Other literary forms
Ford Madox Ford was an extremely prolific author, working in virtually every literary form. His children’s stories and fairy tales include The Brown Owl (1891), The Feather (1892), The Queen Who Flew (1894), Christina’s Fairy Book (1906), and the pantomime Mister Bosphorus and the Muses (1923). His volumes of poetry include The Questions at the Well (1893, as Fenil Haig), Poems for Pictures (1900), The Face of the Night (1904), From Inland, and Other Poems (1907), High Germany (1911), On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service (1918), A House (1921), New Poems (1927), and Collected Poems (1936). Acknowledged with Joseph Conrad as coauthor of the novels The Inheritors and Romance, Ford may also have had some hand in the composition of a number of Conrad’s other works during the decade from 1898 to 1908. Ford’s biographical, autobiographical, and critical works include Ford Madox Brown (1896), Rossetti (1902), Hans Holbein, the Younger (1905), The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1907), Ancient Lights (1911), The Critical Attitude (1911), Henry James (1913), Thus to Revisit (1921), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), The English Novel (1929), Return to Yesterday (1931), It Was the Nightingale (1933), and Portraits from Life (1937; also known as Mightier than the Sword, 1938).
During the last years of his life, Ford served as professor of comparative literature at Olivet College in Michigan and prepared his final book, a massive critical history of world literature, The March of Literature (1938). His history and travel books include The Cinque Ports (1900), Zeppelin Nights (1916), Provence (1935), and Great Trade Route (1937). Collections of Ford’s essays include The Soul of London (1905), The Heart of the Country (1906), The Spirit of the People (1907), Women and Men (1923), A Mirror to France (1926), New York Is Not America (1927), and New York Essays (1927). Several volumes Ford classified simply as propaganda, including When Blood Is Their Argument (1915) and Between St. Dennis and St. George (1915). Ford also edited The English Review and later The Transatlantic Review and wrote much ephemeral journalism.
Achievements
It is generally agreed that Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier is one of the masterpieces of modernism, a major experimental novel of enormous historical and artistic interest. His tetralogy Parade’s End, composed of Some Do Not . . . , No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post, is also a key work in the modernist revolution, more massive than The Good Soldier, more sweeping in its treatment of historical change, but less daring in its formal innovations. After these five novels, there is a considerable drop in the quality of Ford’s remaining fiction. The historical trilogy concerning Henry VIII (The Fifth Queen, Privy Seal, and The Fifth Queen Crowned) is cited by some critics as meriting serious reading. Scattered among his many volumes, works such as A Call reward the reader with surprisingly high quality, but most of the lesser books are all too obviously potboilers.
Ford was equally at home in the English, French, and German languages, and he contributed to the cosmopolitan and polyglot texture of European modernism. As an editor of influential literary magazines, he recognized and encouraged many writers who have since become famous. His collaboration with Joseph Conrad in the 1890’s corresponded with Conrad’s most productive artistic period, but whether Conrad’s achievements were stimulated by Ford’s collaboration or accomplished in spite of Ford’s intrusion is still under debate. Ford also exercised a considerable influence on Ezra Pound during Pound’s early London years. Later, after World War I, Ford was associated with all the prominent writers of the Parisian Left Bank: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys, and others.
Ford’s achievement then, was as a man of letters whose diverse contributions to modern literature—particularly as an editor and as a champion of modernist writers—far transcended his not inconsiderable legacy as a novelist.
Biography
Ford Madox Hueffer was born in Merton, now a borough of London, on December 17, 1873; he was named for his maternal grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893). Brown had two daughters: The elder married William Michael Rossetti (brother to the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti); the younger daughter, Catherine, married the German journalist Francis Hueffer, music critic for The Times of London, who wrote many books and had a serious scholarly interest in Richard Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Provençal poetry. Ford was born to this couple and grew up in an intellectual hothouse of painters, musicians, artists, and writers with advanced ideas.
His family expected him to be a genius, which led him to acquire, early in his life, a sense of inadequacy and failure. Ford tended later to falsify information in his biography and to have difficulty separating reality from fantasy in his recollections. He attended the coeducational Praetorius School in Folkestone, apparently an institution with very modern ideas of education. One of his schoolmates there was Elsie Martindale, a young woman whom he married, against her parents’ wishes, in 1894. Perhaps this elopement by the impetuous young lovers shows Ford’s tendency to play out in reality the conventions of courtly love, a subject of intense study by Ford’s father and a preoccupation of the author himself in all his fiction, evident even in his final book, the critical survey The March of Literature. Ford and Elsie did not, however, find passionate love a practical way to attain long-term happiness or stability.
