Reviewed by: Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life Jesse Matz Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. Max Saunders. Volume II. Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 696. $49.50. Between 1891 and 1939, Ford Madox Ford produced more than 70 works of fiction, poetry, history, and criticism. Of these, we still read only one or two. The Good Soldier, Ford’s 1915 melodrama of deception and betrayal, enjoys a secure place on the modern-novel syllabus; Parade’s End, a World-War-One tetralogy published in the 1920s, while not taught much or very widely read, seems yet to figure in more inclusive views of the modern tradition. Other works do not seem any longer to signify. Some are in print: Ford’s appreciations of Provence and London, his late survey of literary history, and various minor novels occasionally appear on the shelves, but none of these seems surely to offer more than what T. S. Eliot called Ford’s “egotistical meanderings about his own services to English literature” or the ramblings of what V. S. Pritchett saw as an early and extended “anecdotage” (446; 452). Moreover, these lesser works, and the problematic character they reflect, threaten to diminish our respect for the one or two works that deserve attention. Indiscriminate, pointlessly bombastic, engendered by “garrulous self-esteem,” Ford’s lesser works, and his personal behavior, make The Good Soldier seem like a fortunate freak. In bibliographical and biographical context, that is, the novel’s impressive features—its confused and shifting time-frame, the unreliability of its narrator—seem proof of unreliability and confusion rather than conscious literary ingenuity. So goes one argument—the argument against placing Ford among the greats. In the second volume of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Max Saunders continues eloquently to refute it. His Ford is the author of many great books, and it is only their “literary polymorphousness” that has made it hard for us to appreciate them (386). In Saunders’s account, Ford’s inconsistencies resolve into a more meaningful doubleness, which in turn proves to have been a mechanism for the exploration of fundamental psychological dualities. And the tendency toward “egotistical meandering,” tall-tale telling, and outright lying that exasperated so many contemporaries becomes a canny critical disposition that makes Ford a “predecessor of deconstructive criticism” (459). In this new biographical and bibliographical context, The Good Soldier is only the central landmark in a whole undiscovered country of literary attractions, and Ford’s notoriously inflated claims—“England learned all it knows of Literature from me”—start to sound true (101). What completes this critical shift, as Volume Two of the biography progresses, is Saunders’s persistent effort to place Ford’s words and actions in the context of the theory of literature that Ford himself promoted. Ford called himself an impressionist. In a pair of articles written in 1913, he outlined an approach to fiction that places effect over accuracy, suggestion over explanation, subjective over objective report—in short, impressions over facts. Saunders frequently invokes Ford’s impressionism to argue for various deep adjustments in the way we evaluate Ford more generally: wherever misbehavior, inaccuracy, or sketchy work would make Ford look bad, Saunders reminds us that impressionism demands different standards of judgment. As an impressionist, Ford did not lie; rather, he tested the impressionability of his listeners. He was not, as some believed, out of touch with reality; his reality lay in subjective impressions rather than in objective fact. He did not behave unethically; rather, he had “an [End Page 167] Impressionist’s ethics, whereby a person’s sense of responsibility can be profoundly indifferent to facts, or uncannily alienated from them” (356). Saunders’s unmatched knowledge of his subject everywhere compels respect, but this explanatory principle sometimes fails to convince. When pushed beyond its limits, justification through impressionism backfires, proving less that impressionism can redeem Ford than that Ford ruined impressionism. Saunders tells, for example, the story of an offer that Ford once made to Sherwood Anderson. Anderson was broke, and Ford begged him grandly to take Ford’s house in Pennsylvania. The house, Ford claimed, was beautifully furnished, had excellent views, and overflowed with servants. He could not live...