‘Ford Madox Ford: Autobiography, Urban Space, Agoraphobia’

Abstract

Some time in late 1898 or early 1899 Ford Madox Ford came across Emile Zola seated on a bench in Hyde Park. Ford, still in his mid-twenties, was already a published biographer, novelist and poet. Zola, who died in 1902, was in his late fifties. He had fled to London after being convicted of criminal libel for his role in the Dreyfus Affair and sentenced to prison. On Zola‟s previous visit to the city, in September 1893, he had been positively feted: “The Lord Mayor received him at the Guildhall; an elaborate firework display illuminated his portrait in the sky above the Crystal Palace; and editors and writers hosted soirees in his honour” (Cummins 130). At one point, he was conducted on a gruesome tour of the scenes of Jack the Ripper‟s crimes in Whitechapel. “As to London, which I visited for the first time,” he told the Guardian on his return to Paris on that occasion, “the big city made an indelible impression on my mind. Its beauty is not in its monuments, but in its immensity; the colossal character of its quays and bridge, to which ours are as toys” (“Emile Zola Interviewed”). This time, exiled from his homeland, the city‟s immensity did not have the same exhilarating effect on him. He arrived at Victoria Station, with almost no possessions, in July 1898. Soon after he left London on a series of “suburban peregrinations” that his friends insisted would help him “achieve total obscurity” (Brown 752). He spent an anxious few months in England, sporadically afflicted by nervous seizures. Ford recalls the occasion on which he happened upon Zola in Hyde Park in his autobiographical memoir, Return to Yesterday (1931). There he records that Zola “had been gazing gloomily at the ground and poking the sand with the end of his cane” (Return 214). “No gloom could have ever been greater than his,” he adds in a drily melancholic tone (Return 214). According to Ford, Zola listlessly complained that on the ground beside the bench, in the course of the morning, he had found as many as eighteen hairpins carelessly dropped by negligent nursemaids: “A city so improvident must be doomed” (Return 214). Ford, who appears to relish the precision of the number eighteen, implies that this behaviour is positively compulsive. “He had, at any rate during that stay in London, many phobias,” he continues (Return 214). Ford then proceeds to describe another occasion, presumably at about this time, when a mutual acquaintance asked him to convey Zola to some address in a hansom cab. Zola scarcely spoke during the journey, on the assumption that Ford could not speak French. “But eventually I found that he was counting the numbers of the registration plates of the cabs that were in front of us,” Ford notes: