The effect of this association, in Chesterton’s deft détournement, is to evoke a rough-looking, unkempt man skulking about the mean streets of the city. Roland, according to the logic of Chesterton’s reading, is thus effectively transposed to ‘some grey mean street’, where the brute confronts him as antagonist and double. In this interpretation, Roland is like no heroic or anti-heroic archetype so much as the noir detective that Raymond Chandler famously depicted in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944):
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
‘The story’, Chandler concludes, ‘is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth.’56
The detective that, picked out in chiaroscuro, features at the centre of noir movies and novels of the 1940s has long been regarded as an extremely belated chivalric knight, pursuing a perverse moral quest in the nocturnal city, attempting to vanquish evil.57 In his reading of Browning, and in fragments of his own strange, uncategorizable fiction, Chesterton offers us an earlier, equally urgent glimpse of this tradition – that of the knight errant in the street. In a detective story, he reflected, ‘the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland.’58
It is this sort of chivalric romance that Chesterton excavated, above all in The Man Who Was Thursday, from what his former professor Ker had characterized as the ‘abandoned region of medieval thought and imagination’, re-embedding its ‘wandering champions’, who fight against the tyrannical forces of Enlightenment reason on foot, in the streets of the modern metropolis.
6
Collapsing
Ford Madox Ford’s
Return to Yesterday
One day in late 1898 or early 1899, Ford Madox Ford came across Émile Zola seated on a bench in Hyde Park. Ford, still in his mid-twenties, was already a published biographer, novelist and poet. Zola was in his late fifties. He had fled to London after being convicted of criminal libel for his role in the Dreyfus Affair and sentenced to prison.
On Zola’s previous visit to the city, in September 1893, he had been positively fêted: ‘The Lord Mayor received him at the Guildhall; an elaborate firework display illuminated his portrait in the sky above the Crystal Palace; and editors and writers hosted soirées in his honour.’1 At one point, he was conducted on a gruesome tour of the scenes of Jack the Ripper’s crimes in Whitechapel. ‘As to London, which I visited for the first time,’ he told the Manchester Guardian on his return to Paris on that occasion, ‘the big city made an indelible impression on my mind. Its beauty is not in its monuments, but in its immensity; the colossal character of its quays and bridges, to which ours are as toys.’2
What of the visit during which Ford encountered him? This time, exiled from his homeland, the city’s immensity did not have the same exhilarating effect on him. He arrived at Victoria Station, with almost no possessions, in July 1898. Soon after, he left London on a series of ‘suburban peregrinations’ which his friends insisted would help him ‘achieve total obscurity’.3 He spent an anxious few months in England, sporadically afflicted by nervous seizures.
It is in his autobiographical memoir, Return to Yesterday (1931), that Ford recalls the occasion on which he happened upon Zola in Hyde Park. The fugitive ‘had been gazing gloomily at the ground and poking the sand with the end of his cane’. ‘No gloom could have ever been greater than his’, he adds in a drily melancholic tone. According to Ford, Zola listlessly complained that on the ground beside the bench, over the course of the morning, he had found as many as eighteen hairpins carelessly dropped by negligent nursemaids: ‘A city so improvident must be doomed.’4 Ford, who appears to relish the precision of the number eighteen, implies that this behaviour was positively compulsive. ‘He had, at any rate during that stay in London, many phobias,’ he concludes (214).
So did Ford. Indeed, Return to Yesterday itself, not least in its mediations or representations of Zola, offers a rich opportunity to explore Ford’s complicated, distinctly neurotic relationship to urban space, especially in the form of his agoraphobia. Ford’s superstitious temperament, alongside his pathological fear of empty or open spaces, comprises another instance of the crisis of flânerie, of the unsustainability of the flâneur’s characteristic disposition, in the increasingly embattled conditions of industrial and metropolitan modernity in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. It also provides important insight into Ford’s Impressionist aesthetic.
In his anecdotal account of Zola in Return to Yesterday, Ford proceeds to describe another occasion, presumably at about the same time, when a mutual acquaintance asked him to convey the French novelist to some address in a hansom cab. Zola scarcely spoke during the journey, on the assumption that Ford couldn’t speak French. ‘But eventually I found that he was counting the numbers of the registration plates of the cabs that were in front of us,’ Ford writes. ‘If the added digits came to nine – or possibly to seven – he was momentarily elated; if they came to some inauspicious number – to thirteen I suppose – he would be prolongedly depressed’ (214). Ford thus reads Zola reading the occult signs of the modern city.
The scattered hairpins that Zola had counted beneath the park bench, oddly intimate domestic detritus that has spilled out from the private recesses of the metropolis into its public space, seem potentially meaningful. They are both a kind of statistic, the indices of improvidence, and the residue of innumerable untold stories. In contrast, the number plates are merely random codes. The hairpins have narrative significance (even if they also perhaps signal the ‘disintegration’ of narrative into ‘disconnected and autonomous details’, as Georg Lukács might have argued5); the number plates do not. It is the difference, to put it schematically, between a naturalist and a modernist semiotics of the city.
