Ford Madox Ford


Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature.
Ford is now remembered for his novels The Good Soldier, the Parade's End tetralogy and The Fifth Queen trilogy. The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer′s "100 Greatest Novels of All Time", and The Guardian′s "1000 novels everyone must read".

Early life

Ford was born in Wimbledon in London, to Catherine Madox Brown and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer and his sister was Juliet Catherine Emma Hueffer, the wife of David Soskice and mother of Frank Soskice. Ford's father, who became music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. His paternal grandfather :de:Johann Hermann Hüffer|Johann Hermann Hüffer was first to publish Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. He was named after his maternal grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he would eventually write. His mother's older half-sister was Lucy Madox Brown, the wife of William Michael Rossetti and mother of Olivia Rossetti Agresti.
In 1889, after the death of his father, Ford and Oliver went to live with their grandfather in London. Ford graduated from the University College School in London, but never attended university.

Personal life

In 1894, Ford eloped with his school girlfriend Elsie Martindale. The couple were married in Gloucester and moved to Bonnington. In 1901, they moved to Winchelsea. They had two daughters, Christina and Katharine. Ford's neighbours in Winchelsea included the authors Henry James and H.G. Wells.
In 1904, Ford suffered an agoraphobic breakdown due to financial and marital problems. He went to Germany to spend time with family there and undergo cure treatments.
In 1909, Ford left his wife and set up home with English writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he published the literary magazine The English Review. Ford's wife refused to divorce him and he attempted to become a German citizen in order to obtain a divorce in Germany. This was unsuccessful. A reference in an illustrated paper to Violet Hunt as "Mrs Ford Madox Hueffer" gave rise to a successful libel action being brought by Mrs Ford in 1913. Ford's relationship with Hunt did not survive the First World War.
Ford used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer, but he changed it to Ford Madox Ford after World War I in 1919 because "Hueffer" sounded too Germanic.
Between 1918 and 1927, he lived with Stella Bowen, an Australian artist 20 years his junior. In 1920, Ford and Bowen had a daughter, Julia Madox Ford.
In the summer of 1927, The New York Times reported that Ford had converted a mill building in Avignon, France into a home and workshop that he called "Le Vieux Moulin". The article implied that Ford was reunited with his wife at this point.
In the early 1930s Ford established a relationship with Janice Biala, a Polish-born artist from New York, who illustrated several of Ford's later books. This relationship lasted until the late 1930s.
Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan. He was taken ill in Honfleur, France in June 1939 and died shortly afterwards in Deauville at the age of 65.

Literary life

One of Ford's most famous works is the novel The Good Soldier. Set just before World War I, The Good Soldier chronicles the tragic expatriate lives of two "perfect couples", one British and one American, using intricate flashbacks. In the "Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford” that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier “the finest French novel in the English language!” Ford pronounced himself a "Tory mad about historic continuity" and believed the novelist's function was to serve as the historian of his own time. However, he was dismissive of the Conservative Party, referring to it as "the Stupid Party."
Ford was involved in British war propaganda after the beginning of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, along with Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman; When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture, with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations.
After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted at 41 years of age into the Welch Regiment of the British Army on 30 July 1915. He was sent to France. Ford's combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End, set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I.
Ford wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels, The Inheritors, Romance and The Nature of a Crime. During the three to five years after this direct collaboration, Ford's best known achievement was The Fifth Queen trilogy, historical novels based on the life of Catherine Howard, which Conrad termed, at the time, "the swan song of historical romance."
Ford's poem Antwerp was praised by T.S. Eliot as "the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war".
Ford's novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes is, in a sense, the reverse of Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Ford took the side of the left Republican faction, declaring: "I am unhesitatingly for the existing Spanish Government and against Franco’s attempt—on every ground of feeling and reason...Mr Franco wishes to establish a government resting on the arms of Moors, Germans, Italians. Its success must be contrary to world conscience." His opinion of Mussolini and Hitler was likewise negative, and he offered to sign a manifesto against Nazism.

Promotion of literature

In 1908, Ford founded The English Review. Ford published works by Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, May Sinclair, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats; and debuted works of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets in London in the teens particularly valued Ford's poetry as exemplifying treatment of modern subjects in contemporary diction. In 1924, he founded The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, Ford befriended James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish. Basil Bunting worked as Ford's assistant on the magazine.
As a critic, Ford is known for remarking "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." George Seldes, in his book Witness to a Century, describes Ford recalling his writing collaboration with Joseph Conrad, and the lack of acknowledgment by publishers of his status as co-author. Seldes recounts Ford's disappointment with Hemingway: "'and he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.' Tears now came to Ford's eyes." Ford says, "I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway." Seldes observes, "At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry."
Hemingway devoted a chapter of his Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast to an encounter with Ford at a café in Paris during the early 1920s. He describes Ford "as upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead."
During a later sojourn in the United States, Ford was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell. Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. In 1929, he published The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, a brisk and accessible overview of the history of English novels. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended acrimoniously,which Rhys fictionalised in her novel Quartet.

Reception

Ford is best remembered for his novels The Good Soldier, the Parade's End tetralogy and The Fifth Queen trilogy. The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer′s "100 Greatest Novels of All Time", and The Guardian′s "1000 novels everyone must read".
Anthony Burgess described Ford as the "greatest British novelist" of the 20th century.

Selected works