Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life Vol.2

345 Pages·1996·30.442 MB·English

by  Max Saunders

FORD MADOX FORD
A DUAL LIFE
VOLUME II
THE AFTER-WAR WORLD
Adult lives were cut sharply into three sections-pre-war, war,
and post-war. It is curious-perhaps not so curious- but many
people will tell you that whole areas of their pre-war lives have
become obliterated from their memories. Pre-war seems like pre
history.
(Richard Aldington, Death ofa Hero)
The world before the war is one thing and must be written about
in one manner; the after-war world is quite another and calls for
quite different treatment.
(Ford to T. R. Smith, 27 July 1931)
Max Saunders
Oxford New York
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1996
I
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once again I am happy to record my gratitude to Janice Biala, both for allowing me to
quote freely from Ford's published and unpublished writing, and also for the conver
sations and letters in which she has given such a vivid sense of Ford's life in the 1930s.
As the most important witness to his last years, her help was particularly valuable for
this volume, which is duly dedicated to her.
The indispensable collection of Ford's papers at Cornell University has now been
relocated in the new Carl A. Kroch Library. Mark Dimunation and his staff have again
been extremely helpful, and I should once again like to record my gratitude to the
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell University Library for permis
sion to quote from its collection, and to Lucy B. Burgess for all her friendly assistance.
Princeton University Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
of Yale University hold the other major collections. I am again grateful to the librar
ians of both for copying material for me, and for allowing me to quote from it.
Most of the other individuals and institutions thanked in the preceding volume also
helped with this one. The acknowledgements in Volume I should thus be taken to
cover this volume too. Most of those named here helped specifically with this volume.
I am very grateful for information and assistance from: W. T. Bandy; Martin Beisly of
Christie's, London; C. M. Brain; Montagu Bream; Cleanth Brooks; Dr Andrew
Brown, Cambridge University Press; Dr lain G. Brown, National Library of Scotland;
Tom Carter; Sir Tobias and Lady Clarke; Alfred Cohen; Clare Crankshaw; Carla
Davidson; Oliver Davies; Nick Dennys; Monroe Engel; Charles Fenn; Hugh Ford;
Vita Fortunati; Raymond Gadke; Richard Garnett; Graham Greene; Robert
Hampson; Areta Hautman of King Alfred School; Christopher Hawtree; Dr Anton
Willhelm Huffer; Philip Horne; Bruce Hunter; Neville Jason; Martien Kappers; Mrs
P. Karet of University College School; Louise Kennelly; Jerry Kuehl; Robert
Langenfeld; Robie Macauley; Warren Magnussen; Paul Metcalf; aomi Mitchison;
Ray Monk; Francesca Oakley; Leonee Ormond; John Postgate; Sita Schutt; Willis A.
Selden; Tiggy Sharland; Oliver Soskice; Virgil Thomson; Nora Tomlinson; Ulysses
Bookshop; Laura Verplank;Janet Wallace; Fred Wegener; Joan Winterkorn;J. Joseph
Wisdom, Librarian of St Paul's Cathedral; and Francis Wyndham.
I am also grateful to the following libraries and institutions for their help: Joseph
Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; the Librarian of St Joseph's Church,
Avenue Hoche, Paris; the Mansell Collection; the National Library of Scotland; the
New York Public Library; New York University; the Library, University of Reading;
and the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.
To the following I am grateful not only for assistance but for permission to quote
unpublished material; Diana Athill, for permission to quote from a letter to Arthur
Mizener; the estate of W. H. Auden, for a quotation from a letter; Janice Biala,
for permission to quote from some of her own letters and manuscripts; The
British Library, for quotations from unpublished Conrad letters; Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Joseph Regenstein Library, the University of Chicago; James
Vlll ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
lX
Brown Associates Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia Univer for excerpts from The Presence of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Sondra J. Stang; Laurence
sity; the Trustees of the Estate of Joseph Conrad; Clare Crankshaw, for quotations Pollinger Ltd., for excerpts from Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story. Laurence
from letters by Edward Crankshaw; the estate of Theodore Dreiser; the Trustees of Pollinger Ltd. and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, for permission to quote
the Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection in the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, from The Letters ofD . H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton. Princeton University Press,
Dorset; Mrs Valerie Eliot, for quotations from T. S. Eliot; Charles Fenn; The Society for excerpts from Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig. Copyright ©
of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Galsworthy; Richard 1965 by Princeton University Press, renewed 1993.
