'Live Merrily and Trust to Good Letters'

“He never defended himself and he did very little complaining. He loved to quote Dr. Johnson, who said, ‘Live merrily and trust to good letters.’”

Excellent advice, though I’m unable to locate its source. Given that Janice Biala is quoting her former lover, Ford Madox Ford, who valued impressions over facts and memory over documentation, it’s hardly a surprise. It sounds like something Johnson might have said, though he indisputably did say, “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.” Biala’s brief memoir of Ford, written in 1961, is collected in The Presence of Ford Madox Ford: A Memorial Volume of Essays, Poems, and Memoirs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), edited by Sondra J. Stang. Biala writes:

“I cannot remember any time when Ford admitted defeat or gave in to despair. As far as he was concerned the artist’s life was the only one work living. You do what you like and take what you get for it and no complaints, and that is how he lived his life.”

How refreshing to read in our era of subsidies, grants and workshops. One recalls Kingsley Amis’s observation in Jake’s Thing (1978): “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the war, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.” Writing is a person alone in a room with the English language, to paraphrase John Berryman. Biala continues:

“It was rare when good letters brought him in an income equal that of a street cleaner—but then he boasted that every member of his family died poorer than he’d been when he was born. The most important thing about Ford was that he was an artist. He had infinite indulgence for anything human except cruelty and stupidity. He was himself intensely human in his faults as well as his virtues.”

[Biala (1903-2000) was a fine painter. Go here to see her “Portrait of a Writer (Ford Madox Ford),” painted in 1938, the year of Ford’s death.]