MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES ON FORD AND VIOLET HUNT

Susan Lowndes Marques

Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) was a prolific author of ‘why- dunnits’, penning Hitchcock’s first film, The Lodger and less famously creating the character Hercules Perot, a French detective supporting a strong accent, with a penchant for solving murders in the English upper middle classes.1 She was also the sister of the controversial Catholic poet, Hilaire Belloc. However, Marie Belloc Lowndes is, and should be, best remembered as a unique and singularly well positioned memoirist of her age.2 Four volumes3 of her memoirs were published in the early forties, and a selection of letters and diaries in 1971. An enormous number of her letters have also been published in selections of many correspondents – Henry James, Phillip Sassoon, Osbert Sitwell, Katherine Mansfield, Edward Grey, H. H. Asquith – to name but a few. In spite of this, the bulk of her letters are as yet unpublished. Together with these letters and diaries are a vast amount of articles written on specific topics. These vary from cultural and travel pieces to short stories, but the large majority of the material consists of biographical sketches. One such example is this piece about Ford Madox Ford. Marie Belloc Lowndes was tirelessly social and enjoyed meeting and mixing with people from all walks of life. She was, of course, particularly interested in writers, and would seek introductions to the youngest, least prominent as well as the firmly established. These writings also crossed borders, especially in the early part of her journalistic career, when her frequent visits to Paris yielded interviews with the great masters of nineteenth-century French literature. What characterized her work, both fiction and non-fiction, was a deep concern with people’s private lives, especially affairs of the heart. She was unquestionably a gossip, but gossip often leads one to details that might never otherwise be discovered.4 It may also be true that gossip is of dubious truth-value, as seems to be the case with some of the claims she makes in her piece on Ford. What is interesting, in my 96 SUSAN LOWNDES MARQUES view, is even if all the information is not accurate, it perhaps provides an insight into what people thought of the person in question at the time. A gossip does not necessarily invent information, but may merely reproduce what she or he has heard, without confirming its provenance or veracity. Marie Belloc Lowndes met Ford through Violent Hunt. Her earliest reference to Ford is in a diary entry on December 2nd, 1911, when the couple made their first appearance as ‘bride and bridegroom’ at a dinner party she attended; though, as her reminiscences of them show, she had met him at least two years earlier.5 She must have met with both of them regularly at various social occasions, although I get the impression she was never particularly close to either Ford or Hunt. Indeed she profoundly disagreed with Hunt’s version of Lizzie Siddall’s death in The Wife of Rossetti (1931). The following type- script, published here for the first time, was written after the Second World War; and she died in 1947, so it must date from 1945-47.

Ford Madox Hueffer was not only a remarkable writer, he was a fine historical novelist, and it is to me surprising when I read accounts of the novelists of his day, to find no mention of The Fifth Queen and The Fifth Queen Crowned. For years I never went up Whitehall, without remembering certain passages of these two books. They give a more vivid picture of the London of Henry the Eighth than any novel I have ever read. On the declaration of war in 1914 Ford Madox Hueffer immediately joined the Army, to the anguished distress of Violet Hunt. Though his good knowledge of German would have been of great value to the British Staff, no one seems to have thought of utilizing it.6 Also it must be admitted he would have found it difficult to have found respectable sponsors. In those days that fact counted for much. To me there was something repugnant in Ford Madox Hueffer’s personality. He was fat, and stuffy looking, but he must have had a considerable attraction for women. This was proved by the fact that after he had parted from Violet Hunt, and settled in Paris, a charming woman became attached to him.7 After a while he went to America, and settled in New York, there also he found a woman of means who called herself his wife.8 Years after his death I received a letter in which the writer informed me that she was Ford Madox Hueffer’s widow, and asked if she could come and see me – when we met she had evidently been devoted to him, and believed the ceremony of marriage they had gone through, I think, in Paris, had made her his wife.9 At that time it was within my knowledge that though he had never been divorced he had gone through the ceremony of marriage with two other women.10 Ford Madox Hueffer was brilliantly clever, and had he possessed character be might have become very famous. There must have been a strong prejudice against Ford Madox Hueffer in the London literary world, for it is a singular fact that I never met him except