Tuesday

Acquisitions (38): Ford Madox Ford



The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford (1962-63)
[Acquired: Friday, January 10, 2020]:

The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford. Ed. Graham Greene. 4 vols. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1962-63.
  1. The Good Soldier / Selected Memories / Poems (1915 / 1906, 1911, 1931, 1938)
  2. The Fifth Queen: The Fifth Queen; Privy Seal; The Fifth Queen Crowned (1906, 1907, 1908)
  3. Parade's End - Part One: Some Do Not … (1924)
  4. Parade's End - Part Two: No More Parades (1925) / Part Three: A Man Could Stand Up (1926)

We're on holiday near Wellington at present, and so have seized the opportunity to check out the new-look Featherston, New Zealand's only official 'Book Town' (or so I was told by one of the bookshop owners). The actual Featherston Booktown festival is on the weekend of 8-10 May this year. I was a bit sceptical at first, but I have to admit that there are some quite delightful bookshops there to browse in: six, by the latest count.

They are, going in order from south to north, Mr. Feather's Den, The Dickensian, The Ferret, Loco Coffee & Books, For the Love of Books, and Messines Bookshop:



Here's a beautiful little set of books I found in the Featherston Ferret, which bills itself as 'the younger sibling of Cuba Street, Wellington's Ferret':



Graham Greene, ed.: The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, 4 vols (1962-63)

'A Birdie, Fordie'

Born Ford Hermann Hueffer, though he published under the names of 'Ford Madox Hueffer' and then (after the anti-German hysteria of the First World War) 'Ford Madox Ford,' this strangely underrated poet, novelist memoirist, and all-round man of letters seems to undergo a 'rediscovery' every decade or two. Does he deserve it?

Certainly he was a great and influential literary editor. The English Review, before the war, trumpetted the merits of:
Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, May Sinclair, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats; and debuted ... Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas.
His Paris-based journal The Transatlantic Review printed:
James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys ... Basil Bunting worked as Ford's assistant on the magazine.
That's a pretty impressive record as a talent-spotter, though few of those writers could be claimed to have actually been 'discovered' by him ...

What of his own work, though? There's an interesting section in J. M. Coetzee's memoirs where he records his decision, as a young man, to go to London to write a thesis on the novels of Ford Madox Ford. Like most other readers, his knowledge of Ford's fiction consisted of The Good Soldier (1915) and the post-war Tietjens tetralogy - aka Parade's End.

Given the quality and originality of these books, though, it was a natural assumption that there would be many more gems to be found in the rest of his immense body of work. Unfortunately there weren't. Coetzee leaves us with the conclusion that Ford wrote "five good novels and a heap of trash."

With all due deference to Coetzee, this does seem a rather extreme view. Anyone interested in the literary life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will certainly find a good deal of amusement in Ford's various volumes of gossipy (and undoubtedly, at times, distinctly mendacious) memoirs. These include:
  1. Memories and Impressions: A Study in Atmospheres (1911)
  2. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924)
  3. Return to Yesterday (1932)
  4. It Was the Nightingale (1933)
  5. Portraits from Life: Reminiscences (1937)
  6. Memories and Impressions. Ed. Michael Killigrew (1971)



The last-named selection of autobiographical pieces from all of his books was originally included as an extra volume of the Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, published ten years after Graham Greene's initial 4-volume selection.

I don't have it in that form, but I do have a copy of the paperback edition, published a few years later as a Penguin Modern Classic:



Ford Madox Ford: Memories and Impressions (1979)


Later in life Ford ended up as an itinerant lecturer and writer-in-residence in the United States, and there met (and influenced) a new set of writers, including the intense young poet Robert Lowell, who served (briefly) as his amanuensis while Ford worked on an immense tome called The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times (1938).

Lowell later confessed that he often failed to hear what Ford was saying when he took dictation, so instead invented phrases which he imagined might have been those Ford had intended. Ford doesn't appear to have noticed. In any case, he himself claimed to have composed an entire chapter of Nostromo when Joseph Conrad was too depressed to keep up with the latest instalment of the serial, so presumably such acts of literary legerdemain seemed normal to him.