Garnett, for a quotation from Edward Garnett; the estate of Caroline Gordon; the
estate of Graham Greene; David Higham Associates; The House of Lords Record
Office; The Huntington Library; The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
Austin, Texas; Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign; Alexander James, Esq., for quotations from Henry James; John
Lamb, for quotations from Katherine Lamb, Elsie Hueffer, and Dr William
Martindale; the estate of Paul Nash; the McCormick Library of Special Collections,
Northwestern University; Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, for quotations
from its files; Olivet College Library; University Research Library, UCLA; A. P. Watt
Ltd. on behalf of the Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells; Mrs Caroline
White, for permission to quote from Olive Garnett's diary; the estate of William Carlos
Williams; Francis Wyndham, for quotations from Jean Rhys; and Theodora Zavin.
For permission to reproduce photographs I am grateful to: Janice Biala; Tom
Carter; the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collection, Cornell University Library;
Culver Pictures; John Quinn Memorial Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations;
Princeton University Library; Oliver Soskice; and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manu
script Library, Yale University.
Earlier versions of parts of this book have appeared as part of the introduction to the
Everyman library edition of The Good Soldier, 'A Life in Writing: Ford Madox Ford's
Dispersed Autobiographies', Anta.>us, 56 (Spring, 1986), 47-69, and 'Duality, Reading,
and Art in Ford's Last Novels', Contemporary Literature, 30/z (Summer, 1989), 291)-
320 (published by the University of Wisconsin Press). I am grateful to the editors and
publishers for permission to include considerably revised versions here.
For permission to quote. I should also like to thank the following publishers and
copyright holders: the Wyndham Lewis Estate and the Calder Educational Trust,
London, for excerpts from Wyndham Lewis's Blasting and Bombardiering, copyright
©The Wyndham Lewis Estate 1937, 1967 and 1982; Carcanet Press Ltd., for excerpts
from The Ford Madox Ford Reader, ed. Sondra J. Stang; Robert Secor and Marie
Secor, and English Literary Studies, for excerpts from the Secors' The Return of the
Good Soldier: Ford Madox Ford and Violet Hunt's 1917 Diary; Faber and Faber
(Publishers) Ltd., for excerpts from Pound/ Ford: The Story ofa Literary Friendship,
ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted; and Robert Lowell, 'Ford Madox Ford' (from History);
HarperCollins Publishers, for excerpts from Stella Bowen's Drawn from Life, and
Arthur Mizener's The Saddest Story; Louisiana State University Press, for excerpts
from The Southern Mandarins: Letters of Caroline Gordon to Sally Wood, 1924-1937,
ed. Sally Wood; New Directions Pub. Corp., for excerpts from William Carlos
Williams's Collected Poems 1939-62. Copyright by William Carlos Williams; Penguin
Books Ltd., for excerpts from Jean Rhys, Quartet; University of Pennsylvania Press,
CONTENTS
List ofl llustrations
Xlll
I. !9,.!6: Th~. . §z~~~~lajJ::~~g~k l
2. 1.9.16: Kemmel Hill and After 16
3· ~_1i;Jhe£.~~~.(DJV~ 27
4. 1918·:· ATaleofReconstruction: Stella Bowen 42
5. 1918: Armistice· -:==:-..
54
R.e<l"For<l
6. 1919: 61
7. The Post~War Writer Bo
8. 1;};0.:l92i:"B'edfiam: La Vie Litteraire ('Mr Croyd', Thus to
' Revisit, The Marsden Case)
9._ 1922: The Last of England
10. 11923: Thus To Re-View
g I I. I 924: the transatlantic review
11 12. '1924: The Last of Conrad and of the transatlantic
13. Tall Stories
14. Parade's End
JP
o 15._ 1924-1926: Jean Rhys
o 16. 1926-1927= USA 300
o 17. 1927-1928: Provence, New York, Paris 316
18. i928-1929: Elizabeth Cheatham
334
19. 1929: That Same Poor Man
355
20. 1930--1931: Janice Biala 369
21. 1D oubles 385
22. \1931-1933: Weathering the Depression 422
23. J;ord's Autobiography 437
24. 1°933-1935: On the Great Trade Route 468
25. 1935-1936: The Cause of Good Letters 486
26. 1937: Olivet and the Tates 504
27. 1938: 'An Old Man Mad About Writing' 517
28. 1938-1939: The Abyss 531
Abbreviations 550
Notes 554
Index 671
+
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Between pages 290 and 291
Ford (on the right) with fellow officers of the Welch Regiment
Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell Universi~y
Stella Bowen in Paris in the 1920s
Carl A. Kroch Libra1J1, Cornell University
Ford as the small producer at Coopers Cottage, Bedham, Sussex, in 1921: 'the beast in
exhibit no II[. ..] is PENNY my champion Angora (male) goat. he was so-called because
he facially resembled (but was not) POUND, Ezra.' Ford said this photograph repre
sented 'myself as an agriculturist as I was when I wrote NO ENEMY'.
