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Life on Parade. the Contrast of Appearance and Reality in Ford CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive - Università di Pisa UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI PISA Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica Corso di laurea specialistica in Letterature e Filologie Europee TESI DI LAUREA Life on parade. The Contrast of Appearance and Reality in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End Relatore: Dott. Fausto Ciompi Candidato Jessica Tini ANNO ACCADEMICO 2013-14 Index Ford Madox Ford: An Introduction ............................................................................. 3 Part 1. The Text: a Stylistic and Thematic Analysis .................................................. 35 1. Structure and Style of the Tetralogy .................................................................. 35 2. The Contrast Between Appearance and Reality ................................................ 45 3. Marriage, Sexuality and the Role of Women .................................................... 64 4. War, Patriotism and Pacifism: The Final Holocaust .......................................... 83 5. Faith, Hope and the Failure of Religion ............................................................ 90 6. England, Toryism and the Relevance of Pastoral .............................................. 97 Part 2. Tom Stoppard’s Parade’s End ..................................................................... 102 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 112 2 Ford Madox Ford: An Introduction The first biography of Ford was published in 1948 under the title The Last Pre- Raphaelite; the author, Douglas Goldring, had known Ford personally. Both Stella Bowen and Violet Hunt wrote about the man they had a relationship with, in Drawn From Life (1984) and The Flurried Years (1926) respectively. 1965 was the year in which Frank MacShane published Life and Works of Ford Madox Ford, and in 1971 Arthur Mizener published The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford. 1980 was the year of Thomas G. Moser’s The Life and Fiction of Ford Madox Ford, and in 1991 Alan Judd appeared as the author of a biography (simply titled Ford Madox Ford), which is the main source of my brief overview. In 2012, Max Saunders published Ford’s latest biography, a book in two volumes entitled Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, which takes into account recently discovered papers.1 More biographical studies will be listed at the end of the dissertation. Ford Hermann Hueffer was born on the 17th December 1873 in Merton, Surrey. His father was a German intellectual, with a Roman Catholic background. He was also a francophile, a trait he passed on to his son. The latter was named Ford because of his maternal grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter (who was born in France, and was himself a francophile). His mother, Catherine, had been an artist and was a very intelligent and cultivated woman. The Brown family was related with the Rossettis, because William Rossetti, brother to Christina and Dante Gabriel, had married Catherine’s sister Lucy, and as a young boy Ford was educated and often spent time with his Rossetti cousins.2 1 AA VV, “Ford Madox Ford”, in Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography: Contemporary Writers, edited by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, Gale Research, vol. 5, Late Victorian and Edwardian Characters, p. 109, and A. Judd, Ford Madox Ford, London, HarperCollins, 1991, p. 451. 2 Judd, op. cit., p. 13. 3 His father was an atheist, but Ford developed an interest in Roman Catholicism, and was baptized in Paris in 1892. Nonetheless, he was ambiguously religious: he was always critical towards matters of faith and, apparently, went to church only when he was in France and Germany. He married an Anglican woman, and late in his life lived with a Jew; on his deathbed, he refused to see a priest and to receive the last rites.3 When he was young, he was very close to his maternal grandfather, and he and his brother Oliver went to live with him after their father’s untimely death. Ford Madox Brown taught him to «[b]eggar yourself rather than refuse assistance to any one whose genius you think shows promise of being greater than your own». 4 Generosity, self- effacement and sacrifice were to be mingled in him with great editorial skills, that made of him one of the greatest editors and talent scouts of his time.5 Ford began writing at a very young age, and was a very prolific author, so it is not surprising that the quality of his books is uneven.6 His first works included three fairy stories (The Brown Owl, The Feather and The Queen Who Flew, followed in 1906 by the collection Christina’s Fairy Book), a novel, The Shifting of the Fire (a book about the destructiveness of passion, a theme originally derived from Rossetti and the Pre- Raphaelites but that was to recur in all his work), and a collection of poems, The Questions at the Well, published under pseudonym; all these were published between 1891 and 1894.7 His main literary achievement of this period is a volume of descriptive history, The Cinque Ports. Published in 1900, it betrays the author’s early interest in analysing the English country and his people, an attitude that would have his greatest fulfilment in the 3 Ibidem, pp. 12-9 and p. 441. 