BUT CHANGE WAS in the air. By April 1909 Pound was to come across two separate ‘gangs’, as he called them, who wanted to bring new vitality into English writing, and who were beginning to discuss the ideas that would come to be known as modernist, ideas which in three years’ time would be invaluable to Pound in the formation of imagism. Although Pound at this stage was not particularly keen to listen to anything new, he was delighted to meet any likeable literary company. One of these ‘gangs’ was the circle around Ford Madox Hueffer and Violet Hunt, who met at the English Review offices and at South Lodge, Hunt’s large house in Kensington; the other was the famous ‘school of images’, as Pound would later call them, who met in the Tour Eiffel restaurant in Soho.
Hueffer had been christened Ford Hermann Hueffer, though from 1900 he had written under the name of Ford Madox Hueffer, and changed his legal name to the latter by deed poll in 1915. He would change his name again in 1919 to Ford Madox Ford, as we now know him. Ford – as I shall call him for simplicity – had launched the English Review at the end of 1908, in order, he claimed, to publish a poem by Thomas Hardy that more conventional journals ‘found too – let us say – outspoken for them to print’.69 This was a poignant ballad, ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’, about a young girl, pregnant, deserted, whose mother gives her a herb, begged from a knowledgeable shepherd, reputed to ‘balk ill-motherings’.70 The daughter dies from the abortion as the repentant lover turns up to make her his wife. Hardy had given up writing novels after the moralistic censure he had suffered because Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure had offended late nineteenth-century English prudery. It was impossible, he complained, to write novels for grown-up people in English. Ford, a great admirer and defender of French fiction, particularly Flaubert, was eager to enter the fight against what Hardy called the ‘hypocrisy of the age’.71 Publishing ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’ could be seen in itself as a significant landmark in the opening of Anglophone modernism, the refusal any longer to hide behind the euphemisms of British (or even worse, genteel American) propriety, where hints and circumlocutions only were permitted. The championing of greater sexual openness was to be a central cause for the Anglo-American modernists, though they were often loath to admit it in those terms, a reluctance that was in itself perhaps a sign of the problem. On the whole (Lawrence of course was an exception), they would only say they were defending the cause of art.
Yet if Ford’s original impetus had been his desire to publish Hardy’s poem, he succeeded in creating in the English Review an outstanding journal that would bring together the best of the established writers and some, at least, of the best of the new. In that first issue (186 pages for 2s. 6d.) were pieces by Conrad, James, Wells, W.H. Hudson, Galsworthy and a Constance Garnett translation from Tolstoy. Soon Ford would also include those he called ‘les jeunes’, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, F.S. Flint and Norman Douglas, several of whom, such as Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, were given their first publication there. Lawrence, then a young schoolteacher in Croydon, had read the Review from the first issue, and recommended it to Jessie Chambers and her family, who were, she said, ‘delighted with it. The very look of [it] with its fine blue cover and handsome black type, was satisfying … The coming of the English Review into our lives was an event, one of the few really first-rate things that happen now and again in a lifetime.’72 Many felt the same, not enough, it is true, to prevent the journal, whose contributors were generously paid, from losing money from the first issue; but it was undoubtedly a succès d’estime.
The Review was published from 84 Holland Park Avenue, which housed the editorial office, Ford’s living quarters and, on the ground floor, a combined poulterer’s and fishmonger’s. Violet Hunt, who would shortly become his companion and supposed wife, recalls in The Flurried Years that
There was a chaste brown door – the side door of the shop originally – with a gilt plaque, ENGLISH REVIEW, LTD., just over the bell. There was no need of a bell, for, from the date of the installation of the Review, this, the editor’s house and home, was left permanently open to all and sundry, contributors, burglars, and political refugees. Vera F——, the woman who shot at Stolypin, found an asylum here in 1908. An English burglar contrived, one summer afternoon, to steal all the editor’s spare tall hats, while Azef, the Russian spy, so he informed me, was in the habit of coming in and ransacking the editor’s desk. Altogether, 84 Holland Park Avenue seemed to be a mark for all sorts of Communist, Bolshevik attempts, a regular danger-spot. On the pavement outside a man had been sandbagged and left for dead; and Mr Chandler, the poulterer, his landlord, and a big, hefty man carried his takings to the bank each day, but went continually in fear of a knife in his back. The editor rather liked it.
