GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

Abstract

Ford Madox Ford has as often been a subject of controversy as a candidate for literary canonization. He was, nonetheless, a major presence in early twentieth-century literature, and he has remained a significant figure in the history of modern English and American literature for over a century. Throughout that time he has been written about - not just by critics, but often by leading novelists and poets, such as Graham Greene, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Anthony Burgess, A. S. Byatt and CoIm Toibin. His two acknowledged masterpieces have remained in print since the 1940s. The Good Soldier now regularly figures in studies of Modernism and on syllabuses. Parade's End has been increasingly recognized as comparably important. Malcolm Bradbury called it 'a central Modernist novel of the 1920s, in which it is exemplary'; and for Samuel Hynes it is 'the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman'. A major new adaptation by Tom Stoppard is due to be televised this year.During the last two decades, there has been a striking resurgence of interest in Ford and in the multifarious aspects of his work. As befits such an internationalist phenomenon as Ford himself, this critical attention has been markedly international, manifesting itself not only in the United Kingdom and the USA., but in Continental Europe and elsewhere. Many of his works have not only been republished in their original language, but also translated into more than a dozen others.The founding of the present series, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, reflects this increasing interest in Ford's writing and the wider understanding of his role in literary history. Each volume is normally based upon a particular theme or issue, and relates aspects of Ford's work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Previous volumes have focused on ideas of modernity, history, the city, culture and change, and Ford's complex engagements with several generations of literary movements.This eleventh volume contributes to an investigation of the internationalism of Ford's various milieux, joining volume 4 on cities, volume 5 on England and Englishness, and volume 10 on France and especially Provence. It also continues an ambitious multi-volume project initiated by the Ford Madox Ford Society to reappraise what volume 6, edited by Paul Skinner, described as Ford's 'Literary Contacts', taken to include the many writers and artists Ford knew personally (Henry James, Jean Rhys, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell, and Janice Biala all feature prominently here). Many of Ford's key creative contacts were Americans. He was in his early twenties when he first met James, who was to remain a particularly influential figure for Ford's novels and criticism. Ford saw a lot of him, and their mutual friend Stephen Crane, when they were living close to each other around the Romney Marsh in Kent and Sussex; and also the naturalist W. H. Hudson, who, though born in Argentina, was the son of settlers from the US. From 1898 Ford spent a decade collaborating with Joseph Conrad. It was effectively his apprenticeship as a writer; and besides Conrad, it was these American writers who most contributed to Ford's sense of the kind of writing he wanted to practise, and which he would come to define as impressionism.America, and American literature, then, had always been in Ford's literary DNA. He published James in his English Review from 1908 in London, and they continued to meet until James's death in 1916. Hudson appeared in the magazine too, as did the younger American who was to become Ford's closest and life-long friend among the modernists - Ezra Pound. Pound was also in Paris when Ford decided to move there in 1923, and was instrumental in helping him set up his other great modernist publishing venture, the transatlantic review, the following year. The transatlantic put Ford in touch with the American expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s, in particular Ernest Hemingway, whom Ford took on as a sub-editor, and Gertrude Stein. …