Dr Andrew Radford. Paper 18 - Ford Madox Ford: Lecture Handout
1. It has become a critical commonplace to regard Ford Madox Ford’s work as inferior to, not as advanced as, overshadowed by, the art of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot? Ford is not usually considered as either a modernist writer or as a novelist of questing energy who redefined the processes of narrative? Modernism was at least in part an assault on formal unity and completeness, and there is thus surely no reason to exclude Ford completely, as most critics have done, from the most exciting period of modern literary history? It seems more useful to think of modernism, at least in the specific sense of the 1920s with which I use it, as a cultural milieu that affected all writers of the time? Thus Ford was in a unique position to combine the aesthetics of his Victorian/Edwardian upbringing with the avant-garde experiments going on around him in Paris in the Twenties?
2. The Good Soldier signals the demise of the Edwardian gentleman, a good soldier of sorts whose own characteristic emotional reticence functions as a kind of silent, unrewarded virtue?
I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down - whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself. (The Good Soldier, 19)
3. For a pre-War text, The Good Soldier employs very radical disjunctions of
narrative time: leaping from 1904 to 1913; recounting Florence’s illness
at one point and later going back to it and showing it as a sham; even using
the coincidental date of August 4 as a kind of historical flattening device;
its repetition suggesting that the temporal sequence of the calendar is merely
one long repetition of the same day? But behind all this is the eighteen real
months it takes Dowell to recite his tale, and during the final chapters of
The Good Soldier the narrative is almost completely controlled by the “impressions”
of the hapless Dowell as he organises the various versions of Ashburnham’s
final days? But the crucial fact is that Ford is always in control of the temporal
disjunctions and eventually defines their limits around his central character?
Whilst The Good Soldier successfully argues that the traditional sources of
narrative stability - the heroic abstractions of courage, virtue and truth -
are ruined; the “impressionist” self can be proposed as a new way
of organising and unifying a narrative?
4. Dowell seeks out Edward Ashburnham as the ideal opposite to the drab, spiritless modernity of America?
Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he was - the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character? (The Good Soldier, 89)
The final question mark is the telling feature of The Good Soldier. It is a misgiving that language may not be the stable, universal thing of the propaganda poster? Ford draws attention to the way the breakdown in the validity of terms like “heroism” (demolishing the conventional stances of military heroics, the exhilaration and glory of patriotic self-sacrifice) is related to the creation of a narrative form in which there is no single, shared account of events which is “true”?
5. Parade’s End can be read within a widely defined cultural context, where certain modernist techniques such as “impressionism” can productively combine with a more traditional emphasis on the unified narrative? The problem for Ford in Parade’s End, and this may be one reason why commentators tend to scoff at his experimental achievements, was that he tried to reach a universal audience with techniques that have an intrinsic propensity towards an undermining of universals (such as exposing the hollowness of English virtue, truth, integrity, courage, the unified self?). Much of the uniquely interesting form of Parade’s End is due to these, ultimately incompatible, aesthetics that could only interact upon each other in the distinctive literary historical moment of the 1920s?
6. One of Ford’s main preoccupations is with literary impressionism. Ford wrote
The point is that Impressionism, whether it be prose, or verse, or painting, or sculpture, is the record of a moment; it is not a sort of rounded, annotated record of a set of circumstances that happened ten years ago - or ten minutes. It might even be the impression of the moment - but it is the impression, not the corrected chronicle. (“Poetry and Drama”, 2 (June 6 1914), 174, cited in Hynes, Three Dedicatory Letters to Parade’s End, p. 516)
Ford understands that literature is an attempt to render the experience of the moment as fully, as vividly, as possible? Reading Parade’s End as an “impressionistic” whole opens up a whole range of exciting new angles for critical inquiry: Ford grasped that the war’s most permanent legacy, aside from its physical destruction, lay in altering the forms in which man saw, arranged and communicated his own experience?
7. Generically, Parade’s End moves between soldier’s memoir and
modernist fiction? It did not appear as a single volume until 1950. Although
much of its war material is based on Ford’s own experiences at the front,
its central character is only partly autobiographical, and it is quite unlike
the most famous soldiers’ narratives of the Great War. Even in the sections
set in battle in No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up, in method Parade’s
End more closely resembles Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915-38),
a book Ford admired, than Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
or Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929). Parade’s End continues
with more savage energy than The Good Soldier a sustained assault on a particular
brand of Englishness embodied by his central protagonist Christopher Tietjens?
8. In a study of Henry James first published on New Year’s Day, 1914 Ford
had proclaimed himself “a Tory mad about historic continuity” (Henry
James, 203). But by the end of 1922, when Ford embarked on the composition of
Parade’s End, he claimed that he had “arrived at the stage”
of finding the Tory gentleman “an insupportable phenomenon” (It
Was the Nightingale, 199). Ford’s imaginative approach in Parade’s
End is anything but a glorification of medieval feudalism? Ford shows Tietjens’s
austere brand of Englishness as both stubborn and ridiculous because Tietjens
is passive in his goodness, helpless in his own assumed dignity?
9. In the hedge: Our Lady’s bedstraw, dead-nettle, bachelor’s button
(but in Sussex they call it ragged robin my dear), so interesting! Cowslip (paigle,
you know, from old French pasque, meaning Easter); burr, burdock (farmer that
thy wife may thrive, but no burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers,
of course, over; black briony; wild clematis: later it’s old man’s
beard; purple loose-strife. (That our young maids long purples call and literal
shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil)...
