A reading of Some Do Not ... does not leave me with a similar affection for its author. I cannot escape the feeling that Mr. Ford takes that book hard! hard! and that in it he set out to write a masterpiece.
To begin with, there is the style. We have often been told that Mr. Ford is a master of style; and so, in truth, he is. But of what use is style all alone by itself? The style of Some Do Not ... is the grand style, simple, sonorous, purged of affectation, well suited to such a novel as War and Peace; but it is not the right style for Some Do Not.... Indeed, in my opinion, no style is the right style for that novel. Some Do Not ... has for me all the defects of the literature of sophistication, with none of its virtues. It is false and pretends to be true; it is artificial without being witty; it is romance without glamour; it is essentially literary; it is without any more sense of humour than that required to keep it from becoming ridiculous; it has not a touch of spontaneity; it is as dreary as it is well done.
In a negative way the thing is perfect—ever and ever so careful. Mr. Ford introduces an incredible Irish priest by saying that he ‘had a brogue such as is seldom heard outside old-fashioned English novels of Irish life’—thereby protecting himself from the start; he would have been incapable of writing ‘across the breast of her dark dress’; and it goes without saying that in his creditably meagre use of foreign words he adopts none of the original spellings that star Mr. Arlen’s romance (aristocracie, giggolo, and the like). Mr. Ford’s prose is compact, sober, and restrained. But, since this is true, it becomes the more important to discover what it is all about.
I am unable at present to obtain a copy of If Winter Comes (one of the advantages that I neglected to chronicle in the essay on Living Abroad); but I am struck by the similarity between the plot of Mr. Hutchinson’s novel, as I remember it, and that of Some Do Not ... Mark Something-or-Other was a man whom the world in general regarded with indifference as a failure, and for whose excellent work somebody else was always getting the credit, but whom a few really fine spirits reverenced. So was Christopher Tietjens. Each was unhappily married, though (If Winter Comes not being a sophisticated novel) Mark’s wife was merely stodgy and insensitive to her husband’s whimsical sweetness (bless her heart! she had all my sympathy), while Christopher’s Sylvia was—oh, dear me! Each hero loved another lady, really appreciative and good, who was eager to sacrifice, in Mark’s case her husband (unappreciative devil he was, too!), in Christopher’s her virginity. Each hero refused the gift. (‘Some do not’ ... do that kind of thing). In neither case did the hero’s wife—or any one else except those few fine spirits—believe in the refusal. Each, instead of getting himself profitably embusqué, slipped off unassumingly to the war and was badly hurt. Each slipped back home again to take up modestly and wearily the old round—a good deal hampered in this by all those embusqués who had pushed ahead in the meantime. Each, for no obvious reason, became a social pariah, was slandered and fairly hounded by the world in general—but not, of course, in the sophisticated novel, to the point of general hysterics reached in If Winter Comes. The endings, naturally, are different. Mark’s wife divorces him, the other lady’s husband is conveniently killed in France, and the lovers are felicitously united; Christopher Tietjens’ wife does not divorce him, he will not become Valentine’s clandestine lover, and he slips off again, even more unassumingly than before, to the war—presumably to be killed.
Here, as unmistakably as in The Green Hat, we have the artificial stuff of melodrama. Hardly, since Richardson’s Pamela, has such feverish importance as in Some Do Not ... been attached to the question of whether a man and a woman will or will not have sexual relations. The last two hundred pages of the book are virtually devoted to this problem, and to its answer—‘Some do not.’ Personally, I didn’t care in the least. Let them, if they wanted to, or not, only, for heaven’s sake, let them and every one else stop talking about it! What possible difference could it make to me?
I am aware that I have written about Mr. Ford’s novel in an insufficiently cool manner; but the truth is (as you may have guessed) that the book exasperates me. All this cheap sensationalism masquerading as a serious study of life! If Winter Comes was atrocious, but it was too silly to be excessively annoying. By the time one reached the piled-up anguish of the court-room scene one was in the best of spirits. But Some Do Not ... is too carefully done to be silly. Its material is that of any ten-twenty-thirty melodrama; but its style is that of Madame Bovary. It arouses the same distaste as in the fairy-tale the vulgar servant wench who had dressed herself up as the princess.
Even so, I have perhaps not accounted adequately for my conviction that Some Do Not ... is fundamentally false. The stuff of melodrama sometimes is the stuff of life, as it is sufficient to read the daily press to discover; and occasionally a great genius builds up truth out of just such material. He does this, of course, by creating real characters. Once a character comes alive, the most improbable things may happen to him, and no one cares—or doubts them. But Mr. Ford is not a genius, and his characters are not real. He describes them neatly and pungently; he even visualises them for us, until they stand out as sharply as the waxwork figures at Madame Tussaud’s. But that is the end of it. They will not come to life. And even if Mr. Ford were the genius that he is not, they could not come to life in that stifling atmosphere of sophistication, where effect is everything and one eye is always on an audience. But then, if Mr. Ford were a genius he would not give us that atmosphere; he would have something too important to say to trouble with anything so small, superficial and glittering as sophistication.
The truth about the literature of sophistication is, I think, that, since it is at bottom a form of showing off, it can have no dealings with truth. In his choice of material the sophisticated writer selects what is false—not, like that occasional genius, for some other reason than its falsity, or for no reason at all, but precisely because it is false, and therefore sure of an easy effect. There is tawdriness in this, of course. I wonder whether there is not a trace of still another quality. Children especially delight in showing off. Can it be that there is something a little ingenuous in sophistication?
MEDITATIONS ABOUT WOMEN
It is doubtless wrong for any except the very young to make generalizations, because nobody else believes in them—least of all in the ones he himself makes. But it is great fun, and, paradoxically, the fun increases in direct proportion to the maker’s disbelief, I suppose because his generalizations thus tend more and more to become light-hearted taunts flung, dustwise, in the face of a chaotic universe. Byron enjoyed defying God, which indicated that he had a God to defy; your modern sceptic thumbs his nose at emptiness, which is at least as brave of him. And of all generalizations that such a man can make those about women are the most entertaining to him. For, having by his time of life discovered that, save for a small matter of physical formation, women are almost precisely like men, it becomes for him the more amusing to unearth or invent differences explaining that ‘almost,’ and to magnify them and build them up into something artistic that would be a beautiful explanation of life—if life were only like that. Thus, I do not believe in any of the generalizations that follow, but I think it would be quite pleasant if they were true.