An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford

Ashley Chantler, Rob Hawkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317181774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

For students and readers new to the work of Ford Madox Ford, this volume provides a comprehensive introduction to one of the most complex, important and fascinating authors. Bringing together leading Ford scholars, the volume places Ford's work in the context of significant literary, artistic and historical events and movements. Individual essays consider Ford's theory of literary Impressionism and the impact of the First World War; illuminate The Good Soldier and Parade's End; engage with topics such as the city, gender, national identity and politics; discuss Ford as an autobiographer, poet, propagandist, sociologist, Edwardian and modernist; and show his importance as founding editor of the groundbreaking English Review and transatlantic review. The volume encourages detailed close reading of Ford's writing and illustrates the importance of engaging with secondary sources.

1 Ford's Lives

Max Saunders

DOI: 10.4324/9781315566856-2

He began to tell me about himself, filling me with pride by confiding all his troubles and weaknesses. The most monumental of authors – the fountain, apparently of all wisdom, who appeared already to have lived a dozen lives …¹

¹ Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life (London: Virago, 1984), p. 63.

Writing about Ford’s life and his life-writings presents a set of challenges. Ford wrote copiously – even compulsively – about his memories, often producing some of his best writing. But its brilliance can eclipse a more objective biographical narrative. Then there is the problem presented by his insouciance about fact. His playful exaggerations sometimes provoked accusations that he was a fantasist or a liar. A biographer thus has to try not only to sort fact from imagination, but also to try to understand the significance of any fabrications. A striking feature of these is the number of different versions Ford would spin of essentially the same story, some appearing in memoirs and some in fictions. Such issues affect not only his autobiographical works, but also his biographical writing. He explicitly described books such as his memoir of Joseph Conrad (1924) or his reminiscences It Was the Nightingale (1933) as novels. Such a strategy was again provocative, but enables us to see now how precisely he situated so much of his work on the borderline between auto/biography and fiction. It is only recently that such work has been re-described as a mould-breaking experiment in metafiction.² Finally, Ford had an extensive network, or set of networks, of literary friendships and contacts. A striking, often captivating or exasperating figure, he frequently incited his writer-friends and acquaintances to write about him. His shadow-selves thus haunt a range of texts by other writers: memoirs with anecdotes of his conduct and conversation; or poems and novels with Fordian characters – notably by Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Richard Aldington, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Anthony Burgess.³ As with his own multiple versions of experiences, the multiple accounts of Ford’s character are bafflingly diverse and sometimes contradictory. He seemed extraordinarily able to inspire love, loyalty, and admiration on the one hand, as well as anger, betrayal, ridicule and condemnation on the other. Such conflicting accounts have inevitably affected the biographies of him_ from the hagiographical early studies by his younger contemporary Douglas Goldring and the appreciative novelist’s portrait by our contemporary Alan Judd to the more psychoanalytically-inflected books by Arthur Mizener and Thomas Moser. My own critical biography emphasises the ways in which Ford’s writing about others (whether in fiction or memoir) expresses aspects of himself.⁴

² See, for example, Joseph Wiesenfarth, ‘Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance as Metafiction: Or, How Conrad Became an Elizabethan Poet’, Renascence, 53.1 (2000), 43–60. ³ See David D. Harvey, Ford Madox Ford: 1873–1939: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); and for further details Max Saunders, ‘Ford Madox Ford: Further Bibliographies’, English Literature in Transition, 43.2 (2000), 131–205. ⁴ There have been six biographies of Ford: Douglas Goldring, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: A Record of the Life and Writings of Ford Madox Ford (London: Macdonald, 1948), published in the USA as Trained for Genius (New York: Dutton, 1949); Frank MacShane, The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965); Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (New York: Harper and Row, 1971; London: Bodley Head, 1972); Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford (London: Collins, 1990); and Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Goldring’s South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle (London: Constable, 1943) includes valuable biographical material on Ford, as does Violet Hunt’s The Flurried Years (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1926), published in the US as I Have This to Say (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926).