Here's Lowell's somewhat barbed, but still affectionate elegy for his former friend, from Life Studies (1959):
Ford Madox Ford

The lobbed ball plops, then dribbles to the cup. …
(a birdie Fordie!) But it nearly killed
the ministers. Lloyd George was holding up
the flag. He gabbled, 'Hop-toad, hop-toad, hop-toad!
Hueffer has used a niblick on the green;
it’s filthy art, Sir, filthy art!'
You answered, 'What is art to me and thee?
Will a blacksmith teach a midwife how to bear?'
That cut the puffing statesman down to size,
Ford. You said, 'Otherwise,
I would have been general of a division.' Ah Ford!
Was it war, the sport of kings, that your Good Soldier,
the best French novel in the language, taught
those Georgian Whig magnificoes at Oxford,
at Oxford decimated on the Somme?
Ford, five times black-balled for promotion,
then mustard gassed voiceless some seven miles
behind the lines at Nancy or Belleau Wood:
you emerged in your 'worn uniform,
gilt dragons on the revers of the tunic,'
a Jonah – O divorced, divorced
from the whale-fat of post-war London! Boomed,
cut, plucked and booted! In Providence, New York …
marrying, blowing … nearly dying
at Boulder, when the altitude
pressed the world on your heart,
and your audience, almost football-size,
shrank to a dozen, while you stood
mumbling, with fish-blue-eyes,
and mouth pushed out
fish-fashion, as if you gagged for air. …
Sandman! Your face, a childish O. The sun
is pernod-yellow and it gilds the heirs
of all the ages there on Washington
and Stuyvesant, your Lilliputian squares,
where writing turned your pockets inside out.
But master, mammoth mumbler, tell me why
the bales of your left-over novels buy
less than a bandage for your gouty foot.
Wheel-horse, O unforgetting elephant,
I hear you huffing at your old Brevoort,
Timon and Falstaff, while you heap the board
for publishers. Fiction! I’m selling short
your lies that made the great your equals. Ford,
you were a kind man and you died in want.
Here's a brief listing of the other pieces of Ford-iana in my collection:


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Sara Haslam and Seamus O'Malley, ed.: Ford Madox Ford and America (2012)

Ford Madox Hueffer / Ford Madox Ford
(1873-1939)

  1. Conrad, Joseph, & Ford Madox Ford. The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story / Laughing Anne: A Play / One Day More: A Play. 1901 & 1924. Illustrated by Jutta Ash. Joseph Conrad: Complete Works. Geneva: Heron Books, 1969.

  2. Conrad, Joseph, & Ford Madox Ford. Romance. 1903. Joseph Conrad’s Works: Collected Edition. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1949.

  3. Ford, Ford Madox. The Fifth Queen: The Fifth Queen; Privy Seal; The Fifth Queen Crowned. 1906, 1907, 1908. Twentieth-Century Classics. Introduction by A. S. Byatt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

  4. Hueffer, Ford Madox. Memories and Impressions: A Study in Atmospheres. New York & London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1911.

  5. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. 1915. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

  6. Ford, Ford Madox. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. 1924. New York: The Ecco Press, 1989.

  7. Ford, Ford Madox. Some Do Not … A Novel. 1924. Parade’s End, 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.

  8. Ford, Ford Madox. No More Parades: A Novel. 1925. Parade’s End, 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.

  9. Ford, Ford Madox. A Man Could Stand Up: A Novel. 1926. Parade’s End, 3. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.

  10. Ford, Ford Madox. Last Post: A Novel. 1928. Parade’s End, 4. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.

  11. Ford, Ford Madox. It Was the Nightingale. 1933. Introduction by John Coyle. The Millennium Ford. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2007.

  12. Ford, Ford Madox. Portraits from Life: Reminiscences. 1937. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980.

  13. Ford, Ford Madox. The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times. 1938. London: Allen & Unwin / Readers Union, 1947.

  14. Ford, Ford Madox. Memories and Impressions. Ed. Michael Killigrew. 1971. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

  15. Stang, Sondra J., ed. The Ford Madox Ford Reader. Foreword by Graham Greene. 1986. Paladin. London: Grafton Books, 1987.

  16. Lindberg-Seyersted, Brita, ed. Pound / Ford. The Story of a Literary Friendship: The Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and Their Writings about Each Other. The Correspondence of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1982.

