Ammen’s madness is not of merely specialized interest, for it is a fonn of self-consciousness, not of derangement. He has carried consciousness of himself, the mapping of his own brain, to a point that excludes the world, but it is an accurate, not a crazily drawn map. The pathos of his situation is that so complete a self-consciousness must inevitably recognize its own defeat. The moment of cutting himself loose, the moment when he made his decision to destroy, is the only real moment of detachment, of complete superiority:
It seemed very remote, a long time ago, very remote and oddly bright and innocent: it had been spring; and although it was still spring, somehow now it seemed as if he was looking back to it from another season, another year. The plan had then been formless, of course, and this had given it the charm and vagueness of all new things, new undertakings – the stranger had not yet been discovered or his strangeness identified, the whole problem still remained metaphysical – a mere formula – and it was now possible to recognize that at that stage there had been an unmistakable sense of freedom which had, at once, with the actual selection of Jones disappeared.
The values of this story could not have been conveyed through any other mind than Ammen’s, but Mr Aiken, of course, by keeping his story inside the egocentric consciousness, has had to sacrifice all the usual enticements of the novel in the way of vivid objective characterization. I wish I could convey with what poetry and subtle drama, with what pathos in the climax when hopeless defeated Ammen watches Jones put away his still-born child in the hideous marble necropolis, Mr Aiken has compensated the reader. Mr Herbert Read once wrote of the psychological complexity of James’s world that ‘it was obviously the real world, the only world worth describing, once your course is set that way. Henry James went ahead, fearlessly, irretrievably, into regions where few are found who care to follow him.’ Mr Aiken is one of the few – which is only another way of saying that he is perhaps the most exciting, the most finally satisfying of living novelists.
1935
THE POKER-FACE
ONE has seen that face over a hundred bar counters – the lick of hair over the broad white brow, the heavy moustache with pointed ends, the firm, good-humoured eyes, the man who is a cause of conviviality in other men but knows exactly when the fun should cease. He is wearing a dark suit (the jacket has four buttons) and well-polished boots. Could Sherlock Holmes have deduced from this magnificently open appearance anything at all resembling the bizarre truth?
Mr Hesketh Pearson tells this far from ordinary story*7 with his admirable accustomed forthrightness: Mr Pearson as a biographer has some of the qualities of Dr Johnson – a plainness, an honesty, a sense of ordinary life going on all the time. A dull biographer would never have got behind that poker-face; an excited biographer would have made us disbelieve the story, which wanders from whaling in the Arctic to fever on the West Coast of Africa, a practice in Portsea to ghost-hunting in Sussex. But from Mr Pearson we are able to accept it. Conan Doyle has too often been compared with Dr Watson: in this biography it is Mr Pearson who plays Watson to the odd enigmatic product of a Jesuit education, the Sherlock-hearted Doyle.
It is an exciting story admirably told, and it is one of Mr Pearson’s virtues that he drives us to champion the subject against his biographer (Johnson has the same effect on the reader). For example, this reviewer would like to put in a word which Mr Pearson omits for the poetic quality in Doyle, the quality which gives life to his work far more surely than does his wit. Think of the sense of horror which hangs over the laurelled drive of Upper Norwood and behind the curtains of Lower Camberwell: the dead body of Bartholomew Sholto swinging to and fro in Pondicherri Lodge, the ‘bristle of red hair’, ‘the ghastly inscrutable smile’, and in contrast Watson and Miss Mortsan hand in hand like children among the strange rubbish heaps: he made Plumstead Marshes and the Barking Level as vivid and unfamiliar as a lesser writer would have made the mangrove swamps of the West Coast which he had also known and of which he did not bother to write.
And, unlike most great writers, he remained so honest and pleasant a man. The child who wrote with careful necessary economy to his mother from Stonyhurst: ‘I have been to the Taylor, and I showed him your letter, explaining to him that you wanted something that would wear well and at the same time look well. He told me that the blue cloth he had was meant especially for Coats, but that none of it would suit well as Fresson. He showed me a dark sort of cloth which he said would suit a coat better than any other cloth he has and would wear well as trousers. On his recommendation I took this cloth. I think you will like it; it does not show dirt and looks very well; it is a sort of black and white very dark cloth’; this child had obviously the same character as the middle-aged man who wrote chivalrously and violently against Shaw in defence of the Titanic officers (he was probably wrong, but, as Mr Pearson nearly says, most of us would have preferred to be wrong with Doyle than right with Shaw).
It isn’t easy for an author to remain a pleasant human being: both success and failure are usually of a crippling kind. There are so many opportunities for histrionics, hysterics, waywardness, self-importance; within very wide limits a writer can do what he likes and go where he likes, and a human being has seldom stood up so well to such a test of freedom as Doyle did. The eccentric figure of his partner, Dr Budd, may stride like a giant through the early pages of his biography, but in memory he dwindles into the far distance, and in the foreground we see the large, sturdy, working shoulders, a face so commonplace that it has the effect of a time-worn sculpture representing some abstract quality like Kindness or Patience, but never, one would mistakenly have said, Imagination or Poetry.