Oliver Soskice
Julie, the daughter of Ford and Stella Bowen, at St Agreve, 1923
Oliver Soskice
Ford painted by Stella Bowen in 1924. Ford's mother, Cathy Hueffer, called this
portrait 'very clever but hideous, as a likeness exactly like him and also looking like a
Frenchman with a past'.
Oliver Soskice
Ford and Juan Gris, mid 1920s
Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University
The founding of the transatlantic review: (from left to right) Joyce, Pound, John
Quinn, and Ford in 1923
New York Public Library
Jean Rhys in the 1920s
Photo: Pearl Freemay
Jeanne Foster, who worked for John Quinn, and helped Ford with the transatlantic
review. Mont-Saint-Michel.
New York Public Libmry
Elizabeth Cheatham
Tom Carter
Rene Wright in 1930
Carl A. Kroch Libra~)', Cornell University. Photo: C. F. Dieckman/ St Louis Post Dispatch
Ford and Ezra Pound at the base of the statue to Columbus at Rapallo, 1932.
'Columbus landed in Rapallo after committing his indiscretion', Ford joked to his
American publisher Ray Long: 'Your publicity people might be able to make some
thing allegorical out of that-I don't quite see what. Ezra, at any rate, is the greatest
poet the new world has ever sent to the old. Columbus was presumably the greatest
explorer the old world ever sent to the new. I don't quite know where I come in but
you might get one of your people to work it out.'
Curl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University
XIV LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Stella Bowen, Paris, mid-192os
Carl A. Kroclz Library, Cornell University
I
Ford with Caroline Gordon, Janice Biala, and Allen Tate, Clarksville, Tennessee,
mid-193os
Janice Bia/a 1916: THE SOMME AND SHELL-SHOCK
BetJTJeen pages 418 and 419
Ford in the 1920s The imaginative artist like every other proper man owes a twofold duty-to his
Carl A. Kroclz Library, Cornell University art, his craft, his vocation, and then to his State.
Ford in the later 1920s or early 1930s. (Ford, 'Hands Off the Arts', American Mercury, April 1935)
Carl A. Kroclz Library, Cornell University. Photo: Detar Studio
Ford in the 1930s Second Lieutenant Ford Madox Hueffer arrived in France that summer of 1916, the
artist expecting soon to become the stuff to fill graveyards. The Welsh soldiers sang on
Culver Pictures
the river-boat that took them up the Seine to Rouen. Ford later recalled the vision of
Ford in Chicago, January 1927. Ford inscribed the copy of this photo that he sent to
the local bourgeois turned out in their Sunday best to watch them from the river banks
Stella and Julie: 'I like this best of any of the photos of me, it's more how I seem to
as the most moving of the war, because the majority of the soldiers would be dead in
myself!' He later told Elizabeth Cheatham: 'It is the rendering of myself I like best.'
six days time in Mametz Wood. When the boat reached Croisset, the captain or pilot
The Library, Princeton University. Photo: Hutchinson
astounded Ford by his knowledge of Flaubert, pointing out his house, and saying that
Ford and Biala
he too had hoped for English help during the Franco-Prussian War. At the base camp
Carl A. Kroclz Library, Cornell University. Photo: Detar Studio
in Rouen Ford and his fellow members of the Welch Regiment were attached to the
Ford on the beach at Les Sablettes, near Toulon, 1935 9th Battalion, and left Rouen on 18 July to join their units. Ford still had not heard
Carl A. Kroclz Library, Cornell University where he would be sent, though he thought it would be 'presumably in the front line'.
