Ford Madox Research Articles

Truth in Time Travel: Subversions of Time in An Adventure

This article explores how Frances Lamont and Elizabeth Morison’s An Adventure (1913) disrupts temporal and spatial dichotomies through its supposed representations of time travel. An Adventure presents time as a shifting force that aligns with Bergsonian notions of temporality – specifically the concepts of objective and subjective time as defined in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1911) and “Time and Free Will” (1913). This article also considers how Freudian notions of “condensation” further outline the subjective rendering of time in An Adventure’s surreal journeys back in time to the French Revolution and how the narrative’s subjective presentation of time aligns with Ford Madox Ford’s later theories of literary impressionism, particularly his idea that modernist narratives are composed of “various unordered pictures”. This article ultimately argues that Lamont and Morison’s book benefited from the temporally minded scientific and social climate of the time and used the theoretical groundwork of thinkers like Henri Bergson, Ford Madox Ford and Sigmund Freud as starting points from which they could tell their tale as truth. Specifically, their formal construction of the text as scientific research seeks to consciously obscure the differentiation between fact and fable, effectively positing their nonlinear time slip as truth. If that truth is humored, Lamont and Morison are proposing a more radical conception of time than Bergson – a nonlinear conception of time – a proposition that sits in tension with their use of scientific diction and discourse.

The First World War and Ford Madox Ford’s Short Stories, 1914–1920

This article analyses together, for the first time, Ford Madox Ford’s short stories about the First World War. A surprisingly unfamiliar form for Ford, who valued allusion, subtlety, and omission as narrative devices, we see in these stories his first attempts to parse his experience of wartime and, subsequently, military service. It is also an aspect of Ford’s writing which has received little previous critical comment. The wartime and post-war short stories are approached chronologically: ‘The Scaremonger: A Tale of the War Times’ (1914), ‘Fun!—It’s Heaven’ (1915), ‘Pink Flannel’ (1919), ‘The Colonel’s Shoes’ (1920), ‘Enigma’ ([1920–1922] 1999), and ‘The Miracle’ (1928). The contemporary debates in which Ford intervened are highlighted by returning to their original periodical publications, and extensive reference to a range of his non-fictional periodical contributions establishes new connections among his wartime writing. Here I bring together for the first time these short stories, arguing that Ford’s refracting of the war through the lens of his impressionism is distinctive as an early response to war, trauma, and neurosis and is vital to the genesis of his later successes in prose, notably the Parade’s End novel tetralogy (1924–1928).

Ford Madox Ford’s Unusual War: Ongoing Worry and Modernity

In Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford approaches the experience of trauma in an unusual way—it is no longer just past experiences, but the expectancy of dismal events that become as traumatic. Ford chooses worry for such rendering. In order to make the correlation between suffering and sensibility, he places worry in the lives of his characters, which reflects on Ford’s own life. This discussion will introduce the idea that worry is going to be a major component of Ford’s psychologising of war. I explore this worry-driven sensibility and the ways it is reflected, especially in the characters’ obsession with the anticipation of death and face-forward mourning. Within this loss-filled atmosphere, worry over being killed dominates the narrative and continually feeds the sentiment of mournfulness. The Great War transforms into a Greater War, seeping into the societal realm, where it amplifies the private emotional battles of the characters, centred around worry. Consequently, the narrative highlights the coexistence of these personal and public conflicts, ultimately resulting in both physical and psychological losses throughout the story.

Fleeting Furniture

In the last novel of the Parade’s End-series, Last Post (1928), Ford Madox Ford depicts the aftermath of the First World War, and the cataclysmic social, cultural, and material changes it caused, from the perspective of the Tietjens brothers’ rural home in Kent. The novel’s position in the tetralogy has often been questioned, as its setting as well as form differs significantly from the previous three novels. However, as this article will show, the novel also offers Ford’s most substantial examination of the consequences of war. This article looks at the importance of things in Ford’s depiction of post-war reconstruction, arguing that by foregrounding furniture and other domestic objects as a thematic concern, Ford seeks to evade a homogenising narrative of reconciliation and patriotic celebration. The novel participates in a modernist rejection of empirical, objective representation, where things rather than events serve as nodes of reference for the psychological as well as material transformations of the Post-War period.