Luckily, as she entered, ‘nothing more terrible than the sickly, depraved smell of chickens assailed [her]’.73 The open door and the smell have been amply testified to elsewhere, but while Ford was certainly in touch with the world of Russian émigrés – his sister was married to one – whether his office was quite such a centre of Bolshevik intrigue is another matter. He no doubt liked to give that impression.
Pound was introduced to Ford by May Sinclair. She was a friend of Hunt’s, both of them being ardent supporters of women’s suffrage and in 1909 considered by many the two best living women novelists. In other ways they were very different. Hunt’s life was a succession of badly managed indiscretions, while May Sinclair combined advanced views with an air – and probably a life – of invincible propriety. She was beautifully mannered and immensely kind. H.D. recalled Pound rounding Richard Aldington and herself up in Kensington one morning to ‘look in on May’.
Miss Sinclair opened the studio apartment door. Her somewhat Queen Mary bang or fringe was done up in curl papers. I tugged at Richard’s sleeve to suggest that we go home, but Ezra had already swung on into the studio. May Sinclair made no reference to her early morning appearance. She was as Norman Douglas once said, ‘a rare thing nowadays, my dear, a gentlewoman’.
Pound meanwhile had found a pile of books on her table, which he threw on to an inaccessibly high shelf:
‘People impose on you,’ he said, ‘you can’t get those books down. You can’t write letters to all those people’ … This was a swarm of minnows, according to Ezra, poets in the manner of the underprivileged hero of The Divine Fire [May Sinclair’s 1904 novel] … I still think of those books, slim volumes of verse, first books I should imagine for the most part. No doubt Miss Sinclair summoned a janitor, a window-cleaner or a fireman with an imposing ladder. She wouldn’t, with her amazing Edwardian courtesy, neglect her minnows.74
For now Pound was her minnow, and she was not going to neglect him. ‘Ezra,’ Ford recalled, ‘was brought to my office by Miss May Sinclair who said she wanted to introduce the greatest poet to the greatest editor in the world. She could invent these courtesies when she wanted to.’75 The invention was more likely Ford’s. Sinclair was impressed by Pound’s poetry but surely not that impressed.
At the time of this introduction, Ford was thirty-five, and had already published over twenty books, no fewer than six in 1907 alone, one of which was The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a title which might have excited Pound’s interest, though there is no indication that he read anything by Ford on this first visit to London.76 Ford himself had strong connections with the Pre-Raphaelite era, his mother being the daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown, not actually one of the Brotherhood, but associated with them. Her sister had married William Michael Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina). Ford was partial to talking of his ‘Aunt Christina’, whom he once described as ‘the greatest master of words and moods that any art has produced’, and he was immensely proud of his association with them all.77 He had a Chippendale bureau in his office at which he claimed Christina wrote her poems, and he had inherited Dante Gabriel’s velvet jacket, which he always wore. It was from Ford Madox Brown, Ford’s biographer suggests, that Ford inherited his gift for ‘lavish and picturesque’ anecdote, though according to Ford himself all the Pre-Raphaelite circle had engaged in ‘the habit of anecdote, incisive, however wanting in veracity’.78 That was certainly the tradition he emulated. Ford’s father was a musician, a German émigré, who Hunt says first came to England ‘merely to edit the Tauchnitz edition of Rossetti’s poems and play backgammon with him’, but then never left.79 Franz Hüffer or Francis Hueffer, as, after some variations on the way, he became, wrote a book about the Provençal poets, much read by the nineties poets. Pound, one would think, must have known about this book, but again there is no evidence that he ever read it. But Ford’s Pre-Raphaelite backdrop delighted him.
