HASLAM.JKT 18/11/04 3:08 pm Page 1 Fragmenting modernism Fragmenting modernism Ford Madox Ford, the novel and the Great War MMM rd x Ford, ovel the War LLL LLL MM cover illustratio LL Sketch of Ford c. 1916 by Alfred Cohen (1997 LAM SARA HASLAM © Alfred Cohen Printed in Great Brita 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:38 am Page i Fragmenting modernism 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:38 am Page ii 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:39 am Page iii Fragmenting modernism Ford Madox Ford, the novel and the Great War SARA HASLAM Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:39 am Page iv Copyright © Sara Haslam 2002 The right of Sara Haslam to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6055 9 hardback First published 2002 100908070605040302 10987654321 Typeset in Minion by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:39 am Page v It is above all to make you see. (Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924)) It was perhaps Turgenev’s extreme misfortune, it was certainly his supreme and beautiful gift – that he had the seeing eye to such an extent he could see that two opposing truths were equally true. (Ford Madox Ford, Mightier Than the Sword (1938)) 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:39 am Page vi For my parents 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:39 am Page vii Contents Acknowledgements page viii Biography-in-brief of Ford Madox Ford ix Introduction 1 1 The narrative push 20 2 Novel perspectives 41 3 Personal perspectives 65 4 In sight of war 84 5 Imaginative visions 118 6 Visions in colour; religious visions 156 7 ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ 182 Bibliography 223 Index 235 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:39 am Page viii Acknowledgements I should like to thank Chris Walsh, at Chester College of Higher Education, for finding me some valuable time to write, and Bob Owens, at the Open University, for encouraging me in the final stages of this book. I am very grateful to those who have commented at various points on the manuscript: Bernard Bergonzi, Arthur Bradley, Paul Clark, Sarah Cooke, Olwen Haslam, Phil Horne, David Mason, Max Saunders, Sita Schutt and Paul Skinner. For kind permission to reproduce copyright material I am grateful to Michael Schmidt and Max Saunders. I remain in Phil Davis’ debt for introducing me to Ford in inspiring circumstances as an undergraduate. My thanks also go to Anna Symon for her support during early drafts of the book. Members of the Ford Madox Ford Society have helped to provide a stimulating environment for my research, and I should like to thank Michela Calderaro, Vita Fortunati, Robert Hampson, Elena Lamberti, Roger Poole, Joe Wiesenfarth and Angus Wrenn. Max Saunders has offered generous and sustaining advice throughout the project and I am partic- ularly grateful to him. Finally, to Paul, my reader, without whom this book would not have been completed, go my thanks and love. 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:39 am Page ix Biography-in-brief of Ford Madox Ford Ford Madox Ford was born in Merton, Surrey, to an artistic and bohemian clan on 17 December 1873 – the first child of Catherine Madox Brown’s marriage to Franz Hüffer (or Francis Hueffer, to which he anglicised his name) in 1872. He was Ford Madox Brown’s first grandchild. When Lucy Madox Brown, Catherine’s sister, married William Rossetti, brother to Dante Gabriel and Christina, two years later, Ford’s relationship to significant literary figures of the day, and to the Pre-Raphaelites, was confirmed. There was money, coming mainly from publishing, on his father’s devoutly Catholic side of the family (based in Münster); unfortunately, very little of it filtered down to Francis, the youngest of seventeen children. Although Ford’s father was an atheist, Ford himself entered the Church in November 1892, follow- ing a visit to his continental relatives. His conversion was important in artistic terms; though his practice was irregular, his struggle with reli- gious belief and the sense of tradition Catholicism bestowed was to ferment in much of his writing. However, his relationship with his pan- European family had a deeper impact on his development: it fostered a belief in a common Western culture. Following Ford’s birth, and his christening as Ford Hermann Hueffer, the Hueffers moved to Hammersmith. Ford’s initial, cosmo- politan, schooling was to suit him well. He boarded at the Praetoriuses’ school at Folkstone, with his younger brother Oliver. The Praetoriuses were from Frankfurt, and French and German were spoken on alter- nate days. But it could be said that Ford’s real and abiding education had started much earlier. From a young age, because of his connec- tions, Ford had been surrounded by what he later called the Victorian, and Pre-Raphaelite, Great Figures. Such figures would visit Madox Brown; the stories of these visits would be told and retold. When 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:39 am Page x x Biography-in-brief of Ford Madox Ford coupled with the experience of spending time with the Rossetti chil- dren, as well as the young Edward and Olive Garnett (with whom Ford and his sister Juliet mingled after Richard Garnett was made keeper of printed books at the British Museum in February 1890), the shadow that these figures threw would instil in him a sense of his own inferior- ity that would haunt him throughout his adult life. Francis Hueffer died suddenly in 1889, leaving no money. Ford went with his mother and brother to live at Ford Madox Brown’s home in Primrose Hill, two doors away from that of William and Lucy Rossetti where Juliet was lodged. The bond he formed with his grandfather would prove to be one of the most significant of his life, in personal and in artistic terms (perhaps it provided a model for those other, highly significant, relationships with Joseph Conrad, Arthur Marwood and C. F. G. Masterman). Ford is an exceptionally visual artist, one who depicts scenes and textures, colours and images in his work; this applies to his treatment of time as well as of space. In his essay ‘On Impressionism’, published in 1914, he describes this technique, one that he developed with Conrad after meeting and beginning to collab- orate with him in 1898. Ford left Pretoria House school after the death of his father, but a relationship with a fellow pupil, Elsie Martindale, was to continue. It led to an elopement in March 1894. Elsie’s parents did not approve of Ford, partly because of the Rossetti dalliance with anarchism and his own attendance at socialist meetings at Kelmscott House; more seri- ously, however, he was not thought to be a sound financial prospect. Dr Martindale was not wrong in this opinion of Ford’s earning power; the inability to earn sufficient funds was to dog Ford mercilessly for the next forty years. The only brief respite from financial stresses was to come in New York in the 1920s when, as the acclaimed author of Parade’s End, Ford was fêted, and rewarded, as the great man of letters that he was. Elsie and Ford spent their short honeymoon in Germany, and then settled in the Romney Marsh area of southern Kent – their geographi- cal locus for the next ten years. Significantly for Ford’s life as a writer, the area also laid claim to Henry James, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. Ford would never lose his love of the country and his sense of the healing power of rural existence. After the war (in which he was an officer, a second lieutentant, with the Welch Regiment), suffer- ing from shell-shock, his instinct would take him back there, to grow vegetables at Red Ford in West Sussex and allow the ghosts of the 2395 Prelims 7/5/02 8:39 am Page xi Biography-in-brief of Ford Madox Ford xi previous four years to do their worst. (It was after the war, in 1919, that he changed his name to Ford Madox Ford.) For the time being, though, his energies were taken up with trying to earn a living by his pen, a task that was made easier in some senses, and more challenging in others, when Edward Garnett brought Conrad to call. Despite Conrad’s seniority (he was 41, Ford was 24), he suggested collaboration. Though the novels that they produced do not seem adequately to describe the sum of their two parts, Ford learnt much of his craft from this difficult, admirable, demanding and great writer. Their relationship wasn’t easy (they broke with one another in 1909 – Ford still published Conrad’s biography in 1924), and nor was Ford’s with Henry James.