February 22, 2025

1. Ford Madox Ford

A. Introduction

Ford Madox Ford was an English man-of-letters who lived from 1873 to 1939. He published 81 books — novels, poems, memoirs, literary criticism, etc. He edited two literary journals, both of which had high reputations; as an editor, he managed to discover and publish unknown writers like D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis.


Ford Madox Ford

Though many of his novels are forgotten, Ford’s best novels, such as The Good Soldier and Some Do Not, are still highly-regarded. He had a deep interest in fiction-technique, and wrote much about Literary Impressionism. He was close friends with Joseph Conrad, collaborated with him on several novels, and talked with him endlessly about the art of fiction. Ford was also friends with Ezra Pound, Henry James, Hemingway, and many other writers; Ford seemed to know everyone in the literary world.


Left to right, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, John Quinn
In pictures, Ford almost always has his mouth open

In the last issue of Phlit, I said that the philosopher hoped to reach the teenage reader, whose mind was open to new ideas. Ford makes a similar point:

I was sitting in the dusk, last Spring, in a... London room, awaiting the return from business of the master of the house.... With a book upon his knee, in a window-seat [was] a young boy — say he was sixteen. He did not stir; I did not speak for a long time. I had asked him what was the name of the book and he had answered: “Oh, Goldsmith... The Deserted Village.”

He was the master of all us writers. He was the Reader! I had nearly written: He was the Only Reader. For there is no reading like that of a boy in the long dusks: it is the deepest abandonment of the soul that we know on this earth.1

Ford’s importance lies not only in his major novels, but in his enthusiasm for literature, his commitment to literature, his attempts to foster literature. One of Ford’s biographers, Arthur Mizener, said “Ford was a gifted man unqualifiedly devoted to literature — an old man, as he liked to say, mad about writing.”2

Ford had a high reputation in the U.S., and spent considerable time in the U.S. Ford’s novel The Good Soldier has many references to American life. In the 1930s, Ford taught at Olivet College in Michigan. One of his students, Robie Macauley, said that Ford believed “a writer committed himself at the beginning and had to remain committed through all the mischances of life.... He thought of it as something like a priest’s vocation... To write honestly and well was the most important thing in the world.”3 (In the last issue, I quoted Hemingway’s remark, “A writer must come to his work like a priest to the altar.”)


Ford’s maternal grandfather was the painter Ford Madox Brown.
In the above painting, Brown used Ford as a model for the son of William Tell.
According to legend, Tell used a bow-and-arrow to shoot an apple off his son’s head.
Note the groove in the apple, where the arrow has passed through.

Ford admired American literature, especially midwestern-American literature. Frank MacShane wrote,

From about 1923 until his death in 1939, Ford Madox Ford continuously asserted that the best writing in English of those years was being produced not by the inhabitants of the older literary centers like London, New York, and Boston, but by men and women who were born west of the Hudson River. The names of Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, John Dos Passos, James Farrell, Glenway Wescott, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom came from the Middle West, suggest that Ford was not far wrong in his literary judgment.

MacShane also mentions “Nebraska’s Willa Cather... Ezra Pound of Idaho, T. S. Eliot of Missouri, and John Gould Fletcher of Arkansas.”4

Near the end of his life, Ford attempted a survey of world literature; he called it The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times. “I think it a dazzling performance,” said Nicholas Delbanco, “eight-hundred-and-fifty pages chock-a-block with information, a passionately embraced espousal of what that devotee of writing found humane and sane.”

Frank MacShane says that the goal of The March of Literature was the “immensely difficult task of increasing an appreciation of good literature among the general public.” Ford says that creative writers (like himself) are most likely to reach this goal: “It is your hot love of your art... that will enable you to convey to others your strong passion.”5

Ford complained that literary men weren’t respected in England, especially after 1900: “Ranking socially with the governess and the butler — a little above it if he prospers, a little below it if he is poor — he cannot qua writer be a gentleman.”6 As Joyce put it, the British were fond of beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, and battleships. Ford thought that technical advances and material wealth were no substitute for real culture: “A culture that is founded on the activities of the applied scientist, the financier, the commercial engineer [is] very little elevated above the state of savagedom.”7

Ford was an accomplished poet as well as a novelist. His poetry was popular with Modernists like Ezra Pound; they praised Ford for treating modern subjects in contemporary diction. T. S. Eliot said that Ford’s poem “October 1914” was “the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war.”8

When he wrote fiction, Ford tried to reach out to the reader, communicate with the reader, sympathize with the reader. As he worked on The Good Soldier, Ford said he wanted to write in a style “so unobtrusive and so quiet that the reader shall not know he is reading, and be conscious only that he is living in a book.”9 At the start of The Good Soldier, Ford imagines himself telling the story instead of writing it:

I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars. From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say: “Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence!” And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay.

Ford had a particular fondness for Provence, wrote a book about it, and lived there for a time. Ford had a vegetable garden in Provence, and he believed that people would be better off if they grew their own food, and connected with the soil. His father wrote a book about the troubadours of Provence, and Ford shared his father’s enthusiasm for medieval culture.

Ford often told “stretchers,” that is, he stretched the truth about his schooling, his war experiences, etc. H. G. Wells, who was a friend of Ford, wrote a novel called The Bulpington of Blup, which deals with a self-dramatizing man, Theodore Bulpington, who resembles Ford. Bulpington embroiders his war record, as Ford did, and criticizes his former mistress, as Ford criticized Violet Hunt.10

After Ford died, Stella Bowen, who had lived with Ford for several years, said “Ford’s weakness of character, unfairness, disregard of truth, and vanity must be accepted. On the other hand, his tenderness, understanding, wisdom (about anything that didn’t apply to himself!) and the tremendous attraction of his gorgeous mind, must make him always regretted.”11 Allen Tate, who spent considerable time with Ford, spoke of “his great kindness to me as a young man.”

After D. H. Lawrence met Ford, he reported to his friend Jessie Chambers, “He is fairish, fat, about forty, and the kindest man on earth.” When Jessie herself met Ford, she had an impression of “genuine kindliness”: “I suppose never before or since has anyone talked to me with quite such charm, making me feel in the most delicate way that what I said was of interest.” Arthur Mizener wrote, “Ford had considerable charm. He was a sympathetic, even a sentimental man, and his sensitivity to the feelings of others often seemed to them almost uncanny; it made him especially attractive to women.”12

As Lawrence and Jessie walked away from their meeting with Ford, Lawrence said to Jessie, “Isn’t he fat, and doesn’t he walk slow! He says he walks about London two hours every day to keep his fat down. But he won’t keep much down if he always walks at that pace.”13

The English novelist Somerset Maugham described himself as being “in the very first row of the second-raters.” Perhaps we should describe Ford as being in the very last row of the first-raters. Late in his life, Ford was dissatisfied with his reputation, and felt that the world had forgotten him. When the American journalist George Seldes talked with Ford around 1932, Ford complained that

“[Hemingway] disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.”
Tears now came to Ford’s eyes.
“I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I’m now an old man and I’ll die without making a name like Hemingway.”
At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.14

Ford had the weak ego that we often find in intellectuals. Douglas Goldring, who knew Ford well and wrote two books about him, said “There is a good deal of evidence that he suffered throughout his life from a torturing lack of confidence in his own gifts.”15

On the other hand, Ford was often arrogant and “full of himself.” Arthur Mizener said that Ford “knew he alternated between extremes of self-assurance and self-doubt.”16 Violet Hunt lived with Ford for several years. She spoke of Ford’s “native arrogance,” and said that this arrogance “appeared to be completely obliterated when Conrad was in the room.”17

Ford had relationships with

  1. Elsie Martindale, whom he knew in his youth; they married about 1894, when Ford was about 21 and Elsie was 18; they had two daughters
  2. Violet Hunt, whom he lived with from about 1909 to 1918; Hunt was a prominent novelist and active socialite, eleven years older than Ford
  3. Stella Bowen, an aspiring painter whom Ford lived with from 1918 to 1927; they had one daughter; Stella was twenty years younger than Ford
  4. Janice Biala, a Jewish painter, thirty years younger than Ford; Janice lived with Ford from 1927 until his death in 1939


Left to right: Caroline Gordon Tate, Janice Biala, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Tate
The picture was probably taken in Clarksville, Tennessee

When Ford was born, he was given the name Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer. Ford’s father was a music critic and music historian who had been born in Germany. Ford initially called himself Ford Madox Hueffer, but around 1912, he changed his name to Ford Madox Ford.

Violet Hunt claimed that Ford had obtained a divorce from Elsie Martindale in Germany; Violet also claimed that she herself had married Ford in Germany; Violet began calling herself “Mrs. Hueffer.” Meanwhile, Elsie insisted that she was still married to Ford; she refused to give him a divorce, and refused to let him see their two daughters. Elsie claimed to be the only Mrs. Hueffer, and she sued Violet, and won the suit.

