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From The Times

September 24, 2007

Novel views of Madox Ford

Richard Owen

A three-day conference re-assessing the novelist, poet and critic Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was held in Genoa this month, with the writers A. S. Byatt and Colm Tóibín hailing a resurgence of interest in the author of The Good Soldier and Parade’s End as proof of his formative influence on the modern English novel.

Although Ford — son of the Times music critic Francis (or Franz) Hueffer and grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown — lived in France, Germany and the US, he also spent time in Italy, visiting Ezra Pound at Rapallo, near Genoa. As Gene Moore, of the University of Amsterdam, pointed out, Ford collaborated with Joseph Conrad on several of his novels, including his last, Suspense, set in Genoa on the eve of Napoleon’s return from exile on Elba.

Massimo Bacigalupo, Professor of American Literature at Genoa University, said he had unearthed a conversation between Pound and Ford recorded by Olga Rudge, Pound’s long-term mistress, in a Rapallo newspaper in August 1932. In it Ford, asked by the American poet what qualities were most important for a prose writer, replied (after an initial “Oh Hell!” at the question): “An awareness of the roots of words, of the meanings of words.”

A. S. Byatt — who, together with Julian Barnes, Ruth Rendell and John Sutherland is a member of the Ford Madox Ford Society run by Max Saunders, of King’s College London, and Sara Haslam of the Open University — said Ford had himself shown an acute awareness of the impact of “colour words” in his historical trilogy The Fifth Queen, about Henry VIII and Catherine Howard, using the primary colours of folk tales to convey meaning (red and gold for power, green — as worn by Catherine — for hope, black — as worn by Henry and Cranmer — for death).

Tóibín, whose novel about Henry James, The Master, was published to acclaim in 2004, noted that The Good Soldier (1915), a tale of adultery revolving around two couples, Edward and Leonora Ashburnham and their American friends John and Florence Dowell, draws on a fascination with double lives that informed the “spirit of the age”.

Ford presents the story through the eyes of John Dowell, who recounts Florence’s affair with Edward, the “good soldier”, and their subsequent suicides.

Many scandals of the time, Tóibín suggested, derived from the tension between the thrill of a secret life and “the almost desperate desire to be found out”. The “double life” was also the theme of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.

Angela Thirlwell, who recently published a study of the marriage of Ford’s aunt Lucy Madox Brown to William Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and is currently writing a biography of Ford Madox Brown, argued that “if Ford Madox Brown was a painter who thought like a novelist, his grandson was a writer who thought like an artist”. Ford Madox Ford had been “an Impressionist writer, experimenting with modernist narrative techniques even before James Joyce or Virginia Woolf”.

Ford changed his surname from the German Hueffer (his father came from a Catholic Westphalian family) after the First World War, when he served in the Welch Regiment as a transport officer and suffered shell shock during the battle of the Somme. He retained the middle name “Madox” in honour of his grandfather, whose biography he wrote.

He founded the English Review in 1908, in which he published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats, before moving in 1922 to Paris to found the Transatlantic Review. In Paris he published Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce, e. e. cummings and Jean Rhys, one of many women with whom he had a relationship, including Violet Hunt, Stella Bowen and his last companion, Janice Biala. He died at Deauville in France at the age of 66.