Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (17 December 1873 â€" 26 June 1939), born Ford Hermann Hueffer (/ˈhÉ›fÉ™r/ HEF-É™r), was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature. He is now remembered best for his publications The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924â€"28) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906â€"08). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer's "100 Greatest Novels of All Time", and The Guardian's "1000 novels everyone must read".

Biography

Ford was born in Wimbledon to Catherine Madox Brown and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer. His father, who became music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. His paternal grandfather Johann Hermann Hüffer was first to publish the fellow Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a Catholic aristocrat. He used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer and in 1919 changed it to Ford Madox Ford (allegedly, in the aftermath of World War I because "Hueffer" sounded too German) in honour of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written. In 1894 he married his school girlfriend Elsie Martindale and together they had two daughters, Christina (born 1897) and Katharine (born 1900). Between 1918 and 1927 he lived with Stella Bowen, an Australian artist twenty years his junior. In 1920 they had a daughter, Julia Madox Ford. Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, and died in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.

Literary life

One of his most famous works is The Good Soldier (1915), a novel set just before World War I which chronicles the tragic lives of two "perfect couples" using intricate flashbacks. In the "Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford”, that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier “the finest French novel in the English language!” Ford pronounced himself a "Tory mad about historic continuity" and believed the novelist's function was to serve as the historian of his own time.

Ford was involved in British war propaganda after the beginning of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, with other writers and scholars who were popular during that time, such as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman, namely When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915).

After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted at 41 years of age into the Welch Regiment on 30 July 1915, and was sent to France, thus ending his cooperation with the War Propaganda Bureau. His combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End (1924â€"1928), set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I.

Ford also wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism, and collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924, although written much earlier). During the three to five years after this direct collaboration, Ford's best known achievement was The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906â€"1908), historical novels based on the life of Katharine Howard, which Conrad termed, at the time, "the swan song of historical romance." His poem Antwerp (1915) was praised by T.S. Eliot as "the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war".

Ford's novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, extensively revised in 1935) is, in a sense, the reverse of Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Promotion of literature

In 1908, he founded The English Review, in which he published works by Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, May Sinclair, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats, and gave debuts to Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. In 1924, he founded The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, he befriended James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford is the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). As a critic, he is known for remarking "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." George Seldes, in his book Witness to a Century, describes Ford's recollection of his writing collaboration with Joseph Conrad, and the lack of acknowledgment by publishers of his status as co-author. Seldes recounts Ford's disappointment with Hemingway: "'and he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.' Tears now came to Ford's eyes." Ford says, "I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway." Seldes observes, "At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry."

Hemingway devoted a chapter of his Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast to an encounter with Ford at a café in Paris during the early 1920s.

During a later sojourn in the United States, he was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student). Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. In 1929, he published The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, a brisk and accessible overview of the history of English novels. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended acrimoniously.

Selected works

• The Shifting of the Fire, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
• The Brown Owl, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
• The Queen Who Flew: A Fairy Tale, Bliss Sands & Foster, 1894.
• The Cinque Ports, Blackwood, 1900.
• The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Heinemann, 1901.
• Rossetti, Duckworth, [1902].
• Romance, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Smith Elder, 1903.
• The Benefactor, Langham, 1905.
• The Soul of London, Alston Rivers, 1905.
• The Heart of the Country, Duckworth, 1906.
• The Fifth Queen (Part One of The Fifth Queen trilogy), Alston Rivers, 1906.
• Privy Seal (Part Two of The Fifth Queen trilogy), Alston Rivers, 1907.
• An English Girl, Methuen, 1907.
• The Fifth Queen Crowned (Part Three of The Fifth Queen trilogy), Nash, 1908.
• Mr Apollo, Methuen, 1908.
• The Half Moon, Nash, 1909.
• A Call, Chatto, 1910.
• The Portrait, Methuen, 1910.
• The Critical Attitude, as Ford Madox Hueffer, Duckworth 1911.
• The Simple Life Limited, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1911.
• Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, Constable, 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
• The Panel, Constable, 1912.
• The New Humpty Dumpty, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1912.
• Henry James, Secker, 1913.
• Mr Fleight, Latimer, 1913.
• The Young Lovell, Chatto, 1913.
• Antwerp (eight-page poem), The Poetry Bookshop, 1915.
• Henry James, A Critical Study (1915).
• Between St Dennis and St George, Hodder, 1915.
• The Good Soldier, Lane, 1915.
• Zeppelin Nights, with Violet Hunt, Lane, 1915.
• The Marsden Case, Duckworth, 1923.
• Women and Men, Paris, 1923.
• Mr Bosphorous, Duckworth, 1923.
• The Nature of a Crime, with Joseph Conrad, Duckworth, 1924.
• Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance, Little, Brown and Company, 1924.
• Some Do Not . . ., Duckworth, 1924.
• No More Parades, Duckworth, 1925.
• A Man Could Stand Up --, Duckworth, 1926.
• New York is Not America, Duckworth, 1927.
• New York Essays, Rudge, 1927.
• New Poems, Rudge, 1927.
• Last Post, Duckworth, 1928.
• A Little Less Than Gods, Duckworth, [1928].
• No Enemy, Macaulay, 1929.
• The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (One Hour Series), Lippincott, 1929.
• The English Novel, Constable, 1930.
• Return to Yesterday, Liveright, 1932.
• When the Wicked Man, Cape, 1932.
• The Rash Act, Cape, 1933.
• It Was the Nightingale, Lippincott, 1933.
• Henry for Hugh, Lippincott, 1934.
• Provence, Unwin, 1935.
• Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (revised version), 1935
• Portraits from Life: Memories and Criticism of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, H.G.Wells, Stephen Crane, D.H.Lawrence, John Galsworthy, Ivan Turgenev, W.H. Hudson, Theodore Dreiser, A.C. Swinburne, Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, 1937
• Great Trade Route, OUP, 1937.
• Vive Le Roy, Unwin, 1937.
• The March of Literature, Dial, 1938.
• Selected Poems, Randall, 1971.
• Your Mirror to My Times, Holt, 1971.

References

Further reading

• Attridge, John, "Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology," in Modernism/modernity 15:2 ([3] April 2008), 297â€"315.
• Carpenter, Humphrey (1987). Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. Unwin Hyman. ISBN 0-04-440331-3.  Contains a sharp, critical biographical sketch of Ford.
• Hawkes, Rob, Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ISBN 978-0230301535
• Judd, Alan, Ford Madox Ford. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
• Saunders, Max, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-19-211789-0 and ISBN 0-19-212608-3
• Thirlwell, Angela, Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown. London, Chatto & Windus, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7011-7902-1

External links

• Ford Madox Ford Society
• A biography of Ford
• Literary Encyclopedia entry on Ford
• Works by Ford Madox Ford at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Ford Madox Ford at Internet Archive
• Works by Ford Madox Ford at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• The Good Soldier complete
• LitWeb.net: Ford Madox Ford Biography
• International Ford Madox Ford Studies
• The Ford Madox Ford Papers at Washington University in St. Louis
• Notable Names Database NNDB entry, listing family members, lovers, descendents (three daughters)