Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel, The Good Soldier, opens with one of the most arresting first sentences in twentieth-century fiction: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” The paragraph that follows, however, almost immediately undercuts it with a series of irresolute, contradictory statements:
We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy—or rather, with an acquaintance as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.
Notice the narrator’s confiding tone as he seesaws between declaration and denial, past impression and later knowledge. Phrases like “or rather,” “and yet,” and “in another sense” suggest dithering confusion and uncertainty, while the assertion of “extreme intimacy” is refuted by the conclusion that the narrator—he is an American named John Dowell—and his wife really knew nothing at all of the Ashburnhams. This turns out to be only partially true: Florence Dowell knew Edward and Leonora Ashburnham very well indeed.
As one reads on, it grows clear that this fretful, Prufrockian narrator is suffering from emotional strain and exhaustion. Nonetheless, there are hints that his hesitation and backtracking aren’t entirely the result of some overwhelming psychological trauma. Could Dowell, in truth, be subtly controlling the narrative for reasons that escape us? He hasn’t simply heard about this sad story; he witnessed it, played a significant part in it. Consider how casually, almost parenthetically, we soon learn that Dowell’s wife and Captain Ashburnham are both dead and that something terrible has befallen an as yet unidentified girl.
So much for suspense, you might think. But what might seem inept spoilers actually signal Ford’s almost show-offy confidence in his storytelling skill: Look, he seems to be saying, even when you know what will happen to these characters, I’ll keep you turning the pages. In fact the narrative’s grip will grow increasingly tighter as one short, sharp shock follows another. Ford learned this technique from Joseph Conrad. “If you read Conrad sentence by sentence with minute care,” he wrote, “you will see that each sentence is a mosaic of little crepitations of surprise and that practically every paragraph contains its little jolt.” In this case, Ford ramps up those little jolts into seismic events until the very ground we stand on rocks beneath our feet, then gives way.
But first we need to be better acquainted with these two odd couples. Because Florence and the captain both suffer from “heart” trouble, the Dowells and Ashburnhams regularly visit the German health spa of Nauheim. The two wives are both around thirty, give or take a year or two, and the men slightly older. The Dowells are expatriate Americans, Protestant, leisured, and comfortably well off. Captain Ashburnham is English, Anglican, and a decorated soldier, as well as a conscientious landowner who takes seriously his responsibilities to his tenants. The captain’s wife is Irish, Catholic, and careful about money, partly to counter what she sees as her generous husband’s financial extravagance. Both couples pass as model examples of their respective national types.
In short order, however, suspicion leads to conviction that this presentation of Edwardian gentility and the douceur de vivre of spa life masks a Southern Gothic reality of erotic turmoil. As the guileless—or guileful?—Dowell proceeds with his story, we are treated to multiple betrayals, gallows humor, religious zealotry, brutal heartbreak, and eventual madness, not to discount strong hints of sexual impotence, homosexual impulses, and possible incest. No wonder that each of the novel’s characters, at one point or another, yearns for a little peace.
Above all, though, Ford almost brazenly contrives to keep every element in the narrative flickeringly uncertain, labile, open to multiple interpretations. As he declared in a 1914 essay written when he was at work on The Good Soldier:
In a rightly constructed novel every word is a preparation for the final effect, but there are many words, and, since it is the function of art to conceal the artifice, many of the words will possibly be misleading.
“Conceal” and “mislead” are the operating terms of The Good Soldier. What energizes the novel isn’t what we know about its characters but, tantalizingly, what we don’t know and may never know.
In truth, for relentless and layered tricksiness, only Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire can rival The Good Soldier. It employs the entire modernist playbook—a carefully orchestrated, almost fugue-like unfolding of the action, multiple time-shifts, a limited narrator, symbolic historical allusions, the speeding up and slowing down of narrative pace, foreshadowings and reversals, double entendres, and much else.
In particular, the novel’s surface text, reliant on ambiguity, foregrounds the untrustworthiness of first impressions. Dowell’s wife, for example, likes instructing people about European history, so it’s only later that one begins to wonder about the statement “At that time the Captain was quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence.”
