It is cause for celebration that Ford Madox Ford's stature as a novelist is no longer in dispute - The Good Soldier is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive fictional achievements of the century, while the four-book Pa- rade's End has gained steadily in critical esteem. Both works are now handsomely reprinted by Carcanet in their ongoing Millennium Ford edition.
Ford, of course, was much more than a novelist. However, in an age and literary culture suspicious of diversity, it was the sheer range of his interests and talents - allied to the almost buffoonish image he allowed of himself and the notoriously chaotic nature of his personal life - that precluded him from being taken seriously, and in the decades after his death his literary reputation sank into obscurity.
How could someone steeped in outmoded, indeed faintly ridiculous, Pre-Raphaelite values be reckoned not just a novelist of startling modernity but also a poet, critic and editor of real substance and importance? Well, Ford could, and not through any self-pleading (though he wasn't averse to that), but by the sheer quality of his achievement.
In his time overseeing both the English Review and the Transatlan- tic Review he proved himself to be the most discerning and influential editor of the age, discovering and/or encouraging such writers as Hardy, Pound, Eliot, cummings, Conrad, Lawrence, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein - not a bad roll-call by anyone's standards.
And his recognition of new talent was both unerring and exceedingly generous. On receiving a story called Odour Of Chrysanthemums from the then unknown Lawrence, he notes the accuracy of the title ("the majority of people do not even know that chrysanthemums have an odour") and sees from the description of a locomotive in the opening paragraph that "this fellow with the power of observation is going to write of whatever he writes about from the inside".
Mind you, when recollecting this years later, he can't resist the flamboyant drama of hindsight as he describes how he read no further than the first paragraph: "I laid it in the basket for accepted manuscripts. My secretary looked up and said: `You've got another genius?' I answered: `It's a big one this time,' and went upstairs to dress."
You will find this essay in Memories And Impressions, an excellent selection of Ford's non-fiction writings brought out by Penguin Modern Classics some years ago. The volume's serendipity is one of its main charms - a serendipity missing from The English Novel, which was written in the summer of 1927 while Ford was journeying from New York to Marseilles. Still (and making allowances for Ford's notorious disregard of factual accuracy), you'll find much to arrest the attention here, as well as some real insights - such as his description of Madame Bovary as "the first great novel that aimed at aloofness".
Ford's prose is always a delight. The poems are more problematic, though Max Saunders makes a persuasive case for them in his introduction to this Carcanet selection. Their strength - if for some their weakness - comes from Ford's conversational tone, the tone of a man seated across the fireplace from the reader (as the narrator of The Good Soldier saw himself), confiding secrets in chattily uncluttered cadences and occasionally getting a bit over-excited by the rapturous implications of it all.
It's a tone that's easy to resist if you're not in the mood, though mesmerising if you are:
It's an odd thing how one changes! . . .
Walking along the upper ranges
Of this land of plains
In this month of rains,
On a drying road where the poplars march along,
Suddenly,
With a rush of wings flew down a company,
A multitude, throng upon throng,
Of starlings,
Successive orchestras of wind- blown song,
Whirled, like a babble of surf,
On to the roadside turf
This is the opening section of The Starling, a 96-line reverie that evokes an enchanted and vanished world and that exhilaratingly mingles feelings of rhapsody and regret. I first came across it as a teenager in a selection of early 20th century poetry and it has lodged itself in my memory ever since.
So have many others of his poems, especially On Heaven (hailed by Pound as "the best poem yet written in the 20th-century fashion") and the little lyric When The World Was In Building (his own favourite), which was written while he was on active service during the Great War and which runs:
Thank goodness, the moving is over;
They've swept up the straw in the passage
And life will begin . . .
This little, silly, tiled, white, tiny
Cottage by the bridge . . .
When we've had tea I will punt you
To Paradise for the sugar and onions.
We'll drift home in the twilight;
The trout will be rising . . .
Some readers may resist the plangent romanticism of this, but, as Max Saunders observes, "if his emotions occasionally make us wince, it is because they are naked, not draped in cliche". He also notes that Ford "had too much facility to need to labour over verse". It's a facility that led first to critical distrust and then to scornful dismissal. But a potency remains that can't be dismissed, and reassessment is overdue. This fine Carcanet edition should help in the rehabilitation of a real poetic voice.
John Boland is a poet and journalist