‘SCATTERED BUT ALL ACTIVE’: FORD MADOX FORD AND TRANSATLANTIC MODERNISM

Patrick Deer

Howviable is ‘the transatlantic’ as a category for understanding modern literature and culture? Transatlantic crossings of various kinds have emerged in recent modernist studies as a compelling trope for understanding the period.1 The idea offers a comparative framework for Anglophone writing on both sides of the Atlantic that is at once transnational, familiar, and more manageable than heady notions of a ‘global’ modernism. For Ford Madox Ford, editor of the transatlantic review which he launched, edited and foldedin1924, transatlantic modernism is a highly unstable proposition. In the dedication to his memoir of the period, It Was the Nightingale (1933), Ford declares, ‘So you see that, todate, thisfairy-tale has found its appropriate close. The persons of the transatlantic drama are scattered but all active’.2 The italics allow Ford a typographical pun on the lower case titleofthetransatlantic review. But the phrase ‘transatlantic drama’ also evokes the larger migratory crossings between Britain, France, and the United States that transformed his career between 1922 and 1933, along with those of many of his contemporaries. Critics have tended to mine the memoir for historical detail, often emphasizing its unreliability.3 In this essay,Iwill consider various waysinwhich Ford’s experimentalliterary history, It Was the Nightingale, can help us imagine the category of the transatlantic as a ‘drama’ appropriately concluded. First, as a post-war project that offered an internationalist alternative to the reconstruction of national culture; second, as a space of overlapping histories and temporalities that encouraged experiment; and lastly, as an object of struggle and frustrated desire. As a supposedly ‘unreliable’ – or impressionist – literary historian, Ford is an ideal guide to the unstable writerly and critical field. In the memoir Ford narrates his release from the closed world of post-war Britain into a more open transatlantic space, in which he 70 PATRICK DEER could edit a ‘Review’ and begin his Parade’s End novel sequence. As he declares in the dedication:

I have tried then towrite a novel drawing my material from my own literary age. You have here two adventures of a once jeune, homme pauvre – a poor man who was once young. In rendering them, I have employed every wile known to me as novelist – the time-shift, the progression d’effet, the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action. (IWN 6)

Based in Paris and sustained by American capital and Ford’s dwind- ling resources,4 the transatlantic review revived Ford’s passion for editorship and his dream of a ‘more or less modern movement’ that transcended national boundaries allowing him to publish an extraor- dinary array of modern writers.5 He had discovered more writers in the English Review, notably Lawrence, Pound, and Lewis, but the transatlantic review’s roster is remarkable, offering, as Max Saunders observes, ‘a discriminating cross-section of post-war international modernism’.6 It Was the Nightingale recounts in three overlapping parts Ford’s struggletoovercome the crushing effects of his Great War experience as he leaves behind ‘the last of England’ for Paris, New York, and the Mediterranean. Part One explores his decision to abandon rural self-exile and an increasingly hostile English culture for Southern France (1919-22). Part Twocelebrates the simultaneous making of his reputation in the United States and the importance of an American audience to his conception of the Parade’s End novel sequence (1923-28). Finally, in Part Three, he dramatises the ‘frenetic slapstick,’ as Saunders puts it, of the rise and fall of his editorship of the transatlantic review in Paris and his subsequent movetoNew York and Provence (1924-29). The book’s initially exhausting quality comes less from Ford’s time shifts and digressive structure, than from descriptions of his claustrophobic rural existence after the war. Then the narrative shifts from the closed form of repetition, description and isolated anecdote to a more open and playfully comic mode driven by dialogue, sociability and incident. As an experiment in autobiography It Was the Nightingale offers an idiosyncratic view of literary history. But it makes for a pro- vocative guide to modernist transatlanticism. In the dedicatory pro- logue, problems of authority and perspective are given mythological resonance by Ford’s vision on the Mediterranean hillside of a ‘great snake’ and a lizard, which add to the imagery of the rat and the