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| ISBN-13: | 9781847776945 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 16 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Provence
From Minstrels to the Machine
By Ford Madox Ford, Biala
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Michael SchmidtAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-694-5
CHAPTER 1
ON THE LATEST ROUTE
THIS is to be a book of travel and moralising–on the Great Trade Route which, thousands of years before our day, ran from Cathay to the Cassiterides. Along the Mediterranean shores it went and up through Provence. It bore civilisation backwards and forwards along its tides. ... And this may turn out to be in part a book of prophecies–as to what may and mayn't happen to us according as we re-adopt, or go ever farther from, the frame of mind that is Provence and the civilising influences that were carried backwards and forwards in those days.
I have told somewhere else the story of the honest merchant who came to Tarascon which is at the heart of Provence on the Greatest of all the Routes–driven there by an elephant. But the book in which I told that story is long out of print and I do not think it is to treat a reader dishonestly if one repeats in a new book some story or piece of morality that is contained in an old and unobtainable work by the author.
For if the reader wants to read that piece he must buy this book–or obtain it from his library–since he cannot get the other without going to more trouble than any sane or normal person would take over a mere book. If on the other hand he should buy this one whilst already possessing the other, one may, as an honest vendor, assume either that he is so mad as not to be considered or that he so likes the writer that he will pardon in him the very slight dishonesty of obtaining–for a new book should be new all through–the fraction of cent or penny that will be represented by that repetition. ... I indulge in that speculation to show that considerations of commercial morality are not completely alien to this writer. ... I may or may not repeat the story of the elephant: if I do I shall now consider the repetition to be justified.
Long ago, then, I was sitting in the Café de Paris which is the most fashionable café in the city of the Good King René and of St Martha. That is not to say that it is very fashionable but that it is the resort of the ex-officers of the famous but disbanded Fourth Lancers, the officers of the brown-skinned, scarlet-fezzed troops that now occupy the casernes of the regiment of Ney, of the notaire, the avoué, the avocat, the justice of the peace, of the ex-picture dealer who still possesses Gauguins and Van Goghs that he bought from those artists when they were in Arles at twenty francs a time; and the honest–and indeed never to be sufficiently belauded–merchant who still prints and purveys beautiful bandannas. They have been made in Tarascon for hundreds of years and still shine in and beautify, not only the darkest forests of darkest Africa, but the brightest suns of the most coralline of far Eastern strands. Officers, lawyers, judges, honest merchants, professors, surgeons, land-owners ... twice a day all that Tarascon has of the professional and not too newly-wedded classes meets under those awnings, basks beneath the shade of the planes or shivers beneath the blasts of the immense, life-giving and iced mistral.
And, careful as this writer is of commercial morality he is not less careful of the company that he keeps, for twice a year, twice a day, he will be found amongst those impeccables taking his vermouth-cassis before lunch and before dinner his mandarin-citron. Twice a year, twice a day for five or six days at a time. For wherever I may be going in the round-and-round of the great beaten track, begin it where you will, stepping on the eternal merry-go-round at the Place de la Concorde, the Promenade des Anglais, Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly–wherever I may be going on that latest of the Greatest Trade Routes I contrive to fetch up both going and coming for my four or five days in the little city that looks across the Rhone at Beaucaire. Beautiful Beaucaire of the ivorine castle of Nicolette "au clair visage," whose feet were so white that they made the very daisies look dim!
I am bound to say that Beaucaire, one of the stations of the great pre-historic Trade Route that ran from Cathay up the Rhone to the Cassiterides and then sighed for more worlds to conquer. ... Beaucaire that still has her fair that has existed every year on the old merchants' tabu ground since before history began. ... Beaucaire, then, looks far the best, when seen across the Rhone, with her white façade and her white tower. And I am equally bound to say that when, the other day, I asked the young lady who presides over the bookshop at Tarascon for a copy of "Aucassin and Nicolette" ... "V oulez vous entendre l'histoire de deux beaux enfants, Aucassin et Nicolete?" ... she replied:
"Monsieur desires the book of M. Francis Carco? We are not allowed to stock such works."
I do not know what book of M, Carco's she may have meant but I know that none of the inhabitants of the city of the Good King René had ever heard of the shining figures that are, at least for Anglo-Saxondom, the chief glories of the town in which the great Napoleon first saw service. To be sure that city is as unaware of the latter fact as of the former. And I am consolingly reminded that when in June 1916 I asked in Rouen–another of the stations of the prehistoric trade route–for a copy of Flaubert's "Bouvard et Pecuchet" not one of the bookshops of the city that saw the burning of Joan of Arc could yield one up. ... Yes consolingly, when I remember that the Reading Room of the British Museum cannot provide for you nearly all the books of the writer whose lines you are now reading! ... Nous autres pauvres prophètes! ... Still, Rouen has this in revenge. The captain of the transport that was bearing us, reinforcements, to the first battle of the Somme pointed excitedly to the banks when we were passing Croisset and exclaimed to the astonished British officers who were on his bridge:
"Voilà. ... There. ... It is in that pavilion that 'Bouvard et Pecuchet' was written!" ... And all the population of the Rouennais country were there to cheer our passing and great streamers bearing words of welcome covered all the headlands. ... Alas!
