembles the working habits of the cubists than those of the impressionists.

Of course, the real chances are that the writer began with the bits and let the words feel their way toward some absent whole the way a sketch suggests a face or a landscape, rather than commencing with a complete and disciplined design and then scrubbing things out and messing them up.

The impression we are after here, and which we wish to give to
the reader, is that of a consciousness, not of a thing. Things arrive in consciousness from every direction: through sensation, thought, memory, desire. A world in ruins dumps its contents into a pot that leaks. “Modern life is so extraordinary, so hazy, so tenuous, with still such definite and concrete spots in it,” Ford writes, “that I am forever on the look-out for some poet who shall render it with all its values” (Preface to Ford’s
Collected Poems
, 1911, and revised for publication in
Poetry Magazine
, July-August, 1913, in MacShane, p. 142). Mr. Slack’s greenhouse is such a solid spot. What makes it tenuous is the fact, on the one hand, that the Germans are overrunning Belgium and that after this war no one will touch his cap with such alacrity, while on the other, that “we” are mixing Millicent’s indiscretions at Brighton with Mr. Slack and Weasel-face and Cox’s aluminum paint (“You remember the half-empty tin that Mr. Slack showed you—he had a most undignified cold—with a name in a horseshoe over a blue circle that contained a red lion asleep in front of a real-gold sun”); we are also congratulating ourselves on our season ticket; we are thinking this and that, but thinking nothing through; and these other vagrant occupations distort, disrupt, and diminish the clarity, solidity, and completeness of the “greenhouse affair.” In fact, when Mr. Slack began to eye the side of his house, we were probably not thinking of Millicent or of municipal bonds or of Mr. Mills, the vicar, at all, but were simply wondering what was up. And when we remember these circumstances, we probably do not have so clear a picture of the label on Cox’s aluminum paint cans, though we may certainly have had at the time. Impressionisms #2 and #4 predominate, but instead of a romantic rose whose presentation turns the head, we have a dull Mr. Slack and his little household addendum obviously substituting for and consequently obscuring some tawdry, quite personal, and distressing thought.

You cannot have an impression of another consciousness as if it were a train shed, a bright sail, or stretch of beach. Although we might have impressions
in
our consciousness, to say we had an impression
of
our consciousness during any particular present
would be odd indeed. We can have an impression of life
as it comes back to us
, and as it comes back to us it is incomplete and thoroughly confounded with other elements which it certainly didn’t possess originally; it is distorted and rearranged and treated like a table on which we lay out our obsessions.

The fact is that the painters were taking their art in quite another direction (toward a goal
it saw
, if they did not, and one which Kandinsky and others reached), but they were unable to give up the traditional (reactionary and bourgeois) belief that the aim of their art involved, in some essential sense, fidelity to nature. Art and nature had been long wed. Together they were to bring forth a country full of likenesses. Even Kandinsky is forced to spiritualize truth and confer it upon lines and planes in order to continue this charade. When the Old Testament prophets, one remembers, realized that the Kingdom promised them in their contract with the deity was going to be withheld—they weren’t even going to get its dust in their eyes—they similarly spiritualized the laws and dematerialized the many meadows, milks, and honeys they really hungered for. The ultimate such refinement of the physical (i.e., the actual) was called “circumcision of the heart.” Ford makes the same concessions to the conventional doctrines while smoothly subverting them. Life does not narrate, Ford says, and indeed it does not; it takes a teller of tales to disentangle the story, but most people continue to believe the tale is there and describes the main road, the true course taken; for how else could we make sense of byways and forks and high roads and digressions? There is a thread to thought, too, and there is honest dialogue as well, pertinent question and actual answer—so what if no one correctly responds or bothers to listen, as Ford seems to suggest is the actual way of it—because if the exchange is shattered, the bits will still continue to belong.

When the traditional painter persists in drawing firm lines which define the limits of objects and the boundaries of their being; even when he sets them in a pure perspectival space, when he washes them clean of spook and shade; he is merely disclosing the real as
it rests there, holding the reins of things and directing their travel. I am convinced that this is what the ordinary reader believes, and if you want to achieve in your work the illusion of reality, it is best not to trust to appearances. Since life contains stories but does not tell them, no one minds the truth: that this or that story is being
told
. Furthermore, that’s how, daily, we receive news, anecdote, and information: we are
told
. And the teller often puts in observations of his or her own, goes off on a tangent or has a bad cough. The listener has to find the tale in its telling the same way the teller has to find it in events. We are quite comfortable with these conventions, and it is simply not true that the palpable presence of the author puts people off or makes them feel the text is representing something to them that is artificial and unreal.

A conventional manner, then, never hurts the illusion, for when we are told something (although the teller may know more than we do, and in that, or even in some other ways, be superior—and who wants to hear a story you know better than its raconteur?), we are standing or sitting side by side in the same world, and her comments or his asides (supposed to break the illusion of life that the tale is creating) encourage our complicity in events, reassure us about the common plane upon which author, characters, and audience live; and this collusion completes its rhyme: the illusion—if that is what you want—is secure.