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Here in northern France | 0:00:19 | 0:00:20 | |
in the middle of the Battle of the Somme, | 0:00:20 | 0:00:23 | |
in a place the British soldiers called Sausage Valley, | 0:00:23 | 0:00:26 | |
on account of the German barrage balloons that lurked in the sky, | 0:00:26 | 0:00:31 | |
An overweight, middle-aged novelist | 0:00:31 | 0:00:34 | |
with the unlikely name of Ford Madox Ford | 0:00:34 | 0:00:37 | |
was caught in an artillery explosion and blown in the air. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:41 | |
The worst of his physical injuries | 0:00:41 | 0:00:43 | |
were to his expensive porcelain dentures, | 0:00:43 | 0:00:46 | |
but suffering from shell shock, | 0:00:46 | 0:00:48 | |
he couldn't even remember his own name. | 0:00:48 | 0:00:51 | |
'It was a mental darkness. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
'You could not think. | 0:01:01 | 0:01:03 | |
'A Dark Age! | 0:01:03 | 0:01:04 | |
'The earth turned like a weary hippopotamus. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:07 | |
'It was slow, slow, slow | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
'like a slowed down movie. | 0:01:10 | 0:01:12 | |
'The earth manoeuvred for an infinite time.' | 0:01:12 | 0:01:16 | |
That explosion in Sausage Valley proved the trigger | 0:01:21 | 0:01:25 | |
for one of the great novels of the First World War. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:27 | |
And its now been adapted for television | 0:01:27 | 0:01:30 | |
by Tom Stoppard. | 0:01:30 | 0:01:32 | |
Ford was still recovering from the blast six years later | 0:01:48 | 0:01:52 | |
when he began to write Parade's End. | 0:01:52 | 0:01:55 | |
It's both a love story and one of the greatest accounts of the war | 0:01:55 | 0:01:59 | |
and how it shattered the foundations of the old world. | 0:01:59 | 0:02:03 | |
I'm Sylvia. Satterthwaite. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:09 | |
Yes. | 0:02:09 | 0:02:12 | |
My name is... | 0:02:12 | 0:02:13 | |
My name is... | 0:02:15 | 0:02:16 | |
Parade's End is a profoundly experimental | 0:02:16 | 0:02:19 | |
and deeply personal novel | 0:02:19 | 0:02:22 | |
written by one of the most extraordinary | 0:02:22 | 0:02:24 | |
yet forgotten figures in British literature. | 0:02:24 | 0:02:28 | |
But who on earth was Ford Madox Ford? | 0:02:28 | 0:02:31 | |
I think he's been waiting | 0:02:37 | 0:02:41 | |
to be rediscovered on a big scale for a long time now. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:45 | |
Ford has been forgotten largely through his own fault. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:49 | |
He was a self-saboteur. He stumbled through a whole sequence | 0:02:49 | 0:02:53 | |
of damaging scandals in his personal life | 0:02:53 | 0:02:56 | |
and yet he turns out to be | 0:02:56 | 0:02:58 | |
one of the most appealing characters in literature. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:01 | |
Ford Madox Ford didn't take himself terribly seriously. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:05 | |
That self-deprecation was one of his greatest charms. | 0:03:05 | 0:03:10 | |
He enjoyed a surprisingly rich and complicated love life. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:14 | |
If he walked in you wouldn't think "Gosh, what a glamorous creature", | 0:03:14 | 0:03:17 | |
but he was irresistible to women | 0:03:17 | 0:03:19 | |
because he fell in love with them immediately. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:22 | |
And this huge emotion would pour out. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:24 | |
And also he seemed to be in deep trouble. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:27 | |
There was a sense of sadness and melancholy. | 0:03:27 | 0:03:31 | |
Yet despite this vulnerability, | 0:03:31 | 0:03:33 | |
Ford was immensely sociable and unbelievably well-connected. | 0:03:33 | 0:03:37 | |
He seems to have known, and often worked, with every writer | 0:03:37 | 0:03:40 | |
and many of the artists of his era. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:42 | |
Ford was one of the outstanding voices | 0:03:42 | 0:03:45 | |
in the invention of modern fiction. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:48 | |
This is a man who wrote over 18 novels | 0:03:48 | 0:03:50 | |
and 400 essays | 0:03:50 | 0:03:53 | |
and endless books of memoirs. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:56 | |
He wrote as he breathed. | 0:03:56 | 0:03:58 | |
On either side of the Great War, | 0:03:59 | 0:04:00 | |
Ford produced two masterpieces, | 0:04:00 | 0:04:03 | |
the most famous of which is The Good Soldier. | 0:04:03 | 0:04:06 | |
The Good Soldier is quite widely recognised as a masterpiece | 0:04:07 | 0:04:12 | |
and Parade's End isn't and wasn't. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:16 | |
Dare I say that I think Parade's End is a greater work? | 0:04:16 | 0:04:22 | |
You do? Why would you say that? | 0:04:22 | 0:04:23 | |
Its just richer, the canvas is broad. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:26 | |
And, of course, it's an incredibly ambitious work, isn't it? | 0:04:27 | 0:04:31 | |
It's really four novels in one. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:32 | |
Parade's End is a demonstration of the art of the novel. | 0:04:32 | 0:04:37 | |
Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer | 0:04:40 | 0:04:43 | |
was born in London in 1873 and brought up in leafy Brook Green | 0:04:43 | 0:04:49 | |
It wasn't until his mid-40s | 0:04:49 | 0:04:51 | |
that he disposed of his German father's surname | 0:04:51 | 0:04:54 | |
and became Ford Madox Ford. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
His mother was the daughter of the great pre-Raphaelite painter, | 0:04:59 | 0:05:02 | |
Ford Madox Brown. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:05 | |
Brown was a doting grandfather, | 0:05:05 | 0:05:08 | |
who liked to use his grandchildren as models. | 0:05:08 | 0:05:10 | |
He painted the young Ford, aged four, | 0:05:12 | 0:05:15 | |
in his Fitzroy Square studio in the guise of William Tell's son. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:20 | |
That direct gaze, that look of trust in the young Ford's eyes | 0:05:21 | 0:05:26 | |
says a lot about their relationship. | 0:05:26 | 0:05:28 | |
Ford later called his grandfather, "The best man I ever knew." | 0:05:28 | 0:05:33 | |
Brown's painting and the way he looked at the world | 0:05:37 | 0:05:39 | |
made a lifelong impression on his grandson. | 0:05:39 | 0:05:42 | |
He saw the world in radiant colour | 0:05:44 | 0:05:46 | |
but unlike his pre-Raphaelite contemporaries, | 0:05:46 | 0:05:49 | |
also revealed the grit, sweat and detail of modern life. | 0:05:49 | 0:05:53 | |
What is it that makes him such a powerful figure, | 0:05:55 | 0:05:58 | |
especially for Ford? | 0:05:58 | 0:06:00 | |
Because, I think, he was an innovator. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:02 | |
As a character, he was a maverick, an eccentric, | 0:06:02 | 0:06:07 | |
he was prepared to stand up for what he thought was right in art | 0:06:07 | 0:06:13 | |
and he breaks the mould. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:16 | |
-This great picture here... -Yes, The Last of England. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
Well, this is about the great emigration movement | 0:06:19 | 0:06:22 | |
in the middle of the century, when after the industrial revolution, | 0:06:22 | 0:06:27 | |
in a time of economic hardship for people, | 0:06:27 | 0:06:30 | |
particularly for the middle classes, they have no option, | 0:06:30 | 0:06:32 | |
maybe they have to leave England. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:35 | |
-Brown puts himself... -And his wife. -..and Emma into the picture. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:40 | |
And here you see him with his brooding | 0:06:40 | 0:06:44 | |
and moody, apprehensive features. | 0:06:44 | 0:06:48 | |
Look at the little strands of hair across her forehead. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:51 | |
Look at her hand gripping her child, the baby's hand. | 0:06:51 | 0:06:55 | |
-Absolutely. -And her gloved hand. | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
-It's pinching her hand. -It is. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:01 | |
The skin is all blue and puckered. | 0:07:01 | 0:07:04 | |
Its an investigation of character, if you like. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:07 | |
I always think that Brown is a painter who thinks like a novelist | 0:07:07 | 0:07:12 | |
and Ford is a novelist who sees like an artist, | 0:07:12 | 0:07:16 | |
and specifically, like a pre-Raphaelite artist, | 0:07:16 | 0:07:20 | |
in all that detail and super-realism. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:22 | |
Grandfather Brown imprinted a whole range of ideas | 0:07:22 | 0:07:26 | |
into the young Ford's DNA, including a macro-lens for an eye, | 0:07:26 | 0:07:30 | |
