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Ford Madox Ford

Born 17 December 1873(1873-12-17)
Merton, Surrey
Died 26 June 1939 (aged 65)
Deauville, France
Pen name Ford Hermann Hueffer, Ford Madox Hueffer
Occupation novelist, publisher
Nationality United Kingdom
Period 1892 - ????

Ford Madox Ford (17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature.[citation needed] He is now best remembered for The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade's End tetralogy.

Born Ford Hermann Hueffer, the son of Francis Hueffer, he was Ford Madox Hueffer before he finally—in 1919, at a time when German connotations proved unpopular—settled on the name Ford Madox Ford in honour of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written.

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Ford's literary life

One of his most famous works is The Good Soldier (1915), a novel set just before World War I which chronicles the tragic lives of two "perfect couples" using intricate flashbacks. In a "Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford” that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier “the finest French novel in the English language!”

Ford was involved in the British war propaganda after the outbreak of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau managed by C. F. G. Masterman with other writers and scholars who were popular in those years, such as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman, namely When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915).

After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted in the Welsh Regiment on 30 July 1915, and was sent to France, thus ending his cooperation with the War Propaganda Bureau. His combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End (1924-1928), set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I.

Ford also wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoir and literary criticism, and collaborated with Joseph Conrad on two novels, The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903).

His novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, extensively revised in 1935)[1] is, in a sense, the reverse of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Ford's promotion of literature

In 1908, he founded The English Review, in which he published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats, and gave debuts to Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. In 1924, he founded The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, France, he made friends with James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford is the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). Known in his role as critic for the statement "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." In a later sojourn in the United States, he was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student). Despite his deep Victorian roots, Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended bitterly.[2]

Later life

Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, and died in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.

Name

  • Ford went through several name changes. He was baptized Ford Hermann Hueffer, but later adopted his mother's name of Madox. Later he claimed he was Baron Hueffer von Aschendorf, but, after World War I, wanting to disavow his German background, he finally settled on Ford Madox Ford.[3]

Selected works

  • The Shifting of the Fire, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
  • The Brown Owl, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
  • The Queen Who Flew: A Fairy Tale, Bliss Sands & Foster, 1894
  • The Cinque Ports, Blackwood, 1900.
  • The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Heinemann, 1901.
  • Rossetti, Duckworth, [1902].
  • Romance, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Smith Elder, 1903.
  • The Benefactor, Langham, 1905.
  • The Soul of London, Alston, 1905.
  • The Heart of the Country, Duckworth, 1906.
  • The Fifth Queen, Alston, 1906.
  • Privy Seal, Alston, 1907.
  • An English Girl, Methuen, 1907.
  • The Fifth Queen Crowned, Nash, 1908.
  • Mr Apollo, Methuen, 1908.
  • The Half Moon, Nash, 1909.
  • A Call, Chatto, 1910.
  • The Portrait, Methuen, 1910.
  • The Critical Attitude, as Ford Madox Hueffer, Duckworth 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
  • The Simple Life Limited, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1911.
  • Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, Constable, 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
  • The Panel, Constable, 1912.
  • The New Humpty Dumpty, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1912.
  • Henry James, Secker, 1913.
  • Mr Fleight, Latimer, 1913.
  • The Young Lovell, Chatto, 1913.
  • Between St Dennis and St George, Hodder, 1915.
  • The Good Soldier, Lane, 1915.
  • Zeppelin Nights, with Violet Hunt, Lane, 1915.
  • The Marsden Case, Duckworth, 1923.
  • Women and Men, Paris, 1923.
  • Mr Bosphorous, Duckworth, 1923.
  • The Nature of a Crime, with Joseph Conrad, Duckworth, 1924.
  • Some Do Not..., Duckworth, 1924.
  • No More Parades, Duckworth, 1925.
  • A Man Could Stand Up, Duckworth, 1926.
  • New York is Not America, Duckworth, 1927.
  • New York Essays, Rudge, 1927.
  • New Poems, Rudge, 1927.
  • Last Post, Duckworth, 1928.
  • A Little Less Than Gods, Duckworth, [1928].
  • No Enemy, Macaulay, 1929.
  • The English Novel, Constable, 1930.
  • When the Wicked Man, Cape, 1932.
  • The Rash Act, Cape, 1933.
  • It Was the Nightingale, Lippincott, 1933.
  • Henry for Hugh, Lippincott, 1934.
  • Provence, Unwin, 1935.
  • Ladies Whose Bright Eyes(revised version), 1935
  • Great Trade Route, OUP, 1937.
  • Vive Le Roy, Unwin, 1937.
  • The March of Literature, Dial, 1938.
  • Selected Poems, Randall, 1971.
  • Your Mirror to My Times, Holt, 1971.

