Madox Ford The Good Soldier

A Tale Of Passion
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-913111-67-0
Verlag: Galley Beggar Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

'This is the saddest story I have ever heard' - so begins The Good Soldier, the novel that Ford Madox Ford regarded as his best - and with good reason. It isn't perhaps as sad as the storyteller claims - but it is a lesson narration, the use of flashback, and literary impressionism. It's also, crucially, a gripping story, brilliantly told; a shocking and constantly surprising tale of marital strife, sexual intrigue, deep deception, fathomless mystery and tragic death. There is nothing else like it. It is a modernist classic and one of the finest novels of the twentieth century. This edition features a new introduction by Sam Jordison. It details Ford Madox Ford's turbulent, fascinating life and career, explores his place in posterity, recounts his many loves and frequent feuds, and explains why he too was such an unreliable narrator of his own life story. The introduction also includes a critical commentary on The Good Soldier itself. It explains its influence as a work of pioneering modernism, investigates the many narrative tricks, conceits and deceits employed by Ford and makes the case for why this book should be recognised as one of the greatest stories ever told.

Ford Madox Ford was born in 1871 and lived until 1939. He wrote dozens of acclaimed novels and works of criticism and literary biography, as well as founding The English Review and the transatlantic review, where he was widely recognised as one of the finest editors of the 20th century.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Madox Ford, Ford

Leseproben

INTRODUCTON

‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I’m now an old man and I’ll die without making a name like Hemingway.’

So said an aging Ford Madox Ford to the journalist George Seldes. ‘At this climax,’ Seldes tells us, ‘Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.’

That was in 1932. Ford died seven years later, on 26 June, 1939, in Deauville, France; a man whose time had been and gone, whose world was about to be smashed apart by war, whose books were falling out of print and whom almost everyone had forgotten. Picture him: despondent, in poverty, alone, watching his fame and his name – the very name he had chosen for himself – fading away into nothing.

A sad story. Or at least, a sad story if it’s told that way. But, if there’s one thing we learn from , it’s that such narratives should always be doubted. That there are always other ways of looking at things. After all, here you are, reading these lines. Ford is still a going concern, remembered now as a pre-eminent modernist with a posthumous reputation burnished by writers and critics alike. In fact, Graham Greene got to work within a week of Ford’s death, writing in about his ‘magnificent books’ and declaring, correctly, that ‘a posterity which would care for good writing’ would care for Ford.

It’s easy to imagine that one of Ford’s own characters, so often sceptical, so often doubtful, might have a sardonic remark to make about the author’s apparent misreading of his destiny. But, if we’re thinking in the Ford mode, we must also imagine him complicating the picture further; taking us back over the same ground again, making us question our first and second impressions, undermining our suppositions and presenting the case anew. For the truth – as Ford so often demonstrates in his fiction – changes, depending on the angle from which you approach it.

It’s not just Ford’s posthumous reputation that that George Seldes quote misrepresents. He was talking to Ford towards the end of what might just as easily have been described as an eventful and successful career.

So:

Ford was born on 17 December 1873, in Surrey. His father was a German emigre called Francis Hueffer. His mother was Catherine Madox Brown, a model and artist and the daughter of the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown (whose biography our Ford would eventually write). The couple gave their first son the name Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer.

It was a name to contend with – and the younger Ford got going early. He published his first book, a fairy story called , in 1891, at the annoyingly young age of 17. His first novel – – came in 1892, when he was 19. He also embarked on one of the other great projects of his life – keeping company with some of the most important writers of his age. In 1894, at 21-years-old, he set up house on the south coast near Winchelsea (after eloping with a schoolfriend, Elsie Martindale). There he became the neighbour – and soon the friend – of H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. He even began a collaboration with the latter. Ford and Conrad decided that if they combined their considerable talents, they were bound to produce a hit. In 1901 they published a science fiction novel called . It wasn’t as good as the sum of its illustrious parts. Nor was it particularly bad. But it didn’t sell. So next, they tried for a potboiler about smugglers and pirates called . That too was neither good nor bad and, when it emerged in 1903, it was also a commercial failure.