Or consider that subtitle, “A Tale of Passion,” the last word of which denotes both erotic desire and intense suffering. Here they are deftly intertwined. The supposedly libertine Ashburnham weeps over shopgirl romances and typically seeks soulful conversation more than sex in his relationships with young women: “What really made him feel good in life was to comfort somebody who would be darkly and mysteriously mournful.” Insecure and sentimental, he yearns for “assurance of his own worth” and to be “looked upon as a sort of Lohengrin.”
Anyone who has read, or better still reread, The Good Soldier will likely second the judgment of the critic Martin Seymour-Smith: “There is no more formally perfect novel in the language.” That said, Ford Madox Ford deserves attention for more than a single masterpiece. By the time of his death at age sixty-six, he had produced eighty-one books, thirty-two of them novels. He also wrote art criticism, biographies, sociological commentary, memoirs and reminiscences, literary histories, poetry, and World War I propaganda.
Nearly all of those books draw, sometimes closely, on Ford’s rich and muddled life, and it helps to know something about it, which is why Max Saunders’s concise Ford Madox Ford, published in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series, is so valuable. Earlier in his career, Saunders—a professor of English at the University of Birmingham—brought out the two-volume Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (1996), a formidably learned (and unobtrusively witty) critical biography intended for scholars and researchers. Consequently, ordinary readers wanting to know more about the author of The Good Soldier turned instead to Alan Judd’s lively Ford Madox Ford (1990) or to introductory works by Sondra Stang and Frank MacShane. With this new book, however, our leading Ford scholar distills a lifetime of close reading and study into two hundred pages. By so doing, he has produced the essential Ford primer, the best short overview of a writer championed by, among many others, Graham Greene, A.S. Byatt, Ruth Rendell, and Julian Barnes.
Born in 1873, Ford Hermann Hueffer (usually pronounced “Hoofer”)—who would later call himself Ford Madox Ford—grew up in a distinguished late-nineteenth-century artistic and intellectual family. His German-born father was the chief music critic of The Times, Wagner’s champion in Victorian England, and an authority on Provençal poetry; his mother was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. That’s just for starters. The family chose Swinburne to be little Fordie’s godfather, Liszt once dandled the infant, and Ford himself remembered pulling out a chair for Turgenev. The multitalented Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an uncle and the poet Christina Rossetti an aunt.
At age seventeen, when his peers were carousing at Oxford, Ford H. Madox Hueffer brought out his first book, The Brown Owl (1891), a still-delightful fairy tale about a princess protected after her father’s death by a huge owl. Besides this benignant creature, the story features a villainous chancellor, a valiant and handsome emperor of India, a giant, a dwarf, a witch, a shapeshifter, and a dragon. As Ford later recalled, somewhat ruefully, “it sold many thousands more copies than any other book I ever wrote…and keeps on selling to this day.”
Even now, modern collections of Victorian fairy tales seldom leave out The Brown Owl, unless they prefer Ford’s subsequent, even better entry into the genre, The Queen Who Flew (1894). In it, an orphaned and very young queen—she’s really just a teenage girl—escapes both the marital attentions of the regent, Lord Blackjowl, and the confines of the royal palace by acquiring aerial powers from a grouchy bat. Once out in the world, the queen encounters both kindness and cruelty, eventually marrying a young farmer whose blindness she cures by sacrificing her ability to fly.
At not quite twenty-one the precocious Ford eloped with seventeen-year-old Elsie Martindale. The newlyweds eventually settled in the vicinity of Romney Marsh, where the neighbors included Joseph Conrad, Henry James (who would use Ford as a partial model for Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove), the American expatriate Stephen Crane (in Ford’s view “the best of all short-story writers in English”), and H.G. Wells. Ford quickly joined this “ring of conspirators” bent on overthrowing British fiction. Between 1898 and 1908 he and Conrad collaborated on three so-so novels: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of a Crime (eventually published in 1924). When the older writer was ill and on deadline, Ford even stepped in to draft one of the chapters for the serialized version of Nostromo (1904) and later supplied the plot for The Secret Agent (1907).
