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Chapter 3 studies the formation of English modernism around the founding of Ford Madox Ford's two reviews, The English Review in 1908 and the transatlantic review in 1924, tracing the relation between Ford's consecration of Conrad as pioneering modernist and his promotion of Jean Rhys as part of a new modernist avant-garde. Framed by discussion of Rhys's citation of a passage from Conrad's Almayer's Folly in the novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the chapter examines Ford's critical emphasis on the linguistic effect of individual English words in excerpted passages of Conradian prose. Rhys's own economy of description sheds light on the celebrated Conradian search for the mot juste, revealing a problematic priority of cultural identity in the linguistic and literary formation of early twentieth-century English modernism.

This chapter introduces the concept of Ford Madox Ford's ‘positive fictions’, and offers a way of reading Ford's dedication to his grandfather as well as to his grandfather's circle (especially the Pre-Raphaelites) that feeds into the content and the visual style of these texts. It also reintroduces the ‘woman question’, focusing on four novels that reconstruct worlds of alternative systems which emanate from the fragmented consciousness of men such as Grimshaw. These novels are The ‘Half Moon’ (1909), Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), The New Humpty Dumpty (1912) and The Young Lovell (1913). In some texts, Ford investigates the contemporary rage/fear in male reactions to women, together with the healing qualities of what Carl Jung termed the female archetypes. Jung's theories, and Robert Graves's writings, are used as part of an illuminatory test of Jung's assertion that ‘our world seems to be dis-infected of witches’, when the world is Ford's positive fictions. These fictions possess roots that mean the multiple perspectives central to modernism often regenerate as well as destroy.

The enriching and rewarding aspects of modernism (such as myth and self-discovery), as presented in Ford Madox Ford's positive fictions, were the subject of the previous two chapters. This chapter examines which aspects of modernism are manifested in Ford's faith in the act of writing itself – the regenerative or the terrible – and considers Ford's creative dynamic, his techniques and his literary rules for the writing of prose. Using a range of Ford's writing, it addresses the question of which aspects of modernism ultimately hold sway in Ford's oeuvre. The chapter also analyses Ford's theoretical, modernist stances and considers impressionism as well as Ford's position in the modernist subjectivity versus objectivity debate. Concluding with an analysis of memory and its role in the modernist quest, it also returns the book to its beginnings, and a writer who believed in pictures of the past, and the present, and sought to write them, however difficult.

This chapter addresses the debates about the future of the British novel in the years leading up the First World War. The initial focus is Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. By reading the magazine forward from the ‘Art of Fiction’ debates of the 1880s, rather than—as is usual—back through canonical modernism, we see how Ford deliberated staged comparisons between what he saw as the two distinct possibilities for the future of modern British literature: the ‘artists’ drawing on a French, specifically Flaubertian, tradition with which Ford aligned his own ‘impressionism’, and the ‘propagandists’ deriving from English and Russian nineteenth-century novels. The literary relevance of the anti-tsarist politics of the magazine is discussed, and the chapter concludes by analysing Joseph Conrad’s work of the period.

This chapter suggests a new reading of one of Pound's most contested works in terms of the contexts provided in Part I. In particular, Pound's parody of aestheticism is compared to Beerbohm's in Seven Men. The critical tradition has been excessively preoccupied with trying to identify the speakers and ‘originals’ of each section of Mauberley. It argues that, seen in relation to the growing interest in portrait collections, composite portraiture, the disturbances in auto/biography, and imaginary art‐works, this poem sequence can be read as a parody of the forms of literary memoir, through which Pound also explores autobiography.

This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist autobiographies of the novelists Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. It discusses the recent rehabilitation of the concept of literary impressionism in theoretical studies of fiction. While its discussion of the impression looks back to the studies of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust, it also looks forward to the modernists discussed in Part II.

Contrasting the fractured point of view of combatant writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ford Madox Ford to the heroic prospects projected by official War Artists like Muirhead Bone and war poets like Rupert Brooke, this chapter argues that most urgent task confronting the military authorities was to bridge the gulf between the commanding strategic perspective and the collapses of vision in the trench labyrinth of the Western Front. It explores how despite its notorious failures the war machine used propaganda, censorship, military discipline, camouflage and other new technologies to recapture the oversight of battle, turning the imperial sovereign gaze on the minds and bodies of the mass army in the trenches. Despite antimodernism on the home front, the military authorities covertly cannibalized modernist culture in their struggle to modernize. But the camouflaged modernism of Rosenberg, Vera Brittain, or Ford's Parade's End demonstrates a more sceptical response to the dominant perspective of war.