With Biala at the Villa Paul, Cap Brun, c.1934 He wrote to his daughters at the convent, St Leonards-on-Sea, what he probably
imagined would be his last letter (squeezed on to an army letter-card), hoping to regain
Janice Bia/a
their sympathy:
Ford in Toulon, 1932, painted by Janice Biala
Janice Bia/a My dear Kids
Ford receiving his honorary doctorate at Olivet College, Michigan, 19 June 1938. I am just going up to the firing line-so that seems a proper moment to write to you both
The College president, Joseph Brewer, is in the middle. though I do not seem to have much to say-Or rather, I have so much that it w'1 be no use
beginning. So take it all as said. I was looking thro' the dedication of the book called Ancient
Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University
Lights that I wrote for you, the other day. I don't think I want to change it or add to it. Read
Ford with the novelist Dorothy Speare, March 1937 it again yourselves if anything happens to me. You know I have always loved you both very,
Saturday Revie1v of Literature very dearly- but I cd not wrangle for you. I took the Commun[ion] this morning & prayed
In the garden of the Villa Paul, c. 1932 for you both. Pray for me.1
Janice Bia/a
When Christina sent the original to Katharine in 1969 she did not remember having
Ford on his 1939 visit to Greensboro, N.C. seen it before. If she had, perhaps she would not have felt so strongly that Ford was
Daily News, Greensboro, NC. indifferent to her ('I have always had such an inferiority complex myself that it never
occurred to me that anything I did mattered to him at all').
Ford's friend and fellow officer Timothy Sugrue described him as 'a big, florid,
heavy, unhealthy looking man of about 40 and in 1916 rather old for a junior infantry
officer': 'He was most anxi_ous to obtain front line experience (and no doubt inspira
tion) but Colonel Cooke, the then C.O., would not allow him, on account of his age,
to go up to the front with the men much to H's disappointment.'2 Instead he was
stationed with the battalion transport, near Becourt Wood, just behind the front line
2 l 9 l 6: THE SOMME AND SHELL-SHOCK 1916: THE SOMME AND SHELL-SHOCK 3
near Albert. This was at the bottom of 'Sausage Valley' (named after the German en_~f!l).',_igq.or~g "!e for the time, doing dreadful stunts--God knows what-all around
observation balloons hanging over it) in which the 9th Welch had seen heavy losses me .... Immense shapes in grey-white cagoules and sh;ouds, ·michlng and mowing and
during the grisly battle of Mametz Wood, and the Allied attempts to advance up the whispei:ing horrible plans to one another!
valley to La Boisselle. The battle of the Somme had begun on l July. The heaviest As Arthur l\1i~eJ].er rightly notes of this passage: 'Out of these horrors he made
fighting took place on the first day, when the British Army suffered the blackest day
Christopher Tietjens' nightmare of forgetting.' Ford combines the forgetting of his
in its history: almost 60,000 casualties, over 21,000 of whom were killed in battle or
name with another incid~nt that occurred at Corbie: 'When I was in hospital a man
died of wounds. By the time the battle ended on 14 November the Allied casualties
three beds from me died very hard, blood pouring thro' bandages & he himself crying
exceeded 600,000, of whom over 400,000 were British. The German losses were as
perpetually, "Faith! Faith! Faith!" It was very disagreeable as long as he had a cha~ce
heavy. The shelling was still intense by the end of July, as Ford wrote to Lucy
oflife-but one lost all interest and forgot him when one.heard he had none.'6 In Some
Masterman on the 28th:
Do Not~...:.....· the wounded man rolls out of his bed, comes over to Tietjens and tries to
st{.a_ngle him:
We are right up in the middle of the strafe, but only with the 1st line transport. We get
shelled two or three times a day, otherwise it is fairly dull-indeed, being shelled is fairly
He let out a number of ear-piercing shrieks and lots of orderlies came and pulled him off
dull, after the first once or twice. Otherwise it is all very interesting-filling in patches of
me and sat all over him. Then he began to shout 'Faith!' He shouted:
one's knowledge[ ...] The noise of the bombardment is continuous-so continuous that one
'Faith! ... Faith! ... Faith! ...' at intervals of two seconds, as far as I could tell by my pulse,
gets used to it, as one gets used to the noise in a train and the ear picks out the singing of the
until four in the morning, when he died .... I don't know whether it was a religious
innumerable larks ....3
exhortation or a woman's name, but I disliked him a good deal because he started my
Being out of the front-line trenches didn't mean being out of danger. The battalion tortures, such as they were .... There had been a girl I knew called Faith. Oh, not a love
affair: the daughter of my father's head gardener, a Scotsman. The point is that every time
transport was generally two or three miles behind the Front, within range of the big
he said Faith I asked myself 'Faith ... Faith what?' I couldn't remember the name [. ..] .
