The Reputation of Ford Madox Ford

Extract

If Ford Madox Ford is more widely read and discussed today than he was a few years ago, then most of the credit must go to the Americans. In the late thirties, Ford’s reputation was at an absolute nadir in England, only twenty years after he had been at the centre of the metropolitan literary scene. The English Review, which Ford edited between 1908 and 1910, was one of the most distinguished publications ever to appear in the English-speaking world: the contributors to the first issue included Hardy, James, Conrad, Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, Tolstoy, and Wells, while later numbers included the first published work of D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. Ford may, indeed, have been half-remembered as a great editor, but his own creative achievement as a novelist was resolutely disregarded. Thus, Mr Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, first published in 1938, contains a useful chronological list of key works of modern literature published between 1900 and 1932.If we look up the entry for the year 1915, we see titles by Norman Douglas, Ronald Firbank, and Somerset Maugham, but no word of Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Again, Mr Connolly gives a very comprehensive list of books for the years 1924 to 1928, but says nothing of Some Do Not and the other sections of Ford’s long novel about Christopher Tietjens, now known collectively as Parade's End. And Parade's End is certainly regarded in America as one of the major achievements of modern English fiction.