Ford was a man of many talents. Douglas Goldring, who worked as Ford’s secretary at the English Review, has a story of one day arriving at 84 Holland Park Avenue and finding Ford seated at the grand piano, whose presence in the office often surprised his visitors, ‘humming a song and playing over the accompaniment … “One of my few popular successes, my dear Goldring” Ford remarked as he got up from the stool and shut the piano. “I didn’t put my name to it, out of respect for my father’s reputation, but it was sung everywhere for a couple of seasons”.’80 Even at the time Goldring thought this story might well have been true (‘I doubt if “l’honneur” would have allowed him to claim the authorship of something which was not his,’ he commented). More recently it has been discovered that as a young man Ford composed extensively, pieces for voice and piano, following his father’s admiration for the Provençal fusing of verse and music.81 He was also talented as a painter, not perhaps surprisingly given the other side of his genetic inheritance. As a writer, his fiction brought him most fame, though in 1909 his best-known works, The Good Soldier (1915) and the four novels that make up Parade’s End (1924–28) were in the future. He also wrote poetry of which Pound was to say in 1913, ‘Hueffer has … the gift for making lyrics that will sing … Hang it all, if “a lyric” means a song calculated to be sung … we would not be far wrong in calling Mr Hueffer the best lyricist in England’;82 few would agree today. Pound, in fact, was to admire him most as a critic, though he paid scant attention to Ford’s ideas until 1912.
Ford’s father had been an intense Anglophile, who insisted his children learnt to behave in accord with English upper middle-class mores, yet his upbringing was very un-British. For one thing he lived in a milieu of artists, writers and – through the Rossetti connections – revolutionaries. He had German relations; his Rossetti cousins had Italian ones. He didn’t go through the preparatory and public school, Oxbridge route of his class. He was sent to a co-educational Froebel school, run by a German couple, where the children spoke English, French and German on different days in rotation. By the time he was twenty, he had, he said, spent three winters in Paris and two summers in Germany. (‘Fordie,’ Brigit Patmore once heard a relative say to him, ‘don’t speak French so well. Englishmen consider it affected and therefore it is not done.’)83 After his father’s unexpected death when he was fifteen, he went to live with his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, two doors away from William Rossetti and his family, and spent a couple of years at University College School as a day boy. He left at seventeen, not to go to university, nor get a job, but to discover in what artistic field he would best shine. As the very English Goldring commented with some amazement: ‘Ford is the only man I have ever heard of who was actually commanded by a relative – his Madox Brown grandfather – to follow an artistic career.’84
Direction was Ford’s problem. He wondered about music, but decided that there he would not be a bright enough star. His first book was published in 1891, when he was eighteen, and two more in 1892. At twenty he converted to Catholicism, the religion of his father’s southern German family; he liked the ritual and tradition of Catholicism, though it doesn’t appear to have had much influence on the way he lived his life. At twenty-one he eloped with and married a former school friend, a romantic escapade that, like most of his later ones, was to end in misery. He was hard up, but not impecunious, and he went on writing – art criticism, some poetry, and a biography of his grandfather, who died in 1894. What changed everything, his biographers and critics agree, was his meeting in 1898, when he was aged twenty-five, with Joseph Conrad, to whom Edward Garnett introduced him. Conrad, already a much-praised writer, suggested they collaborated. Ford was writing unsuccessful fiction, both in his own estimation and that of his publishers; Conrad was, he told Ford, still struggling with English, his third language, laboriously translating from French. The result of this collaboration, as one critic puts it, was that ‘Ford was converted wholeheartedly to the Novel; not however, to the English tradition of Fielding and Thackeray, but to the art of Henry James and the French and Russian masters, particularly Maupassant, whose preface to Pierre et Jean (1888) had set out new aims for practitioners of the craft of fiction.’85
