FORD MADOX FORD:
THE DEVELOPMENT AND CRAFT OF A NOVELIST

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Frank Walden Thcmpson
1958

 

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FORD MADOX FORD:

THE DEVELOPMENT AND CRAFT OF A NOVELIST

By

Frank Walden Thompson

A THESIS

Submitted to the College of Science and Arts
Michigan State University of Agriculture and
Applied Science in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English

1958

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . .

O O O O O O O O O 1

CHAPTER I, THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE ARTIST. . . 1

CEIAPTER II , TECHNIQUE O o o o o o

O O O O O O O O O 28

CHAPTER III, THE SPECIAL PROBLEM OF COLLABORATION. 85

CHAPTER Iv ’ A SUIAMRY O O O O O O O O O O O O O O C 108

BIBLIOGMPHY O O O 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 120

INTRODUCTION

In Forces in Modern British Literature, William
York Tindall states: "Of lesser writers, Ford Madox
Ford was closest to midstream."1

One is fortunate to find any mention of Ford in
Tindall's work at all, because, judging from the large
balance of contemporary criticism, Ford is a forgotten
writer. If he were, as Tindall states, a minor writer
close to the "midstream," there would be indeed little
necessity for more than Tindall has given him. However,
Ford's name persists in creeping into the footnotes and
occasionally into the text itself of our best critics.
Edmund Wilson, Mark Schorer, T. 8. Eliot, Graham Greene,
Ezra Pound, and others have mentioned Ford with approval
and, in some cases, with fondness. Graham Greene said:
"But I don't suppose failure disturbed him much: he had
never really believed in human happiness, his middle life
had been made miserable by passion, and he had come
through--with his humour in tact, his stock of unreliable
anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, a

half-belief in a posterity which would care for good

1William York Tindall, Forces in Modern British Liter-

ature: 1885-1956 (New York:Vintage Books, 1956)
p. 2050

11

writing."2

Any man who could elicit this statement
from Greene deserves a closer look. The purpose of
this paper is to provide that look.

The artist, his work, and his technique are
necessarily interwoven, and any attempt to separate
them is, of course, artificial. Nevertheless, I
have done so, h0ping thereby to make the whole clearer
by an examination of its parts.

The first chapter of this paper examines Ford's
conception of the responsibilities of the artist. The
moral and aesthetic responsibilities which every serious
writer must possess are described in terms of Ford's
own writings. The influences which helped to shape
Ford's attitudes are also described and examined.

The second chapter analyzes the work itself.
Ford's technique, his architectronics are studied.
If Ford is to gain any future reputation, he will have
to be Judged on the basis of his craftsmanship. For
this reason Chapter II discusses Ford's techniques at
some length.

Chapter III discusses Ford's collaboration with
Joseph Conrad and attempts to show the influence this
period had on the future careers of both writers. The

2Graham Greene, The Lost Childhood and Other Essays
(New York:VikIHg, 19523 p. 91.

111

three novels written in collaboration are analyzed and
their relationship to Ford's later work noted.

As a summation, Chapter IV attempts to locate Ford's
place as an artist in terms of his own standards and
ideas discussed in the earlier chapters. The summation,
while not intending to describe the critical neglect of
Ford's writings as fair or unfair, is intended as one

answer to the question of why he has been neglected.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Because Ford Madox Ford is little more than a name
to most readers, it might be useful to present a brief
biographical sketch before turning to his work as a
novelist. Although an artist's work and his life are
inextricably intertwined, not all of the events of his
life are germane to his work. The following sketch
presents only those incidents of Ford's life which have
some bearing on his work. In most cases the reader will
find references to these incidents in the main text.

Ford Hermann Hueffer was born into a pre-Raphaelite
family on December 17, 1873. His father, an immigrant
from Germany, was a distinguished music critic for the
London.1$mgg. His mother was a daughter of Ford Madox
Brown, a distinguished member of the pre-Raphaelite circle
of painters. Another daughter of Brown's was married to
William Michael Rossetti. Thus Ford was distantly related
to the famous Rossetti family.

Although pre-Raphaelism was nearly dead, the Aesthe-
tic Movement was in full flower, and its hothouse concep-
tion of art for art's sake was impressed on Ford at an
early age. The pre-Raphaelites were very clannish, and
as they were constantly at each other's homes, Ford listened
to many conversations about art and artists during his

fOrnative years.

Ford was educated at private schools and became very
proficient in Latin and French. He published his first
book, a fairy story, at eighteen. Earlier the same year,
he became a Catholic, a faith that was followed by most
of his family except his parents and his maternal grand-
parents. At his baptism he added the namea Joseph,
Leopold and Madox.

Two years later Ford eloped with Elsie Martindale,
who was then seventeen, and went to live near Romney
Marsh in Kent. This marked the first of Ford's several
"escapes" to the country. Although Ford did little out-
side of growing vegetables and writing occasionally, the
young couple was not in need of money. The death of a
distant relative in Germany had given them a small but
comfortable legacy.

Shortly after Ford's first child, Christina, was
born, Joseph Conrad asked Ford to collaborate with him.
Several of Conrad's acquaintances had recommended Ford
as an ideal collaborator for Conrad. Conrad hoped that
through such a collaboration he would be able to develop
a better style. Edward Garnett, a mutual friend of the
two writers, was probably the first to suggest the pos-
sibilities of collaboration.

The collaboration began in the autumn of 1898 and

lasted roughly ten years. Three books resulted from this

V1

collaboration, Romance, The Inheritors, and The Nature

 

of a Crime. Ford's claim that he aided Conrad in other
books, chiefly The Rescue and The End of the Tether, is
probably true. It is also probably true that Conrad
assisted in the writing of several books published under
Ford's name.

Ford and Conrad developed a close friendship during
the years of collaboration which was strengthened by
their mutual concern for good writing. However, Conrad
was a very demanding person and was extremely difficult
to work with. Writing did not come easily to one who
had been born a Pole and had known French before he had
known English. The tortures of composition often drove
him into unapeakable agonies. Ford, who was sensitive
and extremely impressionable, became more and more
nervous as the years of collaboration passed. Further-
more, Conrad, who was constantly in debt, borrowed often
from his collaborator. The result was that both writers
eventually found themselves in debt and faced with the
necessity of constant writing in order to feed their
families. In 1904 Ford suffered a complete nervous break-
down and left England for the continent. Although he
returned after a few months, the two major novels resulting
from the collaboration were finished and the period of

collaboration itself was almost at an end.

vii

In 1908 Ford helped to establish the English Review
which was certainly one of England's greatest literary
Journals. Under Ford's editorship, it gained a reputa-
tion which lasts even today.

It was during this time that Ford not only broke
off the collaboration with Conrad, but also severed
relationships with his wife. Just what brought about
this separation is not fully known. However, it is
probably quite true that Ford was not a well man. One
of the backers of the English Review was Violet Hunt, and,
although she was several years older than Ford, they found
each other mutually attractive. Like Ford, Violet Hunt
had come from a pre-Raphaelite background, and she was
the center of a glittering group of literary dilettantes
which Ford was attracted to. In 1909 Ford went to live
with Miss Hunt.

The complications which arose from this situation
were numerous. Unwittingly, and rather blunderingly,

Ford had attracted a great deal of publicity concerning
his private life. Because his wife had refused to give
him a divorce, Ford conceived the grand idea of returning
to Germany and taking up citizenship there. By renouncing
his English citizenship and marrying Violet Hunt in
Germany, Ford was convinced that his difficulties would

correct themselves. Complications arose when Germany

viii

failed to grant him citizenship. Unfortunately, during
an interview with a newspaperman, Ford referred to Violet
Hunt as Mrs. Hueffer. The following day, a picture of
Ford and Violet Hunt appeared in a London paper with the
caption, "Mr. and Mrs. Hueffer in Germany." The real
Mrs. Hueffer sued the paper, and the paper allowed the
suit to be brought to trial. The ensuing scandal cost
Ford most of his former friends, including Henry James
and Joseph Conrad.

During the following years spent at South Lodge,
Violet Hunt's home, Ford gained many new friends, among
them Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Richard Aldington.

By 1913 the affair was nearly at an end. Partly out of
love for Ford and partly because of the disparity in their
ages, Violet Hunt was extremely jealous, and the romance,
which had begun so passionately, rapidly cooled. Whether
to escape this affair or whether out of feelings of
patriotism, Ford enlisted in the army when the war broke
out in 1914. This act did much to heal the rift between
Conrad and himself, and Ford made Conrad his literary
executor.

Ford served throughout the war honorably and well.
Little is known about his war service, except that he
was gassed while fighting in France and later received a
severe case of shellshock. He emerged from the war no

longer a young man and with a very sincere desire to

ix

avoid pe0ple and literary society. On his return, how-
ever, he met and fell in love with a young Australian
girl named Stella Bowen. The two of them established
housekeeping on a small farm in Surrey. It was here
that Ford changed his name from Hueffer to Ford. The
lack of money and the necessity for writing drove them
finally to Provence where living was much cheaper.
Here Ford began the first novel of his monumental Tietjens
saga, Some Do Not.

In 1923 Ford went to Paris. There he found that
some influential Parisiens were anxious to start a
literary periodical. Although Ford turned down the
Parisiens' money, because there were strings attached
to it, the idea of a new literary journal appealed to
him. He therefore started the famous transatlantic
review. The English Review had published Ford's friends
in 1908, Conrad, James, Hardy, Galsworthy, etc. Fifteen
years later, Ford was again editing a literary journal
and publishing the work of his friends, this time Pound,
Hemmingway, Stein, etc. Thus, in the space of 15 years,
Ford had spanmd a tremendous distance in English letters.
The transatlantic review lasted only a year, and the end
of 1924 found Ford back in Provence.

During the last half of the twenties, Ford lived in
Provence and in Paris, but he also took several trips to
New York. In 1928 he fell in love with a woman in New

York, and his relationship with Stella Bowen was broken off.

During the thirties, Ford was extremely popular in
the United States, and his books sold well enough to
allow him to travel a great deal. In 1938 he took an
appointment at Olivet College as distinguished visiting
professor. He left there in 1959 to return to Provence
where he died on June 28th.

Ford's life was not a very happy one, and the unhap-
piness is reflected in the profound pessimism of his work.
An examination of his work will show that perhaps, if he
had lived a happier life, he would have been a much

greater artist.

Note

The best biographical sources for Ford's life are
his numerous autobiographies, especially Memories and
Impressions, Thus to Revisit, and It Was the Nightengale.
Douglas Goldring's Trained for Genius and South Lodge
are also valuable. For the Violet Hunt episode, see
Violet Hunt's I Have This To Say. Ford's own commentary
of his collaboration with Joseph Conrad can be found in

Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance.

CHAPTER I

The Responsibilities er the Artist

A novelist's attitude toward his art is perhaps
his most important feature, because his attitude will
determine the seriousness and the value of his efforts.
His attitude is far more important than the way he has
handled the tools of his trade. Many have mastered a
competent prose style but have been incapable of giving
it content. An understanding of a novelist's attitude
toward his work will of necessity include an understanding
of his reason for writing. An old theory states that a
writer writes because he has to write. If this be true,
what is the necessity that forces him to write? The
answer lies in what he feels to be the reaponsibilities
of the novelist. The novelist's primary concern is plot,
because to most readers of novels the end of the story
is all important. The reader reads to discover the end
of the affair. Thus, Ford Madox Ford, like other writers
in the realistic tradition, concentrated all his faculties
on bringing the reader to the culmination of his story.

To Ford writing was a highly skilled trade, but he
believed that the novelist's skill should never be seen
by the reader. The presence of the writer in a story
lessens the impact of that story on the reader. Any

reflection of the artist in his work should be the

unconscious reflection of his talent. Ford said of the
pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement,

Its defect as a movement was that its sup-

porters, . . . aimed rather at displaying

personal cleverness than at the concealment

of themselves beneath the surface of their

works. They had not yet learnt the sternest

of all 1essons--that the story is the thing,

and the story and then the story, and that

there is nothing else that matters in the

world.1
Ford felt that the purpose of the novel was to entertain
as well as instruct. To be entertained the reader must
forget that he is reading a story and begin to live the
story. This feeling accounts for Ford's insistence that
the writer keep himself out of his story. ". . . an
authentic rendering--a rendering made with extreme artis-
tic skill--will give you more the sense of having been
present at an event than if you had been corporeally
present, . . . To produce that or similar effects is the
ambition of the novel of today.2 The motivation behind
this theory was realism.

Ford saw the history of the novel as a long progression
toward realism, and he judged all novelists in the light
of whether they wrote realistically or not. If a writer
is to write realistically, he must not allow his cleverness
1Ford Madox Ford, The English Novel (Philadelphia:Lippen-

cott, 1929) p. 141.

2Ibid., pp. 62-63.

to spill out and be seen. Self-effacement must always
be his watchword.

And what more than anything is impressive
about his figure (Richardson) is that one
knows almost nothing about it: he is as
little overdrawn as are his characters
whereas the besetting sin of almost all
other English novelists from Fielding to
George Meredith is that they seem to cut
their characters out with hatchets and to
colour them with the brushes of house-
painters and, never, even at that, being
able to let them alone, they are perpetually
pushing their own faces and winking at you over
the shoulders of Young Blifil, Uncle Toby,
the Widow Wadman, Dick Swiveller, the
Marchioness, Becky Sharp, Ewen Harrington,
and the rest. That is usually applauded by
orthodox Anglo-Saxon criticism and to talk
of the gallery of portraits left by this

or that novelist is considered to be high
praise indeed. But, as a matter of fact,
the overdrawing of characters is merely a
symptom of the laziness and contempt for
their vehicle that is the too usual hall-
mark of the English writer of nuvvles.3

Does this mean, then, that the artist's personality
must never enter into his work? The answer, of course,
is no. The absence of self in a tale would turn it into
a mere report, reducing it to the level of journalism.

It is obvious that the author, being the
creator of his characters, may, if he will,
create himself. As long as he creates his
own character so as to be interesting and
to fit into the scheme of the work, he may
let this portion of himself preach whatever
doctrines he desires.

3Ibid., pp. 90-91.

4Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), The Critical Attitude (London:
Duckworth, 1911) p. 34.

Thus not only are the characters the artist draws filtered
through his personality and imagination, but, according
to Ford, the artist may create a character embodying him-
self as long as this creation does not disrupt the
pattern of the whole and is essential to the story.

Ford's standards of what an artist should be and
what he should not be place a heavy responsibility on the
artist. Ford bitterly attacked the English novelists'
failure to assume these responsibilities. He says that
the artist's "actual and first desire must be always
the expression of himself--the expression of himself
exactly as he is, not as he would like other people to
think him, the expression of his view of life as it is,
not as he would like it to be."5 The idea came from the
French novelists. Remy de Gourmont had voiced it in
almost the same words in "The Book of Masks."‘

The capital crime for a writer is conformity,

imitation, submission to rules and teachings.

The work of a writer should not only be the

reflection but the magnified reflection of

his personality. The only excuse a man has

to write is to write himself, to reveal to

others the sort of world which is reflected

in his individual mirror; his one excuse is

to be original; he must say things not yet
said and say them in a form not yet formulated.6

51bid., pp. 32-33.

 

6Remy de Gourmont, Remy de Gourmont: Selections, chosen
and translated by Richard Aldington (London:Chatto and
Windus, 1932) pp. 39-40.

If "Rossetti, isolated from society, revived Keats
and offered an art without moral or social purpose,"7
Ford's writing was to progress in the opposite direction.
The concept of art for art's sake was an empty concept

to him, full of contradictions. One of his best-realized
characters explodes after hearing a poem of Rossetti's
read:

Damn it. What's the sense of all these attempts

to justify fornication? England's mad about it.

. . . I tell you it revolts me to think of that

obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a

grease—spotted dressing-gown and the under-clothes

he's slept in, standing beside a five-shilling

model with crimped hair, or some Mrs. W. Three

Stars, gazing into a mirror that reflects

their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop

chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon

fat and gurgling about passion.

The habit the later pre-Raphaelite painters had of tacking
on a moral and thereby demonstrating a superficial moral
basis for their art made pre-Raphaelism seem sterile to
Ford. Pre-Raphaelite art was a hothouse flower, an art
separated from mankind.

Ford did not believe that art could be placed in a
vacuum, because art being concerned with humankind cannot
therefore be separated from it. Unlike the pre-Raphaelites
Ford detested the heavy-handed moralizer and preferred
not to moralize but to write with a moral point of view.

He once wrote, ". . . essentially the function of the novel

7William York Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature

(New York:Vintage Books, 19563 p. 5.

8Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End (New YorsznOpf, 1950) p. 17.

is to render life, even though its ultimate aim should
be to make life a better thing."9 If the writer does not
moralize or preach, how is he "to make life a better
thing?" He does this through the careful selection of
his material. This selection is his moral choice. The
artist records an affair, and, through reading about this
affair, the reader is able to make some kind of judgment
about life. The artist

does not . . . expect to improve the world by

advocating anything. He doesn't suggest that

divorce laws or marriage laws or prison laws or

social laws should be altered. He merely gives

you material. .Upon the views which you may

gather from this material you are at liberty to

form your verdict and to direct your votes when

the questions of divorce, marriage, crime, or

society may come before you in a practical sense.10

Ford saw a peculiar need for the novel in the twen-
tieth century. He believed that pe0ple needed "gossip“
in order to maintain normal and mentally healthy lives.
"Gossip" is Ford's term by which he meant that pe0ple
needed to know other peeple's problems, faults, arguments,
and thoughts. He felt that this need was not being ful-
filled in today's large cities because of the increasing

breakdown in human communication. Yet peOple needed to

know gossip, because, in his terms, it was educational.

9Ford, The Critical Attitude, p. 15.

10Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), Henry James (London:Secker,

1913) p. 28.

One profits by another's mistakes. Newspapers cannot
supply this need, because their stories are isolated
incidents. Furthermore, the writing in those news-
papers Specializing in gossip is too highly colored.
Also, in order to be of news value, newspaper stories
must be far from the commonplace. While a few of the
stories pe0ple read in the newspapers might have some
value, these few are quickly forgotten just because
they are too highly colored and widely isolated from
events familiar to us. The value of the novel lies
in its ability to render the commonplace gossip and to
make the reader remember it.11

The function of the novel then is to instruct, which
is really a moral function.

It is in short unbearable to exist without

some view of life as a whole, for one finds

oneself daily in predicaments in which some

sort of pointer is absolutely necessary.

Even though no novel known to you may exactly

meet your given case, the novel does supply

that cloud of human instances without which

the soul feels unsafe in its adventures and

the normal mind fairly easily discerns what

events or characters in its fugitive novels

are meretricious in relation to life however

entertaining they may be as fiction.12
This is not platitudinous. Ford believed the artist

to be the only one left who was concerned with human

11Ford, The English Novel, pp. 18-19.