There was a major scandal, which embarrassed Ford, and stressed him, pushing him close to suicide/madness. Ford briefly went to prison for failure to pay alimony. Ford had a kind of nervous breakdown; Violet calls it “neurasthenia.” Ford was afraid that Elsie would have him arrested. “Imagining he had heard the front doorbell pealing violently, [Ford] tied up all the doors with odd straps, strings, and dog leads, and blocked the front door with a bicycle; he came to bed with a white, scared face.”18 According to Violet, “It was the beginning of a fresh attack of neurasthenia that lasted three whole years, and was responsible for many things, and much private and particular misery.”19

It’s possible that Ford changed his last name from Hueffer to Ford in order to escape the fracas over who was the real Mrs. Hueffer. If Violet called herself “Mrs Ford,” perhaps it would be more difficult for Elsie to sue her. It’s also possible that Ford dropped “Hueffer” to escape his German ancestry. When World War I broke out, he was suspected of being a German agent. He lived in Germany during part of 1911, and he told an English newspaper, “[I] retained my German nationality, I offered myself for service with the German army.”20

Ford spent several stormy years with Violet Hunt. In early 1918, when Ford’s relationship with Violet was ending, Ford met Stella Bowen at a party. She was an aspiring painter, 24 years old; Ford was 44.

They experienced an instant rapport. Bowen found him “quite simply the most enthralling person I had ever met.” He quickly began confiding in her about all his troubles, including his inability to divorce his wife and to disentangle himself from his lover, the writer Violet Hunt. Soon he was telling her that “he wished to place his person, his fortune, his future in my hands.” He was tired of the world and just wanted “to dig potatoes and raise pigs and never write another book.”21


Stella Bowen, Provençal Conversation

Stella Bowen noted Ford’s lack of confidence, his weak ego. She wrote,

[Ford] was all too ready to feel discouraged when things went wrong, and he found so many reasons for feeling frightened. Poor Ford! There was something about the sight of his large patient fingers tapping at the keys [of his typewriter], that I always found infinitely touching. He was a writer — a complete writer — and nothing but a writer. And he never even felt sure of his gift! He needed more reassurance than anyone I have ever met.22

When Ford was married to Elsie Martindale, he had an affair with her sister, Mary. While he was living with Stella, Ford had an affair with a writer named Jean Rhys, who later wrote about the affair in a novel called Quartet. While Ford was living with Violet, Ford seems to have had an affair with Gertrud Schlabowsky, who may have been a prostitute.23

B. The Good Soldier

These overlapping relationships resemble the overlapping relationships in Ford’s novel The Good Soldier. Ford described The Good Soldier as “a serious analysis of the polygamous desires that underlie all men.”24 The protagonist of The Good Soldier, Edward Ashburnham, has a “mad passion to find an ultimately satisfying woman.” For Ford and for Edward Ashburnham, love was about moral support at least as much as physical pleasure. Ford wrote, “no man can satisfactorily accomplish his life’s work without loyal and whole-hearted cooperation of the woman he lives with.”25

Ford was the philandering Edward Ashburnham, but he was also the conservative John Dowell, narrator of The Good Soldier. In creating Ashburnham and Dowell, Ford doubled himself (some of his other novels also have “doubles”26). Dowell says, “I loved Edward Ashburnham because he was just myself.” Mizener says, “[Ford] knew himself to be, at one time and another, both [Ashburnham and Dowell].”

Ford was a philanderer, but he was also a conservative. Ford sees love in a non-sexual way. Harold Loeb, who knew Ford, said “Ford made Dowell proper, extremely proper. And Ford was like that.”27

Discussing Edward Ashburnham’s relationship with his wife, Ford says “he desperately needed her moral support.” Does this imply that Ashburnham, like Ford himself, had low self-esteem, and couldn’t provide his own moral support?

Schopenhauer said, “No man is a hero to his valet.”28 His valet sees him at close range, sees him in his weak moments. Perhaps it’s equally true that no man is a hero to himself, and therefore he needs the admiration of others, the moral support of others. In The Good Soldier, Ford wrote, “I don’t know what anyone has to be proud of.”

Stella Bowen says that, when she lived with Ford, he needed practical support, as well as moral support. “I must manage to keep all worries from him, which was difficult. It meant that I must not let him know how overdrawn we were at the bank, nor how big the bill from the corn mills had become, nor how badly we needed a paraffin tank.”29

Women were often taken with Ford at first acquaintance. But this infatuation dwindled over the years. Then he would meet another woman who was infatuated with him, leave his previous partner, and start the cycle again. Like many other novels, The Good Soldier is about love, about relationships — or rather, it’s about Ford’s experience of love, which was shaped by his own personality, his own weak ego. The Good Soldier is about Ford’s experience of the passing of love, it’s about the transitory nature of love. Ford writes in The Good Soldier,

It is impossible to believe in the permanence of man’s or woman’s love. Or, at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the permanence of any early passion.... Of the question of the sex-instinct I know very little and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion....

There is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist....

[The lover seeks] the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so.... The beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

Ford wanted to call his novel The Saddest Story (not The Good Soldier), but his publisher felt that The Saddest Story was too depressing a name in war-time, when there was so much sad news already.

In The Good Soldier, Edward Ashburnham’s relationships with women don’t bring him happiness — quite the contrary. Likewise, Ford’s overlapping relationships sometimes caused him intense suffering. When he left his wife (Elsie) for Violet, he suffered intensely from the scandal, and from the damage to his friendships with Joseph Conrad and Henry James, who couldn’t accept his philandering.

Ford’s suffering led to the writing of The Good Soldier; his most intense pain led to his greatest novel. Art often comes from suffering. As Kierkegaard said, “Men crowd about the poet and say to him, ‘Sing for us soon again’ — which is as much as to say, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul.’”30

When Ford wrote The Good Soldier around 1913, he had two bitter pills to swallow: his marriage to Elsie had broken down, and his relationship with Violet was proving to be as flawed as his relationship with Elsie. He couldn’t find “an ultimately satisfying woman,” he was at his wits’ end. Ford said that The Good Soldier was “a work over which I sweated real drops of sweat and shed real drops of tears.” Mizener writes, “One may question, as with any novel, the wisdom of its occasional generalizations, but one cannot doubt the genuineness of its dominant attitude, that life is an inexplicable horror, ‘all a darkness.’”31

Can a depiction of pain and horror become a first-rate novel? Yes, says Ford, because life itself is painful, most people experience life as painful, so the reading public is receptive to works that depict life as painful, works that are consistent with their experience.32 Ford said that What Maisie Knew, by Henry James, was “a horrible book” that was “triumphantly true.” Most critics say that Violet Hunt’s best novel is Their Lives, which is also horribly true.33

Douglas Goldring, who socialized with Ford and Violet, said

As personalities, both of them, whether you liked them or not, were outstanding among the literary figures of their time. They were emotional and exciting, they caused discussion, aroused controversies, were intensely alive. Their deep roots in the past and their standard of values enabled them both, in their several ways, to resist the intellectual and moral defeatism which followed the Four Years War.34

Ford wrote The Good Soldier while he was living with Violet. Nonetheless, The Good Soldier depicts Violet in a negative way. Violet is the scheming Florence Dowell, and in Ford’s war novels (the tetralogy known as Parade’s End), Violet became “the promiscuous Sylvia Tietjens.”35 Being a novelist herself, Violet must have recognized herself in Florence and Sylvia, but she made the best of it, she said that fictional characters are generally composites of several people. She helped Ford to publish The Good Soldier, and rescued it from the flames when Ford tried to burn it (Mizener says that pages 113-140 of the manuscript are “scorched”).36

On a first reading, The Good Soldier is somewhat challenging. Ford doesn’t tell the story chronologically, he jumps around, and these jumps can be difficult for the reader. Early reviews of the novel were generally negative. But once you start to feel at home in this fictional world, it’s an enjoyable novel to read; perhaps I should say, it’s an enjoyable novel to re-read.

Is there any way to make it enjoyable on a first reading? I suggest “reading around” the novel, i.e., don’t read only the text, look at the Norton Critical Edition, look at Wikipedia’s articles on Ford and on The Good Soldier, look at the essay by Constance Hinds, look at a biography of Ford, etc. If the text is proving difficult, go back and forth between the text and these secondary sources.

If I’m successful with this essay of mine, it will be the only secondary source you’ll need, and it will enable you to enjoy The Good Soldier on a first reading. If you pursue your Ford studies further, you may find that Ford’s novel Some Do Not is as good as The Good Soldier and more accessible; perhaps The Good Soldier isn’t the right place to start a study of Ford.

