BIALA AND FORD MADOX FORD'S BUCKSHEE: THE SUMMER AT BENFOLLY

Abstract

1 R B I A L A A N D F O R D M A D O X F O R D ’ S B U C K S H E E T H E S U M M E R A T B E N F O L L Y M A R Y M A X W E L L The American painter Janice Biala was the last companion of Ford Madox Ford. The fruitfulness of the final decade of his life, what I think of as ‘‘the Biala years,’’ came to Ford as a kind of ‘‘buckshee,’’ a British Army word signifying something of great value that arrives unexpected and unearned. This was not an easy period for the great writer, as he was in poor health and dire financial straits. But in the company of Biala, Ford experienced a last surge of creative focus that allowed him to articulate his cultural and artistic beliefs in prose works like Provence and The March of Literature . The period’s unanticipated emotional windfall also provided the impetus for Ford’s last poems, whose significance to American poetry has only begun to be appreciated. Yet, as Robert Lowell observed, it is in these Buckshee lyrics that Ford found the ‘‘unpredictable waver of his true inspiration.’’ Ford’s importance as a figure in the history of modernist literature reaches back to Edwardian London. According to Basil Bunting (who served as a subeditor on Ford’s transatlantic review), some of the ‘‘excellent poems’’ written by Ford ‘‘a few years before and after the First German war . . . had a wider influence than anybody has acknowledged except Ezra Pound.’’ There’s the oft- 2 M A X W E L L Y repeated incident told by Pound of Ford ‘‘saving’’ him from early errors of poetic style: ‘‘[Ford] felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling . . . on the floor . . . when my third volume displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejune provincial e√ort to learn . . . the stilted language that then passed for ‘good English’ in the arthritic milieu that held control of the respected British critical quarterlies. . . . And that roll saved me at least two years, perhaps more.’’ It’s an amusing and vivid story, but there’s an important truth beneath the anecdote. That roll on the ground, as Pound recalled in his eulogy for Ford, ‘‘sent me back to my own proper e√ort, namely, toward using the living tongue . . . though none of us has found a more natural language than Ford did.’’ I myself didn’t fully understand the extent of Ford’s involvement with American poetry until I came to know something about the context of his writing of The March of Literature. Though it was completed just months before his death in 1939, the book was begun two years earlier, during the summer he and Janice Biala were visitors at Benfolly, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon’s home in Clarksville, Tennessee. That literary moment will have consequence for several reasons – the most evident one being the arrival of an impressionable young Robert Lowell at the Tates’ doorstep while Ford was in residence. Ford did a certain amount of research as his magnum opus was being compiled (Lowell recalls Ford with ‘‘armloads of Loeb classics . . . rereading the classics in their original tongues’’), though there’s more than a little sense that he wrote the 878-page tome o√ the top of his head. There was a lot in his head. As Lowell said of Ford, ‘‘He liked to say that genius is memory. His own was like an elephant’s.’’ Ford has had a reputation (not always deserved) as a ‘‘fabulist,’’ for telling tallish tales about himself as well as about the literary figures he encountered in his lifetime. One example of both an incredible tale and Ford’s extraordinary memory capacity is the account Tate heard about Ford translating his own The Good Soldier. According to this Fordian ‘‘fable,’’ the writer translated his novel directly into French without once looking at the original English text. Tate was reasonably dubious about the likelihood of this, especially since when he compared...