“God’s England!” Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good
humour. “ ‘Land of Hope and Glory!” - F natural descending
to tonic, G major: chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common
chord of C major...All absolutely correct! Across the counties came the sound
of bugles that his father knew....Pipe exactly right. It must be: pipe of Englishman
of good birth (Some Do Not...,105-6)
10. If Tietjens the feudal landlord and heir apparent to the sizeable Groby
estate, is “the novel’s essential ideal” (Snitow, 209) then
we have to discount how this figure is modified by all kinds of deflationary
devices; the principles which he has been taught to respect are rendered with
amused detachment?
you had to set to the tenantry an example of chastity, sobriety, probity, or you could not take their beastly money. You provided them with the best Canadian seed corn; with agricultural experiments suited to their soils; you sat on the head of your agent; you kept their buildings in repair...The money that comes out of those poor devils’ pockets must go back into the land so that the estate...may grow richer (A Man Could Stand Up-, 635)
11. The way landscape functions within this debate is suggested by Ford’s
imaginative reconstruction of the English past. The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906-1908)
comprises Ford’s version of what he saw as the great schism in English
history, when the medieval Catholic aristocracy was ousted from power by the
new, essentially urban, Protestant class in the sixteenth-century. Katherine
Howard believes:
If these [Protestants] had their farms again they would surely return to the old faith, and she was minded to do away with the sheep. For it was the sheep that had brought discontent to England. To make way for these fleeces the ploughmen had been dispossessed. (The Fifth Queen Crowned, 432)
12. In A Man Could Stand Up-, Tietjens looks out on no-man’s land:
The admirable trenches were perfectly efficiently fitted up with spy-holes. For himself he always disliked them. You thought of a rifle bullet coming smack through them and being guided by the telescope into your right eye. (A Man Could Stand Up-, 552)
13. The image of Tietjens’ brain recurs at crucial points in the narrative.
In the second part of Some Do Not..., shell-shock leads to the loss of both
his highly retentive memory and the evaluative system with which he had viewed
and scrupulously organised his surroundings: “it’s as if a certain
area of my brain had been wiped white.” (Some Do Not...,170) Throughout
the tetralogy frequent references to his “goggle-eyed” hubris reflect
his endeavours to reshape the external world visually, as part of the intellectual
inheritance of his gentry class, a task made almost impossible given the stressed,
hurried, crowded life of the trenches:
In the trench you could see nothing and noise rushed like black angels gone mad; solid noise that swept you off your feet....Swept your brain off its feet. Something else took control of it. You became second-in-command of your own soul (A Man Could Stand Up-, 557).
14. In A Man Could Stand Up-, warfare brutally undercuts the traditional relationship between language and landscape, the country gentleman and authority, seen in terms of social privilege, stoicism under extreme duress, and aesthetic patterning? The earth, far from being the fixed entity dominated by the observing Tietjens in Some Do Not..., here actually threatens to engulf the protagonist and his beleaguered men? Yet in Ford’s war poetry, “our land” (England) also allows the meaningless flux of experience to be momentarily structured? The notion becomes a comforting linguistic and political anchor, played off against the “sharp” obliteration of self that epitomises the “the fields of Flanders”:
It is because our land is beautiful and green and comely,
Because our farms are quiet and thatched and homely,
Because the trout stream dimples by the willow,
Because the water-lilies float upon the ponds.
[...]
That we shall endure the swift, sharp torture of dying,
Or the humiliation of not dying (“Footsloggers”, Qtd in Judd, Ford
Madox Ford, 264)
15. In the final novel of the tetralogy The Last Post, Ford
attempts to reconstitute experience around what he regards as the only coherent
force to survive the derangement of World War I: the English countryside whose
features are “pleasant and green and comely. It would breed true.”
(Last Post, 814) The novel comprises seven “impressionistic” voices
organised symmetrically around that of Christopher’s elder brother Mark,
by now a paralysed, all-but-dumb and dying man. He is the dominant consciousness
whose silence removes him from normal social contact in a novel preoccupied
with absences and subliminal presences; coming to terms with vacancy, expectation
and mortality?
Further Reading:
Andreach, R. J. The Slain and Resurrected God: Conrad, Ford and the Christian
Myth. New York, 1970.
Armstrong, Paul. The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding the Representation
in James, Conrad and Ford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.
Auden, W. H. “Review of Parade’s End.” Mid-Century, 22 (February
1961), 3-10.
Bradbury, Malcolm. “The Denuded Place: War and Form in Parade’s
End and USA”. In Holger Klein (Ed.). The First World War in Fiction: A
Collection of Critical Essays. London: Macmillan,1976. 193-209.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York and London: Oxford
UP, 1977.
Gordon Jr., Ambrose. The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford.
Austin, Texas: 1964.
Green, Robert. Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981.
Judd, Alan. Ford Madox Ford. London: Collins, 1990.
Moore, Gene. “The Tory in the Time of Change: Social Aspects of Ford Madox
Ford’s Parade’s End”, Twentieth Century Literature, 28:1 (Spring
1982), 49-68.
Moser, Thomas C. The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1980.
Radford, Andrew. ‘The Gentleman’s Estate in Ford’s Parade’s
End’, Essays in Criticism 52: 4 (October 2002), 314-332.
Snitow, Ann Barr. Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1984.
Tate, Trudi. “Rumour, Propaganda, and Parade’s End.” Essays
in Criticism, 47: 4 (October 1997): 332-353.
Trotter, David. “Hueffer’s Englishness.” Agenda, 27: 4, 28:
1 (1992), 148-155.
Galef, David. “Forster, Ford, and the New Novel of Manners.” In
John Richetti (Ed.) The Columbia History of the British Novel. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994. 818-841.
Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine
1908-1922. New York: Cambridge UP, 1984.
---------------. Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic
Form from Conrad to Woolf. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.