Ford Redivivus
.THESE two handsome volumes, which contain the first work by Ford Madox Ford to be re- printed in this country since the Penguin issue of 1948, deserve a cheer and a half rather than unqualified praise. Mr. Greene has admired Ford for many years, and one is grateful to him for persuading the Bodley Head to include Ford in their somewhat variegated pantheon, along with Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen Leacock and (in preparation) Jack London. But while it's good to have Ford available again, Mr. Greene's prin- ciple of selection is not as sensible as it might have been.
The first volume contains, rightly, The Good Soldier, together with extracts from Ford's volumes of autobiography and a few poems.
Ford, as a child, had known nearly all the. Pre- Raphaelites and the Abbe Liszt, who, despite a hurt hand, had played the first movement of the 'Moonlight Sonata' especially for little Fordie, 'so that you will be able to tell your children's children that you have heard Liszt play.' There is, one must admit, a suspicious neatness about this story; Ford's memory was unreliable on points of fact, since he felt happier with what he called 'impressions,' and his memoirs are notoriously unveracious. Neverthe- less, e ben trovato, and so are his other recollec- tions of Victorian giants. As, for example, the story told by his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, about William Morris roaring down- stairs at a servant, 'Mary, those six eggs were bad. I've eaten them, but don't let it occur again.' But the 'second volume is a disappointment. One would have expected it to include the Tietjens tetralogy, Parade's End, a comparable though very different achievement to The Good Soldier, and for all its faults the work by which Ford's reputation is likely to stand or fall. But Mr. Greene remarks in his introduction that those books `do not stand up to the erosion of time as satisfactorily as The Good Soldier' and that in any case a one-volume edition has already appeared in the United States. Perhaps; but what happened in America in 1950 isn't particularly relevant to England in 1962. It looks as if these books are being tailored exclusively for the American market, rather than the British, which is a bad thing. Instead, Mr. Greene de- votes the second volume to The Fifth Queen, Ford's historical trilogy about Henry VIII's Katherine Howard. This is a by no means negligible work, but one certainly couldn't claim that it has stood up to the 'erosion of time' as well as the Tietjens books, nor that it is likely to make a very effective introduction to Ford's work for those who are unfamiliar with it.
Having made my protest, I must, in fairness, go on to report that, despite a marked distaste for historical fiction, I found The Fifth Queen not at all bad. Though slow-moving, it's tech- nically almost flawless, and no doubt the result of much arduous discussion with Conrad about the Great Form; the dialogue, while not without the tushery which seems endemic in historical novels, is comparatively unstilted. But the struc- ture, though well-designed, is lightweight. The noble heroine; Queen Katherine, calmly striving to restore Catholicism in England, has some of the attributes of a female sixteenth-century Christopher Tietjens. Still, she isn't Tietjens, and The Fifth Queen isn't Parade's End. I hope that in the next volume Mr. Greene and the Bodley Head will do their duty.
BERNARD BERGONZI
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