FORD MADOX FORD, as Max Saunders rightly notes, wrote some of the best English prose of the 20th century, mastering and metamorphosing most of its major forms: the novel, the memoir, literary criticism, travel writing, even historical and cultural discourse. He was also an innovative and influential poet as well as one of the century's greatest literary editors. In Edwardian London, he got the best writers to contribute to his English Review, in which he published D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound ("the kindest hearted man who ever cut a throat") for the first time in London, next to James, Bennett, Wells, and Hardy.
He was, moreover, associated with the avant garde groups of Vorticists and Imagists. After the Great War, when he had moved to Paris, he founded the transatlantic review, bringing together the work of Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, and Ernest Hemingway. He himself published seventy nine books. Though he never wrote a lifeless sentence, much of his work is uneven and he is only occasionally great, for instance in his two masterpieces, both landmarks of 20th century English fiction: The Good Soldier (1915) and the series of four novels now known collectively as Parade's End (1924-28). Need drove him to write pot boilers. "If I had written less," he notes in Return to Yesterday, "I should no doubt have written better." Overall, though, his artistic merits are indisputable.
Yet Ford suffered scandalous neglect until the 1960s, when American scholars in particular began to draw attention to his work. There are personal reasons for the critical disregard. He infuriated and exasperated as many of those who knew him as he inspired with fierce admiration and loyalty. He was incapable of telling a story without improving it. His freedom with fact made enemies of friends he wrote about and earned him a reputation as a liar. But his outrageousness had more to do with humorous role playing that vanity or vice. The lies he told and put to paper are white lies, not meant to harm or make Ford appear in an advantageous light. He simply wanted to tell ever new, ever better stories.
Arthur Miziner wrote the first biography, The Saddest Story (1972), a psychologising study. Alan Judd published a novelistic biography in 1990 that told a gripping story, but his dependence upon secondary sources led Judd to reduplicate Mizener's errors. Since the new material has been discovered, for instance the manuscripts owned by Ford's daughters. Additionally, Saunders was granted access by Ford's last partner, Janice Biala, to letters from Ford, unavailable to earlier scholars, and he has discovered over thirty previously unrecorded periodical pieces. He has put all this material and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Ford to excellent use. This is an informed, painstaking and meticulous Life that may well turn out to be definitive.
Volume I covers Ford's life from his birth in 1873 to 1916 when, after the publication of The Good Soldier, he enlisted in the British Army and marched to the Somme. Volume II opens with Second Lieutenant F.M.F. arriving in France in the summer of 1916 and expecting soon to be killed. His expectations proved false: he survived the terrible slaughter in Flanders, albeit gassed, shell shocked, a psychological wreck, and until his death in 1939 lived a migratory life mostly in France and the US.
He was born Ford Hermann Hueffer (he later changed his name by deed poll first to Ford Madox Hueffer and then, in 1919, to Ford Madox Ford). His father, Franz Huffer, a member of a large, prosperous Catholic family based in Munster, anglicised his name to Francis Hueffer when he came to live in England. He worked as a music critic and died when "Fordie" was only fifteen. His last words to his son were: "Fordie, whatever you do, never write a book." A precocious adolescent, Ford ignored his father's advice, and in 1891 published his first book, The Brown Owl, a fairy tale written to amuse his sister. He was just seventeen. From that point on, an almost unceasing stream of publications flowed from his pen. Saunders ferries the reader down this stream with masterful dexterity, introducing the books and competently commenting upon them. In between, he tells Ford's story in such vivid terms that the man comes alive.
The problem that Saunders, like every biographer, had to solve was what to put in and what to leave out. He is for the most part sure footed. Only rarely, for instance in the chapter dealing with the myriad troubles Ford and Elsie Martindale had to overcome in order to get married, does Saunders put one in mind of Tristram Shandy. He likewise charts at great length the deterioration of Ford's marriage to Elsie, who became an embittered shrew and judging by her photograph looked the part.
For Ford, a novel is the rendering of an affair. He rendered quite a few. He was an indefatigable womaniser, or maybe he simply fell in love many times.
Saunders is very perceptive in his consideration of the collaborative efforts of Ford and Joseph Conrad and the strangely ambivalent relationship between these two exceptional writers among the many highlights of the two volumes are a sagacious sixty page consideration The Good Soldier, according to John Rodker "the finest French novel in the English language", and a superb 80 odd page analysis of Parade's End; here Saunders displays first rate scholarship. There is also a pertinent explication of Fordian "Impressionism", the narrative technique that concentrates on the act of perception, rendering the manner in which facts make an impression on the mind instead of rendering the facts themselves. What Saunders has perhaps failed to make clear enough is Ford's indebtedness to Conrad and Henry James (above all, to James's notion of the "central intelligence").
The study is justly subtitled "A Dual Life", not only because it comprises two volumes but, more importantly, because Ford's person, life and writings are dominated by diverse forms of duality. For instance, the last novels, such as The Rash Act and its sequel Henry for Hugh, show a fascination with the double or doppelganger, and are Ford's homage to the detective story. These novels explore the sense of the precariousness of identity. At the same time, they can be read as allegories of the artist's metempsychoses and fables of art. Ford believed that a writer's life is "a dual affair", that the life enshrined in the book is and is not the same as the life lived by the man.
Saunders has captured both of Ford's lives admirably. Apart from a few mangled German words and phrases, there is one other slight mistake that I can detect: the name of the Reading based biscuit manufacturers is not "Huntled and Palmer", but Huntley and Palmers. It is a very pardonable mistake, to be sure, for the fastidious. Joseph Conrad also made it in Heart of Darkness.