Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (10 page)

But Provence meant far more to Ford than easy living and sound diet; beneath its surface pleasures lay a mythic and historical substructure. Provence was where the Great Trade Route, having run from China across Asia and Asia Minor to Venice and Genoa and along the north shore of the Mediterranean, finally turned north at Marseilles. Then it went ‘up the Rhône … inland, by way of Beaucaire and
Lyons to Paris; then down the Seine past Rouen to the English Channel which it crossed at its narrowest and so away along the South Coast of England past Ottery St Mary’s to the Scilly Isles where it ended abruptly’. It brought the flow of civilisation with it – or, at least, the display goods of civilisation – and, for Ford, ‘Provence is the only region on the Great Trade Route fit for the habitation of a proper man.’ Of all the towns and cities he loved Tarascon ‘the best in the world’; it was where Good King René held his court, and where, according to Ford, you couldn’t sleep for the noise of the nightingales. King René also had a court at Aix-en-Provence, but Ford didn’t like the city – ‘birthplace of Cézanne though it be, and though it be the gravest and most stately eighteenth-century town that you will find anywhere’. The problem was that Aix contained the Parlement, the intermediary through which successive French kings ruled: from there ‘the lawyers of the Parlement … fixed on Provence the gadfly yoke of armies of functionaries that have ever since bled and crippled not Provence alone but all the country of the Lilies’.

What does civilisation, as embodied by Provence, consist of? In
A Mirror to France
Ford gave his answer:

The period covered runs roughly from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The ‘amiable’ heresy was Albigensianism, whose piety and virtue (and Manichean doctrine) brought its destruction in a papal crusade led with immense cruelty by the English Simon de Montfort in 1209–13. The Troubadours – of whom Bertran de Born (c. 1140–c. 1215) was one of the most famous – and their Courts of Love continued up to the end of the thirteenth century, though their influence was much curtailed when Provence west of the Rhône was ceded to Louis XI in 1229. Avignon prospered between 1309 and 1408 as the seat of seven popes and two anti-popes, while Good King René (1408–80) presided over the final efflorescence of Provençal culture, after which the region east of the Rhône was in turn ceded to the French king. This whole period came in later centuries to represent a kind of Merrie France – tournaments, chivalry and courtly love, with wise rulers overseeing peace and human contentment. According to Ford, the first piece of French literature he read as a schoolboy was a rapturous description by Daudet of life in Avignon under the popes: processions, pilgrimages, streets strewn with flowers, the sound of bells at all hours, ‘the tic-tac of the lace bobbins, and the rustle of the shuttles weaving the cloth of the gold chasubles, the little hammers of the goldsmiths tapping the altar-cruets’ and ‘the under-sound of tambourines coming from the Bridge’. Daudet continued:

Ford is more idiosyncratic and textured than Daudet in his appreciation of the South. Provence was not just a lost golden land; despite conquest, it was both tenacious and invasive. The extermination of the language had been decreed under Louis XI, François I and Louis XIV, but Provençal continued to be spoken for centuries, and was there waiting to be revived and made official once again by the Félibrige. And though France was ‘the first Mass Product in the way of modern nations’, Provence, despite being crushed and subsumed, had the revenge of the defeated: it infiltrated the dominant culture. The virtues and values of Provence spread up through the remnants of the Great Trade Route, so that France was civilised to the extent that she submitted to this reverse takeover. And Provence was not just a region but also a state of mind – indulgent, fantastical, credulous – and this element fed into those harsh and pragmatic owners up in the North.

Ford’s historical and travel writing is vivid, often tendentious, and always personal. His nostalgia becomes blatantly solipsistic, for instance, when he looks at the rewards and public standing of the Troubadour poets. He himself was perpetually impoverished: in 1907 he set what must be some kind of record by publishing six books while also applying to the Royal Literary Fund for financial assistance. How different it was back in the twelfth century:

This was a key feature of Troubadour art for Ford: it was ‘essentially both democratic and aristocratic’. By which he meant that the Troubadours might be of humble origin and yet address their love songs to aristocratic women. But he also meant that this was how all the arts should be: ‘democratic’ inasmuch as anyone could make them, and anyone could enjoy them; but the process was ‘aristocratic’ in the sense of being highly skilled, difficult and rare.

Ford described himself as a ‘sentimental Tory’ who liked ‘pomp, banners, divine rights, unreasonable ceremonies and ceremoniousness’. He presented himself as a rather old-fashioned English officer and gentleman. His grandfather had ‘insisted characteristically that although one must know French with accuracy one must speak it with a marked English accent to show that one is an English gentleman. I still do.’ (But this being Ford, there is a contradictory explanation provided by Stella Bowen: his French sounded English because he never moved his lips enough.) The honourable, chivalric man, trying to do his best in a modern world which fails to recognise his virtues, is a recurrent figure in Ford’s work. And there is a quietly insistent chivalric element underlying
The Good Soldier
. The two couples at the heart of this story of destructive passion meet for the first time in the hotel restaurant of a German spa town. They find a table to suit them; it is round; Florence Dowell comments, ‘And so the whole round table is begun’– quoting Malory. She and her husband have visited Provence, ‘where even the saddest stories are gay’; and Dowell, the narrator, at one point tells, in his prosy, non-understanding way, the story of Peire Vidal. The Good Soldier of the title, Edward Ashburnham, is presented as an absolute English gentleman forever on a ‘feudal’ quest to help others; his ward, Nancy Rufford, who
is in love with him, specifically links him to three chivalric figures of different cultures – Lohengrin, the Chevalier Bayard and El Cid. Dowell, who is in love with Nancy, explains himself with the novel’s famous, high-Romantic line, ‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.’ And at the end of the book, after the great emotional ‘smash’ is over, Dowell revisits Provence: ‘I have seen again for a glimpse, from a swift train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white tower, Tarascon with the square castle, the great Rhône, the immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed through all Provence – and all Provence no longer matters.’

