I never have written a book that has not by someone or other been called autobiography … ¹

Ford Madox Ford

For any novelist, the first—indeed, the only resource that can be consistently and absolutely trusted—is his or her own first-hand experience of life. This holds true even when writing a book heavily dependent on research: a historical novel, for instance; or equally, about any other time or place or person that appears to bear no relation to the writer’s own background. This is why so much fictional writing is labeled as “autobiographical.” Every writer is affected by their own point of view and the texture of their own experience, whether consciously or not. Life, then, invariably finds its way into the transformations of fiction: but these transformations, these transmutations of the raw material, are where the art of fiction lies. What is perhaps less easily and frequently acknowledged, is that a writer’s life also has a tendency to seep into supposedly non-fictional, factual writing. No matter how high we raise the barricades—and many of the conventions of non-fiction writing can sometimes seem like flood-barriers or city walls—language tends to drift towards fictionality. Names, dates, and events stated as clearly as possible can be verified as unarguably true. Nearly everything else—even when written in the most objective of third-person narratives—is affected by the writer’s point of view.

The line between fiction and fact is a matter more of ratios and degrees than absolute cut-off points. Originally, a fact was “something done,” coming from a Latin verb meaning to make or do; while fiction was “a fashioning or feigning,” from a Latin verb meaning to shape, form, devise, or feign—originally, to knead out of clay. At some points these two definitions come close to each other: they touch. Factual writing steels itself against the taint of inaccuracy or fictionality, as though against a disease. The image of infection is, precisely, the right one. All it takes is a chink of hearsay or a slip of the pen for the edifice of literary fact to be called into question. But the importance of defending the line between fact and fiction, at the most critical points (say, in a court of law) should not prevent us from marking out the gradations found all along it.

With the term “autobiographical” there is a similar lack of distinctions; it could be applied to works found at almost any point along the line. In its widest sense, it crosses seamlessly from the literature of fact, to the literature of fiction—the boundary does not affect it. Novels are routinely called autobiographical; works of factual witness are often autobiographical; there is a form of autobiography in diaries and letters; even biographies are often autobiographical. The “I,” the writer’s point of view, is always there, even when suppressed or disguised; and everything comes from the writer’s self. Yet all these kinds of works reveal very different selves.

In the immense body of work produced by Ford Madox Ford—the name Hueffer adopted in June 1919, at the age of forty-five, after his demobilization from the army in January that year—we can find autobiographical writing of many kinds. But much rests on what we mean by this loose term autobiographical. The eighty or so books Ford published in his lifetime span an improbable variety of recognized genres, and invent some genres too. He wrote across so many forms, for so many publishers, that his versatility was even a difficulty, since he was constantly being judged on only one, partial, aspect of his talent. Misjudged throughout his life, as a man and as a writer, his changeability encouraged misconceptions. One of his greatest themes became how people are misunderstood. Yet how are we to understand Ford? From his first published book (of fairy tales) in 1891, to his final book (of criticism) in 1938, the year before he died, he wrote poetry, biography, criticism, journalism, reminiscence, propaganda, travel books, novels, and books which mix several of these elements. The novels themselves move between several very different genres.

In one sense, as Ford’s biographer Max Saunders suggests, just as Ford notes—with foxingly paradoxical logic—that “Conrad was Conrad because he was his books,”² it is all Ford’s books together which “make up his own autobiography.”³ True of all writers, as writers, this is especially valid for the two collaborators, whose names were self-fashioned constructs: almost, but not quite, pseudonyms. Ford believed in a writer’s “literary personality” as something apart from his corporeal existence. Just as “Joseph Conrad” was a rebirth, a new life on the page for the man who was born Korzeniowski, “Ford Madox Ford” was a post-war symbolic rebirth for the man, and for the writer, who had once been Hueffer. It was another chance.

Varied aspects of autobiography appear across Ford’s many books. Often, he revealed himself obliquely, writing in the first person in his journalism, for instance, or in travel books, where the focus is really on something else, and the “I” is just a sidelight. Then there is, of course, his fiction, where, as with many novelists, it is tempting to reach through all the adopted veils and masks to point up likenesses with the life. Of different types, and closenesses to life, this novelistic autobiography—what we tend to mean when we loosely use the term autobiographical—frequently reveals the unconscious self of a writer, much more than the biographical recounting of the facts of their life often does. If we were to imagine the self as having different layers which can be unwrapped, this form of novelistic autobiography can, sometimes surprisingly, take us close to a core, away from the surface; and this frequently occurs in Ford. (One image of the self, used by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, is a ball of string.⁴ Of course, the self doesn’t have to be imagined in ways that oppose surface and depth.)

Then, there is the subgenre of novels popular among his contemporaries, and also practiced by Ford—the roman à clef. Here the relationship between life and novels is explored, as in a game, and the thinness of the veil and the masks separating fictional and real characters is an essential part of the fun. The glimpses of real people are tantalizingly close to life. In his satires such as The Simple Life Limited (1911), under the pseudonym Daniel Chaucer, and The New Humpty-Dumpty (1912), Ford played with this novelistic subgenre, putting his many writer friends and enemies in between the covers, in disguise. Many, such as his antagonistic friend H. G. Wells, poked fun back, in similar novels like Boon and The Bulpington of Blup (1933). The masks give the writer freedom, with the defense that what was written was fiction always remaining applicable. As Violet Hunt wrote of Ford’s The New Humpty-Dumpty (which savaged Wells with its thinly-veiled character Herbert Pett): “When a literature-picture of a total personality is put together it is non-libellous in effect, being a mere blend—an action of A’s, a speech of D’s, a look of C, the hair or eyes of F. Surely such a preparation or composite of aliens cannot possibly be dubbed a description of Z.”⁵

Whatever genre he wrote, a key part of Ford’s literary personality was a celebration—rather than a wary defense—of the thin line between fact and fiction, between novels and life. He didn’t only take people from life and put them on the page. He often loved to pretend that fictional characters could step out of their boundaries on the page into reality. He often insisted that he was certain fictional characters in other people’s books, and did so by making such claims in his own books. Take one of the most celebrated (and disputed) examples: Ford’s repeated pride in his claim that Henry James modeled Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove (1902) on himself. Even as a (large) old man, Ford was very fond of quoting a passage on Densher, the “longish, leanish [alas! alas!], fairish young Englishman, not unamenable on certain sides to classification.”⁶ In his loving critical book-length study Henry James (1914)—which James told Archibald Marshall he “wouldn’t touch […] with a ten-foot pole”⁷—Ford indulged in an extended, extraordinary setpiece where he imagines meeting James’s fictional characters (of which he thinks there must be around one thousand) at a huge garden-party

in the very center of the London season […] one of the great garden-parties of the year. There is a band playing in the square […] But whilst we are waiting in the crowd of new arrivals for our names to be announced, we perceive Madame de Bellegarde talking to Milly Strether […] Quite on the other side of the garden Newman is talking to Princess Casamassima […] The author of Beltraffio is proving extremely boring to Miss Kate Croy, who can’t keep her eyes off Morton [sic] Densher […] what an immense party it is! […] an immense concourse of real people, whose histories we just dimly remember to have heard something about […] Real! Why they are just as exactly real as anybody we have ever met. The fictitious Prince von Vogelstein is just as actual a person to us as Prince von Metternich who was at the German Embassy only the other day, and Milly Strether is just as real as the poor dear little American cousin Hattina who faded away out of life twenty years or so ago.⁸

Ford ended this homage with the proud confession that he had taken a character, Valentin de Bellegarde, from James’s novel The American (1877) and put him into one of his own novels—unawares, since he seemed so real to him that he thought he had met him. As with much of Ford’s work, the humor in this is self-evident, but he’s also making serious, usually unmade points about how the boundaries of life and fiction interact and overlap. The passage is about how little we know the people we meet in real life; how the portrayals of characters in fiction affect our perception of even those closest to us; how we can somehow almost get to know those fictional characters better than anyone real, through the magic of art.

