A Writer's Eye Part 9

Mr. Perelman has always taken aim at the same target. His aim is perfect, but human folly of course is deathless. It just changes shape. Once it was embodied in Hollywood ("I was radiant that night in blue velvet tails and a boutonniere of diamonds from Cartier's, my eyes starry and the merest hint of cologne at my ear-lobes. . . 'Have a bit of the wine, darling?' queried Diana solicitously, indicating the roast Long Island airplane with applesauce.") Now: "You show an amazing knowledge of the body structure," says Dr. Prognose to his patient. "Very impressive in a layman." "I shrugged and said it was available to any student of Gray's 'Anatomy' or, for that matter, anyone with a TV set." He's been duplicating a test he witnessed on a commercial. "You've been glued to the tube studying your materia medica," says Dr. Prognose. This is from the sketch called "Turn the k.n.o.b, Doc, You're Obsolete."

Add to folly tourism. Gullible Joycean scholars in Dublin get what they ask for in "Anna Trivia Pluralized." In "Shamrocks in My Head" a buyer of a castle in Ireland ends up "composing a letter to the Irish Times about peasant brutality." The tourist in London runs into "Creative Humiliation a.s.sociates, Ltd." "Educational sort of thing. Equips all types of folkclerks Page 155 and shop a.s.sistants, hall porters, garage attendants, whomeverto protect themselves" against the customer. "We teach 'em the dynamics: woolgathering, disdain, the snub direct and implied, Schadenfreude, the mechanics of sn.i.g.g.e.ring, simple and compound exacerbationthe lot." The British traveler arriving over here has a bit of retribution dealt him in another sketch, "In Spite of all Temptations/To Belong to Other Nations," and an American vacationing in America doesn't have too easy a load to bear in "I Hate Spanish Moss."

Folk-art collecting gets brought down to size. In another study of sn.o.b culture, Mr. Gotrox, dressed as Jiggs down to the red sock feet, has made desperate efforts to raise his status as a qualified dog owner, so as to break down the refusal of Le Chien Chic to let him buy a dogthey show "an intensity, a pitiless zeal that reminded me of Savonarola," even after he'd taken a course in the great philosophers at the New School for Social Research.

The book has the brilliance we expect. If the insouciance of the early Perelman"I had gone into a Corn Exchange bank to exchange some corn." "I have Bright's disease and he has mine"is not as evident here, n.o.body could keep up that effervescence. (And if he could, he'd run into trouble today, with, at least, the Bright's Disease people.) In its place is a mood very much of its times, and all the more telling in its effects.

Folly is perennial, but something has happened to parody. Life has caught up with it. When Mr. Perelman wrote the superbly hilarious pieces of the thirties and forties, our misuse of the language was in its own vintage years, or so it seems in retrospect. The misuse had its natural place in the movie dialogue, the advertising pages and the sentimental fiction of the day. "There has never been a year like this for the giant double-flowering fatuity and gorgeous variegated drivel," Mr. Perelman wrote back then in "CautionSoft Prose Ahead."

Now the misuse has proliferated and spread everywhere, and, to make it more menacing, it is taken seriously. Promoters of products, promoters of causes, promoters of self have a common language, though one with a small vocabulary. "Well, to be candid, there is a problem of a sort, psychological in nature, I should elucidate," says the patient in Dr. Prognose's office. "It involves a certain dichotomy, and to help you extrapolate its essence and form a viable rationale, I think I ought to sketch in the background first." To which Dr. Prognose replies, "You have a touch of susskind poisoning. Carry on, but watch your syllables."

Page 156 The value of the word has declined. Parody is among the early casualties of this disaster, for it comes to be no longer recognizable apart from its subject. Parody makes its point by its precision and strictness in use of the word, probing to expose the distinction between the true and the false, the real and the synthetic. It's a demanding and exacting art, and there are few with the gift of penetration, and the temerity, let alone the wit and the style, to practice it. Right now, it's in danger of becoming a lost cause. The only writer I know who can save it is the author of this book. He stands alone. We already owe him a great deal for years of utter delight, but we owe him even more now.