The present chapter will seek to tessellate these kaleidoscopic views of Ford so as to present his life through his own and others’ life-writings. The emphasis here will be on what he writes about his own life. The main aim is to demonstrate how much of his oeuvre can be seen as constituting an extended autobiographical project, comparable to the work of other Impressionists and modernists such as Proust, George Moore, Dorothy Richardson, Frank Harris, and James Joyce. Though his later reminiscences are as richly time-shifted as his best novels, there is an essential logic whereby he works systematically through his life-stories – though, as the biographies of him have shown, autobiographical elements also play across his fiction.

Ford was born into an intensely bohemian milieu. His father was the German musicologist and champion of Wagner, Franz Hüffer, who emigrated to London, anglicised his name to Francis Hueffer, and became music critic of The Times. He married Catherine, herself a painter and the daughter of the English artist Ford Madox Brown. Ford Madox Ford, as he became known after the First World War, was born in 1873 and christened Ford Hermann Hueffer. He was to alter his name in stages, adopting the ‘Madox’ and dropping the ‘Hermann’ to publish as Ford Madox Hueffer until 1923, though he had changed his surname to Ford in 1919. Ford Madox Brown’s other daughter, Lucy, married William Michael Rossetti, the brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, who were thus Ford’s uncle and aunt by marriage. Ford described his upbringing in this cosmopolitan Pre-Raphaelite hothouse as a process of being ‘trained for genius’, and duly published his first book, a fairy tale called The Brown Owl (1891), written for his sister Juliet, at the precociously early age of seventeen. By his twentieth birthday he had added a second fairy story, a volume of verse, and his first novel, The Shifting of the Fire (1892). A career as an author may have appeared inevitable, though Ford had also considered music, having demonstrated skill as a composer. He was to write in increasingly fluid and genre-defying forms, which are perhaps best thought of as exercises in the techniques Ford was to come to call Impressionism, played across the different keys of fiction, poetry, life-writing, criticism, and writing about topography and travel.

Until his mid-thirties, he was arguably best known as an authority on the Pre-Rapahelites. His first book of life-writing was his biography of his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown (1896). Though written impersonally, with almost no reference to himself, the entire work is a testimony to his love for his grandfather, and to how Ford came by many of his deepest aesthetic and ethical principles. The Pre-Raphaelite milieu is also where biographies of him tend to begin. Ford later wrote little books on Rossetti (1902) and The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1907). But most of his reminiscences of his grandfather’s circle appeared in his first major autobiographical work, Ancient Lights (1911), which thus contains the bulk of his memories of his early childhood in London, first with his parents in Hammersmith, then, after the premature death of his father, living in his grandfather’s studio at St Edmund’s Terrace in Primrose Hill. (His later book Provence (1935) adds important material about how his London childhood fostered a love of Provence, poetry, and romantic fabulation.)

Ancient Lights was written in 1910 when Ford was living in Germany while trying to obtain German nationality. It was thus, in a sense, the first of his several farewells to England and London and his English roots. The chapters focus on different arts, different artists and different topics. Several were published first in periodicals; and if read there, or by dipping into the book, they might appear as separate critical essays on the atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century literary London (‘Gloom and the Poets’), Anarchists, the press, musicians, or eminent individual Victorian painters or writers such as Holman Hunt, Madox Brown or Christina Rossetti. But Ford prefaced the book with a ten-page ‘Dedication’ to his daughters, which makes something strikingly different of it. First, by arguing that he had discovered he had only ‘grown up’ recently, when he realised he was forgetting his childhood, he frames his reminiscences as being as much about that childhood as their ostensible subjects. This duality, whereby Ford’s writing about others reflects qualities of himself, and vice-versa, was fundamental to most of his writing. As he puts it here, he has always been interested in ‘the subject, not so much of myself, as in how far the rest of humanity seem to themselves to resemble me’.⁵ The book’s full title – Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Beingthe Memories of a Young Man – captures the duality precisely. ‘Ancient lights’ are windows protected by law from being obstructed by new buildings. Ford’s are thus the towering artistic luminaries – ‘those terrible and forbidding things – the Victorian great figures’ (p. xi) whose example he describes as oppressive and impossible to emulate. The ‘New Reflections’ are his thoughts about them, his memories. That image of reflections on a window was one Ford was to use in his crucial essay ‘On Impressionism’ (1914), in which he says:

⁵ Ford Madox Ford, Ancients Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), p. 253. All further references are to this edition.