The anecdote about the hansom cab is comic as well as tragic in its outline. It is amusing in particular to picture Ford silently attempting to infer Zola’s numerological system – which is, in both the more and less strict senses of the term, idiotic – from his reactions to the number plates he sees in the traffic. Ford’s eyes must have flickered incessantly between Zola’s enigmatic face and the meaningless numbers on the hansom cabs themselves. In this respect, though, Ford’s behaviour is quite as compulsive as Zola’s.
Paradoxically, one can detect Ford’s slightly obsessive investment in Zola’s mental processes in the apparent imprecision with which he pinpoints the number that makes his companion elated: ‘If the added digits came to nine – or possibly to seven –’. The presence of that ‘possibly’ signals that, for Ford, there is a difference. As the hesitant, ruminative syntax of this sentence indicates, it matters to him whether it is seven or nine. Indeed, it is as if, more than three decades later, he is still trying to crack the code. Ford too, in short, is secretly a numerologist. He is in this respect Zola’s double. It might even be speculated, in fact, that Zola’s numerological compulsion – one of several ‘phobias’ that this anecdote is intended to exemplify – is finally a fantastical projection of Ford’s.
There is no positive evidence that the fleeting expressions of elation and depression inscribed on Zola’s face had anything to do with the number plates. He might have been gazing into space and making purely introspective calculations. The exiled novelist might simply have been sifting through memories, thinking of his family or his mistress, or contemplating his return to Paris. Ford, then, is a distinctly unreliable narrator.
Of course, Impressionism, the literary aesthetic with which Ford was so closely associated in the early twentieth century, is all about unreliable narration. It is premised on the assumption that, in the act of representation, it is the subject as oppo
sed to the object that is important; or, more specifically, that it is the relationship between them, the process of representation, that imparts meaning to a narrative, so that in the end, folded in on one another, subject and object cease to have independent significance. Impressionism hypostasizes the partial or unreliable narrator, as Ford’s most celebrated novel, The Good Soldier (1915), makes creepingly apparent.
‘The Impressionist author is sedulous to avoid letting his personality appear in the course of his book,’ Ford once asserted. ‘On the other hand, his whole book, his whole poem is merely an expression of his personality.’6 Return to Yesterday, for its part, is an overtly impressionistic retrospective. In its ‘Dedication’, Ford explicitly describes it as ‘a novel’ rather than an autobiography: ‘Where 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’ (4).
We should not be surprised, therefore, if these anecdotes about Zola in London tell us less about the French novelist than about Ford himself.
But, in addition to these external reasons, there is another reason, one internal to the text, for thinking that Ford is consciously or unconsciously projecting onto Zola. If he identifies the numbers that cause Zola to feel elated with an exactitude that is only underlined by his refusal definitely to commit to either nine or seven, he is unexpectedly casual when he comes to identify the numbers that cause Zola to feel depressed: ‘if they came to some inauspicious number – to thirteen I suppose – he would be prolongedly depressed.’
This is an oddly imprecise assessment. Did he or didn’t he succeed in ascertaining the number that upset Zola? It is of course possible that, in spite of his manifest ability to recollect the positive numbers, he has simply forgotten the negative one. Yet the careless tone of the sentence – ‘thirteen I suppose’ – is suspect. It seems disingenuous.
But perhaps I, too, in reading Ford reading Zola reading the numbers, have been infected by the paranoiac hermeneutic that Umberto Eco has brilliantly analysed as ‘over-interpretation’.7 After all, the number thirteen is a proverbial object of superstition. Ford did not, however, cite the number thirteen merely because it is customarily assumed to be inauspicious. He himself suffered from a superstitious fear of the number thirteen; that is, from triskaidekaphobia.
Five years or so after his encounter with Zola, at the end of 1903, Ford moved from Sussex back to London. It is from this moment, when he was writing The Soul of London (1905), his attempt to explore the atmospherics of the metropolis, that the psychological crisis whose effects he would suffer throughout his life began to be manifest.
In both his professional and his domestic life, Ford was afflicted by problems at this time: he couldn’t find a publisher for the book about London; his relations with Joseph Conrad, and the literary collaborations on which they were working, were severely affected by the senior novelist’s depression; he felt acute guilt because of his affair with Mary Martindale; his marriage to his wife Elsie appeared, for this and other reasons, to be on the point of implosion; he caught the influenza then raging through London; and, as if all this was insufficiently dramatic, on one spectacular occasion, as he arrived home, Ford opened the front door to discover his eldest daughter Christina, aged six or seven, fleeing downstairs with her clothes and hair on fire. All of these factors no doubt contributed to the ‘devastating mental breakdown’ he experienced in 1904.8
‘The move to London was for me the beginning of a series of disasters,’ Ford writes in Return to Yesterday: ‘That was perhaps because the year was 1903. Those digits added up to thirteen. No one should have done anything in that year’ (174). This rather theatrical overstatement is undoubtedly comic, but Ford is deadly serious. The abrupt tone of these sentences, in an autobiography that, at some deep level, probes the parallels between his personal crisis of 1904 and the public crisis of 1914, is apocalyptic rather than mock-heroic: ‘These were the early days of that mania that has since beset the entire habitable globe’ (204). Ford declares later in the memoir, ‘I have always been superstitious myself and so remain – impenitently’ (226).
