'Men of Action or Pastors'

“It may be remembered that Gibbon frequently stated that his year in the militia was of more service to him than any of his other experiences.”

Like Gibbon, Ford Madox Ford frequently hides interesting tidbits of information in plain sight in his footnotes. This one the reader will find at the bottom of page 251 in The March of Literature (George Allen and Unwin, 1938). The page is devoted to the Roman histories of Tacitus, but Ford has the sort of hypertextual mind able to recall that from 1759 to 1762, Gibbon held a commission in the Hampshire militia, serving on active duty and in reserve. In his posthumously published Memoirs, Gibbon writes: “The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire.”

I’m reading Tacitus and wanted to see what Ford, the most formidable and eccentric of readers, had to say about him. Here is the footnoted passage in the main text:

“He was a voluminous writer, and he was one of those writers who have experience of life and action by which to set the tone of their writings. He was a fine soldier, he was the son-in-law of Agricola, though his birth does not seem to have been noticeably noble.”

One reads much self-identification in Ford’s passage. He, too, had “experience of life and action.” He enlisted in the Welch Regiment at age forty-two. In July 1916, he was sent to the Somme in time for the bloodiest battle in English military history, and was blown into the air by the explosion of a German shell. He suffered memory loss and for three weeks remained incapacitated. Near the end of 1916, Ford wrote to Joseph Conrad: “I began to take a literary view of the war.” He was hospitalized again with lung problems exacerbated by exposure to poison gas, and in March 1917 was sent home as an invalid. Ford was discharged from the army on Jan. 7, 1919, and out of his wartime experience he crafted the tetralogy of novels Parade’s End (1924-1928), one of the last century’s greatest works of fiction.

Throughout The March of Literature, when he writes about Gibbon, Ford often mentions the historian’s military service. In Chap 7, devoted to the English eighteenth century, he looks at literary continuity: “On a social scale usually lower, you had the string that connected Shakespeare with Johnson. These men were usually men of action or parsons. They were men who had fought or been in the army like Gibbon, Smollett, Steele.” In a later chapter ostensibly devoted to Saint-Beuve he stresses the importance of biography, contra New Criticism, in understanding a writer:

“But once you are really saturated in the work of a writer it is legitimate to enquire into the circumstances of his life. It is human nature—and not only that, details of an author’s life may cast light on passages of his work or on the nature of literature itself. It is, thus, useful to the father of a future littérateur to know that Shakespeare was reputed a deer thief; that Marlowe really was a braggart with the sword; that Sidney died at the Battle of Zutphen; that Dante was a skilful [sic] commander of troops in small engagements; that Gibbon served with the militia; that Conrad—like today’s poet laureate [John Masefield]—was a hand before the mast, or that the writer’s friend, Mr. Hemingway, served voluntarily with the allied troops before his country took part in a late war.”