Look at this picture of James’s garden-party from another angle, and one begins to see what Ford was doing with the line between factual and fictional characters in his volumes of memoir and reminiscence: Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man (1911), Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences (1921), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894–1914 (1931), and It Was the Nightingale (1934). Collectively, these books were all close to being non-fictional autobiographies, and they all chronicled the doings of real people Ford knew during the course of his life. Yet in writing his life, Ford added a quotient of imagination to all these books. In doing so, as another biographer, Arthur Mizener, has observed, he “practically invented a form of fictional reminiscence.”⁹ Only the last of the books, It Was the Nightingale, was explicitly described by Ford as “autobiography,” while the others were “reminiscences”: the difference being the shift in focus from the portraits of others in the earlier series of books more onto himself. He also called several of them novels. What’s most unnerving, and unusual about all of these books is the uneasy mixture of fact and fiction that Ford creates: so much is real, that you can’t always tell what has been made up. To the unsuspecting reader, the aura of factuality is strong enough to deceive. But the books are full of inventions: seamlessly crossing the shadow-line from fact to fiction, without telling us where.

Ford viewed reminiscence primarily as a vehicle for portraying his contemporaries. And he chose to portray them over and over again, painting and repainting their figures in stories that repeat with slight variations. We all repeat stories about our friends and family over the years—many anecdotes often exaggerated over time, to draw out the maximum humor and effect. Ford turned this into an art, sensing that repetition is intrinsic to autobiography. Memories are not fixed: they change constantly. Memories are multiple. Each time we recall our memories of events, we tend to reinvent them: the memory is never quite the same every time. Memory and imagination often fuse, in such rewritings. Ford explored this phenomenon in his reminiscences relentlessly, embroidering as he went along, creating multiplications of the truth.

The basic facts of a life remain the same—the story only happens once—although there are infinite tellings. In life-writing, we often read elements of the same story, in different forms, from different points of view: first, say, in a letter or journal; then slightly remade in a novel; then told in an autobiography; then seen from one side in a memoir; then told in several biographies. Ford, the self-avowed exponent of literary Impressionism, provides many of the different angles himself. As portraiture, the effect this creates is an overlay, a multiple exposure, where each character is grasped simultaneously from different sides. Though always rooted in some truth, the reminiscences stray, adding or changing the details to get their effects. It’s an art of embellishment or improvement, not pure creation, which can nonetheless take us a long way from what might have really happened.

It’s also an art of caricature, as Ford knew. The reminiscences can be traced back to his journalism, beginning with his series of “Literary Portraits” of writers appearing anonymously in the Daily Mail in 1907, and then continued, this time signed by Ford, in the Tribune until 1908. (The series was taken up again for the Outlook in 1913 and continued until 1915.) Ford wrote to his agent James B. Pinker—who took Ford on partly through Conrad’s persuasions—in an undated letter about the very first portrait series, saying that “I want to make the Lit. Portraits I’m writing for the Mail, into a book with Max’s [Beerbohm’s] caricatures.”¹⁰ From the start, he wanted to make them deliberately over-the-top and exaggerated. Ford returned to literary portraiture throughout his life. Even decades later, in his series of articles for The American Mercury, from June 1935 to April 1937, Ford was still writing literary portraits of people he had known and loved, many of whom were, by that time, dead. It was a kind of compulsion.

The initial weekly “Literary Portraits” for the Mail in 1907 were often flamboyant, fusing reminiscence and imaginings with an account of each writer’s latest book. When the “Literary Portraits” moved to the Tribune, Ford changed the format slightly, offering more depth and critical comment. While Ford often used anecdotes, he always made sure that his observations resonated with each writer’s “literary personality,” as he saw it. In a “Literary Portrait” of 1907, “Authors’ Likenesses and a Caricaturist,” discussing Beerbohm’s caricatures and the artist Daniel Maclise’s visual portraits of writers, Ford wrote: “I am inclined to shrink from looking at portraits of literary men. For the writer is expressed by his books, and within the four-square of them his whole personality is contained.”¹¹ Yet Ford’s piece here was positive about Beerbohm’s caricature of Henry James in his A Book of Caricatures (1907)—which also included caricatures of Wells, Sargent, Chesterton, and others. And despite his avowal that a writer’s books expressed his or her entire literary personality, Ford also, very often, used elements of biography in his own sketches of others. His attitude to biography was profoundly double-edged.

When Ford began writing “Literary Portraits” in 1907, he was about to make what would become a significant step in his break with his first wife Elsie Hueffer, by taking a flat above a poulterer’s and fishmonger’s shop, at 84 Holland Park Avenue,¹² which would become the premises of the English Review. Ford was thirty-three years old, and had spent a large part of his twenties in the countryside, with Elsie, after marrying young and having two children with her: Christina in 1897, and Katharine in 1900. The couple had settled in Kent near the Romney Marsh in Bonnington, before buying Pent Farm, where they lived for two years before moving to Limpsfield in Surrey and letting the Pent to Conrad. From 1901 onwards, the Hueffers had mainly been based in a cottage, The Bungalow, in Winchelsea, near Rye.

Later in life, in Return to Yesterday, Ford made Winchelsea, Rye, and the Pent—the respective abodes of his younger self, James, and Conrad—sound like the center of the literary universe, but elsewhere he describes these rural years as fearfully isolating, in artistic terms. Ford had a premature birth as a writer, pushed on by the enthusiasm of his grandfather, who helped him get his first book of fairy tales published in 1891, and whose biography Ford wrote in an uncharacteristically staid, formal style, appearing as Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work (1896), when Ford was twenty-three. The years with Conrad had been an apprenticeship. Conrad depended on him, yet the fact that Ford was so many years his junior was constantly reflected in the role he was forced to play in the collaboration.

When Ford moved up to Holland Park Avenue in 1907, writing his weekly “Literary Portraits” alongside a plethora of other books around this time, he was beginning to assert his own creative identity much more forcefully. Once he began working on the English Review, throughout 1908 and 1909, he was also increasingly involved with other writers in London, although this sometimes led to spectacular fallings-out—with Conrad, over “Some Reminiscences,” and with Wells, partly over whether or not Tono-Bungay (1909) was to be described as autobiographical. In Return to Yesterday, Ford portrayed himself around this time as full of swagger. He has almost become someone else, from the lank, affectedly nonchalant youth who spent his twenties writing in Kent.

You are to think of me then as rather a dandy. I was going through that phase. It lasted perhaps eight years—until Armageddon made one dress otherwise. Every morning about eleven you would see me issue from the door of my apartment. I should be wearing a very long morning coat, a perfectly immaculate high hat, lavender trousers, a near-Gladstone collar and a black satin stock. As often as not, at one period, I should be followed by a Great Dane […] I carried a malacca cane with a gold knob.¹³

By 1910, however, the year Ford wrote his first volume of reminiscences Ancient Lights, it was getting hard to maintain such a swagger through town, mainly because of his relationship with Violet Hunt, who had recently finished an affair with H. G. Wells. In a “Literary Portrait” of Hunt in the Outlook, Ford recounted one of his early meetings with her. “I was walking up Bedford Street when our author suddenly jumped out at me from the door of No. 32, and exclaimed: ‘I say: Mr. H ….n, the publisher, says that you have made the fortune of So-and-So by writing a Literary Portrait of him. Why don’t you do one of me?’”¹⁴ Hunt herself, in her memoir The Flurried Years (1926), also describes meeting Ford at the English Review, sent there at Wells’s suggestion in October 1908.¹⁵ Throughout 1909 their affair became more of a reality, and in January 1910, it became a very public matter, as Ford’s attempt to divorce Elsie was reported in the newspapers and the court ordered Ford to return to his wife: “MR. HUEFFER TO GO BACK IN FOURTEEN DAYS.”¹⁶ Refusing, Ford got ten days in Brixton Gaol. While he was in prison, Hunt moved his things out of 84 Holland Park Avenue to her Victorian villa, South Lodge, nearby, where Ford would be based for the next few years.

During this tumultuous period, Ancient Lights began as a series of articles on the Pre-Raphaelites for Harper’s, with the first appearing in February 1910; it was also based on articles in the Fortnightly.¹⁷ In the summer of 1910, Ford went with Hunt to Germany, hoping to be naturalized as a German citizen and get a divorce there. In September, the idea for Ancient Lights as a book came closer to Ford when he learned of the death of the painter Holman Hunt, in a train near Neuheim. As Violet Hunt recalled in The Flurried Years, Ford dictated the end of Ancient Lights to her in Marburg that same September as she lay ill in bed.¹⁸ The naturalization scheme was to backfire, resulting in a marital situation close to bigamy—Elsie would not grant Ford a divorce, yet it appears that Ford and Hunt went through some kind of marriage ceremony in France or Germany, and even if they didn’t, behaved as if they had.¹⁹ In The Flurried Years, which revolves almost entirely around her relationship with Ford, Hunt deals with the “marriage” with a floating paragraph ending her “Part One”: “There is a lacuna here and I may not fill it lest it should be said that I am representing myself to be what I then considered I was in law—his wife. I have been taught since that it was not so—that I never did become his legal wife.”²⁰ In early 1911, after Ancient Lights was published in March, Ford was stranded in Giessen, no nearer to becoming German.²¹ Eventually, again, he was to return to London.