guns. As Alan Judd explains, the view that Ford spent all his ti~e 'behind the line' and
(p. 212)
afterwards 'grossly inflated his own role' is misleading; and also ignorant: 'b~g
behind the line did not mean that one was not_ involv!;d in the ai::tion. The great T~-~~~Jies ~a~e 1]etjensjp~_fl! strl!_nggl~t~o!l, lJ!:It they_£annot restore the stability,
rri-a1oriryoftroops- ~t !lny time· were behii0.Jh.e frnntlio~_andJnanY.. nex~.rut.a.t..aU.' the identity, of his orderly world of country house ·hierarchy. The d,oubJi;:;g of the
Whereas a tran~port officer would have hacL.tQ ro3~e _rc::_g_~la! ~~pply runs up to foi:.g2.n~nn ames. .c onveysilowI t is not ~~ly Tietj~ris wliO~wilf n~-t be the same, but-also
the F~~-~-'often along routes that were singled out for shelling'. Ford wrote of 'the hi!!. w.holeJ1.ociety. The version in the novel-and it is typical of Ford's gift for seizing
pro;;-ess of the eternalw alilfi"g that -is War'; and', as Judd remarks, th~ 19j!Jjn~s and the on the given and elaborating its significances-adds to the scene the melodramatic
waltiiig were many men's .'predQ!Ilinant e;x:p~rie!!.c~ of war'. Later f orc;l said he began menace and violence of nightmare. In its context i~e ~~tirely appropriate image for
trans!afing· The Good Soldier into French '.i!:! Becourt-Becordel wq_~q inJJIJy_1916'.4 otherwise incommunicable shocks to the physical and moral senses. The unobtrusive
Either later on in the day he described the bombardment to Lucy Masterman, or the detaii-~f: thepui5e suggests that it is also Tietjens's life which i.s being threatened,
next day, he was 'blown into the ~i_r by something'-a high-explosive shell-and challenged by the cry of humanity delivered with mechanical regularity. The shouting
landed on hiS face, concussed and with a 9am.~g_ed _mqu_th_a nd loosened te~he makes Tietjens ask himself'Faith what?' But for Tietjens, wondering what his life has
concussion erased whole patches of his knowledge: 'I had completely lost my memory amounted to, and what it will be like after the war, the question is also 'Faith in what?'
so that [ ...] three weeks of~y life are compl~tely dead to me.' He even forgot his own Should he govern his lifeJ1y.religjous values, or the exhortations of desire? These are
name for thirtY::§i~ ho_urs. Hi~ teeth beca~~-'very bad', affecting hit> 'whole condition'. Ford's questions too, and they take-~; b;tlto' The Good Soldier -;,-;..eil-;;f orwards into
When the battalion went into rest camp he ape!i<:_d_to the medical officer for treatment. Ford's post-war life.
'He sent me in an ambulance to a Field Ambulance', Ford told Masterman: 'the F.A. The later reminiscence of the hospital (in Mightier Than the Sword) goes back still
sent me to C.[asualty] C.[learing] S.[tation] 36; C.C.S. 36 had no appliances for earlier. Not only does the horror of the experience go into the making of Parade's End,
treating me & sent me back to the F.A.; the F.A. sent me to C.C.S. wh. had no but, as Ford later came to recognize, the form that experience took itself came out of
appliances for treating me, & ordered me to report to H.Q of the 4th Army.'5 In one his childhood fears. Once again, at its most charged moments his writing reaches back
yf his last books he remembered the harrowing fears and confusions of the aftermath: to his formative experiences, and to his earlier writings about them:
l(ifter I was blown up at Becourt-Becordel in '16 and having lost my memory, lay in the It has only just Qccurred to me that that Corbie-phobia of my middle years must have taken
1
Casualty Gearing Station in Corbie, with the enemy planes dropping bombs all over it and at least its shape from my childhood's dreads. I might well, I mean, have had as my chief
the dead Red Cross nurses being carried past my bed, I used to worry agonizedly about what dread in those white huts surmounted with the Red Cross, the fear of being taken prisoner
my name could be-and have a day-nightmare[ ...] I thought I had been taken prisoner by by the Germans-but I doubt if my imagined Germans would have taken just that gigantic
the enemy forces and was lying on the ground, manacled hand and foot ... and with the miching and mowing shape if it hadn't been for the nature of my childhood's ambience. I was
1916: THE SOMME AND SHELL-SHOCK 1916: THE SOMME AND SHELL-SHOCK 5
4
then horribly imbued by those people with a sense of my Original Sin so that I used to have The sudden realization that he too loves Nancy is only one example of how Dowell
