'The Habit of Reading Something More Lasting'

“It is in order to help the young who are entering on careers, and those of all ages who desire to extend those delights and spiritual developments of their lives, that I have written the book called The March of Literature.” 

Ford Madox Ford is Modernism’s great publicist and raconteur, an enthusiast forever boosting books and writers from across the millennia. He has little of his confrère Ezra Pound’s stridency and bullying, and none of his anti-Semitism. Like Anton Chekhov, Ford is one of literature’s blessed ones, almost saintly in his service to letters and fellow writers, though a highly fallible man. In the introduction to the last of his more than eighty books, The March of Literature (1938), he describes himself as “an old man mad about writing—in the sense that Hokusai called himself an old man mad about painting,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.”

The passage at the top is taken from the transcript of a radio talk, “The Commercial Value of Literature,” broadcast by Ford on NBC on October 14, 1938, eight months before his death. The March of Literature is not an encyclopedia or any sort of reference work but a biased, idiosyncratic, highly entertaining encomium, published on the cusp of World War II, for the books that had sustained Ford since childhood:

 

“It is not for nothing that the growing barbarism of the world has synchronized with the decay of the art of reading. Reading is probably at a lower ebb at this moment than it has ever been in this world. The reading, that is to say, of such literature as is in fact literature, and not the merest escape from immediate personal problems. Heaven forbid that you should take me as recommending you to become exaggeratedly highbrow!”

 

That’s typical of Ford – expressing a seemingly mandarin taste in the language of the common man. Nearly eighty years ago, and serious reading is already in jeopardy. At this point in his radio talk, Ford adopts a preacherly tone:

 

“The favorite reading of today, after the sports columns of the newspapers, is that of detective or mystery stories. And there is nothing whatever against the reading of mystery stories when you need another relaxation on account of the fatigues of the life of today. But to obtain the spiritual and material benefits of which we have hitherto been talking, it is necessary that you should make the habit of reading something more lasting. Do not believe that the great classics have anything of the repulsive or the super-highbrow about them!”

 

I might have written this during a minor spell of crankiness. Converts are few but I do hear from the occasional renegade or oddball, someone who reads, say, Swift or Conrad, perhaps on a whim. Or Ford’s own fiction, The Good Soldier (1915) or the World War I tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28).

 

“[E]veryone has a right to his own tastes. If you do not like the philosophy of Dante, bathe in the lighthearted pococurantism [OED: “indifference, carelessness, nonchalance”] of Shakespeare’s comedies, or the irony of Swift’s Gulliver, or the greathearted sympathies of Dickens for the poor and distressed, or find fascination from the mental refinements of the greatest of all American writers, Henry James, or the verbal felicities and exactitudes of Miss Katherine Anne Porter, or Mrs. Virginia Woolf, and the respective schools of all such writers.”

 

Ford was born on this date, December 17, in 1873, and died in 1939 at age sixty-five.