I don’t know how many times in nearly forty years I have come back to this novel of Ford’s, every time to discover a new aspect to admire, but I think the impression which will be left strongly on the reader is the sense of Ford’s involvement. A novelist is not a vegetable absorbing nourishment mechanically from soil and air: material is not easily or painlessly gained, and one cannot help wondering what agonies of frustration and error lay behind The Saddest Story.
3
It seems likely that, when time has ceased its dreary work of erosion. Ford Madox Ford will be remembered as the author of three great novels, a little scarred, stained here and there and chipped perhaps, but how massive and resistant compared with most of the work of his successors: The Fifth Queen, The Good Soldier, and Parade’s End, the title Ford himself gave to what is often known, after the name of the principal character, as the Tietjens tetralogy – the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned by the clever devices of a jealous and lying wife.
Ford always wanted to see his novel printed as one book, but he wanted to see it as a trilogy, consisting only of Some Do Not . . ., No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up – the final book, Last Post, was an after-thought which he had not intended to write and which later he regretted having written. In a letter dealing with the possibility of an omnibus edition, which is quoted by Mr John A. Meixner in his critical study, Ford Madox Ford’s Novels, Ford wrote: ‘I strongly wish to omit Last Post from the edition. I do not like the book and have never liked it and always intended to end up with A Man Could Stand Up.’
I think it could be argued that Last Post was more than a mistake – it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade’s End. The sentimentality which sometimes lurks in the shadow of Christopher Tietjens, the last Tory (Ford sometimes seems to be writing about ‘the last English gentleman’), emerged there unashamed. Everything was cleared up – all the valuable ambiguities concerning the parenthood of Christopher’s son (the suggestion chosen by his wife Sylvia to torture him), his father’s possible suicide, his father’s possible relationship to Valentine, Christopher’s mistress – all, all are brought into the idyllic sunshine of Christopher’s successful escape into the life of a Kentish smallholder. Even Sylvia – surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel – groped in Last Post towards goodness, granted Christopher his divorce, took back – however grudgingly – her lies. It is as though Lady Macbeth dropped her dagger beside the sleeping Duncan.
This is a better book, a thousand times, when it ends in the confusion of Armistice Night 1918 – the two lovers united, it is true, but with no absolute certainties about the past so deformed by Sylvia’s lies (if they are lies) or about the future with that witch-wife still awaiting them there. Those of us who, even though we were children, remember Armistice Day (so different from that sober, reflective V.E. day of 1945) remember it as a day out of time – an explosion without a future. It was the Armistice only which counted, it was the Armistice too for the poor tortured lovers: perhaps there would never be a peace . . .
They were prancing. The whole world round them was yelling and prancing round. They were the centre of unending roaring circles. The man with the eye-glass had stuck a half-crown in his other eye. He was well-meaning. A brother. She had a brother with the V.C. All in the family.
Tietjens was stretching out his two hands from the waist. It was incomprehensible. His right hand was behind her back, his left in her right hand. She was frightened. She was amazed. Did you ever! He was swaying slowly. The elephant! They were dancing! Aranjuez was hanging on to the tall woman like a kid on a telegraph pole. The officer who had said he had picked up a little bit of fluff. . . . well, he had! He had run out and fetched it. It wore white cotton gloves and a flowered hat. It said: ‘Ow! Now!’ . . . There was a fellow with a most beautiful voice. He led: better than a gramophone. Better . . .
Les petites marionettes, font! font! font . . .
On an elephant. A dear, meal-sack elephant. She was setting out on . . .