innumerable fears when the candle was put out. ... But that was the worst of all · · · the comes to see himself as following Edward: 'In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive
dread that Mr. Ruskin or Mr. Carlyle or Mr. Holman Hunt-<>r even Herr Richard myself following the lines of Edward Ashburnham. I suppose that I should really like
Wagner!-should with their dreadful eyes come into a room wh~r~ I was alone and where to be a polygamist; with Nancy, and with Leonora, and with Maisie Maidan and
there was no other exit ... and, fixing me with their dreadful, shmmg eyes ... God knows possibly even with Florence. I am no doubt like every other man; only, probably
what then .... (pp. 265-6) because of my American origin I am fainter' (p. 272). However, when he shifts from
That 'God knows' suggests that the transfixing eyes are the sight of God, passing saying he is 'like' Ashburnham, to his culminating declaration that he is the other man
judgement on the sinful child. 'Faith!' has a more than merely figurative significance ('I can't conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham-and that I
love him because he was just myself' (p. 291) ), his exaggeration provokes a dual
for Ford at Corbie. .
It was Charlotte the housemaid who allayed his fears of 'the awful, monumental, response: a sceptical assent. Dowell's words seem to reveal his passion for.Edwar.d to
minatorily bearded tumultuous and moral Great of those days' with narrative, hun:ian him rather as ~~war4'.~§p~~£!1J?!.~~ his feeli11gs J~y-int~--c~n~ciousness. And
izing them through tales of their foibles and exploits: 'The great seen from t~e h~en yet in most other ways he is so unlike Edward (not_least-in:Ilot being loved by any of
room were thus diminished for me[. ..] Insupportably moral they were, and I 1magme tht: !>90k's women}that his daim to ldeiiiity~nds risible-or ironic-at the same
the sense of original sin that in those days possessed me in their presences would have time as it sounds plausible and heartfelt.
overwhelmed me altogether but for the moral support that the anecdotes in the linen The problem o_f l9e.~ ~~-i.de~~~cati<?!! dominates Ford's writing from A Call
room afforded me.'7 The stories give Ford moral support against the insupportably onwards: notably m the senes of autobiographies, and in the late novels of doubles and
moral; and in telling the story about the stories, he is contemplating a possible source m~et;Qj~~.ntl!_i~s. The increasing importance of Arthur Marwood has also been
of his own anecdotal energies; registering how narrative can master fear and menace, recognized. Marwood's death impressed him more profoundly than any since those of
offering psychological protection. In an unpublished essay on 'Great Writers', written his father and grandfather. Ford started writing elegiacally about him immediately
soon after the war, he suggests that his childhood sense of sin came from his failure to after the war, and impli<:itly ackno\\'._ledg_t;c!Nm as the mcist significant source for the
enjoy the writings of the moral Great. Thus he is also analysing the origins of the kind ch~r_!l~ter of Tietjens when he wrote in the prefatory letter to No More Parades: 'Even
of writer he has become: someone who opposes moral intimidation by humanizing then-it must have been in September, 1916, when I was in a region called the Salient,
and I remember the very spot where the idea came to me-I said to myself: How
anecdote.8
So at Corbie when the candle of his intellect and sanity seemed to have all but gone would all this look in the eyes ofX ...- already dead, along with all English Tories?'
ou~indeed-;hen his lifeh°"7idnearly ended- his m1nd~p~e_veiii:~d~ itseTfTroin0emi (p. 7). This was soon enough after his discharge from hospital to indicate that he was
0verwhe~<[by going back ove; his past life. Unable to remember himself, can he probably thinking about Marwood at Corbie too. Thomas Moser argues that
have faith in his own identity? With three weeks'Simply erased from his life, can he 'Manyood, in dying, would save Ford's life by making possible Ford's mad and
belie;ei~ himself as a continuous person? His shell-shock duplicated ~h~ <J~!~ of detailed imitation of the man'.10 But the implications that Ford could not have lived if
dual identity that had already been his subject in boqks like The Young Lovell and The Marwood hadn't died, that he wasn't already imitating him before his death, and that
Ford ever stopped being an artist rather than a convalescent country gentleman are
Good Soldier.