131bid., p. 20.

values. Therefore, the function of the novelist was to
pose the problems peculiar to his time and to work out
the logical outcomes of the problems, be the outcomes
happy or sad. Ford states this function in The Critical
Attitude:

For, if the arts have any function at all,

that function is truly educational-~nay, it

is truly scientific. The artist today is

the only man who is concerned with the values

of life; he is the only man who, in a world

grown very complicated through the limitless

freedom of expression for all creeds and all

moralities, can place before us how those

creeds work out when applied to human contacts,

and to what goal of human happiness those

moralities will lead us.15

No one writes without the pressure of other peOple,
of other times, of other movements upon him. The most
profound pressure that Ford felt had been with him since
earliest childhood, for Ford was born into the strange
hothouse world of pre-Raphaelisut'. His maternal grand-
father was Ford Madox Brown, the famous pre-Raphaelite
painter. His father was a music critic for The Times
and a vociferous supporter of Wagner whose music was so
baffling the masses. Ford numbered the talented Rossettis
among his cousins, and his earliest remembrances included
all the greats of pre-Raphaelism.* from William Morris

to Swinburne. As a child, ford was forced to wear "a

green corduroy suit with gold buttons, which showed up

13Ford, The Critical Attitude, pp. 27-28.

his platinum blond curls . . . one of his stockings was
scarlet, the other green."14

It was only natural that such a childhood should
affect Ford and his art.

Because they found the present world crass and ugly,
the pre-Raphaelites turned to the past for their subject
matter. The past they turned to, however, was a past
that had never existed--a past found only in Malory's
Morte d'Arthur, Shakespeare, or Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes."
The pre-Raphaelite movement was a strange and interesting
one. Founded on a common desire to return to a past
imperfectly seen because of faulty scholarship, the
movement nevertheless was vitally interested in the
present. The pre-Raphaelite painters commonly painted
medieval, or some other historical period, scenes with
the figures representing their friends or fellow painters.
Because of this duality between past and present, the
pre-Raphaelites were never very sure themselves just
where they belonged Or what they believed.

The group had acted as the medium for the

Romantic Poetry, with the Gothic and religious

Revival, with the reaction against the Industrial

Revolution; with Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley,

Pugin and Pusey, the anti-Victorian thinkers

Ruskin and Carlyle, though with the Italian
masters of the later Middle Age, who provided

14Douglas Goldring, Trainedtfor Genius: The Life and
Writings of Ford Madox Ford (New Yorsz. P. Dutton,
1949) p. 18.

10

its curious name, it had very little to do.

It had also the realist, reforming spirit

of 1848.15
Because the duality between the pre-Raphaelite dream
world of the past and the violent realism of the present
was so great, the movement could not last long. Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, through dOpe, lost himself in a dream
world inhabited by Dante's Beatrice. Millais, successful
too young, succumbed to the materialism of the moment.
William Morris struggled to resolve the duality by bring-
ing the past to the present. Morris and his small band
of followers made many artistically beautiful things in
their medieval shop which sold fairly well. But in the
end lorris' ideas bankrupted him. Speaking of Morris in
The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy William Gaunt says, ". . . the
dream had charged full tilt into reality and nothing had

happened at all."

Although the pre-Raphaelites were essentially painters,
they left their mark on Ford Madox Ford, the writer.
Their mark is perhaps most easily seen in Ford's attitude
toward the artist. He says in The English Novel,

It was Flaubert who most shiningly preached

the doctrine of the novelist as Creator who
should have a Creator's aloofness, rendering
the world as he sees it, uttering no comments,
falsifying no issues and carrying the subject--
the Affair-~he has selected for rendering,
remorselessly out to its logical conclusion.16

15William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942) p. 25.

6
Ford, The English Novel, p. 129.

11

While Ford may have sought justification for the "doctrine
of the novelist as Creator" in the works of Flaubert, the
doctrine was certainly embraced by the pre-Raphaelites as
well. Many of Ford's attitudes toward the reaponsibilities
of the artist can be traced to the pre-Raphaelites. Having
been raised as a boy in the pre-Raphaelite world, he
accepted some pre-Raphaelite doctrine. Still more of his
make-up as an artist, however, was in violent reaction
against pre-Raphaelite preachings. While Ford could
imagine the writer as the aloof "Creator," he could not
conceive of the artist isolating himself as Dante Gabriel
Rossetti had done.

With the idea that a writer should have been

a man of action before he begins to write I

am cordially in agreement; indeed, I doubt

whether any writer has ever been thoroughly

satisfactory unless he has once had some sort

of normal existence. No greater calamity could

befall one than to be trained as a genius. For

the writer looks at life and does not share

it. This is his calamity; this is his curse.17
The key word in the above quotation is "before." The
writer must experience life and form some conclusions
about it before he begins to write. Once he begins to
write he must stand aloof from society in order to be
"Creator." The aloofness must never take the form of
the haughtiness, snobbishness found in Oscar Wilde.
Ford believed that an attitude like Wilde's destroyed the

artist's material.

17Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), Memories and Impressions:

A Stud in Atmosphere (New Yorszarper & Bros.,
I9II) p. 268.

12

A novelist had better share the superstitions
of, than high-hat, humanity. He will thus
more understand his matter. . . . Yet the
novelist must pass unobserved in a crowd if
he himself is to observe. And the crowd is
his clay; of his observations of it he will
build his monuments to humanity. . . . But
the first thing the novelist has to learn is
self-effacement--that first and that always.
Not for him flowing locks, sombreros, flaming
ties, eccentric pants. If he gets himself up
like a poet, humanity will act towards him as
if he were a poet . . . disagreeably. That
would not matter were it not that he will see
humanity under a false aspect. Then his books
will be wrong.

His effort should be to be at one with
his material. Without that he will not under-
stand its emotions and reactions. Supersti-
tions, belief in luck, premonitions, play a
great part in human motives. A novelist who
does not to some extent enter into those
feelings can hardly understand and will cer-
tainly be unable to render to perfection
most human affairs. Yes, you must sacrifice
yourself. You must deny yourself the pleasure
of saying to your weaker brothers and sisters:
"Haw! No superstitions about me." Indeed
you must deny yourself the pleasure of high-
hatting anybody about anything. You must live
merrily and trust to good letters.18

If the concept of the artist mingling with society
was counter to the pre-Raphaelite code of art for art's
sake, certainly the concept of the artist as observer of
life would have been in sympathy with pre-Raphaelite
beliefs. The pre-Raphaelites were in one sense realists:

In effect, they said that true beauty is to be

found in Life alone, and that true beauty is to

18Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (New York:
Liveright, 1952) pp. 295-6.

 

13

be brought into works of Art solely by

rendering what they saw.19
But the pre-Raphaelites quickly changed from realists to
something else. In the first place they were handicapped
by a dream, the dream of juxtaposing reality over a
medieval backdrop. "And the method was this: they fitted
real peOple and real backgrounds to imaginary scenes or
vice versa . . ."20 To some extent the paradox of trying
to mix past and present, reality and dream is under-
standable. Before the pre-Raphaelites, painters had been
c0pying the style of the great Italian masters. The style
was imitated by placing just as much shadow in a painting
as the masters had and by always painting on a brown sur-
face to give the work a golden-brown glow. None of these
paintings contained colors which were true to nature. The
pre-Raphaelite movement was a natural reaction away from
the falseness and imitativeness of Academy painting. A
return to the colors of nature was demanded. At the
same time the horrors of the Industrial Revolution were
becoming obvious. Because of its history of guilds and
skilled craftsmen, of men working with their hands and

taking pride in their work, the medieval period was much

19Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:
A Critical Monograph (London:Duckworth.& Co., 1906)

p. 82.

zoGaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy. P. 26.

14

admired by the pre-Raphaelites. They began to use
medieval themes or subjects for their paintings, but, in
order to be true to nature, they used themselves as models,
often against a contemporary backdrop.

Several of the ideas embraced by the pre-Raphaelites
were later taken up by Ford. The desire for realism
which lay behind the pre-Raphaelites'abandonment of the
old techniques of copying the masters shaped many of Ford's
beliefs about his art. Ford's view of the history of the
novel, his concept of the novel's function, his idea of
style and technique were all derived from a belief in
realism. The influence that the pre-Raphaelite preoccupa-
tion with the past had on Ford is much harder to deline-
ate. Apparently there was some subtle influence. In
Parade's End Ford retreats to the past in very much the
same manner as the pre-Raphaelites did. The protagonist
in Parade's End is almost a figure from a pre-Raphaelite
painting, an anachronism. Ford himself came close several
times during his life to falling into the same trap that
William Morris fell into-~that of living in the past one-
self. Twice Ford left the city to live in the country
the life of a "small producer." He would be independent,
he would raise and harvest his own needs, he would return
to the soil. The return was not successful.

The pre-Raphaelites also influenced Ford in a nega-

tive way. Shortly after they had started to paint in the

15

new manner, they found something else to put in their
pictures.
For already they had pronounced the doc-

trine that a picture must enshrine some worthy

idea. It was not sufficient that it should

be well painted. Thus quickly had they reverted

to one at least of the doctrines of the Grand

Style, and set themselves back, as it were, to

the days before Gainsborough existed. They

had, in fact, missed thus early the road along

which modern art was travelling. It was, I

think, Monet who said: "The principal person

in a picture is the light": The Pre-Raphaelites

had by 1849 arrived at the conclusion that the

principal person in a picture was the Incident

pointing a moral (I am, by the way, not re-

vealing a preference but stating a fact.)
Ford's parenthetical remark must be called an under-
statement, because he detested any work of art which was
blatantly moral. As we pointed out earlier the artist,
according to Ford, does not ram a moral down the throats
of his audience but instead gives his audience material:
"Upon the views which you may gather from this material
you are at liberty to form your verdict . . ."22

When Ford was born in 1873 the pre-Raphaelite move-
ment was already 24 years old and was giving way rapidly
to the Aesthetic movement. Where the pre-Raphaelites
had withdrawn from society and yet remained a part of it
through the inevitable "moral," the Aesthetes remained in

society but withdrew their art from it. The Aesthetic

21Ford, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, p. 114.

22Ford, Henry James, p. 28.

16

movement reached England in the early 1860's brought
from Paris by Whistler and Swinburne. In Paris the
revolt against the Middle Class was still in full swing,
a revolt touched off thirty years earlier by Gautier's
Mademoiselle de Maupin.

Whistler was interested in his art, not in morali-
zing. He was interested in the present, not in the
past. He studied his craft earnestly. However, after a
short time in England Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
became good friends, although Rossetti's painting seemed
idiotic to Whistler.

To one habituated to the cleverness of Parisian
cafeE, who was passing from realism to the still
more exacting cultivation of form as understood
by the Japanese, the practice of painting ela-
borate costume pictures and subjects from Dante
was nonsense. That sort of thing might be poetry,
but poetry was poetry and painting was painting.
Whistler's implacable hostility to the alien
form of eXpression appears in his celebrated
remark "Why not frame the sonnet," when Rossetti
was considering in what frame to put a picture
which he had accompanied, as he frequently did,
by a poem.25

While Whistler and Swinburne were largely respon-
sible for the Aesthetic movement in England, the move-
ment's chief spokesman was Walter Pater. Pater had
originally been influenced by Swinburne, but he had also
gone back to the source of Swinburne's inspiration too,

the French Aesthetics, Gautier and Baudelaire. Pater,

23William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (New York:Har-

court, Brace and Co., 1945) p. 39.

17

more than all the others, made a religion out of art.
Pater set out to become art's chief prophet, spokesman,
and high priest.

It was in the late 'seventies that the

various efforts of Whistler, Swinburne, and

Pater to interpret Art for Art's Sake began

to make an impression on English society and

to be combined, after a muddled fashion

typical both of the country and the age with

the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, into

a confused whole called "Aestheticism."

"Are you intense?"24
To the pre-Raphaelites of the 'seventies the new aestheti-
cism was almost incomprehensible, even though the new
movement had taken over many of the pre-Raphaelite theories
of art. The Aesthetes, of course, had no moral point in
their art--their art, they claimed, was merely art and
nothing more. Indeed, as the movement became older and
gained more converts and young disciples, it became more
decadent and more perverse, taking on the aSpect of decay
and rottenness.

The Aesthetic movement lent itself well to poetry,
painting, and drama but not to the novel. Only one nove-
list of much stature emerges from the movement, George
Moore. It is possible that the excesses of the movement

did not appeal to the English novelist or that it took

longer for ideas of the movement to be translated into the

24Ibid., p. 66

18

novel form. However, many of the novels written twenty
years later were to have much of the Aesthetic movement
about them.

The year of Ford Madox Ford's birth, 1873, saw the
publication of a book which contained statements that
were to influence much of Ford's writing. The book was
The Renaissance by Walter Pater, and the statements were
found mainly in the brief Preface to the book. Pater had
said that since beauty was relative to human experience,
its definitions must not be in terms of universals but
in terms of that which is true for the individual-~each
one who views a work of art has his own definition of its
beauty. Therefore

in aesthetic criticism the first step towards
seeing one's object as it really is, is to
know one's own impression as it really is, to
discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. . . .
What is this song or picture, this engaging
personality presented in life or in a book,
to.mg? What effect does it really produce

on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so,
what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my
nature modified by its presence, and under
its influence? The answers to these ques-
tions are the original facts with which the
aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the
study of light, of morals, of number, one
must realise such primary data for one's
self, or do not at all. . . . the picture,
the landscape, the engaging personality in life
or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of
Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for
their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a
herb, a wine, a gen; for the property each

19

has of affecting one with a Special, a

unique, impression of pleasure.
Here we have a critic viewing a work of art and deriving
pleasure from the work through the impressions he receives
from it. To satisfy this critic and others like him, does
it not follow that in writing a novel the artist should
avoid direct statement in favor of impression? The im-
pression is far more apt to seem real and to last longer
in the reader's memory than the direct statement. Ford,
along with Conrad and Henry James, was to develop this
style and technique of writing known as Impressionism.

Ford does not, in his critical or his autobiographi-
cal writings, mention Walter Pater. Certainly Pater could
not have been unknown to him. The reason for this avoid-
ance of Pater probably lies in Ford's dislike of the pre-
Raphaelites and the Aesthetic movement. The reasons for
his dislike are many. He did not have a particularly
happy childhood surrounded by aging pre-Raphaelites
(although he certainly was not adverse to turning a pound
or two in later years with stories based on his memories
of those greats). Ford did not, as we have Seen, vouch-
safe the principle of art for art's sake, a principle which
was, in fact, completely Opposed to his theory that art
supplies a need that people in general have. Rather than

pay allegiance to Pater, Ford preferred to claim that he

25Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetgy-

(LondonzMacmillan and Co., 1935) pp. viii-ix.

20

had been influenced by Flaubert, Henry James, and, in
emulation of James, by Turgenev. These influences will
be described after this sample of Ford's criticism which
should show his debt to Pater, at least in the field of
criticism:

As an artist--as a mere writer-~Anthony Trollope
had most of the vices of George Eliot. He is
never remarkably engrossing, his writing has no
particular justness of phrase, his novels are
hardly constructed at all, but meander one into
another without any particular bounds, without
there being any particular reason why any given
book should begin or end here or there. Yet,
although Trollope's books do not very much cry
aloud to be read, we can take up with interest
"Barchester Towers" in a hand from which nerve-
lessly "Adam Bede" drops. The reason is that
never taking himself with any attempt at solemu
nity, TrollOpe was content to observe and to
"record, whereas George Eliot, as if she had con-
verted herself into another Frankenstein, went

on evolving obedient monsters who had no parti-
cular relation to the life of her time--monsters
who seduced or admitted themselves to be seduced,
who murdered their infants or quoted the Scrip-
tures just as it suited the creator of their
ordered world. Trollope, on the other hand,
observed the world he lived in: his characters
walk upon the ground; perhaps they are even a
little flatfooted, but his observations have the
light of facts, filtered through the screen of

a personality. That the personality was not a
very rare, was not a very subtle one, is perhaps
the reason why we do not read him with very great
avidity. But because the personality, was so
honest so humble and above all, so conscientious,
he helps us to live in a real world, he affords
us real experiences. And precisely because George
Eliot had no conscience, precisely because she
gives us a world that never was, peOpled by
supermen who, we may thank God, never could have
been, she is now a moral force practically extinct,
is hourly losing impetus. And she has as an artist
no existence whatever. Having studied "Das Leben
Jesu," she became inflated by the idea of the

21

writer as prOphet, she evolved monstrous works
which contained her endless comments upon
Victorian philosophy, forgetting that our Lord,
Who was the supreme influence, because He was
the supreme artist, limited Himself in His re-
corded fiction to the barest statement of fact,
to the merest citation of instance.

Having stated so much we may pause to con—
cede that probably the great majority of humanity
would say that the converse of what we have
stated is the actual fact. They would say, that
George Eliot was the great artist because she
presented them with an unreal, with an idealised
world, which is what they demand of art. George
Eliot, that is to say, takes them out of them-
selves. Mr. Trollope makes them think. With
.this, of course, we rcannot quarrel, since it
is merely a matter of terms. We prefer . . . to
consider that the artist is the renderer of human
vicissitude--the creator of a wbrld of his own
in which conscientiously, as he sees it, effect
follows cause. We should not, supposing each
of them to render life as he saw it, quarrel with
Fielding, whose idea of cause and effect is that
drinking makes a man a fine genial fellow any
more than with the late M. Zola, who wrote a book
called "L'Assommoir." Actually "Tom Jones,"
since it is a product of the author's experience
of life, whereas Zola's book is a product not
of experience, but of tabulations--”Tom Jones"
will probably have a more persistent vitality.

It is a rendering of life; it is, such as it

is, a picture of manners. It interests because
it excites our curiosity. After all, we most of
us read because we want to know. . . We want to
know how people used to live in past days, we
want to know what was the outcome of a given
affair. We want to be, as a Stevensonian writer
would put it "at grips with life."26

The above quotation is particularly interesting because
it neatly includes most of the points we have discussed

in this Chapter. Ford says Trollope's "novels are hardly

26Ford, The Critical Attitude, pp. 56-58.

22

constructed at all." We will see Ford's concern for
construction, technique, and style in the next chapter.
Trollope was a better writer than George Eliot because
he "was content to observe and to record" whereas she
"went on evolving obedient monsters who had no . . .
relation to the life of her time." We have seen that
according to Ford the good novel "does supply that

cloud of human instances," his dislike of unrealistic
"monsters“ is certainly motivated by a passionate desire
for realism. Obviously, Ford's criticism is impres-
sionistic--the criticism of personal opinion based on
Ford's own bias and not essentially established by facts--
the critical approach expounded by Pater.

Ford's primary debt, then, was to Pater, the pre-
Raphaelites, and the Aesthetic movement, in spite of his
preference for Flaubert, Henry James, and Turgenev.
Conrad, because of the unique background in Polish and
French culture, was much more the direct disciple of
Flaubert. The task of trying to discover, considering
Ford's admiration of Flaubert, what came from Conrad or
from the Aesthetic movement is an impossible one. Ford's
desire to be a conscientious student of life may well have
come from Flaubert, probably directly through Conrad.
Flaubert expounded the doctrine of realism, the portraying

of things as they really are. The action of environment

23

upon the individual which Ford stuck to conscientiously

throughout his writing can certainly be seen in Madame

Bovary. Charles Weir says:

In Madame Bovary more explicitly than ever
before in any work of literature, the char-
acters and their actions are related to the
environment which has produced them and in
which they move. In one sense, Emma Bovary

is hardly a free agent: the education that
she has received, the farm on which she has
grown up have shaped her character. And the
struggle for which she is so poorly equipped
and in which, by no choice of her own, she
finds herself engaged, is not against herself
or some other person-~not even against fate

in a Greek or an Elizabethan sense-~but against
the intellectual and social milieu in which
she has unwillingly been placed, the stifling
atmosphere of a provincial French village.
Here Flaubert certainly struck a note which
was to become more and more characteristic of
the modern novel, no matter what label it
bore. A new element of plot was clearly
recognized: whatever the clash of human wills
might be, whatever the inner conflicts of

the character, there was still another influ-
ence--assisting, limiting, or thwarting--to

be rggkoned with, the society which surrounded
him.

