'At the Center of Our Mediterranean Civilization'

My youngest son, age twenty-one, is spending much of his summer in Paris as part of a university study program. He’ll be a senior in the fall. I first visited Paris (and Europe) in 1973, age twenty, and stayed in a hotel on the Rue de Maubeuge, 10th arrondissement. Headlines in the French newspapers that summer were devoted to Watergate and Liz-and-Dick shenanigans. I fell for the country and never experienced the much-ballyhooed (in the U.S.) snobbery of the French. My father, a veteran of the war in Europe, detested France and the French, especially Charles de Gaulle, judging them effete, treacherous and cowardly. How could I feel that way about the country that gave us Pasteur and Proust? 

Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) was called by his friend the publisher John Rodker “the great French novel in English,” which has been repeated many times and is probably true. Ford was introduced to French and French culture by his father while still a boy. In 1915 at age forty-two, Ford enlisted in the Welch Regiment. A year later, twelve days after the start of the battle, he was sent to the Somme in northeastern France in time for the bloodiest one-day engagement in English military history. Ford was blown into the air by a German shell, suffered memory and hearing loss and for three weeks remained incapacitated. Much of his  greatest work, the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-28), is necessarily set in France, as its hero, Christopher Tietjens, serves as an officer in the British Army, as did his creator.

 

Ford lived in France, in Paris and Provence, throughout the nineteen-twenties. In one of my favorites among his books, the nonfiction Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine (1935), Ford writes: “There are in this world only two earthly Paradises . . . Provence . . . and the Reading Room of the British Museum.”

 

In the first issue of The Kenyon Review, in 1939, annus horribilis, Ford published one of his final works, an essay titled “A Paris Letter.” It begins:

 

“There is one spot in Paris -- it is in the center of a foot-bridge -- that you must visit before the freedom and rest of the City can confer themselves on you. So that you might imagine one would run there straight from the Gare St. Lazare. One never does. One has first to find out if this city stands where, sempiternally, she has always done, at the center of our Mediterranean civilization, as the eternal elder sister of her northern brothers.”

 

Perhaps my experience was eccentric but in Paris I always felt the proximity of the past. So did Ford:

 

“No, you must not say what Sterne said. They do not manage such affairs better in  France because they do not manage them at all anywhere else. That is the saddest comment on our – surrounding -- civilizations. We burn publicly the works of Heine, but we cannot afford the time or money to put a national bunch of primroses on the tombs of Shakespeare or Henry James, that other greatest Briton, on their birthdays.”

 

Ford alludes to the opening sentence of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1786): “They order, said I, this matter better in France.” Ford died in Deauville, France on June 26, 1939, one year and four days before the country surrendered to the Germans.