‘PRETTY BIG AND SERIOUS’: AND THE YOUNG LOVELL

Paul Skinner

Introduction There is a peculiar fascination about the work that borders – chrono- logically and sometimes thematically – on an acknowledged master- piece. The Marsden Case, Ford’s 1923 novel, touches on many of the themes of Some Do Not . . . and preceded it by less than a year, while, just before , there was – exactly one hundred years ago – The Young Lovell.1 From his hotel in St. Rémy-de-Provence in March 1913, Ford wrote to his agent, James Pinker: ‘Let me whisper into your secretive ear that the novel I am now writing is going to be one of the great historical novels of the world; no doubt you will let that fact be reflected in the contract that I understand you to be making for me’.2 And, again to Pinker, two weeks later:

The title of the book is, for the time being, ‘The Young Lovell’, a of the Borders. The date is towards the end of the XVth Century, running up to the beginnings of the Reformation, though it isn’t in that sense concerned with religion. The action takes place in Northumberland and the story contains any number of things concerning ‘The Percy out of Northum- berland’, the Bishops Palatine of Durham, the besieging of castles, border raids, and so on with what is called ‘a strong element of the supernatural’ and a vigorous love interest. This is rather putting the matter in terms of advertisement, but the book will be, when it is done, a pretty big and serious historical work, rather like ‘The Fifth Queen’, but, in a sense, more romantic. I don’t want to let it go to just any publisher, because, if it is anything at all, it is really literature and I have spread myself enormously over it, but of course I leave that to your discretion.3

The Young Lovell has provoked an extraordinary diversity of critical responses, ranging from ‘one of Ford’s most beautiful novels’ (Max Saunders) and ‘the key to Ford’s life work’ (Caroline Gordon) to ‘a thin and tedious pastiche of [Maurice] Hewlett’ (Samuel Hynes), a book that ‘appears to be a romance for juveniles’ (Paul Wiley).4 238 PAUL SKINNER

Set in 1486, it relates the enchantment by a goddess of ‘a young lording that should be made a knight upon the morrow’,5 who, awakening from that trance three months later, finds his castle, lands and intended bride taken from him through his half-brother’s decep- tion. Though he does succeed in recapturing his castle, it is the ordinary, ‘real’ world that has now become dream to him and he ends his physical life as a hermit, bricked up in a filthy alcove while, in spirit, he sports and courts in the paradisal fields where the goddess has her realm. Subtitled, like several others among Ford’s novels, ‘A Romance’, The Young Lovell uses as epigraph this from a ‘Border Ballad’:

When they were come to Hutton Ha’ They ride that proper place about, But the laird he was the wiser man, For he had left nae gear about.

The ballad is ‘Dick of the Cow’,6 yet the main significance of Ford’s choice is less to do with the tale itself than with the nature of both borders and ballads. Fifteen years later, he would use another such ballad, ‘Rookhope Ryde’, as epigraph to Last Post, also a novel of borders. If the Edwardian period, the Edwardian novel and Ford himself can fairly be termed ‘transitional’, occupying that troubling and de- ceptive terrain between the Victorian and the modern, this also applies to The Young Lovell, doubly so. It is, to a remarkable extent, a novel of transitions and borders and boundaries, of bodily and psychological changes, of doubled vision and states of mind. Max Saunders lists Lovell among the several Fordian protagonists who are ‘on the verge of madness’, such as Mr. Sorrell (in Ladies Whose Bright Eyes), who is ‘touched by visions he cannot forget’ (Saunders I, 309). ‘On the verge of madness’ is certainly applicable not only to Lovell – and, plausibly, to Ford during the novel’s writing – but to the book itself and to the period in which it was written. And how historical is this romance? There was indeed a Lord Lovell who supported Richard III (though not a Young Lovell, since Francis Lovell was childless). In William Collingbourne’s famous couplet (which cost him his life):