an uncompromising desire to modernise | 0:07:30 | 0:07:33 | |
and unconventional social attitudes, especially when it came to women. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:39 | |
Both grandfather and grandson had unsettled | 0:07:39 | 0:07:43 | |
and highly unusual love lives. | 0:07:43 | 0:07:46 | |
For Ford, the confusion and guilt in his personal relationships | 0:07:46 | 0:07:50 | |
became the fuel and the theme of much of his greatest work. | 0:07:50 | 0:07:55 | |
Ford is a writer who's consumed with the idea of love. | 0:07:55 | 0:07:59 | |
There must be love. It gives the meaning to life, | 0:07:59 | 0:08:03 | |
and yet love is the most savage and destructive thing possible. | 0:08:03 | 0:08:07 | |
"The real fierceness of desire withering up the soul of a man | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
"is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. | 0:08:11 | 0:08:15 | |
"He desires to see with the same eyes, | 0:08:15 | 0:08:17 | |
"to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, | 0:08:17 | 0:08:21 | |
"to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:27 | |
"We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, | 0:08:27 | 0:08:30 | |
"we all so need from the outside | 0:08:30 | 0:08:33 | |
"the assurance of our own worthiness to exist." | 0:08:33 | 0:08:37 | |
Ford met his first love, Elsie, | 0:08:44 | 0:08:46 | |
when they were still children at boarding school in Folkestone. | 0:08:46 | 0:08:49 | |
They became classroom sweethearts | 0:08:49 | 0:08:52 | |
and ten years later, they were still passionately in love. | 0:08:52 | 0:08:56 | |
But Elsie's parents were unimpressed with their daughter's boyfriend. | 0:08:58 | 0:09:02 | |
Ford was a totally unsuitable match for their daughter. | 0:09:03 | 0:09:06 | |
They clearly quite liked him as a person but just felt, you know, | 0:09:06 | 0:09:10 | |
that they should take the heat out of the relationship a bit | 0:09:10 | 0:09:13 | |
and of course, they did it in such a heavy-handed way | 0:09:13 | 0:09:15 | |
that it made things worse. They tried locking Elsie in the house | 0:09:15 | 0:09:19 | |
and not letting her out to see Ford. | 0:09:19 | 0:09:20 | |
Ford urged Elsie to elope. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:25 | |
"Do this no matter what happens. | 0:09:25 | 0:09:27 | |
"Tonight is a wild and wet night. | 0:09:27 | 0:09:29 | |
"It is the last night of the old time. | 0:09:29 | 0:09:31 | |
"Something truer and better lies before us. | 0:09:31 | 0:09:34 | |
"Be firm and hope, | 0:09:34 | 0:09:36 | |
"better break down utterly and die than give in any way to deceits. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:41 | |
"Hold yourself aloof and love me." | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
On the way home to Kent with her sister, Mary, | 0:09:44 | 0:09:47 | |
Elsie jumped off the train and boarded another train | 0:09:47 | 0:09:51 | |
heading in the opposite direction. | 0:09:51 | 0:09:53 | |
Mary telegrammed to alert her father. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:56 | |
"Elsie has gone from Ashford. Beware Dover train. Mary." | 0:09:56 | 0:10:01 | |
"Elsie not turned up. Look out at London stations." | 0:10:01 | 0:10:05 | |
She even went off to Clifton near Bristol | 0:10:05 | 0:10:07 | |
where it had been arranged for her to stay in secret | 0:10:07 | 0:10:10 | |
with a friend of the family | 0:10:10 | 0:10:13 | |
and Ford sort of went and joined her there | 0:10:13 | 0:10:16 | |
and they got married there secretly, having lied about both their ages | 0:10:16 | 0:10:21 | |
because Ford was only 20 and Elsie was three years younger. | 0:10:21 | 0:10:25 | |
So they had to say that he was 24 and she was just 21 | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
so they could get married. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:29 | |
It was also a very romantic thing to do | 0:10:29 | 0:10:31 | |
and I think they felt they were, you know, living in a novel. | 0:10:31 | 0:10:35 | |
They thought it was rather a romantic, novelistic escapade, | 0:10:35 | 0:10:39 | |
the whole thing. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:40 | |
This was the first of a slew of scandals that dogged Ford's life | 0:10:45 | 0:10:48 | |
and was responsible for he and Elsie's decision | 0:10:48 | 0:10:51 | |
to begin their marriage in a remote corner of Kent. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:55 | |
Bloomfield Villa was cold and damp | 0:10:56 | 0:10:59 | |
and the bohemian couple lived on the edge of poverty. | 0:10:59 | 0:11:02 | |
But there was never much question that Ford | 0:11:02 | 0:11:05 | |
would earn his living as a writer and here in Bonnington, | 0:11:05 | 0:11:07 | |
he worked on a biography of his beloved grandfather | 0:11:07 | 0:11:11 | |
and produced a number of poems, but isolation and money worries | 0:11:11 | 0:11:16 | |
and Elsie's poor health quickly put the dampeners on the newlyweds. | 0:11:16 | 0:11:20 | |
"I wonder why we toiled upon the earth | 0:11:22 | 0:11:25 | |
"From sunrise until sunset, dug and delved, | 0:11:25 | 0:11:28 | |
"Crook-backed, cramp-fingered, making little marks | 0:11:28 | 0:11:32 | |
"On the unmoving bosoms of the hills, | 0:11:32 | 0:11:34 | |
"And nothing came of it." | 0:11:34 | 0:11:36 | |
But it was here in Kent | 0:11:41 | 0:11:43 | |
that Ford made the most important creative relationship of his life | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
when he and Elsie moved from the edge of the marshes | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
to this small farmhouse on the downs. | 0:11:50 | 0:11:54 | |
-I see there you've got a plaque to Conrad. -We do. | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
-But there's no plaque to Ford. -I'm afraid not | 0:11:57 | 0:12:00 | |
because he doesn't appear to be quite as well-known as Conrad. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:04 | |
Certainly, Conrad was the first author that we heard about | 0:12:04 | 0:12:07 | |
that lived here. | 0:12:07 | 0:12:10 | |
Joseph Conrad was the Polish seaman | 0:12:10 | 0:12:11 | |
who became one of the great figures of English fiction, | 0:12:11 | 0:12:16 | |
author of The Secret Agent, The Heart of Darkness and Nostromo. | 0:12:16 | 0:12:20 | |
He loved Conrad, obviously, admired him enormously. | 0:12:20 | 0:12:23 | |
how did he come to meet Conrad? | 0:12:23 | 0:12:25 | |
They met at the house of a mutual friend | 0:12:25 | 0:12:27 | |
and they were there partly to be introduced to each other. | 0:12:27 | 0:12:31 | |
Conrad wanted someone who was a native English speaker, | 0:12:31 | 0:12:34 | |
who was a literary figure, as Ford was by then, | 0:12:34 | 0:12:37 | |
to help him with his English and his writing. | 0:12:37 | 0:12:41 | |
And the idea was that Ford might be able to help him. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:45 | |
So how did they work together, how did they collaborate? | 0:12:45 | 0:12:48 | |
They talked and talked and talked, they walked. | 0:12:48 | 0:12:52 | |
They would do one page, one paragraph each, one chapter each. | 0:12:52 | 0:12:56 | |
That sort of thing. They did it turn and turn about, | 0:12:56 | 0:12:59 | |
by Ford's account anyway, and I expect that was how they did it | 0:12:59 | 0:13:02 | |
rather than sitting in the same room and doing it. | 0:13:02 | 0:13:05 | |
Their literary sensibility, | 0:13:05 | 0:13:07 | |
their sense of being writers at a critical moment | 0:13:07 | 0:13:09 | |
at the turn of the century, part of the modern movement, | 0:13:09 | 0:13:13 | |
that was something they shared. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:16 | |
They were, as you say, aware of themselves, | 0:13:16 | 0:13:18 | |
or saw themselves as being part of a coming movement, | 0:13:18 | 0:13:22 | |
making a break with the past. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:25 | |
I think that was a very important part of the relationship, | 0:13:25 | 0:13:27 | |
this intellectual identity. | 0:13:27 | 0:13:29 | |
Conrad was 16 years Ford's senior | 0:13:29 | 0:13:31 | |
and the literary marriage between these two great writers | 0:13:31 | 0:13:35 | |
is one of the most unusual | 0:13:35 | 0:13:36 | |
and intriguing collaborations of the age. | 0:13:36 | 0:13:39 | |
Remarkably, during the years in which they worked side by side, | 0:13:40 | 0:13:44 | |
the two men managed to write three novels together. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:48 | |
What's more, its clear that Ford played a significant role | 0:13:48 | 0:13:51 | |
on some of Conrad's greatest works, including his classic Nostromo. | 0:13:51 | 0:13:57 | |
Close inspection of the manuscript of Nostromo | 0:13:57 | 0:14:00 | |
reveals a number of paragraphs actually written in Ford's hand. | 0:14:00 | 0:14:04 | |
But perhaps the greatest achievement of their collaboration | 0:14:05 | 0:14:08 | |
grew from the hundreds of hours they spent, sitting, eating, | 0:14:08 | 0:14:12 | |
drinking and talking together, | 0:14:12 | 0:14:14 | |
