[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In the Little Old Market-Place
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939)

(To the Memory of A. V.)

It rains, it rains,
From gutters and drains
And gargoyles and gables:
It drips from the tables
That tell us the tolls upon grains,
Oxen, asses, sheep, turkeys and fowls
Set into the rain-soaked wall
Of the old Town Hall.

This is a longer poem, ninety-two lines, than I usually feature here, so I’m breaking it up with commentary as I see fit. I hope you’ll excuse my not prefacing each excerpt with “from In the Little…” An added apology: I have no idea who A.V. was. I did look around.

This work first appeared in his collection High Germany, dated 1911 but apparently not published until 1912, and reappeared in the debut anthology of Imagiste poets, back when the movement was helmed by Ezra Pound, Des Imagistes. Pound was awed by Ford and eager to get the established critic, novelist, editor, and poet on board. In part, Pound was thankful. Ford gave several notable poets a beginning in England, among them Pound, DH Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. When put on the pages of Ford’s English Review, they were elevated, sharing space with Yeats and Ford’s dear friend Conrad. It’s said here and about that he “discovered” these new voices, but that’s a messy term. I’m sure what it means in the pertinent sense, as all had published but not to scale, is that Ford lifted them up and made them salon worthy subjects.

Pound, on his ascendance, sang his, then known as Ford Madox Hueffer, praises to Harriet Monroe in his role as foreign editor for her Poetry magazine. He even resigned his position, albeit it briefly, until a squabble was resolved over some slight afforded the man. In a letter to Amy Lowell, before he decided he hated her and went around London calling the squat, large woman the Hippopoetess, Pound wrote “Also, I’ve resigned from Poetry in Hueffner’s favour, but I believe he has resigned in mine and I don’t know whether I’m shed of the blooming paper or not.”

I can’t figure out for certain what the issue was. In letters to Monroe immediately preceding, he’s praising Ford as then Heuffer and trying to get more prose off the man as “you seemed to like it,” while referring to an off stage problem that is seemingly resolved: “I am eased in my mind about the Heuffer matter.”

Ford’s inclusion in Des Imagistes was a coup. For one, the poem is very good. Second, per the Poetry Foundation, Pound “deemed Ford the best literary critic in England because of his keen editorial eye and celebration of vers libre.” Ford was respected in literary circles and Pound, the great promoter, was never above borrowing reputation from associaties. Further, Imagism broke from Victorian poetry’s fussiness and marriage to an even older diction. Ford wrote with a modern voice. He treated objects directly.

The image of the marketplace he gives is straightforward enough. It’s wet, old, and dark. But he takes the readers gaze and darts around. Look up to the gables, drains, and gargoyles. Back down to tables. Animals presumable are off along the side of the square, but it’s not “horses lashed.” Livestock is here and there. Turkeys aren’t kept with oxen or sheep. Asses are good for light traffic. You have to look around to take them all in. Look around. Rain falls. A tower dominating it all.

Next he pulls the reader up and out.

The mountains being so tall
And forcing the town on the river,
The market’s so small
That, with the wet cobbles, dark arches and all,
The owls
(For in dark rainy weather the owls fly out
Well before four), so the owls
In the gloom
Have too little room
And brush by the saint on the fountain
In veering about.

There’s a greater country about. The town is subject to natural forces, situated where it’s allowed to be. Having pulled out, he zooms in.

The poor saint on the fountain!
Supported by plaques of the giver
To whom we’re beholden;
His name was de Sales
And his wife’s name von Mangel.

(Now is he a saint or archangel?)
He stands on a dragon
On a ball, on a column
Gazing up at the vines on the mountain:
And his falchion is golden
And his wings are all golden.
He bears golden scales
And in spite of the coils of his dragon, without hint of alarm or invective
Looks up at the mists on the mountain.