c . themselves absurd. There is a difference between the pious wishfulness of imagining
When Dowell in The Good Soldier amazes himself by saymg, w"ith out be"m g consc1. 0us a close friend as still alive, and the pathology of thinking you have become them. There
of it that Florence's suicide leaves him free to marry Nancy, he comments: 'It is as if is evidence that his thoughts about identity and exchange have an even more signifi
one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious of the other' (p. 123). cant source in Ford's own narrow escape from death, when he was almost hit by a shell
This dual personality makes Dowell Edward's double too, for earlier the same evening only two-and-a-half months after Marwood's death. It is not just that the near coinci
Ashburnham also recognizes and expresses his unconscious passion for Nancy as he dence of dates may have prompted thoughts about why it was that he had been
speaks to her in the 'dark park' outside the Casino. The manuscript originally empha reprieved and Marwood had not. The first prose he wrote after the war, which has
sized the doubling of the two passions, but even with the explicit connection deleted, been neglected by his critics and biographers, indicates that the concussion and
the similarity is unmistakable. The deleted passage is restored in italics: · resulting 'shell-shock' radically disturbed Ford's sense of identity.
An unpublished fragment, 'True Love & a G.C.M.', sheds revealing light on how
And then, it appears, something happ~ned to Edward. Ashburnham~something very similar
the experience of shell-shock forced Ford back to his childhood memories. It was
to what happened to me a little{?} later in the same evening. As far as I can make tt out the other
written between September 1918 and March 1919, and shows how he was connecting
half of hil dual personality spoke- to the girl. He assured me-and I see no reason for
overwhelming dread with bearded and looming Germanic figures soon after his ex
disbelieving him- that until that moment he had had no idea whatever of caring for the girl.
periences at Corbie. This intriguing work de§_Cl".ibes Gabriel Morton's P?-i:tial recu
He said that he had regarded her exactly as he would have regarded a daughter. He certainly
loved her, but with a very deep, very tender and very tranquil love [ ...] But of more than peration from shell-shoclr,iiis fears for his fragile s~nity, and his post-w;.r alienation
that he had been totally unconscious.9 from both -the army and society. One reason for its abandonment is probably that the
-
I 9 I 6: THE SOMME AND SHELL-SHOCK 7
6 1916: THE SOMME AND SHELL-SHOCK
not the worst shock any one ever had between the 4/8/14 and the 28/6/19.' An
ms pages of manuscript make little progress tow~rds describing eithe~ the 'T~ue
extravagant claim indeed about that multitudinously shocking war. What caused the
Love'-Morton's affair with a married woman, Hilda Cohen-or the G.C.M. -
shock? While Gringoire is dozing in a dug-out, a gun-wheel caught its spokes in the
General Court Martial. 11
corrugated iron roof, lifted it, and dropped it again. Something like this probably
The other reason why Ford may not have wanted to complete and publish the no:el
happened to Ford; and the extravagant emphasis is battling against the knowledge that
is precisely the reason why it is of such biographic inte.rest. It.is an extremely candid,
no form of words can reproduce that terror of crashing awake to what you think must
largely autobiographical work. It is not only his most 1~med1ate effort to render the
be your death. Gringoire tells the story 'because it probably accounted for his imme
anxieties of war, but it also promises to become one of his mor~ suc~essful treatments
diately subsequent exultation; it was, I suppose, so good to be just alive after that'. The
of a relationship between father and son. His little contact with his own fathe~ ge~s
subsequent exultation almost certainly happened to Ford too before he was blown up
reflected in the wav fathers tend to be marginal, or replaced by surrogates, m his
at Becourt, and is another example of the strange mental states that constant fear can
novels. (Henry Ma;tin, driven partly by his father to attempt suic'.de in Th~ R~sh Act,
produce. Gringoire walks downhill through the thistles 'with immense, joyful strides':
is a rare exception.) However, it is as if once the book reach~d a pomt at_ which 1t could
only become more revelatory, more self-analytic, and more mtensely filial, For.d broke And an innumerable company of swallows flew round him, waist high, just brushing the
off. What he was able to salvage from it re-surfaces in Jethro Croyd's wart.1m_e e~­ thistledown. 'They were so near,' Gringoire said, 'that they brushed my hands, and they
extended so far that I could see nothing else. It is one of the five things of the war that I really
periences in another unpublished (though complete) novel,. 'Mr ~ro~d'; as T1eqen~ s