arguing their own new theory of what the modern novel should be and do. | 0:14:14 | 0:14:20 | |
They called this theory impressionism. | 0:14:20 | 0:14:23 | |
"Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life | 0:14:23 | 0:14:28 | |
"that are like so many views seen through bright glass - | 0:14:28 | 0:14:31 | |
"through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape | 0:14:31 | 0:14:35 | |
"or a backyard, you are aware that on the surface, | 0:14:35 | 0:14:37 | |
"it reflects a face of a person behind you. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:40 | |
"For the whole of life is really like that. | 0:14:40 | 0:14:43 | |
"We are almost always in one place | 0:14:43 | 0:14:46 | |
"with our minds somewhere quite other." | 0:14:46 | 0:14:49 | |
The collaboration with Conrad was intense and when Ford and Elsie, | 0:14:53 | 0:14:57 | |
now with two small children, | 0:14:57 | 0:14:59 | |
moved to her parents' village of Winchelsea, | 0:14:59 | 0:15:02 | |
it was not long before Conrad | 0:15:02 | 0:15:03 | |
was installed in a cottage just across the road. | 0:15:03 | 0:15:06 | |
The to and fro between the houses may have helped their writing | 0:15:06 | 0:15:10 | |
but it also created tensions. | 0:15:10 | 0:15:14 | |
Conrad's wife Jessie took a strong dislike to Ford. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:20 | |
Ford would drop in over the weekends and stay interminably long. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:24 | |
In Jessie's words, | 0:15:24 | 0:15:26 | |
"The longest I have ever known and a fit punishment | 0:15:26 | 0:15:29 | |
"for any sins I might have committed or ever contemplated." | 0:15:29 | 0:15:34 | |
Matters were not improved when the great Henry James came to tea | 0:15:34 | 0:15:39 | |
and Ford managed to lock Jessie in the kitchen. | 0:15:39 | 0:15:42 | |
And there were other problems. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:47 | |
Over the three years he spent | 0:15:47 | 0:15:49 | |
in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Winchelsea, | 0:15:49 | 0:15:52 | |
Ford became increasingly sick and depressed. | 0:15:52 | 0:15:56 | |
On top of this, his marriage to Elsie was under strain. | 0:15:58 | 0:16:01 | |
But then there's this problem of did he have an affair | 0:16:06 | 0:16:09 | |
with Elsie's sister, Mary? | 0:16:09 | 0:16:10 | |
Was that going on there? | 0:16:10 | 0:16:12 | |
There's some suspicion that there might have been. | 0:16:12 | 0:16:14 | |
When you look at where the two houses are in Winchelsea, | 0:16:14 | 0:16:18 | |
and Winchelsea is a real curtain-twitching place, | 0:16:18 | 0:16:22 | |
you think, you could only do it by renting a hotel in Ashford. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:26 | |
Could you manage an affair here and keep it secret? | 0:16:26 | 0:16:30 | |
I don't know. I think it would have been pretty difficult. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:34 | |
But I think Mary was quite a chancer and quite charming, and he was too. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:38 | |
How much a relationship with Mary | 0:16:43 | 0:16:47 | |
contributed to Ford's mental and physical breakdown in 1904 | 0:16:47 | 0:16:52 | |
we can't know, but illness led him | 0:16:52 | 0:16:54 | |
to spend several months haunting the spas of Germany in search of a cure. | 0:16:54 | 0:17:00 | |
It was a world he would return to some years later, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:02 | |
and it would provide the setting for his novel of sexual deceit | 0:17:02 | 0:17:07 | |
and betrayal, The Good Soldier. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
He came back to London towards the end of 1904 | 0:17:14 | 0:17:19 | |
and he tells this extraordinary story | 0:17:19 | 0:17:21 | |
about the doctor that was called in, who was called Doctor Teb. | 0:17:21 | 0:17:24 | |
Teb sort of looked at him and didn't say anything for a few minutes | 0:17:24 | 0:17:28 | |
and then he says, "You'll be dead within the month." | 0:17:28 | 0:17:33 | |
And he didn't prescribe anything, he just left. | 0:17:33 | 0:17:36 | |
Ford then said he sort of got up, and was so angry with that, | 0:17:36 | 0:17:40 | |
he sort of marched out and walked across Piccadilly Circus | 0:17:40 | 0:17:43 | |
back and forth for an hour, you know, despite all the traffic. | 0:17:43 | 0:17:46 | |
It was quite a dangerous thing to do, | 0:17:46 | 0:17:49 | |
saying "I will not be dead in a month" | 0:17:49 | 0:17:51 | |
and Ford thought that this had cured him. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:54 | |
The jolt he got from the doctor was what brought him back? | 0:17:54 | 0:17:58 | |
He did walk around a lot in London after that and that then turned | 0:17:58 | 0:18:01 | |
into his book on London, The Soul of London, | 0:18:01 | 0:18:04 | |
which was his first real success | 0:18:04 | 0:18:06 | |
and that was the thing that really launched his literary career, | 0:18:06 | 0:18:09 | |
made him feel that he could be a writer and a successful one. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:12 | |
"England is a small island, but London is illimitable. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:20 | |
"A brilliant windswept, sunny day, | 0:18:20 | 0:18:22 | |
"with the fountains like haycocks of prismatic glitter | 0:18:22 | 0:18:26 | |
"in the shadow of Nelson's column, | 0:18:26 | 0:18:28 | |
"with the paving stones almost opalescent, with colour everywhere, | 0:18:28 | 0:18:32 | |
"the vivid blue of the paper used by flower-sellers | 0:18:32 | 0:18:35 | |
"to wrap poet's narcissi, the glint of straws blown from horse's feeds, | 0:18:35 | 0:18:40 | |
"the shimmer of wheel marks on the wooden pavement. | 0:18:40 | 0:18:45 | |
"Or is it the chaotic crowd, | 0:18:45 | 0:18:48 | |
"like that of baggage wagons huddled together after a great defeat, | 0:18:48 | 0:18:51 | |
"an apparently indissoluble muddle of grey wheel traffic, | 0:18:51 | 0:18:55 | |
"of hooded carts, of buses drawing out of line, | 0:18:55 | 0:18:59 | |
"of grimy upper windows through which appear white faces | 0:18:59 | 0:19:03 | |
"seen from one's level on a bus top." | 0:19:03 | 0:19:05 | |
Following the success of The Soul Of London, | 0:19:10 | 0:19:13 | |
Ford's literary career began to grow in many directions. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:16 | |
He produced an impressive trilogy of historical novels | 0:19:16 | 0:19:19 | |
about Henry VIII's wife Catherine Howard | 0:19:19 | 0:19:22 | |
and then in 1908, from his rooms on Holland Park, | 0:19:22 | 0:19:25 | |
he embarked on his most ambitious adventure to date, | 0:19:25 | 0:19:29 | |
a literary magazine called The English Review. | 0:19:29 | 0:19:33 | |
The first edition included contributions | 0:19:33 | 0:19:36 | |
from Conrad, Henry James, Galsworthy, a poem by Thomas Hardy, | 0:19:36 | 0:19:41 | |
and even a short story by Tolstoy. | 0:19:41 | 0:19:44 | |
How critical do you think The English Review was | 0:19:44 | 0:19:47 | |
to the literature and the writers of the time? | 0:19:47 | 0:19:50 | |
I think it was immensely important. | 0:19:50 | 0:19:52 | |
He gathered together such an extraordinary group of writers | 0:19:52 | 0:19:55 | |
for The English Review, and in a way, what defined it was the ability | 0:19:55 | 0:19:58 | |
to mix the more established people with the avant-garde | 0:19:58 | 0:20:03 | |
so some of the writing by people like Wyndham Lewis or DH Lawrence | 0:20:03 | 0:20:07 | |
was very radical and clearly heralding | 0:20:07 | 0:20:09 | |
the way modernism was going to develop. | 0:20:09 | 0:20:12 | |
Ford plucked Lawrence from his job as a teacher in Croydon | 0:20:12 | 0:20:15 | |
and introduced him to literary London. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
Lawrence recalled, "Ford asked to see The White Peacock | 0:20:18 | 0:20:22 | |
"and read it immediately, and in his queer voice, | 0:20:22 | 0:20:25 | |
"when we were sitting on an omnibus in London, he shouted in my ear, | 0:20:25 | 0:20:29 | |
"It's got every fault that the English novel can have, | 0:20:29 | 0:20:32 | |
"but you've got genius." | 0:20:32 | 0:20:34 | |
"I always thought he had a bit of genius himself," Lawrence remarked. | 0:20:34 | 0:20:37 | |
"He is the kindest man on Earth. | 0:20:37 | 0:20:39 | |
"He keeps the doors of his soul open and you may walk in." | 0:20:39 | 0:20:44 | |
Part of the difficulty of talking about Ford's influence, | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
is that he was influential in so many different areas at the same time, | 0:20:47 | 0:20:50 | |
you know, not just as a fiction writer but certainly as a critic, | 0:20:50 | 0:20:54 | |
and also as a poet and very much as a critic of poetry. | 0:20:54 | 0:20:57 | |
He had a really important friendship with Ezra Pound. | 0:20:57 | 0:21:00 | |
We think of Ezra Pound | 0:21:00 | 0:21:02 | |
as the most radical poet of the early 20th century, | 0:21:02 | 0:21:05 | |
one of the true architects of modernism. | 0:21:05 | 0:21:08 | |