In September, 1898, Edward Garnett introduced Ford to Joseph Conrad, now recognized as one of the greatest English-language novelists, even though his native tongue was Polish. Ford, like Conrad, was multilingual, and, at least to some degree, he helped Conrad with the niceties of the English idiom. The two would often write in French and then translate the work into English. By the spring of 1909, however, Ford and Conrad had quarreled and were never again closely associated. They acknowledged that they collaborated on The Inheritors and Romance, although Ford must have had at least some slight hand in many of Conrad’s fictions written between 1898 and 1909. In fairness, it should be noted that Ford, too, must have had his ideas and his style permanently shaped to some degree by his collaboration with the older, more worldly master, Conrad.
Conrad had married Englishwoman Jessie George in 1896, and he lived in a settled and respectable way with her until his death in 1924. At least in part, Conrad’s breach with Ford stemmed from Jessie’s dislike for what she regarded as Ford’s ever more outrageous sexual behavior. In 1903, Ford had an affair with his wife’s sister, Mary Martindale. Throughout his fiction, Ford replays similar real-life issues of passion, adultery, and their tawdry consequences. Thomas C. Moser, in The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (1980), maintains that Ford’s writing follows a cyclical pattern, with each outburst of creativity triggered by the introduction of a new love into his life: Elsie Martindale, Mary Martindale, Arthur Marwood, Violet Hunt, Brigit Patmore,Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala. Moser’s thesis is a bit too neat to be completely convincing, but its outline suggests the generally messy personal life that Ford must have been living while writing his voluminous works.
Analysis
From his association with Conrad, his study of Henry James and of the rise of the English novel, and his knowledge of French literature, Ford Madox Ford developed his notion of literary impressionism, which is central to an understanding of his masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Ford’s clearest statement of his theory of literary impressionism is found in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, where Ford describes literary impressionism as a revolt against the commonplace nineteenth century novel, or “nuvvle,” as he calls it. The impressionist novel should not be a narration or report, but a rendering of impressions. Rather than following a linear plot, giving one event after another as they occur, the impressionist novel enters the mind of a storyteller and follows his or her associated ideas in a tangled stream of consciousness, so that vivid image becomes juxtaposed to vivid image, skipping across space and time in a collage of memory and imagination. The impressionist novel takes as its subject an affair, some shocking event that has already happened, and proceeds in concentric rings of growing complication as the storyteller cogitates. The focus of the novel is internal rather than external. The reader must focus on the storyteller’s mental processes rather than on the events themselves.
The impressionist novel is limited to the mind of the storyteller, and so is finally solipsistic. The novel refers to itself, so that the reader can never “get out of” the storyteller’s limited mentality and judge whether the storyteller is reliable or unreliable, perhaps merely a crazy person telling a tale that has no connection whatever to reality. Limited and unreliable narration, time shifts, fragmentation of details torn from the contexts in which they occur, verbal collages of such fragments in configurations produced by the narrator’s association of ideas, defamiliarization of the commonplace—all these are characteristics of Ford’s best work.
The traditional nineteenth century English novel depended on the convention of the linear plot. The process of reading from page one to the end of the text was generally assumed to correspond to the passage of time as one event followed another in the story, so that the hero might be born on page one, go to school on page fifty, commit adultery or consider committing adultery on page one hundred, and meet his just reward in the concluding pages of the book. In The Good Soldier, Ford rejected this linear structure and substituted for it the “affair”: A shocking set of events has already occurred before the book begins, and the narrator weaves back and forth in his memories related to the affair. Gradually, in concentric circles of understanding, the reader learns the complicated situation underlying the superficial first impressions he or she may have formed. The drama of the story shifts from the events of the tale to the process of the telling; such stories necessarily contrast first appearances with deeper “realities” revealed in the narration.
The Good Soldier
The Good Soldier concerns two married couples: Arthur Dowell (the narrator) and his wife, Florence (Hurlbird) Dowell, and Edward Ashburnham and his wife, Leonora (Powys) Ashburnham. The events of the story take place between August, 1904, and August, 1913, a nine-year period throughout most of which the two couples are the best of friends, living the life of the leisured rich at European spas, in elegant, cultivated idleness. There is an elegiac tone to this work, reflecting the autumn sunshine of the Edwardian era and a way of life that would be brutally wiped out with the outbreak of World War I.