“Damn the Empire!”: Imperial Excess, National Nostalgia, and Metaphysical Modernism in the Poetics of Parade’s End

Ford Madox Ford famously intended his First World War tetralogy Parade’s End to have “for its purpose the obviating of all future wars”. But why do we engage in war to begin with? Modernist literature provides some provocative explanations. Ford’s Sylvia Tietjens, for example, proclaims that “You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women. It was what war was for”. And in the very same year, Virginia Woolf’s shell-shocked Septimus Smith “went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare…” I argue that Ford’s understanding of the causality of war involves a strange combination of these two explanations in Parade’s End’s triangulation of seventeenth-century English literary tradition along with sexual and imperial conquest. While countless modernist novels exhibit a sensibility to the power of early modern poetry amidst battle, Parade’s End displays a particularly emphatic and extended focus on the relationship between poetic tradition and war. Soldiers of various ranks “talk…in intimate undertones about the resemblances between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet form”, host timed sonnet competitions in the trenches, recurringly quote the seduction poetry of Marvell, and fantasize about George Herbert’s lifespan being “the only satisfactory age in England…yet what chance had it today? Or, still more, to-morrow?”. To answer this question, my own transtemporal study will use early modern scholarship to investigate seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry’s dual power to inspire and potentially obviate war. Much has been written on this tetralogy’s anti-linear plot but less on the broader temporality of its politico-literary vision. I contend that the metaphysical allusions of this text help Ford to show us the complexities of nationalism in the imperial conquest and imperial damnation that (early) modern aesthetics can catalyse.

‘[M]en’s Dwellings Were Thin Shells’: Uncertain Interiors and Domestic Violence in Ford Madox Ford’s War Writing

The standard image of First World War soldiers is of men in open trenches: waiting to attack or be attacked; walking, sitting, sleeping, dead. Ford’s Parade’s End includes such scenes. But it is a different kind of image which predominates in his war writings and often produces its most memorable passages: images of houses or house-like shelters. The mind seeks protection in such structures; but they offer little security against the destructiveness outside, against the bombardments, gas, shrapnel, bullets. Ford wrote that the experience of war revealed: ‘men’s dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. … all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields […]’. This realisation works in two ways. The soldier’s sense of vulnerability provokes fantasies of home, solidity, sanctuary, while for the returnee soldier, domestic architecture summons war-visions of its own annihilation: ‘it had been revealed to you’, adds Ford, ‘that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos’. It is now customary to read war literature through trauma theory. Building on analyses of Ford’s use of repression, but drawing instead on object relations theory, I argue that Ford’s houses of war are not screen memories but images of the failure of repression to screen off devastating experiences. The abysses of Chaos can be seen through the screen or projected upon it. Attending to Ford’s handling of this theme enables a new reading of his war writing and a new case for its coherence. The essay will connect the opening of No More Parades (in a hut, during a bombardment) with the war poem ‘The Old Houses of Flanders’; the postwar poem A House; the memoir It Was the Nightingale (quoted above); and the otherwise puzzling, fictionalised memoir No Enemy, structured in terms of ‘Four Landscapes’ and ‘Certain Interiors’.

The Pragmatics, Poetics, and Ethics of Pronouns in Ford Madox Ford’s War Prose

This essay adopts a stylistic approach to delineate the various—and varying—pragmatic effects inherent in the use and interactions of pronouns in Ford’s war prose. Ford’s singular use of pronouns is shown to be instrumental in his practice of literary impressionism. In particular, the omnipresent second person is granted a variety of referents that coexist along a “continuum of reference” (as defined by Bettina Kluge), from a “you” that is speaker-oriented to one that is addressee-oriented. Sorlin’s intersection of Kluge’s continuum with a gradient from personalisation to generalisation (2022) is illuminating when examining the manifold significance of Ford’s use of the second person, as it brings to light its ethical impact. Ford’s war essays shift from the general to the particular and from the collective to the individual in a manner that opposes propaganda rhetorics. Furthermore, the gradient established by Sandrine Sorlin to account for the pragmatic effect of “you” also proves remarkably useful when applied to the pronoun “one”. Scrutinising the interplay between these various pronouns allows us to investigate the multifarious relationships that Ford establishes in his war essays between the persona, the reader, those he often called “my men”, and the collective ethos of wartime Britain.

Verses of Change: Democratisation of Poetry in Ford Madox Ford’s “Antwerp” and Nazım Hikmet Ran’s “The Legend of the National Militia”

Wars have always been echoed in literature as manifestations of humankind's desire for supremacy and power across history. Twentieth-century poetry, marked by the turmoil of the two World Wars and the wars of independence, reflects poets' patriotic and personal responses to the power struggles and expansionist policies of imperialist countries. These poems also challenge traditional war narratives that glorify politicians while ignoring the horrors of war and the ordinary people whose heroic struggles changed the course of history. Ford Madox Ford, one of the leading Modernist poets and novelists in English literature, and Nazım Hikmet, a pivotal figure in twentieth-century Turkish poetry, wrote unique narrative poems that critically reimagine war and attribute heroism to common people. This article contends that Ford’s “In October 1914 [Antwerp]” and N. Hikmet’s “The Legend of the National Militia” (Kuvayi Milliye Destanı) mirror the poets’ attempts to democratise poetry by portraying the extraordinary resistance of ordinary people instead of the idealised hero archetype. Furthermore, the poems serve to politicise modernist verse by addressing the suffering of ordinary individuals and their struggles against expansionist countries and calling for the recognition of alternative histories. While Ford’s poem immortalises the martyrdom of Belgians and the agonies of Belgian refugees brought on by the conflicting interests of hegemonic countries, Nazım’s poem portrays the defiance of the ignored people of Anatolia against both imperialist powers and the unjust social structures.