But Pound was clear where his inspiration came from. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:11 | |
Years later, he wrote of his friend, | 0:21:11 | 0:21:14 | |
"The revolution of the word began in London in 1908 | 0:21:14 | 0:21:18 | |
"with the lone whimper of Ford Madox Ford." | 0:21:18 | 0:21:22 | |
Ford's front door on Holland Park was always left open | 0:21:23 | 0:21:27 | |
for the constant stream of writers | 0:21:27 | 0:21:29 | |
who came proffering their manuscripts | 0:21:29 | 0:21:31 | |
and who he entertained with breakfasts, lunches and suppers. | 0:21:31 | 0:21:36 | |
Its fair to say that Ford was always enthusiastic about food | 0:21:36 | 0:21:41 | |
and in later life wrote a number | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
of entertaining, often nostalgic articles about meals and menus | 0:21:44 | 0:21:48 | |
he'd enjoyed in Edwardian London. | 0:21:48 | 0:21:51 | |
In one of the most extreme of these, a feature for the New York Herald, | 0:21:51 | 0:21:55 | |
Ford invented an unlikely menu for diners observing a strict Lent diet. | 0:21:55 | 0:22:01 | |
Chef Rowley Leigh, an admirer of both Ford's fiction and his food, | 0:22:01 | 0:22:06 | |
is preparing Ford's supposedly austere menu. | 0:22:06 | 0:22:10 | |
The beginning of this Lenten meal, | 0:22:10 | 0:22:12 | |
which, Alan, you'd normally consider a very adequate lunch... | 0:22:12 | 0:22:17 | |
-..is an omelette. -This is simply the first course of a very long... | 0:22:19 | 0:22:22 | |
Simply the first course. | 0:22:22 | 0:22:25 | |
The main course on Ford's menu is a strange fish dish involving pike. | 0:22:27 | 0:22:32 | |
Ah, my God. | 0:22:39 | 0:22:40 | |
So this is... | 0:22:42 | 0:22:44 | |
This is a boudin de brochet | 0:22:44 | 0:22:47 | |
and it is a very fine pike forcemeat. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:51 | |
It's worked with egg white and cream and then some more cream. | 0:22:51 | 0:22:55 | |
-Of course. -And then a little bit of cream. | 0:22:55 | 0:22:58 | |
It's an incredibly laborious process, | 0:22:58 | 0:23:01 | |
but this is one of the great classics, quenelles de brochet. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:05 | |
He did think, in some way, he was stinting himself. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:09 | |
In those days, people ate huge amounts | 0:23:09 | 0:23:13 | |
and he talks about suppers but these were the things he had after dinner. | 0:23:13 | 0:23:17 | |
After dinner! | 0:23:17 | 0:23:20 | |
And then just in case he thought he hadn't had enough egg, | 0:23:20 | 0:23:24 | |
or sugar, or cream, he had oeufs a la neige. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:29 | |
But they had no sense... Cream used to be considered good for you. | 0:23:29 | 0:23:33 | |
Even in my childhood. | 0:23:33 | 0:23:37 | |
-It's just goodness personified, isn't it? -it is. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
Eggs, sugar, cream. | 0:23:40 | 0:23:41 | |
But there was also something about him, isn't there? | 0:23:41 | 0:23:45 | |
I think he was extraordinarily likeable | 0:23:45 | 0:23:47 | |
and I think there's also a sort of vulnerability about him. | 0:23:47 | 0:23:51 | |
-Here's to Ford. -Ford Madox Ford, great Englishman. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:02 | |
Even if he was half-German. | 0:24:07 | 0:24:10 | |
With the constant feeding and entertaining of writers | 0:24:13 | 0:24:17 | |
that went on in Holland Park, Ford needed somewhere to escape | 0:24:17 | 0:24:21 | |
in order to actually edit his magazine. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:23 | |
Where better than his local music hall? | 0:24:23 | 0:24:27 | |
On Friday nights, Ford would discretely head off | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
to the Shepherds Bush Empire, | 0:24:30 | 0:24:33 | |
accompanied by a great pile of manuscripts. | 0:24:33 | 0:24:36 | |
Apparently, during the performance, he mapped out his selections | 0:24:36 | 0:24:39 | |
for the next edition, pausing occasionally | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
when his favourite acts appeared onstage. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
But for all the amusing anecdotes about his editing style, | 0:24:47 | 0:24:50 | |
at the helm of The English Review, thanks to his bravery and openness | 0:24:50 | 0:24:54 | |
and his intuition about writing, | 0:24:54 | 0:24:57 | |
Ford became the midwife of English literary modernism, | 0:24:57 | 0:25:01 | |
bringing into the world some of the greatest writers in the language. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
Rather tragically, after only 12 months, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:10 | |
thanks to hopeless financial management and political rowing, | 0:25:10 | 0:25:14 | |
he was fired from his own magazine. | 0:25:14 | 0:25:18 | |
It was around this time that Violet Hunt entered his life. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:26 | |
Ford's relationship with Elsie had been unravelling | 0:25:26 | 0:25:30 | |
since his breakdown in 1904. | 0:25:30 | 0:25:33 | |
He was already living apart from her and his two daughters, | 0:25:33 | 0:25:36 | |
when four years later, Violet made her entrance. | 0:25:36 | 0:25:41 | |
Violet Hunt, nicknamed Immodest Violet, | 0:25:43 | 0:25:45 | |
was a Kensington novelist and beauty, | 0:25:45 | 0:25:48 | |
with a literary taste in lovers. | 0:25:48 | 0:25:50 | |
She'd been proposed to by Oscar Wilde, | 0:25:50 | 0:25:53 | |
had an affair with Somerset Maugham, | 0:25:53 | 0:25:56 | |
been chased by both HG Wells and the lesbian Radclyffe Hall, | 0:25:56 | 0:26:00 | |
and had herself even attempted to seduce the prim and proper Henry James. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:06 | |
Violet's relationship with Ford began when her editor | 0:26:10 | 0:26:13 | |
suggested she enlist his help with the promotion of her latest novel. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:17 | |
Apparently, Violet leapt on him, | 0:26:19 | 0:26:21 | |
here in Bedford Street in Covent Garden, | 0:26:21 | 0:26:23 | |
in what was then the heartland of British publishing. | 0:26:23 | 0:26:26 | |
She proceeded to proposition him. | 0:26:26 | 0:26:28 | |
He really must write a piece about her for a newspaper, | 0:26:28 | 0:26:32 | |
and Ford fell for it. | 0:26:32 | 0:26:33 | |
He was, he said, "awfully amused at her brass." | 0:26:33 | 0:26:38 | |
It was the initiation of a ten-year relationship | 0:26:38 | 0:26:41 | |
that brought both deep mutual misery and the inspiration | 0:26:41 | 0:26:45 | |
for the troubled relationships at the heart of his greatest fiction. | 0:26:45 | 0:26:50 | |
After months of courtship, in June 1909, | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
Ford and Violet became lovers. | 0:26:57 | 0:26:59 | |
Already well aware of the gossip they were causing, | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
they hoped they could marry as soon as possible. | 0:27:02 | 0:27:05 | |
In September, they went on holiday to stay with friends in Normandy. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:12 | |
It was the beginning of a sequence of events | 0:27:12 | 0:27:15 | |
that would scar Ford's reputation in Britain for the rest of his life. | 0:27:15 | 0:27:19 | |
As Ford and Violet returned from France to Charing Cross Station, | 0:27:22 | 0:27:26 | |
Elsie was waiting to confront them. | 0:27:26 | 0:27:29 | |
On spotting his wife, apparently, Ford muttered to Violet in dismay, | 0:27:33 | 0:27:38 | |
"Its all up, old girl! You'll see." | 0:27:38 | 0:27:41 | |
And he was absolutely right. | 0:27:41 | 0:27:43 | |
Furious with Ford's deception, Elsie gave up divorce proceedings | 0:27:43 | 0:27:47 | |
and instead sued for the restitution of her conjugal rights. | 0:27:47 | 0:27:53 | |
The writ was reported in the newspapers | 0:27:53 | 0:27:55 | |
and Ford and Hunt's affair was transformed from a rumour | 0:27:55 | 0:27:59 | |
into a scandal. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:01 | |
A scandal that only a few months later landed Ford in prison. | 0:28:02 | 0:28:08 | |
When Elsie's case came to court, Ford was ordered to pay maintenance. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:12 | |
He was already giving Elsie money | 0:28:12 | 0:28:14 | |
and bitterly resented the implication | 0:28:14 | 0:28:17 | |
that he was not supporting his family. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:19 | |
Refusing to obey, in an act of pride and typically Fordian self-sabotage, | 0:28:19 | 0:28:24 | |
he was sentenced to ten days in Brixton Prison. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:28 | |
For once, Ford seems to have written absolutely nothing | 0:28:28 | 0:28:32 | |
about this humiliating experience. | 0:28:32 | 0:28:35 | |
In the summer of 1910, partly as an escape | 0:28:40 | 0:28:44 | |
from the disapproval in the London air, | 0:28:44 | 0:28:47 | |
Ford and Violet Hunt went on an extended visit to Germany. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:51 | |