In all his reminiscences, Ford used techniques more common in fiction than in what he called the “Serious book”: passages of dialogue, scenes as well as narration, reported speech mimicked in the vernacular, the time-shift. Ancient Lights is less novelistic than the later reminiscences—Ford became increasingly inventive as he got older—but it carries a trademark dedicatory preface. Character, Ford knew, could hardly be conveyed with factual, archival truth—the husks of circumstantial data which fuel biography. He introduced his portraiture at the outset of Ancient Lights by satirizing the pedantry of fact-checkers with an exaggerated, mocking, absurdist precision:

[…] this book is a book of impressions. My impression is that there have been six thousand four hundred and seventy-two books written to give the facts about the Pre-Raphaelite movement. My impression is that I myself have written more than 17,000,000 wearisome and dull words as to the facts about the Pre-Raphaelite movement […] [But no one has] attempted to get the atmosphere of these twenty-five years. This book, in short, is full of inaccuracies as to facts, but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute […] I don’t really deal in facts, I have for facts a most profound contempt.²²

This dedication to Ancient Lights also, characteristically, takes the form of a letter—a device Ford would use frequently in later works, in a fusion of public and private modes of life-writing. The dedicatory letter of Ancient Lights is addressed to Ford’s two daughters with Elsie, “My Dear Kids,”²³ the elder of whom was now a teenager. In this open letter, Ford tells his children “the earliest thing that I can remember,” “and the odd thing is that, as I remember it, I seem to be looking at myself from outside.”²⁴ He recounts an unsettling anecdote about “looking into the breeding-box of some Barbary ring-doves that my grandmother kept in the window of the huge studio in Fitzroy Square”²⁵ in his grandfather Ford Madox Brown’s house:

The window itself appears to me to be as high as a house and I myself as small as a doorstep, so that I stand on tiptoe, and just manage to get my eyes and nose over the edge of the box whilst my long curls fall forward and tickle my nose. And then I perceive greyish and almost shapeless objects with, upon them, little speckles, like the very short spines of hedgehogs, and I stand with the first surprise of my life and with the first wonder of my life. I ask myself: can these be doves?—these unrecognizable, panting morsels of flesh. And then, very soon, my grandmother comes in and is angry. She tells me that if the mother dove is disturbed she will eat her young […] for many days afterwards I thought I had destroyed life and that I was exceedingly sinful.²⁶

Set within the context of Ford’s split from Elsie, framed as a letter to his daughters from that marriage, the anecdote conveys Ford’s sense of baffled guilt, transgression, and danger hovering over the realm of sexuality, as well as his sense of fear at female wrath. In the anecdote, he recounts how he seems to be looking at himself looking at the breeding doves, whose appearance surprises and shocks him. Motherhood and rage are twinned in the reminiscence. Because of his grandmother’s anger, Ford’s “first conscious conviction was one of great sin, of a deep criminality.”²⁷ His father, Francis Hueffer, Ford also tells us, always called him “‘the patient but extremely stupid donkey’. And so I went through life until only just the other day with the conviction of extreme sinfulness and of extreme stupidity.”²⁸ Ford wishes that his daughters might be spared the “moral tortures”²⁹ which all this instilled in him. He declares that he is writing these reminiscences because he realized that he was already “forgetting my own childhood”:³⁰ “I find that my impressions of the early and rather noteworthy persons amongst whom my childhood was passed—that these impressions are beginning to grow a little dim. So I have tried to rescue them before they go out of my mind altogether.”³¹

Ancient Lights is a self-portrait of Ford’s childhood, and a literary group portrait of the Pre-Raphaelites. It was entitled Memories and Impressions in America, echoing the subtitle of Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea—and Ford constantly plays with words to describe the kind of Impressionism it enacts. In Ancient Lights, Ford, as a literary Impressionist, aims to create impressions in the minds of his readers, not with dry facts but with daubs of gesture and anecdote, experimenting with the effects of words in a way that echoes how the Impressionist painters of the preceding decades in France experimented with the effects of paint. Ford also does verbal impressions of the speech of many of the people he portrays; and he notes how oppressively impressive these people were, and how “they impressed themselves upon me.”³² The memoir shows Ford, right from his earliest memories, as being not quite his own person, enacting a struggle with his artistic inheritance. Ancient Lights opens with a resonant image: a frontispiece of the funeral urn above the doorway of Madox Brown’s house in Fitzroy Square, resting precariously, as Ford writes, on a piece of stone “about the size and shape of a folio book,” which he always imagined “might fall upon me and crush me entirely out of existence.”³³ The second image at the opening of the book is a portrait of Ford as a child, “Tell’s Son,” painted by Madox Brown. Even from the beginning he was made into a little Pre-Raphaelite.

Ancient Lights is a catalogue of embarrassments, as the young Ford, in preposterous clothes, “a very little boy in a velveteen coat with gold buttons and long golden ringlets”³⁴ manages consistently to make a fool of himself, and to inadvertently transgress (as he was still transgressing, so publicly, in the divorce courts). Meanwhile the Pre-Raphaelites take the foreground—Ford reproduces a caricature by Madox Brown of Rossetti lying on the sofa early on, possibly to hint at the equally caricatured literary style he is aiming for³⁵—in a slapstick sequence of squabbles and domestic quarrels. Slowly, the mood turns towards a reflection on the passing of fashions and eras, as Ford clears the ground for his own work. He mentions his own departure to the countryside in the 1890s, where he “remained for thirteen years, thus losing almost all touch with intellectual or artistic life.”³⁶ A recollection from these Kent days interlocks with a later memoir Ford wrote, as the reminiscences move back and forth.

I can very well remember coming up by a slow train from Hythe and attempting at one and the same time to read the volume of stories containing Only a Subaltern [Kipling] and to make a single pipe of shag last the whole of that long journey. And I can remember that when I came at almost the same moment to Charing Cross and the death of the subaltern I was crying so hard that a friendly ticket collector asked me if I was very ill […]³⁷

Ford’s own recent fallings-out with his family and friends in 1910 lie somewhat codedly and obscurely beneath the intrigues he depicts in Ancient Lights, so comically—“Dear Brown, if P— says that I said that Gabriel was in the habit of …, P— lies.”³⁸ This, Ford implies, is what being part of an artistic milieu entails: his contemporaries were no less touchy than the Victorian group of the previous century. The Victorians, Ford writes—in a sentence which applies very keenly to himself—knew exactly how “to paint pictures, to write poems, to make tables, to decorate pianos, rooms, or churches. But as to the conduct of life they were a little sketchy, a little romantic, perhaps a little careless.”³⁹ Their “bickerings” could seem “unreasonably ferocious,” Ford writes, but “in spite of them the unions were very close.”⁴⁰ And for all his own disagreements with other artists, the importance of being part of an artistic group never left Ford. His reminiscences always bring people together, even here when he writes of his childhood.

Ford didn’t only depict the famous writers and artists he knew. In Ancient Lights, he was almost as interested in the maids at Madox Brown’s house in Fitzroy Square, and the cabmen, as in the painters and poets who came through the doors. In his later reminiscences, he depicted the rural poor in Kent, mimicking them at length, threading them into his life-story. In January 1911, Ford proposed an idea to Pinker for a book of “Reminiscences of undistinguished people I have met in the course of my varied career.”⁴¹ This became Women & Men (1923), parts of which were incorporated into Return to Yesterday. Like his grandfather, whose great painting Work (1852–65) depicts Carlyle alongside navvies digging the road in Hampstead, beer sellers, sandwich-board carriers, and pastry-cook’s assistants, Ford saw all people as equally worthy of portrayal.

