FORD MADOX FORD: THE GOOD COLLABORATOR

Abstract

I set out, as a writer-editor myself, to consider Ford as the writereditor who, with the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, has meant most to me. Both managed, I thought, the almost impossible balancing act that makes their editorial, creative and critical work of a piece. The balancing act is between generations, cultures, continents. The heir of James is the publisher of Stein, and Rhys and Hemingway. And it makes sense that he should be and could be. The collaborator and editor of Conrad cannot resist the work of Joyce. And when a contributor was poor, even if no poorer than Ford often was himself, he could find sums of money to alleviate the immediate situation.He knew the tradition of independent magazines in Scotland and England, but he took his bearings from France, from Remy de Gourmont's Mercure de France. Its ?rational, and centrist tone'1 set out to clear a non-ideological space (yes, of course, non-ideological is ideological) where writers and readers might move and engage freely.Dr Matthew Philpotts, Senior Lecturer in German Studies at Manchester, has pointed out what I had not considered, that even as Ford was establishing The English Review in London, in November 1908 Andre Gide was publishing the first issue of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. He tells us, ?these two new journals occupied remarkably similar positions in their respective literary fields'. The closeness in the titles itself is suggestive. And ?both of them provided an inclusive and disinterested space in which different generations of writers were able to enter into productive dialogue with one another and both of them played a vital mediating role between modernism and tradition'.2 One prospered for decades, the other for a season.In 1914 Richard Aldington was Ford Hermann Hueffer's fellow hack, preparing a government-commissioned propaganda book, and also taking Ford's dictation of parts of The Good Soldier (1915). Aldington's then wife H.D. had given up the task, finding the story, originally to be entitled The Saddest Story, too harrowing.For Hueffer the act of writing involved other people. If he helped Conrad with his art and his English, the experience contributed to his own development too, not least his sense that composition depends on speaking the words aloud, on their aural impact as pace, rhythm, the creation of suspenses and resolutions. The analogies with music are clear, the composer using the keyboard to work out melodies, harmonies, rhythms. An art that takes shape ?aloud' shares certain characteristics with the products of the oral tradition. Dictation clarifies language and in the response of the transcriber, who in the case of Conrad or Aldington could not but respond, there is inevitably the beginning of collaboration.Katherine Anne Porter ?never knew him when he was not working on a book'.3 He also edited magazines. Graham Greene, an unconditional modem advocate, remarks how, ?in between, if one can so put it, he found time to be the best literary editor England has ever had: what Masefield, Hudson, Conrad, even Hardy owed to the English Review' - ?as brilliant a literary magazine as there has ever been in this country', John Gross called it - ?is well known'.4 His unspoken motto was, ?suggestions not dictates'. The mission of the English Review was: ?to make the Englishman think', and the very title ?a contradiction in terms'.5I want to focus on the English Review and to glimpse forward to the transatlantic review and see how well these claims hold up and where precisely his originality lay.Ford negotiated a transition from the fin de siecle taste of his boyhood environment to the disciplines of early modernism and then, as Greene puts it, after World War I ?in the transatlantic review he bridged the great gap, publishing the early Hemingway, Cocteau, Stein, Pound, the music of Antheil, and the drawings of Braque' and smoking those bent Gauloises that tasted and smelled of ? …