FORD / FORSTER: NOVEL / NUVVLE

Abstract

Ford Madox Ford published a harsh review of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel1 in December 1927.2 This book was drawn from Forster's Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. Ford had lectured in the States that very year on the English novel. He had drawn on his notes from these lectures to write The English Novel from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad.3 By December of 1927, then, the year after he had finished writing and published A Man Could Stand Up -, Ford was ready to do battle with his perennial enemies: amateurs and academics. Having cast his lot through Christopher Tietjens in Parade 's End with the lower classes and having brought to perfection the kind of novel that he began writing with Conrad, he was committed to the craft of fiction, not to ?aspects' of the novel.Between the Boer War (1899-1902), which he opposed, and the Great War (1914-18) in which he fought, Ford shaped himself into the novelist who gave us The Good Soldier and Parade 's End. That was the result of his collaboration with Joseph Conrad as well as his friendship and admiration of Henry James. Ford's need for a greater sense of the architectonics of the novel and Conrad's need for greater fluency in writing English drew them together and led to their collaboration on The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903) and to Ford's founding of The English Review (1909). These two novels were not remarkable successes, but Ford's knowledge of Conrad - so complete a knowledge that he could write an installment of Nostromo (1904) for his ailing friend - led not only to that novel but also to Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911), which Ford deemed the best of Conrad's novels. At the same time Ford became a neighbour of James who wrote to him on 9 September 1902 to say that ?Nothing ... is ever more interesting to me than the consideration, with those who care to see, or want to, of these bottomless questions of How & Why & Whence & What - in connection with the mystery of one's craft'.4 Ford took up these questions and celebrated James's artistry in Henry James: A Critical Study (1913), telling Stella Bowen that he began to write The Good Soldier on his fortieth birthday, 17 December 1913: T sat down to show what I could do' having never before ?put into any novel of mine all that I knew about writing'.5 This was just three months after reading proof of the book on James.6 Indeed, The Good Soldier ends with Nancy Rufford gone mad and uttering the word ?shuttlecocks', which is the very word James uses to describe the daughter of Ida and Beale Farange: Maisie, ?the little feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them'.7 James's mot juste becomes Ford's, each rendering life as a battle in which the same human missile hits first one combatant then another. During this period between the end of one war and the beginning of another, E. M. Foster wrote four novels, none of which seemed to arouse Ford's curiosity as an artist. Perhaps because, as Aspects of the Novel shows, Foster was not interested enough in Conrad to discuss his novels and was decidedly interested enough in James to savage The Ambassadors (1903) at length in his last chapter.Ford had published Forster's story ?Other Kingdom' in the English Review in 1909.8 The story, in the vein of magical realism, concerns a young naive American woman who, like Daphne, turns into a tree when her aristocratic lover tries to master her free spirit by fencing in and paving paths in a wood, Other Kingdom Copse, which he had given her as an engagement present to do with as she would, not as he would. When, therefore, for all practical purposes, Harcourt Worters takes back his gift, Miss Beaumont simply disappears from the scene rather than live with his gentrification of it and thereby his taming of her. The story begins with a Latin lesson in which she is taking part by taking notes:QUEM, whom; fugis, are you avoiding; ah demens, you silly ass; habitarunt di quoque, gods too have lived in; silvas, the woods. …