My dear Pressly:
You have read every word of this book; thus yon are the only man in the world of whom I can say for certain—or shall ever be able to say for certain!—that he has read every word of it…. To whom can a book be more fittingly dedicated than to its only reader?
I hope you have liked it. If it upholds too noisily for your tastes the banners of the only perfect republic and the only permanent kingdom, forgive that. That is nothing against diplomatists. The Kingdom of the Arts has many subjects who have never employed for expression the permanencies of paper, canvas, stone or catgut, reed and brass. And unless a diplomatist be an artist in those impermanencies, the fates and boundaries of nations, he is no true ambassador. Indeed it is amongst the prouder records of your temporal republic—along with that of France—that it has not infrequently employed and still employs creative artists as its communicating links with other lands. And, since I notice that two of the typed pages of this book have an eagle for their watermark, may I not pride myself on the fact that I thus become, as it were microscopically, a floor-sweeper in the embassy of our lord Apollo, sovereign over Parnassus.
They say every man has it in him to write one good book. This then may be my one good book that you get dedicated to you. For the man’s one good book will be his autobiography. This is a form I have never tried—mainly for fear of the charge of vanity. I have written reminiscences of which the main features were found in the lives of other people and in which, as well as I could, I obscured myself. But I have reached an age when the charge of vanity has no terrors as against the chance of writing one good book. It is the great woe of literature that no man can tell whether what he writes is good or not. In his vain moments he may, like Thackeray, slap his forehead and cry: “This is genius” … But in the dark days when that supporter abandons him he will sink his head over his page and cry: “What a vanity is all this!” … And it is the little devil in human personality that no man can tell whether he is vain or not. He may—as you certainly have every reason to—assert that at least he has a good nose. But if I advanced the same claim? Or a man might limit his boasting to saying that he was a good trencher-man, and yet be vain since he may delight in wolfing down what,in the realm of the haute cuisine, is mere garbage.
I have tried then to write a novel, drawing my material from my own literary age. You have here two adventures of a once jeune, homme pauvre—a poor man who was, once young. In rendering them, I have employed every wile known to me as novelist—the timeshift, the progression d’effet, the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action. If then it is a bad book it is merely because of my want of skill, or because my canons are at fault.
I woke this morning, as is my habit, just before dawn and lay looking, through the mosquito-net, at the harbingers of day and thinking of what I was going to write now…. These words! I saw, in the phantasmagoric way in which one perceives things at dawn when one’s thoughts are elsewhere—something gross descending the trunk of the oak whose boughs overhang my bed. From there the nightingale has awakened me just before every dawn for how long now! … It was a rat, and the nightingale, as it moved, glided down, just three inches from its eyes.
It seemed a fantastic and horrible conjunction, that of rat and nightingale. But after all, all poets are at outs with … let us say, their bankers. Having been, as you see, an editor, I dislike saying that editors are all the same as rats….
I was filled with horror until in a moment peace descended on me. The cat of the house jumped from the roof to a lower roof and so to the path beside me. And at once there went up the long warning note of the male and the answering, croaking menace of the female nightingale when she sits on her eggs. They were then safe…. It is as futile for a rat to try to rifle the nest of the nightingale who is nyctalops as for a banker to ruin the home of a poet. The birds, seeing in the dark, will fly at the rat’s weak eyes until the discomflted quadruped shuffles away down the trunk and the female bird again sits in triumph and peace…. As for the banker, the poet—be it Bertran de Born or Mr. Pound or Mr. Hemingway—will address to him some immortal sirventes or pop him into a novel so that he will never again hold up his head….
Then as soon as it was light I went down into the garden to plan out, in the pitiless Mediterranean drought, the irrigation of the day. The semi-tropical plants and trees—the oranges, lemons, peppers, vines and the rest can do without water for a long time. Musk- and water-melons must have a little water and the Northern plants that for his sins the pink Nordic has imported here—the peas, beans, string beans, cabbages, carrots, and such gross, over-green matter, must have a great deal or incontinently die. It was a whole campaign of irrigation channels that I had mentally to arrange for a day given up entirely to writing and the affairs of the parched earth.
As I went back up the hill to sit down and write this I saw, drinking at opposite ends of my sinking cistern, the great snake who is three foot longer than my six-foot stretch and the emerald green, vermilion-spotted lizard that is as long as my arm. I felt satisfaction. These creatures one only sees drinking in the magic hour between darkness and day. They looked at me with their fateful indifferent glances as I passed, and went on drinking.
