Ford Madox Ford

If one wants to know who Ford Madox Ford was and what he did, this is the book to read. It is excellent on Ford’s personal life as well as on the writers and artists he knew and promoted and on those who knew and promoted him. It not only gives us the chronology and history of Ford’s movements from place to place but also his mental and emotional life as it reveals itself in his books and letters and in those of his family, friends, and acquaintances. Max Saunders gave us Ford’s life in his two-volume biography Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life in 1996 and he has here distilled those twelve hundred pages masterfully in the two hundred pages of this volume in the Critical Lives series. In the time between these two books, many literary documents and personal letters have come to light, and some of what they tell us about Ford is in this book.Two novels and three women figure prominently in Ford’s life. The two novels are The Good Soldier (2015) and Parade’s End (1927). The three women are Violet Hunt, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala, though there are important glances at others like Elsie Martindale, Ford’s wife, who refused to divorce him, Jean Rhys, who fractured his relationship with Bowen, and Elizabeth Cheatham, who proved a significant distraction in the United States.Saunders shows that Ford’s first success came after publishing ten books that didn’t achieve much notice. The one that changed things was The Soul of London (1904). It put both Ford and London prominently on the literary scene. Ford followed it with The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land (1906) and The Spirit of the People (1907). These books gave Ford needed recognition, as did the novels in his trilogy on Henry VIII, The Fifth Queen (1906), which was a notable success. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, Ford founded The English Review, a periodical that gave a voice to modern writers and published the work of yet unknown writers like Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis, to name just a few. Appropriately, as Ford said, its “definite design” was “giving imaginative literature a chance in England.” The English Review did not live a long life, but its goal never died in Ford’s life.Ezra Pound became a lifelong friend of Ford’s, even visiting him in Provence late in Ford’s life. That friendship began with Ford’s dramatic evaluation of Pound’s fledgling poetry. He fondly recalled reading his early poems to Ford in Giessen, Germany, only to find Ford falling out of his chair onto the floor and rolling around in laughter at what he called Pound’s Swinburne verse. Pound learned his lesson quickly enough to give us in good time his most memorable poem: In a Station of the Metro: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd, / Petals on a wet, black bough.” This moment leads Saunders to a lucid and thorough discussion of Ford’s insistence on Impressionism and the use of everyday speech in poetry. Ford’s own poetry before, during, and after the Great War is generously sampled here. Impressionism—the idea that any significant moment that is part of one’s life is not a simple narration of events but a complex mixture of memory and the senses—all of them. Impressionism is the stuff of Ford’s poetry and fiction, and there is no better example of it than his novel The Good Soldier.There are two principal items in Saunders’ commentary on this novel. First, an actual event: Brigit Patmore caught Ford’s eye while she was visiting Violet Hunt—Violet, whose claim on Ford was absolute. Brigit finds herself in a chancy situation as a married woman, attracting the eye of a man who didn’t share Hunt’s claim on him. Second, a fictional moment, the teller of the tale that is The Good Soldier, John Dowell, is a puzzle to himself. And what is that tale? Its subtitle indicates that it is A Tale of Passion, which leaves its characters no place to go as it ends in sordid revelations, madness, and suicide. The frigid wife of John Dowell and his best friend, the good soldier, Edward Ashburnham, are found to be long-time lovers. Dowell finds that out when they kill themselves. The Good Soldier is the saddest story for Ford because it shows us that one human being finds it almost impossible to understand another human being. That is the basic fact that Dowell lives with, cannot comprehend, and cannot transcend. What matters further is that while he dwells in this darkness, Dowell sheds a bright light on the shape of human life itself. That light is so bright in Ford’s telling of the tale that Saunders finds it a masterpiece of metafiction.The Good Soldier anticipates another masterpiece in four volumes, Parade’s End. But Saunders takes us first to Ford in the trenches of the Somme and Ypres Salient, where Ford was in these two most devastating battles of the Great War. He enlisted in the army to fight in a war rather than staying at home to fight with Violet Hunt. The war brought Stella Bowen into his life, and he changed his surname from Hueffer to Ford. Stella then became Mrs. Ford, and he thereby avoided any legal battles with Elsie. Stella was an artist who came from Australia to study in London and wound up in Paris with Ford as he recovered from the war. There Jean Rhys interrupted their life with Ford creating her as a writer and inviting her as a lover. In the midst of this mélange, Ford turned his mind back to the war and began writing Some Do Not . . . , the first volume of the Parade’s End tetralogy.The two principal characters in the four novels are Christopher Tietjens and Valentine Wannop, with Christopher’s wife Sylvia and his sometime friend Vincent Macmaster contributing to his troubles before, during, and after the war. Valentine meets Christopher on a golf course, where he trips a police officer with his golf bag to prevent her demonstrating suffragette friends from being arrested. Christopher begins No More Parades . . . working in the Imperial Department of Statistics, and ends it in Last Post dealing in antique furniture, while Valentine, about to give birth to their son Chrissie, helps care for his dying brother, Mark. Between these first and last novels, the war is fought in No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up. There Christopher as an army officer is found in command not only on solid ground but especially in the trenches, where a shell strikes and buries him in the mud. At home and at war, Ford’s mastery of impressions puts the reader immediately into events: we see them and we hear them and we feel them. As Sanders writes, “Like all great literature, Parade’s End addresses three central problems: how to speak of unbearable suffering; how to speak of, and for, the dead; and how to speak of surviving—especially without losing sight of the suffering of the casualties.”After Stella Bowen left Ford in 1927, he continued to write, but his personal life became more and more harried and problematic. His good fortune was that he was introduced to Janice Biala, like Stella, an artist, whose own personal life was in something of a shambles. But she and Ford were clearly meant for each other and lived together through thick and thin until Ford died on June 26, 1939. They lived in both Paris and Provence, and at times they were close to penury, surviving in Toulon by growing their own fruits and vegetables. Ford wrote some thirteen books in his years with Biala, among them Provence (1935), which may also have inspired his The Great Tarde Route (1937). There were also two books of reminiscences Return to Yesterday (1931) and It Was the Nightingale (1933). Ford made a trip to the United States to confer with his publishers and to meet some of the rising American writers of the day. Another meeting, in London with Joseph Brewer, president of Olivet College, led Ford and Biala to the Midwest. There in Michigan, on and off, during a two-year period, Ford wrote The March of Literature, which Saunders accurately calls “massive and extraordinary.” It runs some 878 pages in the Dial Press edition of 1938, which bears the subtitle From Confucius Day to Our Own. Ford signs the Author’s Introduction that he wrote with a suffix: “F.M.F. D.Litt.” Olivet had conferred on him the title Doctor of Literature. If ever a title was given that was earned, that was it!Ford’s life story is being adumbrated with the emergence and publication of his letters and those of others, like Janice Biala’s, which are generously sampled in this book. Max Saunders leaves nothing of significance out of this brief but encompassing critical biography of Ford Madox Ford. Although as documents accumulate, more may be learned, the basic shape of Ford’s story will remain as it is told here. Indeed, it is difficult to convey adequately how deeply thought out and how elegantly appreciated Ford’s life and art are as presented in this Critical Lives book. I think it is unlikely to be surpassed.