Not for nothing is the new book called Baby, It's Cold Inside. Back of some of these pieces, and not very far, lies deep sadness, lies outrage. What an achievement Mr. S. J. Perelman makes today, that out of our own sadness and outrage we are brought, in these little leaves, to laugh at ourselves once more.

Page 157 The Underground Man By Ross Macdonald The Stuff That Nightmares Are Made of:

New York Times Book Review 14 February 1971: 1, 2830

Curled up, with an insulted look on his upturned face, and wearing a peppermint-striped shirt, the fresh corpse of a man is disclosed in a hole in the ground. From the scene of the crime the victim's little boy is carried off, n.o.body knows why, by a pair of troubled teenagers. And at the same time, a deadly forest fire gets its start in these hills above Santa Teresa: whoever murdered Stanley Broadhurst must have caused him to drop his cigarillo into the dry gra.s.s. So opens the new novel by Ross Macdonald, The Underground Man. It comes to stunning achievement.

A Forest Service man looks into the killing to find out who was responsible for the fire; but Lew Archer goes faster and farther into his own investigation, for a personal reason. That morning, he had met that little boy; they fed blue jays together. He promises the young widow, the child's mother, to find her son and bring him back.

The double mystery of Santa Teresa cries urgency but is never going to explain itself in an ordinary way. For instance, it looks as if the victim himself might have dug the hole in which he lies. ("Why would a man dig his own grave?""He may not have known it was going to be his.") With the fire coming, Archer has to work fast. The corpse must be quickly buried again, or be consumed with his murder unsolved. This, the underground Page 158 man of the t.i.tle, waits the book out, the buried connection between present threat and something out of the past.

"I don't believe in coincidences," Archer says, as the investigation leads him into a backward direction, and he sees the case take on a premonitory symmetry. And it is not coincidence indeed, or anything so simple, but a sort of spiral of time that he goes hurtling into, with an answer lying 15 years deep.

He is to meet many strange and lonely souls drawing their inspiration from private sources. On the periphery are those all but anonymous characters, part of the floating population of the city, evocative of all the sadness that fills a lonely world, like some California versions of those Saltimbanques of Pica.s.so's ("even a little more fleeting than ourselves") drifting across the smoke-obscured outskirts. They are the sentinels of a case in which everybody has something to lose, and most of the characters in this time-haunted, fire-threatened novel lose it in the course of what happensa son, or a husband, or a mountain retreat; a sailing boat, a memory; the secret of 15 years or the dream of a lifetime; or a life.

Brooding over the case is the dark fact that for some certain souls the past does not let go. They nourish the conviction that its ties may be outlived but, for hidden reasons, can be impossible to outgrow or leave behind.

Stanley Broadhurst died searching for his long-lost father. The Oedipus story, which figured in Mr. Macdonald's The Galton Case and The Chill, has echoes here too. 133 But another sort of legend takes a central place in The Underground Man. This is the medieval tale of romance and the faerie.

It is exactly what Archer plunges into when he enters this case. Finding his way, through their lies and fears, into other people's obsessions and dreams, he might as well be in a fairy tale with them. The mystery has handed him what amounts to a set of impossible tasks: Find the door that opens the past. Unravel the ever-tangling threads of time. Rescue the stolen child from fleeing creatures who appear to be under a spell and who forbid him to speak to them. Meet danger from the aroused elements of fire and water. And beware the tower.

But Archer's own role in their fairy tale is clear to him: from the time he fed the blue jays with the little boy, he never had a choice. There is the maze of the past to be entered and come out of alive, bringing the innocent to safety. And in the maze there lives a monster; his name is Murder.

All along the way, the people he questions shift their stands, lie as fast as they can, slip only too swiftly out of human reach. Their ages are deceiving, Page 159 they put on trappings of disguise or even what might be called transformations. As Archer, by stages, all the while moving at speed, connects one character with the next, he discovers what makes the sinister affinity between them.

