'Built With Enormous Skill'

As readers we come to recognize certain names without being quite certain who they are or what they have contributed. One such is Robie Macauley (1919-95). I loosely associated him with Ford Madox Ford, who spent several of his later years in the U.S., but never pursued the matter. Now I’ve learned that Ford was his teacher at Olivet College in Michigan, where Macauley studied in the nineteen-thirties without graduating. At Olivet, Ford completed his final book, The March of Literature (1939). In an interview late in his life, Macauley said: 

“Ford’s wisdom, the wisdom you get from editorial experience and attitudes, along with his creative side, impressed me, and probably set me out on the wrong path. . . . I think he wrote about eighty books, a lot of them easily forgettable, and I don’t like the idea of writing easily forgettable books, but he was a journalist, too, and supported himself by a lot of literary journalistic writings. I do wish, looking back, I’d had a little less editorial work and a little more time to do my own work, but you know: vain regrets.”

 

After a little poking around I found an essay about Ford written by Macauley more than forty years earlier -- “The Good Ford,” published in the Spring 1949 issue of The Kenyon Review, which Macauley would go on to edit from 1959 to 1967. Ford was an obsessively industrious writer, which likely intimidates potential readers. He wrote for a living. How is a reader to wade through so many books? Which are worth reading? I rank Ford above most twentieth-century novelists, yet I’ve read fewer than half the titles he produced, fiction and otherwise. As a Ford admirer, Macauley is admirably pragmatic, honest and helpful:

 

“On some imaginary library shelf there are seventy-five books that carry his name; and three-fourths of them do it harm. For here is a case of literary dementia praecox if there ever was one. We can rearrange those books symbolically and the two enemies will become clear. On one side will be Ford the slipshod literary journalist, the smooth potboiler novelist, the peddler of suspect anecdotes, the author of Thus to Revisit, The Rash Act, and Ring for Nancy. He is a bad writer and a good riddance.”

 

I rather like The Rash Act (1933) but put that aside. Think of the paragraph just quoted as “on the one hand.” Here is “and on the other”:

 

“On the other side of the shelf there are a dozen or fifteen books in an unpopular eccentric style. They are superbly written, profoundly serious, and built with enormous skill. One of them is unlike any other novel in the English language. If they stand on the shelf with Henry James, Joseph Conrad, the Brontes and Jane Austen, they do not suffer for it. Some of them are: the four Tietjens novels [Parade’s End], The Good Soldier.”

 

If you have read only one book by Ford, it’s likely The Good Soldier (1915). Macauley describes it as “his most perfect miniature performance.” It’s a fiendishly well-constructed novel, deceptive, beautiful and sad. But Ford’s masterpiece is his Great War tetralogy, Parade’s End (1924-28). Of it Macauley writes:

 

“This is Ford’s achievement in size and scope. Here are four novels that are generally thought to be about the 1914 - 1918 World War and, superficially, they are. They are about it in the same way that Madame Bovary is about life in a small provincial French town and the way that War and Peace is about the Napoleonic invasion.”