ENGLISH REVIEW, AMERICAN SPECTER: THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE CROSSES THE ATLANTIC

Abstract

In December of 1908, Ford Madox Ford's monthly journal the English Review made its debut in the already crowded milieu of British periodicals. Ford's ambitious project to promote literature that aided what he called 'the comprehension of one kind of mind by another' was a financial failure, and he was forced to give up his post as editor after only fifteen issues.1 This chapter asks what America meant to the English Review, and what role the figure of the American mind played in the journal's cultivation of what Ford called 'the critical attitude'.As E. V. Lucas protested in a letter to Joseph Conrad, Ford's Review had a strong international character despite its Anglocentric name. The serialization of Conrad's own Some Reminiscences in the first seven issues, along with Constance Garnett's translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, gave the literature of Eastern Europe significant representation in the Review. Some German and French texts appeared without translation, so even the language of the English Review was not always English. Indeed, Ford hoped his journal would encourage modes of discourse associated with French culture. Mark Morrison has persuasively argued that Ford used the Mercure de France as a model for the English Review, hoping to emulate the French tradition of critical 'disinterestedness'.4 As Morrison explains, Ford sought to emulate the older French journal's promotion of avant-garde literature, broad-ranging interests, and centrist position.5The international character of the English Review came through largely in such attention to continental literature and culture, though its gaze did routinely advance beyond Europe by addressing the issues of the British Empire in India, Australia, South Africa, and Persia. At first glance, however, the issues from Ford's tenure show little of the transatlantic awareness that would mark his later editorial project, the transatlantic review, in name and spirit. The presence of works by W. H. Hudson and R. B. Cunninghame Graham put South America on the English Review's map, but only on the barely sketched edges.Few Americans or references to 'America'6 appear in the early months of the English Review, but the exceptions are notable. The May 1909 issue includes an essay by President Taft called 'An Answer to the Panama Canal Critics', and three early issues of the Review showcase Ezra Pound's avant-garde poetry. Contributors occasionally discussed American thinkers - the September 1909 issue, for example, contains an essay on the philosophy of William James. It is his brother Henry James, however, who is the most prominently featured American in the first fifteen issues of the English Review. In addition to receiving Ford's lavish praise in various editorial pieces, James published three short stories in the Review in 1908 and 1909. This chapter focuses on the first and most 'American' of those stories, 1908' s 'The Jolly Corner', published in the inaugural issue of the English Review, and on Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson's series, 'Letters From America', which ran from November of 1909 to January of 1910. Both offer Ford's readership a vivid image of turnof-the-century America's seductive and threatening modernity. The American mind, as represented in these works, holds all the promise and danger of twentieth-century commerce and technological advancement. In treating the difficulties of knowing minds across the Atlantic, the works of both James and Dickinson speak to Ford's own editorial designs to analyze and bridge the distance between human minds by taking up the critical attitude.Ford published at least one unsigned editorial in each of his fifteen issues of the English Review. In the first four issues of the journal, he addresses 'The Function of the Arts in the Republic'. His next series of editorials, 'The Critical Attitude', ran from April 1909 to February 1910. In typical fashion, Ford gives us no easy definition of what the 'critical attitude' means, despite dedicating thousands of words to this favored topic. …