by Craig Brown
And smelly, too: ‘I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room, but this was the open air ... I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it, but it still tasted good.’
According to Hemingway, during their drink together Ford sees Hilaire Belloc passing, and cuts him dead. Hemingway gets on his high horse: ‘The afternoon had been spoiled by seeing Ford but I thought Belloc might have made it better.’
As Hemingway relates it, Ford insists that ‘a gentleman will always cut a cad,’ then starts telling him which of their acquaintances is a gentleman, and which is not: Ezra Pound is not (‘he’s an American’), Ford himself is (‘naturally – I have held His Majesty’s commission’), Henry James was ‘very nearly’, Trollope was not (‘of course not’), nor was Marlowe, and Donne was clearly not (‘he was a parson’). Thus, Hemingway sets out to portray Ford as a ludicrous snob.
But did this particular meeting take place in the way described? Friends of both men doubt it. Basil Bunting, who worked on the magazine, suggests Hemingway’s sketch of Ford is ‘deliberately assembled to damage the reputation of a dead man who had left no skilled close friend to take vengeance; a lie cunningly adjusted to seem plausible to simple people who had never known either Ford or Hemingway and to load his memory with qualities disgusting to all men and despicable to many’. Ford’s loyal biographer, Alan Judd, sees it as an act of revenge against Ford for being Hemingway’s ‘superior in age, status, experience, knowledge of his craft, sensitivity and ability’.
When he first employs Hemingway, Ford seems to have an intimation that his protégé is set to betray him. ‘He comes and sits at my feet and praises me,’ he confides. ‘It makes me nervous.’ But why does Hemingway feel such antagonism towards a man who treats him so generously? Might it date back to the time Hemingway asked Ford for his truthful opinion of his novels? Ford replied that, for all their undoubted virtues, they were weak on construction, and that this was something he should work on. Is this honesty his unforgivable mistake?
FORD MADOX FORD
EITHER HELPS, OR FAILS TO HELP
OSCAR WILDE
Montmartre, Paris
November 1899
In 1944, the twenty-five-year-old J.D. Salinger meets the fifty-year-old Ernest Hemingway in Paris; in 1924, the twenty-five-year-old Hemingway meets the fifty-year-old Ford Madox Ford in Paris. Leap a further quarter of a century back, and the twenty-five-year-old Ford Madox Ford is meeting the forty-five-year-old Oscar Wilde, also in Paris. Each encounter carries peculiar echoes of the others.
Ruined and almost penniless, Wilde is drinking alone in a cabaret bar in Montmartre. He is presently living as a guest of the patron in the Hôtel d’Alsace, having been kicked out of the Hôtel Marsollier for not paying his bills. He can no longer find a reason to live. ‘I have lost the mainspring of life and art, la joie de vivre; it is dreadful,’ he writes to Frank Harris, in one of many begging letters. ‘I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me.’ He means to write something wonderful, but he doubts he ever will.127 ‘The cruelty of a prison sentence starts when you come out,’ he observes.
He never rises before noon, and drinks throughout his waking hours, first advocaat, then brandy, and finally absinthe, which, he writes to a friend, ‘has a wonderful colour, green. A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?’ To another friend, he says, ‘I have discovered that alcohol taken in sufficient quantity produces all the effects of drunkenness.’ There is still humour in him, though it sometimes comes close to drowning.
He is often to be seen drinking in the boulevards. His front teeth have fallen out, and he has no plate with which to replace them. ‘Like dear St Francis of Assisi I am wedded to poverty, but in my case the marriage is not a success. I hate the bride that has been given to me.’
The writer Frédéric Boutet remembers coming across him sitting outside a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The pouring rain has turned his straw hat into a candle-snuffer and his coat into a sponge. The waiter, desperate to get rid of this last customer, has piled up all the chairs and wound up the awning, but Wilde is unable to leave because he has run out of money to settle his bill.