"Robert Driscoll Falconer Jr., was a G.o.d come down to earth in human guise," the older Mrs. Broadhurst, mother of the murder victim, has written in a memoir of her father, and here her Spencerian handwriting went to pieces; "It straggled across the lined yellow page like a defeated army." Mrs. Crandall, the mother of the runaway girl, is "one of those waiting mothers who would sit forever beside the phone but didn't know what to say when it finally rang." Another character being questioned plays "a game that guilty people play, questioning the questioner, trying to convert the truth into a shuttlec.o.c.k that could be batted back and forth and eventually lost." And the violence and malice of another character "appeared to her as emanations from the external world.''

These people live in prisons of the spirit, and suffer there. The winding, prisonlike stairs that appear and reappear under Archer's hurrying feet in the course of the chase are like the repeated questionings that lead most often into some private h.e.l.l.

And of course unrealitythe big underlying trouble of all these peoplewas back of the crime itself: the victim was obsessed with the lifelong search for his father; oblivious of everything and everybody else, he invited his own oblivion. In a different way unreality was back of the child-stealing. "As you can see, we gave her everything," says the mother standing in her runaway daughter's lovely white room. "But it wasn't what she wanted." The home environment of the girl and others like her, Archer is brought to observe, was "an unreality so bland and smothering that the children tore loose and impaled themselves on the spikes of any reality that offered. Or made their own unreality with drugs."

The plot is intricate, involuted, and complicated to the hilt; and this, as I see it, is the novel's point. The danger derives from the fairy tales into which people make their lives. In lonely, fearful, or confused minds, real-life facts can become rarefied into private fantasies. And when intensity is acceptedwelcomedas the measure of truth, how can the real and the fabricated be told apart?

We come to a scene where the parallel with the fairy tale is explicitand something more. It is the best in the bookI can give but a part.

"I made my way up the washed-out gravel drive. The twin conical towers Page 160 standing up against the night sky made the house look like something out of a medieval romance. The illusion faded as I got nearer. There was a multicolored fanlight over the front door, with segments of gla.s.s fallen out, like missing teeth in an old smile. . . . The door creaked open when I knocked."

Here lives a lady "far gone in solitude," whose secret lies hidden at the heart of the mystery. She stands there in "a long full skirt on which there were paint stains in all three primary colors." She is a painterof spiritual conditions, she says; to Archer her pictures resemble "serious contusions and open wounds" or "imperfectly remembered hallucinations."

"'I was born in this house,' she said, as if she'd been waiting fifteen years for a listener." (And these are the 15 years that have done their worst to everybody in the novel.) "'It's interesting to come back to your childhood home, . . . like becoming very young and very old both at the same time.' That was how she looked, I thought, in her archaic long skirtvery young and very old, the granddaughter and the grandmother in one person, slightly schizo."

"There were romantic tears in her eyes" when her story is out. "My own eyes remained quite dry."

Fairy tale and living reality alternate on one current to pulse together in this remarkable scene. The woman is a pivotal character and Archer has caught up with her; they are face to face and there comes a moment's embrace. Of the many brilliant ways Mr. Macdonald has put his motif to use, I believe this is the touch that delighted me most. For of course Archer, this middle-aging Californian who has seen everything in a career of going into impossible trouble with his eyes open, who has always been the protector of the weak and the rescuer of the helpless, is a born romantic. Here he meets his introverted and ailing counterpartthis lady is the chatelaine of the romantic-gone-wrong. He is not by nature immune, especially to what is lovely or was lovely once. At a given moment, they may brush close. As Archer, the only one with insight into himself, is aware.

