FORD MADOX FORD WRITES OF PROVENCE

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 154, 25 March 1939, Page 2 (Supplement)

FORD MADOX FORD WRITES OF PROVENCE

Brilliant And Stimulating Work “Provence,” From Minstrels to the Machine, by Ford Madox Ford (London, Allen and L'nwin). Il seems quive wrong when Mr. Ford speaks of looking back 40 years—the young cannot look back 40 years and all who know Mr, Ford’s work know also that his pen holds the secret of perennial youth. It is jarring for him to speak of dates in the last century. How have his tire and vigour persisted thus? He would probably aver with many vehement digressions that it is his Provencal philosophy, the philosophy of a people who live close to the earth, who do the primitive fundamental things of life with their own hands till their own' lields, grow tlieir own grapes, press their own wine—a people frugal, benevolent, tranquil. Just as in bis book, “Provence,” Mr. Ford returns from all his sparkling digressions—bis excursions to London galleries and Paris restaurants to speak of Provence, its past troubadours and its present bull-fights, so in real life he says be returns to Provence whenever depression stays with him too long. , , ••Somewhere between Vienna and Valence the South begins,” he writes, "somewhere between Valence and Moutelimar .. . Eden! The lilione having those towns on her banks runs due south from Lyons to the Mediterranean. Au nothing will persuade me to believe that when man in contagious madess left those regions for the North that was not the real Fall, and what Eve ate sinfully was not an apple but a dish of brussels sprouts boiled in water that lacked the salt of the Mediterranean. Let that at least serve tor a symbol.” This book, "Provence,” is really a digression in lighter vein of "The Great Trade iioute,” which travelled the road of the ancients from Cathay up the Phone Valley, down the Seine to Ottery St. Mary. The word digression is inevitable in reviewing Mr. Ford’s books. His departures from the thread of his chosen theme are more full of enlightenment and entertainment- —of more importance to the reader than the theme itself. He starts a story and then discourses about the history of Provence from 125 B.C. and the British preference for barbaric pale pink roast beef, about the New Dispensation and the poetry of the trouba-

dours. It is all brilliant, provocative, daring. The readei* staggers or leaps according to his temperament, .more than a little intoxicated by his heady literary fare. There is much erudition and much useful present-day philosophy. Mr. Ford has the poetry of the troubadours at his finger-tips; he reconstructs the scenes of the Courts of Love. He finds in the present characteristics of the Provencals many traits handed down perhaps from the Romans who occupied the province before they invaded Britain. From a different point of view he is almost as interested in bullfights as Mr. Hemingway. He appreciates everj r aspect of Provencal life, yet remains very much alive to the pervading spirit of unrest in Europe today, and altogether has written a most stimulating work, though perhaps a little over the head of the reader whose staple literary diet is the more usual, less imaginative book of travel.