1943
FORD MADOX FORD
1
THE death of Ford Madox Ford was like the obscure death of a veteran – an impossibly Napoleonic veteran, say, whose immense memory spanned the period from Jena to Sedan: he belonged to the heroic age of English fiction and outlived it – yet he was only sixty-six. In one of his many volumes of reminiscence – those magnificent books where in an atmosphere of casual talk outrageous story jostles outrageous story – he quoted Mr Wells as saying some years ago that in the southern counties a number of foreigners were conspiring against the form of the English novel. There was James at Lamb House, Crane at Brede Manor, Conrad at The Pent, and he might have added his own name, Hueffer at Aldington, for he was a quarter German (and just before the first world war made an odd extravagant effort to naturalize himself as a citizen of his grandfather’s country). The conspiracy, of course, failed: the big loose middlebrow novel goes on its happy way unconscious of James’s ‘point of view’: Conrad is regarded again as the writer of romantic sea stories and purple passages: nobody reads Crane, and Ford – well, an anonymous writer in the Times Literary Supplement remarked in an obituary notice that his novels began to date twenty years ago. Conservatism among English critics is extraordinarily tenacious, and they hasten, on a man’s death, to wipe out any disturbance he has caused.
The son of Francis Hueffer, the musical critic of The Times, and grandson, on his mother’s side, of Ford Madox Brown, ‘Fordie’ Hueffer emerges into history at the age of three offering a chair to Turgenev, and again, a little later, dressed in a suit of yellow velveteen with gold buttons, wearing one red stocking and one green one, and with long golden hair, having his chair stolen from him at a concert by the Abbé Liszt. I say emerges into history, but it is never possible to say where history ends and the hilarious imagination begins. He was always an atmospheric writer, whether he was describing the confused Armistice night when Tietjens found himself back with his mistress, Valentine Wannop, among a horde of grotesque and inexplicable strangers, or just recounting a literary anecdote of dubious origin – the drunk writer who thought himself a Bengal tiger trying to tear out the throat of the blind poet Marston, or Henry James getting hopelessly entangled in the long lead of his dachshund Maximilian. Nobody ever wrote more about himself than Ford, but the figure he presented was just as dubi
ous as his anecdotes – the figure of a Tory country gentleman who liked to grow his own food and had sturdy independent views on politics: it all seems a long way from the yellow velveteen. He even, at the end of his life, a little plump and a little pink, looked the part – and all the while he had been turning out the immense number of books which stand to his name: memoirs, criticism, poetry, sociology, novels. And in between, if one can so put it, he found time to be the best, literary editor England has ever had: what Masefield, Hudson, Conrad, even Hardy owed to the English Review is well known, and after the war in the Transatlantic Review he bridged the great gap, publishing the early Hemingway, Cocteau, Stein, Pound, the music of Antheil, and the drawings of Braque.
He had the advantage – or the disadvantage – of being brought up in pre-Raphaelite circles, and although he made a tentative effort to break away into the Indian Civil Service, he was pushed steadily by his father towards art – any kind of art was better than any kind of profession. He published his first book at the age of sixteen, and his first novel, The Shifting of the Fire, in 1892, when he was only nineteen – three years before Conrad had published anything and only two years after the serial appearance of The Tragic Muse, long before James had matured his method and his style. It wasn’t, of course, a good book, but neither was it an ‘arty’ book – there was nothing of the ‘nineties about it except its elegant period binding, and it already bore the unmistakable Hueffer stamp – the outrageous fancy, the pessimistic high spirits, and an abominable hero called Kasker-Ryves. Human nature in his books was usually phosphorescent – varying from the daemonic malice of Sylvia Tietjens to the painstaking, rather hopeless will-to-be-good of Captain Ashburnham, ‘the good soldier’. The little virtue that existed only attracted evil. But to Mr Ford, a Catholic in theory though not for long in practice, this was neither surprising nor depressing: it was just what one expected.
The long roll of novels ended with Vive le Roy in 1937. A few deserve to be forgotten, but I doubt whether the accusation of dating can be brought against even such minor work as Mr Apollo, The Marsden Case, When the Wicked Man: there were the historical novels, too, with their enormous vigour and authenticity – The Fifth Queen and its sequels: but the novels which stand as high as any fiction written since the death of James are The Good Soldier with its magnificent claim in the first line, ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’ – the study of an averagely good man of a conventional class driven, divided and destroyed by unconventional passion – and the Tietjens series, that appalling examination of how private malice goes on during public disaster – no escape even in the trenches from the secret gossip and the lawyers’ papers. It is dangerous in this country to talk about technique or a long essay could be written on his method in these later books, the method Conrad followed more stiffly and less skilfully, having learnt it perhaps from Ford when they collaborated on Romance: James’s point of view was carried a step further, so that a book took place not only from the point of view but in the brain of a character and events were remembered not in chronological order, but as free association brought them to mind.