The texture of the novel invites the reader to consider the conflict between appearance and reality. For most of the nine-year period of the action, Arthur Dowell believes that his wife is suffering from a heart ailment that confines her travels and requires her to be shut in her room under peculiar circumstances from time to time. He subsequently learns, however, that her heart is sound and that these arrangements are necessary to allow her to commit adultery, first with a young man named Jimmy and later with Edward Ashburnham. Dowell imagines Ashburnham to be a model husband, only gradually learning that he has engaged in a series of affairs and that his wife does not speak to him except when required to do so in public. This novel is like a hall of mirrors, and any statement by the narrator must be doubted.
Because readers are accustomed to novels with linear plots, a summary of the novel is more easily understood if the plot is rearranged into the customary linear sequence of events. Edward Ashburnham is from an ancient Anglican landholding family who owns the estate Branshaw Teleragh. As the novel opens, he has recently returned from serving as a military officer in India and arrives at the health spa, Bad Nauheim, in Germany, where he meets the Dowells for the first time. Although he appears to be brave, sentimental, and heroic, like the knights in ancient romances, the reader learns that he has been involved in a series of unfortunate affairs with women. His parents arranged his marriage to Leonora Powys, a convent-educated Catholic girl, whose impoverished family had an estate in Ireland. Religious and temperamental differences soon cause their marriage to cool. While riding in a third-class carriage, Edward tries in a blundering way to comfort a servant girl and is arrested for sexual misbehavior in what is called the Kilsyte case. This misadventure leads him for the first time in his life to consider himself capable of bad conduct. His next affair involves a short-lived passion for a Spanish dancer, La Dolciquita, who demands cash for spending a week with him at Antibes. Reckless gambling at the casino, combined with the direct expenses of La Dolciquita’s passion, substantially depletes Edward’s inherited fortune. His wife, Leonora, makes herself the guardian of his estate and sets out to recover their financial losses. She demands that he take a military post in India for eight years and doles out his spending money carefully while squeezing his tenants and lands back in England for as much profit as possible.
In India, Edward finds his next woman, Mrs. Basil, whose husband, a fellow officer, allows the affair to continue in order to blackmail Edward. Eventually, Mrs. Basil’s husband is transferred to Africa so that she can no longer stay with Edward. Edward then makes an alliance with Mrs. Maidan, also the wife of a junior officer. Mrs. Maidan has a heart condition and accompanies the Ashburnhams to Bad Nauheim for treatment. On the day that the Dowells and the Ashburnhams first meet, Leonora Ashburnham has found Mrs. Maidan coming out of Edward’s bedroom in the hotel. Enraged, Leonora has slapped her and, in doing so, entangled her bracelet in Mrs. Maidan’s hair. Florence Dowell sees them struggling in the hallway and comes to help. Leonora lamely explains that she has accidentally caught her bracelet in Mrs. Maidan’s hair, and Florence helps them get untangled, after which the sobbing Mrs. Maidan runs to her room. That evening, Leonora insists on sitting at the Dowells’ dinner table in the hotel so as to prevent any gossip about that day’s events in the hallway. Mrs. Maidan soon commits suicide, leaving Edward free to form a liaison with Florence Dowell herself.
Edward’s ward, Nancy Rufford, is being educated in the same convent where Leonora went to school. As Nancy grows to a mature woman, Edward becomes attracted to her, but he is caught in the conflict between love and honor. He desires Nancy, but he is honor-bound not to violate his sacred trust to protect her. After Florence Dowell learns of Edward’s affection for Nancy (along with some other distressing developments), she too commits suicide. Edward remains firm, however, and refuses to take advantage of his ward or corrupt her, even when she openly offers herself to him. He arranges for her to be sent to her father in Ceylon. On her voyage there, she cables from Brindisi a cheerful note implying that she feels no sorrow about leaving him. Edward then commits suicide with a penknife, and Nancy goes insane when she hears of his death. His widow, Leonora, marries a rabbitlike neighbor, Rodney Bayham, while Arthur Dowell is left as the proprietor of the Branshaw Teleragh estate, where he nurses the insane Nancy Rufford.