Maupassant’s preface, already translated into English by 1890, was both the summation of Flaubertian principles and an indication of the way in which the modernist novel, and indeed poetry, would develop. According to Maupassant, the novelist who cares for his art should not simply ‘show us a commonplace photograph of life, but … give a presentment of it … more complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is out of the question … a choice must be made.’ Above all, the artist-novelist ‘knows what to eliminate’.86 Ford described the technique that he and Conrad had evolved following Maupassant’s precepts as ‘Impressionism’, for the Impressionist painters too had abandoned photographic realism, wanting to paint not the scene itself but something ‘more cogent than reality’, the sensations that the scene evoked in them. Conrad and Ford were concerned to show or present, rather than explain or describe, the essence of Impressionist technique being selection, not the piling up of information but the choice of the illuminating detail that conveyed what Ford described in Henry James’ work as ‘vibrating reality’.87 Like Maupassant and the Impressionist painters, Ford believed the subject-matter to be treated in this way was the modern world: ‘Facts,’ he wrote in 1909,
so innumerably beset us, that the gatherer of facts is relatively of very little value. And when, each man by himself, we are seeking to make out the pattern of the bewildering carpet that modern life is, it matters very little whether the facts are those collected by the scientific historian, by the socio-political economist or by the collector of railroad statistics. But to be brought really into contact with our fellow men, to become intimately acquainted with the lives of those around us, this is a thing which grows daily more difficult in the complexities of modern life. This, vicariously, the artist is more and more needed to supply.88
Ford would pass these precepts on to Pound to apply to poetry, most successfully the exhortation to eliminate: indeed Pound’s expertise at elimination, slashing out unnecessary or redundant words, was to become legendary, and ‘showing’ or ‘presenting’, rather than ‘describing’, would be central to imagism. For Ford himself, in practice ‘Impressionism’ meant less eliminating than embroidering facts. Even in memoirs like Return to Yesterday and Thus to Revisit he quite blatantly embellished his stories, but he insisted that by so doing he gave a better impression of how things actually felt. In the past, it has to be said, some of Ford’s more baroque flourishes have been taken by earnest literary historians as sober documentary. Even the compiler of the history of the Pound–Ford literary friendship solemnly repeats Ford’s assertion that Pound crossed to Europe on a cattle boat: it was actually RMS Slavonia. Fortunately she draws the line at endorsing Ford’s version of Pound’s birth: ‘Born in the blizzard, his first meal consisted of kerosene. That was why he ate such enormous quantities of my tarts, the flavour of kerosene being very enduring. It also accounted for the glory of his hair.’89
Ford had been acquainted with these French and Russian writers before meeting Conrad, even if he had not yet been influenced by them. He had known the Garnett family, tireless promoters of the Russian novel, since boyhood, for Edward, whose father Richard was Keeper of Books at the British Museum library, and its first cataloguer, had lived next door to William Rossetti. (According to David, Edward’s son, his grandfather had only reached the letter S when he retired; perhaps that gave Virginia Woolf, whom David Garnett knew well, the idea that Mr Ramsay should stall at R.) By 1898 Edward’s wife Constance had already translated much of Turgenev’s work. Constance, whose output was prodigious – she translated seventy books in thirty-five years – later moved on to Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, but Turgenev was to remain the important Russian influence on Ford, as he had been on Henry James. Ford’s own wife, Elsie, was translating Maupassant, a factor which has perhaps not been given its due weight, and his sister Judith, who married a political exile from Russia, was later to collaborate with Constance, and to produce acclaimed translations of Russian poetry.90 The Garnetts were sympathetic to the opponents of the Tsar, and the neighbourhood of the Cearne, the Garnett cottage that Lawrence would later visit, became known as ‘Dostoevsky Corner’ on account of the number of Russian exiles and émigrés around. At the International Social Democratic Conference in London in 1907, Constance met Lenin and Trotsky, whom she admired, and Stalin, whom she thought a ‘bank robber’.91 Perhaps Azef the Russian spy really did keep an eye on Ford after all. Yet if Conrad by no means introduced Ford to the European novel, it appears to have been working with him that revealed to Ford how he could use the example of these writers to shape his own fiction.