Travelling into the world of polite German society, | 0:28:51 | 0:28:54 | |
in the company of a woman who was not his wife, | 0:28:54 | 0:28:57 | |
lit the fire under what would become | 0:28:57 | 0:28:59 | |
Ford's intense and astonishingly modern novel, The Good Soldier. | 0:28:59 | 0:29:05 | |
The book is set in the German spa town of Bad Nauheim. | 0:29:05 | 0:29:10 | |
Though not directly autobiographical, it draws deeply | 0:29:10 | 0:29:13 | |
on Ford's turbulent emotional state during the months spent in Germany | 0:29:13 | 0:29:18 | |
after his nervous breakdown and his difficult year here with Violet. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:23 | |
The Good Soldier is Ford's masterpiece. | 0:29:23 | 0:29:27 | |
It begins, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." | 0:29:27 | 0:29:32 | |
Short and shocking, it describes the adulterous and tragic affairs | 0:29:32 | 0:29:36 | |
of an English officer, Captain Edward Ashburnham. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
It's set here in the hotels of Bad Nauheim. | 0:29:39 | 0:29:43 | |
It's a book about memories, about remembering and deceit. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:49 | |
There are certain books that you absolutely remember | 0:29:49 | 0:29:52 | |
your first reading of, | 0:29:52 | 0:29:53 | |
and The Good Soldier is that book for me. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:56 | |
I remember sitting on the floor of this terrible flat | 0:29:56 | 0:29:59 | |
and reading The Good Soldier sort of late into the night | 0:29:59 | 0:30:03 | |
and non-stop, and it did change my life. | 0:30:03 | 0:30:05 | |
And the reason it changed my life is because of the way its told | 0:30:05 | 0:30:11 | |
and because it... reveals the depths of the human heart | 0:30:11 | 0:30:17 | |
in a way that I think no other book does | 0:30:17 | 0:30:20 | |
and because it is savagely truthful | 0:30:20 | 0:30:22 | |
about what human beings are capable of. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:25 | |
That was the thing that gripped me at the age of 18. | 0:30:25 | 0:30:28 | |
I hadn't fully plumbed the wickedness of the human heart | 0:30:28 | 0:30:34 | |
until I read The Good Soldier. | 0:30:34 | 0:30:36 | |
There's four people, two couples, | 0:30:38 | 0:30:42 | |
centring around Ashburnham who is the good soldier of the narration. | 0:30:42 | 0:30:47 | |
It's... about their close relationship, | 0:30:47 | 0:30:51 | |
everything seems very transparent. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:53 | |
They're all good people, they're all very friendly | 0:30:53 | 0:30:56 | |
and behave very well. Yet, underneath, | 0:30:56 | 0:30:58 | |
this tremendous deception has been, as it were, lived out | 0:30:58 | 0:31:02 | |
which the narrator discovers very slowly | 0:31:02 | 0:31:06 | |
and very indirectly throughout the course of the years. | 0:31:06 | 0:31:11 | |
And it's the bewilderment of his own discovery | 0:31:11 | 0:31:13 | |
that he passes on to the reader. | 0:31:13 | 0:31:16 | |
He wants you to be as puzzled and as bewildered as he is | 0:31:16 | 0:31:20 | |
about the absolute contrast between how people appear to be | 0:31:20 | 0:31:24 | |
and what they really are underneath. | 0:31:24 | 0:31:27 | |
In fact, what they really are underneath, | 0:31:27 | 0:31:29 | |
is that what they really are? It's this perpetual labyrinth | 0:31:29 | 0:31:32 | |
and layering and unpeeling about what constitutes the human being. | 0:31:32 | 0:31:37 | |
It's very devilish. | 0:31:37 | 0:31:39 | |
"I would walk with Florence to the baths, | 0:31:41 | 0:31:43 | |
"and of course she entertained me with her conversation. | 0:31:43 | 0:31:46 | |
"It was wonderful what she could make conversation out of. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:50 | |
"When she came to the door of the bathing place, | 0:31:50 | 0:31:53 | |
"she would look at me with a little coquettish smile, | 0:31:53 | 0:31:55 | |
"so that her cheek appeared to be caressing her shoulder. | 0:31:55 | 0:31:58 | |
"Yes, that is how I most exactly remember her. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:02 | |
"For whose benefit did she do it? | 0:32:02 | 0:32:06 | |
"For that of the bath attendant? And the passers-by? | 0:32:06 | 0:32:10 | |
"I don't know. Anyhow, it can't have been for me." | 0:32:10 | 0:32:15 | |
The two couples take a day trip to nearby Marburg Castle | 0:32:20 | 0:32:24 | |
where the deception at the heart of the book becomes painfully apparent, | 0:32:24 | 0:32:29 | |
but even nine years after the event, | 0:32:29 | 0:32:34 | |
the narrator still struggles to comprehend this monumental betrayal. | 0:32:34 | 0:32:39 | |
As she explains the historical documents on display, | 0:32:39 | 0:32:44 | |
Florence, the narrator's wife, | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
"laid one finger upon Captain Ashburnham's wrist." | 0:32:47 | 0:32:52 | |
He gives you a fragment, | 0:32:54 | 0:32:56 | |
like the touching of the wrist, for example, that takes place. | 0:32:56 | 0:32:59 | |
He manipulates your perception of what appears | 0:32:59 | 0:33:04 | |
to be an absolutely devastating giveaway of a relationship. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:10 | |
He manipulates you back into seeing it as completely innocent. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:13 | |
When Ashburnham's wife, Leonora, sees Florence touch her husband, | 0:33:14 | 0:33:18 | |
she grabs the narrator and drags him out. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:21 | |
"I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful, | 0:33:23 | 0:33:26 | |
"something evil in the day. | 0:33:26 | 0:33:28 | |
"I can't define it and can't find a simile for it, | 0:33:28 | 0:33:31 | |
"and it was a panic in which we fled! | 0:33:31 | 0:33:33 | |
"We went right down the winding stairs, | 0:33:33 | 0:33:36 | |
"across the immense Rittersaal to a little terrace that overlooks the Lahn. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:40 | |
"Don't you see?" she said. "Don't you see what's going on?" | 0:33:40 | 0:33:44 | |
"No, what's the matter? Whatever's the matter?" | 0:33:44 | 0:33:48 | |
Ford makes it seem as if, at the time of writing, | 0:33:52 | 0:33:55 | |
the narrator had absolutely no idea that his wife was having an affair, | 0:33:55 | 0:34:00 | |
and this conceit, that the writer doesn't fully understand his own story, | 0:34:00 | 0:34:05 | |
continues throughout the book. | 0:34:05 | 0:34:06 | |
It's about, fundamentally, the savagery and instinct to kill | 0:34:09 | 0:34:15 | |
and ruthless brutality that there is in all of us. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:19 | |
Ford wrote The Good Soldier on the eve of the First World War | 0:34:28 | 0:34:32 | |
and every significant event in the novel | 0:34:32 | 0:34:35 | |
repeatedly shares the same date, the 4th of August, | 0:34:35 | 0:34:39 | |
the date on which the war began. | 0:34:39 | 0:34:43 | |
The collapse of the novel's spa society | 0:34:43 | 0:34:46 | |
mirrors the breakdown of European civilisation in 1914. | 0:34:46 | 0:34:52 | |
But its not just public events that echo through the book. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
By the time The Good Soldier was published in 1915, | 0:34:55 | 0:34:59 | |
Ford's relationship with Violet Hunt was also falling apart | 0:34:59 | 0:35:03 | |
and three months after the novel came out, | 0:35:03 | 0:35:07 | |
Ford unexpectedly decided to become a soldier himself. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:10 | |
Violet knew their relationship was over. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:14 | |
Ford was assigned to the 3rd Battalion of the Welsh Regiment | 0:35:15 | 0:35:20 | |
and undertook his training at Cardiff castle. | 0:35:20 | 0:35:23 | |
The war did represent, I think, an escape route | 0:35:23 | 0:35:28 | |
really, from this weird and difficult set of relationships | 0:35:28 | 0:35:33 | |
he found himself in. For him, he thought, | 0:35:33 | 0:35:36 | |
"This is the most important thing, in the world, | 0:35:36 | 0:35:40 | |
"that's happened in my lifetime. I can't be on the edges of this. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:46 | |
"As a writer, as somebody who wants to make sense | 0:35:46 | 0:35:50 | |
"of experience in general, this is far, far too important to ignore." | 0:35:50 | 0:35:56 | |
On 13th July, 1916, after a nerve-wracking wait, | 0:35:58 | 0:36:02 | |
Ford and his unit left Cardiff for France. | 0:36:02 | 0:36:06 | |
Ford was anxious to get up onto the frontline, | 0:36:06 | 0:36:09 | |
partly to get a writer's view of the war | 0:36:09 | 0:36:12 | |
and partly out of a desire to do his duty. | 0:36:12 | 0:36:14 | |
However, because of his age, he was now 42 years old, | 0:36:14 | 0:36:18 | |
his commanding officer posted him with battalion transport | 0:36:18 | 0:36:22 | |
just behind the line, down there at Becourt Wood. | 0:36:22 | 0:36:25 | |
He might not have been on the first line of attack but he was still | 0:36:25 | 0:36:29 | |
