FORD MADOX FORD AS QUEEN VICTORIA: THE ENGLISH SOVEREIGNTY OF IMPRESSIONIST MEMORY IN FORD’S TRANSATLANTIC MODERNISM

Abstract

About two-thirds of the way through Jean Rhys' s first published novel, Quartet, it occurs to the heroine, Marya Zelli, that H. J. Heidler 'looks exactly like a picture of Queen Victoria'.1 The image offers a concise example of the techniques of impressionism championed by Ford Madox Ford. Through distortion, it caricatures the Englishness and male chauvinism of the character Heidler by superimposing them both on that sovereign emblem of English respectability, Queen Victoria. As an impressionist image, it is Fordian in a number of ways. It draws on techniques Rhys learned from Ford - for example, the use of the medium of 'a picture' (ambiguously referring both to painting and to photography). The image may owe something to the particular method of 'composite' portraiture and photography that was a favorite image of Ford's. The caricature may well also be directed at Ford himself, since Quartet is at least in part based on Rhys' s own affair with Ford. Whatever Rhys' s portrait of Heidler reveals biographically about her own affair with Ford, the image follows that Fordian mixing of the modes of autobiography and fiction that Max Saunders has described as foundational for modernist impressionism (using the term 'autobiografiction'). Rhys's composite portrait of Heidler, Ford, and Queen Victoria, might indeed itself be read as a critical commentary on the technique of Fordian impressionism. In all these ways, Rhys's impressionist portrait echoes Ford's own impressionist accounts of impressionism. Focusing on the quartet of reminiscences Ford published between 1921 and 1933, in the period coinciding with his collaborative affair with Rhys, I want to consider how such impressionist techniques define Ford's significance for the 'transatlantic' modernist turn of the 1920s - above all, 1924, the year Ford edited the transatlantic review and published Some Do Not . . ., the first novel of Parade 's End; and the year of his affair with Rhys. Heidler is not Ford - and Ford is not Queen Victoria - but the distortion of cultural and historical memory enacted by that composite image foregrounds how ambiguously central Ford remains for genealogies of transnational modernism.Why Queen Victoria? What does that emblem of British sovereignty have to do with Ford, with impressionism, and above all the transatlantic and transnational dimension of all the various kinds of modernist experimentation associated with Ford? The seeming incongruity of this anachronistically British national and imperial image belongs, I argue, to the transatlantic, and specifically American logic that is part of the critical agenda developed in the quartet of Ford's reminiscences Thus to Revisit (1921), New York is Not America (1927), Return to Yesterday (1931), and It Was the Nightingale (1933). In these impressionist memoirs which also seek to explain the technique of impressionism, Ford repeatedly turns to America - more characteristically the America of other writers (such as Henry James and Ezra Pound); but also the America to which Ford himself traveled. So, for example, in Return to Yesterday, Ford retrospectively turns the decadent movement of the 1890s into an 'American movement5 paralleling the 'American movement' of Vorticism, Futurism, and Imagism led by Ezra Pound. This marked transatlantic turn is perhaps most fully realized in the last of these books, It Was the Nightingale, a book of 'transitions' (as John Coyle puts it) 'in which Ford portrays himself as crossing a shadow line between an earlier self and a new embodiment, so that Hueffer becomes Ford, the English Review becomes the transatlantic, Marwood becomes Tietjens, and moribund London yields to the various cultural renaissances of Paris and New York' - the book's three parts successively marked by the Latin mottoes attributed to London, Paris, and finally New York.4One might expect this transatlantic turn to take Ford further away from the image of Queen Victoria. And to an important extent it does. …