From the exterior, to those who know him only slightly, Edward Ashburnham appears almost superhumanly noble, the ideal of the British country gentleman and good soldier. If the reader believes all that is alleged about him, he is quite the contrary, a raging stallion, recklessly ruining every female he meets. The superficial goodness is merely a veneer masking his corruption. All the other characters, as well, have two sides. Florence Dowell, the respectable wife, has had an affair before her marriage to Arthur with the despicable Jimmy and may have married simply to get back to her lover in Europe. She certainly does not hesitate to become Edward Ashburnham’s mistress and commits suicide when she learns in a double-barreled blow that Edward is attracted to Nancy Rufford and that the man in whose house she committed adultery with Jimmy is now talking with her husband in Bad Nauheim. Leonora is purposeful in trying to manage her husband’s estate economically, but she is cruel and unloving. The reader can easily imagine that her husband would be driven to seek other company. Arthur Dowell, the narrator himself, is stupid, lazy, and piggish.
Since the story is told entirely from the point of view of Arthur Dowell, and since his is a limited intelligence, the reader can never entirely trust the narration as reliable. Dowell may assert on one page that a character is noble yet show the reader in a hundred ways that the character is despicable. The reader is caught in the web of Dowell’s mind. Clearly, Dowell sometimes does not tell the “truth”; but since the total work is fiction, the reader is confronted not simply with a conflict between appearance and reality but with the statuses of competing fictions. Is Edward a noble knight or a despicable roué? The story evaporates into the impressions in Dowell’s mind. What Dowell thinks or believes is the truth at that moment in the fiction. It could be seriously argued that Edward, Leonora, and Florence have no external “reality” at all, that they are simply the imaginings of the sickly Dowell as he tells or dreams his story. This approach may shock readers of conventional fiction, who are accustomed to reading a novel as if the characters were real people, yet all characters in every fiction are simply projections of the author’s creative imagination.
Parade’s End
Ford’s massive tetralogy Parade’s End consists of four separate novels: Some Do Not . . . , No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post. The main theme of these works repeats a major concern of The Good Soldier, the destruction of the Tory gentleman. Edward Ashburnham in The Good Soldier belongs to the same class as Christopher Tietjens, theprotagonist of Parade’s End. Both are said to have been modeled on Ford’s friend Arthur Marwood, who collaborated with Ford in publishing The English Review. Ashburnham is the landowner of Branshaw Teleragh, whereas Tietjens’s family owns the Groby estate. Both feel an obligation to their dependents and take seriously their stewardship over the land. Both are highly altruistic in certain areas but are tormented by the conflict between their sexual impulses and what is considered proper or honorable behavior. They are Tory gentlemen, landowning, relaxed in manner, Anglican in religion, physically vigorous, classically educated, generous, virile, and possessed of a worldview in which man’s place in the universe is clearly defined. Such men are assailed on all sides by women, by modern commercial industry, by Catholics and Jews, by fascists and communists, and finally by the internal contradictions of their own characters. World War I smashed that class of Tory landholding gentlefolk once and for all, in an externalization of that internal battle.
Because the books are a kind of verbal collage, creating a palimpsest of memory and imagination, weaving backward and forward through the minds of characters who are frequently under stress and incapable of reporting events without distorting them, the linear plot of the tetralogy is difficult to summarize. The first novel, Some Do Not . . . , opens with Christopher Tietjens traveling in a railway carriage. His destination, unknown to him at the time, is the future world, the wasteland created by World War I and the destruction of the comfortable Tory universe into which he was born. His wife, Sylvia, has a child of whom he is perhaps not the true father, and she has run away with another man to Europe. Christopher meets an attractive young woman named Valentine Wannop. In the course of the tetralogy, Valentine replaces Sylvia as Tietjens’s mate. The war, when it breaks out, is a terrifying expression of the conflict already implied in the mind of Christopher.
In No More Parades, Christopher sees the men on the battlefield harassed by infidelity at home. The combat scenes in the next volume, A Man Could Stand Up, include ones in which Christopher is buried in a collapsed trench under fire, fights desperately to free his companions, and then is demoted for having a dirty uniform. At the end of this book, Valentine and Christopher come together in a nightmare party celebrating the end of the war. The final volume in the tetralogy, The Last Post, is composed of a series of dramatic monologues in which the reader learns that the estate has passed to other hands and that the Groby elm, signifying the Tietjenses’ ownership of the land, has been cut down.
Ezra Pound suggested that Ford’s contribution to modern literature could be measured less by reference to any given works than by “the tradition of his intelligence.” While most of Ford’s many novels have been consigned to oblivion, The Good Soldier and Parade’s End testify to his manifold gifts as a man of letters and as a godfather to the modernists.