In the twenty-five years leading up to World War I, the industrious F.M. Hueffer brought out some forty books, ranging from biographies of Ford Madox Brown and Hans Holbein to sociological studies of British culture and history such as The Soul of London (1905) and The Heart of the Country (1906) to collections of poetry and a dozen novels, among them a time-travel romance to counter Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Called Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), it seems to have been the book a young T.S. Eliot gave his friend Alain-Fournier, who found in it “so much feverish emotion and heart-rending beauty”—which is saying something coming from the author of that achingly dreamlike novel of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913).
Years later, Ford listed this “admirable unappreciated novel”—Eliot’s phrase—among his top dozen titles for a collected edition of his work. Oddly enough, he passed over the now highly regarded trilogy about Henry VIII and Catherine Howard, consisting of The Fifth Queen (1906), Privy Seal (1907), and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908). Together the three novels chart the unsuccessful attempt by Katharine—as Ford spells her first name—to bring her royal consort back into the Roman Catholic faith.
Particularly admired for its style by William H. Gass, The Fifth Queen trilogy—“slow, intense, pictorial, and operatic,” as Gass describes it—chronicles the death of chivalry and faith before the ruthless onslaught of deceit, Machiavellianism, and moral relativism. A.S. Byatt neatly sums up its atmosphere of paranoia:
The world of this novel is largely an indoor world, dark, artificially lit, a world of staircases, spyholes, hangings that conceal listeners, alleys where men lurk with knives, walls that close people in.
While Thomas Cromwell does appear, there is little overlap with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and its successors. Overall, Ford depicts the king as a tormented, tragic figure, temperamentally suspicious and jealous. Henceforth most of his best fiction would deal with sexual passion and its attendant angst and confusions.
In 1908, at thirty-five, Ford launched The English Review, which during his editorial tenure—an all-too-brief year or so—he made the best literary magazine of its time. The offices, as the assistant editor, Douglas Goldring, recalled, “consisted of three floors above a poulterer’s and fishmonger’s shop,” and to reach them you passed by “suspended carcases of rabbits, fowls, and game birds.” In the very first issue Ford printed Thomas Hardy’s controversial poem “A Sunday Morning Tragedy” (abortion gone wrong), Constance Garnett’s translation of Tolstoy’s “The Raid,” Henry James’s spooky “The Jolly Corner,” the opening of H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, and some of Conrad’s reminiscences. Later the magazine showcased work by Yeats, Ezra Pound, and E.M. Forster and helped launch the careers of D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. Ford paid his writers well, perhaps remembering the mantra of his grandfather Ford Madox Brown: “Beggar yourself rather than refuse assistance to anyone whose genius you think shows promise of being greater than your own.”
Unfortunately, besides promoting good writing, Ford also started dallying with his wife’s sister. Elsie was willing to overlook this familial infidelity but not her husband’s subsequent infatuation with Violet Hunt, a well-known novelist a decade Ford’s senior (now chiefly remembered for her eerie 1911 collection Tales of the Uneasy). By this time in her life, Hunt hungered for security, having in earlier years turned down a half-facetious marriage proposal from Oscar Wilde and enjoyed short affairs with Wells and Somerset Maugham.
In what may have been a last-ditch attempt to recapture her husband’s affection, Elsie accused Arthur Marwood, Ford’s close friend and the chief financial backer of The English Review, of making unwelcome advances toward her. When that effort failed, she resolutely denied Ford a divorce. Meanwhile, the illicit lovers tried various ways, all unsuccessful, to legalize their relationship, only to enflame Elsie’s righteous anger when a newspaper identified Hunt as Mrs. Ford Madox Hueffer. A libel suit and court battle followed, resulting in further social obloquy and near bankruptcy for the errant husband.
At this low point, as he entered his forties, Ford sat down to write—or rather to dictate, then revise—The Good Soldier. He called it his first true “novel,” his earlier fiction being unjustly demoted to pastiches or potboilers. The story of the Ashburnhams and the Dowells, we can now see, rejiggered aspects of Ford’s own recent life and marital travails. Marwood, for example, provided a partial model for Ashburnham (and would later do the same for Christopher Tietjens in the Parade’s End tetralogy).
Because The Good Soldier appeared just after World War I broke out, the unnerving book was largely buried by world events. Though middle-aged, the patriotic Ford dutifully enlisted in the British Army, receiving a commission as a second lieutenant with the Welch Regiment. In France, he was shelled at the Battle of the Somme, gassed, and rendered amnesiac for three days. His lungs were so badly affected that he huffed and wheezed and spoke softly for the rest of his life.
