The Books: Passions of the Mind, ‘Accurate Letters: Ford Madox Ford,’ by A.S. Byatt

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Passions of the Mind, a collection of essays by A.S. Byatt.

Like many voracious readers, I am uncomfortably aware that there are many authors I haven’t “gotten to” yet, many books I still have to read, many gaps in the knowledge I have acquired over my years as a reader. I am a self-directed reader. I am my own activities-planner. “Okay, so what will this year be about? Who do we want to tackle this year?” There was the one year when I said, “Let’s re-read everything you were forced to read in high school.” That was a very good project. This year I have my Chronological Shakespeare project going on (I am up to All’s Well That Ends Well.) I also finally sat down and read The Red and the Black – my first encounter with Stendhal – and the list goes on and on. I enjoy vigorous reading, I enjoy challenging reading. And once I become aware of a gap, I feel the urge to right the situation as quickly as possible. That’s what happened with Evelyn Waugh. Maybe I would have encountered his work earlier if I had taken English classes in college (which I didn’t). I had seen the Brideshead Revisited mini-series with Jeremy Irons and was mildly obsessed with it. But I didn’t pick up the book. And so I moved on with my life, blissfully unaware for YEARS that I was missing out on anything. Then I happened to read Christopher Hitchens’ review of Scoop in The Atlantic, and his review made me laugh out loud, and I thought, “You must read this book INSTANTLY.” And I did. Within two pages I realized what I had been missing all those years. How could I never have read him before? I love it when that happens.

I bring all of this up because I had already decided, as my own activities-planner, to finally read Ford Madox Ford this year. I don’t know why I never read him before. There’s really no excuse, especially since he “ran with” the crowd I love, all of those Modernists whom I revere. Hell, I’ve read Ezra Pound, and he can be pretty tough-going. And Pound knew Ford (of course – Pound knew everyone) … and yet for whatever reason I “missed” Ford in the shuffle.

Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and John Quinn (a New York lawyer who was responsible for the world-shaking event of the 1913 art show at the New York Armory.)

I had already made my decision to read some Ford Madox Ford this year when I re-read Byatt’s essay in preparation for this post. It felt like kismet. I am very excited. I will start with The Good Soldier but there is so much else to discover! His art books. They sound fascinating. His Tudor history. What? Who is this man?? I can’t WAIT. I have a couple of other books going on right now, Silas Marner (a re-read, I love it so much and find it a very relaxing and healing book), a biography of Christopher Marlowe (what a life!), but once those two are done, I’m going to start my Ford Madox Ford project.

A.S. Byatt’s essay on Ford is lengthy, enthusiastic, and extremely knowledgeable. She explains his place in the scheme of things, why he is misunderstood, why biographers focus on the biographical details thinking that will somehow “explain” him (a pet peeve of mine), and also Ford’s various theories on language, and prose. (Ford and Joseph Conrad were good friends and collaborators, and she has a lot to say about that relationship, especially when it comes to their thoughts on prose language). Ford, like all those Modernists, thought deeply about what he was doing, and thought deeply about language and how he wanted to use it. His idol was Henry James.

Byatt adores Ford, and adores his specificity of thought in regards to language. It is something she strives for in her own work.

Excerpt from Passions of the Mind: ‘Accurate Letters: Ford Madox Ford’, by A.S. Byatt

In fact Ford’s literary “character” is not unlike that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also his own worst enemy. Both were men with a passion for exact thought and exact use of words who nevertheless had justified reputations as appalling liars. Both wrote major works o art, and a considerable body of writing by any standard (Ford wrote eighty-one books). Yet both were felt not to have fulfilled their promise: to have wasted their talents. Both boasted, and both devoted themselves, with tact, humility and, most important, appropriate and adequate intelligence, to the furthering of the work, and the understanding of the work of writers they felt were greater than themselves. Both were grandiose and incompetent, journalistic entrepreneurs, whose periodicals are nevertheless literary landmarks. Both rewrote, to our benefit, literary history. Both were not insular – Ford knew French, German, Italian, Provencal literature, and used it, as Coleridge knew German, French and Italian. Perhaps this last is another reason why Ford found his best reception, and his sharpest critics, among the Americans. He wrote about, and claimed that he was, the English gentleman: he was in fact a polyglot, half-German, brought up amongst the aesthetes and Bohemians who frequented the house of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown.

It is time another attempt was made to re-establish his reputation, not only as the author of three or four novels better than most English novels, but as a thinker about the nature of writing, and the craft of action, whose injunctions and priorities, far from having become outdated, have not yet been fully explored or understood. Not by critics, not by novelists. Hugh Kenner, writing in 1950, on the occasion of the American republication of Parade’s End (remaindered eight years later), said: “It would be worth most novelists’ while to spend some years of study and emulation of the procedures and felicities of Parade’s End.” And he locates the felicities in Ford’s exact language, his orchestration of “a sort of scrupulous lexicography working by the exact reproduction of the tones of numerous speaking voices.”

Ford in his lifetime worked out – to a considerable extent during his discussions and collaborations with Conrad – a theory of good prose-writing, of fictive construction, which derived immediately from the idea of Henry James about the “rendering” of an “affair” and the organization of “impressions”, in English, and from the ideas of Flaubert, de Maupassant and their literary sympathizers about le mot juste, “the minutiae of words and their economical employment; the charpente, the architecture of the novel; the handling of dialogue; the rendering of impressions; the impersonality of the Author” (Ford’s essay “Techniques,” 1935). It was from Ford’s belief that the novel of Flaubert was “the immensely powerful engine of our civilization” that Ezra Pound derived his view that “No man can now really write good verse unless he knows Stendhal and Flaubert.” In “The Prose Tradition in Verse” (Poetry [Chicago], 1914), Pound praised Ford as the “one man with a vision of perfection,” “in a country in love with amateurs, in a country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so fragile and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the introduction of competent criticism.” Pound said of Ford: “It is he who has insisted, in the face of a still Victorian press, upon the importance of good writing as opposed to the opalescent word, the rhetorical tradition. Stendhal had said, and Flaubert, de Maupassant and Turgenev had proved, that ‘prose was the higher art’– at least their prose.” Because of this English amateurism, Pound asserted, it had been left to “a prose-cragsman like Arnold Bennett to speak well of Mr. Hueffer’s prose, and a verse-craftsman like myself to speak well of his verses.”

The situation has not much changed – except that English amateurism now perhaps values the casual, underwrought style more than the precise attention to diction of a Ford, whereas the Edwardians were still in love with the Pre-Raphaelite raptures and dreams. Pound added crisply that Ford did not learn from Wordsworth, because “Wordsworth was so busied about the ordinary world that he never found time to think about le mot juste.” Students nowadays are apt to say that writers who use words “everyone doesn’t know” are elitist. Ford believed there were three English languages: “that of The Edinburgh Review which has no relation to life, that of the streets which is full of slang and daily neologisms and that third one which is fairly fluid and fairly expressive – the dialect of the drawing-room or the study, the really living language.” He could use all three, to elect, in fact, but we now need to insist again – for prose writers, for novelists – that the language “of the study,” thought about (I do not mean “made” academic language), is living, and must be kept available.