By the end of Ancient Lights, Ford is very much his own man, the author of thirty-seven books “of all shapes and sizes”⁴² (he was thirty-seven years old), declaring “I may humbly write myself down a man getting on for forty, a little mad about good letters.”⁴³ Yet even this phrase, “a little mad,” shows how he was still tied to his family, echoing a phrase in his grandfather’s diaries, which Ford possessed, when the painter declared himself in years of hardship to be “intensely miserable very hard up & a little mad.”⁴⁴

As Ancient Lights proceeds, however, Ford increasingly sounds the elegiac note for the passing Victorian world of his youth, implying how his own literary Impressionism had now superseded the fashions of the Pre-Raphaelites. At the same time, through the pages of the English Review, Ford saw the rising new generation, and felt his relative age and impending obsolescence. In the visual arts in London, Impressionism had moved towards Post-Impressionism precisely around the time of Ancient Lights, with Roger Fry’s exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” in November 1910, and the “Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition” in 1912. Ford was aware of the new artistic currents going on around this time. But sometimes his championing of the new made him always feel old. An abiding tension throughout Ancient Lights is how Ford keeps returning to the way the new succeeds the old, in a book which simultaneously asserts Ford’s modernity and his extremely deep roots in tradition and the Victorian age.

At South Lodge in the years from 1910 until the war, Ford and Violet Hunt played host to a crowd of writers, old and new, and in many ways were at the center of the rising avant-garde in London. As Ford told it in Return to Yesterday, the summer of 1914 before the war, when he was out in London nearly every night, crescendoed with new destructive, artistic movements and “isms”: Vorticism, Imagism, the rallying cries of Blast. In a “Literary Portrait” in the Outlook in 1914, “Mr. Wyndham Lewis and ‘Blast’,” Ford puffed Blast, in which an excerpt of his own novel, The Good Soldier (1915), appeared (as “The Saddest Story”). But he also revealed his feelings of being under attack from the new manifesto-filled periodical. “Vorticism, Cubism, Imagism—and Blastism—,” Ford writes, “may well sweep away anything for which I have stood or fought.”⁴⁵ Ford gives a satirically hyperbolic sketch of Blast’s editor, Wyndham Lewis, whom as Ford pointedly relates, he was the first to publish, in the English Review:

In the luxuriously appointed office stood an individual whom with his unerring eye the editor at once took took to be a Russian moujik. The long overcoat descending to the feet, the black wrappings to the throat, the black hair, the pallid face, the dark and defiant eyes—all, all indicated the Slav … Slowly and with an air of doom the stranger began to draw out manuscripts—from his coat-pockets, from his trouser-pockets, from his breast-pockets, from the lining of his conspirator’s hat. The dark stranger uttered no words; his eyes remained fixed on the editor’s face so that that official quailed […] his unwilling eye descended on the pages.⁴⁶

This literary portrait of Wyndham Lewis by Ford appeared on July 4, 1914. Ford would reprise it, and improvise on it, and portray Lewis again, many times throughout his career. As this portrait shows, Ford saw himself as Lewis’s elder (he was nine years older), as well as his sometime mentor and first editor. Yet he also felt threatened by him—although hardly threatened enough to refrain from portraying him in outrageously exaggerated and humorous, lavishly visual, terms. Soon after this sketch of Lewis, the First World War was declared, and Ford’s “Literary Portraits,” in response, became far more concerned with war than writing. By August 8, 1914, Ford uses his space in the Outlook to muse on the very point of writing: “And what is the good of writing about literature […] There will not be a soul that will want to read about literature for years and years. We go out. We writers go out. And, when the world again has leisure to think about letters the whole world will have changed.”⁴⁷

At the end of 1913, Ford had turned forty. He had supposedly sat down on that birthday to begin what he called in 1927 his “last book,”⁴⁸ The Good Soldier. In July 1915, at forty-one, he enlisted in the army. Soon, as he later portrayed it in “Footsloggers,” he was heading rapidly who knows where.

[…] in the 1.10 train,
Running between the green and the grain,
Something like the peace of God
Descended over the hum and the drone
Of the wheels and the wine and the buzz of the talk,
And one thought:
“In two days’ time we enter the Unknown,
And this is what we die for!”49

The war fell across the center of Ford’s life like a dividing line, a partial death. There is no reason to think that he didn’t fully expect to die. After the war, he felt like a ghost, and for years after, if not forever, he was a changed person. During the battle of the Somme, in the summer of 1916, as he later recalled in It Was the Nightingale, Ford was “blown into the air by something […] falling on my face.”⁵⁰ In the same autobiography he notes that “from some date in August till about the 17th September […] I had completely lost my memory, so that […] three weeks of my life are completely dead to me.”⁵¹ This is how he remembered, or failed to remember, his war trauma in the early 1930s. But closer to the events, Ford’s letters trace a similar lacuna. In 1920, Ford wrote to F. S. Flint about the same incident, saying how he was still trying to recover lost shreds of his memory, and how “for thirty-six hours I did not even know my name. It is, as I have said, coming slowly back; in patches it comes quite vividly.”⁵² Ford mostly kept the war out of his reminiscences—leaving a looming blank in the middle of his life. Return to Yesterday ends with the outbreak of war in 1914, while It Was the Nightingale picks up Ford’s story after peace was declared. Ford may have felt, by the time of these two books, that he had already explored the war in his fiction, in the four volumes of Parade’s End (1924–28); or perhaps there were deeper psychological reasons for its omission in his reminiscences.

When he was demobilized in 1919, Ford came back to London, but he no longer fitted in. He was estranged from Violet Hunt by then, having started a romance with the Australian painter Stella Bowen. The self-portrait of this time in It Was the Nightingale is of a spectral figure just returned from the apocalypse, haunting a London which seems like one vast hallucination. The encounters Ford has are disturbed and unreal. His mind reels. Stripped almost of all earthly possessions, Ford leaves the city, and makes his way down to the laborer’s cottage of Red Ford in Sussex, where he slowly begins—after a few life-or-death decisions—to put himself back together. As he tells it, he was almost completely forgotten as a writer. He resurrected an old persona, of the agricultural small-holder, tending his small plot of land, and slowly repaired the half-derelict cottage where he now planned to begin once again.

Ford’s first post-war book was another volume of reminiscences. This was Thus to Revisit (1921), whose title alludes to the ghost in Hamlet, emphasizing how Ford felt himself to be haunting his old country, more than half-dead. By the summer of 1920, Bowen had joined him in Sussex, and was pregnant, giving birth to Esther Julia on November 29. But just as Ford’s memory was still only coming back in patches, his writing at the time was also off-kilter, slightly unhinged.

The war is completely avoided in Thus to Revisit, which started, like Ancient Lights, as a series of articles, this time for the English Review and The Dial, begun in 1920. Ford subtitled the book Some Reminiscences, recalling Conrad’s reminiscences for the Review over ten years earlier; and he wrote that he saw it as a “continuation of my Ancient Lights.”⁵³ Yet the “reminiscences” tag is slightly misleading, as Thus to Revisit is closer to literary criticism than memories. But it is, like Ancient Lights, a kind of group portrait, giving an account of English literature from the Yellow Book to the English Review. It is unsteady, but formally inventive, almost novelistic. Playing with the conventions of fact, the index includes imaginary figures—Professors Bauch, Hauch, and Wauch, Mr. P., Mr. X., Mr. Y., and “George Crumb (imaginary Poet)”—alongside real people like Conrad, W. H. Hudson, Henry James, and Stephen Crane. Early on in Thus to Revisit, Ford complains about how hard it is to write about the living, rather than the dead.⁵⁴ Reflecting on the ethics of biography, Ford evolves his own standpoint, which reflects his ingrained discretion while allowing himself a crucial loophole: “To report details of private history, affections or intimacies is usually infamous—unless, like Boswell, you should be paying public tribute to a figure whom you have much loved.”⁵⁵

The two main figures Ford portrays in Thus to Revisit are Conrad and James, although they are surrounded by a host of other writers. Ford, now in the English countryside once again, looks back nostalgically to the long period of collaboration with Conrad, when they devoted themselves to questions of literary technique—“buried deep in rural greennesses we used to ask each other how, exactly, such and such an effect of light and shade should be reproduced in very simple words.”⁵⁶ Conrad is portrayed as a fellow craftsman, all the more heroic for his struggles with English and deep knowledge of French literature. Perhaps because of the depth of their unquestioned prior friendship, or perhaps because of their quarrel, Ford is reticent about Conrad’s life, devoting most of his discussion of his friend to his work. Ford’s comments about Conrad are nearly all positive, even when discussing potential defects such as Conrad’s often-perceived inability to portray women credibly.

