Ford Madox Ford: Autobiography, Urban Space, Agoraphobia’

摘要

Some time in late 1898 or early 1899 Ford Madox Ford came across émile Zola seated on a bench in Hyde Park. Ford, still in his mid-twenties, was already a published biographer, novelist and poet. Zola, who died in 1902, was in his late fifties. He had fled to London after being convicted of criminal libel for his role in the Dreyfus Affair and sentenced to prison. On Zola.s previous visit to the city, in September 1893, he had been positively feted: "The Lord Mayor received him at the Guildhall; an elaborate firework display illuminated his portrait in the sky above the Crystal Palace; and editors and writers hosted soirées in his honour" (Cummins 130). At one point, he was conducted on a gruesome tour of the scenes of Jack the Ripper.s crimes in Whitechapel. "As to London, which I visited for the first time," he told the Guardian on his return to Paris on that occasion, "the big city made an indelible impression on my mind. Its beauty is not in its monuments, but in its immensity; the colossal character of its quays and bridge, to which ours are as toys" ("Emile Zola Interviewed"). This time, exiled from his homeland, the city.s immensity did not have the same exhilarating effect on him. He arrived at Victoria Station, with almost no possessions, in July 1898. Soon after he left London on a series of "suburban peregrinations" that his friends insisted would help him "achieve total obscurity" (Brown 752). He spent an anxious few months in England, sporadically afflicted by nervous seizures