At any rate I have spent hours and hours in the Café de Paris at Tarascon. ... And on one of those occasions I saw, depressedly in a corner, drinking gaseous lemonade, the honest merchant who was chased–by an elephant–from Ottery St. Mary's to the city opposite Beaucaire. He was complaining bitterly of his drink and when I asked him why in the country of the vine, the olive tree–and the lemon–he should be drinking highly diluted sulphuric acid, for it is of that that artificial lemonade consists, he answered with agitation:
"You wouldn't have me drink their wines or eat their messy foods!"
Alarm grew and grew in his wild eyes and he exclaimed:
"Why, I might get to like them and then what would become of me?" ... I think that, at his brilliant exposition of that theory that is at the root of our uncivilisedness, I had my first impulse–it must have been eleven years ago!–to write this book.
He was an honest merchant, retired. ... To Ottery St Mary's which, though he did not know it, had been the home of a great poet. He would have been horrified at the idea of writing verses; he had passed an honest life as a cutler at Sheffield where they supply, to the ignorant heathens that trick themselves amidst forests and on coral strands with the bandannas that are the glory of Tarascon, knives that will not cut.
He had, he said, been all his life aware that merchants did not receive the social respect that should be due them. The most honest of Sheffield merchants retired will not be received by the County. That seemed to me odd in a cosmogony whose chief claim to call itself civilised lay in the successes of its merchants. But he, presumably, knew what he was talking about. He continued, however: All his life he had dreamed of visiting and travelling along the Great Trade Route–the one and only Great one. It ran, he said, from China across all Asia to Asia Minor; then along the shores of the Mediterranean as far as Marseilles. There, up the Rhone, it ran inland, by way of Beaucaire and Lyons to Paris; then down the Seine past Rouen to the English Channel which it crossed at its narrowest and so away along the South Coast of England past Ottery St Mary's to the Scilly Isles where it ended abruptly. ... And for ever backwards and forwards along that beaten track had gone the honest merchants bearing the merchandise of China to Cornwall and the products of Cornwall to Pekin. And they were regarded as sacred messengers, the protégés of the gods.
To that honest merchant it had seemed all his life that that track must be a paradise. Bearing your goods, regarded as sacred and so protected by kings and priests, you moved from tabu ground to tabu ground–at Nijni Novgorod, at Stambul, at Athens, Marseilles, Beaucaire, Lyons, Paris, Dover, Salisbury, Ottery St Mary's. On the tabu ground, as in the great shaded fair-ground at Beaucaire, today, you laid down such goods as you were minded to sell and retired. The inhabitants came, inspected your offerings, laid down such goods as they were minded to give in exchange for yours and in turn retired. You advanced again; inspected their goods and if they seemed sufficient took them and went off with them ..., And you were sacred. Druids with their sickles, priests of Moloch with their tridents, of Mithras with their arrows, of Baal with their serpents, all kings and princes with their myrmidons and, more dreadful still, all gods, hidden in mountains and seas, with their appalling thunderbolts, their dread pestilences and famines, protected you. You were tabu. Sacred!
That honest merchant sighed when he thought of that splendid vision, the image of a great beaten track extending across the world, like a broad swathe cut through vast plains of very tall grasses. All his life, till the elephant aided him; ... who is a symbol of a very high Trade Route God indeed ... he had had dreams of moving one day along that track. And for me it caused the realisation that in all my always migratory life no place outside Provence has ever seemed really a home to me though all my life I have been moving along parts of that same track, resting for five days, or a month, or six, and then moving on and on again. For me–as for most of humanity–the Route has today become the Grand Tour. At Monte Carlo or Mentone or possibly even Genoa, it suddenly takes a turn to the right, across the Mediterranean and through the Straits of Gibraltar and so to the west. ... And indeed it occurs oddly to me that the only place in which I ever spent eight solid months, never sleeping outside its city walls–the only place in all my life must have been New York which is usually accounted unrestful enough. ... But still, from Genoa to Sandy Hook and Sandy Hook to Tilbury Dock and thence to Calais Pier and so, by the Overland Route to Marseilles and the Quai de Cronstadt at Toulon the gyratory journey continues and continues....
It is my thoughts upon those journeys and the projections of the places that form the beads of that string of voyages that I am setting down. ... My thoughts on faiths and destinies and chances and cuisines and digestions and the Stage and music and the fine arts and the neglect of writers and love and honest merchanting and treason and death and strategies ... and the Parish of St Marylebone and the harbour of Chichester and the Sixth Arrondissement and the semi-circular Place in front of the palace of the Dukes of Burgundy at Dijon and the Roman city of Vaison where Provence begins and was begun and the theatre of Orange and disasters at Tarascon and so onwards....
