An Eminent Edwardian
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing AN EMINENT EDWARDIAN BY PEARL K. BELL Ford Madox Ford was only 65 when he died in Deauvilie in 1939, but his life and career spanned so vast a spectrum of literary history that...
...Even Ezra Pound, whose affectionate loyalty never faltered, had to admit "Ford was almost an iiallucine...
...The irony, of course, is that although Ford regarded himself as an anachronistic Tory gentleman like Tietjens, the life Mizener has documented with such scrupulous, meticulous care and compassion is a quite different matter...
...When Ford's avaricious mistress, Violet Hunt, hounded him to divorce his wife, he became entangled in an elaborately ineffectual fantasy whereby he would first acquire German citizenship so he could then get a German divorce--and almost convinced himself he had done both when in practical fact he could do neither...
...And Tietjens is free to reject his family wealth and land, his job in a government department, for a frugal life as an antique dealer...
...on chivalric deference to and defense of women, even pathological bitches like his wife...
...Though in later life Ford wrote that "the Middle Victorian, tumultuously bearded Great . . . were a childish nightmare to me," his heritage left him indelibly convinced "that the profession of the humaner letters was a priestcraft and of itself consecrated its earnest votary...
...No matter that this England existed only in Ford's mind...
...It seemed impossible that we could have been so wrong...
...Not for the country...
...The wonder of it is that Ford managed to write all those books while he was engaged in so many sizzling exchanges of letters, was periodically struck down by paralyzing depressions, edited the English Review in 1908-9 with astonishing brilliance, and during the '20s, when he lived in Paris, ran the Transatlantic Review...
...In Parade's End, Ford worked out a number of subtle and enormously successful devices for "dramatizing the perceiving consciousness," revealing character through intricate interior dialogues with a keen cutting edge of speech and action...
...His beginnings were deeply rooted in the Victorian world of the arts, through his maternal grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, and his German emigre father, who was music critic of the London Times and an early Wagnerite...
...In trying so desperately to identify with the outmoded noblesse oblige and Tory rectitude of Tietjens, Ford parodied the ideal into an everyday absurdity...
...As Mizener points out, Ford's books "were the purpose of his existence, the one commitment of his life that nothing--disaster, illness, despair--was allowed to interfere with...
...People saw him as only a vain, self-flattering, absurdly snobbish literary fogey, full of British hot air...
...They are the meaning of his life, and its most valuable product...
...Through the bitterness and blood of war, Tietjens realizes that the Edwardian value system, like the smug empire-building materialism of Victoria's reign, was a hypocritical travesty of his code of honor, a code based on the benevolent consideration for tenants' and servants' welfare on his family's vast Yorkshire estate...
...A little afterward some of us went to war ourselves and later, coming back, took Ford's novels down from the shelf...
...on unquestioning allegiance to one's country and ungrudging generosity toward one's friends...
...The way John Dowell, the narrator of The Good Soldier, pieces together Edward Ashburnham's tragic decline into madness and suicide from what at first seem to be random patches of disconnected memory is a breathtaking tour de force...
...For some peculiar reason of his own he had hoaxed us...
...Between these diametric opposites of poetic history lay Ford's crowded years of unending work and restless travel, of competition, bickering, friendship, feuding, and voluminous correspondence with the whole dazzling honor roll of modern British and American writing: Conrad, Galsworthy, James, Bennett, Wells, Lawrence (whom Ford encouraged, befriended, and printed in the English Review when no one else could be bothered), Hemingway, Pound, Tate, among many others...
...But his phrase infers a mere fluency that scarcely begins to do justice to his great technical gifts as a novelist...
...Although he attended a small boarding school, in later years, Mizener writes, "he liked to hint that he had been sent to one of the famous public schools: he usually favored Winchester, though sometimes he chose Eton...
...But what comes through so forcibly in Arthur Mizener's new biography, The Saddest Story (World, 616 pp., $20.00), is the unflagging sense of vocation that enabled Ford, in a not especially long lifetime, to write 81 books, 32 of them novels...
