The Sound of Ford Madox Ford: War-Time, Impressionism, and Narrative Form
The Sound of Ford Madox Ford: War-Time, Impressionism, and Narrative Form Rachel Kyne ELH, Volume 87, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp. 211-244 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2020.0007 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751744 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] THE SOUND OF FORD MADOX FORD: WAR-TIME, IMPRESSIONISM, AND NARRATIVE FORM BY RACHEL KYNE “It is rather curious, the extra senses one develops here,” Ford Madox Ford wrote to Lucy Masterman in August 1916 from the Ypres Salient.1 “I sit writing in the twilight &, even as I write, I hear the shells whine & the M. G.’s [machine guns] crepitate & I see (tho’ it is hidden by a hill), the grey, flat land below & the shells bursting. Thanks so very much for the Echo de Paris.”2 Musing on the coexistence of the sounds of war and the activity of writing, Ford inadvertently slips from the audible landscape of the front to the literary Echo of the page. Ford’s experience of war sounds in the summer of 1916 awakened him to the literary possibilities of an auditory impressionism. Between mid-July and mid-September 1916, he was deployed to France, partici- pated in his first active combat at the Battle of the Somme, suffered a concussion caused by an exploding shell, lost his memory for three weeks, returned to his battalion in the Ypres Salient with a renewed devotion to capturing the war in writing, and suffered a second collapse attributed to
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