References

  1. ^ Richard A. Cassell, "The Two Sorrells of Ford Madox Ford", in Modern Philology, Vol. 59, No. 2, November 1961, pp. 114-121 [1]
  2. ^ Jean Rhys
  3. ^ Henry James: A Life, Leon Edel, c. 1985, p. 523.

Further reading

  • John Attridge, "Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology," in Modernism/modernity 15:2 ([2] April 2008), 297-315.
  • Humphrey Carpenter (1987). Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. Unwin Hyman. ISBN 0-04-440-331-3.  Contains a sharp, critical biographical sketch of Ford.
  • Thirlwell, Angela, Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown. London, Chatto & Windus, 2010. ISBN 9780701179021

External links


Quotes

Up to date as of January 14, 2010

From Wikiquote

It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-12-17 - 1939-06-26), also known as Ford Madox Hueffer, was a British novelist, essayist, memoirist and publisher.

Contents

Sourced

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?
  • What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.
  • Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst.
    • Joseph Conrad : A Personal Remembrance (1924)
  • No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country... nor for the world, I dare say... None... Gone.
    • Parade's End: No More Parades (1925) [Random House, ISBN 0-14-11-8661-5] (p. 307)
  • No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: "Great heavens, did I write as well as that then?" for the implication always is that one does not write any longer so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.
  • For the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one's personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time.
    • The March of Literature (1939)

The Good Soldier (1915)

The Good Soldier : A Tale of Passion - Full text online
Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.
All he desired in life was that…the girl, being five thousand miles away, would continue to love him. He wanted nothing more, He prayed his God for nothing more.
Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness.
  • This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
    • Part One, Ch. I (p. 3) first line; Ford had originally intended the work to be titled The Saddest Story.
  • You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.
    • Part One, Ch. I (p. 5)
  • Our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously should choose; and we could rise and go, all four together, without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or, if it rained, in discreet shelters.
    • Part One, Ch. I (p. 6)
  • No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison — a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.
    And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting — or, no, not acting — sitting here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?
    • Part One, Ch. I (p. 7)
  • I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.
    • Part Two, Ch. I (p. 122)
  • Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.
    • Part Four, Ch. I (p.185)
  • It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.
    Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men's lives like the lives of us good people — like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords — broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?
    • Part Four, Ch. V (pp. 237-238)
  • She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What did he want? What did he want? And all he ever answered was: "I have told you". He meant that he wanted the girl to go to her father in India as soon as her father should cable that he was ready to receive her. But just once he tripped up. To Leonora's eternal question he answered that all he desired in life was that — that he could pick himself together again and go on with his daily occupations if — the girl, being five thousand miles away, would continue to love him. He wanted nothing more, He prayed his God for nothing more. Well, he was a sentimentalist.
    • Part Four, Ch. V (pp. 240-241)
  • Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness.
    • Part Four, Ch. VI (p. 253)
  • Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don't like society — much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward's gun-room, all day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests. In twenty minutes or so I shall walk down to the village, beneath my own oaks, alongside my own clumps of gorse, to get the American mail. My tenants, the village boys and the tradesmen will touch their hats to me. So life peters out. I shall return to dine and Nancy will sit opposite me with the old nurse standing behind her. Enigmatic, silent, utterly well-behaved as far as her knife and fork go, Nancy will stare in front of her with the blue eyes that have over them strained, stretched brows. Once, or perhaps twice, during the meal her knife and fork will be suspended in mid-air as if she were trying to think of something that she had forgotten. Then she will say that she believes in an Omnipotent Deity or she will utter the one word "shuttle-cocks", perhaps. It is very extraordinary to see the perfect flush of health on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise of the head upon the neck, the grace of the white hands — and to think that it all means nothing — that it is a picture without a meaning. Yes, it is queer.
    • Part Four, Ch. VI (p. 254)

Quotes about Ford

  • The first war had ruined him. He had volunteered, though he was over military age and was fighting a country he loved; his health was broken, and he came back to a new literary world which had carefully eliminated him. For some of his later work he could not even find a publisher in England. No wonder he preferred to live abroad — in Provence or New York. But I don't suppose failure disturbed him much: he had never really believed in human happiness, his middle life had been made miserable by passion, and he had come through — with his humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing.
    • Graham Greene, in "Ford Madox Ford," Collected Essays (1951), Part II: Novels and Novelists, p. 124 [Viking/Penguin, ISBN 0-14-003159-6]

External links

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