(Now what saint or archangel
Stands winged on a dragon,
Bearing golden scales and a broad bladed sword all golden?
Alas, my knowledge
Of all the saints of the college,
Of all these glimmering, olden
Sacred and misty stories
Of angels and saints and old glories . . .
Is sadly defective.)
The poor saint on the fountain . . .

The statue is of a great man. Possibly, he’s more than a man, but still great among his kind. We know that because there is a statue of him. He’s decorated with symbols of achievement. He has a very impressive sword. People have paid lavishly that we remember him and honor him, but we can’t do the latter as we don’t do the former.

On top of his column
Gazes up sad and solemn.
But is it towards the top of the mountain
Where the spindrifty haze is
That he gazes?
Or is it into the casement
Where the girl sits sewing?
There’s no knowing.
Hear it rain!
And from eight leaden pipes in the ball he stands on
That has eight leaden and copper bands on,
There gurgle and drain
Eight driblets of water down into the basin.

I wrote and then backspaced “Ford had issues in relationships with women.” That’s true, but there are so many women he had issues with that he can’t hide from common denominator blame. He did have issues with women, but he caused issues with women often by gravitating towards other women on the sly, those women having new and exciting issues of their own, ready to enervate local gossip as needed.

He started off with an angry father-in-law. Before marriage, he proposed to Elsie Martindale when she turned sixteen. He was three years older and the two had been students together. Her parents didn’t like his “advanced ideas, especially about sex,” per Wikipedia. That’s not a telling thing to say about a Victorian nineteen year old. The time’s reserved speech and easily piqued moralisms leaves us very little to go on. He may have had a thing for ankles. He may have been a burgeoning Swinburne. His nebulous predations weren’t the only problem. The family feared for Elsie’s sister Mary’s mental stability. She had a thing for Ford as well, and the family, again per Wikipedia, was “terrified of the effect on her of any special intimacy” between Ford and Elsie.

Two years of parental disapprovals and attempts to dissuade followed. A Rossetti was enlisted to talk Ford away. The Rossettis keep popping up in his story. His father was the artist who mentored Dante Rossetti. An aunt married in to that family so he had Rossetti cousins. In this case, William, brother to Christina and Dante, stood, but to no end. Elsie and Ford eloped in 1894 and didn’t make it back into her family’s graces until their first daughter, Christina, was born in 1897.

To his credit, Ford was very upfront with his wife. He told her wouldn’t be faithful. Ford only knows what happened in the first ten years of their marriage, but on the eleventh Ford banged Mary. Incredibly, that didn’t immediately break up his marriage. He did that the next year when he took up with Violet Hunt.

Violet was well known in London literary circles. She’d written a handful of well received novels, was apparently engaged to Oscar Wilde at one point, had notable affairs with Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells, but was best known for knowing people as a salon hostess and for founding the English Review with Ford, theoretically before the two were entwined. She was a force in literary London. Neither was faithful to the other. The duplicitous Florence, of Ford’s famous novel The Good Soldier, which he dictated parts of to the author Brigit Patmore, was based on Violet and I’m sure that made for interesting bedtime talk. Patmore famously carried on a love triangle with Pound and Richard Aldington until Pound tapped out to be replaced by HD. Unsurprisingly, Ford took working with her as an opportunity for a physical relationship with her as well. Pull back the veil, and there’s a world of modernist writers on the rise hopping into bed with each other, acting as B-squad Bloomsburys or shadow literati. Literary London required a lot of towels.

Despite, or because of, the loose adherence to fidelity, Hunt and Ford stayed together until 1918, even when, or because, Ford enlisted at the seemingly too old-for-infantry age of forty-one. Max Saunders of King’s College London, writing for the Ford Madox Ford Society, tells us Ford’s was no ceremonial duty of a well known figure.