Ford defends his superstitious disposition on the grounds that everyone lives their daily lives under the influence of a sense of good or bad luck: ‘The most rationalist of human beings does not pass his life without saying: “I am in luck today!”’ It is thus a normal rather than deviant characteristic of human nature. He goes on to argue, convincingly enough, that this superstitious perception of whether one happens to be lucky or unlucky at a particular time, immaterial as it might appear, has a definite and measurable effect on one’s psychology. When you feel lucky, ‘you will be resolute, keen, active, awake to proper courses to pursue’, and you thereby ‘ensure luck’ (226).
There is a similar circular logic to bad luck: ‘When you are depressed by ill omens you are less resolute, you are despondent in the degree however small of the weight you attach to the beliefs of your fellow man’ (226). Ford then gives two examples of runs of poor luck, and of psychological depression, that succeeded some inauspicious incident. He describes the first of these, involving a superstitious attempt to rid himself of an opal, which must have taken place in the opening months of 1904, in detail; and I want to examine it closely in a moment.
He alludes to the second one, which must have happened sometime in the late 1920s, more cursorily. Here, he recalls that he was driving in ‘a closed automobile’ in ‘an open space’ in Harlem when one of the car’s female passengers suddenly exclaimed, ‘Look at that immense crescent!’ ‘She was indicating the new moon,’ he explains, ‘which in consequence I saw through the front glass.’ He concludes: ‘From that day for a long time – indeed until about a year ago – I experienced nothing but disaster: in finances, in health, in peace of mind, in ability to work’ (226). Indeed, the memory of that moon subsequently makes him incapable of working for several months. This phobia is the cause of a debilitating agraphia, an inability to write.
What interests me about this description is its emphasis on space: Ford was in a closed automobile in an open space in the city. A concern with the disposition of space, and with movement in it, is a consistent feature of his autobiographical memoir (as of his other writings). Indeed, Ford seems to have found it difficult to comprehend emotional states in abstraction from space. This is evident in The Soul of London, for example, where he repeatedly conceives the capital in terms of what he calls ‘intimate London’.9
This highly personalized London, which as a committed Impressionist Ford believes is the only London it is possible for the individual to apprehend, not least because of the city’s abstract immensity, consists of ‘the little bits of it that witnessed the great moments, the poignant moods of his life; it will be what happened to be the backgrounds of his more intense emotions’ (22). It is at all times a matter of affect. London and other cities are in this sense ‘psychogeographical’ entities for Ford. Guy Debord classically defined psychogeography, it will be recalled, as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’.10
Ford’s spatial fixation is evident even from the ‘Dedication’ to Return to Yesterday, which addresses his friends, the poet Eileen Hall and her husband Dr Michael Lake. When Ford conceived his memoir, he was convalescing with them at their studio in New York. Ford was suffering from gout, and Michael Lake, known as ‘Micky’, had bandaged up his foot. ‘My Dears,’ the ‘Dedication’ begins, ‘It was whilst looking up at the criss-cross beams in the roof of your tall studio that the form of this book was thought out.’ Ford goes on to explain the formal analogy between the roof of the studio and the autobiography: ‘So, as I go through these pages I seem to see that criss-cross in your gracious old house[,] and the literary form of the work is inextricably mingled with those Cubist intricacies’ (3). This space,
multi-faceted, intimate, is cosily familiar.
Here is a poetics of space comparable to the one that Gaston Bachelard famously devised, in which the individual’s house is a ‘universe, a real cosmos’.11 I want however to suggest that, if Ford attempted in the form of his memoir to reproduce a comforting architectural space, then, less consciously perhaps, his writing from the early 1900s reproduced, or negotiated, an alien, alienating form of space. One might almost say that, in recasting his life until 1914 in the form of this comforting cubistic autobiography, Ford was redeeming the rather different poetics of space that shapes the earlier period.
That poetics of space can be glimpsed in the image of the house on Campden Hill in Holland Park – close to where G. K. Chesterton was born – that Ford and Elsie rented from friends at the end of 1903 and moved into in early January 1904. Initially, Ford ascribed the series of disasters that succeeded this move to the fact that the digits that constitute the year 1903 add up to thirteen. He does however propose an alternative interpretation:
Or it was perhaps because the house I then took was accursed. It was a monstrous sepulchre – and not even whitened. It was grey with the greyness of withered bones. It was triangular in ground plan: the face formed the nose of a blunted redan [an arrow-shaped embankment in a fortified construction], the body tapered to a wedge in which there was a staircase like the corkscrew staircases of the Middle Ages. The façade was thus monstrous, the tail ignoble. It was seven stories in height in those days and in those days elevators in private houses were unknown. It was what housemaids call: ‘A Murderer’. (174)
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