well within range of the relentless barrage of the German guns. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:34 | |
It was an experience that gave him more than enough literary fuel. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:38 | |
"I remember standing at an observation post | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
"during the July push on the Somme, on the highest point | 0:36:43 | 0:36:46 | |
"of the road between Albert and Becourt Wood. | 0:36:46 | 0:36:49 | |
"In the territory beneath the eye or hidden by the folds in the ground, | 0:36:49 | 0:36:54 | |
"there must have been, on the two sides, a million men, | 0:36:54 | 0:36:57 | |
"moving one against the other and impelled by an invisible moral force | 0:36:57 | 0:37:02 | |
"into a Hell of fear | 0:37:02 | 0:37:04 | |
"that surely cannot have had a parallel in this world." | 0:37:04 | 0:37:07 | |
His reaction to the military is quite interesting. | 0:37:13 | 0:37:16 | |
He says in an early letter back | 0:37:16 | 0:37:20 | |
how much easier this is than being a writer. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:23 | |
This is a letter from the Somme. | 0:37:23 | 0:37:25 | |
Basically, in the army, all you had to do is do what you're told. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:31 | |
Life is relatively straightforward. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:33 | |
But of course he is observing it all the time, | 0:37:33 | 0:37:35 | |
as his letters to Conrad at that time show. | 0:37:35 | 0:37:37 | |
He's writing deliberately saying, | 0:37:37 | 0:37:39 | |
"This is stuff you might be able to use. | 0:37:39 | 0:37:42 | |
"It's interesting the difference in sounds between shellfire | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
"according to the kinds of countryside you're in," | 0:37:45 | 0:37:47 | |
and then he details the differences. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
"In woody country, heavy artillery makes most noise, | 0:37:49 | 0:37:53 | |
"because of the echoes. | 0:37:53 | 0:37:54 | |
"On marshland, the sound seems alarmingly close. | 0:37:57 | 0:38:01 | |
"On dry downland, the sound is much sharper, | 0:38:04 | 0:38:07 | |
"it hits you and shakes you." | 0:38:07 | 0:38:13 | |
Only two weeks after he arrived in the Somme, Ford was blown up. | 0:38:20 | 0:38:25 | |
Ford's wounds were superficial but the impact was enormous. | 0:38:44 | 0:38:49 | |
The reverberations of the explosion at Becourt Wood went on to shape | 0:38:49 | 0:38:53 | |
Ford's life and his literature for the next decade and beyond. | 0:38:53 | 0:38:59 | |
""After I was blown up at Becourt-Becordel in 1916, | 0:39:04 | 0:39:07 | |
"and having lost my memory, | 0:39:07 | 0:39:09 | |
"I lay in the Casualty Clearing Station in Corbie." | 0:39:09 | 0:39:13 | |
"I used to worry agonisedly about what my name could be." | 0:39:14 | 0:39:18 | |
For Ford the writer, the explosion at Becourt | 0:39:26 | 0:39:29 | |
and the horrors of his hospitalisation here | 0:39:29 | 0:39:32 | |
in the sheds and tents at Corbie were a powerful creative catalyst. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:37 | |
Back in hospital a few months later he wrote, | 0:39:37 | 0:39:40 | |
"I am in short rather ill still and sometimes doubt my own sanity. | 0:39:40 | 0:39:45 | |
"Indeed quite frequently, I do, | 0:39:45 | 0:39:48 | |
"and that is pretty well the condition of a number of men here. | 0:39:48 | 0:39:53 | |
"I wonder what the effect of it will be on us all, after the war." | 0:39:53 | 0:39:56 | |
Four years as a soldier | 0:40:00 | 0:40:02 | |
had a profound and wearying effect on Ford. | 0:40:02 | 0:40:05 | |
By the time the war ended he was in poor health and felt forgotten | 0:40:05 | 0:40:09 | |
and washed up as a writer. | 0:40:09 | 0:40:11 | |
However, once again he had fallen in love, | 0:40:11 | 0:40:14 | |
this time with a young Australian painter, Stella Bowen, | 0:40:14 | 0:40:18 | |
and after two years living together hidden away in the country, | 0:40:18 | 0:40:23 | |
Stella gave birth to a baby girl. | 0:40:23 | 0:40:26 | |
In 1922, Ford and Stella decided to leave England for a break in France. | 0:40:30 | 0:40:36 | |
He didn't realise it at the time, but for Ford, | 0:40:36 | 0:40:40 | |
this would prove to be the last of England. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:43 | |
His grandfather's famous painting of exile seemed strangely prophetic. | 0:40:43 | 0:40:49 | |
Ford would never live in England again. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:53 | |
Towards the end of 1922, | 0:41:04 | 0:41:05 | |
Ford and Stella with their infant daughter Julie | 0:41:05 | 0:41:09 | |
took up the offer of a villa here in the south of France at Cap Ferrat. | 0:41:09 | 0:41:13 | |
The winter sun was to prove a powerful and immediate catalyst. | 0:41:13 | 0:41:18 | |
For two or three days, Ford paced the grounds | 0:41:18 | 0:41:20 | |
of an idyllic garden overlooking the Mediterranean | 0:41:20 | 0:41:24 | |
as the structure and the philosophy of a new novel | 0:41:24 | 0:41:27 | |
began to take shape in his mind. | 0:41:27 | 0:41:29 | |
"I will here make a confession. | 0:41:31 | 0:41:33 | |
"I have always had the greatest contempt for novels | 0:41:33 | 0:41:36 | |
"written with a purpose. | 0:41:36 | 0:41:38 | |
"Fictions should render, not draw morals. | 0:41:38 | 0:41:41 | |
"But when I sat down to write that series of volumes, | 0:41:41 | 0:41:43 | |
"I sinned against my gods to the extent of saying | 0:41:43 | 0:41:45 | |
"that I was going to write a work that should have for its purpose | 0:41:45 | 0:41:50 | |
"the obviating of all future wars." | 0:41:50 | 0:41:52 | |
"Intense dejection, endless muddles, endless follies, endless villainies. | 0:41:58 | 0:42:03 | |
"All these men given into the hands | 0:42:03 | 0:42:05 | |
"of the most cynically care-free intriguers in long corridors | 0:42:05 | 0:42:09 | |
"who made plots that harrowed the hearts of the world. | 0:42:09 | 0:42:13 | |
"All these men toys, all these agonies mere occasions | 0:42:13 | 0:42:16 | |
"for picturesque phrases to be put into politician's speeches | 0:42:16 | 0:42:19 | |
"without heart or even intelligence. | 0:42:19 | 0:42:22 | |
"Hundreds and thousands of men tossed here and there | 0:42:22 | 0:42:25 | |
"in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of mid-winter." | 0:42:25 | 0:42:29 | |
After six years in which he had struggled to put words on paper, | 0:42:34 | 0:42:39 | |
Ford suddenly found himself writing with new purpose and energy. | 0:42:39 | 0:42:44 | |
As their summer in Provence drew to a close, | 0:42:47 | 0:42:50 | |
Ford and Stella decided to head back not to England, but Paris. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:56 | |
This cafe, Les Deux Magots, in the heart of Paris's left bank, | 0:43:00 | 0:43:05 | |
was one of the most popular drinking holes for artists and writers | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
and Ford made himself thoroughly at home here. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
There's an extraordinary roll call of artists with whom Ford shared | 0:43:12 | 0:43:16 | |
a glass of Pernod during his Paris years, | 0:43:16 | 0:43:19 | |
including James Joyce who had only recently completed Ulysses, | 0:43:19 | 0:43:22 | |
and his old friend Ezra Pound. | 0:43:22 | 0:43:24 | |
A young American journalist called Ernest Hemmingway | 0:43:26 | 0:43:29 | |
and the Queen of the Parisian avant-garde, Gertrude Stein. | 0:43:29 | 0:43:34 | |
It was a cultural cocktail that fuelled Ford's creativity. | 0:43:34 | 0:43:38 | |
It not only provided the kind of background noise | 0:43:38 | 0:43:41 | |
he needed to write the four ambitious novels of Parade's End, | 0:43:41 | 0:43:44 | |
but it soon inspired a new project. | 0:43:44 | 0:43:48 | |
A brilliant and eclectic literary magazine | 0:43:48 | 0:43:50 | |
entitled The Transatlantic Review. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:54 | |
"The transatlantic review arose almost accidentally. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:58 | |
"A dozen times I was stopped on the boulevards | 0:43:58 | 0:44:01 | |
"and told that what was needed was another English Review. | 0:44:01 | 0:44:05 | |
"Then one day, crossing the Blvd St Michel, | 0:44:05 | 0:44:07 | |
"up near the Luxembourg Gardens, I met my brother. | 0:44:07 | 0:44:11 | |
"He said he wanted me to edit a review | 0:44:11 | 0:44:13 | |
"owned by friends of his in Paris! | 0:44:13 | 0:44:15 | |
"The startling nature of that coincidence | 0:44:15 | 0:44:18 | |
"with the actual train of my thoughts made me accept the idea | 0:44:18 | 0:44:22 | |
"even whilst we stood in the middle of the street." | 0:44:22 | 0:44:25 | |
What was distinctive, do you think, about HIS Transatlantic Review? | 0:44:29 | 0:44:32 | |
I think he put a lot of energy into it, | 0:44:32 | 0:44:36 | |
because he...gave a lot of stock to new writers, | 0:44:36 | 0:44:41 | |
young writers trying hard to write, | 0:44:41 | 0:44:44 | |