Ford's final great work, Parade's End, demonstrates
most clearly this Flaubertian theme of society and
its pressures upon the individual. Flaubert insisted
that a novel stand as a work of art. He felt that it
need serve no other purpose than to be an aesthetic
object and as such should not contain a heavy-handed
27Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, introduction by

Charles I. Weir, Jr. (New York:Rinehart & Co.,
1948) p. x.

24

moral. To create an aesthetic object, he believed, it

was necessary to approach the art of writing a novel with
the craftsman's eye. The novel needed to contain crafts—
manship not only in each line but as a whole as well.28
Earlier in this chapter Ford's preoccupation with realism
has been noted. In the next chapter and in the chapter on
Ford's collaboration with Conrad, his desire for the
craftsman's technique, the craftsman's skill, will be
shown. It is easy to overstress Ford's debt to Flaubert,
and the student of the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth century must always remember that Flaubert had

a tremendous impact on many of the novelists of that

period including Henry James, Conrad and Ford. In Conrad's
case, Flaubert's influence was probably more direct

than that which other English novelists received indirectly
through the Aesthetic movement.

Henry James had much more of a direct influence on
Ford's work. Around 1901 Ford took a cottage at Winchelsea
which was fairly close to Henry James's home in Rye.

James at that time was considered one of the foremost
living writers, and it was not unnatural that Ford should
have assiduously cultivated James's friendship. As a

matter of fact, the character of Densher in Henry James's

281bid., pp. x-xi.

25

Wings of the Dove was "a projection of Ford."29 That
Henry James personally taught Ford much about the craft
of writing is doubtful, although it is very likely that
during the course of their friendship they discussed the
technique of writing many times. It is much more certain
that Ford learned a great deal about his craft from Henry
James's novels. Ford tried, as did James, to get inside
the minds of his characters. Unlike James, Ford generally
tried to do this through the technique of first-person
narrative. In Parade's End, however, which is third-
person narrative, Ford used much the same technique as
James did in What Maisie Knew, although Ford did not con-
fine this technique of seeing the action through the eyes
of one character, as we see the action through the eyes _
of Maisie, but rather shifted from one character to another.
Robert Spiller says that James "was quite certain that
the only reality lies in the impressions made by life on
the Spectator, and not in any fact of which the spectator
is unaware. Realism is therefore merely the obligation
that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it,
which may not be the same as life as it 'really' 13.":50

We have seen Ford's desire to present life as he saw it,

29Goldring, Trained for Genius, p. 99.

30Robert E. Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature

(New YorkzMentor Books, 1957) p. 134.

26

to work out the logical answers to the problems that life
presented to him as a thinking individual.

Ford wrote his novels "to make life a better thing,"
to feed the hunger for "gossip" that pe0ple felt, and he
did this by writing about life as he saw it not as he
wished it might be. These then were the reSponsibilities
Ford felt toward his craft and his fellow man. One other
reSponsibility has not been mentioned until now. We have
referred to Ford as a craftsman, and, perhaps, the deepest
responsibility he felt was the necessity for craftsmanship
within his trade of literature. The years before World
War I and after 1900 saw Ford preaching to the young
writers the doctrine of good prose.51 Ford's doctrine is
best summed up by one who looked to him as a leader during
those years. Ezra Pound reiterates that the function of
literature in the state

has to do with the clarity and vigour of

Qany and every" thought and Opinion. It

has to do with maintaining the very clean-

liness of the tools, the health of the

very matter of thought itself. Save in

the rare and limited instances of invention

in the plastic arts, or in mathematics, the

individual cannot think and communicate his

thought, the governor and legislator cannot

act effectively or frame his laws, without

words, and the solidity and validity of
these words is the care of the damned and

31Ezra Pound, Polite Essays (LondonzFaber and Faber

Ltd., 19377Fp. 57.

27

despised litterati. When their work goes
rotten—-by that I do not mean when they
express indecorous thoughts--but when their
very medium, the very essence of their work,
the application of word to thing goes rotten,
i.e., becomes slushy and inexact, or exces-
sive or bloated, the whole machinery of social

and 9% individual thought and order goes to
pot.°

Let us turn then and examine how Ford Madox Ford

used his words.

32

Ibid., p. 164.

CHAPTER II

Technique

Shortly after Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad
began their collaboration in the autumn of 1898, they
were struck by the necessity of self-effacement from
their style. Both admired Flaubert and had noted how
the great French author managed to keep his own person-
ality from his writing. Then, too, they noticed the
seemingly effortless writing of the American author,

W. H. Hudson. This they decided was the perfect style:

The trouble, however, with Conrad and
myself was this: we could not get our
own prose keyed down enough. We wanted
to write, I suppose, as only Mr. W. H.
Hudson writes—-as simply as the grass
grows. We desired to achieve a style--
the habit of a style--so simple that you
would notice it no more than you notice
the unostentatious covering of the South
Downs. The turf has to be there, or the
earth would not be green.

Our most constant preoccupation,
then, was to avoid words that stuck out
of sentences either by their brilliant
unusualness or their "amazing aptness."
Either sort of word arrests the attention
of the reader, and thus "hangs up" both
the meaning and the cadence of a phrase.
We wanted the reader to forget the
writer-~to forget that he was reading.

We wished him to be hypnotised into
thinking that he was living what he read--
or, at least, into the conviction that

he was listening to a simple and in no

way brilliant narrator whf was telling--
not writing-~a true story.

1Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (New YorkzLiveright,
1932) p. 216.

29

The rigid discipline of self-effacement kept Conrad and
Ford in constant search for le motgjuste, the word which
would not dazzle the reader with the authors' cleverness
but which would exactly convey the impression the authors
wished the reader to feel. Feel is a key word here,
because feeling is exactly what Ford and Conrad were
striving for. They wanted the reader to sense or feel
their story rather than be conscious of reading it. The
reader, therefore, must never be aware of the author's

hand.

The struggle-~the aspiration-~0f the novelist
down the ages has been to evolve a water-tight
convention for the framework of the novel. He
aspires--and for centuries has aSpired--to
construct his stories and so to manage their
surfaces that the carried away and rapt reader
shall really think himself to be in Bermuda

on the first of Waterloo days or in Grand
Central Station waiting for the Knickerbocker
Express to come in from Boston though actually
he may be sitting in a cane lounge on a beach
of Bermuda in December. This is not easy.2

To make the reader think he is in one place when he is
really in another, the author must not only avoid
cleverness in his writing, which would draw the reader's
attention from the story to the author, but the author
must also avoid making direct statements. Direct state-
ments tend to keep the reader aware that the author is
only telling a story. Since he is telling a story, the

2Ford Madox Ford, The English Novel (Philadelphia:
Lippencott, 1929)p. 86.

SO

writer cannot help writing statements, but he can avoid
writing direct, flat statements. He can make his state-
ments render impressions.

Impressionism was taken over from the French by
Henry James, and, during the 1890's, James became its
leading eXponent. Stephen Crane also experimented with
it, and, at Pent Farm, Ford and Conrad wrestled to perfect
it. The idea behind impressionism was this. The reader
read of an affair which was filtered through the mind of
the author. Thus what the reader read was not so much
the narration of an affair but the impressions of the
author viewing the affair. Through the eyes and mind
of the author, then, the reader would be immersed in the
sights and sounds of the affair, the main purpose being
to make the reader forget he was reading. Herbert Read
in English Prose Style offers the clearest definition of
impressionism.

"Impressions" are received and recorded by the

nervous organism. They may be held in their

sensational vividness (and the capacity so to

hold them is a peculiarity of the artist) and

then projected back into forms which match the

impressions. But alternatively they may be

allowed to 'sink in“ and arouse whatever reac-

tions and associations may linger in the memory.

They then become transformed into SXpressive

symbols of the SXperience of the receiving

personality. In each case we have a structure

of words--one extravert and objective, the other
introvert and subjective.3

3Herbert Read, English Prose Style (BostonzBeacon Press,
1952) p. 145.

31

We have thus two types of impressionism, the extravert and
the introvert. Read goes on to say that it is possible
to define the extravert type in terms of rhythm. If the
writer is trying to convey the impression of intensity,
or stress, or excitement, he will convey it through the
rhythm of his prose. Notice in the following passage
how the tension builds toward the climax through the use
of rhythm.

Monks began to sing; a great brass instrument

grunted lamentably; in the body of the building

there was silence. The bishop and his supporters

moved about, as if aimlessly, in front of the

alter; the chains of the gold censors clicked

ceaselessly. Seraphina's head had sunk forward

out of my Sight. All the heads of the cathedral

bowed down, and suddenly, from round the side of

the stall, a Rand touched mine, and a voice said,

"It is time."
— In the introvert type of impressionism, as Read has
said, the impressions depend upon the mind and the memory
for their effect; ". . . the mirrors beneath the new
luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very
little . . ."5 This fragment, of course, has been lifted
from context, and the image appears startling standing by
itself. Yet, in context the image is hardly noticed,
and only the impression of newness remains. This is the
4Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Heuffer (Ford), Romance,

Concord Edition (Garden City:Doubleday, Page and Co.,
1923) p. 241.

5Ford Madox Ford, Paradgfs End (New York:Alfred A. KnOpf,
1950) p. 3.

52

impression that sinks in, not the implication that mirrors
become dirty because they have reflected a great deal.

As mentioned earlier, when Ford and Conrad began their
collaboration they were heading in the same stylistic
direction as James and Crane.

I think we both started out with at least this
much of a new form in our heads: we considered
a nevel to be a rendering of an affair. We used
to say, I will admit, that a subject must be
seized by the throat until the last drOp of
dramatic possibility was squeezed out of it.

I suppose we had to concede that much to the
cult of the strong situation. Nevertheless,

a novel was the rendering of an affair: of one
embroilment, one set of embarrassments, one
human coil, one psychological progression. From
this the novel got its unity. No doubt it
might have its caesura--or even several; but
these must be brought about by temperamental
pauses, markings of time when the treatment
called for them. But the whole novel was to be
an exhaustion of aspects, was to proceed to one
culmination, to reveal once and for all, in the
last sentence--or the penultimate--in the last
phrase, or the one before it, the psychological
significance of the whole.6 . '

Impressionism was the perfect style for a novel of this
form. Each impression building on to the one before
until suddenly the final impression reveals the truth or
solution, giving added meaning to the remembrance of the
proceeding impressions.

If a story is to uncoil like this, each word must be

chosen with care, each impression carefully thought out.

6Ford, Return to Yesterday, p. 203.

33

Next to the ending, therefore, the beginning of the story

is of greatest importance, Should the beginning be thought-
ful, or should it plunge right into the story? In either
case the beginning must give a hint of what is to come.

As conscious artists Ford and Conrad gave a great deal

of thought to beginnings.

Openings for us, as for most writers, were
matters of great importance, but probably we
more than most writers realised of what
primary importance they were. A real short
story must Open with a breathless sentence;
a long-short story may begin with an "as“ or
a "since" and some leisurely phrases. At
any rate the opening paragraph of a book or
story should be of the tempo of the whole
performance. That is the régle generals.
Moreover, the reader's attention must be
gripped by that first paragraph. 80 our
ideal novel must begin either with a dramatic
scene or with a note that should suggest the
whole book. "The Nigger of the Narcissus"
begins:

"Mr. Baker, chief mate of the Narcissus,
stepped in one stride out of his lighted cabin
into the darkness of the quarter deck . . ."

 

"The Secret Agent":

"Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning,
left his shop nominally in charge of his
brother-in-law.. . ."

"The End of the Tether":

"For a long time after the course of the
steamer Sophala had been altered . . ."
this last being the most fitting beginning for
the long-short story that "The End of the
Tether" is.

"Romance," on the other hand, begins:
"To yesterday and to-day I say my polite
vaya usted con dios. What are those days to

 

34

me? But that far-Off day of my romance, when

from between the blue and white bales in

Don Ramon's darkened store room in Kingston . . ."

an Opening for a long novel in which the

dominant interest lies far back in the story

and the note must be struck at once.

"The Inheritors" first lines are:
"Ideas," she said. "Oh as for ideas . . ."
an opening for a short novel

By his own admission and by example, Ford preferred
the thoughtful beginning to Conrad's usual dramatic
beginning.8 Most of Ford's openings have the same thought-
ful approach, the same reminiscent quality. Two Openings
written after the collaboration with Conrad are:

The Good Soldier:

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We
had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town
of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy--or, rather, with an
acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a
good glove's with your hand."

A Man Could Stand Up:

"Slowly, amidst intolerable noises from, on the one
hand the street and, on the other, from the large and

voluminously echoing playground, the depths of the telephone

began, for Valentine, to assume an aSpect that, years ago

7
Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance
(BostonzLittle, Brown and 00., 1924) pp. 181-83.

8Ibid., p. 183.

35

it had used to have-~of being a part of the supernatural
paraphernalia of inscrutable Destiny."

The first sentence of the Opening to The Good Soldier
holds forth to the reader the promise of an interesting
story. The second sentence starts the reader on a series
of reminiscenses and impressions that will, when strung
together, tell the saddest story. The note of the story
is struck in the second sentence with the image of the
glove. The "known with intimacy" is quickly changed to a
"loose and easy acquaintanceship," which is really all
one has with one's gloves. We are quite familiar with the
outside of our gloves, and yet all we know of their in-
sides is what we feel. The story the narrator is about
to tell us is the story of one who thought he knew some
people quite well, but who has come to realize that all
he knew of them was the surface they showed. The story
is the saddest story, because of what it took to make
the narrator see. Thus the first sentence could very
well be the last, because at either end of the book it
is a summation of the story.

The opening to_A_Man Could Stand Up has to serve
different functions. The book forms the third book of
a tetralogy, and this opening must not only remind the
reader Of what has gone before but hint of what is to

come. It must act as a bridge. The book opens on

36

Armistice Day, but the reader does not know that it does.
The noise in the street and playground is a hint that
something has happened which is yet to be revealed. The
tone of the Opening while clearly speaking of the present
still manages to convey a sense Of past events and action
through the words "years ago it had used to have." The
Opening also promises some sort of fulfillment to come by
using the word "Destiny." As we shall see later, fulfill-
ment does come for Valentine in the third book of the
Parade's End tetralogy.

BOth the dramatic and reflective openings have dis-
advantages. As Ford says,

The disadvantage of the dramatic opening is

that after the dramatic passage is done you

have to go back to getting your characters

in, a proceeding that the reader is apt to

dislike. The danger with the reflective

opening is that the reader is apt to miss

being gripped at once by the story. Openings

are therefore Of necessity always affairs of

compromise.9
The two Openings of Ford's quoted above were from his
later work and clearly show the effects of this com-
promise. Of the two, I think The Good Soldier is the
more successful, for it is reflective and at the same
time the reader cannot miss being gripped by the story.

There is an important aSpect of technique here. All

three of the books resulting from Ford's and Conrad's

9Ihid., pp. 183-84.

37

collaboration were written in the first-person, as was
The Good Soldier, Ford's greatest achievement. It was
obviously a useful form for impressionism. I have men-
tioned before that it was Ford's and Conrad's chief aim

to so beguile the reader as to make him forget he was
reading and begin to participate vicariously in the events
described. The reader identification with the pronoun I
is, of course, obvious. I think this identification was
obviously what the two writers were striving for in
'Thg_;nheritors. There is a great deal of dialogue in the
book, much of it in half sentences. The plot is fast-
paced and yet never well explained. It has a certain
dreamlike quality to it. The subtleties or nuances are
never fully realized by the narrator, and the reader never
knows more than the narrator. The protagonist, who is

the narrator, is left in the end with the feeling that he
has irrevocably lost something he had once had, but had
never known the value of before. All these points lead
the reader to identify himself with the narrator. The
half-sentence does much for self identification. Dialogue
in half-sentences can become quite confusing, but what is
said is really unimportant. Half-sentences come much
closer to daily Speech, since the Speaker Often assumes
previous knowledge on the listener's part. Hence, the

Speaker does not complete his sentence but pauses and

38

hurries on to his next sentence. In reading, however,
the process of assimilating ideas goes at a slower rate,
generally because the ideas are more complex. Thus,
half-sentence dialogue in the wrong place could distract
the reader and destroy the illusion of being immersed

in a story. This is why the half-sentence can only be
used at certain Spots in the story. The Opportunities
for the half-sentence must come where what is spoken by
the characters is of little importance. A better way of
putting this would be to say that while the total impres-
sion to be gained from a scene in which half-sentence
dialogue is used may be important, the actual words and
bits of sentences spoken by the characters must have little
importance. The important thing to be gained from such a
scene, then, is the total impression. The half-sentence
goes far in communicating an impression. It can convey
anger, disbelief, grief, almost any emotion, if properly
handled. It can do this through one Of the techniques of
impressionism mentioned by Read, rhythm. The sudden
torrent of words, the pause, the interruption, the ques—
tion started but never asked all contribute to definite
rhythm patterns. If these half-sentences are interSpersed
with reflections from the narrator on his feelings of the
moment, one can easily see how an impression is conveyed.

Then too, if the reader is plunged from half-sentences to

39

reflection and back to half-sentences, identification

becomes easier. The rhythm, as it were, will pick the

reader up and carry him along. Although it is hardly
possible to "pick the reader up and carry him along"
through a single quotation, this quotation from Th2
Inheritors may serve as an example of what has been
described:

"I don't believe you," I proclaimed,
"I won't . . . You are playing the fool with
me . . . trying to get around me . . . to
make me let you go on with these--with these--
It is abominable. Think of what it means for
me, what people are saying of me, and I am a
decent man--You shall not. Do you understand,
you shall not. It is unbearable . . . and
you . . . you try to fool me . . . in order
to keep me quiet . . ."

"Oh, no," she said. "Oh, no."

She had an accent that touched grief, as
nearly as she could touch it. I remember it
now, as one remembers these things. But then
I passed it over. I was too much moved myself
to notice it more than subconsciously, as one
notices things past which one is whirled. And
I was whirled past these things, in an ungovern-
able fury at the remembrance Of what I had
suffered, of what I had still to suffer. I
was Speaking with intense rage, jerking out
words, ideasb'as flood-water jerks through a
sluice the debris of once ordered fields.

"You are," I said, "you are—~you--you--

dragging an ancient name through the dust--
you . . ."10

10Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), The

Ipheritors: An Extravagant Stopy (New YorkzDoubleday,

Page and Co., 1914) pp. 193-94.