This failure of , coupled, so many scholars speculate (although nothing is certain) with a torrid affair with his sister-in-law, Mary Martindale, drove Ford to nervous exhaustion. In 1904, he went to Germany for a nerve cure (an experience that provided some of the emotional and physical landscape for ) and when he came back, his fortunes picked up. He wrote a study of the capital, , which sold well and was well reviewed (it ‘boomed in the newspapers’ said Ford). He followed up in quick succession with (1906), (1907) and (1908), a successful trilogy of historical romances about Katharine Howard, wife of Henry VIII.

He also found the time to be, as Graham Greene put it, ‘the best literary editor England has ever had’. In 1908, the 30-something Ford established and began to edit , a journal championing (and deeply influencing) modernism and encouraging new forms of poetry (which Ford insisted should be ‘as good as prose’). debuted D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Norman Douglas. Ford also published W.B. Yeats, Henry James, May Sinclair, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad. In fact, the last five writers in that list appeared together in one single edition of the magazine. Ford’s own writing more than held its own in that remarkable crowd. Ezra Pound also reckoned him the ‘finest critic’ in English.

Yet just as Ford’s literary reputation was reaching new heights, his private life began to fall apart. By 1909, he had begun a relationship with the novelist Violet Hunt, but Elsie Martindale (who later became a Catholic) refused him a divorce. The dispute continued for several years, and in 1912 Elsie even brought a libel case when Violet was named in the press as ‘Mrs Ford Madox Hueffer’ – a title which Elsie still claimed for herself.

And here I have to pause. The details of Ford’s extraordinarily complicated love life would take up several volumes of their own. In fact, they already have. Jean Rhys featured her disastrous 1920s affair with him in her 1928 novel . Rhys’s husband Jean Lenglet also wrote about Ford and Rhys in a Dutch novel called , in 1932. During this period, Ford was also in a relationship with Stella Bowen, who wrote in her autobiography that Ford had ‘a genius for creating confusion and a nervous horror of dealing with the results’. Ford himself also wrote about the mess of his love life in in 1931. And that’s just a sampling, from a few years when he was deep into his career as an amorous adventurist.

Back in 1912, meanwhile, Ford’s reputation was taking a battering. But that didn’t put him off further amorous adventures. By 1913, he was dictating to Brigit Patmore, a writer, hostess and lover of numerous poets, poetesses and authors. Ford was very keen to be among them. Violet Hunt jealously noted in her diary the ‘flattery’ Ford paid to her rival. She suggested that Patmore’s husband must have known she had been ‘up to’ something. In May 1914 she also wrote: ‘Brigit came & went. Is this the day they sat & cried all day silently & I left them alone?’

It’s easy to see parallels between this particular ménage à quatre and the marital difficulties Ford describes so strikingly in . It’s also easy (and fun!) to imagine the infatuated writer hoping his novel might impress Brigit as she typed it out. Certainly, it impressed him. At least, it did in 1927, when he wrote in an introduction to a new edition of the book:

No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity, if taking down one of his ten-year-old books he exclaims: ‘Great heavens, did I write as well as that then?’ for the implication always is that one does not any longer write so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.

Ford, as he so often was, is being a little deceptive here. He actually continued to write productively until his death. The only gaps came in the years eaten up by World War I. They were hard years. By then in his 40s, Ford should have been counted as too old to serve, but managed to join the army in 1915. He was injured by a shell in the Somme, exposed to gas at Ypres and eventually invalided home, suffering mentally, physically, emotionally.

In 1919 he changed his name from the Germanic Ford Hueffer to the more English, but still idiosyncratic, Ford Madox Ford and by 1923 he was back at the forefront of the avant-garde, working on in Paris where he published his lover Jean Rhys, along with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. In 1927, the year the 54-year-old Ford was claiming to worry about being an ‘extinct volcano’, he was actually in the middle of publishing another great masterpiece, , the mighty four-volume work that appeared between 1924 and 1928. Malcolm Bradbury has declared it ‘the finest English novel’ about the Great War and Julian Barnes has called it ‘masterly’.

brought Ford new fame in America, and a few good years, before the Depression hit. After that, Ford’s sales began to decline and he sometimes struggled to find a publisher. Yet, even if he was reduced, at the end, to Bohemian poverty, he was still a going concern. , the last book published in his lifetime, came out in 1938, just months before he died....