and he actually dubbed the Transatlantic Review "the enterprise for discovery of the youth". | 0:44:44 | 0:44:52 | |
There was a nightclub, I think, that he ran, didn't he? | 0:44:52 | 0:44:55 | |
Yeah, the Bal du Printemps was a high place of Ford's, | 0:44:55 | 0:44:59 | |
and Stella, obviously. | 0:44:59 | 0:45:01 | |
They held... | 0:45:01 | 0:45:03 | |
I think it was on Thursdays they had balls there | 0:45:03 | 0:45:05 | |
and they had people dancing and drinking, | 0:45:05 | 0:45:08 | |
and Ford was apparently not so much of a good dancer | 0:45:08 | 0:45:11 | |
as you would expect him to be, | 0:45:11 | 0:45:13 | |
because he was a bit heavy and he had problems breathing, | 0:45:13 | 0:45:17 | |
but he loved dancing. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:19 | |
In his last edition of The Transatlantic Review, | 0:45:24 | 0:45:27 | |
Ford printed an extract from a novel by an ex-chorus girl. | 0:45:27 | 0:45:31 | |
Her name was Ella Lenglet and she was married to a Dutchman | 0:45:31 | 0:45:35 | |
recently imprisoned for embezzlement. | 0:45:35 | 0:45:37 | |
On publishing the fragment, | 0:45:37 | 0:45:40 | |
Ford decided to change her name to Jean Rhys. | 0:45:40 | 0:45:44 | |
Stella Bowen later recalled... | 0:45:44 | 0:45:47 | |
The girl was a really tragic person. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:49 | |
She had written an unpublishably sordid novel | 0:45:49 | 0:45:52 | |
of great sensitiveness and persuasiveness. | 0:45:52 | 0:45:55 | |
Ford gave her invaluable help with her writing, | 0:45:58 | 0:46:02 | |
and I tried to help her with her clothes. | 0:46:02 | 0:46:04 | |
I was singularly slow in discovering that she and Ford were in love. | 0:46:04 | 0:46:07 | |
Ford's affair with Rhys is one of the most well-documented | 0:46:14 | 0:46:18 | |
and vitriolic love affairs in literary history. | 0:46:18 | 0:46:22 | |
All four parties - Jean, her Dutch husband, Ford and Stella - | 0:46:22 | 0:46:26 | |
all wrote about the relationship. | 0:46:26 | 0:46:29 | |
Rhys's poisonous caricature of Ford in her intense novel Quartet | 0:46:29 | 0:46:34 | |
both condemns and redeems Ford in the lurid extremity of its rage. | 0:46:34 | 0:46:40 | |
As he dressed she would lie with one arm over her eyes and think, | 0:46:42 | 0:46:46 | |
"A bedroom in hell might look rather like this one." | 0:46:46 | 0:46:50 | |
Her lips were dry. | 0:46:50 | 0:46:52 | |
Her body ached. He was so heavy. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:54 | |
He crushed her. | 0:46:55 | 0:46:57 | |
He bore her down. | 0:46:57 | 0:46:59 | |
The dim room smelt of stale scent. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:03 | |
She began to imagine all the women who had lain | 0:47:03 | 0:47:06 | |
where she was lying, laughing, or crying if they were drunk enough. | 0:47:06 | 0:47:10 | |
He always hurried the end of his dressing, | 0:47:12 | 0:47:15 | |
as if getting out of the room would be an escape. | 0:47:15 | 0:47:18 | |
Jean Rhys's portrait of Ford in Quartet undoubtedly | 0:47:21 | 0:47:25 | |
tarnished his reputation, but in reality it was Ford who helped her | 0:47:25 | 0:47:29 | |
get started as a writer, and in later life she admitted as much. | 0:47:29 | 0:47:34 | |
When it came to writing he was a very generous man | 0:47:34 | 0:47:37 | |
and he encouraged me a great deal. | 0:47:37 | 0:47:39 | |
I really don't think he tried to impose his ideas on me or anyone else | 0:47:39 | 0:47:43 | |
but his casual hints could be extremely helpful. | 0:47:43 | 0:47:47 | |
-Do you happen to have a cigarette? -Yes, of course. | 0:47:47 | 0:47:51 | |
Ford's great war epic, Parade's End, took six years to write | 0:47:51 | 0:47:56 | |
and his affair with Jean Rhys occurred in the middle of that endeavour. | 0:47:56 | 0:48:00 | |
Although the books are set during the Great War, | 0:48:00 | 0:48:04 | |
at heart this is a compelling love story. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:06 | |
Parade's End is a fiercely original and experimental work, | 0:48:08 | 0:48:13 | |
with a strongly cinematic quality, | 0:48:13 | 0:48:16 | |
and it's now been brought to the screen by the director Susanna White | 0:48:16 | 0:48:20 | |
and the writer Tom Stoppard, a passionate advocate of the book. | 0:48:20 | 0:48:24 | |
If one looks at it as essentially a love story, | 0:48:24 | 0:48:28 | |
it's the story of a man between two women. | 0:48:28 | 0:48:31 | |
One of them he met at the wrong moment, | 0:48:31 | 0:48:35 | |
the other one he meets too late. | 0:48:35 | 0:48:36 | |
His sense of honour prevents him from acting dishonourably, | 0:48:36 | 0:48:44 | |
until the world becomes dishonourable. | 0:48:44 | 0:48:48 | |
-Christopher! There you are, at last! -Yes, sorry. | 0:48:48 | 0:48:52 | |
-You look lovely. -You look like thunder. | 0:48:55 | 0:48:59 | |
Sylvia Tietjens is one of the great characters in modern fiction, | 0:49:01 | 0:49:08 | |
erm, and Christopher is one of the most puzzling in a certain way. | 0:49:08 | 0:49:15 | |
We can't begin to decide whether he's sympathetic or unsympathetic, | 0:49:15 | 0:49:22 | |
stubborn or charming and so on. | 0:49:22 | 0:49:24 | |
On the one hand it's a vividly truthful novel about the war | 0:49:30 | 0:49:33 | |
but it's also about sex, about sexual politics, | 0:49:33 | 0:49:37 | |
about social change. | 0:49:37 | 0:49:38 | |
Actually... | 0:49:39 | 0:49:41 | |
you've reminded me that we've actually omitted to say something | 0:49:41 | 0:49:45 | |
very important about Parade's End, which is that it's a comedy. | 0:49:45 | 0:49:49 | |
It is sometimes grotesque, sometimes very dark, | 0:49:49 | 0:49:54 | |
but it's a comic masterpiece, | 0:49:54 | 0:49:58 | |
it's a comedic look at that part of the world at that time. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:04 | |
-Well, that's the thing, Potty. -What thing? | 0:50:04 | 0:50:07 | |
SHE SIGHS | 0:50:08 | 0:50:10 | |
It's not for ever. | 0:50:10 | 0:50:12 | |
Yes, it is. | 0:50:14 | 0:50:15 | |
-I hope you're not going to behave badly. -About what? | 0:50:15 | 0:50:19 | |
-About my going back, before it's too late. -Oh, no, you're not! | 0:50:20 | 0:50:26 | |
-What are you talking about? -I miss my husband. -No, you don't! | 0:50:26 | 0:50:31 | |
-You called him a...a...great lump of wood! -Oh, he is. | 0:50:31 | 0:50:35 | |
I often want to kill him just to see if there's any blood in him. | 0:50:35 | 0:50:38 | |
I'm permanently angry with him. | 0:50:38 | 0:50:40 | |
But he's spoiled me for any other decently groomed man in London. | 0:50:42 | 0:50:45 | |
He knows everything about everything. | 0:50:45 | 0:50:47 | |
It's the difference between being with a grown man and... | 0:50:47 | 0:50:51 | |
and trying to entertain a schoolboy. | 0:50:51 | 0:50:53 | |
-Why can't one get a man to go away with one and be just... -SHE SIGHS | 0:50:56 | 0:51:00 | |
..light comedy? | 0:51:00 | 0:51:02 | |
I say, you're not going to kill yourself, I hope, Potty. | 0:51:02 | 0:51:06 | |
I want you to swear on your St Anthony that you won't leave me. | 0:51:11 | 0:51:14 | |
I'll do no such thing. | 0:51:15 | 0:51:16 | |
Then, I'll kill you if you try. | 0:51:16 | 0:51:18 | |
The French understand these things. | 0:51:20 | 0:51:22 | |
In these hotels one's been staying in the notepaper is simply shaming. | 0:51:22 | 0:51:27 | |
Sylvia is extraordinary, isn't she? | 0:51:28 | 0:51:31 | |
I mean, she's dangerous and manipulative but then she's also unexpectedly vulnerable. | 0:51:31 | 0:51:35 | |
One of the difficulties and one of the great things | 0:51:35 | 0:51:39 | |
about trying to write and, I daresay, play these characters | 0:51:39 | 0:51:43 | |
is that there's always a degree of apparent self-contradiction and internal contradiction. | 0:51:43 | 0:51:50 | |
It's probably why the book has appealed so deeply. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:56 | |
It does have the complexity of the people that you know in real life, | 0:51:56 | 0:52:03 | |
people you know well. | 0:52:03 | 0:52:04 | |
Is Mrs Duchemin really your mistress? | 0:52:06 | 0:52:09 | |
Or only Macmaster's? | 0:52:09 | 0:52:12 | |
Or both? | 0:52:12 | 0:52:13 | |
She's been Mrs Macmaster for six months. | 0:52:14 | 0:52:17 | |
There's a party tonight to announce it. | 0:52:17 | 0:52:19 | |
And what about that girl you were potty about at that horrible tea party? | 0:52:21 | 0:52:25 | |
-Has she had a war baby by you? -SHE LAUGHS LIGHTLY | 0:52:28 | 0:52:31 | |
Everyone says she's your mistress too. | 0:52:31 | 0:52:34 | |
No, Miss Wannop is not my mistress. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:38 | |
It upset Brownlie so much, | 0:52:42 | 0:52:44 | |
he's going to refuse your cheques just to please me! | 0:52:44 | 0:52:47 | |
Oh. | 0:52:49 | 0:52:50 | |
Do bankers do that just to please their women friends? | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
HOT JAZZ PLAYS | 0:52:57 | 0:53:01 | |
In the autumn of 1926, | 0:53:13 | 0:53:15 | |
a couple of months after the affair with Jean Rhys had ended, | 0:53:15 | 0:53:19 | |