I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass – through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you.⁶

⁶ Ford Madox Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, Poetry and Drama, 2 (June 1914), 174. On Ford and Impressionism, see Chapter 5 in this volume.

Like that essay, the Dedication to Ancient Lights is also a manifesto for literary Impressionism; and this is the second way in which the frame alters the picture. Ford includes a long ‘P.S.’ ‘to make plain the actual nature of this book’, saying that ‘It consists of impressions’ (p. xiii); and – controversially – that:

This book, in short, is full of inaccuracies as to facts, but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute. […] I don’t really deal in facts, I have for facts a most profound contempt. I try to give you what I see to be the spirit of an age, of a town, of a movement. (pp. xv–xvi)

By way of example, he writes that when he says ‘the Pre-Raphaelite poets carried on their work amidst the glooms of Bloomsbury’, if he were to give meteorological statistics about the number of days of fog as opposed to sunshine it ‘would not seriously help the impression’ (p. xvi). This explanation is offered as part of a humorous defence against pedants inclined to complain about inaccuracy (as Ford’s uncle William, the least poetical of the three Rossetti siblings, did indeed write to the papers to complain). But when we read Ancient Lights in the light of Ford’s definition of Impressionism, it becomes clear that Impressionism too is one of its reflected subjects as much as its technique.⁷ Because Ford’s veracity is frequently impugned, it is important to be clear about exactly how he handles questions of accuracy or truth. Though the Dedication might sound as if he simply distorts or exaggerates tacitly in the rest of the text, and only attaches the defensive label of Impressionism pre-emptively in the opening pages, in fact what he does is much more subtle; and characteristic of his method in any genre or form. Essentially, he gives an episode of some extremity, but then immediately complicates it by juxtaposing something contradictory, or which raises questions about veracity.

⁷ The US edition was titled Memories and Impressions (New York: Harper, 1911).

Thus Ancient Lights recounts how Robert Louis Stevenson’s cousin, ‘Bob’ (R.A.M.) Stevenson, publicly delivered a hyperbolic assessment of Madox Brown, as: ‘the only real English painter since Hogarth – the only national one, the only one who could paint’; and pausing before the painting The Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851) exclaimed: ‘By God! the whole history of modern art begins with that picture. Corot, Manet, the Marises, all the Fontainebleau School, all the Impressionists, never did anything but imitate that picture’ (p. 207).⁸ Of course, such claims are far more sweeping than anything in academic art history. (Though the view of Madox Brown as a pioneer, especially in this picture, of traits popularly associated with the Impressionists, such as painting en plein air or giving haystacks purple shadows, is shared by his most recent biographer, Angela Thirlwell.⁹) Ford was perhaps exaggerating Stevenson’s praise, wanting him to make the case about Madox Brown, that Ford may have felt it unbecoming to make himself about his grandfather. But he complicates it by preceding it with its opposite: Stevenson lecturing him the day before on how Madox Brown ‘could not paint for nuts’ and ‘ought never to have been a painter at all’ (p. 207). A cynic might say Ford only mentions this attack to counterbalance the accolade, which is what he really wants said about Madox Brown, but wants to look objective even while reporting it. Yet behind Ford’s presentation of himself as perplexed – as he often portrays himself in the proximity of Victorian great figures – by this contradiction might lie a psychological subtlety: perhaps Stevenson exaggerated his praise the following day because he felt he had hurt Ford’s family feelings. At another level, though, Stevenson’s conflicting exaggerations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Brilliant Ford Madox Ford
• 1 Ford’s Lives
• 2 Ford and Conrad
• 3 Towards The Good Soldier: Ford’s Edwardian Fiction
• 4 Ford and Modernism
• 5 Ford’s Literary Impressionism
• 6 The Good Soldier
• 7 Ford Among the ‘Movements, Magazines and Manifestos’
• 8 In the ‘Twentieth-Century Fashion’: Ford and Modern Poetry
• 9 Ford and the First World War
• 10 Parade’s End
• 11 Ford and the City
• 12 Ford and Gender
• 13 Ford and National Identity
• 14 Ford and Politics
• Guide to Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index