When The Good Soldier was published in 1915, older critics were impatient with it, but the 23-year-old Rebecca West saw its merits:

Behind it is a force of passion which so sustains the story in its flight that never once does it appear as the work of a man’s invention.... When one has come to the end of this beautiful and moving story it is worth while reading the book over again simply to observe the wonders of its technique. [Ford] has used the device, invented and used successfully by Mr. Henry James... of presenting the story not as it appeared to a divine and omnipresent intelligence, but as it was observed by some intervener not too intimately concerned in the plot.... Out of the leisured colloquialism of the gentle American who tells the story [Ford] has made a prose that falls on the page like sunlight. It has the supreme triumph of art, that effect of effortlessness and inevitableness.37

The protagonist of The Good Soldier, Edward Ashburnham, is the country gentleman, the lord of the manor, that Ford dreamed of being. Ford describes Edward sitting down in the dining-room of a hotel:

His face hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair; neither hope nor fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to perceive no soul in that crowded room; he might have been walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect expression before and I never shall again. It was insolence and not insolence; it was modesty and not modesty.

Though Ford resembles Ashburnham in some respects, Ford probably didn’t enter a room with such a “perfect expression.” Likewise, Ford’s conversation wasn’t as empty as Ashburnham’s. Ashburnham talked only of

Where you got the best soap, the best brandy, the name of the chap who rode a [horse] down the Khyber cliffs; the spreading power of number three shot before a charge of number four powder... by heavens, I hardly ever heard him talk of anything else. Not in all the years that I knew him did I hear him talk of anything but these subjects. Oh, yes, once he told me that I could buy my special shade of blue ties cheaper from a firm in Burlington Arcade than from my own people in New York.... How could he arouse anything like a sentiment, in anybody?

Ford was full of doubts, but doubt never seems to enter Edward’s head. Ford writes,

I have given a wrong impression of Edward Ashburnham if I have made you think that literally never in the course of our nine years of intimacy did he discuss what he would have called “the graver things” ...He would say that constancy was the finest of the virtues. He said it very stiffly, of course, but still as if the statement admitted of no doubt.

So in some respects, Edward and Ford are opposites, but they resemble each other in their polygamous tendencies. They also resemble each other insofar as they’re generous, high-minded, chivalric — medieval knights living in the modern world. Ford was raised by artists and writers who respected the Middle Ages; Ford tried to bring medieval values into his own life. In the eyes of Ford’s relatives, business was unworthy of a human being. When Ford considered a civil-service career, his grandfather said, “God damn and blast my soul! I will turn you straight out of my house if you go in for any kind of commercial life.”38

C. War

When World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, Ford was recruited for the propaganda department. One of the main goals of this department was to attract American support to the Allied cause. Ford wrote two books in the next year, When Blood Is Their Argument, and Between St. Dennis and St. George. Douglas Goldring said in 1943, “Both books are as valuable today as when they first appeared, and they are probably the only two, out of the mass of propaganda literature put out between 1914 and 1919, which deserve to survive.”39 These two books discuss the strengths and weaknesses of English, French, and German civilization.

In the summer of 1915, after a year in the propaganda department, Ford decided that the only honorable course was to join the army. He wanted “a commission in the regular army, not in any of the fancy services which are only a form of shirking.”40 Ford wrote his mother, “If one has enjoyed the privileges of the ruling class of a country all one’s life, there seems to be no alternative to fighting for that country if necessary.” (In an egalitarian country like ours, a country without a ruling class, does anyone feel an obligation to fight for the country?)

For Ford, the army offered an escape from literary labor. Ford felt that his literary career wasn’t moving forward. “The world now belonged to younger men.”41 Young radicals like Wyndham Lewis dismissed Ford — sometimes to his face — as a relic of the nineteenth century. Ford was eager to take a break from literature, to stop hunting for the mot juste. But could he contribute to the army? Or would he just get in the way?

Violet cried for three days when Ford enlisted. For the first year of his enlistment, he was training in England, then in the summer of 1916, his unit was sent to the front, to join the Battle of the Somme. Ford was 43. One of his superiors realized he wasn’t up to front-line service, so he served behind the front line.

Nonetheless, he was in the battle, he was within range of German guns. “When he was knocked down by the concussion of a near-miss and damaged his front teeth, he went to pieces. He was sent to Corbie to have his teeth attended to and found he had lost his memory; for thirty-six hours he could not even recall his own name; for at least a month after, he could remember very little, and he later said that he did not get ‘over the nerve tangle of the war’ until 1923.”42

Like Hemingway, Ford wasn’t a front-line soldier, but he was psychologically scarred by the war. And like Hemingway, Ford drew on his war experiences in his fiction. The protagonist of Some Do Not..., Christopher Tietjens, has a nightmare about forgetting.

After the Battle of the Somme, Ford was delirious, had nightmares, and was afraid of going mad; the common term for Ford’s condition was “shell shock.” He wrote to his mother, “It would be preferable to be dead, but one is not dead.”43

Like Hemingway, Ford prayed. “During the worst phase of the first battle of the Somme,” Ford wrote, “at night, when one had a long period of waiting with nothing to do, in pitch blackness, in the midst of gunfire that shook the earth I did once pray to the major Heavenly powers that my reason might be preserved.”44 If Hemingway and Ford were rarely in the front lines, yet still were traumatized by the war, imagine how many front-line soldiers were traumatized. Imagine how many soldiers in Ukraine today are traumatized.

Some of Ford’s superiors felt that he was too old, he was a burden to his unit. Ford was teased frequently. One of his superiors wrote,

I consider that he is quite unsuitable to perform the duties required of an officer in this campaign. He would not inspire his men with confidence and his power as a leader is nil. I recommend that he be sent home as early as possible as there is no use to which I can put him. I could not place him in command of men in the field. I cannot recommend him for employment at home.45

On one occasion, a German plane dropped poison gas on Ford’s unit when Ford was packing a suitcase. When he closed his suitcase, the gas was trapped inside. Later, at home, he opened the suitcase, and was poisoned, though the effects weren’t permanent.46

D. Literary Impressionism

Ford was a student of the art of fiction, and had countless conversations with Conrad about the art of fiction. Ford and Conrad admired Henry James, who was about 15 years older than Conrad, and about 30 years older than Ford. Ford and Conrad were fond of James’ The Spoils of Poynton, and read it together, probably aloud, with “rapturous and shouting enthusiasm.... That must have been the high-water mark of Conrad’s enthusiasm for the work of any other writer.”47

As Ford learned from James, so James learned from Flaubert, who was about 20 years older than James. Flaubert tried to depict the world as it was, while English novelists were didactic. English novelists often depicted the triumph of virtue; English novelists often tried to expose abuses, and instigate reforms. Ford said that Dickens was a “great genius,” but he produced “works of propaganda.”48

Dickens describes “villains all black, heroes all white.”49 Ford preferred French novelists like Stendhal and Flaubert, who tried to depict the world as it was, without moralizing, preaching, or reforming. English novelists thought they knew what was moral, while for French novelists, morality was more ambiguous, more debatable, more Nietzschean (Nietzsche was a big fan of Stendhal).

Literary Impressionism meant giving the reader an impression of a character or place, often a visual impression, such as one would get in real life. At the start of Madame Bovary, Flaubert doesn’t describe the character of Charles Bovary, he describes his hat, so the reader can see him, and draw conclusions about his character. Flaubert’s disciple, Maupassant, introduces a character as “a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a door.”50 We have an impression of the man, we can see him, and infer something about his character.

James admired Maupassant, and praised the simplicity, the directness, “the masculine firmness, the quiet force of his style.”51 Was Maupassant the Hemingway of his day? James’ praise of Maupassant reminds me of Ford’s praise of Hemingway.

Ford shared James’ admiration of Maupassant. Ford said that, in writing The Good Soldier, he aspired to do what Maupassant had done in his novel Fort Comme la Mort [Strong As Death].52 Maupassant’s novel, like The Good Soldier, is about a man in a relationship with a woman and her daughter. In The Good Soldier, Nancy Rufford isn’t Leonora’s biological daughter, but she’s Leonora’s ward, a quasi-daughter. Edward Ashburnham’s love for Nancy is fort comme la mort, strong as death.

Though his love is strong as death, Edward parts from Nancy with typical English reticence. On their final drive to the train station, their conversation is trivial, and “There was upon those people’s faces no expression of any kind whatever.” On their drive to the station, Dowell is sent along, to make sure that Edward and Nancy control their emotions.