There are countless stories of old friends crossing the street to avoid him. But one night, the palmist Cheiro spots him in a restaurant and goes over to him. ‘How good of you, my dear friend,’ says Wilde. ‘Everyone cuts me now.’ They have met only once before, at a society party back in 1893; Cheiro had been performing blind readings of guests’ palms.
‘The left hand is the hand of a king, but the right that of a king who will send himself into exile,’ he told Wilde.
‘At what date?’ asked Wilde.
‘A few years from now, at about your fortieth year.’ Wilde, ever superstitious, left the party without another word. Six years on, Wilde tells Cheiro that he has often reflected on the truth of his remarkable prediction.
Ford writes two wildly differing accounts of his youthful meeting with Wilde in Paris, one in 1911, the other in 1931. In the first, he portrays him as a tragic figure, sitting at a table at a cabaret, ‘lachrymosely drunk, and being tormented by an abominable gang of young students of the four arts’. Though impoverished, Wilde has managed to keep an ivory walking stick from his days of prosperity. Prowling about the club is a man Ford describes as ‘a harmless, parasitic imbecile’ called Bibi Labouche. The students convince the sozzled Wilde that Labouche is in fact a dangerous criminal who is planning to murder him for his walking stick while he is on his way back to his hotel.
In this version, Wilde cries and protests; Ford is so disgusted by the casual cruelty of the scene that he leaves the café at once, ‘permanently cured of any taste for Bohemianism that I may ever have possessed. Indeed, I have never since been able to see a student ... without a feeling of aversion.’ He adds, by way of an afterthought, ‘I do not know that I acted any heroic part in the matter.’
But in his second version, written twenty years after the first, Ford has expanded his own role, injecting it with heroism. In this one, he encounters Oscar Wilde not once but ‘several times’ in Paris, and each time Wilde is the butt of these merciless students, their pranks still centring around his walking stick, which is now not only ‘of ebony with ivory insertions, the handle representing an elephant’, but a gift from Lady Mount Temple.
In this version, the tearful Wilde continually surrenders his stick to the students, who keep returning it to his hotel the next morning, by which time he has forgotten everything that happened the night before. Instead of simply skulking off in a fury, Ford rushes to Wilde’s aid. ‘I once or perhaps twice rescued his stick for him and saw him home ... He did not have a penny and I, as a student, had very little more. I would walk him down the miserably lit Montmartrois streets, he completely silent or muttering things that I did not understand. He walked always as if his feet hurt him, leaning forward on his precious cane ...’
The accounts are linked by Ford’s visceral dislike of Wilde. In 1911, it is confined to Wilde’s writing: ‘His works seemed to me derivative and of no importance, his humour thin and mechanical.’ But by 1931, Ford has extended it to the man: ‘It was humiliating to dislike so much one so unfortunate. But the feeling of dislike for that shabby and incoherent immensity was unavoidable.’ In his elaboration of the revulsion youth feels towards age, is Ford Madox Ford rehearsing his own imminent destruction at the hands of Ernest Hemingway?
OSCAR WILDE
LOSES HIS NERVE WITH
MARCEL PROUST
9, boulevard Malesherbes, Paris
November 1891
When the much-fêted Oscar Wilde arrives in Paris, he is preceded by his reputation as a wit and dandy.128 Now aged thirty-seven, he has come for two months to brush up his first play, Salome, which he is writing in French. ‘French by sympathy, I am Ir
ish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare,’ he complains to Edmond de Goncourt. He speaks the language fluently, with a prodigious vocabulary, though he makes no attempt at an accent.
He makes his mark straight away, aphorisms spraying from his blubbery lips in all the most fashionable salons. Everyone is held spellbound. At one lunch party, guests weep to think words can achieve such splendour. ‘I have put all my talent into my works,’ he announces. ‘I have put all my genius into my life.’
He is adept at conquering all conversational obstacles, brushing aside contradiction as pedantry. When he tells a dinner party about Salome, and a professor points out that he is confusing two Salomes – one the daughter of Herod, the other the dancer – Wilde retorts that this is the drab truth of an academic: ‘I prefer the other truth, my own, which is that of a dream. Between the two truths, the falser is the truer.’
