'He Directs the Mind to Good Things'

A young reader who learned of Ford Madox Ford from this blog – “Nobody mentioned him at university” -- tells me he is reading Parade’s End, Ford’s great World War I tetralogy. If Anecdotal Evidence has any purpose apart from keeping me gainfully employed, it is to share my enthusiasm for certain writers and books, hoping others will read them.

In On the Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography (Carcanet, 1989), the poet and critic C.H. Sisson (1914-2003) terms his relationship with Ford an “addiction,” and I understand. He first read Ford shortly before the start of World War II, and here’s how he describes It Was the Nightingale (1933) and those other early Ford encounters:

“[T]hese I had turned to frequently for the comfort of easy, balmy reading, when that was what I wanted, rather as one might take Relaxa-tabs or some other mild preparation to soothe the nerves.”

Ford (1873-1939), a self-described “old man mad about writing,” published more than eighty books. “There were soon nearly forty of them on my shelves,” Sisson writes. “It was a true addiction. This insinuating style made its way to every corner of my mind. If there is such a thing as a capacity to write, without necessarily having anything to say, Ford had it.”

Sisson is being a little disingenuous. Ford seldom harangues, though he occasionally blows smoke, but writing for him is a primal necessity. He is the most facile of writers, in the best sense. In The March of Literature (1939), Ford suggests we look at works of literature on both the macro and micro scales, and compares the latter to music:

“It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.”

Sisson is no blind idolater of Ford. There is “plenty to be said against him,” he says. However:

“There is an appalling technical facility about such books [he has just mentioned Ford’s excellent 1933 novel The Rash Act], and God keep me from it. I suppose the perfect novelist would have all the immense skill Ford disposed of, and somehow succeed in not using it. There is however some content in Ford. The writers he mentions casually in passing almost always turn out to be good ones. He directs the mind to good things, seen a little askew and out of context.”

Sisson describes Parade’s End as “a great work of some kind.” The four novels are eccentric but not show-offingly so. Ford is often doing things that at first strike the readers as peculiarly indirect, as Conrad and James sometimes do. Be patient. “Yet somehow,” Sisson writes, “the book manages to be about the impact on England of the 1914 war and for some exposed nerves Ford’s books at large will remain, deleterious, seductive, beneficent, for a good many years, as the duration of books go.”

I’m reminded of Hugh Kenner’s essay “Remember That I Have Remembered” (Gnomon, 1958), a reassessment of Ford’s tetralogy, in which he writes:

“The artist who can actually get down on paper something not himself – some scheme of values of which he partakes – so that the record will not waver with time or assume grotesque perspectives as viewpoints alter and framing interests vanish, has achieved the only possible basis for artistic truth and the only possible basis for literary endurance.”     

Ford endures, as my young reader is finding out.