Ford Madox Ford [antikvár]

ONE here are also the rich in spirit. It overflows and is seen in everything they do. They are never mean, not even with money. In the 1930s, when Ford was hard up in Paris, a Georgian prince - every Georgian in Paris was a prince in those days - came to him and asked for some. Ford had never met the man before but let him have a cheque. The prince was outraged by the smallness of the sum and never visited Ford again, though he kept the cheque. It was for one half of the money Ford owned. He neither begrudged the money nor resented the prince's anger; by then he probably expected it. He had become ironic, as when, following one of the occasions when he was attacked in print, he responded by protesting that he had never done anything to help his attacker, had never given him money, had not arranged for his first book to be published - so why was he thus attacked? People were quite often rude about him, often the people he had helped. Hemingway was perhaps the most notorious and ungrateful example. He caricatured Ford cruelly and said he smelt. Others said he didn't. Whether he did or not, it's a curious way to criticise a writer. Ford was almost never rude about anyone. As a kind of Catholic, or agnostic, or Catholic-agnostic - what he would have said would have depended upon his audience and when he was speaking - Ford would almost certainly have known Ignatius Loyola's 'Teach us to give and not to count the cost.' He never made the mistake of preaching it, but that was how he lived. He said of his immediate ancestors and the Victorian figures of his childhood: 'They had their passions, their extravagances, their imprudencies, their follies. They were sometimes unjust, violent, unthinking. But they were never cold, they were never mean.