Alan Judd is one my favourite current writers and Ford Madox Ford is one of my favourite writers of the earlier years of the twentieth century so, for me, Judd’s 1990 biography of Ford is a perfect match of author and subject.
Ford Madox Ford, grandson of the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, came from the sort of late-Victorian artistic milieu where no-one expected to have to work. Everyone seems to have had property to sub-let and if they needed money, borrowed it from family and friends. In this world, writing was taken for granted and Ford became a professional writer after he left school and never earned his living in any other way, not that he ever earned that much. That was not his priority. He was a true servant of literature throughout his long and eventful life. He was a real Bohemian. So long as he had a devoted female companion, good wine, good conversation and somewhere to produce his daily quota of words, he was satisfied. In this way, he produced some eighty or so books. The best-known of these today are The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade’s End sequence (1924–1928), which have become permanent classics.
Poet, novelist, memoirist, editor and soldier, Ford Madox Ford was born in 1873 and died in 1939. He was an important figure in the development of modernism, not just through his own writing but because of his generous promotion of younger writers. He had already collaborated with Joseph Conrad, when as editor of the English Review, he discovered D H Lawrence. He had an instinct for spotting literary talent. He was a lifelong friend and supporter of Ezra Pound.
He separated from his wife just before the first world war, a scandalous event in Edwardian London. She refused to divorce him, so despite several subsequent long-term affairs and more children, he was never free to re-marry. He appears to have been one of those people who are a magnet for trouble and misunderstanding of one kind or another, his generous nature often puzzled by what came his way in return. As he put it “I am the green baize door that everyone kicks on the way out”.
He also suffered repeated problems with publishers, leading to some of his best works not being as widely available as they could have been and perhaps not as well-known as their quality deserved.
Possibly to escape his marital situation he enlisted as an over-age junior officer in 1915. At first, he enjoyed the army, finding the life easier to cope with than the squabbles of the literary world but trouble followed him even here as he fell out with his commanding officer. Despite not being a front-line combat soldier, he endured the shelling and ended up with what we would today call PTSD. After the war he went to live in France with his latest girlfriend and never returned to England. He used his war experiences in the Parade’s End books. Later on, he spent a great deal of time in America where his literary reputation was greater than in his home country. (In fact, when I first discovered Ford’s books, I assumed he was an American writer.)
Alan Judd’s biography is plainly a love letter from one writer to another. He brings Ford and the times in which he lived vividly to life in these pages. There is a fair amount of quotation of Ford’s works, particularly the poetry, which is hard to find these days. There is just enough critical interpretation to make clear what Ford’s ideas about writing were, without interrupting the flow of the story.
Ford’s aim in fiction was to remove from the text any presence of himself as the author. For this reason, he particularly disliked the technique of English novelists such as Joseph Fielding and William Thackeray, where the author comments on the events and characters of the novel. In The Good Soldier, the illusion that the story is being told to us by the narrating character, John Dowell, is complete. Ford likes to make the reader do a little more work, and part of the fascination of his novel is that we begin to realise that events may not have happened quite the way Dowell describes them. He is keen to make us think of him as the passive and innocent dupe of the other characters. As we read and re-read the novel, we are troubled by the feeling that he might have had a much more active role in the dark events of the story. It could be that what really happened is almost the opposite of what Dowell tells us. But in the end, Ford is making us realise that, like life itself, there is no definitive interpretation, everybody has their own point of view and the mystery must remain.
When I first read The Good Soldier many years ago, I was amazed that anyone could write a book like that. It remains a real favourite of mine to this day. The title of my blog is an allusion to it. I believe that Alan Judd was inspired to write his biography of Ford Madox Ford because of his admiration for it.
Graham Greene wrote that Ford had “a half-belief in a posterity that would care about good writing”. Ford’s best works have passed the test of time.
Tag: D H Lawrence
Piano by D H Lawrence
D H Lawrence was considered an important writer when I was younger, but his reputation has declined somewhat since then. There are signs that interest in his work may be reviving, helped by the recent publication of a new biography, Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence by Frances Wilson.
Like Thomas Hardy, D H Lawrence was best-known as a novelist but was arguably at his best in his poetry. It was Lawrence’s novels and essays that went out of fashion, whereas the poems have continued to be included in anthologies. Many of his poems are written in a very loose, free verse style, but this earlier one from 1913 is tighter and more structured.
The poem gives a very accurate depiction of how memory works. The woman singing at the piano in the present day summons the memory of the poet’s mother. It’s not a conscious act but something that happens involuntarily. What Lawrence calls “the flood of remembrance” is the kind of memory that Proust was so interested in. Lawrence was also certainly aware of Freud’s theories quite early on, although he later argued against them.
We can all recognise that painful feeling of realising the impossibility of going back into the past. There’s a wistful longing for the security of childhood here. The poem gets it across very effectively and poignantly.
Ultimately though, Piano is a very enjoyable poem. With its long lines and strong end rhymes the poem itself has a musical quality.
Piano by D H Lawrence
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
The Good Reader 