Time pressing, time lapsing, time repeating itself in dark acts, splitting into two in some agonized or imperfect mindtime is the wicked fairy to troubled people, granting them inevitably the thing they dread. While Archer's investigation is drawing him into the past, we are never allowed to forget that present time has been steadily increasing its menace. Mr. Macdonald has brought the fire toward us at closer and closer stages. By the time it gets as close as the top of the hill (this was the murder area), it appears "like a brilliant omniform growth which continued to grow until it Page 161 bloomed very large against the sky. A sentinel quail on the hillside below it was ticking an alarm." Then, reaching the Broadhurst house, "the fire bent around it like the fingers of a hand, squeezing smoke out of the windows and then flame."

Indeed the fire is a multiple and acc.u.mulating ident.i.ty, with a career of its own, a super-character that has earned itself a character's nameRattlesnake. Significantly, Archer says, "There was only one good thing about the fire. It made people talk about the things that really concerned them."

What really concerns Archer, and the real kernel of the book, its heart and soul, is the little boy of six, good and brave and smart. He const.i.tutes the book's emergency; he is also entirely believable, a full-rounded and endearing character. Ronny is the tender embodiment of everything Archer is by nature bound to protect, infinitely worthy of rescue.

When Archer plunges into a case his reasons are always personal reasons (this is one of the things that make us so much for Archer). The little boy for as long as he's missing will be Archer's own loss. And without relinquishing for a moment his clear and lively ident.i.ty, the child takes on another importance as well: "The world was changing," says Archer, "as if with one piece missing the whole thing had come loose and was running wild."

If it is the character of the little boy that makes the case matter to Archer, so it is the character of Archer, whose first-person narrative forms all Mr. Macdonald's novels, that makes it matter to us. Archer from the start has been a distinguished creation; he was always an attractive figure and in the course of the last several books has matured and deepened in substance to our still greater pleasure. Possessed even when young of an endless backlog of stored information, most of it sad, on human nature, he tended once, unless I'm mistaken, to be a bit cynical. Now he is something much more, he is vulnerable. As a detective and as a man he takes the human situation with full seriousness. He cares. And good and evil both are real to him.

Archer knows himself to be a romantic, would call it a weaknessas he calls himself a "not unwilling catalyst" for trouble; he carries the knowledge around with himthat's how he got here. But he is in no way archaic. He is at heart a champion, but a self-questioning, often a self-deriding champion. He is of today, one of ours. The Underground Man is written so close to the nerve of today as to expose most of the apprehensions we live with.

In our day it is for such a novel as The Underground Man that the detective form exists. I think it also matters that it is the detective form, with Page 162 all its difficult demands and its corresponding charms, that makes such a novel possible. 134 What gives me special satisfaction about this novel is that no one but a good writerthis good writercould have possibly brought it off. The Underground Man is Mr. Macdonald's best book yet, I think.135 It is not only exhilaratingly well done; it is also very moving.

Ross Macdonald's style, to which in large part this is due, is one of delicacy and tension, very tightly made, with a spring in it. It doesn't allow a static sentence or one without pertinence. And the spare, controlled narrative, built for action and speed, conveys as well the world through which the action moves and gives it meaning, brings scene and character, however swiftly, before the eyes without a blur. It is an almost unbroken series of sparkling pictures.

The style that works so well to produce fluidity and grace also suggests a mind much given to contemplation and reflection on our world. Mr. Macdonald's writing is something like a stand of clean, cool, well-branched, well tended trees in which bright birds can flash and perch. And not for show, but to sing.

A great deal of what this writer has to tell us comes by way of beautiful and audacious similes. "His hairy head seemed enormous and grotesque on his boy's body, like a papiermche saint's head on a stick": the troubled teenager's self-absorption, his sense of destinytheatrical but maybe in a good causealong with the precise way he looks and carries himself, are given us all in one. At the scene of evacuation from the forest fire, at the bottom of a rich householder's swimming pool "lay a blue mink coat, like the headless pelt of a woman." A sloop lying on her side, dismantled offsh.o.r.e, "flopped in the surge like a bird made helpless by oil." The Snows, little old lady and grown son: "The door of Fritz's room was ajar. One of his moist eyes appeared at the crack like the eye of a fish in an underwater crevice. His mother, at the other door, was watching him like a shark."