Writing of Henry James, meanwhile, Ford makes it clear that the relationship was more formal. Yet it was there nonetheless: in some ways the opposite of Ford’s friendship with Conrad, so concerned with intricate creative and technical matters. “I think I will, after reflection, lay claim to a very considerable degree of intimacy with Henry James,” Ford notes, hesitantly yet firmly. “It was a winter, and a wholly non-literary intimacy. That is to say, during the summers we saw little of each other. He had his friends and I mine.”⁵⁷ James, Ford writes, was happier talking with him about writers’ personalities than about their books. “I could, I think, put down on one page all that he ever said to me of books.”⁵⁸

Now that James was dead, Ford drew him more mischievously, impersonating him at length, and declaring that underneath a placid, even bumbling exterior, James was tough, and even cruel. “He loved to appear in the character of a sort of Mr. Pickwick—,” Ford writes, “with the rather superficial benevolences, and the mannerisms of which he was perfectly aware. But below that protective mask was undoubtedly a plane of nervous cruelty. I have heard him be—to simple and quite unpretentious people—more diabolically blighting than it was quite decent for a man to be.”⁵⁹ Ford, going further into the realms of exaggeration, even hints at a strain of occult malevolence in James: “My own servants used to say that his eyes looked you through and through until you could feel your own backbone within you, and it was held in Rye that he practised black magic behind the high walls of Lamb House.”⁶⁰

Thus to Revisit, unlike the other reminiscences, has no dedicatory letter explaining its truth to impressions rather than facts. It hardly needs one, since the whole book is an extended tirade against the tyranny of fact. Fact, argues Ford, is often antithetical to great writing; works of fact often become literature only by virtue of their factual inaccuracies. “Facts are of no importance, a dwelling on facts leads at best to death—at worst to barbarism,”⁶¹ Ford declares, picking up on arguments also traced in his war-time books of propaganda When Blood is Their Argument (1915) and Between St. Dennis and St. George (1915). A set of diagrams towards the end of Thus to Revisit shows Ford’s division of literary genres from “Pure Factual” Prose to “Propagandist” Verse at opposite sides.⁶² For Ford, here, the facts distorted literature, diverting it from real writing, whose effort was primarily creative, imaginative.

Years later, in It Was the Nightingale, Ford wrote of Thus to Revisit that “I should imagine it was not a very good book […] it must have been written in some bitterness […] No doubt it was even a little mad. I was still bitter about the treatment of any ex-comrades in arms.”⁶³ The war appeared much more centrally—if elliptically—in another book inadvertently taking shape in the summer of 1920, in Ford’s “English Country” essays in the New Statesman. These became, after a long delay, No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (1929): a book of reminiscences “of active service under a thinly disguised veil of fiction […] part of it having been actually written in the lines.”⁶⁴ Even more than Thus to Revisit, No Enemy—which was never published in England in Ford’s lifetime, only in America—resonates with psychic shock. This divided, almost schizoid book, compiled from a medley of writings from different times, was “a Tale of Reconstruction” in the textual as well as the psychological sense. It is perhaps Ford’s most unclassifiable book, and he wasn’t even sure what it was himself, telling Pinker, who spoke of it as a novel, that he saw it more as a “serious book”: “I suppose it is really betwixt & between.”⁶⁵

No Enemy inhabits a unique no-man’s-land in Ford’s work. It reads like a book of non-fictional reminiscences forced into a fictional frame. Its ratio of fact and fiction is odd. The way the material is poured into a new form is intriguingly skewed and off-balance. A certain poet, “Gringoire,” tells “your Compiler” (who tells us) about his experiences of the war, in a long monologue, with interruptions, organizing his memories around the few times during the conflict when he was able to notice and appreciate the landscape around him. The Compiler—as Ford did for Conrad in The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record—takes down his dictation in shorthand. This framing gradually collapses, as the Compiler tires of the paraphernalia he uses to present Gringoire’s monologues, and lets Gringoire speak more for himself, after warning us not to be shocked. At one point, the two argue over what “the stuff of war-reminiscences”⁶⁶ should be—the Compiler often having put his pencil down and stopped transcribing when Gringoire strays too far from the point. They undermine each other in sniping footnotes, sometimes by Gringoire, sometimes by the Compiler. Eventually, the thin mask blurs further and slips off altogether, the last vestiges of the framing crumble, and it’s hard to know who’s supposed to be talking—Gringoire, the Compiler, or, indeed, Ford.

Beneath this bizarrely framed tussle, the war appears in fragments, and flashes. Memory in the book is maimed and fragmentary, as though parts have been torn out or damaged. “I remember,” says Gringoire, “—and I say ‘I remember’ advisedly, since such an immense number of things blotted themselves out and only crop up in suddenly vivid pictures […] where it was a duty to notice, one noticed—railway stations in their sequence, streams, contours […]”⁶⁷ The narrative seems to have missing parts, no record of how Ford, or Gringoire, gets from A to B. Or he knows how he gets there, without knowing where “there” will be. No Enemy is full of interstices—what might serve as linking passages or narrative corridors in another novel—with nothing at either end. There’s a disturbing sense that traumatized memories will suddenly emerge, from all the broken pieces. Figures appear inexplicably, frozen at odd moments, stripped of causality, sequence, time, or place, disembodied talking heads surrounded by erasures. Of a certain Lt. Morgan, Ford writes, “we took together a long railway journey—but I don’t remember why or where—probably because I spent it listening to the story of his life. I remember his tired movements as he took his knapsack down from the rack whilst the train was running into some terminus.”⁶⁸ This is impressionism of a different order from elsewhere in Ford’s books: the effect, the impression, becoming all that remains.

The greatest of Ford’s creative friendships ended on August 3, 1924, when Conrad died. For well over a decade the friendship had been rather one-sided. They didn’t see each other much, especially after Ford moved to France with Bowen in 1922, decamping for good from the cold and mud of Sussex, and arriving in Paris around the time of Proust’s funeral in November, before going south for the winter and spring. They returned to Paris in the autumn of 1923. Conrad, still in England, became a half-imaginary character for Ford by this stage of their lives. But he was never that far from Ford’s mind. From the lines of the war, Ford wrote Conrad letters about the sounds of the shelling and the planes overhead; he worried, in May 1924 on the boat to Plymouth, en route to America for a business trip, that he might never see Conrad again.⁶⁹ In the last decade of his life, as he had his success with Chance, Conrad grew increasingly distant from Ford, who after the war had to start again almost from scratch—and who never really stopped writing about him, and to him.

In Paris in late 1923, Ford had decided to launch a new review. As he tells it in It Was the Nightingale, “a dozen times I was stopped on the Boulevards and told that what was needed was another English Review.”⁷⁰ The transatlantic review—which was initially going to be called the Paris Review—was based at first in Ford’s brother’s cottage at 65 Boulevard Arago, where Ford and Stella were staying, before an office was found on 29 quai d’Anjou, on the Ile Saint-Louis.⁷¹ Running throughout 1924, the magazine published work by Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, and Stein—as well as by Ford himself, and many others. Launching the review reinvigorated Ford. As he wrote to Wells in 1923 from 65 Boulevard Arago, “I’ve got over the nerve tangle of the war and feel able at last really to write again—which I never thought I should do […] Also Mrs. Ford […] has more commissions for portraits than she has time for; (She hasn’t much time).”⁷²

As he was launching the new venture, Ford seemed to hope that his slightly broken relationship with Conrad could be taken up and patched over, wondering if Conrad could resume the semi-interrupted autobiography he wrote for him in the English Review years before—“Could you possibly write for me about 5,000 words—of Personal Record? […] I know what a beastly thing it is to ask—I know it fully. But if you took the line of least resistance & just wrote down—even in the form of a letter to me—a personal note as to how the original Personal Record came into being it would be all that I would ask.”⁷³ Conrad declined the proposal to pick up the reminiscences, but he did write a brief note to Ford.

