27 AUGUST 1965, Page 18

Ford's Way

FORD is not only a giant among modern English nOielists, but also he must be one of the most monumentally neglected of all writers. A few useful but gossipy books have been written about his troubled life, and an American critical study was published a year or two ago; but, in view of his achievement, he has been all but ignored —overshadowed by ultimately less worthy writers whom, in fact, he anticipated. The reasons for this underestimation are not easy to discover. It is his character rather than his work which has been denigrated—as if the harmless and pathetic romancing of his later years were much more serious than the more fatal lapses of some of his contemporaries. No one has troubled to deny his unparalleled generosity to younger writers, or his genius as the editor of The English Review and, to a lesser extent, the post-war Transatlantic Review. Yet of all those who en- joyed his friendship or whom he introduced to literature, perhaps only Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams remained wholly loyal to him and to his own literary capacity—and Pound had troubles of his own.

The Good Soldier (1915), written when Ford was forty, is often described as the best French novel in English—originally a half-humorous remark made by John Rodker. This is a ibis- ieading view, for The Good Soldier is a study of an 'English gentleman' even more than it is of an evil American bitch. This subtle and ironic book was one of the first to explore thoroughly the rottenness, the spiritual ignorance, that lay behind the façade of modern 'civilised' life; and because it does not condemn or draw pseudo-religious or false political conclusions from what it exposes, it remains one of the best. The shock of genuine moral horror it produces has not been equalled by a novelist of this cen- tury, and, although it is technically a master- piece—an ironic exploitation of the way memory works—it is remarkable how few technical liberties Ford had to take to gain his pervasive effect. The tetralogy Parade's End, which brottht tro-id tehiporary fame, especidlly in America, further develops the theme of The Good Soldier,

and is Ford's completest answer (rather than solution) to the problem of how the conscientious and 'good' man (Tietjens) can function in society and retain his integrity.

Mr. Frank MacShane has been working on this critical biography for many years, and the result is a worthy one. In conjunction with the Letters—announced for publication by Prince- ton University Press in the autumn--it begins to represent something like justice for Ford. Mr. MacShane gives an unexpectedly full account of Ford's fascinating early years. His pages on The Good Soldier and Parade's End are ad- mirable, both as criticism and as clear writing. He has been unable to quote directly from unpublished letters and manuscripts, and his account of Ford's private life in his last years is somewhat sketchy---but this is in no sense his fault, and his paraphrasing is so skilful that the effect is not much felt. From his long familiarity with the subject he has been able to build up a rich composite portrait of what Ford was really like as a man; this book finally rehabilitates him, and effectively scotches the myth that he was a 'bounder,' which was the pitiable and spiteful sum total of what was held against him.

Mr. MacShane does justice, too, to Ford's ley; well-known novels, such as Wizen the Wicked Man (1931), to his incredibly suggestive and remarkable last published book, The March of Literature (1938), and to his slight but not negligible gifts as a poet. I have only one com- plaint to make about this salutary and well- written biography, and this is that it still tends to underrate Ford. It is not enough to say of The Good Soldier that it 'can stand on an equal footing with almost any novel written during the first quarter of this century': it stands on an equal footing with the best novels of any age—and so do the four novels that make up Parade's End. Nevertheless, Mr. MacShane's study introduces Ford responsibly and warmly to a new generation of readers; in doing this it performs, not a valuable or useful, but a vital service to literature.