The novel series of Ford Madox Ford and R. H. Mottram show clearly the development of disenchantment in the latter part of the post-war decade. Both write between the Victorian and the modern, demonstrating a loyalty to the realist form but also engaging with new literary metaphors and techniques. Ford’s Parade’s End (1924-8) and R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924-7) both feature a bureaucrat protagonist, the quintessential modern figure emblematising the impact of mechanisation and mass culture on individuals and social structures. Both adapt the family saga form: Ford uses subtle time shifts, while Mottram’s narratives intersect through a single location. Contextual links are made with contemporary philosophies and scientific discoveries about time and space. Both series highlight the intensification of disenchantment, and in particular Ford’s Last Post (1928) is an indictment of post-war decline in Britain.

This chapter examines Ford’s reminiscences—Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (1911), Thus to Revisit (1921), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), Return to Yesterday (1931), and It Was the Nightingale (1934). The chapter begins with a discussion of different degrees of autobiography, and the difference between autobiography and autobiographical forms including the roman à clef. It then traces the evolution of Ford’s reminiscences from his early “Literary Portraits” up to Mightier Than the Sword (1938). It argues that Ford forged a new genre, fusing fact and fiction to portray his contemporaries. Ford’s reminiscences are seen as group portraits, and Ford’s accounts of Conrad, James, Lewis, Stein, and Wells are discussed. The chapter also examines how the pivotal experience of the First World War was avoided by Ford in all his autobiographies, and how Ford also omitted his relationships with women in his reminiscences.

Ford Madox Ford admired Ivan Turgenev, so it is not surprising that one comes across ideas borrowed, perhaps, from him in the later writer's work. In this case, though, there is a development at work; a development precipitated by World War I. Turgenev's self-confessed nihilist Bazarov expresses amazement at the tenacity of human belief in words – words that, in his example, can diminish and deaden a feeling of catastrophe. Were he to find himself instead in the volumes of Parade's End (or one of a number of other war novels), Bazarov's amazement would be tempered. Ford, post-war, has lost belief in words. He is often unsatisfied with the capacity of language to express the totality of thought or experience; speech constantly ‘gives out’, to be replaced by his most characteristic grammatical tool: ellipsis. Two quotations provide a framework for an exploration into how and why sight functions in the fragmentation of war. The first is from John Keegan's book, The Face of Battle; the second from Frederic Manning's novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune.

Isaiah Berlin writes in Four Essays on Liberty that ‘historians of ideas cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern’. Where modernism is credited with a pattern, and it usually is, it is more than likely that the concept of fragmentation is prominent in it. This book puts novelist, poet, editor and critic Ford Madox Ford in context, placing him in the context of literary modernism, in which, as editor of the English Review, author of The Good Soldier and transformer of Ezra Pound's verse, he performed a vital part. Indeed, in his magisterial biography of Ford, Max Saunders writes that ‘the period of literary modernism is “the Ford era” as much as it is Pound's, or T. S. Eliot's, or James Joyce's’; Ford was ‘at the centre of the three most innovative groups of writers this century’. In addition, the language of decline, collapse and fragmentation is commonly applied by historical analysts to events and developments of the early twentieth century.

This chapter turns to one of the most flexible and complex political effects of cynicism: its taking of distance on the politics of the nation state. It starts by re-reading the old story of cosmopolitanism’s point of origin in the claim of Diogenes of Sinope to be ‘not a citizen’ of Athens, or any other city state, but kosmopolites, a citizen of the world. It examines the difference between the classical historical literature, in the main, wary of giving Diogenes credit for advocating universal humanitarianism, and the more-and-less critical uses made of classical history by twentieth- and twenty-first-century political theorists. On that basis, the chapter traces the lines of a specifically ‘cynic cosmopolitanism’ as it finds expression within two literary writers looking to challenge the role, and the rights, of Englishness in an international frame: George Eliot (as she turns away from ‘moral realism’, at the end of her writing career, towards more experimental engagement with the form of the character sketch), and Ford Madox Ford, as he develops and revises his literary ‘Impressionism’ during and immediately after the First World War. For both, cosmopolitanism was less a moral matter than one of psychology, requiring an internal balance to be found, in one’s own mind, between idealism and a bracingly cynical realism.

