Ford Madox Ford and His Relationship to Stephen Crane and Henry James (review)

Abstract

88 The Henry James Review Bowl and the consequent sense of temporal and spatial disconnectedness (ch. 5). He provides incisive readings of the discussions and the deployment of referentiality in the text (ch. 6). The chapter on narration uses the techniques and the vocabulary of structuralist narratology to support the "argument that the text challenges a realistic ontology, an ontology that valorizes a perceptual denominative vocabulary for regulating the interaction of subject and object" (104). Finally, Steele's discussion of the Bildungsroman in The Golden Bowl, that aspect of the novel he calls "Maggie Verver's Ontological Voyage," is a model of analytic acuity that sees the "Verver" and the "non-Verver" as competing "systems" of being, knowing, and referring, and Maggie's voyage between them not as a one-way trip towards "teleological closure," the "triumph" with which readers have often credited her, but as a gradual movement into "a space of desire where the reader joins the characters in the task of rereading" (130). These are valuable insights, and this is a valuable book. It does not, however, accomplish all that it proposes. The transition between the two sections glosses over the author's insufficiently justified presumption that his three fictional texts somehow "represent" the history of realism or even of "the novel." To state that after Flaubert "the project of the novel is no longer to depict the manners of society but to represent the ontological discontinuity of experience" is to ignore thousands of later novels. The last paragraph of the conclusion marks another of the limitations of the book when it avers that "the way a text reroutes reference becomes a concern not only for linguistics, rhetoric, and philosophy, but also ideology" (133). Steele's study is too strictly textual to answer the challenge that this statement implies; it nods occasionally in the direction of history and society, but does not make the connections that a genuine "concern for ideology" would demand. Like many other deconstructionists (and an even larger number of New Critics), Steele is a fine reader of texts. The insights provided by Realism and the Drama of Reference should help Steele and others move beyond close rhetorical, linguistic, and philosophical reading to a sophisticated understanding of the complicated relations between "realism," "reality," and history. William W. Stowe Wesleyan University Brita Lindberg-Seyersted. Ford Madox Ford and His Relationship to Stephen Crane and Henry James. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1987. 123 pp. $19.95. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted calls the friendship between Henry James and Ford Madox Ford "A Troubled Relationship," and that is a fair description of it. Ford met James on 14 September 1896 when Ford was twenty-two and James fifty-three. They remained in contact, one way or another, until at least 1913, when a letter from James to Violet Hunt on 7 March 1913 conveys James's congratulations to Ford on his being able to work again after a nervous breakdown. Having had a similar breakdown in 1910, James would have understood Ford's situation sympathetically. The last time they met face to face was either in 1912 (according to documentary evidence) or in 1915 (according to Ford) shortly before Ford joined the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium and France. Their friendship had suffered a breach when Ford left Elsie Martindale, his wife, to live with Violet Hunt in London. Ford's publication of Henry James: A Critical Study (1913), though written by Ford to honor James's seventieth birthday, didn't please James either. James had been on good terms with Ford and Elsie when they lived in Winchelsea and he in Rye, as the extant correspondence (seventeen items to Ford and nine to Elsie) reveals. Olive Garnett's diary adds to the facts presented by Lindberg-Seyersted, showing James visiting the Hueffers on the eve of the Epiphany in 1903 and giving their children toys. And after they had moved to Airlie Gardens in London, James did not abandon Book Reviews 89 them. Olive notes that one evening after visiting the Hueffer children in their upstairs bedroom, she returned downstairs to find that Henry James was there. The specific evidence against a friendship between the men is that...