This is a key incident in the novel, and it’s based on something that Ford experienced himself. Ford was sent along as a chaperone on a similar final drive to a train station. Ford felt that novels originate in such real-life incidents. “Tales depending purely on invention... have seldom any literary merit.”53

The best summary of Literary Impressionism that I’ve found is this paragraph by Frank MacShane:

The school [of Literary Impressionism] wished neither to follow Zola’s sociological approach to reality, nor to use the artificial patterns of the plotted Victorian novel to achieve the essence of the real. They believed, rather, that this essence was to be captured only by a careful selection of telling detail and a concentration on the seemingly casual aspects of human relationships which so often, as in real life, provide true insights into personal relationships and human activities. Above all, it depended on visual information, which meant that the Impressionist could not tell the reader what was going on, either internally or externally. Instead, he had to show the reader these things.54

Let’s assume that Ford describes Edward walking around his estate while the sun is setting. Is Edward paying attention to the sunset? Edward’s mind may be elsewhere, he may be thinking of Nancy, or of Nancy and a leaking roof. Literary Impressionism may give the reader, not one impression/emotion, but a jumble of impressions/emotions. Ford wrote,

It [is] perfectly possible that a piece of Impressionism should give a sense of two, of three, of as many as you will, places, persons, emotions, all going on simultaneously in the emotions of the writer.... Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like... glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.

In the last issue, I discussed Hemingway’s story “The Battler.” The protagonist is talking with two tramps. As he walks off, “he found he had a ham sandwich in his hand.” When the sandwich was given to him, his mind was elsewhere, only later does he ‘find it’ in his own hand.

This is how we experience life, though it’s not how the mind conceives of life. Impressionism is about our experiences, not our conceptions. The mind conceives of sky and sea as two different things, but an Impressionist painter may depict them merging together; an Impressionist painter depicts how we see things, not how the mind conceives them.

Ford depicts characters who speak involuntarily, speak without intending to; their mind is on one subject, then they hear themselves speak about a different subject; their conscious mind is on one subject, their unconscious mind on another subject. When Edward expresses his love for Nancy, he speaks involuntarily, “as if the very words that he spoke, without knowing that he spoke them, created the passion as they went along. Before he spoke, there was nothing; afterwards, it was the integral fact of his life.... He had been totally unconscious [of his passion for Nancy].”

Likewise, Dowell is unconscious of his interest in Nancy. After Dowell’s wife (Florence) dies, Dowell says “Now I can marry the girl [i.e., Nancy],” then he’s surprised by his own remark. Dowell says, “I had never had the slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I never had the slightest idea even of caring for her.... It is as if one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious of the other. I had thought nothing; I had said such an extraordinary thing.” Dowell is surprised by his own remark, like a person surprised to find a sandwich in his own hand. As practiced by Ford, Literary Impressionism is psychologically subtle.

* * * * *

While Ford is interested in technique, he never forgets that reader and writer are human beings. A writer reveals his personality, a reader responds with his personality, his subjectivity. Ford said, “Impressionism is a frank expression of personality.”55 The Impressionist might give you, for example, his impression of the Bible — “that the Holy Scriptures are a good book, or a rotten book, or contain passages of good reading interspersed with dullness.”

The interaction between reader and writer is a meeting of two personalities. It begins with style: “The ideal critic [is] a person who can so handle words that from the first three phrases any intelligent person... will know at once the sort of chap that he is dealing with.”55B

Ford says that the writer seeks a reader with an open mind, a reader with experience of life; the writer seeks a “virgin mind,” not an intellectual whose head is stuffed with “so many conventions.” Ford says he wouldn’t want a reader who “had by heart the whole of the Times Literary Supplement, from its inception to the present day.”56 Ford would prefer “a peasant intelligence [that] will know that this is such a queer world that anything may be possible.”

* * * * *

It would be difficult to find a major writer who has no interest in the occult. The most common kind of occult phenomenon is telepathy, the passing of thoughts/feelings from one person to another. In The Good Soldier, Ford speaks of, “the mysterious way in which two people, living together, get to know each other’s thoughts without a word spoken.” “[Edward] had known... that Leonora was worrying about his managing of the estates.”

* * * * *

Ford is interested in fiction-technique, but he realizes the chief task of literature is to change people’s lives, and thereby improve the world. Ford writes,

Certain qualities are necessary to the ingredients of one’s ego if one is to go through a world of unforeseen accidents with dignity and composure. It is obvious that one will hardly be a proper man unless one is acquainted with the frame of mind of, say, the Old Testament, or, let us add, Plutarch’s Lives or the Morte d’Arthur.

You will say that the majority of the world have not read those last two books — to which the reply is that the world is none so satisfactory a place.... If you have not read Plutarch you will not have made acquaintance with a sort of high courage and sense of responsibility expressed as it is nowhere else expressed, and if you have not read the Morte d’Arthur you will not know the quintessence of reckless adventure and the rarenesses of chivalry....

And you may be given the idea of restoring a little of that feeling, by your own conduct, to this world and if you are able to you will be the happier man.... And if a great — an enormous — many should read those words a great many of the ills that affect us would melt away. That is what literature is for.57

Ford never tires of quoting the letter of Sir Gawain to Sir Launcelot:

I send thee greeting and let thee have knowledge, thou flower of all noble knights that ever I saw or heard of by my day, that this day I was smitten on the old wound that thou gavest me afore the city of Berwick and through the same wound that thou gavest me I am come to my own death day, wherefore I beseech thee, Sir Launcelot, to return again unto this realm, and see my tomb and say some prayer more or less for my soul.

Notice how Gawain esteems Launcelot, though Launcelot was his enemy and fought against him. During World War I, Ford said, “If we could fight the war in terms of the ‘gallant enemy,’ it would be better for all parties.”58 But chivalry was dead, nationalism was in the saddle, and the enemy was viewed as evil, if not inhuman.

E. Travel Writers and Nature Writers

Ford had a deep interest in Literary Impressionism, the art of fiction, and the history of the novel. But he appreciated all kinds of literature, not just fiction and poetry. He said that the historian Clarendon was “perhaps the greatest of all our prose writers,”59 and he has high praise for The Book of Common Prayer of 1549.

Ford says, “English literature has one very great glory,” namely, its travel-writers and nature-writers. Ford says, “the passion with which these records are made, revealing the great, liberal personalities of the writers, makes them become under the almost unconscious pen great works of art.”60 Ford praises

Ford often praises books by naturalists. He asks, “Where, in fact, would English prose be without Walton’s Compleat Angler, [Gilbert] White’s Natural History of Selborne, or W. H. Hudson’s Nature in Downland?”61 Ford says, “The most beautiful of all prose will be found in the letters of Thomas Edward... who watched birds with passion all his life and was unable either to read or to write until the latest years of his life.” The writings of Thomas Edward can be found in a book by Samuel Smiles called Life of A Scotch Naturalist: Thomas Edward; Ford calls this book “the most beautiful book in the world.”62

* * * * *

Ford and Violet Hunt were on friendly terms with W. H. Hudson and his wife. Douglas Goldring says that Hudson was “the stylist [Ford] most admired,” because he wrote “as simply as the grass grows,” he was “completely ‘natural.’”63

In her memoirs, Violet criticizes Ford for not being faithful, and she praises Hudson’s fidelity to his wife. After Hudson’s wife died, Violet cared for Hudson as he was dying; one scholar spoke of “her own total commitment to Hudson as he faced the ordeal of his death.”

Like most deep thinkers, Hudson had doubts about Darwinism. According to Wikipedia,

Hudson was an advocate of Lamarckian evolution. Early in his life he was a critic of Darwinism and defended vitalism. He was influenced by the non-Darwinian evolutionary writings of Samuel Butler. Hudson considered himself an animist and although he was familiar with Christian tradition from his mother he did not belong to any denomination.

Hudson wrote, “I had become an evolutionist, albeit never wholly satisfied with natural selection as the only and sufficient explanation of the change of the forms of life.”64

F. Ford on Henry James

Ford was on friendly terms with Henry James. Around 1900, James lived in Rye, Ford in the next town, Winchelsea. James would walk over to Ford’s house, and ask questions

as to his investments, as to what would cure the parasites of a dog, as to brands of cigars, as to where to procure cordwood.... Whether for his books or life, he studied every aspect of the affair on which he was engaged with extraordinary elaboration.... I would accompany him, after he had had a cup of tea, back to his Ancient Town; and next day I would go over and drink a cup of tea with him and wait whilst he finished dictating one of his sentences to his amanuensis and then he would walk back with me to Winchelsea.... In that way we each got a four-mile walk a day.65

James was tireless in his questioning of all sorts of people about all sorts of things. He even collected information about erotic matters from people whom he regarded as experts in the field. Ford speaks of conversations that were

for me, really horrific, on the topics of esoteric sin or sexual indulgence... conversations that made the tall wax candles seem to me to waver in their sockets and the skin of my forehead and hands prickle with sweat.... I don’t wish to leave the impression that these conversations were carried on for purposes of lewd stimulation or irreverent ribaldry. They occurred as part of the necessary pursuit of that knowledge that permitted James to give his reader the “sense of evil.”66

When we think of James, we think of a bachelor committed to his literary work. But there were two women for whom James had romantic feelings, and these women had a profound impact on his work. The first was Minnie Temple, James’ cousin, who died of tuberculosis at age 24. Thirty years after Minnie’s death, James wrote The Wings of the Dove in order to wrap Minnie’s death in the “beauty and dignity of art.”67 The character who represents Minnie Temple is Milly Theale. And many of James’ other heroines, such as Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, were probably based on Minnie Temple. Minnie became the “James type,” the typical James heroine, his recurring female protagonist.