Ford’s first book to excite real praise was published in 1905, not as it happened fiction, but an extraordinarily evocative account of the modern metropolis, called The Soul of London. His marriage, however, was rapidly falling apart, not helped by an affair with his wife’s sister. By now Ford and Elsie had two daughters, to whom he was devoted, but possibly the extra burden of family expenses on a slender income was an added stress. Ford had had a nervous breakdown in 1904, and the doctor insisted he went abroad by himself. The couple never again lived together for any length of time. By 1909, when the English Review was already in financial trouble, Elsie was asking for a divorce, which Ford resisted, though in great distress about the relationship and his life in general. He was profoundly depressed, even, according to Violet Hunt, on the verge of suicide. In The Flurried Years Violet relates how she was round at 84 having dinner one night, when Ford began to talk, in deep dejection, about his plans to kill himself. He would take poison and then immediately throw himself under one of the many buses that trundled past from Notting Hill, so it would look like an accident, and Elsie would get the life insurance:
What can a woman do? There is the old, traditional way of comfort … something of the sort … I put one hand on the lapel of his coat, using, I think it was, the simple outsider’s phrase:
‘Don’t look so unhappy!’
The other hand, by the will of Providence, stole to the loose, open pocket of the brown velvet jacket that Rossetti had once worn. It fished out a dark, fluted bottle, inscribed in the Futurist colours of danger, POISON. The blunt letters were like the head of a cobra suddenly reared. I took it to the light, and he waited like a condemned criminal.
‘Were you?’ I said; and he answered, ‘I was.’
‘Donkey’, I said.92
She then, as Douglas Goldring puts it, ‘proceeded to take Ford in hand and put the all-but-shipwrecked genius under entirely new management’.93
Violet Hunt was seven years older than Ford. They had known each other as children. Hunt’s father, Arthur Hunt – no relation, as it happened, of Holman – was another Pre-Raphaelite painter, a friend of Ford Madox Brown and the Rossettis, but she and Ford only met up again in 1907, at dinner with the Galsworthys. She had approached Ford in 1908 to see if he would publish one of her short stories in the English Review, which he did, the occasion on which she first attempted the dangerous environs of his office. Violet, a woman of enormous charm and wicked tongue, had a wide acquaintance in the London literary and artistic world, and her ‘At Homes’ were famous. She lived with her mother, also a novelist, in Campden Hill Road, only a few minutes from Ford. According to Goldring, her novels had an alluring reputation for ‘Nastiness’, and a haze of scandal always hung around her. ‘She was regarded,’ he wrote,
as an English Colette with whom, indeed, she had much in common, besides a passion for cats … Popular rumour credited her with being very French and fast, a fashionable and faintly vicious blue-stocking. People I met discussed in a knowing way the tragic ‘grande passion’ of which Sooner or Later [her 1904 novel] was supposed to be a projection. Violet was never notable for emotional reticence and had already wept copiously on several famous shoulders, so she had herself to blame for being talked about. Even in her girlhood her friends had nicknamed her ‘the immodest Violet’.94
The ‘grande passion’ had been for Oswald Crawfurd, her second lover, roué, diplomat and married man, who, when his invalid wife died, married someone else, leaving Violet with a broken heart and syphilis. She had had affairs since with Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells. (The only person ever to propose to her, or perhaps the only suitor she felt worth recording, was Oscar Wilde, when she was about seventeen; how it would have worked out emotionally one can’t tell, but dinner conversation between them would have been of a high order.) She attempted, possibly out of habit, to seduce the untemptable Henry James, who remained (for now) an excellent friend. Ford was her second ‘grande passion’. She was never to recover after he left her.