Descriptions so interpretive are of course here as part and parcel of the character of Archer who says them to us. Mr. Macdonald's accuracy of observation becomes Archer's detectionrunning evidence. Mr. Macdonald brings characters into sudden sharp focus too by arresting them in an occasional archetypical pose. The obsessed Stanley is here in the words of his wife: "Sometimes he'd be just sitting there shuffling through his pictures and his letters. He looked like a man counting his money." And Fritz in the lath house, where Archer is leaving him, complaining among his plants: "The striped shadow fell from the roof, jailbirding him."

Page 163 The Saddest Story:

A Biography of Ford Madox Ford

By Arthur Mizener The Saddest Story:

New York Times Book Review 2 May 1971: 1, 14, 16, 18

What the reader hopes most to see in a biography is the work of the intelligent scholar who also feels an affinity for his subject. For Ford Madox Fordwho had greatness, who did so much for the cause of letters, who was intuitively kind to other writers everywhere but to whom unkindness has often been done in returnfor Ford, in particular, his reader would hope he would fall into good hands.

Mr. Mizener's work has taken him, not surprisingly, six years. He has read and considered everything Ford ever wrote in his incredibly productive life. He has put his longest and most probing scrutiny, of course, into The Good Soldier and the four novels of Parade's End, but, we must believe, he has skimped nowhere, left nothing out. 136 Yet for all his intelligence and his devotion to the task, the book, as I see it, falls short. A little more imagination might have made all the difference.

Ford's heritage was a double one, and, indeed, his life was almost always under a double pressure of some kind, forces pulling him in opposite directions. His father, Francis Hueffer, was German, Catholic, a London music critic and composer; his mother, Kathy Brown, was the daughter of one of the formidable Pre-Raphaelites, the painter Ford Madox Brown. He himself grew up with a double alarm sounding in his ears: one, that he was "a patient but exceedingly stupid donkey" (this was his father talking) and the Page 164 other, that he was expected to be nothing less than a genius (that was from Grandfather Brown). But perhaps the admonition that reached his deepest heart was something else his grandfather told him: "Fordy, never refuse to help a lame dog over a stile. . . . Beggar yourself rather than refuse a.s.sistance to anyone whose genius you think shows promise of being greater than your own." Ford not only remembered this; he acted upon it times without number.

Of course, he lived very much in the imaginationto the point of hallucination sometimes when he read (as a child he could see, could watch, Captain Kidd; after he was 40, as a World War I soldier in France, he looked up from The Red Badge of Courage and saw around him on the battlefield soldiers dressed in blue, not khaki). He was also uncompet.i.tive, deeply un-self-confident; in fact, he showed as a child both the strengths and the weaknesses that would stay with him all his life. And, of course, he began in his cradle filling the capacious, wonderful and romantic memory that did him both service and disservice in his life and art.

Ford soon developed, as is well known, a tender susceptibility toward women and a deep need for them. At 21 he eloped with a 17-year-old girl, Elsie Martindale. When some years later he tried to persuade her to divorce him so that he could marry Violet Hunt, she would not, and the affair breaking into print made a scandal that left its scars on all involved. The long, exhausting and bitter ordeal (in telling which Mizener goes to equally exhaustive lengths) damaged Ford severely.

Violet was the oddest soul, a lady writer who was somewhat in vogue at the time. Henry James had called her his "Purple Patch," but when the scandal broke he had to write to detach himself from her acquaintance, signing himself, "Believe me, then, in very imperfect sympathy, . . ." Ford had humbly thanked Violet for loving him, but then he almost never saw the last of her. She liked to track down her predecessors in love and move in on them, and she moved in on Elsie; and she kept up with her own successor with Ford, Stella Bowen, by peeping at her through a fence. With Stella Bowen, who had warmth of heart and sanity of mind, Ford had a daughter, and a life in France, and a garden. His later, and last, strong alliance was with Janice Biala, and in this country (where he had moved) she seems to have offered him strength and comfort. They remained together for the rest of his life. The touching, almost never realized hope of Ford's relationships with women seems all the way through to have been for domestic peace"rest."