What sort of a person was Minnie? “She craved above all things freedom of talk.” She was “an asker of endless questions.” She had “a lightness all her own,” but she was “grave at the core.” “She was eager to meet George Eliot, whose novels she loved. She could barely wait to hear what her friends had to say about Browning’s new novel in verse.” Henry James said, “She was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder.” William James was taken with “this provocative and irresistible Minnie — charged to the lips with life.”68


Minnie Temple

Henry James’ feelings for Minnie were lasting. As Ford says, “the tenacity of his attachments was singular and unforgetting.” In 1906, when Ford was traveling to the U.S., James asked him to visit Newport, and go to “the spot where, for the last time, he had parted from his dead cousin.”

The second woman who impacted James’ work was a Mystery Woman. Ford says that James “underwent an experience that completely altered his point of view, his methods, and his entire literary practice.”69 This experience was a relationship with a woman, a relationship that collapsed, a relationship that was “completely detrimental to him.” Ford calls it “a misfortune that... shattered his life, and convinced him that his illusions as to the delicacies of his ‘good’ people of a certain milieu were in fact... delusions; after that he became the creature of infinite precautions that he was when I knew him best.”

We know that James was close to a novelist named Constance Fenimore Woolson, who apparently committed suicide in 1894. James lived with Woolson for a time, and if he stepped back from the relationship, that might have prompted Woolson’s suicide. James was certainly affected by the suicide, and even attempted to submerge Woolson’s dresses in the water near Venice. I don’t think the Mystery Woman is Woolson. Woolson impacted James’ life, but I don’t see evidence that she impacted his work. Woolson’s suicide wouldn’t have caused James to lose faith in the upper class.

Comparing the Mystery Woman to Minnie Temple, Ford describes the Mystery Woman as “a more conspicuous but less satisfactory personage who in the end... let him down mercilessly after a period of years.” It sounds to me like the Mystery Woman is from a rather high social class, and lived a rather fast life.

At any rate, Ford says that this “misfortune” made James infinitely cautious, “determined that nobody or nothing... should ever have the chance... to let him down.” James’ caution made his prose “continuously parenthetic.... He could never let his phrases alone.... The underlying factor in his later work was the endless determination to add more and more detail.”

There were two Jameses, Ford says: the earlier James who could write “clear, crisp” stories like Maupassant’s, and the later James, who obscured his prose with “a sort of cuttlefish cloud of interminable phrases.” The notion that there are two Jameses is common among James critics, but no one has accounted for the two Jameses in as plausible a way, or as interesting a way, as Ford.70

* * * * *

As I mentioned above, Ford and James lived near each other around 1900, and saw each other with some frequency. James used Ford as a model for Merton Densher, a character in The Wings of the Dove, which was published in 1902. Ford was rather proud of his role in the novel, and quoted James’ description of Merton: “He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman.... He was young for the House of Commons, he was loose for the army. He was refined, as might have been said, for the City.... He looked vague without looking weak — idle without looking empty.”

Ford says that Merton was “no hero,” and therefore James worried that Ford would take offense. James apologized to Ford “in one of the fits of apologizing that would occasionally come over him.” Evidently James worried frequently, and apologized frequently. In this case, no apology was necessary, Ford wasn’t offended; Merton was only partly based on Ford, and Merton had the honor of being the companion of the adored Milly Theale.

* * * * *

Ford admired James partly because James studied fiction-technique. Ford says that earlier English novelists, like Fielding, were often careless about technique, perhaps because the novel as a genre wasn’t respected in England, the novel wasn’t even taken seriously by novelists. Ford says, “In the demobilization forms after the late war the novelist was actually placed in the eighteenth category — along with gypsies, vagrants, and other non-productive persons.”71

One of Ford’s favorite English novelists is Samuel Richardson. Ford says, “Richardson begat... the modern novel which does not avoid the problems of the day and is written with some literary skill.”72

* * * * *

In his book about Ford, Douglas Goldring makes some interesting remarks about reading. He says that education requires reading the classics, and this takes effort:

But the effort has to be made if [the student] is to acquire the necessary basis for the formation of any sort of taste in literature. In my childhood, an hour or two used to be set aside, on Sundays, for what my mother quite frankly described as “hard reading.” The books permitted us during this period were “good books,” in the literary sense: books which she was well aware required a certain effort of the mind to be appreciated.73

Is “hard reading” an essential part of education? Does hard reading become less hard with practice, like lifting weights? Are today’s students willing to do hard reading — willing to rack their brains, and stretch their souls? Does technology enable youngsters to avoid hard reading, by offering online summaries, etc.?

Should we abandon hard reading altogether? Should we try to make reading enjoyable, even if it means ignoring the classics? I’ve spent much of my life doing hard reading, so I consider myself something of an authority on hard reading, I know its costs as well as its benefits.

G. Politics

Ford believed that “No human being likes listening to long and sustained arguments,”74 so Ford often digresses. In his last years, he wrote Great Trade Route, which discusses civilization in a broad sense. I find it difficult to read, it seems like a series of digressions.

Writing in the 1930s, Ford questions whether civilization is moving forward or backward:

I wonder whether we progress more, or more degenerate towards savagery.... We have arrived, after the collapse of the world in the Dark Ages, at about the civilization of the Roman Empire in its late days. I cannot see that in any important division of human activities we have progressed at all [beyond the Roman Empire]. On the other hand we have increased in ferocity and in the power of doing murder — to an incredible degree.75

Ford believed that machines would continue improving, but people would deteriorate due to “indoor, mechanized occupations and the consumption of inferior food.”76 Ford championed small producers, small farms: “If communities do not remain in contact with the soil their populations will deteriorate mentally, as well as physically.”77 Ford was right: machines have improved greatly, but this improvement has been of dubious benefit. Many people seem to agree with Ford’s views on small farms; I see lots of small farms popping up, Farmers Markets are everywhere, and restaurants are offering local produce.

One danger to civilization is loss of faith in itself, and this appeared around 1900, before the world wars, when civilization seemed to be at a high point. Ford and Goldring were exposed to various movements: Futurism, Cubism, Vorticism, Imagism, etc. The Futurist Manifesto of 1909 seems hostile to civilization:

We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism and all utilitarian cowardice. It is in Italy that we hurl this overthrowing and inflammatory declaration, with which today we found Futurism, for we will free Italy from her numberless museums which cover her with countless cemeteries. We intend to glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strength of daring. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.78

Goldring calls the Futurist Manifesto “a foretaste of Fascist ideology.”79

What were Ford’s political views? He called himself “a Tory mad about historic continuity,” but he supported Home Rule for Ireland, and he supported women’s suffrage. He opposed Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. He seems to have had no enthusiasm for Communism.80

Ford dreamed of a government of men, not laws. Perhaps he was nostalgic for the Middle Ages, perhaps he felt that medieval men were restrained by religious and moral principles, not by laws. “A written constitution,” Ford wrote, “forever imposes the stranglehold of the dead on the throats of the living. All laws are bad because they can never meet special cases, and every case is a special case.”81

In 1908, Ford founded and edited The English Review. Though it was primarily literary, it had a section on politics. Goldring says, “The great value of Ford’s English Review, as regards its extremely important section devoted to political comment, lay in the fact that its Toryism was of so exalted a nature as to be above party conflict.”82 The first issue of The English Review had an essay on unemployment insurance; some Tories wanted to build a welfare state, believing that a welfare state would diminish the attraction of Communism. Below is the cover of the first issue of The English Review.

Goldring says that Ford’s aim was to be “a transmitter to succeeding ages of a great cultural tradition.”83

Links

2. Films

A. Anora (2024) is a terrible movie, painful to watch, yet it’s very popular with both critics and the public; it won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes. The ending is good, but the ending can’t begin to redeem the movie’s vices. Anora depicts a sick lifestyle — a materialistic, hedonistic lifestyle — but it doesn’t offer any alternative. It offers only sex (usually for money), violence, and profanity. There isn’t a ray of sunshine, there isn’t a hint of wisdom or nature or beauty or culture. One wonders how such a degrading movie would impact an impressionable young person. Click here for a glowing review of Anora by John Podhoretz.

