HERBERT READ'S DILEMMA: FATHERLY ADVICE FROM FMF
In September 1920 Herbert Read, the man who was to become the foremost English writer on twentieth-century art, was in a state of profound spiritual turmoil. At that moment Read's interests in the visual arts were, at best, dormant, and his ambition lay in becoming a leading figure in the world of literature, not only as a critic but as a poet and novelist in his own right. The portents for this had, however, been somewhat mixed. In 1915, shortly after enlisting to fight in the First World War, Read had used his own extremely limited funds to self-publish a volume of poetry, entitled Songs of Chaos. Like most of his wartime verse this emulated the style of Ezra Pound, but clearly Read was dissatisfied with the result as he destroyed almost every copy within a year of its publication. At the end of the war he published two further collections of poetry, Naked Warriors and Eclogues, that were undoubtedly more successful artistically, but passed largely unnoticed in the wider world. The evidence suggests that by 1920 Read was trying to move more towards prose writing, and he submitted a short story, again based on his wartime experience, for publication in The New Age. The response of the editor, Alfred Orage, must have come as a shock, with Orage describing Read's effort as ‘dull in every sense’.1 Read did, of course, have some literary successes around this time, most notably in establishing, with Frank Rutter, the literary journal Art and Letters. Founded in 1917, this is widely acknowledged as the forerunner to T. S. Eliot's hugely influential journal The Criterion.2 Yet in 1920 this project too ran into trouble, with Art and Letters closing due to lack of funds. Elsewhere, Read was also finding the workload of his ‘day job’, as a civil servant in HM Treasury, increasingly heavy and complained that it left him little time or energy to write. In short, by 1920 Read found himself facing the real possibility that his literary ambitions were slipping away for good. It was with this in mind that in September of that year he wrote to Ford Madox Ford for advice. The two men had met for the first time in 1918 when both were 166 MICHAEL PARASKOS still serving in the British Army. According to Read, he came across Ford at the Tees Garrison in Redcar whilst idly looking down a list of officers attached to the base. To his ‘surprise and delight’ he saw Ford's name and armed only with his ambition to become a novelist introduced himself. As Read wryly noted, he became Ford's ‘young and enthusiastic disciple’ and Ford was ‘not unwilling to adopt the rôle of mentor’.3 Read's description of his relationship with Ford is significant for casting light not only on how Ford saw himself as a kind of suture between the late nineteenth-century cultural world of Henry James and Joseph Conrad and the avant-garde of early British modernism, but on Read's seemingly repeated need in his early career to be guided by father-figures. Read's friendships were frequently with people who were either older or in some ways more worldly-wise than himself, and in addition to Ford the list includes Rutter, Orage, Eliot and Richard Aldington.4 It is tempting to assume Read's motivation in seeking such guides stemmed from an unconscious desire to replace his biological father who had died in a horse-riding accident when Read was aged only eight. Read had felt the loss keenly, not only for the death of a parent, but the resulting eviction he and his brothers faced from their home in an isolated part of the rural North Riding of Yorkshire. As far as Read was concerned, his rehousing in an orphanage in the heavily industrialised West Riding town of Halifax was little short of a fall from Eden, and it was to inform his writings and political outlook for the rest of his life.5 Yet there is also reason to suggest that in the early stages of his writing career Read needed the support of more self-assured figures such as Ford because of a fundamental lack of confidence in his own critical opinion. Evidence for this is often circumstantial, but as an example it is worth noting the effect Eliot had on Read in the 1920s. In the 1910s Read had shown a strong and even Promethean interest in the use of psychoanalysis as a critical tool, but this was effectively banished in the face of Eliot's open hostility towards Freudianism.6 It was to be many years before Read was self-assured enough in his own views to counter such critical opinion, and his interest in psycho- analysis was not to re-emerge until he broke free of Eliot in the early 1930s.7 Although this might indicate the young Read was easily led by strong personalities such as Eliot, in the case of Ford there was something more gentle and open in their friendship that could be seen in Read's desire for career guidance and literary opinion from Ford. On the surface Ford and Read could not have been more