It is not surprising that from time to time Ford suffered with neurasthenia.

Page 165 What he usually did for it was to run over to Germany to see his Tante Emma, who was an advice giver. Other, more drastic, treatments were visited on him, too; almost none of them ever helped. "I live," he said during the first of these illnesses, "in a state of hourly apprehension of going mad."

Mr. Mizener sees Ford's illnesses as "a product of the destructive clash between his dreams of glory and the actualities of his existence." Whatever they are called, Ford survived them, as he survived emotional crises, financial troubles, and all the complications of his literary life. In the last, at any rate, he held for a long while a central place.

Ford wrote 81 books during his life, 32 of them novels. "These books were the purpose of his existence," says Mr. Mizener in his Foreword, "the one commitment of his life that nothingdisaster, illness, despairwas allowed to interfere with. They are the meaning of his life and its most valuable product. Some of them are important books; some are imperfect . . . some are failures. But every one of them shows something about a human imagination perhaps not radically different from other men's but made to seem so by being revealed to us in unusual detail by these books, and every one of them helps us to understand the process by which Ford slowly learned to reveal his imagination."

Thus the biography opens with promise of the kind of Criticism we would most wish to see. But this reader does not find its promise very well fulfilled.

Part of the trouble has to come from the writing. Mr. Mizener's is a rather coa.r.s.e-grained prose without the compensating liveliness that sympathy can sometimes give. This is a typical Mizener sentence: "Gradually during the winter of 191314, Ford succeeded in inventing a conception of himself and his motives that explained his recent conduct in a way that satisfied his imagination." He is referring to the writing of The Good Soldier. The heaviness in his own style seems always to show most when he comes up against Ford's imagination; it seems to burden him. "The right cadence," so central in Ford's style and in his own test of good writing, is lacking in his biographer. A good ear would have helped the biographer and critic of Ford almost as much as a deeper feeling for the man and his work: perhaps the two qualities are related. This calls insistent attention to itself, for situated in among the paragraphs of Mizener are the many quotations from Ford. To read while they alternate is like being carried in a train along the southern coast of Francelong tunnel, blinding view of the sea, and over again.

Mr. Mizener is fully able, by astute use of the rich help available to him, to present a good scene, and the book is full of them. There is, for example, Page 166 the one in which we see Ford and Conrad, their collaborative novel Romance finished, taking it up to London in the train, Conrad reading the proof down on his stomach on the floor because the train was jolting, so deeply absorbed that when Ford tapped him on the shoulder to tell him they had reached Charing Cross, "he sprang to his feet and straight at my throat."

And we see Wyndham Lewis, "in an immense steeple-crowned hat and an ample black cape of the type that villains in . . . melodramas throw over their shoulders when they say 'Ha-ha!'" appearing to Ford for the first time, having marched upstairs to find Ford in the bathroom taking a bath; producing "crumpled . . . rolls" of ma.n.u.script from all over his person as if he were a sleight-of-hand artist, he announced himself a genius and proceeded to read them aloud.

The extraordinarily large population that filled Ford's life is lively here, too; and not many are of an undemanding presence in their own right. The book is thronging with vivid personalities, by no means all of them Pre-Raphaelites; it has to concern itself with the literary great of three generations. I think Mr. Mizener has handled this surge of people very well. The trouble is that when he comes to the great rock in the middle of them, the heart of his work, Ford himself, his powers seem to weaken.

He is at his best on Ford as editor. In The English Review, "the most obvious measure of Ford's editorial skill is perhaps the fact that, even today, none of these writers except [two] needs identifying." Ford published James, Galsworthy, Hudson, Tolstoy, Wells, Conrad, Hardy, Pound, Yeats, Forster, Joyce. London took Ford to its bosom, to its clubs, even; and shouts could be heard going up from restaurant tables, "Hurray, Fordie's discovered another genius. Called D. H. Lawrence!" It was electrifying.

