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Full Description
The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. This series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies was founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme or issue; and relates aspects of Ford's work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. The present book is part of a large-scale reassessment of his roles in literary history.
Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade's End, which Anthony Burgess described as 'the finest novel about the First World War'; and Samuel Hynes has called 'the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman'. But he was a prolific writer in many different modes, which include criticism of others' writing, and reminiscences of the many writers he had known. One of the most striking features of his career is his close involvement with so many of the major international literary groupings of his time. In the South-East of England at the fin-de-siècle, he collaborated for a decade with Joseph Conrad, and befriended Henry James, and H. G. Wells. In Edwardian London he founded the English Review, publishing these writers alongside his new discoveries, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. After the war he moved to France, founding the transatlantic review in Paris, taking on Hemingway as a sub-editor, discovering another generation of Modernists such as Jean Rhys and Basil Bunting, and publishing them alongside Joyce and Gertrude Stein. He spent more time in America from the later 1920s, spending time with Southern Agrarians, and poets such as William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Robert Lowell. He was always a tireless promoter of younger writers, reading manuscripts and recommending them to publishers.
This book takes Ford's 'literary contacts' to include such creative friendships, editorial involvements, and influential biographical encounters; and they form the most substantial, central section on 'Contemporaries and Confrères', covering figures like Proust, Carlos Williams, Rebecca West, Herbert Read, and Hemingway. But it also explores contacts with literary texts. The first section on 'Predecessors' considers the impact of Ford's reading of Trollope, George Eliot, and Turgenev. The final section discusses 'Successors': writers such as Graham Greene, Burgess, and A. S. Byatt, whose literary contacts with Ford have been as his admiring readers and eloquent critics. Ford has been described as 'a writer's writer'. This volume reveals how true that has been, and in how many ways, as it sheds new light on his relationships with other writers, both familiar and surprising. It includes two pieces published here for the first time: one by Ford himself, on Turgenev; the other a memoir about Ford by his contemporary, Marie Belloc Lowndes (the sister of Hilaire Belloc).
Contents
Max SAUNDERS: General Editor's Preface
Paul SKINNER: Introduction
Part one: Predecessors
Helen SOUTHWORTH: 'That Subtle and Difficult Thing: A National Spirit': Ford, Anglo-Saxondom and 'the Gorgeously English' George Borrow
Monica C. LEWIS: Trollope Re-Read
Sara HASLAM: The Prophet and the Sceptic: George Eliot and Ford Madox Ford
Max SAUNDERS: Ford and Turgenev
Part two: Contemporaries and Confrères
Helen SMITH: Opposing Orbits: Ford, Edward Garnett and the Battle for Conrad
Susan Lowndes MARQUES: Marie Belloc Lowndes on Ford and Violet Hunt
Anat VERNITSKI: The Complexity of Truth: Ford and the Russians
John COYLE: Mourning and Rumour in Ford and Proust
Stephen ROGERS: 'A Royal Personage in Disguise': A Meeting between Ford and John Cowper Powys
Joseph WIESENFARTH: The Genius and the Donkey: The Brothers Hueffer at Home and Abroad
Christopher MACGOWAN: Ford Madox Ford and William Carlos Williams: The Country Squire and Dr. Carlos
Seamus O'MALLEY: The Return of the Soldier and Parade's End: Ford's Reworking of West's Pastoral
MICHAEL PARASKOS: Herbert Read's Dilemma: Fatherly Advice from FMF
Brian Ibbotson GROTH: All at Sea with Petronella: A Ford Madox Ford Biographical Mystery
Jörg W. RADEMACHER: Images of the First World War: Ford's 'In October 1914' Read in the Context of Contemporary German Writers
Susan SWARTZLANDER: 'Thus to Revisit or Thus to Revise-It': Ernest Hemingway, Defiant Disciple
Part three: Successors
Corwin BADEN: Richard Hughes: Ford's 'Secret Sharer'
Bernard BERGONZI: Ford and Graham Greene
William MILL: Hueffer/Ford and Wilson/Burgess
Angus WRENN: 'Long Letters about Ford Madox Ford': Ford's Afterlife in the Work of Harold Pinter
Laura COLOMBINO: The Ghostly Surfaces of the Past: A Comparison between Ford's Works and A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden
Contributors
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