Ford Madox Ford, His Fellow Writers, and History: Another Tale of Shem and Shaun

Abstract

Might the key to Ford's work after Parade's End be the influence on Ford of Finnegans Wake? I propose that the prior influence of Conrad on Ford is doubled by the no less weighty influence of Joyce, starting at least in 1924, when Conrad died and when Ford published in the Transatlantic Review the first piece of the Wake ever printed. That from 1927 on Ford followed the unfolding of Finnegans Wake in the journal Transition is implied by Joyce's asking Ford in 1929 to write a preface for excerpts from the Wake, to be called Tales Told of Shem and Shaun. But by 1929 Ford is not just reading Joyce. He seems to be drawing his own books out of the Wake, especially out of Joyce's drama of the antagonistic twins, Shem and Shaun.I An element of uncanny Shem-Shaun-like doubling in Ford's posthumous collaboration with Conrad might have cemented this convergence with Joyce. After Last Post (1928), one of Ford's ways of waking the recently dead Conrad is A Little Less Than Gods (1928), a novel about the Napoleonic era which doubles and completes Conrad's last, unfinished novel Suspense. Resurrecting and doubling Suspense as it does, A Little Less Than Gods is also about doubles: the hero's rival turns himself into a twin for the hero's hero and thereby saves the latter's life. Now Ford's insertion of Joyce's play with doubling into Ford's life with Conrad, as well as into his historical novel and into his picture of history in general, might mean little if it were a passing matter. But in fact it belongs to an essential pattern in Ford's