40

Identification with the narrator-protagonist is one
aim of the first-person narrative. Obviously identifica-
tion was attempted in The Inheritors. We know it was
attempted because of the over-abundance of dialogue. In
a book of first-person narrative, written with the phil-
osophy that a reader should lose himself in the story, a
great amount of dialogue must exist for a purpose. Any
dialogue, especially a lot of dialogue, supposedly recorded
by someone who was present becomes suSpect to the reader.
For the reader well knows that no one can remember exact
conversations word for word for very long. And when the
narrator purports to remember conversations and proceeds
to record them, the reader becomes well aware that he is
only reading after all. This leads to a far more subtle
use of the first-person narrative and, I think, to a
far easier form. In this form the reader sits, as it
were, at the feet of the narrator. The reader is con-
scious that he is reading a story, but he is unconscious
that it is fiction. That is, he believes in the narrator.
He believes that the narrator was there, saw those things,
and talked to those people. I am, of course, Speaking of
a temporary suspension of disbelief. This cannot be done
unless the narrator himself is an integral part Of the
story he is telling. He must not be an impartial Observor

merely standing and watching from the background. Which

41

role the narrator will assume in the story is very impor-
tant. In all three of the Conrad-Ford collaborations,
the narrator is the protagonist. Romance, the longest
and most successful of the collaborations, is the story
of the adventures of one John Kemp. Kemp is also the
narrator. Romance is a conventional adventure story with
a strong plot full of action and suSpense. It shows
careful planning and conscientious writing. The story

is told chronologically without stylistic subtleties. If
the reader is immersed at all in the story, it is because
of plot and atmOSphere. He is immersed as he would be in
any tale of adventure and pirate gold—-that is, through
his imagination and his longing for adventure. The term
"strong plot," Of course, implies that it is built well
and that it progresses steadily toward a déhouement:

Will he or won't he get the girl? One does not find out
until the last page. The atmOSphere is carefully created
and emerges very strongly, its power, to a great extent,
coming from the judicious use of,rhythms.

In The Nature of a Crime, the third and final colla-
boration, first-person narrative is employed with an
added stylistic device. The narrator tells his story
through a series of letters to his mistress. Such a
device cannot be sustained for long, and, fortunately, the

book is not a long one. It records some dialogue so that

42

the effect that one is reading the narrator's letters
might possibly be weakened for some. A further defect
is that the reader has difficulty in believing the
character of the narrator. He seems to be overdrawn.
He is supposed to be scornful and superior, but he is
too much so. Again, his prose is too precious and
overwritten. As an example:

It is very curious--the world now. I walked

slowly down here from Gordon Square. I walked

slowly--for all my work is done. On the way

I met Graydon Bankes, the K. C. It would

have astonished him if he could have known how

unreal he looked to me. He is six feet high,

and upon his left cheek there is a brown mole.

I found it difficult to imagine why he existed.

And all sorts of mists hurried past him. It was

just outside the Natural History Museum. He

said that his Seaford Railway Bill would come

before Committee in June. And I wondered: what

is June? . . . I laughed and thought: whyiJune
will never come!11

In spite of these defects The Nature of a Crime is
a long step toward Ford's very fine novel, The Good Soldier.
For in The Nature of a Crime, the logical and orderly
progression Of events that characterized Romance is gone.
In its place we find the much more lifelike disorder of
the narrator's thoughts. The narrator sets out to tell
of one thing, but memories of other things crowd in on
his mind, and he must set them down too. Thus chronological
time is broken up, and the time that is recorded is the

11Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), The Nature
of a Crime (LondonzDuckworth and 00., 1924) p. 18.

 

43

time existing in the narrator's mind. This technique is
well illustrated in the first three pages of The Nature

of a Crime. The news the narrator wishes to tell his

 

mistress is that he is a ruined man and that he is going
to commit suicide. He begins, "You are, I suppose, by
now in Rome." This makes him think of Rome and, in turn,
of a dream he had of Rome the day before. The mistress
was in the dream which brings his mind back to her, from
her it jumps to her husband whom he had seen the day before.
Thinking of yesterday reminds him of the letter he found
which will lead him to suicide. He begins to write of
this, but out of consideration for his mistress' feelings
he only hints at suicide. The consideration again reminds
him of her and Rome. Thus, three pages are filled with
only a hint of what is troubling the narrator. We are
receiving impressions, then, in the order that they are
received by the narrator and not in the order of their
occurrence. It is, as it were, as if the reader were
sitting at the feet of the narrator listening to him tell
his story, rather than as if the reader were reading it.
In effect, this device makes the narrator more human. It
is Obvious that this humanizing of the narrator would not
work unless he is made a part of the story he is telling.
The three novels of collaboration are not mere curio-
sities, for they form stepping—stones to the best work of

both authors. Romance, conventional in manyg ways, still

44

shows the develOping rhythms of impressionism and the
progression d'effet that Conrad and Ford thought so
necessary. As we shall see in the next chapter, Romance
also strikes the same chord that Conrad's later and

better works were to sound so strongly. In Ihg_;nheritors
we find the first attempt to plunge the reader into the
story by stylistic means rather than by plot alone. And
finally, in The Nature of a Crime, we discover the final
subtlety of first-person narrative achieved--the destruc-
tion of chronological time and the substitution Of time

in terms of the narrator.

In the preface to the American edition of The Good

Soldier, Ford said:

Until I sat down to write this book--on the

17th of December, l9l3--I had never attempted

to extend myself, to use a phrase of race-
horse training. Partly because I had always
entertained very fixedly the idea that-~what-
ever may be the case with other writers--I

at least should not be able to write a novel

by which I should care to stand before reaching
the age of forty; partly because I very definitely
did not want to come into competition with
other writers whose claim or whose need for
recognition and what recognitions bring were
greater than my own. I had never really tried
to put into any novel of mine‘all that I knew
about writing. I had written rather desul-
torily a number of books--a great number--

but they had all been in the nature of pastiches,
of pieces of rather precious writing, or of
tours de force. But I have always been mad
about writing-~about the way writing should be
done and partly alone,partly with the companion-
ship Of Conrad, I had even at that date made

 

45

exhaustive studies into how words should be
handled and novels constructed.

So, on the day I was forty I sat down
to Show what I could do--and the Good Soldier
resulted. I fully intended it to be my last
book. I used to think--and I do not know
that I do not think the same now--that one
book was enough for any man to write, and,
at the date when the Good Soldier was finished,
London at least and possibly the world appeared
to be passing under the dominion of writers
newer and much more vivid. . . . SO I regarded
myself as the Eel which, having reached the
deep sea brings forth its young and dies—~or as
the Great Auk I considered that, having reached
my allotted I had laid my one egg and might
as well die.12

 

The above passage shows Ford's burning desire for
craftsmanship. It is interesting to note that although
Conrad continued to use the first-person narrative after
the years of collaboration, Ford, with the notable excep-
tion of his "Great Auk's Egg", dropped the first-person
narrative technique. Since it is always difficult to
separate style and technique from plot and motives, and
since I wish to deal with The Good Soldier more thoroughly
in the next chapter, I shall only point out now the style
of The Good Soldier in relation to the novels of collaboration.
The Good Soldier is narrated by one Of the participants
of the story. The events that have happened to this
participant have been both revealing and shocking. He is
now trying to sit back and remember the events in some kind

12Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (New Yorszlbert &
Charles Boni, Inc., 1927) pp. v-vi.

46

‘3:

of order and thereby find some meaning in them. Time, in

terms of the narrator, which we saw operating in Th3
Nature of a Crime, is here used with extreme facility.

The book is constructed somewhat on the lines of a
detective story. The narrator has all the threads, all
the necessary material to make up the story in his memory.
As he sits in his study telling his tale, he is anxious
that it should be told right. He wants to tell his story
chronologically. He begins at what he thinks is the be-
ginning, but he soon finds that he has not started far
enough back in his story. He is, therefore, forced at
times to stop the forward motion of his story in order to
go back in time and supply the reader with important
information he has neglected to mention. Having all the
facts, the narrator also cannot help now and then hinting
at what is to come, particularly when he realizes, pos-
sibly for the first time, that what he is writing at the
moment is going to lead soon to a bigger revelation. Thus,
remarks he makes on one page seem less cryptic as we read
the next page. The total effect is similar to a detective
story in that after the book is read, certain heretofore
unexplainable episodes and remarks are understood.

The Good Soldier is much more successful than Th3

Nature of a Crime because the narrator is much more realistic

47

and human. The things that make him more human are weak-
nesses rather than qualities. Because he is an actual
participant in the story, his version is not to be trusted.
He is always anxious to present himself in the most
favorable light. He likes to pretend that he was only an
Observor and that the happenings he describes did not
touch him. The reader knows better. At times the nar-
rator fancies himself a philosopher, stopping the action
to moralize and make some philOSOphic point. At other
times, he identifies himself with one of the other, more
colorful characters. The book is indicative of the degree
of craftsmanship Ford had attained. The narrator of Th3
Good Soldier is at once the central figure of his own
narrative and yet on the surface he is not a central
figure but only a detached Observor. It is the narrator's
development, or lack of develOpment, which must and does
come through the story he is telling.

Ford's final-great work is the monumental Tietjens
Saga, composed of four separate novels published together
under the title, Parade's End. The four books are Obvi-
ously meant to be read together, although they were not
published in one big volume until eleven years after Ford's
death and twenty-two years after the last of the four was
written. In Parade's End Ford switched from the first-
person narrative he had used so successfully in The Good

Soldier to third-person narrative. However, he retained

48

the time-shift that he and Conrad had first used in

The Nature of a Crime. In the terms with which I have
described the time-shift in The Good Soldier, one may well
ask how Ford could have retained it in third-person
narrative. Ford in Parade's End does not use the standard
author-as-observor viewpoint. Instead, he presents a
scene through the conscious mind and subconscious of one
of its participants, much as Henry James did in.fl§££

Maisie Knew. Many Of the thoughts and facts that pre-

 

sumably would not be in the conscious mind of the parti-
cipant during the particular scene being recorded are,
nevertheless, thoughts and facts which are part of the
participant's background and subconscious mind. A scene
is recorded in terms of a participant of that scene.
Thus, we find a time-shift in terms of this participant
as his subconscious mind shifts from the present to some-
thing in the past that has bearing on the present scene.
This constant shifting is never so abrupt as to be

annoying. For example, in Some Do Not, the first book

 

of Parade's End, Tietjens is on a train with his friend,
iacmaster. We absorb the scene through Tietjens' eyes.

There sat Macmaster; smallish; Whig; with a
trimmed, pointed black beard, such as a smal-
lish man might wear to enhance his already
germinated distinction; black hair of a
stubborn fibre, drilled down with hard metal
brushes; a sharp nose; strong level teeth; a

49

white, butterfly collar of the smoothness
of porcelain; a tie confined by a gold ring,
steel-blue Speckled with black--to match
his eyes, as Tietjens knew.

Tietjens, on the other hand, could not
remember what coloured tie he had on. He
had taken a cab from the Office to their
rooms, had got himself in a loose, tailored
coat and trousers, and a soft shirt, had
packed quickly, but still methodically, a
great number of things in an immense two-
handled kit-bag, which you could throw into
a guard's van if need be. He disliked letting
his wife's maid pack for him. He even dis-
liked letting porters carry his kit-bag. He
was a Tory--and as he disliked changing his
clothes, there he sat, on the journey, already
in large, brown, hugely welted and nailed golf
boots, leaning forward on the edge of the
cushion, his legs apart, on each knee an
immense white hand--and thinking vaguely. 3

Eleven pages later we find the same scene only through
the eyes of the other participant.

But there sat Tietjens, in his grey tweeds,

his legs apart, lumpish, clumsy, his tallowy,
intelligent-looking hands dropping inert

between his legs, his eyes gazing at a

coloured photograph of the port of Boulogne
beside the mirror beneath the luggage rack.
Blond, high-coloured, vacant apparently, you
couldn't tell what in the world he was thinking
of. The mathematical theory of waves, very
likely, or Slips in someone's article on
Arminianism. For, absurd as it seemed, Macmaster
knew that he knew next to nothing of his friend's
feelings. As to them, practically no confidence
had passed between them. Just two: On the night
before his starting for his wedding in Paris
Tietjens had said to him:

"Vinny, Old fellow, it's a back door way out
of it. She's bitched mg."

13Ford, Parade's End, pp. 3-4.

 

50

And once, rather lately, he had said:

"Damn it! I don't even know if the
child's my own." 4

Each of these two identical scenes has been painted
by a different mind. In the first scene Tietjens muses
on his friend's appearance. The description of Macmaster
could very well have been thought by Tietjens, word for
word. But following the picture of Macmaster there is a
turning inward of Tietjens' thoughts, and the reader gets
a description of Tietjens himself.» It is not a word for
word description, however, nor is it a description which
would have entered Tietjens'conscious mind. The first
sentence, "Tietjens, on the other hand, could not remember
what coloured tie he had on." is a logical thought pro-
gression from the phrase preceding it, ". . . a tie con-
fined by a gold ring, steel-blue Speckled with black--to
match his eyes, as Tietjens knew." It is logical to
assume that a man might precede from musing on his friend's
tie to thinking that he could not, without looking at it,
remember the color of his own tie. It is also logical
that his conscious mind should go on to remember the
occasion of his dressing that morning. "He had taken a
cab from the Office to their rooms, had got himself into a

loose, tailored coat and trousers, and a soft shirt, had

14Ibid., p. 15.

51

packed quickly, but still methodically, a great number

of things in an immense two-handled bag, which you could
throw into a guard's van if need be." At this point it
might be argued that this is merely descriptive thinking
on Tietjens part and that there is no indication here of
subconscious thought. But there is. The key word is
"methodically," because it is a judgment or a descriptive
adverb of his own actions. One consciously thinks in
terms of adjectives--"tailored coat," "soft shirt"--but
not in terms of adverbs, particularly adverbs like
methodically as applied to oneself. This adverb is a
warning that Tietjens iszfliding into his subconscious.
The following sentences prove it. The pride, the inde-
pendence, subconsciously felt, which are a part of him
stand out. "He disliked letting that 'man' touch his
things; he had disliked letting his wife's maid pack for
him . . ." The third-person time-shift in Parade's End
should be Obvious from the two quotations. The first
quotation begins with Tietjens musing over his friend's
appearance, shifts to Tietjens' toilet that morning and
to his independent bias, and finally ends with Tietjens'
own appearance. The second quotation, eleven pages later,
describes the same instance in time that the first quota-
tion did only from a different character's viewpoint. It

is placed in time through the fact that it begins exactly

52

where the first quotation left off, a description of
Tietjens. Again the time-shift operates from Tietjens'
appearance to a speculation on what he is thinking and
from that to exactly what he has confided to Macmaster.

Ford said of Conrad and himself, ". . . we saw that
Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains.
We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of
life, must not narrate but render impressions."15 Ford,
to a great extent, came the closest to perfection in
rendering impressions in Parade's End. This perfection
can be seen in the following passage from Parade's End
which introduces a character for the first time:

A tall, white-haired, white-moustached, red-

cheeked fellow limped after Tietjens, who

was getting his immense bag out of the guard's

van. He clapped the young man on the Shoulder

and said:

"Hullo! How's your mother-in-law? Lady

Claude wants to know. She said come up and

pick a bone tonight if you're going to Rye."

He had extraordinarily blue, innocent eyes.
If the reader were forced to stOp reading at this moment
and do something else for a period of time, his descrip-

tion of this newly introduced character would certainly

begin with, "He had blue eyes." This is the striking

feature about this character. Ford wants to give this

15Ford, Josaph Conrad, pp. 194-95.

16Ford, Parade's End, p. 21.

53

impression, therefore he begins with a commonplace des-
cription, lets his character speak a line or two of in-
consequential chatter, and then arrests our attention with
an added line of description. The fact that it is added
gives it the necessary strength. The sentence itself is
not startling, its position is. The passage conveys the
impression Ford wanted.

Ford says in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance,

One unalterable rule that we had for the

rendering of conversations--for genuine

conversations that are an exchange of

thought, not interrogatives or statements

of fact-~was that no speech of one char-

acter should ever answer the Speech that

goes before it. This is almost invariably

the case in real life where few people

listen, because they are always preparing

their own next Speeches.
He continues with an Obvious illustration of this tech-
nique. However, a close examination of his writings
fails to bring out a similar illustration. But a close
examination of his later work reveals a keen sense of
the rhythms, patterns, and habits of everyday speech.
The works of collaboration and the early post-collabora-
tion works tend to indicate that he was trying too hard.

The later works show a much more deft hand, as in this

example from Parade's End:

l7Ford, Josaph Conrad, pp. 200-201.

 

54

Tietjens said:

"Hullo, General," and added: "I believe
she's much better. Quite restored. This is
Macmaster. I think I shall be going over to
bring my wife back in a day or two. They're
both at Lobscheid . . . a German spa."

The general said:

"Quite right. It isn't good for a
young man to be alone. Kiss Sylvia's
finger-tips for me. She's the real thing,
you lucky beggar." He added, a little anxi-
ously: "What about a foursome to-morrow?
Paul Sandback is down. He's as crooked as
me. We can't do a full round at singles."

"It's your own fault," Tietjens said,
"You ought to have gone to my bone-setter.

Settle it with Macmaster, will you?" He
jumped into the twilight of the guard's van.

18

In the middle of his speech, Tietjens introduces his
friend Macmaster to the General. The General naturally
begins his speech by acknowledging the introduction,
"Quite right. It isn't good for a young man to be
alone." This last is made somewhat disconcerting by
the fact that Tietjens has just finished saying, "They're
both at Lobschied," meaning his wife and mother-in-law.
Therefore, the "Quite right." is in answer to "This is
Macmaster.", while the "It isn't good . . ." is in
answer to "I think I shall be . . .". The general

comments on Tietjens' wife and adds an invitation for

golf. Tietjens' first reply is not to the golf invitation

18Ford, Parade's End, p. 21.

 

55

but to the general's lameness, leaving the golf arrange-
ments to Macmaster. All this, of course, loses its
spontaneity under close scrutiny, but in normal reading
the passage seems quite natural. I might add that it
reads best when read aloud, for it does demand closer
attention than we might normally give it. For example,
when reading to oneself one is apt to read the line
"It isn't good for a young man to be alone" as "It
isn't good for a young woman to be alone," thinking of
the preceding speech of Tietjens'.

Again, in a later section of Parade's Egg, we find
this same close attention to human intercourse. The
golf party is sitting in the clubhouse waiting for their
turn on the links. Macmaster has just been handed a copy
of a telegram that Tietjens has sent to his wife. At a
table nearby, two men are sitting loudly discussing their
mistresses. The reader receives a fleeting impression of
them through Macmaster's mind. The impression is neither
favorable nor unfavorable. Macmaster continues to read
the telegram; the words making little sense to him since
he is still worried over an earlier incident. He has the
impression that the other three members of his party are
sitting as stiffly as pokers. He thinks that he shall
undoubtedly beat them, since he is the best golfer of the
four. Suddenly he exclaims, "Good God!" He has just

realized that the telegram means that Tietjens is going

56

to Germany. Tietjens immediately says in answer to
Macmaster's exclamation, "‘Yes. It lg unbearable. If you
don't stop those swine, General, I Shall.'" The "swine"
that Tietjens refers to are the two men discussing their
mistresses. Macmaster's mind has been occupied with

other thoughts and has been too busy to notice that his
companions have found the two men at the next table in-
creasingly offensive. It is Ford's skill that the reader
recognizes all this at the same time Macmaster does. What
more natural thing than Macmaster's exclamation or Tiet-
jens' innajretation of it. A side comment, which has
little place in a discussion of style but which is ines-
capable at this time, is that this incident is a good
example of Ford's essentially ironic viewpoint. To Tiet-
jens, the General, and the General's friend, the presence
of such boors in the clubhouse is embarrassing and un-
speakable. The mere act of politely suggesting to them
that they should discuss their private affairs somewhere
else is upsetting to the General. "The General came back
to his seat. He was trembling with vexation. 'It makes
one as beastly a bounder as themselves,' he said. 'But
what the devil else was one to dO?'" The three men feel
that in a correct society such unpleasant incidents would
not occur andthat the presence of these crude interlopers

is somehow a threat to the existence of the old way of life.

