FORD’S HENRY JAMES AS A DOUBLE IMPRESSION

Abstract

Written to mark the seventieth birthday of Henry James, whom Ford had first met in 1896 and read regularly since, Ford's Henry James (1913) serves a number of purposes: it allows Ford to pay homage where it is due, and to pre-empt the official academic biography that would naturally soon be published. Written by an impressionist about ?an author who, more than anything else, is an impressionist', it stages Ford as ?the ideal critic', ?who isn't compelled by the same trade exigencies as is the reviewer' and who as a fellow-writer and citizen of the Republic of Letters is fully qualified to write what in fact is the first full length British monograph on James.1 While putting into practice the critical reflection Ford would develop in the articles ?On Impressionism' published a few months later,2 Ford's tribute energetically takes the reader through a number of James's novels and short stories, extensively quoted and discussed, as well as through his prefaces to the collected New York Edition of 1907-09. And, by contrast with his later, and in many ways comparable, monograph about his other main early Edwardian literary friendship, the posthumous tribute Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), it is possible to see Henry James as not simply about James but also as written to him, in the more or less conscious hope that the Master might acknowledge it.Henry James displays Ford's intimate in-depth knowledge of James's work and temperament, as well as his enjoyment of the Master's technique. It also makes obvious the bad faith of some early reviewers and admirers of James who gave the book a bad press. After the war and James's death, recalling, in Thus to Revisit (1921), the violence of the press toward Henry James, Ford reflected that apart from ?want of reverence for the Master', the reason for the outcry must have been that he had ?hatefully pointed out that this great man was an American', which to Ford was naturally part of James's personality. He comments: ?And this outcry was made by gentlemen who, very obviously, had neither a tenth of my knowledge of the Master's works, nor one hundredth part of my love for the man'.3Ford's intimacy with James's work is the subject of the present chapter. That intimacy ultimately matters more than his intimacy with the man - the question that has exercised much of the writing about Ford's sometimes troubled or delicate relationship with James.4 The fact is that their friendship existed even if, like some of Ford's other friendships, it was at some point damaged by his decision to leave his wife for Violet Hunt. James's and Ford's personalities were extremely different, their lives were miles apart, but their temperaments as writers in spite of the difference in age were, toward the end of the Edwardian period, very close. Their relationship was episodic and never non-literary even when they were virtually neighbours: in 1896, when Ford, 7e jeune homme modeste', in James's ironic phrase,5 asked if he could call on the master, he was twenty-two and James fifty-three, so that the curiosity and fascination were quite normally on Ford's side. They were never close friends, as Ford and Conrad were, but Ford frequently wrote about James, both before publishing his monograph and long after James's death. At the time of the English Review, when Ford turned editor published three short stories by James, their friendship must have been almost wholly literary, and tense at times, as Philip Home's brilliant use of the Pinker archive documents.6 Let us not forget that Ford had made of the publication of the first volume of James's collected edition the ?topic of the month' in the first number of the Review.7The writing of Henry James also marks the moment when Ford was finally outgrowing his ?self-imposed tutelage under James',8 feeling ready to pass from his ?pastiches' to the ?further turn of the screw' that is The Good Soldier, candidly indebted to James, yet undeniably Fordian. …