WAR AND THE ARTS: JAMES, WELLS AND FORD

Abstract

All life . . . comes back to the question of our speech, the medium through which we communicate with each other; for all life comes back to the question of our relations with each other.- Henry James, The Question of Our Speech (1905)Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live. . . .- Henry James to Clare Sheridan, 30 May 1915Ford Madox Ford increasingly spent his time amongst American writers and artists. But the writer from whom he learned most about America, and the American writer whom he had known longest, and whose work made the deepest impression on him, was Henry James. It was the Great War that especially put the relationship between art and nationality into question for Ford, James and their circle.When Henry James wrote about visiting the 'long wards' of hospitals holding British and Belgian soldiers wounded in the war, he began by recalling those who fought and were wounded in the American Civil War. His knowledge of them was intimate because his younger brothers Robertson and Wilky were of their number. He himself, already in his seventies, was called to action in the First World War and became in the 1910s what he said Walt Whitman was in the 1860s: 'a constant, a permitted and encouraged familiar of the great hospitals'. The good Walt . . . sounds a note of native feeling, pity and horror and helplessness, that is like the wail of a mother for her mangled young'. Many of James's friends were among the mangled young, the poet Rupert Brooke notably among them. Following in Whitman's steps, James became a familiar of hospitals as well as of soldiers whom he met on the street, giving them not only encouragement but also whatever money he could spare. He accepted the honorary presidency of the American Volunteer Motor- Ambulance Corps, soliciting funds and material for it by a letter to newspapers.4 The Corps was composed of American citizens living in France who converted their cars into ambulances and personally drove them to the front to transport wounded soldiers to hospital, to determine the names of the missing and dead, and to transport families threatened by the enemy to places of safety. This is the American Henry James whom Ford Madox Ford set in the Puritan tradition of moral responsibility5 and the James whom fellow-American and fellow-expatriate Ezra Pound dubbed always and everywhere a 'hater of tyranny'.6 This is the James whom Ford and Pound said gave the greatest service to the Republic by dramatizing the actual conditions of human existence: 'an unbiased picture of the world we live in'. In short, James was a formidable antagonist to anyone who thought him quite simply one of the cultural elite. His powerful essay The Long Wards' answers that charge this way: ? believe in Culture - speaking strictly now of the honest and of our own congruous kind' (WR 119). And that honesty and congruity lay in 'the thickest mantle of heroic history' (WR 98). That culture produced not only the soldiers of the Civil War but also those of the Great War whom James visited indefatigably in the long wards. This martial mettle resided in the literary James too - the James who believed that all 'Life is, in fact, a battle'8 - who when attacked counterattacked decisively.Such an attack came almost a year after war broke out in August 1914 between the Allies and the Central Powers when H. G. Wells confronted James on the literary front. France was the object of attack and defense in both the military and literary campaigns. For Kaiser Wilhelm II, France was the cultural capital of Europe and looked down upon Germany. For H. G. Wells, France threatened England because Henry James promoted a French aesthetic in English fiction. So just as the Kaiser sought to conquer and humiliate France, Wells sought to conquer and humiliate James, an American, as well as Ford Madox Ford, an Anglo-German, who were stigmatized as 'a ring of foreign conspirators', that, under the influence of French fiction, plotted to overthrow the classic English novel. …