57

Yet it is not the boors, the fools who threaten the
old way of life, it is the men whose exclamations they
misinterpret. "Macmaster realized that, for these
Tories at least, this was really the end of the world.
The last of England!"19

We have seen that Ford believed that the writer had
certain responsibilities toward his art. These respon-
sibilities, which included duty, a moral point of view,
and the fulfillment of a public need for "gossip;
necessitated a presentation conditioned by the writer's
subject and true to the life surrounding him. This
necessity demanded the establishment of a realistic style,
a style which would be faithful to the rhythms and patterns
of contemporary Speech and a technique of presentation
closely following or copying the realities of action in
everyday life. The responsibilities that Ford felt were
the reSponsibilities Of the artist and the style that had
been demanded by these responsibilities needed plots which
would closely follow life as it really was. Until the
publication of the Good Soldier, however, Ford had for the
most part fdiled to live up to the standards he had set
for himself. As we have seen earlier, Ford felt that this

was the one good book.

lglbido, pp. 57-90

58

Ford had every right to be proud of The Good Soldier,
because it is a magnificent novel. It is as nicely con-
structed and as tightly woven as is possible--it is, in
short, the culmination of many years of training.

The Good Soldier, because of its complexity, is not
an easy book to evaluate or to explain. The plot is,
or seems to be at any rate, fairly easy to follow. Dowell,
who narrates the story, and his wife, Florence, meet the
Ashburnhams, Edward and Leonora at Nauheim, a fashionable
spa. The Dowells are wealthy Americans who Spend their
time at spas, because Florence has a heart condition.

The Ashburnhams are aristocratic English. They are at the
spas, because Edward has a heart condition. The four
strike up a friendship which Dowell believes to be quite
wholesome. Edward is a dashing fellow, quite romantic,

a former Captain in the army with a flair for women. In
fact his life with Leonora has been one affair after
another--all with the best of intentions. Leonora, a
Catholic, would not think of leaving him. Florence Dowell,
a seemingly giddy person, has not allowed her husband
near her since their marriage because of her heart condi-
tion. Dowell, an unimaginative fellow, thinks this is

the best of all possible worlds. The shock comes when

Florence's world falls apart. Dowell discovers She was

59

promiscuous before their marriage and Edward, with whom
She has been having an affair known to Florence but not
to Dowell, falls in love with Nancy, his young ward.
Florence resorts to suicide. This is too much for
Leonora and she strives to keep Nancy and Edward apart.
To Edward, an affair with Nancy would be unthinkable. A
romanticist, he wants Nancy to go away but still love
him. Leonora succeeds in getting Nancy to leave but also
to stop loving Edward. This is too much for him and he
commits suicide. Leonora marries an old love, and Dowell
is left as owner of Edward's property and with Nancy,

who has gone insane at the news of Edward's death, as his
ward.

The foregoing is a Simple resume’of the plot. The
actual book is not so easy, because Dowell is the narra-
tor. The Good Soldier has to be approached from several
levels of understanding. It is essentially the story of
Dowell's discovery that social conventions merely mask
reality. This theme, or various manifestations of it,
occupied Ford before, particularly in The Inheritors,
Dowell believes that he and his friends are "all good people."

We took for granted that we all liked beef under-

done:but not too underdone; that both men preferred

a good liqueur brandy after lunch; that both women

drank a very light Rhine wine qualified with

Fachingen water--that sort of thing. It was
also taken for granted that we were both

6O

sufficiently well off to afford anything
that we could reasonably want in the way
of amusements fitting to our station . . .

20

But the truth is that the Ashburnhams did not have the
wealth they were thought to have. Behind the mask of
Rhine wines, liqueurs, and carriages stood the reality

of poverty. Leonora in telling Dowell of a nearly con-
sumated love affair says: "And then suddenly the bitter-
ness of the endless poverty, of the endless acting--it
fell on me like a blight, it Spoilt everything. Yes, I
had to realize that I had been spoilt even for the good

"21 The horror of it is that it is

time when it came.
poverty on two levels, not only physical poverty but
moral poverty as well.

The moral poverty of these four people dovetails
into the afore-mentioned theme of reality and the mask
of social conventions. The four main characters Should
be examined separately in this light.

Florence Dowell uses her wealthy husband as a Shield
of reSpectability to hide her promiscuousness. She uses
her supposedly weak heartto hide from her husband her
unfaithfulness. On the surface She is a charming but

somewhat giddy woman. She appears to delight in touring

famous historical places and beautiful scenes; spouting

zoFord, The Good Soldier, p. 34.

21Ibid., p. 9.

61

facts and tidbits of information, which She has picked

up from guidebooks, to her companions. Of course it is

a fraud. Dowell says: "She could find her way, with the
sole help of Baedecker, as easily about any old monument
as She could about any American city where the blocks are
all square and the streets all numbered, so that you can
go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth."22
When Florence's affair with Ashburnham is discovered, when
she realizes the mask is gone and her moral poverty
SXposed, she commits suicide.

Edward Ashburnham, like Florence, allows the mask of
social convention to hide his inability to remain faith-
ful. Perhaps of the four of them he has the easiest time
in keeping up appearances. As an English gentleman his
poise, correct ties, correct wines, polo, etc.,are almost
automatic. His heart condition, like Florence's is a
fapade.

You understand that there was nothing the

matter with Edward Ashburnham's hearts-that

he had thrown up his commission and had left

India and come half the world over in order

to follow a woman who had really had a "heart"

to Nauheim. That was the sort of sentimental

ass he was. For, you understand, too, that

they really needed to live in India, to econo-

mise, to let the house at Branshaw Teleragh.23

221bid., p. 38.
zslbido, p. 490

62

It is interesting to note that Dowell excuses Edward by
saying that he was just this sort of sentimental ass.
As I have said before, Edward's fagade is his code as an
English gentleman. He uses it to protect himself from
reality, but because it is so much a part of him he con-
fuses it with reality. He finds the idea of sleeping
with his ward, Nancy, unthinkable, yet he still loves
her. When she leaves he commits suicide. Thus Edward,
who has.no moral basis, must attach himself in the end
to social convention which does not have a moral basis
either. The result is disillusionment and self destruction.
Leonora Ashburnham is on the surface a patient and
understanding wife, well-founded in reality. She is
aware of Florence's and Edward's affair, and she is aware
of her husband's past infidelities. She is also aware
of the fraud which masks reality. But she lives the lie
just as the others do. Dowell gives us a hint when he
says: "YeS,Leonora was extraordinarily fair and so extra-
ordinarily the real thing that she seemed too good to
be true."24 Leonora desires security and children, in
other words all that Edward is incapable of giving her.
She thought, however, that she was close to achieving these
things with Edward, until she learned that he and Florence

were having an affair. When Florence dies and Edward takes

24Ihid., p. 8.

63

up with Nancy, Leonora's fagade crumbles. "Pride and
reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are
not even the best things. But, if they happen to be

your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you
let them go. And Leonora let them god“?5 Leonora coldly
and with a vengeance sets out to obtain the life she has
always wanted. She destroys Edward and drives Nancy
insane. ". . . only Leonora, active, persistent, instinct
with her cold passion of energy was 'doing things.' . . .
It worked out in the extinction of two very Splendid per-
sonalities--for Edward and the girl.!g£g splendid person-
alities, in order that a third personality, more normal,
should have, after a long period of trouble, a quiet,

comfortable, good time."26

She immediately remarries
after Edward's death, thereby securing what She has
always wanted. Like Edward she wanted to believe in social
conventions, and, when She found the truth too difficult,
she exchanged one code for another.

Although Edward Ashburnham is "The Good Soldier,"
the novel is really about Dowell, the narrator. Dowell
is the man who has been taken in by social convention.

He, as narrator, is attempting to tell what happened when

all the things he believed in turned out to be Sham.

25Ibid., p. 189.

26Ibid., p. 236.

64

Naturally he is confused, and consequently his story
is confused. The startling thing about Dowell is that
he lived in a world of social convention and never once
saw behind it. He is the social-convention man, his
character is composed of the fraud. And the thing which
this fraud covered in Dowell is far more frightening than
moral poverty. The reality of Dowell is that he is
incapable of genuine feeling, neither hatred or love are
in his makeup. "You have no idea how quite extraordinarily
for me that was the end Of Florence. From that day to
this I have never given her another thought; I have not
bestowed upon her so much as a sigh."27 What Dowell
cannot understand is the loss of what seemed to him to
be reality. He recognizes that the others were not what
they seemed to be, and yet were not some of these things
real? It is the central irony of The Good Soldier that
while it professes, at least on the surface, to be a tale
of the exposure of social conventions masking reality,
it is in fact stating that appearances are sometimes
reality. Let us examine this more closely. Dowell in
his bewilderment looks back on their lives together
before they exploded:

. . . our intimacy was like a minuet, simply

because on every possible occasion and in

27Ibid., p. 121.

65

every possible circumstance, we knew where

to go, where to sit, which table we unani-
mously should choose; and we could rise and
go, all four together, without a signal from
any one of us, always to the music of the

Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sun-
shine, or, if it rained, in discreet shelters.
No, indeed, it can't be gone. You can't kill
a minuet de la cour. You may shut up the
musicbook, close the harpsichord; in the cup-
board and presses the rats may destroy the
white satin favours. The mob may sack Ver-
sailles; the Trianon may fall, but surely the
minuet--the minuet itself is dancing itself away
into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of
the Hessian bathing places must be stepping
itself still. Isnit there any heaven where
old beautiful dances, Old beautiful intimacies
prolong themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana
pervaded by the faint thrilling of instru-
ments that have fallen into the dust of worm-
wood but that yet had frail, tremulous and
everlasting souls?

No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a
minuet that we stepped; it was a prison--a
prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down
so that they might not outsound the rolling
of our carriage wheels as we went along the
shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.

And yet I swear by the sacred name of my
creator that it was true. It was true sun-
shine; the true music; the true splash of
the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins.
For, if for me we were four people with the
same tastes, with the same desires, acting--
or, no, not acting--sitting here and there
unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for
nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that
is rotten at the core and discover its rotten-
ness only in nine years and Six months less
four days, isn't it true to say that for nine
years I possessed a goodly apple? SO it may
be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his
wife and with poor dear Florence.28

ZBIbido’ pp. 6-7.

66

The foregoing resembles to a great extent the
utterances of a man who cannot believe that his world
has cracked around him. It is a welter of contradictions,
and yet each one has a certain validity of its own. The
image of the minuet is an apt one. People associating
with each other do possess a certain rhythm and harmony.
We have the Slight hint of rottenness at the core before
it is actually stated in the figure of the rat in the cup-
board. But Dowell goes back to the reality of the har-
mony, the dance. After the symphony is over the music no
longer exists physically, but it does have existence still
in the mind, in the imagination. The musicians may or
may not live sordid lives; this does not matter, for they
created something beautiful while they were together.

But suddenly Dowell wrenches the mask off and changes
his metaphor to that of a prison. Is this reality? Yes,
on one level it is. And yet the fountains, the sunshine,
etc. were true too. In his schoolboyish analogy of the
apple, Dowell strikes very closely to the truth. On one
level appearances are reality, or, to put it another way,
they are the lie functioning as reality. Florence and
Nancy are unable to live without it, Edward is not able
to live with it, and Leonora trades it for another. Only

Dowell survives because he is incapable of understanding

67

the horror of reality, and he can understand the reality
of appearances.

In the end Dowell recognizes that men must live
with the mask of appearances or illusion, and he promptly
proceeds to accept it by likening himself to Edward
Ashburnham, a procedure so laughable and ridiculous that
the irony of it cuts like a sword.

Society must go on, I suppose, and society

can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous,
and the slightly-deceitful flourish, and if

the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-
truthful are condemned to suicide and to mad-
ness. But I guess that I myself, in my fainter
way, come into the category of the passionate,
of the headstrong and the too-truthful. For

I can't conceal from myself the fact that I
love Edward Ashburnham--and that I love him
because he was just myself. If I had had the
courage and the virility and possibly also

the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should,

I fancy, have done much what he did. He seems
to me like a larger elder brother who took me
out on several excursions and did many dashing
things whilst I just watched him robbing the
orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am
just as much of a sentimentalist as he was. . . .29

Since Ford was so enamored of writing, it is not
surprising that The Good Soldier did not prove to be
his swan's song, his Great Auk's egg. For various reasons,
however, Ford wrote little above the potboiler class
until 1923 when he began Some DO Not, the first Of the

Tietjens tetralogy. Although published separately, the

291bid., p. 257.

68

four Tietjens novels, Some Do Not, No More Parade's,

A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post were Obviously

meant to be taken as a whole. In 1950 they were combined

and published as a whole under the title Parade's End.
Post-war England proved a shock to many of her people.

As a contemporary of Ford's described it:

To be born in it, and then to have to
witness, over a period of half a century,
at first the gradual and, after 1919, the
terrifyingly rapid collapse of the moral
standards of a once great governing class;
to live to see shame and dishonour, avarice,
stupidity, treachery and broken faith taking
the place, in the highest quarters, of nobil-
ity of purpose and pride in the maintenance of
great traditions; to grow to boyhood in a
country governed by a Gladstone, a Disraeli,
or a Salisbury, and to die when the hand of
your birth was at the mercy of such men as
ruled over us during the armistice years, was,
for an artist like Ford, who was also in
every meaning of the word a "gentleman" and
a "Christian", by no means a happy experience.30

Once again Ford's theme was to be the crumble and decay
of the Old order and the rise of the new, the lie func-
tioning as truth. ,Scme Do Not begins in time several
years before World War I and ends Shortly after the war.
These years were years of flux, transition and change,and
through them strides the unchangeable man, Christopher
Tietjens. Tietjens believes that the only way for a

man to survive amidst the crumbling of society, the
30Douglas Goldring, South LodgezReminiscences of Violet

Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle
(London:Constable & Co., Ltd., 1943) p. 205.

69

break-up of the old orden is to cling to the ideals which '
once made the world a pleasant place to live in. High
Toryism, order, stability, altruism, truth, and enlighten-
ment are Tietjens' ideals; he is the eighteenth century
man. Tietjens is aware that his anachronistic ideals are
in conflict with the reality of change. But he is also
aware of the madness Of those around him who are dSSper-
ately trying to adjust to the rottenness that the war has
SXposed. In the following description of plot, the four
novels are considered as a whole.

The Opening lines of Parade's End set the stage for

 

change.

The two young men--they were of the English
public official class--sat in the perfectly
appointed railway carriage. The leather

straps to the windows were of virgin newness;
the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks
immaculate as if they had reflected very little;
the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regu-
lated curves was scarlet and yellow in an
intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design

of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment
smelt faintly, hygenically of admirable varnish;
the train ran as smoothly--Tietjens remembered
thinking--as British giltedged securities. It
travelled fast; yet had it swayed or jolted over
the rail joints, except at the curve before
Tonbridge or over the points at Ashford where
these eccentricities are expected and allowed
for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would
have written to the company. Earhaps he would
even have written to the Times.3

31Ford, Parade's End, p. 3.

 

70

The time will come when there will be no more such order
and newness, when letters to the Timgg will be meaningless.

Macmaster serves as a foil for Tietjens. He is
approximately Tietjens' age and works with Tietjens in the
Department of Statistics. In everything else he is
Tietjens' exact opposite. He is ambitious, a Whig, the
son of a Scottish shopkeeper, a psuedo-literary. Later,
when Tietjens goes into the war, Macmaster turns and
persecutes him for his altruism.

On one level persecution is the theme of Parade's
.EEQ‘ It is small wonder that Tietjens' contemporaries
cannot understand this anachronism, and that what they
cannot understand they turn and rend. The symbol of the
hatred felt toward Tietjens, the symbol of the persecution
against him is his wife, Sylvia. Shortly after Tietjens'
marriage to Sylvia, she has a child. There is some ques-
tion as to whether it is Tietjens' or not. When the novel
Opens she has already skipped to France with another man,
become bored, and asked Tietjens to take her back. She
is, in short, a wanton, beautiful and desirable but full
of spleen and hate. If Tietjens would only beat her or
revile her or even merely reproach her She could love
him. Instead, because he is SO impossibly good, she hates
him with a cold fury.

Sylvia's mother attempts to explain Sylvia to the

family priest:

71

"There's this to be said for Sylvia," Hrs.
Satterthwaite went on. "There are times
when a woman hates a man--as Sylvia hates
her husband. . . . I tell you I've walked
behind a man's back and nearly screamed be-
cause of the desire to put my nails into the
veins of his neck. It was a fascination.
And it's worse with Sylvia. It's a natural
antipathy.52

The irony is that to a corrupt world it is the honest
man who is indecent and immoral. This is what causes
Sylvia's antipathy. She says:

"You want to know why I hate my husband.
I'll tell you; it's because of his simple,
Sheer immorality. I don't mean his actions;
his views! Every Speech he utters about
everything makes me--I swear it makes me--
in spite of myself, want to stick a knife
into him, and I can't prove he's wrong, not
ever, about the simplest thing. But I can
pain him. And I will. . . . He sits about
in chairs that fit his back, clumsy, like

a rock, not moving for hours.. . . And I

can make him wince. Oh, without showing

it. . . . He's what you call . . . oh, loyal.
There's an absurd little chit of a fellow

. . . oh, Macmaster . . . and his mother
whom he persists in a silly, mystical way
in calling a saint . . . a Protestant saint!
And his old nurse, who looks after the child
. . . and the child itself. . . . I tell
you I've only got to raise an eyelid . . .
yes, cock an eyelid up a little when any

one of them is mentioned, and it hurts him
dreadfully. His eyes roll in a sort of

mute anguish. . . . Of course he doesn't

say anything. He's an English country
gentleman."03

The priest prcphetically adds to her mother, "' . . .

her hell on earth will come when her husband goes

72

running, blind, head down, mad after another woman. . . .
‘Ihgg she'll tear the house down. The world will echo
with her wrongs.”34
The inevitable other woman is Valentine Wannop whom
Tietjens meets while his wife is still in France. It is
she to whom he returns after the war, broken and almost
insane. And it is she who nurses him and goes to live
with him in the country.
Valentine is not the only one who loves Tietjens,
for there is his brother, Mark. As Macmaster is gradually
dropped into the background, he is replaced by Mark. By
the time the war is over ChristOpher is in open conflict
with everyone around him except Valentine. Indeed, he
has just left the conflict on a macrocosmic scale. He
has learned to cultivate his own garden. Mark, on the
other hand, is only just beginning to perceive that he
and his family are anachronism. When he learns on
Armistice Day that there will be no advance into Germany,
no gesture for France, he has a stroke and never speaks
again. There is the hint in The Last Post that the loss
of speech is a mental withdrawal, a voluntary act, rather
than a physical manifestation. Thus, the one foil, Mac-
master, conforms to the changing world and becomes success-

ful, the other withdraws and dies.

54Ibid., p. 42.

73

It will appear to the reader that a concise recording

of the plot of Parade's End has been avoided and that I

 

have concentrated on only two characters, Christopher and
Sylvia Tietjens. I have avoided outlining the plot simply
because there is, strictly Speaking, little or no plot.
There is what might be termed a theme, and I have tried
to show what that theme is. Unlike Ford's earlier novels
and unlike the novels of James and Conrad, Parade's End
has no degredation or regeneration of the central character.
Tietjens' progress is in a straight line. He is the same
eighteenth century man, the anachronism, at the end that
he was in the beginning. He has suffered the persecution
of his wife on the human level and the persecution of war
on the world level. He has seen his fellow humans go mad
as their world crumbles about them. It should be noted
that each happening on a world scale is mirrored in an
individual on the human level in Parade's End. Since the
book has little plot, it depends upon its characterization
for its effects. And since the essential theme of the
book is the conflict between the embodiment of the eighteenth
century man and a world unable to understand him, the
symbols of these two concepts, Christopher and Sylvia,
are the only characters I have outlined in detail.
Tietjens' view of the war may be taken as one of the

most valid in the long list of war novels. For it is the

74

completely impartial view of a man who is in it and yet
aloof from it. One never sees more than Tietjens sees,
but this is enough. For in his view of the war, he sees
the collapse of his world.