"If Ford's commitment to the highest standards together with his complete lack of business sense pretty well a.s.sured financial disaster," says Mr. Mizener, "that same commitment, with the support of his remarkable powers of selection, made it certain that as long as the Review survived it would be a great magazine."

But Ford's creative power, which I think must be Mr. Mizener's trouble, is something else. It was a mountain with many springs running through, sources he could tap at different times, at different levelssome near the surface, some deeper. The most profound was hidden until he reached the age of 40, its existence perhaps unsuspected until he wrote the novel The Good Soldier.

Page 167 To that Rosetta Stone of a novel Mr. Mizener gives full and earnest study, but he still seems to feel that the only safe way to approach the novel is with a dossier and a timetable and a firmly literal grip. It is, in fact, a dangerous way to approach The Good Soldier, full of traps.

Except for the timetable. It is interesting and useful (and how hard it must have been to make it!) as a parallel to the shifting times of the story. But Mr. Mizener's a.s.sumption that he must trace the characters to real people and by that means lay a finger on their fictional meaning has put him in trouble; to start with, he finds Ashburnham to be Ford's "Image of himself" and the narrator Dowell to be Ford and therefore his own author.

The fact is, Mr. Mizener never makes the essential leap of mind to discover the novel as a complete ent.i.ty, a world in itself and quite freed of its author.

Mr. Mizener refers to Ford's revolutionary and brilliantly developed technique as "the defensive air" he adopted "about factual inaccuracy that would eventually become a whole theory of literary art, which he would call 'impressionism.'" "Thus Ford sought to make a virtue out of his habit of representing his memories and impressions of an experience rather than the experience itself." Mr. Mizener's apparent unwillingness or inability to see further into Ford's greatest achievement seems to me a most serious defect.

I believe Mr. Mizener treats the construction of The Good Soldier as a riddle, and if he can't get the answer, he'd like to get the best of it. Another reader, with better content, might see the novel as a prism suspended by a thread and turning on it. Set in motionforward, backwardat the delicate control of the author, it turns its faces to us, and the present moment moves into time past or time future. In so doing, it constructs a pattern out of its own fractured light, reflections and shadows; they glance, criss-cross, pa.s.s through and modulate one another. Ford the Impressionist was breaking up human experience by his technique of the time shift in order to show the inner life of that experience, its essential mystery. The reader slowly learns the meaning of the novel from this pattern; we watch it being revealed.

But Mr. Mizener consistently treats the inventions of fiction as Ford's barefaced attempts to get away with something in his personal life by foisting these false versions upon the public. "This is the novel's improved version of Ford's involvement with Gertrud Schlabowsky," he says of The New Humpty Dumpty. In effect, he implies that all that's not "real life" is inferior to it, that fiction is at best secondhand life, that fiction is, in fact, not Page 168 honest, for it has been stolen from life and is capable of being returned to its original state by reliable critics.

Does Mr. Mizener not recognize Ford's subjects? Pain, going-to-pieces, loneliness, courage, honor, horror, hope, most of all, pa.s.sionand these are real life; they do not need Gertrud Schlabowsky's ident.i.ty to make them real.

When Mr. Mizener does admire, we know it only from a quote from somebody else. On Buckshee we hear from Robert Lowell: "In these reveries, Ford has at last managed to work his speaking voice, and something more than his speaking voice, into poemsthe inner voice of the tireless old man, the old master still in harness, confiding, tolerant, Bohemian, newlymarried, and in France." If only the biographer himself could ever give us an expression of feeling, something of his own! We are not sure, as it is, that he ever feels any more than he can say.

The biography is written entirely from the outside. The book is one whole, huge compilation of details from outside. And so it is voluminous without being generous, just as it is lengthy but short on tolerance. One original insight would have equalled the force of a dozen of these pages.

