Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes
Authors: Julian Barnes
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and I don’t want to become French for reasons that would take too long to tell … No, I want to belong to a nation of Small Producers, with some local, but no national feeling at all. Without boundaries, or armed forces, or customs, or government. That would never want me to kill anyone out of a group feeling. Something like being a Provençal. I might want to insult someone from the Gard if he said he could grow better marrows than we in the Var. But that would be as far as even local feeling would go.
The old advice about cultivating one’s garden was always moral as well as practical; nor was it a counsel of quietism. As human beings recklessly use up the world’s resources and despoil the planet, as the follies of globalisation become more apparent,as we head towards what could be the biggest smash of all, the wisdom and the way of living that Ford Madox Ford – literature’s good soldier – found in Provence are perhaps even more worth attending to.
FORD’S ANGLICAN SAINT
I N 1927, F ORD Madox Ford compared himself to a great auk, that clumsy North Atlantic penguin, hunted to death by the middle of the nineteenth century. The occasion was the reissue of his first masterpiece
The Good Soldier
(1915) – his ‘great auk’s egg’ – which he had published at the age of forty-one. Even back then, he maintained, he had felt like an ‘extinct volcano’, one who had had his time and was all too willing to hand over to the ‘clamorous young writers’ of the rising generation. But those new voices – Imagists, Vorticists, Cubists – had been blown away by the Great War, and somehow he was still around. And so, to his own surprise, ‘I have come out of my hole again’ to write more books … Such weary, genteel valetudinarianism was typical of Ford. When he died, Graham Greene wrote that it felt like ‘the obscure death of a veteran – an impossibly Napoleonic veteran, say, whose immense memory spanned the period from Jena to Sedan’.
However, it was and is always a mistake to go along with Ford’s self-presentation. He appeared confused and was often confusing; he would say one thing and probably mean another, only to state its opposite as a counter-certainty not very long afterwards; he was fanciful, unreliable and exasperating. Some thought him simply a liar, though as Ezra Pound charitably pointed out to Hemingway, Ford ‘only lied when he was very tired’. So in 1927, for all his self-dismissingness, he was three-quarters of the way through what would become his second masterpiece: the four-book
Parade’s End
(1924–8). A novel which couldn’t be further from the work of somesuperannuated old buffer: in literary technique and human psychology, it is as modern and modernist as they come. And now that the years have shaken down, it is Ford who makes Greene look old-fashioned, rather than the other way round.
The Good Soldier
’s protagonist, Edward Ashburnham, was a version of the chivalric knight.
Parade’s End’s
protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, is a version of the Anglican saint. Both are great auks making do in a world of modernity and muddle. Tietjens – a North Yorkshireman whose ancestors came over with ‘Dutch William’ – believes that the seventeenth century was ‘the only satisfactory age in England’. He is ‘a Tory of an extinct type’ who has ‘no politics that did not disappear in the eighteenth century’. He reads no poetry except Byron, thinks Gilbert White of Selborne ‘the last English writer who could write’, and approves of only one novel written since the eighteenth century (not that we can read it, since it is by a character in
Parade’s End
). Both Ashburnham and Tietjens share a streak of romantic feudalism – nostalgia for a time of rights and duties and supposed orderliness. But Ashburnham is better fitted for the modern world, being – beneath his chivalric coating – a devious libertine and not outstandingly bright. Tietjens, by
The old advice about cultivating one’s garden was always moral as well as practical; nor was it a counsel of quietism. As human beings recklessly use up the world’s resources and despoil the planet, as the follies of globalisation become more apparent,as we head towards what could be the biggest smash of all, the wisdom and the way of living that Ford Madox Ford – literature’s good soldier – found in Provence are perhaps even more worth attending to.
FORD’S ANGLICAN SAINT
I N 1927, F ORD Madox Ford compared himself to a great auk, that clumsy North Atlantic penguin, hunted to death by the middle of the nineteenth century. The occasion was the reissue of his first masterpiece
The Good Soldier
(1915) – his ‘great auk’s egg’ – which he had published at the age of forty-one. Even back then, he maintained, he had felt like an ‘extinct volcano’, one who had had his time and was all too willing to hand over to the ‘clamorous young writers’ of the rising generation. But those new voices – Imagists, Vorticists, Cubists – had been blown away by the Great War, and somehow he was still around. And so, to his own surprise, ‘I have come out of my hole again’ to write more books … Such weary, genteel valetudinarianism was typical of Ford. When he died, Graham Greene wrote that it felt like ‘the obscure death of a veteran – an impossibly Napoleonic veteran, say, whose immense memory spanned the period from Jena to Sedan’.
However, it was and is always a mistake to go along with Ford’s self-presentation. He appeared confused and was often confusing; he would say one thing and probably mean another, only to state its opposite as a counter-certainty not very long afterwards; he was fanciful, unreliable and exasperating. Some thought him simply a liar, though as Ezra Pound charitably pointed out to Hemingway, Ford ‘only lied when he was very tired’. So in 1927, for all his self-dismissingness, he was three-quarters of the way through what would become his second masterpiece: the four-book
Parade’s End
(1924–8). A novel which couldn’t be further from the work of somesuperannuated old buffer: in literary technique and human psychology, it is as modern and modernist as they come. And now that the years have shaken down, it is Ford who makes Greene look old-fashioned, rather than the other way round.
The Good Soldier
’s protagonist, Edward Ashburnham, was a version of the chivalric knight.
Parade’s End’s
protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, is a version of the Anglican saint. Both are great auks making do in a world of modernity and muddle. Tietjens – a North Yorkshireman whose ancestors came over with ‘Dutch William’ – believes that the seventeenth century was ‘the only satisfactory age in England’. He is ‘a Tory of an extinct type’ who has ‘no politics that did not disappear in the eighteenth century’. He reads no poetry except Byron, thinks Gilbert White of Selborne ‘the last English writer who could write’, and approves of only one novel written since the eighteenth century (not that we can read it, since it is by a character in
Parade’s End
). Both Ashburnham and Tietjens share a streak of romantic feudalism – nostalgia for a time of rights and duties and supposed orderliness. But Ashburnham is better fitted for the modern world, being – beneath his chivalric coating – a devious libertine and not outstandingly bright. Tietjens, by
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