...Ford liked to describe himself as "an old man mad about writing," scribbling away under a tree in his beloved Provence, where he owned a tiny villa and garden--the closest he ever came to the landed estates of the English gentry...
...Finally it is not Ford's work that arouses one's sadness, and not even the many years of failing health, near poverty, shattering disappointment, public indifference...
...Tietjens' tragic enlightenment in the trenches and in the sumptuous drawing rooms of Edwardian society forces him out of his feudal vision of harmony into a morality more appropriate to the disorder and inhumanity of the 20th century...
...in 1950, Robie Macaulay commented in his introduction on this deceptive image: "The year before he died Ford Madox Ford used to walk around the campus of Olivet College like a pensioned veteran of forgotten wars...
...Yet that life is "the saddest story" (the title Ford originally chose for The Good Soldier) not simply because Ford's relations with his wife, mistresses, and children were often unhappy and destructive, or because he was rarely more than a jump ahead of the bill collectors, but because through many of his best writing years, and for at least a decade after his death, his genius was scarcely noticed...
...In Mizener's brilliantly perceptive interweaving of the man and the work, we can see how the war experience provided Ford with exactly the dramatic framework he needed for Parade's End, his most comprehensive, subtle and electric representation of the way he judged not only the modern world but himself...
...He lied habitually and skillfully about his life and work, and in his volumes of reminiscence altered the facts in his favor or ignored them altogether...
...He was an incorrigible party-giver, and as though all this weren't far more than enough for one man, Mizener points out, "He was also for more than thirty years one of the most effective literary journalists in the English-speaking world, able to write interestingly on anything from Amenemhet I's advice to his son to Joyce's Ulysses...
...Tietjens is the last civilized man, buffeted and battered by a dishonorable world whose credit finally runs out in 1914, not with a whimper but a bang...
...he can now cast off his wife and live with his mistress...
...Robert Lowell knew the old Ford, and later wrote an extraordinarily cruel poem about him...
...Not for the world, I daresay...
...Like the Victorian landed gentry, Ford was raised in the belief, which he never really shed, that "to speak to any one who made money by commercial pursuits was almost not to speak to a man at all...
...but we had read all that before...
...He has become a citizen of the modern age: "No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more...
...He collaborated with Conrad on two novels, but later claimed in careless vanity that he had given Conrad the plots for many of his books...
...he was neither benevolent nor harmless and his books were by no means a simple warning as to what modern warfare is like...
...Writers & Writing AN EMINENT EDWARDIAN BY PEARL K. BELL Ford Madox Ford was only 65 when he died in Deauvilie in 1939, but his life and career spanned so vast a spectrum of literary history that it seems almost impossible for one man's mortality to have contained it all...
...None of these novels were potboilers, and five of them --The Good Soldier and the tetralogy Parade's End --are innovative landmarks in 20th-century fiction...
...Mizener has now rescued Ford from the blight of his discrepancies not by slighting his shortcomings but by understanding them...
...The sadness is in Ford's need to live out so many illusions about himself...
...Victorian and Edwardian England had forfeited the order of the past for the profits of the present, and thus prepared the way for the ruinous disintegrations of the future...
...It is the story of a satanically persecuted man of honor, Christopher Tietjens, and the violent demolition of his 18th-century dream of England as the seat of human order and responsibility...
...We knew vaguely that his Tietjens books were about the First World War...
...Swinburne and Rossetti cast giant domestic shadows over the young Ford...
...When Parade's End was reprinted in the U.S...
...Though Ford was already in his 40s when the War broke out, his deep sense of Tory obligation led him to apply for an officer's commission, and he was sent to the front...
...Ford was able to discern the truth of Edwardian England with unsentimental clarity in Parade's End, but unable to face the truth about himself...
...We took him for a kind of vast, benevolent and harmless Uncle Toby . . . wheezing out his stories of Henry James as Toby might have spoken of Marlborough...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 9