Developing the discussion of religion, this chapter compares Ford Madox Ford's fantasy novel, The Young Lovell (1913), with the poem ‘On Heaven’, written at the same period. It seeks the religious equivalent of the symbolic healing of women and investigates the peculiarly Fordian notion of peace. ‘Fantasies are scenarios of desire’, according to Peter Gay; they are ‘in touch with the deepest motions of the mind, principally its unmet needs’. In ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, Sigmund Freud examines the often ordinarily sublimated extension of the childhood need for fantasy and play as expressed in creative writing. In The Young Lovell and ‘On Heaven’, Ford's desire, his fantasy, is to do with being seen. Not for these characters Dowell's ‘mortifying’ experience of having Leonora's ‘lighthouse glare’ turned upon him (The Good Soldier); here characters are seen and known in their entirety, in their complexity, and in this there is peace.

D. H. Lawrence's essay ‘Why the Novel Matters’ focuses on issues of communication and plurality as displayed by the effective novel. The relationship between Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford was sometimes close, and at times was difficult. It began when Ford first published Lawrence in the English Review and ‘introduced him to literary London’. What is communicated in Ford's novels, and how? This chapter examines the resultant dramatic thrust of the contemporary Fifth Queen trilogy, the eye for colour, for detail, for patterns. The psycho-political geography of Ford's writing is thus confirmed in its period of relative certainty, especially when compared with the suicides of Edward and Florence in The Good Soldier and the suicide of Christopher Tietjens's father in Parade's End. These later novels are distinguishable from the Fifth Queen trilogy primarily due to their more complex interweaving of levels. As another manifestation of modernist fragmentation, one fomented by psychoanalysis and sexology, the four main characters are read partly as four parts of the same psyche, individually and oppositionally gaining (at times violent) expression.

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.

This chapter first argues that Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Ford Madox Ford’s First World War tetralogy Parade’s End, appropriates the plot and themes of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier. Both works are early engagements with the formulation of shell-shock as a medical condition and are simultaneously theorizings of modernist historical practices. For Ford especially, traumatic amnesia becomes a model for a modernist historical narratology and an impressionist aesthetic: language cannot directly name historical objects, which instead must be “thought round,” to use the words of Ford’s protagonist Christopher Tietjens. Some Do Not . . . also suggests a place in historiography for amnesia and forgetting: the novel’s ellipses, nonlinearity, and radical use of indirect discourse, rather than distancing the text from history, actually pull intimately close to the process by which human memory becomes historical text.

This chapter discusses the histories of Ford Madox Ford's the transatlantic review and Ezra Pound's The Exile. Both magazines sought to publish innovative work, which both Pound and Ford liked to differentiate from ‘commercial’ writing. In practice, however, neither of them carried out this strategy in a programmatic fashion, since they both tended to follow their own tastes, published whatever they liked, and relied heavily on personal contacts. The main differences between them were that The Exile was a ‘closed shop’ and that Ford's editorial policy was in no sense dependent on considerations of gender, while Pound's was radically male-centred and exclusionist. Ford's desire to create a public sphere in which a variety of voices might productively commingle was inclusive, whereas Pound was bent on creating a new American civilization in which in at least one respect exclusive, male-centred, and misogynist.

This chapter examines Ford’s Parade’s End in comparison to Rebecca’s West’s earlier novella, The Return of the Soldier, exploring the different ways in which their respective protagonists ‘work through’ the psychological and emotional legacy of war. Opening with an initial survey of contemporary responses to the newly-emergent condition ‘shell shock’ – medical definitions, military classifications and the emerging field of psychoanalysis as theorised by Freud and W. H. R. Rivers – the chapter goes on to discuss Ford and West’s engagement with these discourses in their fiction as both attempt to imagine the possibilities for the reintegration of the mind after the return from war. It concludes by exploring the ways in which this paradigm of psychological trauma contributes to the authors’ literary modernism.

In ‘Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club’, Nathan Waddell explores Ford’s post-war revisiting of the pre-war avant-garde party scene in his reconstruction in The Marsden Case (1923) of a staging of an ombres chinoises at the Cabaret Theatre Club. The Club’s performance space, the Cave of the Golden Calf, fostered part-public, part-private activities away from a dismal ‘above-ground’ where ‘people were disagreeably odd and wearisome things had to be accounted for’. Ford’s return in The Marsden Case to an early modernist scene of revelry and hedonism is, in Waddell’s account, not so much a ‘frivolous avoidance of […] political anxieties’ as the recalling of a cultural era ‘whose cosmopolitan and intellectual underpinnings might point the way for a directionless post-war modernity’.