Read Online Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Julian Barnes
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To which Ford replied, ‘It is just that the public
will
not read me.’
Trying to explain it further – to himself, as much as tohis correspondent Gerald Bullett – he wrote from Toulon in 1933:
Why should a London public like my works? My constatations of life have dubious international backgrounds; they contain nothing about British birds’ nests, wild-flowers or rock gardens; they are ‘machined’ with a Franco-American modernity that must be disagreeable indeed to the inhabitants of, say, Cheltenham. To them, on account of the ‘time-shift’ and projection instead of description, they must be quite incomprehensible and inexpressibly boring. Between the Middle West and the Eastern sea-board of the United States as well as round the Pantheon where those devices saw light they are already regarded as
vieux jeu
, accepted as classics which you must know of, and used for Manuals in University English Classes. So I go on writing in the hope that, a hundred and fifty years from today, what I turn out may be used as an alternative study in, say, Durham University. And at any rate, I have the comfortable feeling that none of our entrants for the Davis Cup will have been kept off the playing fields of Eton by a reprehensible engrossment in my novels.
Ford sees the problem as purely internal, textual; yet there are many external – and overlapping – reasons for his past and continuing neglect. He presents no usefully crisp literary profile; he wrote far too much, and in too many genres; he fails to fit easily into university courses. He seems to fall down a hole between late Victorianism and modernism, between a childhood of being dandled by Liszt and seeing Swinburne gambol, and a subsequent career as the avuncular facilitator of Pound, Hemingway and Lawrence. He also presented himself as an elderly party fading out before this new generation,which was probably a bad tactical move. If ambitious novelists should all study
The Good Soldier
as an example of the possibilities of narrative (how dull that makes it sound), they would also do well to look at Ford’s life as a prime example of negative career management.
He had the sort of large, soft, bonhomous presence which provoked attack, and also a suffering gentlemanliness which declined to reply (this naturally provoked renewed attack). He quarrelled endlessly with publishers, regarding them as tradesmen, and impertinent for wanting to read his manuscripts before buying them. Even those who admired Ford were often irritated by him. Rebecca West said that being embraced by Ford was ‘like being the toast under a poached egg’. Robert Lowell’s praise of the ‘master, mammoth mumbler’ is lapped with fondish mockery:
… tell me why
The bales of your left-over novels buy
Less than a bandage for your gouty foot
.
Wheel-horse, O unforgetting elephant …
Those who weren’t fond of Ford were more than irritated. Hemingway – whom Ford had made the mistake of promoting – denounced him to Stein and Toklas as ‘an absolute liar and crook always motivated by the finest synthetic English gentility’. Once, when he was near Philadelphia, Ford applied to see the Barnes collection. Admittedly (if characteristically), he made his approach through the wrong person; but tactical maladroitness alone can’t account for the ferocity of Dr Barnes’s telegram from Geneva: ‘Would rather burn my collection than let Ford Madox Ford see it’.
He changed his name, from Hueffer to Ford; he changed his country of domicile more than once; he was sometimes more ambitious for literature than for himself. Even so, it is strange how completely he fails to blip on certain radar screens.Edmund Wilson scarcely mentions him in his journals and criticism: did he simply miss (or miss the point of)
Parade’s End
, despite sharing the war with Ford? Virginia Woolf and Orwell are silent. Waugh never mentions him in letters, journals or criticism: this seems even more
will
not read me.’
Trying to explain it further – to himself, as much as tohis correspondent Gerald Bullett – he wrote from Toulon in 1933:
Why should a London public like my works? My constatations of life have dubious international backgrounds; they contain nothing about British birds’ nests, wild-flowers or rock gardens; they are ‘machined’ with a Franco-American modernity that must be disagreeable indeed to the inhabitants of, say, Cheltenham. To them, on account of the ‘time-shift’ and projection instead of description, they must be quite incomprehensible and inexpressibly boring. Between the Middle West and the Eastern sea-board of the United States as well as round the Pantheon where those devices saw light they are already regarded as
vieux jeu
, accepted as classics which you must know of, and used for Manuals in University English Classes. So I go on writing in the hope that, a hundred and fifty years from today, what I turn out may be used as an alternative study in, say, Durham University. And at any rate, I have the comfortable feeling that none of our entrants for the Davis Cup will have been kept off the playing fields of Eton by a reprehensible engrossment in my novels.
Ford sees the problem as purely internal, textual; yet there are many external – and overlapping – reasons for his past and continuing neglect. He presents no usefully crisp literary profile; he wrote far too much, and in too many genres; he fails to fit easily into university courses. He seems to fall down a hole between late Victorianism and modernism, between a childhood of being dandled by Liszt and seeing Swinburne gambol, and a subsequent career as the avuncular facilitator of Pound, Hemingway and Lawrence. He also presented himself as an elderly party fading out before this new generation,which was probably a bad tactical move. If ambitious novelists should all study
The Good Soldier
as an example of the possibilities of narrative (how dull that makes it sound), they would also do well to look at Ford’s life as a prime example of negative career management.
He had the sort of large, soft, bonhomous presence which provoked attack, and also a suffering gentlemanliness which declined to reply (this naturally provoked renewed attack). He quarrelled endlessly with publishers, regarding them as tradesmen, and impertinent for wanting to read his manuscripts before buying them. Even those who admired Ford were often irritated by him. Rebecca West said that being embraced by Ford was ‘like being the toast under a poached egg’. Robert Lowell’s praise of the ‘master, mammoth mumbler’ is lapped with fondish mockery:
… tell me why
The bales of your left-over novels buy
Less than a bandage for your gouty foot
.
Wheel-horse, O unforgetting elephant …
Those who weren’t fond of Ford were more than irritated. Hemingway – whom Ford had made the mistake of promoting – denounced him to Stein and Toklas as ‘an absolute liar and crook always motivated by the finest synthetic English gentility’. Once, when he was near Philadelphia, Ford applied to see the Barnes collection. Admittedly (if characteristically), he made his approach through the wrong person; but tactical maladroitness alone can’t account for the ferocity of Dr Barnes’s telegram from Geneva: ‘Would rather burn my collection than let Ford Madox Ford see it’.
He changed his name, from Hueffer to Ford; he changed his country of domicile more than once; he was sometimes more ambitious for literature than for himself. Even so, it is strange how completely he fails to blip on certain radar screens.Edmund Wilson scarcely mentions him in his journals and criticism: did he simply miss (or miss the point of)
Parade’s End
, despite sharing the war with Ford? Virginia Woolf and Orwell are silent. Waugh never mentions him in letters, journals or criticism: this seems even more
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