Lemon and Pink

David Trotter

  • Return to Yesterday by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Bill Hutchings
    Carcanet, 330 pp, £14.95, August 1999, ISBN 1 85754 397 1
  • War Prose by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Max Saunders
    Carcanet, 276 pp, £14.95, August 1999, ISBN 1 85754 396 3

One day in 1914, Ford Madox Ford, then 40 years old and feeling it, found himself for a while in the custody of the youthful Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer whose work had appeared in Ford’s magazine, the English Review, and who was about to launch a magazine of his own, the rather more intemperate Blast. Gripping Ford by the elbow, Lewis, who was as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those old fellows are done,’ he was to be heard insisting. ‘Exploded! ... Fichus! ... No good! ... Finished!’ Lewis’s beef was with literary ‘impressionism’: with novels which sought intricately to render the movements, at once furtive and immense, of a consciousness enmeshed in and inseparable from worlds not of its own making. ‘You fellows try to efface yourselves; to make people think that there isn’t any author and that they’re living in the affairs you ... adumbrate, isn’t that your word? ... What balls!’ Adumbration had been Flaubert’s method, and Turgenev’s, and James’s, and Conrad’s. It was rather ostentatiously the method of Ford’s The Good Soldier, whose opening chapters were shortly to appear in Blast. Lewis thought that people had had enough of all that. They did not want self-effacement. They wanted brilliant fellows like him performing stunts and letting off fireworks. ‘What’s the good of being an author if you don’t get any fun out of it?’

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[*] It is the intimations of class and sex war in Parade’s End which have persuaded David Ayers to give Ford a prominent place in his resolutely invigorating account of English Literature in the 1920s (Edinburgh, 248 pp., £40, 5 February 1999, 0 7486 0985 7). English literature turns out to mean English fiction, but within that narrower frame of reference the argument is wide-ranging and sophisticated. Ford apart, the main beneficiary of Ayers’s contextualising approach is Lawrence, but he also writes well about Lewis and Woolf, in particular. A dizzying final chapter, which imaginatively construes A Passage to India with the help of Hegel and Derrida, seems to belong to a different book altogether.