This is the end of A Man Could Stand Up, and this – not the carefully arranged happy finale of Last Post – was the true conclusion of a story of unhappy marriage, of Sylvia’s tortuous intrigues which had begun, before the so-called Great War had closed in, in a little resort among the pine woods of Lobscheid. ‘They were sitting playing bridge in the large, shadowy dining-hall of the hotel: Mrs Satterthwaite, Father Consett, Mr Bayliss. A young blond sub-lieutenant of great obsequiousness who was there for a last chance for his right lung and his career, and the bearded Kur-doctor cut in.’ Sylvia had not yet entered ‘like a picture of Our Lady by Fra Angelico’, but I have always been reminded of another wicked setting, in a poem written at about the same time:
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.
Parade’s End is not a war-book in the ordinary sense of the term; true, it was produced from the experiences of 1914-18, but while a novel like All Quiet on the Western Front confined its horror to the physical, to the terrors of the trenches, so that it is even possible to think of such physical terrors as an escape for some from the burden of thought and mental pain, Ford turned the screw. Here there was no escape from the private life. Sylvia pursued her husband even to the headquarters of his regiment. Unlikely? Read in The Memoirs of Lord Chandos how, just out of the heavily shelled Ginchy valley, he and his friend were greeted by the disquieting telegrams from home. I remember a week-end reunion with wives and mistresses in the dug-outs of Dien-Bien-Phu, as the troops waited day by day for the assault. The private life cannot be escaped and death does not come when it is most required.
1939 and 1962
FREDERICK ROLFE: EDWARDIAN INFERNO
THE obscurity and what we curiously believe to be the crudity and violence of the distant past make a suitable background to the Soul. Temptation, one feels, is seldom today so heroically resisted or so devastatingly succumbed to as in the days of Dante or of Milton; Satan, as well as sanctity, demands an apron stage. It is, therefore, with a shock of startled incredulity that we become aware on occasion even today of eternal issues, of the struggle between good and evil, between vice that really demands to be called satanic and virtue of a kind which can only be called heavenly.
How much less are we prepared for it in the Edwardian age, in the age of bicycles and German bands and gold chamber ware, of Norfolk jackets and deerstalker caps. How distressingly bizarre seems the whole angelic conflict which centred around Frederick Rolfe, self-styled Baron Corvo, the spoilt priest, who was expelled from the Scots College at Rome, the waster who lived on a multitude of generous friends, the writer of genius, author of Hadrian the Seventh and Don Tarquinio and Chronicles of the House of Borgia. When Rolfe’s fictional self prayed in his Hampstead lodging:
God, if ever You loved me, hear me, hear me. De Profundis ad Te, ad Te clamavi. Don’t I want to be good and clean and happy? What desire have I cherished since my boyhood save to serve in the number of Your mystics? What but that have I asked of You Who made me? Not a chance do You give me – ever – ever –
it is disquieting to remember how in the outside world Mr Wells was writing Love on Wheels, the Empire builders after tiffin at the club were reading ‘The Song of the Banjo’, and up the crowded stairway of Grosvenor House Henry James was bearing his massive brow; disquieting too to believe that Miss Marie Corelli was only palely limping after truth when she brought the devil to London. For if ever there was a case of demonic possession it was Rolfe?
??s: the hopeless piety, the screams of malevolence, the sense of despair which to a man of his faith was the sin against the Holy Ghost. ‘All men are too vile for words to tell.’
The greatest saints have been men with more than a normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have sometimes narrowly evaded sanctity. Frederick Rolfe in his novel Hadrian the Seventh expressed a sincere, if sinister, devotion to the Church that had very wisely rejected him; all the good of which he was capable went into that book, as all the evil went into the strange series of letters which Mr Symons has described for the first time,*8 written at the end of his life, when he was starving in Venice, to a rich acquaintance.
He had become a habitual corrupter of youth, a seducer of innocence, and he asked his wealthy accomplice for money, first that he might use it as a temptation, to buy bait for the boys whom he misled, and secondly, so that he might efficiently act as pander when his friend revisted Venice. Neither scruple nor remorse was expressed or implied in these long accounts of his sexual exploits or enjoyments, which were so definite in their descriptions that he was forced, in sending them by post, so to fold them that only blank paper showed through the thin foreign envelopes.
