Hem and Fordie
Ford had committed the unpardonable sin of helping Hemingway by publishing him in the influential Transatlantic Review which he, Ford, edited. At that time his stories were rejected elsewhere.
The section in ‘Feast’ is a disquisition on cutting. Whom might a gentleman cut? A gentleman will always cut a cad etc.
When one analyses Ford’s work it is clear that Hem is being wound up like a long case clock. cf. post supra: In the Last Post(from the tetralogy Parade’s End) the fear of Sylvia Tietjens is that she will be cut by her estranged husband Christopher.
That she had hitherto never dared. From a social point of view it would have been outrageous, but she was prepared to chance that. She was sure enough of her place in Society, and if people will excuse a man’s leaving his wife, they will excuse the wife’s making at least one or two demonstrations that are a bit thick. But she had simply not dared to meet Christopher: he might cut her.
Perhaps he would not. He was a gentleman and gentlemen do not actually cut women with whom they have slept. . . . But he might. . . . She might go down there, and in a dim, low room be making some sort of stipulation — God knew what, the first that came into her head — to Valentine. You can always make up some sort of reason for approaching the woman who has supplanted you. But he might come in, mooning in, and suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy — oh, adorable — face of stone.
That was what you would not dare to face. That would be death. She could imagine him going out of the room, rolling his shoulders. Leaving the whole establishment indifferently to her,
— closing only himself in invisible bonds — denied to her by the angel with the flaming sword! . . . That was what he would do. And that before the other woman. He had come once very near it, and she had hardly recovered from it.
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