4 F. M. Hueffer, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man, London, Chapman and Hall, 1911, p. 198. 5 Ibidem, p. 30, and Concise DLBL, cit., pp. 112-3. 6 K. Young, Ford Madox Ford, London/New York/Toronto, Longmans, Green & Co., 1956, p. 7. 7 Judd, op. cit., pp. 33, 36-7 and 18. 4 trilogy England and the English (1905-7). It is a historical description of the five English towns that formed the ancient Confederation of the Cinque Ports, but it had also literary ambitions. Another important work of Ford’s early period, attesting his love for his recently-deceased grandfather, is Ford Madox Brown’s biography.8 In 1894, at the age of twenty, Ford married the seventeen-year-old Elsie Martindale, and they went to live in the Sussex countryside, where they made the acquaintance of, among others, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, Arthur Marwood and – most notably – Joseph Conrad.9 Ford met Conrad in September 1898, and the two men influenced, supported and wrote to each other until Conrad died, in 1924 (he was 41 when they met, while Ford was only 24). They collaborated on three books, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (published in 1924, but written between 1906 and 1909). It was in particular Ford who helped Conrad in many ways, economically and morally, promoting his work and helping him with the English language; but it was Conrad’s influence that allowed Ford to emancipate from the Pre-Raphaelite style and develop a more modern writing. Their collaboration did not perhaps produce great literature, but their discussions and experimentation on literary techniques were to provide the basis for the development of Modernist literature.10 From the very beginning of his career, Ford was concerned with the matters of the novel and its way of portraying reality.11 Having grown up in non-conformist family that 8 Ibidem, pp. 48, 91, 18. 9 Ibidem, pp. 44-128. 10 Ibidem, pp. 62-8 and 80-7, Concise DLBL, op. cit., p. 114, G. Smith, Ford Madox Ford, New York/London, Columbia University Press, 1972, pp. 11-5, Young, op. cit., pp. 12-3, V. Fortunati, Ford Madox Ford. Teoria e tecnica narrativa, Bologna, Patron, 1975, pp. 26-7. It was Conrad who asked Ford for his help, as it is recalled by the latter in Thus to Revisit: «It is, say, twenty-two years and six months since, about Michaelmas, 1897, I received from Mr. Conrad a letter in which, amazingly, he asked me to collaborate with him», Hueffer, Thus to Revisit. Some Reminiscences, New York, E. P. Dutton and Company, 1921, pp. 26-7. 11 Smith, op. cit., p. 4. 5 gave him a continental education, he was critical towards the contemporary London literary establishment; later, through the collaboration with Conrad, he committed to creating a modern novel that would be as true as possible to reality. He saw English novels as antiquated, excessively didactic and moralizing, and English novelists as more concerned in defending obsolete and anachronistic moral values than in creating a believable and realistic portrait of life.12 He exposed his views on the matter in his private correspondence as well as in various essays and (auto)biographical accounts, namely Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (1911, re-published the same year under the title of Memories and Impressions), The Critical Attitude (1911, a collection of articles published in the literary review he directed in 1908-9, The English Review), the critical biography Henry James (1914), Thus to Revisit (1921), Joseph Conrad. A Personal Remembrance (1924), The English Novel (1929), Return to Yesterday (1931), It Was the Nightingale (1933), Provence (1935), Portraits from Life (1937) and The March of Literature (1938). Ford exposed the ideas that were adopted and elaborated during the collaboration with Conrad mainly in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, a reminiscence in the form of a novel and a literary essay,13 written in a very short time after the death of his friend, and in the article “Techniques”, published in 1939 in the American Southern Review. It contains a detailed account of their achievements and discussions, and therefore we will presently give a brief analysis of it, although its publication is chronologically distant from the actual period of their collaboration. 12 F. MacShane, “Introduction” to Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1964, pp. x-xi. 13 In the author’s own words, Joseph Conrad «is a novel, not a monograph; a portrait, not a narration: for what it shall prove to be worth, a work of art, not a compilation», Ford, “Preface” to Joseph Conrad.
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