Worse still, a traumatized Ford felt himself to be washed up as a writer. After separating from a brokenhearted Hunt, he took up with an Australian painter named Stella Bowen, twenty years his junior, and retired to the country to raise vegetables and pigs. It was only now that he changed his name to Ford Madox Ford, partly to signal a new start in life, partly so that Stella could be referred to as Mrs. Ford. There were, after all, two other women claiming to be Mrs. Hueffer.
In the early 1920s the again restless Ford moved to Paris with Bowen, where he relaunched his editorial career by founding The Transatlantic Review. In its pages he published sections of James Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” i.e., Finnegans Wake, as well as work by Gertrude Stein, E.E. Cummings, and the young Ernest Hemingway, “the best writer in America at this moment…the most conscientious, the most master of his craft, the most consummate.” (In A Moveable Feast, the mean-spirited Hemingway would repay Ford’s kindness with mockery, going so far as to say the man smelled.) In Paris, Ford hosted parties, grew stout, told stories about the writers he had known, and, when Stella gave birth to a daughter, persuaded Joyce to act as Julia’s godfather. He also embarked on his most ambitious work of fiction.
In 1922 Marcel Proust died, and Ford attended the funeral. The English writer had once considered translating the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, but nothing came of this project—except, apparently, a desire to emulate Proust’s overall achievement. Like the French writer’s roman-fleuve, Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy charts the breakdown of an elegant, self-confident society in which long-standing traditions crumble during the upheaval of World War I. Both masterpieces probe the ramifications of class, the torments of jealousy and sexual obsession, the workings of memory, a pervasive rottenness at the heart of high society, the solace afforded by art and literature, and, most of all, the gradual changes in the main character’s self-understanding. Both are also funny, sometimes confusing because of dated period references and slang, full of improbabilities, and marked by occasional longueurs.
The protagonist of Parade’s End, Christopher Tietjens, is a younger scion of the house of Groby and a brilliant statistician in an important government department, but also something of a saintly simpleton whose talents and generosity are repeatedly exploited by the careerists around him. Though physically plain himself and often likened to an elephantine meal-sack, he is nonetheless the husband of the beautiful Sylvia, who tricked him into marriage to cover her affair with another man.
As Some Do Not…(1924) begins, Sylvia has run off to France with a new lover named Perowne, though few people know of her infidelity. As Ford writes, “English people of good position consider that the basis of all marital unions or disunions is the maxim: No scenes.” Shortly thereafter, Christopher encounters the vivacious suffragette Valentine Wannop, and the two fall in love. While Valentine quietly confesses that “I know I’m all right with you,” Christopher soon recognizes that “she was the only soul in the world with whom he could talk.” But will the pair act on their sexual attraction? After all, some people do and some do not.
Before long, however, the gossip mills start grinding. The jealous Sylvia spreads the rumor that Christopher is a philandering rake and Valentine his shameless mistress and the mother of an illegitimate child. None of this is true, but rather than defend himself, Christopher exhibits an almost sheep-like forbearance. As for divorce, well, a gentleman simply doesn’t, and Sylvia, being a Catholic, simply won’t. In fact she persecutes her rather insufferably high-minded husband only because of his indifference and neglect:
“If,” Sylvia went on with her denunciation, “you had once in our lives said to me: ‘You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in hell for it…’ If you’d only said something like it…about the child! About Perowne!…you might have done something to bring us together.”
Despite being inveterately flirtatious, Sylvia concedes that her own love affairs leave her feeling “bored…bored…bored!” As she reflects,
taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten you had read it. You had not been ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with a man before you said: “But I’ve read all this before.”
As it does here, the tetralogy regularly depicts the world as a sad and desperate comedy, especially when satirizing the unctuous hypocrisies of ambitious social climbers.
In the next two books, No More Parades (1925) and A Man Could Stand Up—(1926), Ford takes Christopher into the Great War, where he suffers—as his creator did—a traumatic head injury, one so severe that for a while he can’t even remember his own name. Soon, though, he is back in France with his troop of “small drapers, rate-collectors’ clerks, gas inspectors. There were even three music-hall performers, two scene shifters and several milkmen,” but also a Latin-spouting subaltern who is going insane and a financially strapped colonel who is slowly dying from cancer.