After Conrad’s death, Ford wrote Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924) in two months, and Conrad’s letter to him was reproduced at the beginning in facsimile. Ford’s portrait of Conrad is tender, emphasizing the Pole’s weird absurdism, reimagining him as an Elizabethan, a larger-than-life, piratical figure. It is full of factual untruths—but all the effects Ford uses serve to commemorate his friend, or to make us laugh. He depicts himself and Conrad with knockabout humor, taking pot-shots at rats outside the Pent with a Flobert rifle. He mimicks Conrad’s famously odd accent—“my dear faller”⁷⁴—and satirizes his own ineptitude. He pays homage to Conrad’s A Personal Record with his subtitle, and also by following a similar conceit, structuring Joseph Conrad around the writing of their collaboration Romance, just as Conrad’s reminiscences were framed around the writing of Almayer’s Folly. Partly due to this conceit, Joseph Conrad is also a brilliant “how” of the novel, as much of Ford’s non-fiction writing was, describing how collaboration worked, step by step. Ford’s preface, dated “Guermantes, Seine et Marne, August” to “Bruges, October 5th, 1924,” also displays the extent to which Ford had thought about the form and potential of biography. Despite the “very great aversion from the usual official biography for men of letters whose lives are generally uneventful” which Ford says he shared with Conrad, he frames his own book as a fusion of elements of biography, portraiture, and fiction simultaneously:

This then is a novel, not a monograph; a portrait, not a narration: for what it shall prove to be worth, a work of art, not a compilation. It is conducted exactly along the lines laid down by us, both for the novel which is biography and for the biography which is a novel. It is the rendering of an affair intended first of all to make you see the subject in his scenery. It contains no documentation at all; for it no dates have been looked up, even all the quotations but two have been left unverified, coming from the writer’s memory. It is the writer’s impression of a writer who avowed himself impressionist.⁷⁵

Joseph Conrad is as much about Ford as about Conrad—and often, as when Ford describes how Conrad told and retold his stories, always slightly changing the facts,⁷⁶ or when he describes Conrad’s mythologizing, associative turn of mind⁷⁷—we would be right to detect a self-portrait. At points, very transparently, “as to biography […] the writer becomes hazy”⁷⁸—partly because “Conrad himself wished to throw a haze”⁷⁹ over parts of his own life. Ford tells how he took down “the episode of the Tremolino in the Mirror of the Sea […] from Conrad’s dictation,”⁸⁰ noticing how “Conrad sensibly modified aspects and facts of his word of mouth narrations.”⁸¹ He captures the odd formality of their working relationship, and their mutual inability to talk about feelings: “the writer never in his life uttered one word of personal affection towards Conrad. What his affection was or was not here appears. And Conrad never uttered one word of affection towards the writer.”⁸²

Other figures from the Kent period also inevitably appear in Joseph Conrad, among them, fairly briefly, H. G. Wells, who had written to the English Review in 1920 to complain about Ford’s “imaginative reminiscences”⁸³ when he had been parodied, in the first instalment of what became Thus to Revisit, as an “Eminent novelist.” In Joseph Conrad, Ford writes of visiting Wells in Sandgate with Conrad to announce—on Conrad’s insistence—their collaboration;⁸⁴ and how the following day Wells bicycled to Aldington to persuade Ford not to work with Conrad. Ford refuses gently. Wells had been one of the few to stand by Ford when his marriage to Elsie fell apart. But Wells did not mean the phrase “imaginative reminiscences” to be a compliment, as he was displeased and bemused at Ford’s embroiderings. All the same, perhaps Ford took the phrase as a creative hint, judging from the highly and unapologetically imaginative scenes in Joseph Conrad. Ford, settled in France throughout the 1920s, living mostly in Paris and Toulon in the winters, as well as going on several trips alone to America, was now entering into his greatest phase as an incorrigible fictional autobiographer.

In the long, light, gently swaying carriages
As the miles flash by,
And fields and flowers
Flash by85

If memory, in Henry James’s autobiographies, could be consciously stimulated—as the writer swings through vast caverns opening and blooming before him—in Ford’s late reminiscences its central motif is the zigzag or criss-cross. Memories move along abruptly changing tracks, like trains. In the dedicatory letter to Return to Yesterday, written on July 14, 1931 in Cap Brun, near Toulon, Ford told how he came up with the form of the book while sitting with a bandaged foot staring up at the “criss-cross of beams”⁸⁶ in the roof of a friend’s studio in New York. Henry James, he says, was born close by. The patterns of life, Ford suggests, like the patterns of volumes of memories, are deceptively formless: “Life meanders, jumps back and forwards, draws netted patterns like those on the musk melon.”⁸⁷ Ford writes that the only excuse for “setting down one’s life on paper” is “that one should give a picture of one’s time.”⁸⁸ With this in mind, Ford declares that he has tried to keep himself out of these reminiscences, although he knows that complete self-effacement is impossible. “Being a novelist, it is possible that I romance,” he also warns us, and describes Return to Yesterday as a novel: “The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions.”⁸⁹ Then in the first chapter the intricate criss-cross begins, as Ford thinks of James, thinks of his young days near Rye, then in New York takes down a book of Kipling stories from the shelves:

I was eighteen when I first read those words. My train was running into Rye station and I had knocked out the ashes of my first pipe of shag tobacco […] My first book had just been published. I was going courting […] The story was Mr. Kipling’s Only a Subaltern. The next station would be Winchelsea where I was to descend.⁹⁰

This is the same book he was reading in Ancient Lights, still smoking shag tobacco, as the train went the other way, coming into Charing Cross. Ford leaps fifteen years on, walking up the narrow street in Rye to James’s house, where he bumps into Kipling coming down. Ford had come to Rye from Winchelsea with Conrad to hire a car. A few pages on, James is coming to visit Ford in Winchelsea in the middle of winter, having walked across the flats with his dog:

I can still see his sturdy form as arrayed in a pea-jacket which nobly enhanced his bulk, wearing one of his innumerable cricket-caps, emphasising his steps and the cadences of his conversation by digging his cane into the road he stumped under the arch of the sea-gate up the hill into Winchelsea, lugging behind him on a ten yard leather lead his highly varnished dachshund, Maximilian. The dog would gyrate round his master. Mr. James would roll his eyes […]⁹¹

Return to Yesterday weaves with a serpentine movement through Ford’s past, with a series of portraits. It is mainly a book about Kent and London, from the 1890s to the 1910s, although it covers Ford’s breakdown in 1904 and his attempted cures in Germany, as well as the trip he made to America in 1906, before returning to his subsequent years in London and the English Review, moving up to the eve of the war. According to the dates at the end of the book—November 4, 1930 to August 8, 1931—it was conceived in New York, and largely written in France, but parts were written before, and appeared elsewhere, in passages in Ancient Lights and Thus to Revisit as well as other articles.⁹² To that extent, like the “Compiler” in No Enemy, Ford’s role in making Return to Yesterday was one of selection and arrangement, as much as writing and remembering.

Ford was fifty-seven years old in 1930, and he had begun his last, perhaps happiest relationship, with the painter Janice Biala, having met her in Paris on May Day that year, after his shared life with Stella Bowen had broken down, painfully but amicably, by 1928. There was now an immense distance between the world Ford was writing about in these reminiscences, and his new life in France, which gave his memories even more warmth. The portrait he gives of his time in Kent, in particular, has the glow of personal mythology and nostalgia. But it is a comic nostalgia, in which Ford, as so often, plays a blundering role—while securing his place in the pantheon of literature at the turn of the century, as he redrew it.

He was not physically well, to say the least, as he wrote these long-gone memories. At the end of 1930, he had a heart attack. Yet in some letters at this time, as in Return to Yesterday, he tried to seem undaunted. In January 1931, Ford went to Toulon with Janice, and by March they had settled in to the Villa Paul in Cap Brun, as Ford wrote to Hugh Walpole soon after:

a very simple place where we live a life of a frugality which would astonish and for all I know appal you […] [With] an immense view of the Mediterranean and agricultural labours that begin at dawn and end after sunset, I have recovered a good deal of the vitality that I thought had gone for ever with my heart attack last December. And indeed I have got back into complete writing form and have made immense strides with my book so that even if another heart attack did carry me off Gollancz would have at least a book, for Reminiscences don’t need either beginnings or ends.⁹³

This was the brave face Ford put on quite often in the 1930s, refusing to be beaten down by his straitened financial circumstances, and his difficulties in getting his books published, made even worse by the Depression. Even though parts of Return to Yesterday were compiled from earlier writings, the book’s lightness of spirit, considering Ford’s ailing health at the time, is astonishing, suggesting a rare inner contentment.

Some of this lightness is achieved by avoiding difficult subject-matter, such as his failure to obtain a divorce from Elsie. Indeed, the erasure of Elsie Hueffer, Violet Hunt, and Stella Bowen from Return to Yesterday (and Ford’s other autobiographies) is almost total; while the marital intrigues that so defined his life are played out endlessly in his fiction. Partly, this might have been due to the legal complications which would no doubt have arisen if Ford had chosen to write about Elsie—as ever since the breakdown of their marriage, it had been a matter for the courts. Violet Hunt, however, had devoted most of The Flurried Years, fairly recently published in 1926, to depicting Ford—who did not retaliate in kind. Whether this was a moral, practical, or artistic decision is hard to say; yet in his reminiscences Ford clearly wished to avoid details of his private life and his affairs. There was also the delicate fact to consider that nearly every time Ford began a phase of autobiography, he was in a new relationship: with Violet Hunt when he wrote Ancient Lights; with Stella Bowen when he wrote Thus to Revisit; and with Janice Biala when he wrote Return to Yesterday and It Was the Nightingale.