“Ford joined the army in 1915, serving as an officer in the Welch Regiment. It was an escape from a life that had become intolerable, and he appears to have wanted to die. When he was sent to the Somme in July 1916, only two weeks into the bloodiest battle in British military history, he nearly did die: a shell explosion concussed him, and he lost his memory for three weeks, forgetting even his own name for a few days. He was sent back to the front, this time in the Ypres Salient. But he became ill again, suffering from pneumonia, probably exacerbated by exposure to poison gas. His wartime experiences went into Parade’s End, now increasingly seen as one of the greatest literary works about the First World War, and by some critics as the greatest English war fiction, and one of the greatest English novels.”

Elsie never granted a divorce for the sake of their two daughters. At one point Ford tried to get German citizenship under the impression that a divorce could be granted by the German government without Elsie’s consent. Whether that was possible or not, the German’s refused his application.

Twice in print, Violet was referred to as Mrs. Hueffer and twice Elsie successfully sued Ford for the usurpation. I don’t know how the chain of blame was established, but such was the situation that a newspaper’s claim was his liability. If you’ll allow me to got back to Pound and his correspondence with Harriet Monroe, there’s an exchange – a year after the issue that caused him to resign – where Pound writes “No—you are not at liberty to say that she is Mrs. F.M. Hueffer. You are especially requested to make no allusion to the connection.” And in a second letter dated the same day, “And, as I intimated in my note this morning, no, for gawd’s sake don’t connect Violet Hueffer with F.M.H. There have been enough suits for libel etc. I can’t go into the inner history at this moment, but refrain from bracketing the two names.”

In 1919 he changed his name from Ford Madox Hueffer to Ford Madox Ford. In part, he did so because after the war, Germanic names were on the outs. Another reason is that he’d left Violet for Stella Bowen and, again per Max Saunders, “He needed to change his name now that he had two ex-partners fighting for the right to be ‘Mrs Hueffer’.” A third would make him look greedy.

With Stella he founded, at Pound’s urging, the transatlantic review. She was an Australian painter and writer he met through Hunt. He wrote a lovely and heartfelt dedication for a reprint of the previously undedicated The Good Soldier. He may or may not have cheated on her with Wide Sargasso Sea author, Jean Rhys. After almost nine years and one daughter together, Bowen and Ford split. He took up with the painter Janice Biala next, and the two lived happily ever after. Surprising, but true.

We are beyond the history of the 1912 poem at this point, but it informs the poem knowing Ford’s impermanence.

He introduces a woman into the marketplace.

And he stands on his dragon
And the girl sits sewing
High, very high in her casement
And before her are many geraniums in a parket
All growing and blowing
In box upon box
From the gables right down to the basement
With frescoes and carvings and paint . . .

The poor saint!
It rains and it rains,
In the market there isn’t an ox,
And in all the emplacement
For waggons there isn’t a waggon,
Not a stall for a grape or a raisin,
Not a soul in the market
Save the saint on his dragon
With the rain dribbling down in the basin,
And the maiden that sews in the casement.

She’s as unknowable as the man, the statue. She’s framed in beautiful flowers and steadfast in domestic work, but she is seen, not met. Here the setting of a marketplace is important. It’s a place of exchange. He has his achievements. She has her charms and skills. But around them nothing’s happening. There’s no interaction. They are together, in their place, like the town is in its place, because that is how outside forces intend them to be. They are together by convention, not connection. Man and woman belong together, but then what? His history shows he has immense trouble meaningfully connecting, no matter how enthusiastically he tries.

I had to look up Mutterseelens: As alone as a child in the womb.

They are still and alone,
Mutterseelens alone,
And the rain dribbles down from his heels and his crown,
From wet stone to wet stone.
It’s grey as at dawn,
And the owls, grey and fawn,
Call from the little town hall
With its arch in the wall,
Where the fire-hooks are stored.

From behind the flowers of her casement
That’s all gay with the carvings and paint,
The maiden gives a great yawn,
But the poor saint—
No doubt he’s as bored!
Stands still on his column
Uplifting his sword
With never the ease of a yawn
From wet dawn to wet dawn . . .