Ford's life was sad. The scandal over the divorce is pitiable and the more so because another time in history would have let it go by without a ripple. Ford was never lucky in his timing. But there was a worse scandal that was done to him, which no difference in times or manners could excuse. He came out of the war ga.s.sed and in troublehis memory itself was threatenedto find himself forgotten on the literary scene. He suffered neglect and indifference, even scorn; he was quite callously hurt by a number of people to whom he had been good and for whom he always bore the best will in the world.

Mr. Mizener has this to say of that time: "During Christmas week he came to London for a party at the French Emba.s.sy for the English writers who had supported France during the war . . . and no one recognized him. He had expected as much. 'It was seven years,' he said with superb impressionistic inaccuracy, 'since I had written a word.'"

This may serve to suggest why, in this reader's opinion, Mr. Mizener's biography is in some fundamental respects an antagonistic work. If affinity between biographer and subject is impossible, at the very least there had better be personal tolerance.

Ford's vulnerabilities, which were scaled to the rest of him, too large to miss, appear to have the fascination of guilty secrets for Mr. Mizener. Ford's Page 169 condescension, Ford's ''Tory gentleman" notions, Ford's overestimation of some of his work and his fantasies about his reputation, Ford's confusion in money matters, Ford's handwritingthey all exasperate him. The a.s.sertions of grandeur came, however, from a man of painfully little self-confidence, very often of none at all. Surely Mr. Mizener might see in this not the lie but the connection. I think it is hard, too, to accept his interpretation of Ford's innumerable acts of generosity as vanity, as he sometimes presents them.

By all accounts of those who knew him, Ford was a man of an exceedingly sweet nature, utterly without malice, bearing no thought of a grudge, an uncondemning man. All his life, when he heard that a friend was in trouble, he went. Sometimes it was at a risk to himself. He sat up with other people's sick children, he got out a book of a woman's poems when money was needed to pay her funeral expenses. When fire destroyed an installment of a novel Conrad had written for Blackwood's, Ford found him a house nearby and worked along with him day and night to write it all over again.

Ford's lifetime broached three generations of writers and readers who were affected by him and his work. He could remember, as a little boy of three in his grandfather's house, pulling out a chair for Mr. Turgenev, and toward the other end of his life the young Hemingway was pulling out his editorial chairand taking it. In between those timesand to a lesser extent up until his deathpractically every writer of serious substance in Britain or America moved through his life and gained from his mind and presence. How generously Ford offered both! There is no sign that he ever gave out of kindness. 137 Mr. Mizener calls Ford's life "The Saddest Story" because of what Ford might have done and didn't do. Ford did, undeniably, waste his gifts and fail to live up to his greatest powers. But it is, to say the least, unavailing to blame a manand the man who had done, in spite of this, so much for the cause of literaturefor what most certainly had to be a cause of pain and frustration to himself.

It has to be expected that a biographer who is unimaginative about a man's work will be unimaginative about his life, and vice versa; but if this is the saddest story, then, of all ways to write it, the unimaginative is the saddest way. Mr. Mizener, fairly, records in his Introduction that in the opinion of Janice Biala the book does Ford injustice.

At bottom, Mr. Mizener puts blame on Ford as a man who could never face me truth; and apparently, in one sense, that can fairly be said. But at the Page 170 same time, Mr. Mizener's truth of harsh fact is not Ford's truth. Ford said that the novelist "is a sensitized instrument, recording to the measure of the light vouchsafed him what iswhat may bethe Truth." Ford not only faced but found inner truths that confound such statements as Mr. Mizener's or show them to be beside the point of his fiction.

"An old man mad about writing." This brief self-portrait of Ford at the end of his life contains at once the soberest and the most inspiriting truth he could teach us.

The honor that is due him, I think this book pays in part. But a larger response is also due him; there are many who believe as this reader does that the response of love is the true and the right one.

Page 171 Words with Music By Lehman Engel Everything Writers and Composers of Musicals Need to Know:

New York Times Book Review 28 May 1972: 7, 10