These were the astonishing bounds of Corvo: the starving pander on the Lido and the man of whom Mr Vincent O’Sullivan wrote to his biographer: ‘He was born for the Church: that was his main interest.’ Between these bounds, between the Paradise and the Inferno, lay the weary purgatorial years through which Mr Symons has been the first to track him with any closeness. Mr Symons’s method, unchronological, following the story as he discovered it from witness to witness, lends Rolfe’s vacillating footprints a painful drama. Continually, with the stamp of an obstinate courage, they turn back towards Paradise: from the rim of the Inferno they turn and go back: but on the threshold of Paradise they turn again because of the devilish pride which would not accept even Heaven, except on his own terms; this way and that, like the steps of a man pacing a room in agony of mind. It is odd to realize that all the time common-or-garden life is going on within hailing distance, publishers are making harsh bargains, readers are reporting adversely on his work, friends are forming hopeless plans of literary collaboration. Mr Grant Richards and Monsignor Benson and Mr Pirie-Gordon and the partners of Chatto and Windus beckon and speak like figures on the other side of a distorting glass pane. They have quite a different reality, much thinner reality, they are not concerned with eternal damnation. And their memories of Rolfe are puzzled, a little amused, a little exasperated, as if they cannot understand the eccentricity of a man who chooses to go about sheathed in flame in the heyday of the Entente Cordiale, of Sir Ernest Cassel, and Lily Langtry.
Mr O’Sullivan wrote of Rolfe to Mr Symons as a man ‘who had only the vaguest sense of realities’, but the phrase seems a little inaccurate. His realities were less material than spiritual. It would be easy to emphasize his shady financial transactions, his pose as the Kaiser’s god-son, his complete inability to earn a living. It is terrible to think what a figure of cruel fun a less imaginative writer than Mr Symons might have made of Rolfe, turned out of an Aberdeen boarding house in his pyjamas, painting pictures with the help of magic-lantern slides, forced to find employment as a gondolier, begging from strangers, addressing to the Pope a long indictment of living Catholics. But against this material reality Mr Symons with admirable justice sets another: the reality of Hadrian the Seventh, a novel of genius, which stands in relation to the other novels of its day, much as The Hound of Heaven stands in relation to the verse. Rolfe’s vice was spiritual more than it was carnal: it might be said that he was a pander and a swindler, because he cared for nothing but his faith. He would be a priest or nothing, so nothing it had to be and he was not ashamed to live on his friends; if he could not have Heaven, he would have Hell, and the last footprints seem to point unmistakably towards the Inferno.
1934
FREDERICK ROLFE: FROM THE DEVIL’S SIDE
‘HE was his own worst enemy’: the little trite memorial phrase which, in the case of so many English exiles, disposes discreetly and with a tasteful agnosticism of the long purgatories in foreign pensions, the counted coppers, the keeping up of appearances, sounds more than usually unconvincing when applied to Frederick Rolfe. It is the measure of the man’s vividness that his life always seems to move on a religious plane: his violent hatreds, his extreme ingratitude, even his appearance as he described it himself, ‘offensive, disdainful, slightly sardonic, utterly unapproachable’, have about them the air of demonic possession. The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, the long autobiographical novel of the last dreadful years in Venice, the manuscript of which was rediscovered by Mr A. J. A. Symons, has the quality of a medieval mystery play, but with this difference, that the play is written from the devil’s side. The many excellent men and women, who did their best, sometimes an unimaginative best, to help Rolfe, here caper like demons beside the long Venetian water-fronts: the Rev. Bobugo Bonsen (known on the angels’ side as Monsignor Benson), Harry Peary-Buthlaw, Professor Macpawkins, Lady Pash. It is instructive and entertaining to see the great and the good for once from the devil’s point of view.