Ford Madox Ford’s Modernist Trio: A Psychosocial Study of Suicidal Doppelgängers in The Rash Act

As one of the most prolific writers of modernist fiction, Ford Madox Ford shared the period’s fascination with suicide. Despite the complementary relationship between the theme of suicide and the double-motif, a concentrated analysis of its significance in Ford’s portrayal of the modern world in The Rash Act (1933), his work which most directly focuses on the theme of suicide, has not, to date, been conducted. Accordingly, this article presents a systematic examination of the aforementioned relationship in The Rash Act by applying Anthony Giddens’ psychosocial exploration of suicide in “A Typology of Suicide” (1966), which apart from offering an etiological analysis, serves to aptly contextualize the structuring device of suicidal doppelgängers in the modernist milieu of the novel. It will be argued that, through suicide, the protagonist strives to realize his ego-ideal, which is embodied by his double, oblivious to the fact, however, that it ironically entails the annihilation of the identity of the double (ego-ideal) himself, along with the symbolic destruction of the protagonist’s own identity. By expunging the embodiment of the ego-ideal rather than the protagonist’s undesirable ego, suicide thwarts the actualization of the protagonist’s illusory rebirth. The upshot is a trio, in whose liminal space, suicide, the double-motif and the narrative of identity loss correspond to each other’s contradictions and indeterminacy, which mirror Ford’s literary conception of his age.

СПЕЦИФИКА ИМПРЕССИОНИСТСКОГО РАССКАЗА ДЖИН РИС: ВЛИЯНИЕ Ф.М. ФОРДА

The article examines the impressionistic features of Jean Rhys’short stories through the example of “Hunger” included in the first collection of short stories by the writer. The features of short stories’ literary impressionism (fragmentation, sketchiness, tendency to plotlessness or displacement of events from external life to internal, details’ domination, use of stream of consciousness) are considered through a review of the aesthetic principles of the English writer and critic Ford Madox Ford, who had a direct influence on the Rhys’ development as a writer in the 1920s. In the process of research, the reason for the preference for a short story is revealed. Thus, being fragmentary, the story acts as a ‘scene’ and the main role is being played by impression, feeling, moment.

Samuel Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, and How to End a Novel

Samuel Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, and How to End a Novel

Dispatches from the home front: Violet Hunt as war writer and reluctant modernist

ABSTRACT The life and work of Violet Hunt showcases the tension between modernism's challenges to Victorian and Edwardian literary and social traditions, and the conservatism, particularly with regard to gender norms, of many of the modernist canon's key figures: institutions, writers and critics alike. Although her work was well-regarded during her lifetime, and she was a central figure in London's literary scene in the early-twentieth century, Hunt is now best known for her long, and ultimately disastrous, relationship with Ford Madox Ford. Her copious literary oeuvre, comprising seventeen novels, three collections of short stories, and several works of biography, translation and criticism, is now largely neglected. Hunt's exclusion from the modernist canon mirrors that of many other women writers of the period; however, Hunt's “recovery” remains a difficult case. Her numerous affairs, suffragettism, blending of Victorian, Edwardian and modernist styles, and authorial focus on the lives of women, all challenge conventional cultural and literary categories. Yet Hunt's work, especially during and after World War I, is important, as it offers an alternative not only to the male-centric war canon, but also to more traditional understandings of modernism, which is often presented as a break from the past.

St. Christopher Returns from the Trenches: Imitating Christ in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End

Abstract: Critical work on Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End has paid little attention to the protagonist’s depiction as a Christ figure; generally, the Christ allusions are read ironically. By contrast, this article contends that Christopher Tietjens’ association with saints and Christ is central to Ford’s experimental Great War tetralogy. To counter discourses that portrayed soldiers as comforting Christian martyrs, Ford constructs a living, disquieting Christ figure. Both Tietjens’ trauma and his desire for suffering undermine efforts to explain war experience and forget. Ultimately, Ford’s subversive use of Christ allusions transforms a conservative motif into a radical one to challenge postwar commemoration.