Ford, in his reminiscences, defines his life around his work; and the work of writing about his work and other writers seemed to help Ford sustain his idea of himself and his own literary identity. In Return to Yesterday, even facing the dark days of his collapse in 1904, Ford remains oddly blithe. He lets himself go with his portraiture of other writers, inventing and extemporizing freely. In the past, Ford says, he had been “afraid of hurting feelings”:⁹⁴ these versions are closer to the truth. But he must mean the truth of impressions. There are stories where the embellishments flag themselves up, yet still retain a fidelity to what happened. Exaggerations, when pointed in the right direction, can serve to increase the truth. Yet some of the inventions point to things which only happened in Ford’s head—especially when he once again writes at length of Henry James.

James clearly meant more to Ford than Ford meant to James. Yet in Return to Yesterday, while exaggerating, say, the number of times James came to have tea in Winchelsea with him, Ford was also quite honest about James’s lack of respect for him. Where so many portraits of James capture his stately eloquence, Ford’s James again reaches under what he implies is a mere veneer. The Master is lovingly mocked and impersonated for his verbosity, but Ford hints again at a demonic side to James, as well as being clear about his desperate attachment to social niceties. Physically, Ford always brings us close to James’s eyes, seemingly fascinated by their oiliness, in a passage which also appeared in Thus to Revisit, now transposed to Return to Yesterday: “the brown face with the dark eyes rolling in the whites, the compact, strong figure, the stick raised so as to be dug violently into the road.”⁹⁵ He again emphasizes a simmering toughness in James: “At times he was unreasonably cruel—and that to the point of vindictiveness when his nerves were set on edge.”⁹⁶ “Occasionally he would burst out at me with furious irritation […] ‘Don’t talk such damnable nonsense!’ He really shouted these words with a male fury.”⁹⁷ Ford writes of his relationship with James that “I do not think that, till the end of his days, he regarded me as a serious writer.”⁹⁸

The portrait of Conrad is far more affectionate, though full of nervous tetchiness. Ford highlights Conrad’s convulsive, spasmodic movements, his feverishness when in the throes of composition. Like James’s irritation, Conrad’s “furies would be sudden, violent, blasting and incomprehensible to his victim.”⁹⁹ As in Ancient Lights, Ford, in his portrait of Conrad and James, is someone who draws down the wrath of others, without knowing why. But Ford depicts his first meeting with Conrad in a way that also emphasizes Conrad’s formality and excessive politeness, as he sees Ford at the Pent, visiting with Edward Garnett. “I was very untidy in my working clothes,” Ford writes. “I said: ‘I’m Hueffer.’ He had taken me for the gardener […] ‘My dear faller … Delighted … Ench … anté!’ He added: ‘What conditions to work in … Your admirable cottage … Your adorable view … ’ ”¹⁰⁰ Soon afterwards, they were collaborating: “I suppose that for seven or eight years we hardly passed a day and certainly not a month without meeting and discussing our joint and several works”:¹⁰¹

That was how it went, day in day out, for years—the despair, the lamentations continuing for hours, and then the sudden desperate attack on the work—the attack that would become the fabulous engrossment. We would write for whole days, for half nights, for half the day, or all the night. We would jot down passages on scraps of paper or on the margins of books, handing them one to the other or exchanging them. We would roar with laughter over passages that would have struck no other soul as humorous.¹⁰²

While Conrad is the central figure in Return to Yesterday, Ford makes sure to include everyone else of note that he has met, and to sketch their milieus. As with Ancient Lights, Ford also pointedly weaves in portraits of less distinguished people, and the country folk he met in Kent, giving “some peasant biographies”¹⁰³ in Return to Yesterday, which form a counterweight to the depictions elsewhere in the reminiscences of eminent politicians and royalty.

Return to Yesterday ends with another incomprehensibly irate attack, which signals another artistic death for Ford. The coda begins on June 1914, just before the war, with the author surveying London as he stands on the curb in Piccadilly Circus, unawares that he would soon be gone. As Ford strolls out with Ezra Pound one day, he is accosted by Wyndham Lewis, disguised in this book as a “Mr. D. Z.,” who addresses him in a “vitriolic murmur”: “Tu sais, tu es foûtu! Foûtu! Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact. Your generation has gone. What is the sense of you and Conrad and Impressionism? […] Get a move on. Get out or get under.”¹⁰⁴ “You and Conrad had the idea of concealing yourself when you wrote,” Lewis says to Ford. “I display myself all over the page. In every word. I … I … I … ”¹⁰⁵ Once again Ford is under attack from Lewis, who seems to find the self-effacement of Ford’s Impressionism pointless.

At the very end of Return to Yesterday, Ford writes of the outbreak of war, which was declared just after he went up to Berwickshire to a house party. The hostess of the party, Mary Borden Turner, Ford writes, let Ford choose some of the guests. “So Mr D. Z. was there, and Ezra was to have come, and the turf of the Scottish lawns was like close fine carpeting and the soft Scottish sunshine and the soft Scottish showers did the heart good.”¹⁰⁶ This was the last moment of peace for Ford before the war. “We sat on the lawns in the sunlight and people read aloud—which I like very much. D. Z. had brought the proofs from Blast of my one novel. I read that.”¹⁰⁷ Sauntering up to the brink of war in this way, Return to Yesterday concludes, nonchalantly dangling over the very edge of the abyss.

It Was the Nightingale, begun in Paris on January 12, 1933 and finished in Toulon on June 11, the same year, also presents an intricate criss-cross of memory. The period and places covered in the book were closer to the present than Return to Yesterday: beginning with Ford’s experiences after the war and his time in Sussex, up to editing the transatlantic review in Paris. Originally titled Towards Tomorrow,¹⁰⁸ and largely written by hand at the Villa Paul, it was much more of an original composition than the previous reminiscences, much less of a compilation. It was also a stylistic departure. While Ford saw Return to Yesterday not as autobiography but as reminiscences—“in that form the narrator shall be a mirror not any kind of actor”¹⁰⁹—the dedicatory letter of It Was the Nightingale declares that for the first time in his life, Ford is now writing his autobiography (“a form I have never tried—mainly for the fear of the charge of vanity. I have written reminiscences of which the main features were found in the lives of other people and in which, as well as I could, I obscured myself”).¹¹⁰ Although It Was the Nightingale does contain portraits of others, inevitably, it is more about Ford himself than the other reminiscences. We can almost predict the next declaration in the dedicatory letter: that this book is also “a novel.”¹¹¹ “I have employed every wile known to me as novelist—the timeshift, the progression d’effet, the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action,”¹¹² Ford writes, telling us that he had planned to continue up to the Great Depression in 1929. “But I found that subsequent events are too vivid in my mind. Moreover, it is inexpedient to write of living people in their too near presents”¹¹³—partly because they will be more aggrieved at the portrait, Ford says, in comparison to depictions of things that happened further in the past.

In It Was the Nightingale, Ford achieves his ideal of the tone of good prose, which as well as being unobtrusive, as he says, is close to a quiet speaking voice, speaking to someone he loved very much. The tone is so controlled that it carries the weight of the book almost by itself. At the opening, Ford pictures himself “on the day of my release from service in His Britannic Majesty’s army—in early 1919”:¹¹⁴ back in London, a ghost in a city of ghosts, slightly shell-shocked. Ford leaves himself standing on the curb in 1919, near John Galsworthy’s house “at the corner of the Campden Hill Waterworks,”¹¹⁵ for almost a hundred pages, sidetracking back and forth over different years and memories triggered by chance associations. The digressions drift, as, his foot still paused half off the ground, Ford decides to recount, say, a lunch with Theodore Dreiser in 1923—until he suddenly returns to the point, as he then sits in a café later in Paris, “where I sat all alone and read that Galsworthy was dead.”¹¹⁶

He always cuts back to the curb eventually, until he finally decides to leave London, with almost identical words to Lewis’s pre-war attack on him in Piccadilly: “as far as London was concerned there was nothing to do but to get out or go under!”¹¹⁷ Ford extemporizes wildly on his period in Sussex at Red Ford, almost seeming to enjoy the dramatic effects of emphasizing his destitution after the war. As in Return to Yesterday, he manages to turn difficult and even desperate material into comedy. Yet there is also incomprehension and bitterness as he writes of how many of the people he had known and liked in London before the war had been killed, or were now impoverished, while other acquaintances “had prospered unbelievably,” becoming “war-rich.”¹¹⁸ “We who had returned […] were like wanderers coming back to our own shores to find our settlements occupied by a vindictive and savage tribe.”¹¹⁹ Seen in this light, Ford’s period in Sussex—where, as Stella Bowen’s memoir Drawn from Life (1941) makes clear, he endured very real poverty—was a painfully forced retreat from a society that no longer had any use for whatever Ford had done or suffered in the service of his country.