When Ford died he had passed through a period of neglect and was re-emerging. His latest books were not his best, but they were hailed as if they were. The first war had ruined him. He had volunteered, though he was over military age and was fighting a country he loved; his health was broken, and he came back to a new literary world which had carefully eliminated him. For some of his later work he could not even find a publisher in England. No wonder he preferred to live abroad – in Provence or New York. But I don’t suppose failure disturbed him much: he had never really believed in human happiness, his middle life had been made miserable by passion, and he had come through – with his humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing.
2
How seldom a novelist chooses the material nearest to his hand; it is almost as if he were driven to earn experience the hard way. Ford, whom we might have expected to become a novelist of artistic bohemia, a kind of English Murger, did indeed employ the material of Fitzroy Square incomparably well in his volumes of reminiscence – and some people might regard those as his finest novels, for he brought to his dramatizations of people he had known the same astonishing knack he showed with his historical figures. Most writers dealing with real people find their invention confined, but that was not so with Ford. ‘When it has seemed expedient to me I have altered episodes that I have witnessed, but I have been careful never to distort the character of the episode. The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions. If you want factual accuracies you must go to . . . but no, no, don’t go to anyone, stay with me.’ (The italics are mine: it is a phrase worth bearing in mind in reading all his works.)
In fact as a novelist Ford began to move further and further from bohemia for his material. His first period as an historical novelist, which he began by collaborating with Conrad in that underrated novel Romance, virtually closed with his Tudor trilogy. There were to be two or three more historical novels, until in Ladies Whose Bright Eyes . . . he came half out into the contemporary world and began to find his true subject. It could even be argued that in The Fifth Queen he was nearest as a novelist to Fitzroy Square. There is the sense of saturation: something is always happening on the stairs, in the passages the servants come and go on half explained errands, and the great King may at any moment erupt upon the scene, half kindly, half malevolent, rather as we feel the presence of Madox Brown in the gas-lit interstices of No. 37.
Most historical novelists use real characters only for purposes of local colour – Lord Nelson passes up a Portsmouth street or Doctor Johnson enters ponderously to close a chapter, but in The Fifth Queen we have virtually no fictional characters – the King, Thomas Cromwell, Catherine Howard, they are the principals; we are nearer to the historical plays of Shakespeare than to the fictions of such historical writers as Miss Irwin or Miss Heyer.
‘The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions.’ In The Fifth Queen Ford tries out the impressionist method which he was later to employ with triumphant ease in the great confused armistice-day scene of A Man Could Stand Up. The whole story of the struggle between Catherine and Cromwell for the King seems told in shadows – shadows which flicker with the flames of a log-fire, diminished suddenly as a torch recedes, stand calm awhile in the candlelight of a chapel: a cresset flares and all the shadows leap together. Has a novel ever before been lit as carefully as a stage production? Nicolas Udal’s lies, which play so important a part in the first volume, take their substance from the lighting: they are monstrously elongated or suddenly shrivel: one can believe anything by torchlight. (The power of a lie – that too was a subject he was to pursue through all his later books: the lies of Sylvia Tietjens which ruined her husband’s army-career and the monstrous lie of ‘poor Florence’ in The Good Soldier which brought death to three people and madness to a fourth.)
If The Fifth Queen is a magnificent bravura piece – and you could say that it was a better painting than ever came out of Fitzroy Square with all the mingled talents there of Madox Brown and Morris, Rossetti and Burne-Jones – in The Good Soldier Ford triumphantly found his true subject and oddly enough, for a child of the Pre-Raphaelites, his subject was the English ‘gentleman’, the ‘black and merciless things’ which lie behind that façade.
Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap; – an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he never told a story that couldn’t have gone into the columns of the Field more than once or twice in all the nine years of my knowing him. He didn’t even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You would have said he was just exactly the sort of chap
that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness.
The Good Soldier, which Ford had wished to call The Saddest Story, concerns the ravages wrought by a passionate man who had all the virtues but continence. The narrator is the betrayed husband, and it is through his eyes alone that we watch the complications and involvements left by Ashburnham’s blind urge towards satisfaction. Technically the story is undoubtedly Ford’s masterpiece. The time-shifts are valuable not merely for purposes of suspense – they lend veracity to the appalling events. This is just how memory works, and we become involved with the narrator’s memory as though it were our own. Ford’s apprenticeship with Conrad had borne its fruit, but he improved on the Master.
I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes. And when one discusses an affair – a long sad affair – one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.
A short enough book it is to contain two suicides, two ruined lives, a death, and a girl driven insane: it may seem odd to find the keynote of the book is restraint, a restraint which is given it by the gentle character of the narrator (‘I am only an ageing American with very little knowledge of life’) who never loses his love and compassion for the characters concerned. ‘Here were two noble people – for I am convinced that both Edward and Leonara had noble natures – here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, agony of the mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness.’ He condemns no one; in extremity he doesn’t even condemn human nature, and I find one of the most moving understatements in literature his summing up of Leonora’s attitude to her husband’s temporary infatuation for the immature young woman, Maisie Maidan: ‘I think she would really have welcomed it if he could have come across the love of his life. It would have given her a rest.’