‘I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down’: Uncooperative narration in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier

This article offers a pragmatic stylistic analysis of Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel The Good Soldier, assessing the technical notion of ‘cooperation’ developed in Gricean theory as a means of explaining its distinctive narrative style. Critics have generally agreed this text offers a salient example of unreliable narration, but have differed significantly in how they judge the character of the narrator himself, and even in how they interpret the events of the novel. Grice characterises communicative exchanges as typically rational pieces of behaviour, in which a mutually accepted set of purposes guarantees that individual contributions are suitable and constructive, but he does also detail ways in which speakers may fail to fulfil these expectations. This article will analyse examples from the novel in which the relationship between narrator and reader might be characterised as uncooperative in specifically Gricean terms; the narrator faces a clash of conversational maxims, opts out of the maxims or violates them, rather than either adhering to them or flouting them for communicative effect. This suggests a way in which pragmatic literary stylistics might be able to offer a principled explanation of the idiosyncratic style of this canonical work of modernist fiction, and by extension of the effects of this style of narration on the reader.

Two Good Soldiers: Ford Madox Ford and May Sinclair

Two Good Soldiers: Ford Madox Ford and May Sinclair

Powered modernity, contested space: literary modernism and the London tram

ABSTRACT A literary history of London’s tramways spans the period between late-Victorian and High Modernism, encompassing naturalist fiction, reportage, creative non-fiction, modernist poetry, and the psychological novel. The same timespan saw the horse tram give way to the electric tram, which itself faced replacement by motor buses and trolleybuses during the 1930s. This essay intersects these two narratives, of literary history and of transport history, as a contribution to mobility humanities focused on the city. Trams and tramways had a peculiarly in-between identity as vehicles and environments emerging from powered modernity but associated with the proletariat, as well as the urban districts where they lived. Reading literary texts by Arthur Morrison, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, spotlighted here as part of a broader corpus extending from the 1880s to the 1980s, brings the tramways’ interstitiality to life. Trams, the literary readings demonstrate, were a contact zone that threatened to overturn separations of class and gender, as well as presaging an expanded future in which the city would be built around the industrial working class. The curtailment of tram operations in 1930s London meant that such a future never came to pass, but literary texts are windows onto its possibility.

Authors Take a Stand on the Irish War: Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and the Rediscovery of a Significant Document for the Politics of Modernism

A virtually unknown petition signed by fifty prominent intellectuals protesting against the violent tactics of the Black and Tans in Ireland appeared in several newspapers in January 1921. Signatories included leading writers, scientists and academics of the day, such as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Jane Harrison, J. M. Keynes, Gilbert Murray, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Dorothy Richardson, Siegfried Sassoon, May Sinclair, R. H. Tawney and Virginia Woolf. The article discusses the origins of the petition, its political context and orientation, and its significance for the literary and political history of Modernism.

‘The dawn, the dawn, it comes too soon!’: The Medieval Alba in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

This paper argues for the importance of the alba, a medieval genre of courtly love poetry, to Ford Madox Ford's oeuvre and particularly to his tetralogy Parade's End. While the influence of troubadour songs and culture on Ford is widely recognised, no work has yet been devoted to the presence of the alba in his work. Describing a scene in which a knight and lady's adulterous love affair is interrupted by the coming of dawn, the alba invests daybreak with erotic and dramatic potential. Ford co-opts the conventions of this poetic form to illuminate and intensify one of the tetralogy's central themes: the analogy between love and war. In Parade's End daybreak repeatedly spells the interruption of the lovers' bliss and the end of the soldiers' vigil. The alba shows the motif to be key to the work's treatment of the love/war parallelism.

Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.), with the assistance of Max Saunders. The Inheritors; The Nature of a Crime

The 2022 publication of The Inheritors (1901) and The Nature of a Crime (1909) in a single volume of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad offers two of the three collaborations produced by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (Romance [1903] is the third). As this volume illustrates, the relationship between Conrad and Ford is of great interest to literary history, especially in relation to each author’s development of protomodernist narratorial techniques and the thematic focus of later works. Jeremy Hawthorn’s expert editing of the volume, with the assistance of Max Saunders, provides a welcome addition to the Cambridge series of authoritative texts of Conrad. The volume also presents much-needed new research into the complex nature and timing of the collaboration, the textual sources and contexts of the two works, and a comprehensive account of the choice of copy-text, textual variation, and helpful explanatory notes, including appendices, one of which publishes for the first time a tantalizing, early precursor of The Nature of a Crime in a fragment of Ford’s ‘The Old Story’ (Appendix B, p. 279).

“Pure Literature Is Today Doomed”: Hemingway’s Modernism and the transatlantic review

Hemingway’s editorial role in Ford Madox Ford’s second modernist little magazine project, the transatlantic review, is overlooked both in critical scholarship and within the scope of his biography. The editorials he published in the review reveal Hemingway’s assessment of the modernist movement as it developed around him and his devotion to the idea of “pure literature” that stems from authentic inspiration rather than contrived experimentalism. This article offers an analysis of four such editorials and how they, along with his leadership over the July and August issues of the magazine, provide insight into Hemingway’s development as a modernist figure and the brand of modernism he would promote throughout his career.