For me the great snake, messenger of Aesculapius to whom the cock is owed, represents Destiny, the scarlet-spotted lizard, the imps of discomfort and the little devils of doubt that beset one’s daily path. I know that writer’s cramp will make me have to lay down my pen often to-day and the femme de ménage will be more than usually like a snake in the kitchen. These are the reminders that Fate sends us so that in our baked sanctuary our stomachs be not too haughty or too proud…. But I know that the great snake will soon swallow the rat. It is true that, being inscrutable and august, it will eventually rifle the nightingale’s nest. But it is fitting that Lilith should ruin poets….
So you see that, to date, this fairy-tale has found its appropriate close. The persons of the transatlantic drama are scattered but all active. You, it is true, are in Paris with Katherine Anne, and Mr. Glenway Westcott is still faithful to the great Faubourg; Mr. Pound is Professor of Economics in Rapallo; Mr. Hemingway is writing a novel in Key West if he is not momentarily shooting lions in Arkansaw or diving to recover bottles of Perrier-Jouet from a sunken rum-runner. Mr. Nathan Ash is somewhere in the State of New York; Mrs. Rodes is shiningly directing the interior decorating of the chief but not capital city of that State; the conscientious objector is on the other side of the frontier near here; the White Russian Colonel is I don’t know where; Mrs. Foster is in Schenectady. And so the city sitteth solitary and the round table is dissolved….
But all, all the Knights, be sure, in their fastnesses seek the Holy Grail…. I read in the newspapers that Mr. Pound—momentarily in Paris—announces that his opera Cavalcanti—more power to his bâton!—will be broadcasted in a month or so. From time to time he writes a line of poetry, too.
The flood of laymen will in the end submerge us all and dance on our graves. The layman hates the artist as the atrocious Mr. Hitler hates learning. Indeed the layman regards the artist as a sort of Jew. But, to the measure of the light vouchsafed, my late comrades shine in their places and may be content. The pogroms will come but, even as Heine, the greatest of German poets, they have lit beacons that posterity shall not willingly let die.
I had intended to continue this novel to the edge of the abyss of 1929. But I found that subsequent events are too vivid in my mind. I cannot get them into any perspective. Moreover, it is inexpedient to write of living people in their too near presents. It is all right to write of a man in his hot youth. He will regard the record with complacency, knowing that he has now neared perfection. But write about their immediate presents and not only will you find yourself in a hornet’s nest—which is so much my normal situation that it would leave me fairly indifferent—but they will be deeply and really grieved—which would be hateful! I once said to the beautiful and how much regretted poet, Elinor Wylie, that that day she was looking radiantly beautiful. As she was. She said to me with fury:
“That is because you thought I looked like a hag yesterday!” and she never spoke to me again. That grieved me since she and her husband used to be very good friends of mine because, she said, she and Mr. Benet got engaged over reading one of my poems. But—what was worse—she was mortally hurt by that remark and, I have heard, never got over the idea that it had suggested to her. So, for my novel about the years immediately preceding super-Armageddon you will have to wait another decade…. And glad of it! says you….
I don’t wonder. During all these months you, as Benedict, should have been squiring Katherine Anne Porter-Pressly to Maxim’s, or the Moulin Rouge, or the Chat Noir … I see a smile of polite irony come over your diplomat’s inscrutability: but what do I know or care about the transpontine night life of the Ville Lumière to-day!—Instead you have rushed home from your embassy at the days’ ends and have spent the hours with Katherine Anne poring over my minute and indecipherable script. It is a scandal and I a real scoundrel to have let you do it…. Youth and beauty should be better served, though the sky fall in on the manuscripts of all novels.
But there is this: Whilst you sat quiet at home Katherine Anne has written some more of her exquisite short stones. Thus what youth, beauty and the night club lost on the fugitive swings, Literature has gained for her roundabouts that are eternal….
And there is this, too … I daresay that, in the course of this novel I have rendered humanity as rather chequered. People who owe one a little gratitude or a little consideration now and then fall short. One’s ewe lamb will show the terrible teeth of the lamb in Turgenev’s story…. But you have done that heavy and monotonous work—I dare not say “for the love of God”—but then without any faint hope of any return. For what return could I possibly make you except to subscribe myself
With infinite gratitude,
FORD MADOX FORD.
CAP BRUN
ON THE FEAST OF ST. EULOGIUS
MCMXXXIII