Ford sailed, without Stella, here to New York | 0:53:19 | 0:53:22 | |
for a speaking tour to promote the third of his Parade's End novels. | 0:53:22 | 0:53:26 | |
Ford was excited at the prospect of America. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:30 | |
On board he socialised with movie stars | 0:53:30 | 0:53:33 | |
and was thrilled to see reporters waiting on the dock. | 0:53:33 | 0:53:36 | |
He was sure they were waiting for him - well, perhaps - | 0:53:36 | 0:53:40 | |
but his arrival in the city was noted by several of the New York dailies. | 0:53:40 | 0:53:45 | |
The second volume of Parade's End | 0:53:45 | 0:53:48 | |
had sold almost ten times better here than in England | 0:53:48 | 0:53:51 | |
so Ford was in his element and more than ready to celebrate. | 0:53:51 | 0:53:56 | |
Everywhere he went Ford was welcomed by large, enthusiastic audiences, | 0:53:57 | 0:54:01 | |
including 800 society ladies over there at the Plaza Hotel. | 0:54:01 | 0:54:06 | |
He wrote articles, was toasted at literary lunches, | 0:54:06 | 0:54:10 | |
and of course met everyone who was anyone. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:12 | |
He enjoyed the adulation unashamedly | 0:54:12 | 0:54:15 | |
and reciprocated by falling head over heels in love with the city. | 0:54:15 | 0:54:20 | |
Standing in front of the buildings of Fifth Avenue, | 0:54:21 | 0:54:24 | |
he felt this was a place where you could think faster, feel faster | 0:54:24 | 0:54:28 | |
and see further. | 0:54:28 | 0:54:30 | |
America was a shot in the arm for him, | 0:54:35 | 0:54:38 | |
in the sense that the book sold, | 0:54:38 | 0:54:40 | |
and he also found New York incredibly exciting and energising. | 0:54:40 | 0:54:47 | |
-The noise, the cars, the... -The vertical living. | 0:54:47 | 0:54:51 | |
He's interested in angles, he's interested in perspective. | 0:54:51 | 0:54:55 | |
Being asked to look up, being asked to look down. | 0:54:55 | 0:54:58 | |
And also grid living. I mean, that's the other thing, the way | 0:54:58 | 0:55:01 | |
in which you can stand on a corner and see these incredible distances. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:04 | |
His acceptance in America sort of almost turned him, | 0:55:04 | 0:55:07 | |
for many people, into an American, didn't it? | 0:55:07 | 0:55:10 | |
Yes, it did. It turned him into an American novelist. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:14 | |
Hemingway said that he became one of the two generally admired | 0:55:14 | 0:55:19 | |
American novelists at that point, or, sorry, novelists in America. | 0:55:19 | 0:55:23 | |
Which is interesting, because it does sort of move him | 0:55:23 | 0:55:26 | |
across the Atlantic into that environment. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:29 | |
It wasn't just America that Ford fell in love with. | 0:55:31 | 0:55:35 | |
After several brief affairs, | 0:55:35 | 0:55:37 | |
in 1930 he met a young American painter called Janice Biala. | 0:55:37 | 0:55:42 | |
"I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman... | 0:55:45 | 0:55:49 | |
"No, that's the wrong way of formulating it. | 0:55:49 | 0:55:52 | |
"For every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination | 0:55:52 | 0:55:59 | |
"has set her seal for good. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:00 | |
"He will travel over no more horizons, | 0:56:00 | 0:56:03 | |
"he will never again set the knapsack over his shoulders, | 0:56:03 | 0:56:07 | |
"he will retire from those scenes. | 0:56:07 | 0:56:10 | |
"He will have gone out of the business." | 0:56:10 | 0:56:14 | |
Ford and Janice remained together for the rest of Ford's life, | 0:56:16 | 0:56:20 | |
dividing their itinerant lifestyle between America, Paris and Provence. | 0:56:20 | 0:56:26 | |
Until they ran out of money, | 0:56:29 | 0:56:30 | |
Ford and Janice spent their summers | 0:56:30 | 0:56:33 | |
in a rented apartment in a villa in Toulon - | 0:56:33 | 0:56:35 | |
and it was here that Ford wrote a book called Provence, | 0:56:35 | 0:56:40 | |
illustrated with some of Janice's sketches. | 0:56:40 | 0:56:43 | |
The book is a wonderful concoction | 0:56:43 | 0:56:46 | |
of history, romantic anecdotes and recipes, | 0:56:46 | 0:56:49 | |
and it concludes in Ford's favourite place in the world, | 0:56:49 | 0:56:52 | |
the obscure Provencal town of Tarascon. | 0:56:52 | 0:56:58 | |
Tarascon was a sacred place for him ever since childhood, | 0:57:03 | 0:57:07 | |
when he saw his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, | 0:57:07 | 0:57:11 | |
painting the medieval king and his bride | 0:57:11 | 0:57:14 | |
who built the town's fairytale castle. | 0:57:14 | 0:57:17 | |
This final scene of the book is written with | 0:57:20 | 0:57:23 | |
a flourish of typically Fordian self-mockery and good humour. | 0:57:23 | 0:57:28 | |
Flushed with cash for the first time in his life | 0:57:29 | 0:57:32 | |
thanks to a windfall from sales of Parade's End, | 0:57:32 | 0:57:35 | |
Ford and Janice took the first train to his beloved Tarascon. | 0:57:35 | 0:57:39 | |
A thundering mistral wind is blowing through the town, | 0:57:39 | 0:57:42 | |
but, undeterred, they head out to visit the castle, | 0:57:42 | 0:57:46 | |
Janice carrying a wallet stuffed with Ford's earnings. | 0:57:46 | 0:57:50 | |
Leaning back on the wind as if on an upended couch | 0:57:52 | 0:57:56 | |
I roared with laughter. | 0:57:56 | 0:57:58 | |
We were just under the great wall | 0:58:00 | 0:58:02 | |
that keeps out the intolerably swift Rhone. | 0:58:02 | 0:58:06 | |
Our treasurer - Janice Biala, keeper of the wallet - | 0:58:06 | 0:58:09 | |
her cap was flying in the air, over into the Rhone. | 0:58:09 | 0:58:13 | |
What glorious fun. The mistral sure is the wine of life. | 0:58:14 | 0:58:20 | |
Our treasurer's wallet was flying from under an armpit | 0:58:23 | 0:58:26 | |
beyond reach of a clutching hand. | 0:58:26 | 0:58:29 | |
More money than Ford had seen in a lifetime | 0:58:31 | 0:58:33 | |
had fallen out of Janice's wallet and into the depths of the Rhone. | 0:58:33 | 0:58:38 | |
Poor old Ford. | 0:58:39 | 0:58:41 | |
I hadn't been going to do any writing for a year. For two. | 0:58:42 | 0:58:47 | |
But perhaps the remorseless Destiny of Provence | 0:58:48 | 0:58:52 | |
desires thus to afflict the world with my books. | 0:58:52 | 0:58:55 | |
In the spring of 1939, after years of ill health, | 0:59:00 | 0:59:04 | |
Ford developed kidney problems while travelling back from America. | 0:59:04 | 0:59:09 | |
When he and Janice arrived in France they went to stay in this hotel, | 0:59:16 | 0:59:20 | |
the Cheval Blanc, in the picturesque coastal town of Honfleur. | 0:59:20 | 0:59:25 | |
Ford insisted on having a decent view right to the end. | 0:59:25 | 0:59:29 | |
He died on 26th June 1939 | 0:59:30 | 0:59:34 | |
and was buried in the town cemetery at Deauville. | 0:59:34 | 0:59:38 | |
There were only three people at his funeral. | 0:59:38 | 0:59:40 | |
In a typically Fordian curse of fate, | 0:59:40 | 0:59:43 | |
the drunken sexton managed to bury him in the wrong spot | 0:59:43 | 0:59:46 | |
and after the war his coffin had to be reburied. | 0:59:46 | 0:59:50 | |
By the time of his death, in England, Ford was largely forgotten. | 0:59:54 | 0:59:59 | |
He'd lived in exile and scandal had obscured his reputation. | 0:59:59 | 1:00:03 | |
But over here in America he continued to be read and respected. | 1:00:04 | 1:00:09 | |
What's more, an elite and ardent band of Ford admirers | 1:00:09 | 1:00:13 | |
kept his flame alight. | 1:00:13 | 1:00:15 | |
It was Graham Greene who wrote, "There is no novelist of this century | 1:00:15 | 1:00:21 | |
"more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford." | 1:00:21 | 1:00:24 | |
He died in France in relative obscurity. | 1:00:26 | 1:00:30 | |
He loved America and they loved him. | 1:00:30 | 1:00:32 | |
And yet I think of him as such an English...artist, | 1:00:32 | 1:00:36 | |
such an English writer. | 1:00:36 | 1:00:38 | |
And I know that he was hugely influenced by French writing | 1:00:38 | 1:00:42 | |
and loved to be called... | 1:00:42 | 1:00:43 | |
you know, loved to be described as more French than the French | 1:00:43 | 1:00:46 | |
and loved to claim kinship with Flaubert and Maupassant and Daudet. | 1:00:46 | 1:00:50 | |
But the nostalgia, | 1:00:50 | 1:00:53 | |
the...the sentiment, | 1:00:53 | 1:00:58 | |
the romanticism, erm, the feeling for the past, | 1:00:58 | 1:01:03 | |
the anxiety, the trouble. | 1:01:03 | 1:01:05 | |
all that seems to me deeply, deeply English. | 1:01:05 | 1:01:09 | |
I can't help thinking he was born in the wrong era. | 1:01:11 | 1:01:14 | |
Perhaps the humorous, opinionated, overweight, | 1:01:14 | 1:01:19 | |
passionate and absurdly named Ford Madox Ford | 1:01:19 | 1:01:23 | |
would fit in better today than he did 100 years ago. | 1:01:23 | 1:01:26 | |
And if he was still around, | 1:01:26 | 1:01:28 | |
I can't imagine many people I'd rather have lunch with. | 1:01:28 | 1:01:31 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:01:48 | 1:01:52 |