B. The Hours (2002) is a dismal movie about Virginia Woolf, her struggle with depression, and the writing of Mrs Dalloway. Woolf’s story is interwoven with even more lugubrious stories: a woman in the 1950s who’s reading Mrs Dalloway, and a woman in 2001 who seems to be living Mrs Dalloway. Click here for Roger Ebert’s take on The Hours; he has a positive view of it. Perhaps the life of Virginia Woolf would be a good subject for a documentary.

3. Native American Place Names

I came across a book on Native American place names. The author, James Hammond Trumbull (1821-1897), grew up in Stonington Connecticut, and wrote several works on Connecticut history.84

Trumbull says that tuk is the NativeAmerican word for river, especially a river “whose waters are driven in waves, by tides or wind.” If you add the adjective missi, meaning “great,” you get miss-tuk, or Mystic. There’s a Mystic River near Boston, and another Mystic River separating Stonington Connecticut from Groton Connecticut.

East of Connecticut’s Mystic River is the Pawcatuck River, which separates Connecticut from Rhode Island. The name “Pawcatuck” is made up of tuk, river, plus “Pawca,” a variant of Pequot. The Pequot were a major tribe in Connecticut, so “Pawcatuck” means “Pequot River.” So the Pawcatuck River once demarcated tribal lands, as it now demarcates states. The Hudson River was known as “the river of the Mohicans,” or Mohicanituk.85 Below is a map of Connecticut tribes.

Below is a more detailed map of Connecticut tribes.

East of the Pawcatuck River is the Providence River and Narragansett Bay. If you were talking to natives in that area (i.e., natives in Rhode Island), they would refer to natives east of the Providence River as Wampanoags, that is, Easterners, or East-landers. Likewise, if you were talking to natives in New Hampshire, they would refer to the natives who lived east of the Piscataqua River (in what is now Maine) as Abenakis, East-landers. So the Pisquataqua River, like the Pawcatuck River, was once a tribal boundary, and is now a state boundary.

West of Connecticut’s Mystic River is the Connecticut River. The word “Connecticut” is formed from tuk, river, plus quinni or conne, meaning “long,” plus it or et or ut, meaning “on” or “at.” So conne-tuk means “long tidal river,” and conne-tuk-ut (Connecticut) means “valley of the long tidal river,” or “land near the long tidal river.” Quinni, meaning “long,” appears in other river names — Quinnipiac, Quinebaug, Kennebec, etc.

Pawtucket (as in, Pawtucket, Rhode Island) means “at the falls.” The root of “fall” seems to be “roaring” or “noisy.” Of course, waterfalls are noisy. The prefix paw (meaning “falls”) is found as far west as Michigan (and maybe even further west), suggesting that NativeAmerican languages had a family resemblance, like Spanish and Italian. Pawtucket’s falls are still falling today, they’re located just downstream from Slater Mill, a well-preserved historic mill. Of course, the mill was built at that spot to take advantage of the fall. Lowell Massachusetts was also called Pawtucket, since it was also at a waterfall (and is also known for its mills).

To form the diminutive “small waterfall,” you add es, so paw-tuk-it (at the falls) becomes paw-tuk-es-it (at the little falls). This is the origin of Pawtuxet, a town south of Providence. The town of Plymouth Massachusetts was also called Pawtuxet or Patuxet; doubtless Plymouth had a “little fall.”

I mentioned above that tuk means river, flowing water. Standing water, water at rest, was called paug, pog, or bog. This gives us Massapoag, “great pond.” Massapoag can be spelled in various ways, including Mashapaug. Quinebaug means “long pond,” and probably referred to a pond first, then became the name of a nearby river.86

Where does Trumbull get his information about NativeAmerican place names? He’s familiar with the work of Henry Schoolcraft, who wrote a 6-volume work on Native Americans. Trumbull also uses John Eliot’s translation of the Bible into the native tongue. By comparing the English and native versions of the Bible, Trumbull could learn native words; Eliot’s Bible was Trumbull’s Rosetta Stone.

Nunnepoag means “fresh-water pond,” and was the native name for Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. In his translation of the Bible, Eliot uses nunnipog for “fresh water.” Trumbull points out that a waterfall often separates fresh water (upstream) from salt water (downstream); tides carry salt water to the waterfall, but the salt water can’t get beyond the fall.

Trumbull says that NativeAmerican names mean something, whereas our names are often meaningless. Patrick and Mary, for example, are names, useful for denoting individuals, but they don’t mean anything. If we dig deeper, however, there is indeed a meaning buried deep within our names; Trumbull says that Patrick was originally “patrician,” and Mary was originally “bitter.”

4. Trump

Trump is a pure businessman, with little knowledge of history or war. His plan to turn Gaza into a beach resort is ludicrous, as is his plan to make Canada the 51st state. His plan to extract minerals from Ukraine shows his business mentality. His respect for Putin, and disrespect for Zelensky, has appalled many Republicans, as well as Democrats.

On the other hand, Trump’s domestic policies impress Republicans. DOGE is finding all sorts of waste and fraud, such as a grant by USAID of $1.5 million to a Serbian group to promote DEI in Serbia’s workplaces. Democrats complain that Musk wasn’t elected, but Musk serves at Trump’s pleasure, and Trump was elected, so Musk was indirectly elected. Democrats don’t seem troubled that unelected bureaucrats at USAID gave taxpayer money to causes that the taxpayers certainly wouldn’t support. The “woke” bureaucrats managed to conceal their spending, so we would never have found out about the Serbia grant if not for DOGE.

DOGE also found that unelected bureaucrats at FEMA secretly sent $59 million to New York City to pay the hotel bills of illegals. This is a case of left-wing bureaucrats using FEMA as a slush fund to promote Democratic projects, projects that voters certainly wouldn’t support. We never would have known about this slush fund if not for DOGE.

DOGE is the most promising step taken in my lifetime toward getting our fiscal house in order, and stanching the flow of red ink. That Democrats are quick to criticize DOGE shows that they don’t care about the deficit. The Founders would like DOGE; in Federalist 70, Hamilton wrote, “Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” The Founders wouldn’t want unelected bureaucrats secretly spending taxpayer money on their own pet projects.

Trump has also made considerable headway at securing the border, and deporting illegals, especially criminals and gang-members. If you have a house with four walls, and one of the walls is removed, you don’t have a house. Likewise, a nation with an open border isn’t a nation. Trump disgraces the nation every day, but at least with Trump, we have a nation. With Biden, we didn’t have borders and we didn’t have a nation.

© L. James Hammond 2025
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Footnotes
1. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, edited by Frank MacShane, “The Reader,” p. 22 back
2. Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford, Introduction, p. xix

Mizener says, “David Harvey’s fine bibliography of [Ford’s] work lists 81 books, 419 contributions to periodicals, and 57 miscellaneous contributions to other men’s books.”(Mizener, p. xxiii) Perhaps Ford wrote a lot because he was able to publish whatever he wrote, thanks in part to his family connections and social connections; another possibility is that Ford acquired a reputation at a young age, and once he had a reputation, publishers were confident of some sales, so they were willing to publish his books.

In an earlier issue, I said that writers usually do their writing in the morning, often before breakfast. Ford fits this pattern: “Most days of his life Ford got up early, and wrote a thousand words or two.”(Max Saunders) back

3. Quoted in Mizener, p. xix back
4. See Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, edited by Frank MacShane, Introduction, p. ix back
5. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 165; March of Literature, Dedication/Introduction

My book Realms of Gold: A Sketch of Western Literature is akin to Ford’s March of Literature. My book is much shorter than Ford’s; in our time, a writer can’t assume that a reader is willing to read an 800-page book. Another difference between my book and Ford’s is that I pay more attention to philosophy, psychology, history, science, etc.

There are lots of interesting anecdotes in March of Literature. Ford says that Pythagoras was a fan of the poet Stesichorus, and thought that Homer’s soul had been reincarnated in Stesichorus. Wikipedia says that Hugh Walpole was a fan of Walter Scott, and “liked to think of himself as [Scott’s] reincarnation.”

Goldring is dismissive of Walpole and Wodehouse, saying that they became rich by appealing to, not genuine aristocrats, but the “new rich” who were entering the elite schools and colleges. The genuine aristocrats had been decimated by World War I; as Goldring puts it, “The pre-1914 type of public schoolboy had been to a large extent wiped out.”(South Lodge, p. 131) back

6. South Lodge, p. 19, quoting Ford’s Return to Yesterday. Goldring writes, “The British bourgeois, unlike his French counterpart, prefers golf to literature, despises art, and only consents to regard a writer or an artist as a social equal if, from the pursuit of his avocation, he makes as much money as an ordinary sensible business man.... The average upper-class male prides himself on his illiteracy and is not only ignorant of the arts but actively detests them.”(South Lodge, pp. 19, 20) back
7. South Lodge, p. 20, quoting Ford’s Return to Yesterday. Goldring writes, “A visit [Ford] once paid to D. H. Lawrence’s home near Nottingham convinced him that the only really cultured society in England, the only hopeful breeding ground of new literature and new art in this country was to be found among working-class intellectuals.”(South Lodge, p. 20) back
8. I can’t recall where I first saw these remarks on Ford’s poetry; I don’t know if they’re my words, or someone else’s. The Eliot quotation is in Mizener’s biography, p. 569, footnote 10.