As It Was the Nightingale progresses, Ford takes the digressive method further, pushing the circles of association away harder each time, tacking back and forth across wider gaps in years, so that the autobiography slips its stated time-scheme unpredictably: sometimes, albeit only briefly, narrating things that happened before and during the war. Writing of his move to the south of France in 1922 with Stella Bowen (who, as with all Ford’s treatment of his women in his autobiographies, is quite invisible), Ford changes tracks in time and place once again:

It was six years since I had seen the Mediterranean, going back to the line from the Red Cross hospital at Mentone […] The Red Cross train had stopped for an hour, at midnight, at Tarascon […] I desperately disliked going back to the line. My lungs were in a terrible condition still […]¹²⁰

The chain of memories, as here, continues to move unpredictably, as Ford refers constantly and freely back and forth to other moments in his life throughout It Was the Nightingale. As in all Ford’s autobiographies, there are also many glimpses of other writers. Gertrude Stein appears in a typically brief and disconnected snapshot of Paris, as “years ago—I should say in 1913—I was on top of a bus in front of the Bon Marché. I saw Gertrude Stein driving with a snail-like precision her Ford car.”¹²¹ The height of the car above the road, Ford writes, “gave to Miss Stein, driving, the air of awfulness of Pope or Pharaoh, borne aloft and swaying on their golden thrones.”¹²² Ford, due to leave Paris that afternoon, jumps down off his bus to pursue this vision: “I trotted on, keeping that procession in sight for quite a number of blocks,” but “she outdistanced me.”¹²³

Stein’s biographer James Mellow writes that Ford must have the dating of this memorable vision of Stein wrong, as at this period Stein had no car and did not drive.¹²⁴ What is more important is the impression of Ford’s simultaneously grandiose and comic depiction of the queenly Stein here, and his sense of his humility. Stein’s own The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was beginning to be serialized in The Atlantic Monthly in May 1933, precisely around the time when Ford was finishing It Was the Nightingale. Stein was more an acquaintance than a close friend; and Ford writes in It Was the Nightingale, slightly perplexingly, “I have had so many and such long arguments with that old friend—or enemy—that they seem to fuse, the one into the other in an unbroken chain of battle.”¹²⁵ But as Stella Bowen notes, Stein often saw Ford and herself in Paris in the 1920s, coming to their parties and inviting them back. Bowen recalled her visits to Stein and Toklas, as the three women “would sit beneath the Picassos and the rest of the collection and discuss methods of dealing with one’s concierge, or where to buy linen for sheets, or how to enjoy French provincial life.”¹²⁶ Both Ford and Stein made sure to provide glimpses of each other in their autobiographies—but they remained glimpses, almost as if they were hailing each other from a distance.

Towards the end of It Was the Nightingale, Ford is on a train, between Calais and Paris, when, by chance, he strikes on the principal character for Some Do Not (1924), through something someone says that reminds him of his and Conrad’s friend Arthur Marwood. His thoughts once again change track suddenly, to another time, another place: “I was in a railway-carriage—not in a French one running down through France, but in a first-class carriage running from Ashford in Kent to Winchelsea in Sussex.”¹²⁷ So suddenly, he’s back in the much earlier time of the English Review. Describing the genesis of Some Do Not in this way, Ford also recalls the novel’s first scene, as the two main characters, two young men, sit “in the perfectly appointed railway carriage”¹²⁸ rushing through the Kent countryside.

The associative structure of It Was the Nightingale is managed so well that Ford even digresses at length about his method of digression—without seeming to stray from the point. He talks about anything that comes to mind. The thoughts spiral out, reined in by the central pull which holds the book together. It is a centrifugal motion. Moving away from the story, Ford writes, say, about his mother’s skill at finding burglar-proof hiding places, or the pain he feels holding a pen, or whether or not he ever used real characters in his novels. (“I never […] used a character from actual life for purposes of fiction—or never without concealing their attributes very carefully.”)¹²⁹ It all connects. Frequently, Ford cuts to the scene of the book’s composition, in the Villa Paul, “in a room that looks over the Mediterranean,”¹³⁰ moving right up to the present tense, in passages more like a journal or diary:

I was lying this morning before dawn, looking at the Mediterranean framed in a tall oblong by the pillars of the terrace […] As abruptly as if a conductor had raised his bâton the chorus of small birds began […] A greyness is there and a single, agonising note infinitely prolonged. Instantly the chorus of small ones ceases […] The lights of St. M — — die; the sea is like listening, grey satin. The lighthouse turns more slowly, so as to miss no note. It is the nightingale […]¹³¹

There is a healing quality to It Was the Nightingale, both in its dramatizing of Ford’s “reconstruction” after the trauma of the war, and in its mood, which suggests that even if he had little worldly wealth by the 1930s, Ford had found happiness with Biala, and their life in France. The pages are suffused with Mediterranean clarity and light. And their echoes reverberate with all his other reminiscences. Writing of how he allows his thoughts to circle out in wide flights, before trying “in the end to let them come home,”¹³² like birds around a dove-cote, Ford brings us right back to the opening of Ancient Lights, where he saw himself “in a long blue pinafore” looking at the box of ring-doves in Fitzroy Square and incurring his grandmother’s anger.

Ford’s unique art of reminiscence caused him many public troubles. It was just as misunderstood as he was. But he kept at it nearly until his death in 1939, with his final volume of literary portraits for The American Mercury from 1935 to 1937, collected as Mightier Than the Sword in England and Portraits from Life in America. When Wells denigratingly referred to Ford’s “imaginative reminiscences” he was worried—as many of the subjects of the reminiscences might well have been worried—about the effect all Ford’s tall stories would have. Reinventing the facts, as Ford did, is dangerous. His books tried to explain themselves in their prefaces. Yet the peculiarity—the originality—of the form he was concocting, compelled many of his subjects to point out, publicly, what was true, and what wasn’t. The reminiscences were true enough, close enough to the facts, to seem real, even when they weren’t. In their repetitions, they also aimed to create a shifting multiplicity, not a final authority. As Stella Bowen wrote in Drawn from Life, Ford “could show you two sides simultaneously of any human affair, and the double picture made the subject come alive, and stand out in a third dimensional way that was very exciting.”¹³³ Bowen also wrote perceptively of Ford’s Impressionism:

All his art was built on his temperamental sensitiveness to atmosphere, to the angle from which you looked, to relative, never absolute values. When he said, “It is necessary to be precise”, I used to think that he meant—precisely truthful. Of course, what he really meant was that you must use precision in order to create an effect of authenticity, whatever the subject of your utterance, in the same way as the precision of a brushstroke gives authenticity to an image on canvas, and need have no relation to anything seen in fact. Words to Ford were simply the material of his art, and he never used them in any other way. This created confusion in his everyday life, for words are not like dabs of paint. They are less innocent, being the current coin in use in daily life.¹³⁴

Ford’s improvements to fact in his reminiscences were made in the service of story and character, to bring them to life. The reminiscences’ power, and their closeness to fact, has meant that the stories Ford tells about the people he knew have indeed infected all their biographies. Once heard, these stories are hard to forget. They are often treated with caution by the writers who quote them—yet they are quoted, all the same, since they bring Ford’s era back to life more effectively than many other sources. In Ford’s reminiscences, he never quite lets us know when he’s pulling our leg, so we treat everything he says with a suspect alertness. We can never be sure when he’s telling the truth; we can never be sure when to doubt him.¹³⁵ The entire literature of fact, Ford shows, should always be treated with the same caution.

Edith Wharton, c.1936.

Source: Edith Wharton Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Reproduced in Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 338, and published with permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.

3

For facts a most profound contempt

Ford Madox Ford