Violet Hunt had captivating looks, although those who disapproved of her morals said she just missed beauty through her frivolity of expression. Even Brigit Patmore, who knew what it was like to be condemned as frivolous, and who has left one of the most sympathetic accounts of ‘the startling beauty of [Hunt’s] eyes … their clear curious green colour and the perfect leaf-shape of the lids round them’, wrote that:
In conversation she was inconsequent, a verbal dragon-fly. When she was young, had it not been a crime for a girl to be clever? Blue stockings were more shameful than bloomers, therefore be amusing and again amusing … Truthfully, a friend of hers said ‘Violet prefers her worst epigram to her best friends.’95
Violet Hunt thought of herself as a New Woman, but she was still bound by some of the old chains. She certainly had sexual charisma (even one of her enemies described her as ‘a thin viperish beauty’) and continued to use it.96 Goldring describes her, some fifteen years later, over sixty, surrounded by young men laughing at her witticisms, ‘the centre of attraction, a regular “honey-pot”, sparkling, flirtatious and lavishly endowed with sex-appeal. “The brave old dear!” murmured a man who had known her as long as I had, as we watched her flash her still lovely eyes at the youth who was handing her a cocktail. “She does keep her end up!”’97 Ford, plump, pasty and adenoidal, appeared a much less likely recipient of a ‘grande passion’. Wyndham Lewis described him as a ‘flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the Zoo inviting buns’, and some women are on record as finding him simply repulsive: Rebecca West, a few years later, memorably commented that being kissed by him was ‘like being the toast under a poached egg’.98 Yet a series of women fell hopelessly in love with him (including, for a while, Jean Rhys, though unlike Hunt she recovered with a vengeance), but perhaps it was more for his golden tongue than his straw-coloured hair.
Part of Ford’s charm for his women may well have been his warm encouragement and promotion of their own talents, for he was always generous in his support and help. This was certainly the case with Hunt, though as an established writer she was in a very different position from Rhys, who was first published by Ford. But in addition Hunt was grateful to Ford for his support in other ways. They were drawn together not only by literature but by what Hunt describes as the ‘lien’ of ‘our mutual passion for women’s suffrage’.99 Ford, a natural libertarian, had been converted to ‘the Cause’ by his mother and sister, and was delighted to support Hunt’s efforts. Ford’s politics were, like much about him, very contradictory. He insisted he was a Tory, but the two political causes he cared deeply about, suffrage and Irish Home Rule, were denounced by the Conservative Party of the period. His account of the London poor in The Soul of London has a profound humanity that seems miles away from a Tory party engaged, as it was in those years, in bitterly resisting attempts to introduce the first rudiments of a welfare state. Ford attributed these contradictions to his upbringing: ‘To irritate my relatives, who advocated advanced thought, I dimly remember that I professed myself a Tory. Amongst the bourgeoisie whom it was my inherited duty to épater I passed for a dangerous anarchist. In general speech, manner and appearance, I must have resembled a socialist of the Morris group. I don’t know what I was: I don’t know what I am.’100
The Rossetti family must have been the ones that Ford had most wanted to provoke by his ‘Toryism’. His sister Judith had gone to live with them when he and his brother went to their grandfather’s, and recalled their political zeal: ‘I had four cousins, who, though they were young, were social reformers. Mary was seven; Helen was nine; Arthur was about fourteen; and Olive was fifteen at least. I was eight, and I became a social reformer too. We were anarchists. We believed that all people should be equal, and nobody should possess more than anybody else; and we hoped for the social revolution.’ On ‘an anarchist printing press’ in the basement they printed an anarchist paper called the Torch, written mainly by Olive and Arthur but with occasional contributions from ‘real outside social reformer[s]’, selling it at railway stations and in Hyde Park. ‘I think,’ she recalled, ‘it must have been interesting and uncommon, because whenever anybody bought a copy they would first stand some time staring at the cover, and as soon as they got to the title of the first article they would to an absolute certainty (we knew because we used to watch) turn round suddenly and stare after us.’ (The Torch, as Max Saunders points out, is one of the magazines sold by Mr Verloc in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a book for which Ford supplied the plot and many details.) Judith, Mary and Helen had ‘a special mission’ of their own. ‘It was the reformation of policemen … What we had to explain to the police was that it was very unfair to put a man in prison merely for taking what he needed from another man who had more than the first man had.’101 Judith’s own son was later to become Attorney-General in the Attlee government, clearly inheriting her left-wing views and powers of persuasion, if not perhaps her view of policemen.
