Homage to Ford Madox Ford
THAT Ford was one of the best and most im- portant novelists of this century, and the most discerning and generous editor of all time, and that he has received only an infinitesimal part of his due, are now accepted facts. Why did so many of those who knew him react against him with such spite and fury? I remember seeing a vitriolic postcard from Conal O'Riordan (1874- 19481 an Irish writer who had known Ford, which was provoked by nothing more than a sentence in a letter expressing appreciation of Ford: `talentless,"nothing but a liar,' why give him a moment's attention?'—it would have been a nasty enough postcard about a wicked uncle, let alone Ford.
A year or two ago we had the first serious works on Ford, a study of his fiction and D'avid Dow Harvey's invaluable bibliography; and last summer Mr. Frank MacShane's long-awaited and excellent critical biography was published. Now Professor Ludwig has assembled this collection of over 250 letters written by Ford between 1894 and his death in 1939, most of them never pub- lished before.
Although this must represent only a small fraction of Ford's total output of letters, Professor Ludwig has managed to provide a comprehensive picture of the man—he has done so by prodigious industry in the matter of actual collection (the problems involved were unusually difficult) and by skilful, acutely intelligent docu- mentation. One of the first questions the reader will ask is whether these letters give any clue as to why Ford was denigrated or at best ignored by the writers and critics of his own country. Was there anything seriously irritating about him? Did he, despite his admitted edi- torial flair and generosity, treat people badly?
These letters reinforce the impression given by Mr. MacShane's biography—that Ford, despite small and obvious and rather silly faults, was an emotionally scrupulous and lovable man, who treated people better than they treated him. Mr. MacShane has suggested two reasons for his neglect: he was forced by need to write too much, so that his finest works may seem to be lost in a pile of pot-boilers; and he has never been given a satisfactory niche in any one of the three literary generations to which he belonged. But neither reason accounts for the personal hostility that Ford aroused. Perhaps the cruelly ironic final line of Robert Lowell's tribute comes nearest to explaining this: 'you were a kind man and you died in want.'
As these letters sometimes show, Ford possessed a peculiar kind of vulnerability, a capacity for attracting spite and cruelty towards himself : he projects this into the narrator of The Good Soldier, into Tietjens, and into Notter- dam, the central figure of a later, much more neglected novel, When the Wicked Man (1931). Although forced to write pot-boilers, he always tried to maintain his standards—and he never allowed any considerations to affect his purely literary decisions. He had little malice, but per- haps his more straightforward dedication to literary purposes irritated his contemporaries more than malice would have done.
Many correspondents are represented in this book, including Stein, Wells, Joyce, Williams, Galsworthy, Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate and Herbert Read. We get a uniquely full picture of the financially harassed, hugely gifted, wholly professional man-of-letters actually at work. This is poignant as well as instructive. More con- sistently than any writer of comparable stature, Ford was as interested in the work of others as in his own. He was vain (although it does not show up much in these letters), but not egotistic with it. The letters are crammed with opinions (usually good) of other writers. To Ezra Pound he was consistently tolerant (he frequently begged him to write properly—'Your 1892 0. Henry stuff is wearisomely incomprehensible') and at one point, when a very sick man, vainly tried to get Pound to take his place as teacher of English literature at Mount Olivet College in Michigan.
However, one of the most revealing letters of all, which would certainly never have seen the light of day had not Ford himself pre- served a copy of it, is to Malcolm MacDonald (then at the Colonial Office). It was written at the end of February 1939, when his health was very poor indeed. Neither Eliot nor Pound would have liked it at all. It is a most dignified letter, reminding MacDonald of the British failure to found a National Jewish Republic in Palestine, and of the moral consequences of her defection at Munich. Copies were sent to The Times and the Manchester Guardian, but neither paper published it: wholly free of political alignment, just in its charges, it is the kind of letter newspapers never like to print. It demon- strates the humanity that underlay Ford's
genius as surely as any of the letters in this im- portant book.
A Lume Spento (`With Tapers Quenched') wa- Pound's first book of poems, privately printed for him in 1908 in Venice. He reprinted only thirteen of its forty-odd poems in Personae. Printed with it here arc ten poems selected by Pound's daughter, Princess de Rachewiltz, from his second book, A Quinzaine for this Yule (1909). Uncritical admirers of Pound will prob- ably take little notice of his on (1964) fore-
word : . . stale creampuffs. . . . No lessons to be learned save the superficiality of non-percep- tion. . . . Ignorance that didn't know the mean- ing of "Wardour Street." ' This judgment is somewhat over-severe. Cer- tainly these .poems show lack of self-confidence expressing itself as a disturbing semi-whimsical nervousness; they display a Satie-like refusal to allow themselves to be taken seriously, and are marred by 'poeticisms' and (as Pound him- self implies) the kind of 'Wardour Street' that he could never escape from, even by his later manic assault on the structure of language itself. Even so, these poems are dedicated, in a heroic manner, to an idea of beauty. There is some- thing in them that stirs the heart.
Perhaps this is because they so clearly exemplify Pound's tragic failing—that he could only generalise, never particularise, about what affected him so deeply. I wonder if he now, who speaks of his own errors, would think of this as the chief one? For did it not lead him, in desperation, first into the crazy and boring in- comprehensibility of which Ford complained, and then into even worse evils? It was the way the author of these early poems had in-
tended to go. MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
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