Always on the side of the wolf
Carole Angier
IT WAS THE NIGHTINGALE by Ford Madox Ford Carcanet, £14.95, pp. 272, ISBN 9781857549324 ✆ £11.95 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Poor old Fordie. That was Ford’s eternal cry, and it is repeated often here. His father called him ‘the patient but extremely stupid Ass’, his very name — Huffer — meant ‘Ass’, so was changed first to Hueffer, then to Ford. As a writer he was disliked (‘It is me they dislike, not the time-shift’), as a returning Great War soldier loathed; even as a Sussex smallholder he is a figure of fun, followed everywhere by a dog, a drake and a goat. Above all, after years of war he is forgotten as a writer, ‘as good as dead’, convinced he could no longer write. He is an outsider, a dung beetle, a ‘ruined author’, misunderstood and despised.
Poor old Fraudie. For most of this, like much of what he said and wrote, is not true. I’ve never heard of first world war soldiers meeting the hatred he describes; and he wrote several books in Sussex, as he cheerfully admits. But truth was not the point of Ford. The opening of It Was the Nightingale promises a book about Paris in the Twenties, and this new edition picks up the promise for its blurb. But if you want to read about Paris in the Twenties, It Was the Nightingale is almost entirely useless. There is the odd line about Hemingway, Joyce and Gertrude Stein, and a bit more about Ezra Pound and the great patron of writers John Quinn; but nothing about Jean Rhys (from whom Ford had parted with mutual loathing) or anyone else, and nothing at all about Paris. There is a good deal about the birth and early death of the transatlantic review, but none of it is remotely reliable.
Coming to Ford for history, however, is like coming to his nightingale for eggs — our mistake, not his. We must come for the song. And Ford’s song, it struck me reading this, is surprisingly like Jean Rhys’s. Ford may have been a well-educated Englishman, but like Rhys, he knew only himself. It Was the Nightingale is about Ford’s thoughts and feelings at a turning point in his life; and about these he can write marvellously.
The turning point is between England and France, the farmer and the writer. Will he stay or will he go? Given his Francophilia, his hatred of English philistinism, his sense that his England died in the war, it’s not much of a contest. But he makes us feel it is, through the power of imagery. His decision to leave London happens in the hour ‘between dog and wolf’; between page 15, when he lifts his foot from a kerb to cross a road, and page 64, when he recalls that moment, together with the railway porter’s call — ‘London only! This train for London only!’ — and knows that that will never again be said of him. And his decision to return to writing happens on his first night in Sussex, when he makes a pact with himself over a mutton stew (very Ford). His biographers will tell you that he had fried chicken that night, and that this, therefore, is an invention too. But no one who has read it will forget the throw of Fordie’s dice in the form of shallots tossed into a stew.
Unlike Jean Rhys’s, though, his inwardness resonates with the wider world. It Was the Nightingale is not only about his own passage from a prewar to a postwar self, but about the same passage for England, and especially for English literature. On this he is paradoxical, and interesting. He was always on the side of the wolf — the iconoclast, the revolutionary, especially in writing; but the iconoclasm of post-first world war England — the iconoclasm of Lytton Strachey, though he doesn’t mention him — has gone too far for him. A nation cannot flourish without its illusions, he says; and when ‘Courage, Loyalty, God and the rest’ left London, so did he. Perhaps he was right. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, as another writer wrote; but perhaps without that weakness we wouldn’t try to make it better.
Ford was a great self-pitier, but he was occasionally a great artist, and often a decent man. He loved England not just for courage and loyalty, but for her freedom and tolerance to foreigners like himself. I cheered at that, and at his ringing declaration that his only country was the country of art. He exaggerates wildly, as always, calling non-artists ‘merely the stuff to fill graveyards’, and setting beside his image of the artist as nightingale that of the banker as rat. But secretly I agree. With this too: ‘[A novelist] is a person who must not side with his characters, so, in his life, he must not side with himself. Not even with his own side. He is, therefore, the only person who is fit to rule our world.’ Hurrah, Fordie!
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