After Ford died, Ezra Pound wrote, “There passed from us this June a very gallant combatant for those things of the mind and of letters which have been in our time too little prized. For ten years before I got to England there would seem to have been no one but Ford who held that French clarity and simplicity in the writing of English verse and prose were of immense importance as in contrast to the use of a stilted traditional dialect, a ‘language of verse’ unused in the actual talk of the people.... Ford’s poetry is of high importance, both in itself and for its effect on all the best subsequent work of his time.” back

9. See the Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier, edited by Martin Stannard, Preface, p. xiii. See also the essay by Constance Hinds, “Ford Madox Ford’s Good Soldier in a Modern World.”

The Norton Critical Edition is clogged with textual variants, but the average reader doesn’t want textual variants. Only a few specialists want to see textual variants, so these variants should be put on a website.

Ford wanted to break through the covers of the book, and seem to be speaking rather than writing. Likewise, he wanted the reader to feel that he was living, not reading. In an earlier issue, I discussed Gerald Basil Edwards, who was able “‘to seem as if he were speaking rather than writing’.... William Golding said of Edwards’ book, ‘To read it is not like reading but living.’ Great literature carries us beyond books, it brings us into contact with life itself.” back

10. The Bulpington of Blup is discussed in Mizener’s biography, Ch. 21, pp. 292-294 back
11. See Mizener’s biography, epigraph at start of book back
12. Mizener, Introduction, xix back
13. See D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, by E. T. [Jessie Chambers Wood], pp. 163-175. Did he really walk two hours every day? Or is this another Ford stretcher? back
14. Seldes is quoted in the Wikipedia article on Ford. Like other first-rate writers, Ford had high aims, and cared about his posthumous reputation. Richard Aldington said, “More than once I have heard Ford say that what he most hoped for was that his books would be read after his death.”(Norton Critical Edition of Good Soldier, p. 320) back
15. South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and The English Review Circle, Ch. 3, p. 38. Goldring writes well, his books on Ford are valuable primary sources. When Ford edited The English Review, Goldring was his assistant. Goldring tells a charming story about Wyndham Lewis’ first call at The English Review office:

“Lewis, tall, swarthy and with romantically disordered hair, wearing a long black coat buttoned up to his chin, arrived... with the MS of a character sketch called ‘The Pole.’ Getting no answer to his ring, he walked up to the editorial sanctum and found it deserted. Undeterred, he climbed another flight of stairs and, hearing at last sounds of human life, knocked at the door through which they came and marched in. It happened to be the bathroom, and there, reclining on his back in the bath, in two feet of hot water, with a large sponge in one hand, and a cake of soap in the other, was the missing editor.

“Disregarding any unconventionality in his surroundings, [Lewis] at once proceeded to business. After announcing in the most matter-of-fact way that he was a man of genius and that he had a manuscript for publication, he asked if he might read it. ‘Go ahead,’ Ford murmured, continuing to use his sponge. Lewis then unbuttoned his coat, produced ‘The Pole’ and read it through. At the end, Ford observed ‘Well, that’s all right. If you’ll leave it behind, we’ll certainly print it.’

“The interview then terminated. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this, or indeed of any of Ford’s anecdotes, but if it didn’t happen it ought to have done. Events of this description occurred daily, almost hourly, during the twelve months of Ford’s editorship of the Review. Looking back, it seems amazing to me that so much could have happened in so short a time. It was only a year: but what a year!” back

16. The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford, by Arthur Mizener, Ch. 20, p. 263. I like Mizener’s biography; it’s thorough but not overly detailed. Mizener draws on an astonishing number of sources. back
17. Mizener, Introduction, p. xviii back
18. Mizener’s words. See the Mizener biography, p. 219
One could argue that the leading English writers of Ford’s day weren’t really English. Ford was the son of a German immigrant, Conrad was of Polish descent, Joyce was Irish, Shaw was Anglo-Irish, W. H. Hudson was Argentine, Henry James and T. S. Eliot were American-born, and D. H. Lawrence was an “immigrant” from the English working-class. back
19. Mizener, p. 219

When dealing with English writers, an Oxfordian like myself always asks, “What does he think about Shakespeare? Does he realize that ‘Shakespeare’ wasn’t the man from Stratford?” Alas, Ford fails the Shakespeare test. Ford wrote, “Only two writers, Virgil and Shakespeare, in a millennium and a half, can be noted as having made large fortunes. Virgil acquired his by way of gifts. Shakespeare, by exploiting his own gifts as a theatrical producer, stands before us not merely as the greatest of poet-playwrights but as the first Anglo-Saxon big-business man.”(March of Literature, p. 410) This is arrant nonsense.

But Ford is capable of deep philosophical ideas, as when he says “The motive of most crimes is so obscure, so pathological or so fatalized by hereditary weakness that there is almost nothing that cannot be pardoned once one has dived beneath the calm surface of things.”(Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 7) Here’s another profound idea from Ford: “The fashionable taste in literatures being a matter of endless reactions.”(ibid, p. 26) These endless reactions are Hegel’s dialectic.

Ford thought that philosophical wisdom was capable of taking the world by storm. He used the term “afflatus” for collective consciousness, and he wrote, “You say the afflati of evil fly faster across the world than those of good. It isn’t true. We are all so frightened today that if any really salient good thought could be put into salient and flaming words it would fly across the world faster than any black magic.”(South Lodge, p. 223) back

20. Mizener, p. 218. My own maternal grandfather dropped his German name during World War I, and took his mother’s maiden name, an English name. I don’t know what his German name was. back
21. See neglectedbooks.com, or see Bowen’s memoir, Drawn From Life. back
22. Mizener, p. 264. Perhaps Ford’s diffidence had its roots in his childhood; it is said that he was bullied by his father. His father called him “the exceedingly stupid but patient donkey of the family.”(South Lodge, p. 31) back
23. One of Ford’s biographers, Alan Judd, thinks that Gertrud was a prostitute. Judd’s biography is currently one of the most popular Ford biographies.

Mizener writes, “Ford told Elsie at the time of their marriage that she was not to expect him to be faithful to her.”(p. 63) back

24. Hinds essay, p. 10 back
25. Quote from The Good Soldier back
26. Mizener says that Ford also doubled the hero of his Fifth Queen trilogy, and doubled the hero of his novel No Enemy. See Mizener’s biography of Ford, Introduction, p. xv. This doubling process is common, not only in Ford’s works, but in novels generally. For example, the three Karamazov brothers can be seen as three aspects of Dostoyevsky himself. back
27. Mizener, p. 260 back
28. You may find this maxim attributed to Goethe. Schopenhauer said that he used it in conversation with Goethe; Goethe learned it from him. back
29. See neglectedbooks.com or see Bowen’s memoir Drawn From Life (a hard book to find) back
30. Either/Or, Part I, “Diapsalmata.” Perhaps Ford’s specialty is relationships, while E. M. Forster focuses on the inner life, the quest for wholeness. Ford’s view of the inner life was rather simplistic: “I am no moralist: I consider that if you do what you want you must take what you get for it and that if you deny yourself things you will be better off than if you don’t.”(Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 12)

In his preoccupation with relationships, does Ford overlook personal growth? Has Forster surpassed Ford by suggesting that a Zennish outlook might lead to personal growth? Perhaps Forster under-emphasizes relationships, as Ford under-emphasizes personal philosophy; perhaps Forster’s strength is Ford’s weakness, and vice-versa. Perhaps they each give us a valid/true aspect of life; life is indeed largely about relationships, but it’s also largely about the inner life, personal growth. (My remarks on Forster and Zen can be found here.) back

31. Mizener p. 253. This notion “all a darkness” suggests that there’s much we don’t understand, our knowledge is very limited. One critic, Martin Stannard, spoke of, “The Good Soldier’s largest subject: the transference from a culture of intellectual confidence to one of uncertainty.”(Norton Critical Edition, p. xiv) When World War I began, Ford wrote, “We are fighting to answer the question whether it is right to thank God for the deaths of a million fellow-beings. Is it then right? Is it then wrong? I don’t know. I know nothing any more; nobody knows anything.”(Norton Critical Edition, pp. xiii, xiv) back
32. Ford wrote, “Inasmuch as this world is a very miserable purgatory for most of us sons of men... inasmuch as horror, despair and incessant strivings are the lot of the most trivial of humanity... so, if a really great master strike the note of horror, of despair, of striving, and so on, he will stir chords in the hearts of a larger number of people than those who are moved by the merely vulgar and the merely trivial. This is probably why Madame Bovary has sold more copies than any book ever published, except, of course, books purely religious. But the appeal of religious books is exactly similar.”(Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, edited by Frank MacShane, p. 49) back
33. See the essay on Ford and Violet by Joseph Wiesenfarth back
34. South Lodge, p. 229

Wikipedia says that, at age 18, Ford became a Catholic, “very much at the encouragement of some Hueffer relatives, but partly (he confessed) galled by the ‘militant atheism and anarchism’ of his English cousins.” I see no evidence that Ford ever left the Catholic Church, but I also see no evidence that he was a man of deep faith. Mizener says that Ford was “scarcely Catholic in either feeling or conduct.”(p. 20)

The Good Soldier has much to say about Catholics and Protestants; for example, Ford writes, “Leonora was a woman of a strong, cold conscience, like all English Catholics.” Ford speaks of Leonora’s “rigid principles.” It’s as if Ford were shifting his Catholicism onto Elsie/Leonora, though Elsie wasn’t Catholic, until she converted to Catholicism in the 1920s.