In these pages, Ford dramatically recreates the psychological strains of war, as soldiers—half-inured to the constant shelling—anxiously brood over what’s happening back home. At one point, Christopher denies a dispatch-runner’s request for a leave because he knows the man will confront and likely be killed by his wife’s lover, a prizefighter. On that same day this very soldier is struck by shrapnel and dies, Pietà-like, in the now guilt-ridden Christopher’s arms. Everything seems so futile. Later in the war, Christopher will himself undergo symbolic death and resurrection when a German shell buries him alive under mounds of dirt and debris.
Originally, Ford meant to end the sequence with the raucous and drunken celebration of Armistice Day. By then, Christopher understands that “feudalism was finished” and that the war “had coarsened him and hardened him.” He determines to be with Valentine, no matter what, just as Valentine, who has been working as a phys ed teacher at a girls’ school, vows that “she was never going to show respect for anyone ever again. She had been through the mill: the whole world had been through the mill! No more respect!” The last pages of A Man Could Stand Up— reveal a tipsy Christopher and Valentine dancing in each other’s arms, about to set out on a life together.
But what kind of life? A friend wrote to Ford demanding to know what happened to the couple—and to Sylvia and all the others—in postwar England. In Last Post (1928) we learn that the lovers are now living together in the country, Christopher eking out a small income as an old furniture dealer, Valentine pregnant, and the ancestral house of Groby rented by Sylvia to a vulgar American woman who high-handedly orders a centuries-old oak cut down because it blocks the light. Much of the novel reproduces the thoughts and memories of Christopher’s older brother Mark, who lies paralyzed and speechless after a stroke. The household itself is overseen by Mark’s no-nonsense French wife and former mistress, Marie-Léonie, arguably the most sheerly likable character in the entire tetralogy. Christopher, looking tragic, only appears toward the very end.
Its love-in-a-cottage setting notwithstanding, Last Post is hardly a pastoral idyll. When not worrying about her own unborn baby, Valentine, like Leonora in The Good Soldier, frets about her husband’s blithe inattention to money. Her last words in the novel are a cri de coeur: “How are we to live?” Thus the tetralogy closes with the future of Christopher and Valentine, and even Sylvia, still shrouded in uncertainty.
Besides fiction, in the 1920s and 1930s Ford began to publish a series of memoirs and critical works. These rambling, gossipy, highly diverting volumes include Thus to Revisit (1921), in which he reminisces about some of the “prosateurs” he knew and admired; Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), which Sinclair Lewis called “the one great book on the technique of writing a novel that I have ever read”; Return to Yesterday (1931), which covers Ford’s life before the war; It Was the Nightingale (1933), which covers the years after; and Mightier Than the Sword (aka Portraits from Life, 1937), which collects short biographical essays about Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Theodore Dreiser, and other literary eminences. While these books may be structurally slapdash and factually unreliable, Ford always insisted that they were faithful to his impressions of those times and the people he knew.
Reading them, as well as such related books as The English Novel (1929), The Critical Attitude (1911), and The March of Literature (1938), one can almost hear Ford talking about books, art, writing. He castigates Dickens for breaking novelistic illusion with authorial intrusions, even as he praises Austen’s consummate artistry. Among his “private preferences,” he ranks Trollope’s Framley Parsonage “higher than any other English novel.” Nearly everything worth knowing about the art of fiction, he maintains, can be learned from attentive study of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education. Turgenev was “the greatest poet in prose who ever used the novel as the vehicle for his self-expression.”
Most surprisingly, Ford points to W.H. Hudson as “the unapproached master of the English tongue.” He particularly extols Hudson’s nature writing but also notes that Green Mansions (1904) is virtually unrivaled as “Anglo-Saxondom’s only rendering of hopeless, of aching passion.” That the author of The Good Soldier could say this underscores Ford’s unstinting and almost instinctual generosity and selflessness in praising the work of other writers.