And the devil has been fair. Anyone who has read Mr Symons’s biography of Corvo will recognize how very fair. The facts (the correspondence with Bonsen and Peary-Buthlaw, for example) appear to be quite truthfully stated; it is Rolfe’s interpretation which is odd. Offer the starving man a dinner or the homeless man a bed and instantaneously the good deed is unrecognizably distorted. The strangest motives begin obscurely to be discerned. Is it that one is seeing good from the devil’s side: ‘The lovely, clever, good, ugly, silly wicked faces of this world, all anxious, all selfish, all mean, all unsatisfied and unsatisfying’: or is it possibly only a horribly deep insight into human nature?
The difficulty always is to distinguish between possession by a devil and possession by a holy spirit. Saints have starved like Rolfe, and no saint had a more firm belief in his spiritual vocation. He loathed the flesh (making an unnecessary oath to remain twenty years unmarried that he might demonstrate to unbelieving ecclesiastics his vocation for the priesthood) and he loved the spirit. One says that he writes from the devil’s side, because his shrill rage has the same lack of dignity as Marlowe’s cracker-throwing demons, because he had no humility (‘he came as one to whom Mystery has a meaning and a method, as one of the intimate, and fortunate, as one who belonged, as a son of the Father’), and because, of course, he had a Monsignor among his enemies. But the devil, too, is spiritual, and when Rolfe wrote of the spirit (without the silly rage against his enemies or the sillier decorated style in which he tried to make the best of a world he had not been allowed to renounce) he wrote like an angel; our appreciation is hardly concerned in the question whether or not it was a fallen angel:
He slowly paced along cypress-avenues, between the graves of little children with blue or white standards and the graves of adults marked by more sombre memorials. All around him were patricians bringing sheaves of painted candles and gorgeous garlands of orchids and everlastings, or plebeians on their knees grubbing up weeds and tracing pathetic designs with cheap chrysanthemums and farthing night-lights. Here, were a baker’s boy and & telegraph-messenger, repainting their father’s grave-post with a tin of black and a bottle of gold. There, were half a dozen ribald venal dishonest licentious young gondoliers; quiet and alone on their wicked knees round the grave of a comrade.
It was Saturday. The little triptych on the altar lay open – Sedes Sapientiae ora pro nobis. – How altogether lovely these byzantine eikons are! That is because they have Christian tradition – they alone, in religious art. Undoubtedly that council of the Church was inspired divinely which uttered the canon prohibiting painters from producing any ideals save those ecclesiastically dictated. Whoever dreams of praying (with expectation of response) for the prayer of a Tintoretto or a Titian, or a Bellini, or a Botticelli? But who can refrain from crying ‘O Mother!’ to these unruffleable wa
n dolls in indigo on gold?
Literature is deep in Mr Symons’s debt, and in debt, too, to all the libelled philanthropists without whose permission this book could hardly have been published.
1934
FREDERICK ROLFE: A SPOILED PRIEST
HUBERT’S ARTHUR, the latest work of Frederick Rolfe to be brought into print by Mr Symons, is a laborious experiment in imaginary history. The assumption is that Arthur was not murdered by King John but escaped and, after recovering a treasure left him by Richard Lion-Heart, won the crown of Jerusalem and finally, with the help of Hubert de Burgh, the chronicler of his deeds, gained the throne of England. Originally Rolfe collaborated with Mr Pirie-Gordon, but after the inevitable quarrel he rewrote the story during the last months of his life. The style, we are told, ‘was meant to be an enriched variant upon that of the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi and of William of Tyre, with an admixture of Maurice Hewlett’. Hewlett, alas, in this appallingly long and elaborate fantasy is too much in evidence, and perhaps only a knowledge of the circumstances in which it was written, to be gained from Mr Symons’s biography, gives it interest.
For if Rolfe is to be believed (a very big assumption) he brought this book to its leisurely decorative close at the very time when he claimed to be starving in his gondola on the Venetian lagoons.