For more on religion in The Good Soldier, click here. back

35. Wikipedia back
36. See Mizener p. 566, footnote 22. The manuscript is at Cornell. One scholar wrote, “In a remarkably generous gesture, [Violet] defends the novelist’s art of amalgamation and transformation even as she smarts from seeing traits of her own in Sylvia Tietjens and traits of Stella Bowen in Valentine Wannop in Some Do Not... and No More Parades.” back
37. West’s review can be found in the Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier.

Ford’s trilogy The Fifth Queen has a high reputation, and is considered one of Ford’s best fictional works. Ford said he learned something about historical fiction from Maurice Hewlett, who wrote The Queen’s Quair, a novel about Mary Queen of Scots. back

38. Mizener, p. 8 back
39. South Lodge, p. 117 back
40. Ford’s words, quoted in Mizener, p. 280 back
41. Mizener, p. 279 back
42. Mizener, p. 286 back
43. Mizener, p. 292 back
44. Mizener, p. 287 back
45. Mizener, p. 572, footnote 25 back
46. Goldring, South Lodge, p. 122 back
47. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, pp. 114, 115. Ford says that The Spoils of Poynton is “the technical high-water mark of all James’ work.” Ford says that James’ “The Real Thing” is “his other great and impeccable masterpiece.” Ford says that James’ “The Great Good Place” deals with “his sort of mysticism.” James told Ford that all his life he’d been thinking of treating that subject, and finally he “yielded to temptation.”

Ford says that James’ mysticism was “a perception of a sort of fourth dimensional penetration of the material world by strata of the supernatural, of the world of the living by individuals from among the dead. You will get a good inkling of what I mean if you will read again “The Turn of the Screw” with the constant peepings-in of the ghosts of the groom and the governess with their sense of esoteric evil — their constant peepings-in on the haunted mortals of the story. For him, good and evil were not represented by acts; they were something present in the circum-ambience of the actual world, something spiritual attendant on actions or words. As such he rendered them and, once convinced that he had got that sense in, he was content — he even took an impish pleasure in leaving out the renderings of the evil actions.” back

48. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 13 back
49. MacShane’s Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford is an excellent book; it might be a better place to begin a study of Ford than The Good Soldier. But MacShane’s book contains abridged versions of Ford’s critical writings. If you want an un-abridged version, I suggest Ford’s The English Novel. The quote about “villains all black” is from The English Novel, p. 97. back
50. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 38, quoting Maupassant’s “La Reine Hortense.” The original is “C’était un monsieur à favoris rouges qui entrait toujours le premier.”

Ford compares the Impressionist novel to “a Futurist picture... one of those canvases that show you in one corner a pair of stays, in another a bit of the foyer of a music hall, in another a fragment of early morning landscape, and in the middle a pair of eyes, the whole bearing the title of ‘A Night Out.’” back

51. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 122 back
52. See Ford’s Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford at the start of The Good Soldier (p. 5 of Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier) back
53. Ford’s words, quoted in South Lodge, p. 168 back
54. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 33 back
55. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 36 back
55B. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 36

Ford felt that, if you read a short sample of a book, you can judge the author’s style and tone, you can judge the book’s literary merit. Ford said, “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” back

56. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 52 back
57. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, pp. 166, 167; The March of Literature, pp. 637, 638 back
58. Mizener, p. 251 back
59. The March of Literature, p. 416 back
60. The March of Literature, p. 477. See also Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, pp. 57, 58 back
61. The March of Literature, p. 472. Gilbert White inspired Darwin to become a naturalist. Darwin kept White’s book by his bedside, and before setting out on the Beagle, he made a pilgrimage to Selborne. back
62. See Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 23, and The March of Literature, p. 473 back
63. South Lodge, p. 27 back
64. Essay on Hudson by Jason Wilson.

Besides Hudson, many other leading writers viewed Darwinism as only a partial explanation of evolution. I’ve discussed Darwin-skepticism in many earlier issues.

In her memoir The Flurried Years, Violet depicted herself as Medea, betrayed by Jason/Ford. She also depicted herself as Cordelia, mistreated by her sisters, who are cast as Goneril and Regan.(Essay by Joseph Wiesenfarth) back

65. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 113 back
66. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 119 back
67. James’ words, quoted in Wikipedia. See also James’ Notes of a Son and Brother, and Robert D. Richardson’s biography of William James, Ch. 16 back
68. See Robert D. Richardson’s biography of William James, Ch. 16, or see this site. Minnie’s real name was Mary.

In an earlier issue, I discussed the typical James heroine.

Clover Hooper Adams, wife of Henry Adams, has also been mentioned as an inspiration for Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer. Fictional characters are often “overdetermined,” that is, they’re based on more than one model.

Henry James admired Clover’s wit, calling her “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats.” When Clover was five, her mother died, and she became close to her father. When her father died, she committed suicide; at the time of her death, Clover was 42 and had no children. back

69. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, pp. 122-124 back
70. I discussed the two Jameses here and here. I think Ford exaggerates the clarity of James’ early work, James’ prose was always somewhat obscure. back
71. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 13. In an earlier issue, I wrote “James’ interest in structure/form appealed to Pound. ‘Pound’s concern with craftsmanship, his insistence that the literary artist bring an abundance of conscious techniques to the act of composition, is reflected in the relatively large amount of space he gives... to James’ notes for The Ivory Tower. The interest in form that these notes reveal makes James, according to Pound, unique among novelists who have written in English.” back
72. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 6. Ford says that the great French novelists like Stendhal and Flaubert were “avowed followers” of Richardson. Diderot’s novel Rameau’s Nephew is “a direct imitation” of Richardson’s Pamela.

Ford says that Richardson was fundamentally sentimental (unlike Bunyan, who was fundamentally moral). Richardson belongs to the 18th century, though he was born in the late 17th century. In the craft of fiction (Ford says), Richardson had no rival in England until Trollope. Like Henry James, Richardson often wrote about women.

Ford criticizes Henry Fielding (“a dreadful example of how not to do things”), but says nothing about Laurence Sterne. back

73. South Lodge, p. 29 back
74. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, p. 48 back
75. Great Trade Route, p. 432, quoted in South Lodge, p. 222 back
76. South Lodge, p. 217 back
77. South Lodge, p. 217; Great Trade Route, p. 298 back
78. South Lodge, pp. 64, 65 back
79. South Lodge, p. 64 back
80. See Wikipedia and the Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier, Preface, p. xii. Ford says he would have admired Communism if it put its faith in hand tools, but it put its faith in machines.(Great Trade Route, p. 225) back
81. Great Trade Route, pp. 298, 299 back
82. South Lodge, p. 213 back
83. South Lodge, p. 205

Richard Aldington said, “Any memorial to Ford should begin with a complete set of The English Review under his editorship. It was not only the best English literary monthly of its time, but the best that has been issued in the 20th century.” back

84. James Hammond Trumbull was a distant relative of Governor Jonathan Trumbull, who was the Governor of Connecticut both before and after American independence. “He was the only governor to take up the Patriot cause at the start of the Revolutionary War.” Governor Jonathan Trumbull was the father of the painter John Trumbull, four of whose paintings hang in the Capitol Rotunda.

One of James Hammond Trumbull’s brothers, Henry Clay Hammond, traveled to Egypt and Palestine, and became interested in the early Hebrews. He wrote

back
85. Apparently “Mohican” means “people of the great tidal river,” i.e., the Hudson. Mohicans should not be confused with Mohegans, who lived in southeastern Connecticut, between the Thames River and the Connecticut River. In The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper took liberties with history, making Uncas a Mohican, though he was actually a Mohegan. back
86. The long pond is probably Quinebaug Lake, but could be Aspinook Pond, which is more intimately connected to the Quinebaug River. back