"At the beginning of the war," Tietjens said,
"I had to look in on the War Office, and in a
room I found a fellow . . . What do you think
he was doing . . . what the hell do you think
he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial
for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion.
You can't say we were not prepared in one mat-
ter at least . . . Well, the end of the show
was to be: the adjutant would stand the
battalion at ease; the band would play Land of
Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would
say: There will be no more parades. . . .
Don't you see how symbolical it was--the band
playing Land of Hoge and Glory, and then the
adjutant saying There will be no more parades?
. . . For there won't. There won't, there
damn well won't. . . . No more Hope, no more
Glory, no more parades for you and me any
more. Nor for the country . . . nor for the
world, I dare say . . . None . . . Gone . . .
Na poo, finny! No . . . more . . . parades!"35

It is interesting to compare the plots of Ford's two
major works, The Good Soldier with its intricate and in-
volved plot and Parade's End with its fairly simple plot
of life in the pre-war world, the war world, and the post-
war world. Because of its intricate plot, The Good
Soldier did not require as much skill in characterization
as did Parade's End, although Ford certainly managed to
make his characters believable in the former. The two

best-realized characters in The Good Soldier are Dowell

351bido, pp. 306-70

75

and Edward Ashburnham. This is particularly interesting
in the light of Violet Hunt's statement regarding Ford
and The Good Soldier. "Edward Ashburnham and Mr. Dowell
in The Good Soldier are Joseph Leopold's [Ford'SJJekyll
and Hyde--or say two Mr. Jekylls for neither is really
wicked and Joseph LeOpold holds no brief for either. He
simply doesn't know."36 If Ford really did see himself
in these two characters, it is not surprising that they
are better drawn than the other characters in the book.
In many respects Edward Ashburnham foreshadows
Christopher Tietjens of Parade's End. Ashburnham is a
symbol of the landed gentry of pre-war England, solid but
dashing, owner of a great estate, a gentleman always.
Unlike Tietjens, Ashburnham's landed gentry qualities
only serve to mask the corruption within him. And yet
for all his evil, Ashburnham is pictured rather sympathe-
tically by Dowell, of course, but also by Ford through
Dowell. Perhaps the reason the reader catches the tone
of sympathy for Ashburnham is that Ashburnham, rather
than Dowell, is a pathetic and very understandable figure.
His passion has carried him too far and now others are
set in motion against him. Ashburnham could stand the

havoc he created himself by recourse to sentimentalizing

36Violet, Hunt, I Have This To Say: The Story of My Flurried

Years (New York:Boni and Liveright, 1926) p. 202.

76

and posturing. He goes too far. He falls in love with
his ward. He.522ߤ he has gone too far, and the code of
the English gentleman comes through, "This just isn't
done, old boy." It is too late, and Leonora, horrified
by what seems to her an almost incestuous love affair,
knowing the history of Ashburnham's past love affairs,
moves quickly to end the affair. Edward, whose self-
destructive bent has been obvious, commits the final act.
There is an air of horror and of impending destruction
around Ashburnham which is brought to the reader's atten-
tion often throughout the book. Notice how skill in writing
and the carefully built up blindness and fatuousness of
Dowell combine to communicate horror at and yet sympathy
for Edward Ashburnham:

Yes, it was a great worry. And just as I
had got things roughly settled I received the
extraordinary cable from Ashburnham begging me
to come back and have a talk with him. And
immediately afterwards came one from Leonora
saying, "Yes, please do come. You could be so
helpful." It was as if he had sent the cable
without consulting her and had afterwards told
her. Indeed, that was pretty much what had hap-
pened, except that he had told the girl and the
girl told the wife. I arrived, however, too
late to be of any good if I could have been of
any good. And then I had my first taste of
English life. It was amazing. It was over-
whelming. I never shall forget the polished
cob that Edward, beside me, drove; the animal's
action, its highstepping, its skin that was like
satin. And the peace! And the red cheeks! And
the beautiful, beautiful old house.

77

Just near Branshaw Teleragh it was and
we descended on it from the high, clear,
windswept waste of the New Forest. I tell
you it was amazing to arrive there from
Waterbury. And it came into my head--for
Teddy Ashburnham, you remember, had cabled
to me to "come and have a talk" with him--
that it was unbelievable that anything essen-
tially calamitous could happen to that place
and those people. I tell you it was the very
spirit of peace. And Leonora, beautiful and
smiling, with her coils of yellow hair, stood
on the top doorstep, with a butler and a foot-
man and a maid or so behind her. And she
just said:--"So glad you've come," as if I'd
run down to lunch from a town ten miles away,
instead of having come half the world over
at the call of two urgent telegrams.

The girl was out with the hounds, I think.

And that poor devil beside me was in an
agony. Absolute, hopeless, dumb aggny such as
passes the mind of man to imagine.

The supreme achievement of The Good Soldier is the
character of Dowell. Never before had Ford's-~or Con-
rad's—-use of the first-person narrative created such a
living character in the person of the narrator. This
was a creation that was doubly hard to accomplish
because Dowell is not perceptive and, further, is in-
capable of feeling or of a sense of attachment. When
his wife dies, he is unmoved--"I have never given her
another thought."38 He can be a perfect fool babbling

about the inconsequential and, in so doing, revealing his

weaknesses:

57Ford, The Good Soldier, pp. 19-20.

381b1d., p. 121.

ll Ii lye-Do 'ml'l'iril'l .Iii'

78

That question of first impressions has
always bothered me a good deal-~but quite
academically. I mean that, from time to
.time I have wondered whether it were or
were not best to trust to one's first impre-
sions in dealing with people. But I never
had anybody to deal with except waiters and
chambermaids and the Ashburnhams, with whom
I didn't know that I was having any dealings.
And, as far as waiters and chambermaids were
concerned I have generally found that m
first impressions were correct enough.5

Yet Dowell is likeable in his confusion, his misunder-
standing, his preening, his stupidity, and his lack of
emotion. He is likeable because,_paradoxically, he can
give the reader what he cannot see or feel, what he is
not even aware of. The irony of such a character as
narrator becomes vivid when Dowell the narrator writes
the truth and yet is completely unaware that it is the

truth.

Is there then any terrestrial paradise
where, amidst the whispering of the olive-
leaves, people can be with whom they like and
have what they like and take their ease in
shadows and in coolness? Or are all men's
lives like the lives of us good peopleo-like
the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells,
of the Ruffords--broken, tumultuous, agonised,
and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by
screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by
agonies? Who the devil knows?4O

Early in his story Dowell says, "Someone has said
that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack
of Home by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking

up of our little four-square coterie was such another

591b1d., p.-155.-

40Ibido, pp: 240-410

79

unthinkable event."41 The theme of The Good Soldier
becomes apparent-~in viewing the decay of Ashburnham,
Leonora, and Florence, the reader sees in minature the
decay of a whole class. Thus Dowell with all his limi-
tations is the only logical one to tell his tale, for

he is not really a part of this class. He is the impar-
tial Observor because he is not a part of them, and
because he has no feeling for any of them. Dowell was
unable to write truthfully about himself, "I guess that
I myself, in my fainter way, come into the category of
the passionate, of the headstrong and the too truthful."42
And yet simply because he did not know them but thought
he did, Dowell reveals the truth about the others.

The Good Soldier depends on the character of Dowell
for its effects. But it is possible that the book would
have been just as powerful without Dowell because of its
strong plot. Parade's End, however, depends completely
on the realization of its character, because it has no
plot.

The most interesting figure in Parade's End is Sylvia

 

Tietjens. She is interesting because she is the symbol
of an idea which is difficult to imagine in a single person.
Sylvia represents everyone hating and deSpising the one

who is out of step, the one who by his very presence in the

411bid., p. 5.

421b1d., p. 257.

80

group is a threat to that group's way of thinking and
way of life. She is all the violent forces of confor—
mity unleashed on a single person, her husband. Although
Tietjens is so moral that he is Christ-like, to Sylvia
the reason for her hatred of him is "'because of his
simple, sheer immorality.'"43 It is immoral in Sylvia's
eyes, in the world's eyes, for someone to be out of step
with the rest no matter how honest, truthful, good,
in short moral, this someone is. And yet throughout all
her persecution of Tietjens the reader is aware that she
is in love with him. "' If that man would throw his
handkerchief to me, I would follow him round the world in
my shift! Look here . . . see me shake when I think of
it. . . .'"44

It is always dangerous to draw comparisons between
fictional characters and actual people. However, in
Parade's End I believe the comparisons do exist. Parade's
.EEQ is part autobiographical and part wish-fulfillment.
Sylvia Tietjens emerges as a believable character because
she is patterned after a real person. There is no doubt
that Violet Hunt persecuted Ford terribly during and imme-
diately following the war. Ford's biographer records the

situation in some detail.45 There is a great deal of

43Ford, Parade's End, p. 39.
44Ibid., p. 386.

45Douglas Goldring, Trained for Genius: The Life and Writings
of Ford Madox Ford (New Yorsz. P. Dutton, 19497 pp. SOS-8.

81

Violet Hunt in Sylvia Tietjens. So much so that Violet
Hunt found it necessary to defend herself:

I was asked several times last year how I liked
being called Sylvia--and certainly I do recol-
lect something about a pair of sheets commandeered
for the use of the Regiment--my best sheets!
(of. Parade's End, p. 353.) I think I should
rather sign myself Sylvia-Valentine, for my
record suffrage exPeriences were those of Miss
Valentine Wallop (sic.) and, though my hair is
not yellow nor my eyes blue, my nose has cer-
tainly more than a soupcon of the tilt of the
nose of Dante.

 

It is a pity, but the public must realise F
that authors, like beggars, cannot be choosers.4O

Sylvia is interesting, however, not for her resemblance
to Violet Hunt, but because she lives, because she is so
terribly human. Christopher Tietjens lives too which is
incredible because he is not terribly human. He lives
because he was also drawn from life. It is well known
that Christopher Tietjens was based on Ford's friend,

Arthur Marwood. Marwood had helped finance the English
Review, and he and Ford had become good friends. Marwood
had been educated at Eton and Cambridge, and these were

things that Ford strongly desired. When he wrote Parade's

 

'End, Ford decided to pattern Tietjens after Marwood,
although Marwood had died of tuberculosis before World
War I. Hobie Macaulay quotes Ford as saying: "'I seemed
. . . to see him stand in some high place in France

46Hunt, I Have This To Say: The Story of My Flurried Years,
p. 203.

82

during the period of hostilities taking in not only what
was visible but all the causes and all the motive powers
of infinitely distant places. And I seemed to hear his
infinitely scornful comment on those places. It was as
if he lived again.'"47 The Henry James technique of
viewing the action or filtering the action through the
mind of one central character sometimes shifts to one of

the other characters in Parade's End. Essentially, though,

 

the reader obtains Christopher Tietjens' view. If Ford
patterned Tietjens after Marwood, he must have had to
stop often and ask himself, "How would Marwood have

viewed this situation?" We know from Ford's biographer
that Ford admired Marwood immensely, that he imitated him,
and that he eventually even ascribed some of Marwood's
background to his own. It is logical to assume, then,
that Tietjens is not so much Marwood as he is the embodi-
ment of what Ford would have liked to have been and, in-
deed, even became in his own mind. Physically, Tietjens
resembles Ford more than he does Marwood; the events which
happen to him happened, in large measure, to Ford; and, at
the time of the writing of Parade's End, Ford felt that

he had passed through a period of extreme persecution by

Violet Hunt and others. Ford tried several times during

47Ford, Parade's End, p. vii.

83

his life to return to the soil, to become, as he termed
it, a "small producer." Shocked by what he saw in England
after World War I, Ford retired to a small farm with a
young Australian girl. Tietjens finds the same escape.
Parade's End becomes then a novel of wish-fulfillment
through the Christ-like figure of ChristOpher Tietjens.

As Remy de Gourmont said:

Literature indeed is nothing but the
artistic development of ideas, the symbolizing
of ideas by means of imaginary heroes.

Heroes or men (for every man is a hero in

his sphere) are only outlined by life; it is

art which completes them by giving them in
exchange for their poor sick souls the treasure
of an immortal idea . . .48

48Remy de Gourmont, Remy de Gourmont: Selections, chosen

and translated by Richard Aldington (London:Chatto
and Windus, 1932) pp. 36-37.

CHAPTER III

The Special Problem of Collaboration

The story is told that Joseph Conrad once said to
W. E. Henley,

Look here. I write with such difficulty:

my intimate, automatic, less expressed

thoughts are in Polish; when I express

, myself with care I do it in French. When

I write I think in French and then trans-

late the words of my thoughts into English.

This is an impossible process for one

desiring to make a living by writing in

the English language. . . .
Henley is supposed to have replied, "'Why don't you ask
H. [Hueffer] to collaborate with you. He is the finest
stylist in the English language of to-day. . . .'"l
Ford Madox Ford, to whom Conrad related this incident,
candidly remarks, "Henley obviously had said nothing of
the sort.""(3

Regardless of how it happened, in the autumn of
1898, when Ford was twenty-four years old, Joseph Conrad
approached Ford with the idea of collaboration. Conrad
had written three novels, Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of
the Islands, and The Nigger of the Narcissus, and a
collection of short stories, Tales of Unrest. Ford had

written two novels, a book of poems, two children's

stories, and a biography of his famous grandfather, Ford

1Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance
(BostonzLittle, Brown and Co., 19247p. 32.

21bid.,

E [‘IEI'!’I"_

85

Madox Brown. Although Conrad was considerably older
than Ford, they found each other mutually congenial.

Their views regarding the art they practised
were almost identical and their knowledge and
appreciation of the masters of contemporary
French literature equally profound. To Conrad,
who was very much a stranger in a strange is-
land, Ford's German origin must have seemed
comfortingly continental. At the same time,

as an Englishman born and bred, Ford's idio-
matic knowledge of his native language, com-
bined with his already admired prose style,
supplied just the element which Conrad lacked.3

Both men were steeped in French literature, parti-
cularly Flaubert and Maupassant. Much of the mature
style of Ford, as discussed in Chapter II, indicates the
passion with which he and Conrad studied the two great
French masters. The training which developed this style
was marked by the harsh disciplines of writing in Flau-
bert's and Maupassant's native French and then translating

what had been written into English.

We remembered long passages of Flaubert;
elaborated long passages in his Spirit and
with his cadences and then translated them
into passages of English as simple as the
subject under treatment would bear. We
remembered short, staccato passages of
Maupassant; invented short, staccato passages
in his spirit and then translated them into
English as simple as the subject would bear.4

3Douglas Goldring, Trained for Genius: The Life and
Writings of Ford Madox Ford (New Yorsz. P. Dutton,
1949) p. 66.

4Ford, Joseph Conrad; A Personal Remembrance, p. 208.

. . Oiih. x'h'llfl—iviufimi P 744. 1,! gm;

86

The two collaborators acknowledged few English masters.
They admired H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man, the stories
of Cunninghame Graham and W. H. Hudson. Henry James, who
had practiced many of the French novel writing techniques,
was also admired.5 These English influences, but most of
all the weight of the French masters, were to be felt
throughout the years of collaboration.

When Conrad first approached Ford in 1898, Ford had
just completed the manuscript for a new novel to be
entitled Seraphina. It was a historical romance concerning
the adventures of the last man to ever be tried as a
pirate in England. In answer to a polite query as to
what he was writing at the moment, Ford read the manu-

script of Seraphina to Conrad. Although Conrad was not

 

particularly impressed with what Ford had written, he was
intrigued by the possibility of the subject matter.
Therefore the two writers decided to make Ford's origi-
nal manuscript the basis for their first collaboration.

It was to take them almost six years to turn Seraphina

 

into the best work of their collaboration, Romance. Not
all of the six years were consumed in artistic struggle
over Romance. Each writer did a considerable amount of
work on his own. Indeed, Conrad was to do his best work,
including Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, during those six

years.

51bid., p. 59.

87

The actual struggles put into the creation of
Romance were long and frustrating, and it was during
this time that the collaborators decided to turn to another
unpublished manuscript of Ford's called The Inheritors.
Ford describes the manuscript as

. . . a political work, rather allegorically

backing Mr. Balfour in the then Government;

the villain was to be Joseph Chamberlain

who had made the war [the Boer War] . The

sub-villain was to be Leopold II, King of

the Belgians, the foul--and incidentally

lecherous--beast who had created the Congo

Free State in order to grease the wheels of

his harems with the blood of martyred negroes

and to degrade them with fretted ivory cut

from stolen tusks in the deep forests. . . .

it had appeared to be an allegorico--realist

romance; it showed the superseding of pre-

vious generations and codes by the merciless

young who are always alien and without re-
morse. . . .

It was a subject that appealed to Conrad's political
bent, and Romance was drOpped for awhile in favor of
this new work.

The_lnheritors was written in the first-person, a
technique that Ford and Conrad were not only to use in
all of their collaborated works but in much of their
individual work as well. Unlike Conrad's Marlow, how-
ever, the narrator of The Inheritors is closely akin to
Ford's Dowell in that he is the protagonist of his tale.

The narrator, a struggling young writer, falls in love

5ibid., p. 141.

 

88

with a girl who claims to be of the fourth-dimension.
The inhabitants of the fourth-dimension are in the
process of subverting and overthrowing the existing
government in England to make room for themselves. By
the clever use of her charms as bait, the girl manages
to enlist the narrator's aid in the plot of the fourth-
dimensionists. With the help of the narrator's pen, all
England becomes enthused over a scheme to colonize Green-
land. PeOple, possessing unlimited faith in the existing
order, invest their life savings in the project. As a
final act of fidelity to the fourth-dimensionist girl,
the narrator cajoles the Prime-Minister into supporting
the Greenland project. At the height of popular enthu-
siasm, the fourth-dimensionists prick the balloon by
exposing as frauds the backers of the Greenland project.
The Government falls, and in the ensuing chaos the fourth-
dimensionists sieze control of England. Since he can no
longer be useful to them and since he has never been one
of them, the narrator is cast aside by the fourth-dimen-
sionists. The Inheritors closes with the narrator posses-
sing neither country nor girl.

At the time of the collaboration on The Inheritors,
it appears that Conrad had little admiration for the book

but that Ford was quite serious about it.

89

In a letter to [Edward] Garnett, after
saying that he [Conrad] considered the
acceptance of the book by Heinemann a
distinct bit of luck, "Jove, what a
lark!", he remarks that he set himself
to look upon the thing as a sort of skit
on the sort of political novel,written
by a certain sort of fools. "This in
my heart of hearts. And poor H [Huefferj
was dead in earnest! 0h lord. How he
worked! There is not a chapter I haven't
made him write twice-~most of them three
times over."7

However, many years later when the two collaborators
were discussing the republishing of The Inheritors
Conrad explained:

"Why not? Why not republish it? It's

a good book isn't it? It's a damn good

book!" And the writer [Ford] let the

matter go at that--rather than imply

that Conrad would have set his name to

a book that he did not consider good,

or even damn good.