If I write of Provence a little as if it were an earthly Paradise the reader must amiably condone what, not being fully in the know, he will consider as a weakness. I shall dwell on Provence far, far more than on Piccadilly or the Place de la Concorde. But let him again pardon the writer whose whole motive is to get him into that "know" as fully as lies within the power of his pen. The well-advertised motive of the sainted of many centuries has been to leave the world a little better than they found it. To such haloes it is not for me to aspire. It has however become more and more manifest to me as the years went by me that the safest road to fame and fortune is that of the Moralist, whether he be Marcus Aurelius or St Paul or the late Robert Louis Stevenson or my friend Miss Katherine Anne Porter's life's hero, Cotton Mather. And, if I do not set about soon to procure myself those desiderata, fame, fortune and the consequent esteem of my fellows will be for ever strangers to me. So I here make that bid. ... I shall point out recurrently to my reader–recurrently and apparently without relevance in the middle of paragraphs otherwise devoted to the climate of the parishes of St Marylebone and Greenwich or to the lost and gone speak-easies round and about West Forty-eighth Street–that Provence is the only region on the Great Route fit for the habitation of a proper man. I run thus, I am aware, the risk of being styled prolix or of having lost control of my pen or faculties. But it is proper that the good should be defamed by people like reviewers and my strength is indeed as the strength of ten because of the purity of my purpose. That purpose is none other than to induce my readers–that goodly and attractive band–either to settle in the land of Clemence Isaure, St Martha, the Tarasque, Marius and Olive of Marseilles, MM. Gambetta, Thiers and M. Bonhoure, the winner of the Five Millions, and other fabulous monsters, or at least to model their lives along the lines of the good Provençal and his Eden-garlic-garden. So in the end, like the jongleur who juggled before Our Lady and was rewarded by a smile from the Bambino in her arms, I may be pardoned my sins of inclusion. And if I may not receive the reward of those who have left the world better than they found it I may have led my readers to a world better than any they yet knew. And the rest of the world may, for all I care, go on living in its former abomination....
In the middle of some reflections on the meeting, on East Forty-second Street, of the spheres of influence of Mrs Patrick Campbell coming from Her Majesty's Theatre and Mrs Aimée Macpherson coming from California, I may introduce some directions as to the real, right and only best way to make bouillabaisse. ... That will be because I am capable of anything in the furtherance of a just cause and not because I suffer from a senile impotence to marshal my thoughts. Moreover I may desire to suggest to my reader how much better engaged those two electrifying ladies would have been had they been seated one on each side of a bowl of that amazing fish stew, at Martigues on the Etang de Berre, in the sunlight, than the one in the pulpit of an East Side Temple and the other, not of course with a baby in her arms, but at least lost in the snowdrifts outside that fane. ... For where better and more fittingly could Beauty and Righteousness kiss and clasp hands than over one of the great steaming bowls of M. Pascal? And indeed if Beauty and Righteousness cannot be induced soon to be reconciled what is to become of this poor world? That at least is the moral of this book. For, in the end, it is about the Courts of Love that the Troubadours held in the little castle of Roumanille in the Alpilles above St Rémy de Provence five miles or so from Tarascon. Since the last of those Courts was holden our Western World under, or awaiting, the leadership of Mr Mather, gave up the attempt to reconcile those necessary concomitants of the existence of a civilisation–and slid towards the Pit. And still slides.
I do not mean to say that even in Provence it is all perfection. A really perfect Garden would not be one in which the dog had none of the little irritants that a dog's life calls for. Provence will always have its three flails ... Le Parlement, le Mistral et la Durance sont les trois fléaux de la Provence ... Parliament, the North Wind and the dire river that with sudden and utterly unforeseeable disaster floods the whole valley of the Rhone....
And Providence there too is apt to be inscrutably lavish of her gifts. Of the first six great Lots of the new French lottery five have gone to the inhabitants of the Midi as against all the rest of France. The cold Northerner will point out that that is because the Provençal, being a gambler, has bought exactly five times as many tickets as all the rest of France together. ... But the Northern world is dying because of the disappearance of that very gambler's spirit; Provence alone continues on her tranquil way beneath the sun ... and mops up the Gros Lots in addition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Provence by Ford Madox Ford, Biala. Copyright © 2012 Michael Schmidt. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Preface,
Illustrations,
Part I THE GREAT TRADE ROUTES,
I On the Latest Route,
II London from Provence,
III Destiny on the Great Route,
IV Fin de Section,
Part II PROVENCE SEEN FROM THE NORTH,
I Provence from London,
II Nature,
III Darkest Provence,
IV Courts of Love,
V Church and Stage,
VI Fine Arts,
Part III MISE A MORT,
I There the Poor Dare Plead,
II Paris-Dijon-Méditerranée,
III Animam non Coelum Mutare,
Afterword,
INDEX,
About the Author,
Also by Ford Madox Ford from Carcanet Press,
Copyright,