see, for it was like walking, buoyantly, in the pellucid sunlight, waist-high through a sea of
shell-shock; and in the psychological explorations of hauntingly s1gmficant memories
unsurpassed and unsurpassable azure. I felt as if I were a Greek god. It was like a miracle.15
-in No Enemy.12
After he had written most of Parade's End he recalled: 'As soon as the war was over No Enemy's impressionist psychology of war is organized around these five visions of
I wrote a novel. But when I came to read it over I found that I had been writing like landscapes and people. Characteristically, Ford's feelings are refracted through litera
a madman. The book was not readable. I suppressed it.' If Ford is referring to 'True ture, and combine his reading of W. H. Hudson watching thistledown, Gilbert White
Love & a G.C.M.' here, there is one passage in particular which suggests what he watching birds, and St Francis communing with them. It was, perhaps, the first of
might have later found it necessary to suppress: 'He would wonder if his mind differed several intimations that he had escaped the death he expected and dreaded. That
in its action from that of other men-but he never had the courage to ask other men. ex~ltation is the sign of a reincarnation. 'It would be interesting to know what that
He never had the courage because he suspected that it might mean that he was a little class of feeling comes from', speculates the narrator: 'possibly from some sort of
mad- it might be a symptom of brain disease; so that ifhe revealed it by questions to atavistic throwback to the days when the gods were nearer.' It also became a focal
others it might be put about that he had queer brain symptoms.'13.<?ne oft~e mental moment in Parade's End, when Marwood's reincarnation, Christopher Tietjens, has a
actions he is worrying about here is the panic that results from military. act10n-:--an? similar vision of the blue of swallows' backs: an omen of his ability to assert his own
more disconcertingly, from periods of inaction in the line. As he was ~is~ovenng.' it powers in the world. In a later novel, The Rash Act, Ford's hero takes a boat out to sea
was 'that eternal "waiting to report" that takes up I 121113ths of ones time dunng intending to commit suicide; but he is caught in a storm, and instinctively saves
war'. (Compare the refrain of Wilfred Owen's poem 'Exposure': 'But noth'.ng h~p­ himself from death. Ford himself may have been surprised on the Western Front by
pens'; much of the writing about the Front is perplexed b_y the diff~rent ~ays,m which how much stronger was his unconscious desire for self-preservation than his desire for
'nothing' can happen.) 'There will be no man who survives of Hts Maiesty s Ar~ed death.16
Forces' Ford wrote later, 'that shall not remember those eternal hours when Time Much of his war fiction has at its heart the experience and survival of fear, including
' h . ' '
itself stayed still as the true image of bloody War! ...' The emp as1s on ~oura~e fear of fear and fear of cowardice. Samuel Putnam reported one of Ford's war remin
stresses the related, but more shaming fear that the other men would thmk him iscences of the late 1920s as an example of how the 'born story-teller' 'carried his
cowardly. In all his war prose Ford writes penetratingly about the ~attle to square the fictionizing over into real life':
conventional image of stiff-upper-lip resilience and nonchalance with the overw~el_m­
'I remember,' he is saying. 'It was in No Man's Land. We were making a night attack. I had
ing eruptions of uncontrollable panic. He is acutely sensitive to the. war's undermm~ng
gone ahead to reconnoiter. I was crawling along on my---er- stomach when suddenly, above
of conventional assumptions about what made for courage, manlmess, or cowardice:
the roar of battle, I heard a sound- it was larks singing. Then I looked up and saw that it was
'The most you could afford to say as to your mental state was that you had got the wind light as day. From the bursting shells, y'know. The larks had seen the light and thought it
up like Hell. You could say that to any extent; indeed it was an assertion of courage to was morning.'17
be able to say with extravagant emphasis that you had got the wind frightfully up on
14 When Putnam told Aldington the story, they thought they saw the light of Ford's
occasions. It meant you had been in the devil of a tight place. '
larks. 'Richard bellowed. "Just imagine!" he exclaimed. "Just imagine Ford crawling
No Enemy recounts- with extravagant emphasis- a moment when Gringoire,
anywhere on that stomach of his!"' Ford's written stories are all so much subtler than
Ford's alter ego, got the wind frightfully up by mistake. 'He thought the b?t~om of
his conversational ones (usually reported in order to satirize him), so one must be wary
Hell had dropped out. It was his worst shock of the war. I shouldn't wonder 1f it were