Fordie

One of my English professors devoted much energy, in class and out, to defending and reclaiming the reputation of John Keats. He was offended that Keats had been turned into a sylph-like nancy boy. This was 1971, the year Rod Stewart sang “I couldn't quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats.” For my professor, then about 35 years old, Keats was a virile, tough-minded poet whose music was rivaled only by Shakespeare’s and possibly Milton’s. Today, I know he was right but back then I found his vehemence amusing and a little embarrassing. I hadn’t yet learned the therapeutic worth of riding a hobbyhorse.

Among the Xeroxed assignments he handed out in our English Romanticism class was an excerpt from The March of Literature, by Ford Madox Ford. I had already read The Good Soldier and seen the famous photograph of Ford posing with Joyce, Pound and arts patron John Quinn, but otherwise knew little about him. The passage helped transform my understanding of both Keats and Ford. I’ve looked it up again:

“Before Keats alone, of all these poets – except perhaps Christina Rossetti – the impatient prose writer must sheathe his scalpel. Before the century closed – and even in the hands of Landor – prose had become the only keen instrument of the scrupulous writer. But the verbal felicities and labours of Keats placed him not infrequently beside any prose writer that you like to name. And in words he was a perfectly conscious and perfectly self-critical artist. Thus, in the manuscript of Endymion you can still see how he first wrote the agreeable but not exquisitely inspiring six lines:

“`More forest-wild, more subtle-cadenced
Than can be told by mortal: even wed
The fainting tenors of a thousand shells
To a million whisperings of Lily bells;
And mingle too the Nightingale’s complain
Caught in its hundredth echo; ’t would be vain…’

“but he crossed them out and substituted:

“`thou art as a dove
Trembling its closed eyes and sleeked wings
About me’

“This is art.”

Ford’s tone, as always, is conversational. He speaks as though he knew Keats and watched him revise Endymion. But his critical insight is nonetheless acute. That’s one of the lessons Ford’s example teaches: Criticism need not be written as though it were a computer program. There’s room for the personal, the emotional, the discursive – so long as it’s rooted in close reading.

The March of Literature was published in1938, and Dalkey Archive Press returned it to print in 1994, with an introduction by Alexander Theroux. The almost-900-page book, subtitled From Confucius to Modern Times, is so willfully idiosyncratic it seems written by a visitor from another world, and in a sense it was. In the last years of his life, this friend of the Rosettis, collaborator with Conrad, champion of Stephen Crane and Henry James, and Modernist co-conspirator with Pound and Joyce, assembled his rambling monument while serving as visiting lecturer in literature at Olivet College, Michigan. The book was his last. A year later, on the eve of World War II, Ford died at the age of 65.

The March of Literature is reliably tart, anecdotal, digressive and always amusing, like having a kindly, voluble uncle who has read every book every published, and who knew half the authors. In his dedication, which doubles as an introduction, Ford states his goal is restoring to young people “a lost art – that of reading.” Instead of academics, colleges ought to employ “artist-practitioners”(like himself) to instill a love of books in college students:

“For it is your hot love for your art, not your dry delvings in the dry bones of ana and philologies that will enable you to convey to others your strong passion.”

Despite the porno-sounding phrasing, Ford -- an aging, ailing, overweight, money-strapped Modernist – remains an enthusiast of the written word. Later in the dedication he rightly calls himself “an old man mad about writing.” So here are the paragraphs immediately following the Keats passage cited above:

“As against Keats, Shelley is diffuse. It is impossible to dissociate these two whose careers on earth seemed indissolubly intertwined. The splendours, the almost supernatural beauty of the active mind of Shelley will obviously forever gild his poems and blind one to the mediocrity of thousands of his inferior lines. But the gold is an exterior gold; we bring it ourselves to his shrine, and his shining soul only very seldom illuminates his poems from within. He is almost never natural; he is almost never not intent on showing himself the champion of freedom, the Satan of a Hanoverian Heaven. And even when he is natural his sheer carelessness will spoil – for the impatient prose writer – his most satisfactory poems. Take

“`I awake from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
And the winds are breathing low
And the stars are burning bright:

“`I awake from dreams of thee
And a spirit in my feet [haunted feet?]
Has led me, who knows how,
To thy chamber window, sweet…

“The poem is beautiful, but imagine the meanest short-story writer introducing into it that `who knows how?’ It gives the effect of a large piece of red hot iron suddenly put into water. A writer should precisely `know how’ things happen in his prose or verse. If he does not he should not write.”

Some scholars have attempted a reclamation of Shelley based on his mushy-headed politics (“unacknowledged legislators of the world!”). The “radical Shelley” has an obvious appeal to crackpot academics. I would rather reread Richard Holmes’ biography of Shelley than read the sensitive old plant himself, and Ford probably would have, too. Good sense always trumps posturing.