  17. Mizener, Arthur. The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford. London: The Bodley Head, 1971.




Graham Greene, ed.: The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, vol. 1 (1961)



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Leon Edel, ed.: The Bodley Head Henry James (1967-74)


And here are some other classics in the Bodley Head series:



    David Cecil, ed.: The Bodley Head Max Beerbohm (1958-63)


  1. The Bodley Head Max Beerbohm. Ed. David Cecil. London: The Bodley Head, 1970.



    2. Malcolm Cowley, ed.: The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald (1958-63)


  2. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Malcolm Cowley et al. 6 vols. London: The Bodley Head, 1958-63.
    1. The Great Gatsby; The Last Tycoon and Some Shorter Pieces. 1925, 1941. Introduction by J. B. Priestley (1958)
    2. Tender is the Night; Autobiographical Pieces; Letters to Frances Scott Fitzgerald and Four Short Stories. 1934 (1959)
    3. This Side of Paradise; The Rich Boy; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; The Cut-Glass Bowl and Other Short Stories (1960)
    4. The Beautiful and Damned. 1922 & 1961. Rev. ed. 1967 (1979)
    5. Short Stories – I. Early Successes; II. Glamour and Disillusionment. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. 1951 (1963)
    6. Short Stories – III. Retrospective: Basil and Josephine; IV. Last Act and Epilogue. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. 1951 (1963)



    3. Graham Greene: Collected Works (1969-94)


  3. Graham Greene: Collected Works. Introductions by the Author. 23 vols. London: William Heinemann / The Bodley Head, 1969-94.
    1. Brighton Rock. 1938 (1974)
    2. It's a Battlefield. 1934 (1970)
    3. England Made Me. 1935 (1974)
    4. Our Man in Havana. 1958 (1974)
    5. The Power and the Glory. 1940 (1974)
    6. The Heart of the Matter. 1948 (1974)
    7. The Confidential Agent. 1939 (1974)
    8. Collected Stories ['Twenty-One Stories,' 1954; 'A Sense of Reality,' 1963; & 'May We Borrow Your Husband?' 1967] (1973)
    9. A Gun for Sale. 1936 (1973)
    10. The Ministry of Fear. 1943 (1974)
    11. The Quiet American. 1955 (1974)
    12. Stamboul Train. 1932 (1974)
    13. The End of the Affair. 1951 (1974)
    14. A Burnt-Out Case. 1960 (1974)
    15. The Man Within. 1929 (1974)
    16. The Third Man / Loser Takes All. 1949 & 1955 (1974)
    17. The Comedians. 1966 (1974)
    18. Journey Without Maps. 1936 (1974)
    19. The Lawless Roads. 1939 (1974)
    20. Travels with My Aunt. 1969 (1974)
    21. The Honorary Consul. 1973 (1974)
    22. The Human Factor (1978)
    23. Collected Essays (1969)



    4. Leon Edel, ed.: The Bodley Head Henry James (1967-74)


  4. The Bodley Head Henry James. Introductions by Leon Edel. 11 vols. London: The Bodley Head, 1967-74.
    1. The Europeans & Washington Square (1878 & 1880)
    2. The Awkward Age (1899)
    3. The Bostonians (1886)
    4. The Spoils of Poynton (1897)
    5. The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
    6. What Maisie Knew (1897)
    7. The Wings of the Dove (1902)
    8. The Ambassadors (1903)
    9. The Golden Bowl (1904)
    10. The Princess Casamassima (1886)
    11. The Turn of the Screw & Daisy Miller (1898 & 1878)



    5. J. B. Priestley, ed.: The Bodley Head Leacock (1957)


  5. Stephen Leacock. The Bodley Head Leacock. Ed. J. B. Priestley. London: The Bodley Head, 1957.



    6. Arthur Calder-Marshall, ed.: The Bodley Head Jack London (1963-65)


  6. The Bodley Head Jack London. Ed. Arthur Calder-Marshall. 4 vols. London: The Bodley Head, 1963-65.
    1. Short Stories; The Call of the Wild. 1903. Introduction by Arhtur Calder-Marshall (1963)
    2. John Barleycorn / The Cruise of the Dazzler / The Road. 1913, 1902 & 1907 (1964)
    3. Martin Eden. 1909 (1965)
    4. The Klondike Dream (1963)



    7. J. W. Lambert, ed.: The Bodley Head Saki (1963)


  7. Hector Hugh Munro. The Bodley Head Saki. [Short Stories; 'The Unbearable Bassington,' 1912]. Ed. J. W. Lambert. London: The Bodley Head, 1963.



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