There is little doubt, whether Conrad cared for the
book or not, that the plot of The Inheritors was con-
ceived by Ford. It is significant that in the plot of
The Inheritors appears for the first time the central
theme which was to dominate all of Ford's best writing--
the destruction and decay of the old society and the coming
of the new.

The idea for the plot may have come from H. G. Wells's

The Time Machine, which was published in 1895, three years

7Goldring, Trained for Genius, p. 67.

8Ford, Joseph Conrad, p. 126.

90

before the collaboration began. In The Time Machine,

time is called the fourth dimension. Ford and Conrad

have peopled this fourth dimension with a race, repre-
senting youth, which wishes to overthrow the existing

conditions.

The Inheritors not only is the beginning of Ford's

 

use of the fall—of-the-existing-order theme, but it also
marks the beginning of another aspect of Ford's technique,
his characterization. All of Ford's major novels hinge
on a central figure in a crumbling society. In Parade's * w
End the central figure, Christopher Tietjens, does not
adapt to his new society and suffers inevitable perse-
cution. In The Good Soldier Dowell is left alone with
the realization that he has helped to destroy his world.
The narrator-protagonist of The Inheritors has by
helping the fourth-dimensionists overthrown his world.
But, on the day his world collapses, the horror of what
he has helped to bring about slowly becomes clear.
I was beginning to wonder how it was that
I felt such an absolute conviction of being
alone, and it was then, I believe, that in
this solitude that had descended upon my
soul I seemed to see the shape of an approach-
ing Nemesis. It is permitted to no man to
break with his past, with the past of his kind,

and to throw away the treasure of his future.
I began to suspect I had gained nothing; I

91

began to understand that even such a catas-
trOphe was possible.9

The narrator's tragedy is that by helping time,
or the future, to overthrow the present, he has severed
his ties with the present, but there is no place for him
in the new order because he is essentially a product
of the old. In the last chapter the girl from the
fourth-dimension tells him.

"Well, you have parted with your past . . .

and there is no future for you. That is

true too. But what is that to me? A set

of facts--that you have parted with your

past and have no future. You had to do the

work; I had to make you do it. That is all

. . . I knew you; knew your secret places,

your weaknesses. That is my power. I stand

for the Inevitable, for the future that goes

on its way; you for the past that lies by

the roadside. If for your sake I had swerved

one jot from my allotted course, I should

have been untrue . . ."l

The decay of an existing order is never easily
accepted or properly evaluated by those who are present
during the decay. Those who do recognize it are powerless
to stop it. The novelist who embraces such a theme
quickly encounters the problem of so many modern writers,
the dichotomy between appearance and reality. A social
order crumbles or a culture decays because beneath its
surfaces it is rotten. Thus the writer, particularly the
9Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), The Inheritors:

An Extravagant Stopy (New YorkzDoubleday, Page and Co.,
1914) p. 305.

lOIbid., pp. 319-20.

92

twentieth century writer, who discovers that the old order
is dying just as quickly discovers that no one around him
seems aware of it or will recognize it. This lack of
awareness is partially due to the fact that men must live
in the world ofillusion to protect themselves from reality.
Men must believe that what they do today will have signi-
ficance tomorrow.

The fourth dimension of The Inheritors represents
time and reality. The narrator moves in a world of illu-
sion. He is blinded by the illusions covering reality.
However, because he has witnessed the downfall of his
society from the inside as it were, because he has inad-
vertently worked for the fourth-dimensionists, he recog-
nizes far more clearly than his fellow men the horror of
what has happened. As the prcps are pulled out from
under his society, he says,

. . . but more revolting to see without a

mask was that falsehood which had been

hiding under the words that for ages had

spurred men to noble deeds, to self-sacri-

fice, to heroism. What was appalling was

the sudden perception that all the tradi-

tional ideals of honour, glory, conscience,

had been committed to the upholding of a gi-

gantic and atrocious fraud. The falsehood

had spread stealthily, had eaten into the

very heart of creeds and convictions that we

lean upon on our passage between the past

and the future. The old order of things had
to live or perish with a lie.11

11Ibid., p. 282.

1"). “1h: ‘nzfi-‘dav
-.‘

95

It must be remembered that when Conrad saw the
manuscript of The Inheritors it was in nearly complete
form. Just what was Conrad's contribution to lg;
Inheritors, then? With the aid of Ford's invaluable
work, Josgph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, which
describes the years of collaboration, Conrad's contri-

bution can be accurately analyzed. It was a stylistic

L‘Nu é.”
" 1-7"!

contribution. By adding a word here, adding a phrase

there, Conrad was able to tighten the construction of

K r.—:D§ mummy .. VI-

1"

the whole and to clarify the parts. As Ford says,
"Conrad's function in 'The Inheritors' as it to-day stands
was to give to each scene a final tap; these, in a great
many cases, brought the whole meaning of the scene to

the reader's mind."12 Ford has left several examples of

Conrad's work in The Inheritors. The following is an

 

example of how Conrad's additions helped to more sharply
define the first impression the narrator has on meeting
the girl from the fourth-dimension. The italics are

Conrad's additions.

I had looked at her before; now I cast
a sideways, critical glance at her. I came
out of my moodiness to wonder what type this
was. She had good hairy good eyesL and some
charm. .123. And something besides-~a some-
thing--that was not an attribute of her beauty.
The modelling of her face was so perfect as
to produce an effect of transparency, yet there

 

12Ford, Joseph Conrad, p. 144.

 

94

was no suggestion of frailness; her glance
had an extraordinapy strength of life. Her
hair was fair andpgleaming, her cheeks col-
oured as if a warm light had fallen on them
from somewhere. She was familiar till it
occurred to you that she was strange.

Conrad had a passion for defining things exactly which

nicely balanced Ford's easy-going vagueness. An amusing .
sidelight to the above quotation is Ford's recollection -.1
of Conrad's attitude toward the addition of "she had i

good hair, good eyes, and some charm" to the above

 

quotation. J

pf.
g

It was only with difficulty that he was
restrained from adding good teeth to the
catalogue. He said with perfect serious-
ness, "Why not good teeth? Good teeth in

a woman are part of her charm. Think of
when she laughs. You would not have her
'32; have good teeth. They are a sign of
health. Your damn woman has to be healthy,
doesn't she?" The writer, however, stopped
that. . . . To-day he would not.14

It was Conrad's passion for accuracy and definition
that controlled Ford's use of half-sentences already
discussed in Chapter II. In Ford's original manuscript
a scene was presented as follows:

"You don't understand. . . . She. . . .
She will. . . ."

He said: "Ah! Ah!"'in an intolerable
tone of royal badinage.

15Ibid., p. 142.

14lbid., p. 152.

95

I said again: "You don't understand.
. . . Even for your own sake. . . ."

He swayed a little on his feet and said:
"Bravo. . . . Bravissimo. . . . You prcpose
to frighten. . . ."

I looked at his great bulk of a body.
. . . People began to pass, muffled up, on
their way out of the place.15 “i

Together the two collaborators reworked the scene.

Conrad's additions are italicized. f

 

 

"Ifgyou do not" (cease persecuting her g
had been implied several speeches before), .
I said; "I shall forbidgyou to see her. t E

And I shall. . . ."

"OhL oh!" he interjected with the
intonation of a reveller at a farce.
"We are at that-~we are the excellent
brother--" He paused and then added:
"Welly go to the devil,pyou andpyour
forbidding." He spoke with the greatest
_gpod humour.

"I am in earnest," I said, "very
much in earnest. The thing has gone
too far. And even for your own sake you
had better . . . ."

He said: "Ah, ah!" in the tone of
his "Oh, oh!"

"She is no friend topyou," I struggled
on, "she is_playing with you for her own

purposes; you will. . . ."

He swayed a little on his feet and
said: "Bravo . . . bravissimo. If we
can't forbid him we will frighten him.

Go onL_my good fellow. . . ." and then,
"ComeL go on."

15Ibid., pp. 144-45.

96
I looked at his great bulk of a
body. . . .

"You absolutely refuse to pay agy
attention?" I said.

"Othabsolutely," he answered.16
Although the above might appear to be a laborious type
of collaboration, the patchwork effect is undoubtedly due
to Ford's having already written a complete first draft.
The Inheritors was published in 1901 and received, if not
enthusiastic, at least favorable reviews.

The two collaborators returned to the writing of
Romance which was eventually published in 1903.

Romance is the first-person narrative of one John
Kemp. As a young man, Kemp becomes involved with smugglers
and is forced to leave England for the West Indies. An
unfortunate fight in Jamaica forces him to move again.

A beautiful girl, Seraphina, whom helas met in

Jamaica, offers him sanctuary in Cuba. The sanctuary,

on the death of Seraphina's father, becomes a prison
guarded by pirates. Kemp manages to flee with Seraphina,
however, and returns to England where he finds himself
accused of piracy and threatened with hanging.

The plot of Romance is a Stevensonian adventure on

the order of Treasure Island. Such a romantic plot is

quite different from the other plots conceived by Ford

lerido, pp. 145-460

97

which we have studied. However, on several occasions
throughout his life, Ford used romantic, historical
plots successfully. Romance, however, is the only novel

worth studying in this tradition.
The genesis of Romance had begun:

Years before . . ., looking through the pages
of Dickens's "All the Year Round" for woodcuts
contributed by Ford Madox Brown, upon whose
biography he had been engaged, the writer

had come upon a short rendering of the offi-
cial account of the trial of Aaron Smith.
This had been the last trial for piracy that
had ever been held at the Old Bailey and the
prisoner was acquitted. The story told by
him in the dock was sufficiently that of
"Romance," as it now stands.1

The name, John Kemp, and the date, 1822, had been scratched
into one of the windows at Pent Farm, which was first
Ford's home and later Conrad's.

Although Romance was a long time in being written,

It is not to be imagined that we spent the
whole of our times upon this enterprise; we
each at intervals carried on work of our own.
Then we would drop it, have another month's
try at "Romance." Then drop that again. . . .
Or sometimes one of us would write his own
work in the morning; the other would write
away at "Romance"; in the evenings and till
far into the night we would join up. We
pursued this monstrous undertaking all over
the shores and near-shores of the British
Channel; at the Pent, near Hythe in Kent;
at Aldington; at Winchelsea in Sussex, in
Bruges. . . . The most terrible struggles of
all took place in a windy hotel at Knocke on
the Belgian coast, with a contralto from

17Ib1d., p. 5.

3.3-“ “a”... ‘ -_—. Ar”:
"

98

Bayreuth practising in the basement.
. . . Conrad was then beginning "Nostromo"
in the mornings: . . .18
The plot of Romance was not typically Conradian
or Fordian, but it captured their imaginations. Romance

is a beautifully constructed novel with excellent tech-

nique and a flawless handling of progression d'effet.

 

The atmosphere and the suSpense of its plot superbly
handled make it the epitome of "romance." It is as good
as Stevenson and better written and constructed than Scott
or Dumas. The individual temperaments of the two writers
clashed again and again during the writing of Romance,

but this clashing helped to make it the tightly constructed
book that it is. Ford recalled many years later,

John Kemp merely kidnapped by pirates and mis-
judged by the judicial bench of our country
was not so vastly attractive, but a John Kemp
who was in addition a political refugee, sus-
pect of High Treason and victim of West India
merchants. . . . That was squeezing the last
drop of blood out of the subject. . . .

The differences in our temperaments were
sufficiently well marked. Conrad was brave:
he was for inclusion and hang the consequences.
The writer, more circumspect, was for ever on
the watch to suppress the melodramatic incident
and the sounding phrase. 80, till that psycholo-
gical moment, the writer doing most of the first
drafting, Conrad had been perpetually crying,
"Give! Give!" The writer was to give one more,
and one more, and again one more turn to the
screw that sent the rather listless John Kemp
towards an inevitable gallows. The actual

Ibido’ pp. 123-240

 

99

provision of intrigue in 1820 between
England and Jamaica was the writer‘s
business. Conrad contented himself with
saying, "You must invent. You have got

to make that fellow live perpetually

under the shadow of the gallows." . . .

It was therefore necessary to give the
screw one turn more: Kemp had to be made

a misjudged man, betrayed by the stupid
cruelty of merchants and the administration.
He thus became exactly a figure for Conrad
to handle. For, if Conrad were the eternal
Loyalist, nevertheless the unimaginative
and cruel stupidity of Crown and Government
officials was an essential part of his
creed . . . So, by that moment, we had
worked John Kemp into a position that can
have been occupied by very few unjustly ac-
cused heroes of romance. When he stood

in the Old Bailey Dock he had the whole
legal, the whole political, the whole naval
forces of the Crown, the whole influence at
once of the City of London and of the King-
dom of Spain determined to hang him. . . .N 9

oo--,_. LL "3
-".'_

n‘u’w-cfl...“

The skillful use of progression d'effet, the giving of
"the screw one turn more," helps to create the real
value of Romance, its atmosphere which, in turn, is
further enhanced by the sensibility and the sensuous
perceptiveness of the descriptions of situations and
feelings. As an example, notice in the following chapter
the mood created by a man lying in a darkened room and
how the description of situation and feeling pile on top
of each other until the moment of surprise is reached in
the last line:

I turned my head to a click, I saw a

door open a little way, and the small blue

lglbid., pp. 42-45.

lOO

flame of a taper floated into the room.

Then the door closed with a definite sound
of shutting in. The light shown redly
through protecting fingers, and upwards onto
a small face. It came to a halt, and I

made out the figure of a girl leaning across
a table and looking upwards. There was a
click of glass, and then a great blaze of
light created a host of shining things; a
glitter of gilded carvings, red velvet
couches, a shining table, a low ceiling,
painted white, on carved rafters. A large
silver lamp she had lighted kept on swinging
to the gentle motion of the ship.

She stood just in front of me; the girl
that I had seen through the door; the girl
I had seen play with the melon seeds. She
was breathing fast--it agitated me to be
alone with her--and she had a little shining
dagger in her hand.20

It has been mentioned that The Inheritors is inter-

 

esting because it marks the beginning of themes which

were to become more important in later and more mature
works. Romance is not entirely devoid of these themes,
however. If Graham Greene were right when he said that

Ford "had never really believed in human happiness, . . ."21
and if in Conrad's work Marlowe with his shrinking from

the darkness and Heyst's final "victory" Speak for

Conrad, then one can catch a glimpse of the future themes

of each man's work in Ford's statement:

ZQJoseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), Romance,

Concord Edition (Garden City:Doubleday, Page & Co.,
1925) p. 97.
21Graham Greene, The Lost Childhood and Other Essays
(New York:Viking Press, 1952) p. 91.

1'.

101

It is characteristic of Conrad-~it is most

characteristic of Conrad--that when, after

five years, he and the writer got to the

last paragraphs of "Romance" and when the

writer had written, "For suffering is the

lot of man," Conrad should have added, "but

not inevitable failure or worthless despair

which is without end: suffering, the mark

of manhood, which bears within its pain the

hope of felicity, like a jewel set in iron."22

The final work of collaboration was published in
book form in 1924. It was entitled The Nature of a
Crime. The actual date of composition is almost impos-
sible to discover. Edward Naumberg, Jr. in his "A Cata-
logue of a Ford Madox Ford Collection" says that The
Nature of a Crime first appeared in the April and May
issues of The English Review for 1919 under the pseudonym
"Baron Von Aschendorf."23 However, Conrad, in his preface
to The Nature of a Crime, Speaks of the tale's origin
as being near the time the English Review was founded.
Stylistic evidence would also indicate an earlier date
than 1919. The English Review was founded in 1908, and,
since Conrad places the writing of the story near the
founding, we may assume it was composed within a year or

two of that date. (Possibly 1919 is a typographical error

and should have read 1909.) The date is important because

22Ford, Josgph Conrad, p. 14.

 

23Edward Naumberg, Jr., "A Catalogue of a Ford Madox Ford
Collection." The Princeton University Librapy
'Chronicle, IX, p. 153.

9531-;L- MI”-

{FLJ‘QJ‘U'W‘T IA

102

The Nature of a Crime is a better stepping-stone to
The Good Soldier, published in 1915, than the novels
written in the intervening years, 1909-1915, when Ford
, was writing alone. The Nature of a Crime points directly
toward The Good Soldier stylistically, so does it
thematically.

The plot of The Nature of a Crime unfolds through
a series of letters the narrator writes to his mistress.
The narrator is a wealthy and influential man, largely
through the money he has embezzled from a fund left in
his trust. The person whose money he has been holding
has come of age and is about to be married. Thus the
narrator faces exposure when the young man asks for his
money. The narrator has enjoyed his life of deceit, and
it has been doubly enjoyable because he has appeared so
respectable. Now that exposure is near he contemplates
suicide, However, his client, the young man, decides
not to audit his books for fear of offending him, and thus
the narrator is reprieved. Here again is an example of
illusion serving as a shield for reality, protecting, in
this case, reality from being discovered. The narrator's
apparent respectability has served as protection against
the reality of his crime.

The narrator, of course, knows that it has been his

respectability which has saved him from discovery. He

.m‘.:-.

i

103

has three choices: he can write his client, telling
him what he has done and carry out his suicide plan,
thus exposing his client to reality; he can quietly get
his client's books in order to put him off indefinitely,

thus protecting his client from reality; or he can con-

 

tinue to gamble his client's money, facing eventual :IE
discovery and ruin, thus pnionging his client's discovery i
of reality. It is significant that he narrows his choice 5
to the latter two. Just as the narrator in The Inheri- i
La~

_pgg§ discovers that men are spurred on to courageous

deeds by words that hide falsehoods, so the narrator of
The Nature of a Crime commits himself to knowingly up-
holding the lie to protect man from discovering the horror
of reality.

The eventual break between Conrad and Ford was in-
evitable, and it was brought about by a combination of
several things. One of the aSpects of writing which con-
stantly harassed Conrad was his difficulty with the English
language. Although he was far enough removed from the
influence of the Polish language when he began his career
as a writer, Conrad was not far enough removed from the
French language. Essentially he thought in French so that
for him writing became a problem of translation. The in—
fluence of Flaubert was too great, because it was this

influence which constantly led him in search of le mot juste.

 

104

Finding the exact English equivalents for the phrases and
words which sprang to his mind in French was terrifying
and nerve wrecking work.24 As he grew older the strain
became greater, until Conrad formed an intense dislike for
the English language. To Ford Conrad's hatred of the
English language was like biting the hand that fed him,
although he understood and sympathized with Conrad's
problem:

Conrad's indictment of the English
language was this, that no English word
is a word; that all English words are
instruments for exciting blurred emo-
tions. "Oaken" in French means "made of
oak wood"--nothing more. "Oaken" in
English connotes innumerable moral attri-
butes: it will connote stolidity, reso-
lution, honesty, blond features, relative
unbreakables, absolute unbendableness--
also, made of oak. . . . The consequence
is that no English word has clean edges:
a reader is always, for a fraction of a
second, uncertain as to which meaning of
the word the writer intends. Thus, all
English prose is blurred.25

As Conrad's fury mounted over his frustrations,
which were not all stylistic but monetary as well, he
would turn and lash out at his friend and collaborator.
Unfortunately Ford was going through a period of personal
stress as well. He was in debt, his wife was seriously
ill, and he was beginning to have doubts as to his capacity
24For a specific example of this particular problem in
Conrad's writing see Ford, Joseph Conrad, pp. 168-74.
25Ford, Joseph Conrad, p. 229.