Ford, in fact, could be as critical of present ills as any anarchist social reformer, but he felt acutely the need to understand, or to attempt to understand, the nature of the modern, which he feared was spreading a lamentable uniformity. This was the central concern of The Soul of London, for in London, the sprawling, cosmopolitan metropolis, is to be found, Ford says, ‘the highwater mark achievement of the Modern spirit,’ about which Ford was deeply ambivalent. He writes of London that ‘it is one gigantic pantheon of the dead level of democracy’:
If in its tolerance it finds a place for all eccentricities of physiognomy, of costume, of cult, it does so because it crushes out and floods over the significance of those eccentricities … In its innumerable passages and crannies it swallows up Mormon and Mussulman, Benedictine and Agapemonite, Jew and Malay, Russian and Neapolitan. It assimilates and slowly digests them, converting them, with the most potent of all juices, into the singular and inevitable product that is the Londoner – that is, in fact, the Modern. Its spirit, extraordinary and unfathomable … spreads, like sepia in water, a tinge of its own over all the world. Its extraordinary and miasmic dialect – the dialect of South Essex – is tinging all the local speeches of England. Deep in the New Forest you will find red brick houses trying to look like London villas; deep in the swamps of coastal Africa you will find lay white men trying to remain Londoners, and religious white men trying to turn negroes into suburban chapel worshippers.
Apart from his remarkable prophecy of the emergence of estuary English, Ford’s insight into coming globalisation is striking. He goes on: ‘London is the world town, not because of its vastness; it is vast because of its assimilative powers.’102 Yet if for him that process of assimilation was of dubious value, it is worth noting that assimilative powers were also a characteristic of modernist art and poetry. Douglas Goldring once referred caustically to Ezra Pound’s poetry as ‘stuffed with cultural bric-à-brac, classical allusions and rather pretentious souvenirs of the European Grand Tour’.103 But it was to become more of a World Grand Tour, albeit a highly eclectic one. Whether it was pretentious or not is another matter, but Pound, like other modernists, came to realise, as Ford put it, that the modern ‘owes its being to no one race, to no two, to no three’.104 Like metropolitan culture, modernist poetry was formed by an increasingly multicultural world.
It would be some years before Pound could be won over to Ford’s view that the modern world necessitated new endeavours for the artist. For now, if Ford published his poetry, invited him to tea, introduced him to interesting people and gave him a good deal of amusement, that was quite enough. By the following March, when Pound left England again, he had had nine poems appear in the English Review, with considerable benefit to his finances. And if he enjoyed Ford’s company, Ford found Pound irresistibly comic.
Ezra … would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large, blue earring … he was astonishingly meagre and agile. He threw himself alarmingly into frail chairs, devoured enormous quantities of your pastry, fixed his pince-nez firmly on his nose, drew out a manuscript from his pocket, threw his head back, closed his eyes to the point of invisibility and looking down his nose would chuckle like Mephistopheles and read you a translation from Arnaut Daniel. The only part of that aubade that you would understand would be the refrain:
‘Ah me, the darn, the darn it comes toe sune!’105
Pound and Ford met some time in March or April; they certainly knew each other by the end of April, when Pound wrote home that Ford had advised him to stay in London rather than go to Italy, his latest plan for saving money.106 By then he had also met the other ‘gang’ who were to attempt to modernise him.