It no longer matters because its high-hearted truths have been shown to be deluded. Ford may have loved Provence and its golden mythology, but he was also a modern novelist, guided by the emotional truthfulness of Flaubert and Maupassant. He knew that ‘the saddest stories’ nowadays are rarely gay, but just very sad, if not murderously violent; and that any gaiety around is likely to come from misunderstanding and self-deception. He knew also that the human heart is ‘defective’. For all his convincing self-presentation as a moth-eaten old gent – E. M. Forster snootily called him ‘a fly-blown man of letters’, Paul Nash ‘Silenus in tweeds’ – Ford understood the modern world, and the new reality that opposed the past’s lingering myths. After all, in 1913, two years before
The Good Soldier
was published, he had visited the totemic city of Carcassonne, towards which Dowell and others feel such a romantic impulsion. And what had Ford discovered there? Snow and rabies.

Ford’s Provence was an ideal lost world, a cradle of civilisation, and a reference point in his fiction. But the region contained more than just the past and present; it also suggested a possible future. In
Provence
(1935) Ford at one point asks to be regarded not as a moralist or historian, but ‘simply as prophet’. Civilisation is ‘staggering to its end’ and he wants to show ‘what will happen to it if it does not take Provence
of the XIII century for its model’. Ford had seen service as a transport officer in the First World War, where he was gassed; and he spent his last twenty years (before his death in 1939) watching the grim chest-beating of nations and ideologies across Europe. He loathed empty-headed nationalism, violence, transnational standardisation, mechanisation, and most of the doings of financiers. He was also a writer, and thus a citizen not of any one country but of the world; and he wondered how that world might emerge from the great smash that was coming, and avoid further smashes. How might the human brute be tamed? Not by bigger groupings, by signing up to yet more overarching -ologies, by exterminating languages and individualisms. Perhaps, he thought, we should become local again, live in smaller communities, learn to avoid the hysterical clamourings of gangs and groups. This was the sort of life he imagined – and had found – in Provence. In
The Great Trade Route
(1937), he wrote:

The old advice about cultivating one’s garden was always moral as well as practical; nor was it a counsel of quietism. As human beings recklessly use up the world’s resources and despoil the planet, as the follies of globalisation become more apparent,
as we head towards what could be the biggest smash of all, the wisdom and the way of living that Ford Madox Ford – literature’s good soldier – found in Provence are perhaps even more worth attending to.

I
N
1927, F
ORD
Madox Ford compared himself to a great auk, that clumsy North Atlantic penguin, hunted to death by the middle of the nineteenth century. The occasion was the reissue of his first masterpiece
The Good Soldier
(1915) – his ‘great auk’s egg’ – which he had published at the age of forty-one. Even back then, he maintained, he had felt like an ‘extinct volcano’, one who had had his time and was all too willing to hand over to the ‘clamorous young writers’ of the rising generation. But those new voices – Imagists, Vorticists, Cubists – had been blown away by the Great War, and somehow he was still around. And so, to his own surprise, ‘I have come out of my hole again’ to write more books … Such weary, genteel valetudinarianism was typical of Ford. When he died, Graham Greene wrote that it felt like ‘the obscure death of a veteran – an impossibly Napoleonic veteran, say, whose immense memory spanned the period from Jena to Sedan’.

However, it was and is always a mistake to go along with Ford’s self-presentation. He appeared confused and was often confusing; he would say one thing and probably mean another, only to state its opposite as a counter-certainty not very long afterwards; he was fanciful, unreliable and exasperating. Some thought him simply a liar, though as Ezra Pound charitably pointed out to Hemingway, Ford ‘only lied when he was very tired’. So in 1927, for all his self-dismissingness, he was three-quarters of the way through what would become his second masterpiece: the four-book
Parade’s End
(1924–8). A novel which couldn’t be further from the work of some
superannuated old buffer: in literary technique and human psychology, it is as modern and modernist as they come. And now that the years have shaken down, it is Ford who makes Greene look old-fashioned, rather than the other way round.

The Good Soldier
’s protagonist, Edward Ashburnham, was a version of the chivalric knight.
Parade’s End’s
protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, is a version of the Anglican saint. Both are great auks making do in a world of modernity and muddle. Tietjens – a North Yorkshireman whose ancestors came over with ‘Dutch William’ – believes that the seventeenth century was ‘the only satisfactory age in England’. He is ‘a Tory of an extinct type’ who has ‘no politics that did not disappear in the eighteenth century’. He reads no poetry except Byron, thinks Gilbert White of Selborne ‘the last English writer who could write’, and approves of only one novel written since the eighteenth century (not that we can read it, since it is by a character in
Parade’s End
). Both Ashburnham and Tietjens share a streak of romantic feudalism – nostalgia for a time of rights and duties and supposed orderliness. But Ashburnham is better fitted for the modern world, being – beneath his chivalric coating – a devious libertine and not outstandingly bright. Tietjens, by contrast, declares, ‘I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it.’ He is also highly intelligent, with an encyclopedic memory – ‘the most brilliant man in England’, as we are frequently assured in the opening book,
Some Do Not
. This may be an advantage in the Imperial Department of Statistics, where he number-crunches for England; but isn’t such a good idea in the world he inhabits.