105

as a writer. He cracked and in 1904 he suffered a ner-
vous breakdown. It would be impossible to determine

how much of Ford's illness was due to Conrad's carping,
but there is little doubt that Conrad contributed heavily
toward its inception. Douglas Goldring, Ford's biographer,
says, "The long and nerve-wrecking collaboration with

the always wailing and bemoaning Conrad no doubt had

pernicious after-effects. It could hardly be otherwise

yang mm JI‘A’JL—j
-. FJY‘

in view of Ford's easily impressionable natured“?6

vrhn
a

After Ford's return from a long rest-cure in EuroPe,
fresh differences arose between the two collaborators.
Ford started the English Review which Conrad violently
opposed on the grounds that it would destroy Ford's
imaginative writing career.27 And finally there was the
scandal which surrounded Ford's association with Violet
Hunt. Although it is entirely probable that most of the
animosity toward Ford was felt by Mrs. Conrad, there was
nevertheless a considerable cooling off between Ford and
Conrad after Ford began living with Violet Hunt. The two
writers continued to correspond, and in 1915 Conrad
agreed to become Ford's literary executor in the event

that Ford was killed during the war.

szoldring, Trained for Genius, p. 114.

27Ford, Joseph Conrad, p. 131.

106

In any event the end of an unusual and interesting
collaboration had come. It was a collaboration which
had given much to both men, because both men had had
something to give to the other.

Our attributes were no doubt different.

The writer probably knew more about words,

but Conrad had certainly an infinitely

greater hold over the architectonics of

the novel, over the way a story should be

built up so that its interest progresses

and grows up to the last word. 5

Conrad wrote his best work during the period of
collaboration and the years immediately following it,
including Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), The Heartggg
Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907),
Chance (1913), aha Victogy (1915). And much of this
writing shows a sensitivity for words which was not
apparent before Conrad and Ford wrestled over the words
of Romance.

In H. G. Wells's opinion:

". . . Conrad owed a very great deal to

their early association," . . . “Hueffer

helped greatly to 'English' him and his

idiom, threw remarkable lights on the

English literary world for him, . . ."29

Ford's debt to Conrad is obvious, the style and

structure of The Good Soldier being a tribute to Conrad's

281bid., p. 179.

29Goldring, Trained for Genius, p. 89.

107

teachings. However, the collaboration did Ford a lot of

harm too. In later years, because he had collaborated
with Conrad, Ford was accused of imitating him and even
of paying for the privilege of writing with him.30

Ford did give Conrad several sums of money during the
years of their collaboration as loans which were always
repaid. Ford also imitated Conrad in that he helped
Conrad in the writing of several novels, including

The Rescue and The End of the Tether. Neither The Good
Soldier nor Parade's End, however, could in any sense

be called Conradian. It is unfortunate that literary

historians in lionizing one man had to belittle the other,

because out of their association came three interesting

books, one of them a masterpiece.

30See Ford, Joseph Conrad, pp. 187 and 159.

CHAPTER IV

A Summary

The preceding chapter has explored the period during
which the careers of two writers traveled the same path.
When their two careers touched, one of the writers, Ford
Madox Ford, was far more eXperienced in the profession
of writing. Today, the other writer, Joseph Conrad, is
considered one of the great English novelists, and the
name of Ford Madox Ford has been all but forgotten. Why
did this happen?

The obvious answer is that Conrad had genius and Ford
did not. Unfortunately, the obvious answer is not always
true. This essay has shown that Ford possessed the
ingredients necessary to make a writer of genius. Ford
was aware of the deep moral and aesthetic responsibilities
demanded by true artistic creation. He had also studied
and learned the tools of his craft and within their dis-
ciplines had been something of an innovator. He had,
furthermore, collaborated and been intimately associated
with one of the great English novelists during a period
when this great novelist had written much of his best
work.

Although very few have been interested enough in Ford
to bother criticizing his work, one interesting theory has

develOped concerning Ford's inability to qualify as a great

 

109

writer. The source of this theory is Granville Hicks who
said:

It is, perhaps, clearer to me than before

that he [Ford] fell short of greatness,

in even the loose sense of the term,

through excess rather than deficiency of

talent. He wrote too easily, and he

wrote far too much.
There is a certain amount of truth in this idea. A
bookshelf containing the total of Ford's literary out-
put would display almost 80 volumes. All but a very

few would be considered worthless by most literary

1P56‘ a 1M1 ‘_~¢:. x Y“L‘l.‘i." -Ar_- ~.--
4 .

critics. These few would include The Good Soldier, the
four novels comprising Parade's End, his biography of
Conrad, one or two of his numerous autobiographies, and
probably some of his poetry. The reason why Ford wrote

so many worthless books is perhaps threefold. He was
constantly in debt, and his financial worries drove him
often to the necessity of writing potboilers. Connected
with this was his great facility for writing. The ease
with which a novel could be dashed off for a little

money to buy necessities kept him from devoting the time
and effort necessary to the writing of a great novel. The
third reason can be found, paradoxically, in his devotion
to good writing. This devotion led him to consider every-
thing he wrote before the age of forty as in the nature
1Granville Hicks, "Ford Madox Ford," New Directions:

Number Seven (Norfolk, Connecticut:New Directions,
1942) p. 443.

 

110

of practice and eXperimentation. In 1924 he wrote:
For it was quite definitely the writer's
conviction that the only occupation fitting
for a proper man in these centuries is
the writing of novels-~and that no novel
worth much could be written by himself or
any other man-~at any rate, by himself--
before he has reached the age of forty.
So till he had attained that age the
writer was determined never to attempt the
production of anything that was not either
a pastiche or a tour de force-~just for

practice in writing. One must roll one's
hump around the world first. . . .2

Ford had "rolled his hump" quite far when he wrote The
Good Soldier at the age of forty--he had published forty-
two books by that time.
However, the practice and experimentation resulted
in an excellent novel, and, in the years following World
War I, the four superior novels which comprise the
Tietjens tetralogy appeared. So that before he died,
Ford had produced five very good novels. Surely this
would be enough to base a distinguished reputation on.
Five great novels out of a lifetime of writing is a
distinguished record, and yet Ford is virtually forgotten
today. The defect must lie in the five novels themselves.
0n the surface the central theme of the five novels--
the crumbling of the old order and the coming of the new--
is acceptable enough. The theme is common to mankind, it

2Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance
(BostonzLittle, Brown and Co., 1924) p. 186.

111

is true to life. Other writers have exPlored and used

the same theme successfully, including Conrad, James and
Proust.5 However, the theme was one which demanded more
than Ford was willing to bring to it. For The Good Soldier
and Parade's End are essentially pessimistic books.

In The Good Soldier the reader is left gazing at a
scene of incredible destruction in the midst of which
stands Dowell fatuous and foolish, mouthing absurdities
about his resemblance to Ashburnham. Because Dowell
has learned nothing from his experience, the reader learns
nothing. The reader has been shown that in a situation
which is decayed, relationships will fall apart, that
decay is not always easy to see, and that peOple need the
mask of social convention to hide from themselves the
horror of reality. Beyond this Ford does not go. He
does not offer any solution nor make any comment, he
merely presents the affair. The only conclusion the reader
can safely draw, therefore, is that The Good Soldier
intentionally presents a completely nihilistic view toward
life.

At first glance Parade's End would seem to supply
what had been omitted in The Good Soldier. Essentially

 

the same theme has been repeated not once but twice--the

3w1111am York Tindall, Forces in Modern Britgsh Literature:
1885-1956 (New York:Vintage Books, 1956) p. 192 and
p. 205.

112

decay and corruption of the values of 19th century England
as signaled by the war on a macrocosmic scale, and the
same decay and corruption mirrored in the lives of those
surrounding Christopher Tietjens on a microcosmic scale.
And unlike Dowell, Tietjens is a character who understands
and battles the forces of corruption which surround him.
Furthermore, Ford has made Tietjens of heroic proportions,
and not only in name, but in the horror and tragedy of

the endless persecution he is made to suffer, Christopher
Tietjens becomes, intentionally, a Christ-like figure.
Parade's Egg fails, however, for almost the same reason
that The Good Soldier fails. The central character will
not bear the load he is forced to carry. Tietjens'
solution to the chaos around him is not only intensely
personal, it is anachronistic. His solution is not appli-
cable to anyone else. So that the reader of Parade's End
is again left with a well-defined picture of the chaos
created by the crumbling of an old order but without a
guide out of the chaos. Tietjens' advocacy of a return

to an older set of values has little meaning to today's
reader who looks upon Tietjens as a crank, a prig, and a
boor. And I am not sure that Tietjens' values had any
more validity in 1924 when the first book of the tetra-
logy was published, for the world had passed through World

War I and was seeking to form a new set of values applicable

113

to the 20th century and not a reversion to older values

ineXplicable to most people. Further, in spite of the

fact that Tietjens' values are labeled as 17th and 18th

century, they are actually Victorian. The following is an

example of Tietjens, not as a political Tory but a Victorian

gentleman Tory: fin?
He disliked letting that "man" touch his 6
things; he had disliked letting his wife's
maid pack for him. He even disliked letting
portezs carry his kit-bag. He was a Tory-- L

 

This description would undoubtedly be as unintelligible is;
to a 17th or 18th century man as it is meaningless to
the 20th century reader. Ford has, therefore, in his
characterization of Tietjens fallen into the same trap
that his pre-Raphaelite forefathers fell into. He has
cast an essentially historical figure, who could never
exist except as an anachronism, into a contemporary
setting. As an anachronism, Tietjens can have little
effect on the world about him. Thus William Gaunt's
remark on William Morris and the pre-Raphaelite movement
has equal validity when applied to Christopher Tietjens
and Parade's End: ". . . the dream had charged full tilt
into reality and nothing had happened at all."5

Another factor which conspired to obscure Ford's
fame after his death was his style and technique. As

4Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End (New Yorszlfred A. Knopf,
1950) p. 40

5William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (New York:

Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1948) p. 207.

114

was pointed out in Chapter II, Ford was a mature crafts-
man when it came to using the tools of his trade. However,
Ford's greatest novels are, in a sense, experimentation

and innovation. The Good Soldier needs to be read more

 

than once in order to grasp its meaning. Probably
several readings would be necessary in order to understand
all of its subtleties and complexities. As I mentioned
in Chapter II, the style in The Good Soldier is analogous
to a detective story in which the facts gained on one
page serve to illuminate a clue subtly stated several
pages before. It is not until the whole book is read and
a re-reading begun that certain passages' become clear.
So that, although one can state that The Good Soldier is
a beautifully constructed and carefully written novel,
it is, because of its complexities, the sort of book which
will never become popular.

Complexity, however, has never deterred the literary
critic from examining a work that is profound and a;con-
tribution to literature. However, as I have pointed out

earlier, the critic, on reading The Good Soldier, is not

 

only faced with complexity of style but with a somewhat
dubious philosOphy. The critic is, therefore, forced to
the same conclusion that H. G. Wells came to when he com-

pared much of Henry James's work to a cathedral:

115

"Without congregation to distract you, with

every light and line focused on the high

altar. And on the altar, very reverently

placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten,

an egg-shell, a bit of string. . . ."5

For different reasons, the style and technique of
Parade's End are similarly complex and difficult. While
Ford tried to combine everything he knew about writing
into The GoodVSoldier, in Parade's End he explored his
new techniques of the time-shift and the shifting of
viewpoint from one character to another. Coupled with
this complex style is Parade's End's vast bulk. Although
the four novels comprising the Tietjens tetralogy are
meant to be read as one book, they were published separ-
ately with several years between each volume, necessitating

a recapitulation of the preceding events each time a new

book is begun. Therefore, in some reSpects, Parade's Egg

 

is a clumsy novel, not nearly as compact and concise as
The Good Soldier and containing all of the latter's com-
plexities of style. From my above discussion of the
central character of Parade's End, it may well be concluded
that Wells's comment would be applicable here.

Ford's personal life did much to damage his reputa-
tion during his lifetime. His unfortunate troubles with

his legal wife and the subsequent scandal created when

6Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature, p. 198.

116

he made Violet Hunt his mistress turned many otherwise
sensible critics against him. Inasmuch as the publicity
attending Ford's embroilment with Violet Hunt preceded

the publication of The Good Soldier by only two or three
short years, the novel was greeted with either silence

or highly critical reviews. Some idea of the violence

with which The Good Soldier was greeted by some critics

may be gained from the following letter written in reply

to a review of the novel in The New Witness, a reply
written by one of Ford's few remaining friends, H. G. Wells:

"This business of the Hueffer book in the

New Witness makes me sick. Some disgusting
little greaser named has been
allowed to insult old F.M.H. in a series of
letters which makes me ashamed of my species.
Hueffer has many faults no doubt, but first
he's poor, secondly he's notoriously unhappy
and in a most miserable position, thirdly
he's a better writer than any of your little
crowd and fourthly, instead of pleading his
age and his fat and taking refuge from ser-
vice in a greasy obesity as your brother has
done, he is serving his country. His'book is
a great book and just lies about
it--I guess he's a dirty-minded priest or

some such unclean thing-~when he says it is a
story of a stallion and so forth. The whole
outbreak is so envious, so base, so cat-in-the
gutter-spitting-at-the-passerby, that I will
never let the New Witness into the house again.

Regretfully yours,
H. G. Wells"7

7Douglas Goldring, Trained for Genius: The Life and Writings

of Ford Madox Ford (New Yorsz.P. Dutton, 1949)
pp. 180-181 0

117

Following the war, Ford found a new mistress and
succeeded in making a powerful enemy of Violet Hunt. The

four novels composing the Tietjens' saga received very
few reviews in England as a result.

Furthermore, Ford succeeded in making many enemies
by his egocentricity and inability to tell the truth
about himself. When he published his biography of Conrad,
he revealed something which most peOple had forgotten,
he had at one time collaborated with Conrad. Unfortunately,
many critics found the idea of Ford collaborating with
the great Conrad unsettling and promptly branded Ford's
biography as braggadocio. Credence was lent to this
Opinion by Mrs. Conrad who had never liked Ford and who
promptly wrote a biography of her husband which played
down Ford's association with Conrad. The popular opinion
concerning Ford eventually came to be summed up in
H. L. Mencken's famous attack:

"This Ford, or Hueffer, has been a promising
young man in England for thirty years. He

got launched early through the fact that his
grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was much talked
of in the 'nineties; he has made gallant efforts,
since then, to realise the high hOpes of his
sponsors and rooters, of which last group he
has always been an ardent member himself . . .
another time he took to writing history and
biography. Yet another time he consecrated
himself to novels. Lately, apparently
deSpairing of making a go of it in London,

he moved to Paris and started a tendenz
magazine called the transatlantic review . . .
Half German and half English, he is a sort

of walking civil war--too much engrossed by

118

the bombs going off in his own ego to make

much of an impression upon the rest of the

human race. The high, purple spot of his

life came when he collaborated with Conrad,

and upon the fact, I daresay, his footnote

in the Literature books will depend."8

Anger at Ford's pretensions has now, with the passage
of years, subsided into indifference. Perhaps it is
unfortunate that appreciation and knowledge of his work
has suffered the same fate, for if what Ford said in
his novels lacks validity today, the way in which he
said it certainly deserves the conscientious study of
those interested in good writing. Ford was a craftsman,
and he brought the craftsman's feeling for competent and
artistic work to his writing. And what he did say in his
five great novels was said beautifully. Granville Hicks
probably stated the position of Ford and Ford's works
most succinctly when he stated:

"Ford's work not only shows that formal

excellence may be combined with vitality

and vigor; it reminds us that the sole

justification of formal excellence is

its effect in enhancing the vitality of
the work in question."

81bid., pp. 242-43.

 

9Granville Hicks, "Ford Madox Ford," p. 455.

NOTE ON SOURCES

I have tried wherever possible to draw from Ford's
own works. The only biography of Ford is Trained for
Genius: The Life and Writings of Ford Madox Ford by
Douglas Goldring. As a young man, Goldring was Ford's
assistant on the English Review, and,since he knew Ford
most of his life, his biography may be taken as fairly
authoritative. However, the reader should note that
Ezra Pound in a personal interview said: "You mustn't
believe Goldring in his accounts of the war years. He
was what we called a 'fly boy.' He fled to Ireland to
avoid conscription, and he is constantly trying to keep
this from coming out."

Violet Hunt's I Have This To Say covers the 1908-
1915 period of Ford's life. It is, as one would expect,
prejudiced and not altogether accurate.

A complete bibliography of all of Ford's works
published in England and the’United States can be found

in Trained for Genius, pp. 278-84.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blackman, R. P., "The King Over the Water: Notes on the
Novels of F. M. Hueffer." Princeton Library
Chronicle, IX, pp. 123-27.

 

Conrad, Joseph and Hueffer, Ford Madox, The Inheritors:
An Extravagant Story (New York:Doubleday, Page & Co.,

 

 

 

1914).
----- , The Nature of a Crime (LondonzDuckworth, 1924).
----- , Romance (New York:Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923).

Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovagy, introduction by Charles
I. Weir, Jr. (New York:Rinehart & Co., 1948).

(Ford) Hueffer, Ford Madox, The Critical Attitude (London:
Duckworth, 1911).

..... ,_Ihe English Novel (PhiladelphiazLippencott, 1929).

-----, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (New York:
Albert & Charles Boni, 1927).

-----, Henry James (London:Secker, 1915).

----- , Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (Boston:

----- , Memories and Impressions: A Study in Atmosphere
(New Yorszarper and Brothers, 1911).

..... , Parade's End (New Yorszlfred A. KnOpf, 1950).

----- , Portraits From Life (New Yorszoughton Mifflin & Co.,
1957 .

----- , The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: A Critical Monograph
(LondonzDuckworth & Co., 1906).

-----, Return To Yesterday (New YorkzLiveright, 1952).

Gaunt, William, The Aesthetic Adventure (New York:Barcourt,
Brace and Co., 1945).

----- , The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (New Yorszarcourt,
Brace and Co., 1942).

Goldring, Douglas, South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet
Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and The English Review Circle
‘TLondonzConstable & Co., Ltd., 1943).

121

Goldring, Douglas, Trained for Genius: The Life and Writings
of Ford Madox Ford (New Yorsz. P. Dutton, 1949).

 

Gorman, Herbert, "Ford Madox Ford: The Personal Side,"
Princeton University Library Chronicle, IX, pp. 119-22.

de Gourmont, Remy, Remy de Gourmont: Selections, chosen
and translated by Richard Aldington (London:Chatto
and Windus, 1932).

Greene, Graham, The Lost Childhood and Other Essays
(New York:Viking, 1952).

 

Hunt, Violet, I Have This To Say: The Story of My Flurried
Years (New York:Boni & Liveright, 192?).

Naumberg, Edward Jr., "A Catalogue of a Ford Madox Ford
Collection," Princeton University Library Chronicle,
IX , pp. 134-65 0

New Directions: Number Seven (Norfolk, ConnecticutzNew
Directions, 1942).

Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
(London:Macmillan and Co., 1935).

Pound, Ezra, Polite Essays (London:Faber and Faber Ltd.,
1937).

Read, Herbert, English Prose Style (Boston:Beacon Press,
1952).

Schorer, Mark, "The Good Novelist in The Good Soldier,"
Princeton University Library Chronicle, IX, pp. 128-33.

Spiller, Robert E., The Cycle of American Literature
(New York:Mentor Books, 1957).

Tindall, William York, Forces in Modern British Literature:
1885-1956 (New York:Vintage Books, 1956).

 

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