A Moveable Feast
How Ford appears in its pages: Editor of the transatlantic review, encountered over an evening at the Closerie des Lilas spent 'cutting' the wrong man.
Editor of the transatlantic review, encountered over an evening at the Closerie des Lilas spent 'cutting' the wrong man.
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeFord arrives at the Closerie des Lilas like weather — large, wheezing, and impossible to ignore. He is the editor of the transatlantic review, a genuine link to the Victorian greats, and the employer who has the narrator reading manuscripts for him. The book's comic centerpiece has Ford loftily explaining the English art of 'cutting' — refusing to acknowledge — a bounder who has just passed their table.
What Ford wants is to be a gentleman among gentlemen while running the era's most important little magazine, and the memoir finds the gap between the two ambitions endlessly funny. The portrait has sharp elbows — Hemingway holds his breath against the man's nearness even while cashing his checks — but the debt is on the record: Ford serialized him early, when it counted.
How the book draws them
- The bulkUpright, heavy, and well tailored — the book compares him to a barrel stood on end in good clothes, breathing hard through a stained mustache.
- Up closeThe narrator spends the chapter maneuvering to stay upwind; proximity to Ford is one of its running jokes.
- The grand mannerInstruction delivered from a great height, backed by a memory the book treats as majestic and unreliable in equal measure.
- The taxonomyA complete classification of who may count as a gentleman, delivered with total confidence: a gentleman always cuts a cad, could never have known a bounder, and Ezra — being American — is disqualified at the border. The narrator's own eligibility is left carefully unresolved.
- The arrivalHe descends on the café table uninvited and settles in like an institution — the quiet evening at the Lilas reorganizes itself around him, and stays reorganized.
- The soiréesHe extends an invitation to his weekly literary evenings, held at a bal musette on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine — a dance hall the narrator knows rather better than Ford does, having lived above it.
At a glance
- 'Ford' — editor of the transatlantic review
- 'Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's Disciple,' at the Closerie des Lilas
- Ford Madox Ford (born Ford Hermann Hueffer) · 1873–1939 · Merton, Surrey, England
The chapter's punchline: the man Ford ostentatiously cuts as the bounder Hilaire Belloc turns out, on inquiry, to be Aleister Crowley — the occultist styled 'the wickedest man in the world.' Ford has cut the wrong notorious Englishman, and the anecdote quietly makes the case that his grand manner and his accuracy were rarely in the same room.
Ford died at Deauville in 1939, having spent his last years teaching and still discovering writers. The younger generation he published repaid him unevenly in print — this chapter is Exhibit A — but Parade's End and The Good Soldier outlasted every cut, and modern readers of the memoir generally note that Hemingway owed Ford considerably more than the portrait admits.