L’Echo de Paris describes Wilde’s arrival in the city as ‘le “great event” des salons littéraires parisiennes’ of the season. His principal guide is a young literary lion called Marcel Schwob, who also translates his story ‘The Selfish Giant’. After Wilde’s departure, Schwob describes him as ‘A big man, with a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck some more. While he ate – and he ate little – he never stopped smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes. A terrible absinthe-drinker, through which he got his visions and desires.’
Schwob often entertains Wilde at his apartment. Léon Daudet, who meets him there, finds him both attractive and revolting, words tumbling out of his slack mouth ‘like a fat, gossipy woman’. Sensing this ambivalence, at their third meeting Wilde asks Daudet what he thinks of him: Daudet hedges with a few words about his complexity, and his possible guile. The next day, he receives a letter from Wilde, insisting he is ‘the simplest and most candid of mortals, just like a tiny, tiny child’.
A glimpse of Wilde’s manner of speaking is offered by Ernest Raynaud, who bumps into him on a sunny day in the boulevard des Capucines: ‘We must let our instincts laugh and frolic in the sun like a troop of laughing children. I love life. It is so beautiful and –’ at this point, Wilde surveys his surroundings, lit by the sun ‘– How all this outdoes the languishing beauty of the countryside! The solitude of the country stifles and crushes me ... I am not really myself except in the midst of elegant crowds, in the exploits of capitals, at the heart of rich districts or amid the sumptuous ornamentation of palace-hotels, seated by all the desirable objects and with an army of servants, the warm caress of a plush carpet under my feet ... I detest nature where man has not intervened with his artifice! When Benvenuto Cellini crucified a living man to study the play of muscles in his death agony, a pope was right to grant him absolution. What is the death of a vague individual if it enables an immortal world to blossom and to create, in Keats’s words, an eternal source of ecstasy?’
But, just occasionally, language fails him.
Wilde is first introduced to the twenty-year-old Marcel Proust at the home of Madame Arthur Baignères on rue du Général Foy. He is impressed by Proust’s extraordinary knowledge of English literature, and when Proust asks him to dinner at his home in boulevard Malesherbes he immediately accepts.
On the evening in question, Proust is delayed, so arrives puffing and panting, several minutes late. ‘Is the English gentleman here?’ he asks his servant.
‘Yes, sir, he arrived five minutes ago. He had barely entered the drawing room when he asked for the bathroom, and he has not come out of it.’
Proust runs to the end of the passage, and shouts through the door of the bathroom, ‘Monsieur Wilde, are you ill?’ Wilde unlocks the door and peers out. ‘Ah, there you are, Monsieur Proust. No, I am not in the least ill.’
It emerges that he has suffered an unprecedented attack of shyness, and is now overcome by embarrassment. ‘I thought I was to have the pleasure of dining with you alone, but they showed me into the drawing room. I looked at the drawing room and at the end of it were your parents. My courage failed me. Goodbye, dear Monsieur Proust, goodbye ...’
With that, he departs in a flurry. Baffled, Proust goes into the drawing room and greets his parents, who inform him that Wilde burst into the room, took one look at the interior decoration, exclaimed, ‘How ugly your house is!’ and rushed out.129
It is an odd sequence of events, somehow out of character. Wilde may be bombastic, but he is seldom rude, and his retreat into the bathroom seems additionally strange.
Could this be the most likely explanation? On first entering the drawing room, Wilde fails to notice anybody else. He exclaims, ‘How ugly your house is!’ out loud, but to himself; only then does he catch sight of Proust’s parents, sitting quietly in the corner. Horribly embarrassed, he rushes out of the room, and can then think of no way of returning with his dignity intact.
