1939 He produced nearly 80 works of poetry, criticism, literary and cultural history, biography, travel and mould-breaking novels. He founded The English Review and The Transatlantic Review. He befriended and supported everyone from Henry James and Joseph Conrad, through Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, to William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon and Robert Lowell. Yet though his novels have seldom been out of print, he’s a stranger to university English courses, not to mention A-level syllabuses.
His name? It evolved, during the course of his long and eventful life, from Ford Hermann Hueffer and H. Ford Hueffer through Ford Madox Hueffer, finally settling (at the outbreak of the First World War, when the Saxe-Coburg and Gothas became the Windsors) on Ford Madox Ford. His life? A kaleidoscope of marriages and other alliances, two bouts of bruising service in the Great War, residence in London, Paris, Provence and Sussex – even a spell in New York – and writing, writing, writing. According to Max Saunders in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he used to get up early and write ‘a thousand words or two’.
Pound made him the subject of a famous essay in Poetry, ‘The Prose Tradition in Verse’ (1914), because he thought that Hueffer’s (as he then was) poetry was grounded on ‘an instinct for prose’, or an ear for everyday language. He gives for example the start of Hueffer’s poem, ‘Finchley Road’:
As we come up Baker Street
Where tubes and trains and ’buses meet
There’s a touch of fog and a touch of sleet;
As we go on up Hampstead way
Toward the closing of the day …
Today Ford is better known for his novels, especially The Good Soldier (1916), the one that opens with the most arresting line since ‘Call me Ishmael’ – ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’. Thus John Dowell introducing the novel, but it soon becomes clear that he didn’t hear the story – he was part of it, as one half of one of the two seemingly perfect couples whose lives are laid waste during the course of the action.
Dowell is not just both narrator and participant; he is unreliable in other ways too, jumping around the story (as Julian Barnes has put it) ‘backwards, forwards, sideways, switching times and tenses’ and even coming up with ‘an “impossible tense”, beginning a sentence like this: “Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together …” – as if such a coming-upon were still possible.’1 These were radical departures for 1914, surpassing even Henry James in slippery narration and predating Joyce by six years.
1 Julian Barnes, ‘The Saddest Story’, Guardian, 7 June 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/07/fiction.julianbarnes