'The Accuracies of My Impressions'

“I was in a house in French Flanders when three shells passed clean through the roof and burst in the houses beyond. You would have said that not one of those houses could have stood through the night; yet they were there next morning and in one of them, the maire [mayor], a dentist and a brave fellow, was extracting a tooth, with the plaster of the ceilings inches deep on the floors. And they are there yet; or they were at the Armistice.”

The very definition of a “war story,” in the mythological sense. Did such an intrepid dentist even exist? Hard to say when the chronicler is Ford Madox Ford. We naturally resent liars, but I’m usually charmed by Ford’s embellishments. The passage above is from one of Ford’s eighty published volumes, A Mirror to France (Albert and Charles Boni, 1926). If not a literal transcription of what took place in a French village during the Great War, the story is true to Ford’s devotion to France and Frenchmen.

C.H. Sisson said Ford had “a congenital preoccupation with good writing,” a rare affliction, and at the end of his life, in The March of Literature (1938), Ford described himself as “an old man mad about writing.” In “Ford Madox Ford: Saltavit et Placuit” (The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays, 1978), Sisson says of that volume:

“The madness is shown in the way the historian limits himself to books he has found attractive ‘because if I lead my reader up to unreadable books I risk giving him a distaste for all literature.' There is a profound modesty in that. Ford recognized the duty of giving pleasure. It is not the least of duties. Ford’s great corpus of writing is an abundant fulfillment of it, only awaiting exploration by those who have a taste for literature.”

Like most readers, my first Ford was The Good Soldier, a novel assigned in a modern British fiction class. That same year, 1971, I read The Saddest Story, Arthur Mizener’s   newly published biography of Ford, and then I read his masterpiece, Parade’s End. That was it for some years. Only later did I begin exploring the memoirs, critical works and other novels. You have to work to find his books. Few are in print and some were never published in the United States. A good library helps. I recommend The Soul of London (1905), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), The Rash Act (1933), It Was the Nightingale (1933) Provence (1935) and, of course, The March of Literature (1938). My new half-serious resolution is to read everything he published, even the early fairy tales and Pre-Raphaelite creampuffs.

In one of his many purported memoirs, Return to Yesterday (1932) – the one Ford first edition I own – he shuffles truth/fiction in the dedicatory introduction, in a typically Fordian fashion:

“So this is a novel: a story mirroring such pursuits. If that pursuit is indeed hypocrisy in this book—but this book is all that homage paid to virtue by one who errs. Where it seemed expedient to me I have altered episodes that I have witnessed but I have been careful never to distort the character of the episode. The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions. If you want factual accuracies you must go to . . . But no, no, don’t go to anyone, stay with me!”