All the Sad Clowns: On Francis Carco’s Novel “Perversity” Douglas Glover Love’s Betrayal, or the Perverse Inception of the Book I WAS READING my way through Jean Rhys recently when I came upon the curious fact that, early in her career, she had translated Francis Carco’s 1925 novel Perversité from French into English. Ford Madox Ford, Rhys’s mentor and lover (she was living with Ford and his wife Stella Bowen in Paris), had arranged the project as a way for her to earn money. She was impoverished; her husband was in prison for embezzlement — this was decades before her literary apotheosis with Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Yet inexplicably, when the book appeared, Ford was billed as the translator. Ford insisted this was a mistake on the part of the publisher, Pascal Covici, and that he had not intended to take the credit. But there has always been a suspicion that Ford and Covici colluded to suppress the unknown Rhys’s name in order to promote the book. The first edition flyleaf blurb reads: Ford Madox Ford is discriminating; he does not trade in glittering generalities. So, when he called Perversity a second Madame Bovary, he was not talking hokum. Of course, Mr. Ford is the translator and well — he may feel a bit indulgent. Not a bit of it! Indefatigable man of letters that he is, he ranged through modern French literature until he happened onto Perversity. “By Jove, this must be translated.” So he went to it, and at length wrought a translation as admirable in its way as his works of creation are in theirs. The whole thing was a mess. Ford protested. Perhaps out of guilt (he did have a disagreeable habit of patronizing young female writers in more ways than one), he quietly paid Rhys the money she was owed for the work when Covici failed to pony up. But the relationship between Ford and Rhys soured (not the least because Stella Bowen refused to relinquish Ford). Rhys’s first novel, Quartet (1928), fictionalized the sordid details. A taste for portraying sordid scenes and misogyny was something Carco and Rhys shared. There is a legend that, years later, Ford and Rhys met by chance in a Paris bistro: she walked up to his table and slapped him. This lurid anecdote has had a distracting effect on the book’s reputation, an effect only compounded by Perversity’s subsequent publishing history. The novel languished, little noticed, until revived by Avon Books as a mass market paperback in 1950, with a sultry and disheveled young woman leaning against a lamppost on the cover. (It is perhaps the only pulp fiction ever printed with a prominent pull quote from The Nation.) A few years later, Berkeley Books brought out another mass market edition, with yet another sultry young woman reclining on an unmade bed, cigarette in hand, wearing a black velvet choker and nylons with garter clasp showing (the blurb read: “A Strange