As Ford entered the last third of his life, he wasn’t just an “old man mad about writing,” as he described himself. In Paris, he shepherded the early career of Jean Rhys, but also embarked on a brief affair with her (darkly fictionalized in Rhys’s 1928 novel Postures, aka Quartet). It signaled the approaching end of his decade with Bowen, who was succeeded by an even younger painter, Janice Biala, with whom Ford remained for the rest of his life.
The new couple spent more and more time in Provence. Already in The Good Soldier, Dowell had longingly wondered,
Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?
In the 1914 poem “On Heaven”—much admired by Ezra Pound—Ford described the celestial paradise as a small town rather like Aix or Arles. Twenty years later, Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine (1935) contended that only by fostering a Provençal spirit—one that emphasized an appreciation of the arts, a simple diet, and a healthy sensuousness—could the world be saved from barbarism, indigestion, and heavy industry. As Ford once said—and it’s tempting to agree—there are only “two earthly paradises. The one is in Provence…. The other is the Reading Room of the British Museum.” In London, though, he complained that his prose drooped “as backboneless as a waterhose,” but “when I get back to Provence…I shall write little crisp sentences like silver fish jumping out of streams.”
Something of the same sensuousness and vitality animates the best of Ford’s late novels, The Rash Act (1933). Set in a little town on the Mediterranean, it focuses on Henry Martin, an American in his mid-thirties whose life has reached a dead end. Completely broke, he has resolved to commit suicide by going out sailing and, Hart Crane–like, drowning himself. However, on the night before this rash act, Henry encounters the immensely rich and dashing Hugh Monckton.
The two men look much alike, and Hugh, the reader soon grasps, is also planning to commit suicide. His film-star lover has dumped him, a head injury from the war causes almost constant pain, and drinking alcohol of any kind tends to bring on muscular convulsions. What is there to live for? “Means of escape,” he explains, “The world’s full of them. Only one is genuine.”
In Ford’s life and fiction, Max Saunders points out, one finds multiple instances of “homo duplex”—a man divided between the opposing forces of physical appetite and moral or societal restraint. So what happens next in The Rash Act is easily guessed: Henry, failing to carry through on his own suicide, discovers the body of Hugh, who has shot himself. In a daze, Henry trades identification papers with the dead man and becomes Hugh Monckton. Wanting to be someone else, he tells himself, was fundamentally “a desire for salvation.” Naturally, though, complications ensue from this other kind of rash act, mainly involving money and two sisterly whores (one of whom guesses the truth).
Told entirely through Henry’s stream of consciousness, The Rash Act neatly preserves the classical unities of time, place, and action. While initially intended to open a trilogy that would do for the Great Depression what Parade’s End had done for World War I, it is now more often enjoyed as a stand-alone novel. Reading it, I was alternately reminded of Buried Alive (1908), Arnold Bennett’s deliciously comic take on the same theme, and Cyril Connolly’s brittle comedy of drunken expatriates on the Côte d’Azur, The Rock Pool (1936). All three books deserve rediscovery.
When not in France, Ford and Biala regularly visited the United States, once riding a Greyhound bus from Washington, D.C., to Tennessee to visit Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. As always, Ford promoted young writers, now welcoming the early work of Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Eudora Welty. Still, he was feeling his age. The old walrus—sick with cardiac trouble, needing money, eager for appreciation—accepted a teaching job at Olivet College in Michigan, where he completed his last book, The March of Literature: From Confucius’ Day to Our Own (1938). This is a garrulous, idiosyncratic paean to the great writers of world literature, marred by editors who cut many of the quotations. Soon thereafter, Ford fell ill on a return trip to France and died in 1939, worn out at just sixty-six.
Will Ford Madox Ford ever be more than a coterie author? As he himself plaintively acknowledged, only a few people bought his books no matter how enthusiastic the reviews. To me, Ford is one of those prodigious writing engines, like Trollope or Wodehouse, who published so much that he seems inexhaustible. His nonfiction glories in being quirky and self-indulgent, while remaining great fun as well as insightful, even prescient: “The characteristic of modern life that is most appalling is its inability to sustain any protracted train of thought.”
As for his best fiction, Graham Greene had no doubt about its singular merit, declaring that “there is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford.” Is that wishful thinking? Perhaps. A more persuasive recommendation might well be this quieter one from William Trevor: “I remember the novels and their people as one remembers life.”
English (US) · 