War Prose

Charlotte Taylor reviews two Ford Madox Ford volumes, Critical Essays and War Prose
American Scholar, Summer 2004 volume 73
"I love sweeping dicta; they awaken trains of thought, they suggest," wrote Ford Madox Ford. In Critical Essays, a new selection of Ford's previously uncollected writings on literature and art, there are sweeping dicta aplenty. "The object of a work of art is to carry conviction," he proclaims, and his statements consistently carry the force of his own conviction, even if they are not always perfectly consistent. No matter what his subject, Ford wanted above all to provoke the reader to think.
Born Ford Hermann Hueffer in 1873, Ford changed his name in 1919 to distance himself from his estranged wife and because "a Teutonic name is in these days disagreeable." He wrote almost thirty novels--the best-known is The Good Soldier, published in 1915 - but he fell just short of establishing himself as a reigning creative talent of his age. Still, on the strength of his work as an editor, his collaborations (he wrote two novels with Joseph Conrad), and his many friendships with other writers, including Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, he is a central figure in the history of literary modernism.
Ford's maternal grandfather was the painter Ford Madox Brown; Dante Gabriel Rossetti was his uncle by marriage. By birthright, then, Ford was a part of the intellectual life of turn-of-the-century London. But he had mixed feelings about the nostalgic medievalism of his pre-Raphaelite forebears, and he was always looking ahead for the next important literary innovation. He insisted that new means of expression were needed in a modern world where men found themselves overwhelmed by "an infinite number of little and transitory facts--the tram-tickets of life, as it were."
In a 1914 review, for example, he objected to the archaic diction of W. B.
Yeats's early poetry, and proposed to rewrite the famous lyric "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." The opening stanza of Yeats's poem runs:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and
wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the
honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
Ford offered the following "improvement":
At Innisfree there is a public-house;
They board you well for ten and six a week.
The mutton is not good, but you can eat
Their honey. I am going there to take
A week or so of holiday tomorrow.
This may sound like satire, but Ford was deadly serious about the ethical value of simplicity and contemporaneity in literature. "If you are perpetually to be told that heroism, beauty, fineness, or chivalry are only to be found in the records of the year 1415 ... you will gradually cease your efforts to be beautiful, fine, heroic, or chivalrous," he warned.
World War I made the ethical task of art still more urgent. Appropriately for a half-German, half-English man of letters, Ford argued that the conflict was largely the result of both sides' misuse of language - Germany's militaristic allegory no less than England's evasive understatement:
The Germans loudly proclaimed to the rest of
the world that if anyone sought to cast the
shadow of dishonour upon their unspotted
eagle-banner they would unsheathe the
sword their fathers had bequeathed to them
and would gird on the shining armour fashioned
for them by Thor, the God of War, and,
with the words of Luther on their lips, under
the auspices of the God of the Germans,
would "let loose" ... upon an effete Europe
and so secure a place in the sun. The rest of
the world, with Great Britain at its head, replied
that in the event of certain unfortunate
eventualities, certain other unfortunate eventualities
might eventuate.
Out of this failure of communication, the Great War was born.
Ford's writings about his military experience are collected in War Prose. In July 1915, he obtained a commission in the British Army; the following summer he fought in the Battle of the Somme, where he suffered a concussion and lost his memory for a short time. Famous for his memory and conversational fluency, Ford was deeply troubled by his amnesia and the difficulty he found in expressing his response to battle. "As far as I am concerned an invisible barrier in my brain seems to lie between the profession of Arms and the mind that puts things into words," he wrote. In the essays of War Prose, he turns repeatedly to the modernist art he had so long championed for help in overcoming that barrier. Trying to recall the day his regiment embarked for France, he wrote: "All that is blackish clouds; all that comes back to me like one of those Futurist or cubist pictures we had discussed throughout July 1914."
At times, literature seemed more real to Ford than the battlefield itself. He repeatedly described the confusion he felt when, after hours spent in his tent reading Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, he emerged to see the khaki uniforms of British soldiers; he expected Union Blue. On another occasion, he recalled, a young soldier began to describe an appendectomy: "We had to stop him; the mere talking of cutting flesh with a knife made us feel sick. Yet the sight of a man literally smashed into the dust had produced no emotions in us.... I know of no more striking tribute to the power of the word."
These experiences ensured that when Ford left the army in January 1919, he returned to literary criticism with heightened fervor. "No proper man today can be dogmatic," he reminded his readers, "since all proper men for the last five years have been shaken, earthquaked, and disturbed, to the lowest depths of their beings." In this spirit, he defended the vers libre of poets like Pound and H.D. against the criticisms of poetic traditionalists, offering samples of wartime conversation to prove that poetic rhythms can be found in the way ordinary people express themselves:
That was my eldest son,
Muss 'Uffer!
He lay with his head twid my breastesses
Six hundred mornings and more
Before it was properly light;
Counting the flies on the ceiling,
And me never to see him no more.
In the early 1920s Ford's mission of exploration and provocation took him across the Channel to Paris. His critical essays from this period show him relieved to have escaped the moralizing climate of "the grey regions of Covent Garden," but still nurturing a hope that English literature might finally prove itself on the Continent. He also began to look to Americans to exert a salutary influence on writing in English. In 1924 he began publishing the Transatlantic Review, which gave a home to the writers of the Lost Generation: Hemingway, Joyce, Stein, and Pound. The postwar decade also saw him produce his masterpiece, the four-volume novel Parade's End, completed in 1928. The editors of War Prose have unearthed an unfinished piece of fiction, "True Love & a GCM" (general courtmartial), which represents a kind of rough draft of Ford's archetypal war novel.
Just before the outbreak of the war, Ford wrote: "I think what I should like best in the world would be to know what form human expression will take in ten centuries from now, and I think that what I should like least in the world to have recorded of me is that I should have hindered that oncoming." As these two volumes prove, Ford had nothing to fear. His energetic work was indispensable to the "oncoming" of modern English literature.
Charlotte Taylor is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Yale University.