Wilde returns to Paris in the summer of 1894, the year before his downfall, and again encounters Marcel Proust. Might it be some subliminal imprint of his past mistake that makes him come out with another rude remark130 about Proust’s furnishings? ‘I don’t think Mr Wilde has been well brought-up,’ comments Monsieur Proust as soon as he has departed.131
MARCEL PROUST
GETS RID OF
JAMES JOYCE
Hôtel Majestic, avenue Kléber, Paris
May 19th 1922
Marcel Proust, once so social, is nowadays very picky about going out, preferring to stay in his bedroom. He has developed a particular distaste for exclusive, intimate parties. ‘Nothing amuses me less than what was called, twenty years ago, “select,”’ he observes.
The British art patrons Sydney and Violet Schiff are obliged to employ stealth to attract him to the dinner party of their dreams, which they are holding in a private room at the Hôtel Majestic, in celebration of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
For some time, they have been plotting to gather the four men they consider the world’s greatest living artists – Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust – together in the same room. Proust is perhaps their greatest catch, being both the most lionised and the most elusive; since the publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe the week before last, he has been the talk of the town. Knowing his aversion to select gatherings, Sydney Schiff does not send him a formal invitation, but craftily slips a reference to it into a letter a few days before: might he perhaps drop by after dinner?
Picasso and Stravinsky arrive in good time. The less dependable James Joyce arrives after coffee, drunk and shabby, swaying from side to side. ‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond,’ he admits. He sits to the right of his host, places his head in his hands, and says nothing.
Their fellow guest Clive Bell remembers the entry at 2.30 a.m. of ‘a small, dapper figure clad in exquisite black with white kid gloves ... looking for all the world as though he had seen a light in a friend’s window and had just come up on the chance of finding him awake. Physically he did not please me, being altogether too sleek and dank and plastered: his eyes were glorious however.’ This otherwise elegant entrance of Marcel Proust gets off to a bad start when another guest, Princesse Violette Murat, looks daggers at him and flounces out of the party, furious at being depicted as a skinflint in his recent volume.
Proust, flustered by this rebuff, is placed between Igor Stravinsky and Sydney Schiff. Stravinsky notes he is ‘as pale as a mid-afternoon moon’. Proust tries to pay Stravinsky a compliment by comparing him to Beethoven.
‘Doubtless you admire Beethoven,’ he adds.
‘I detest Beethoven.’
‘But, cher maître, surely those late sonatas and quartets ...?’
‘Worse than the others.’
Around this time, James Joyce emits a loud snore (‘I hope it was a snore,’ adds Bell), then wakes with a jolt. Proust – looking ten years younger than he is, or so Joyce thinks – introduces himself.132 The two are widely re
garded as rivals; their works are often compared, generally to Joyce’s disadvantage.
Encounters at parties are subject to the vagaries of memory, and further obscured by layers of gossip and hearsay and inaudibility, the whole mix invariably transformed even more by alcohol. So it is unsurprising that the Proust/Joyce exchange should be related in at least seven different ways:
1) As told by Joyce’s friend Arthur Power:
PROUST: Do you like truffles?
JOYCE: Yes, I do.
2) As told by the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre:
PROUST: I have never read your works, Mr Joyce.
JOYCE: I have never read your works, Mr Proust.133
3) As told by James Joyce many years later to Jacques Mercanton:
‘Proust would talk only of duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids.’
4) As told by James Joyce to his close friend Frank Budgen:
‘Our talk consisted solely of the word “No”. Proust asked me if I knew the duc de so-and-so. I said, “No.” Our hostess asked Proust if he had read such and such a piece of Ulysses. Proust said, “No.” And so on. Of course the situation was impossible. Proust’s day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.’
5) According to another friend of Joyce, Padraic Clum, Joyce wants to undermine the Schiffs’ hopes for a legendary occasion, so tries to stay as silent as possible:
PROUST: Ah, Monsieur Joyce, you know the Princess ...
JOYCE: No, Monsieur.
PROUST: Ah, you know the Countess ...
JOYCE: No, Monsieur.
PROUST: Then you know Madame ...
JOYCE: No, Monsieur.
However, in this version, Joyce clearly wrong-foots himself, as his silence becomes part of the legend.
