Ford Madox Ford's Literary Contacts (review)

"During the last decade or so, there has been a striking resurgence of interest in Ford and the multifarious aspects of his work" (11). So proclaims Max Saunders in the "General Editor's Preface" to this the sixth book in the series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies. The series, which was founded to reflect the "increasing interest" in Ford, already includes volumes focusing on "ideas of Modernity, History, the City, and Englishness" (11). In this collection, Paul Skinner departs from the trend of assembling essays around a particular theme and presents an exploration of the ways in which Ford's work interacts and intersects with that of other writers. This, however, is far more than a set of comparison pieces between Ford and one after another of his "literary contacts". Skinner describes Saunders's essay on Ford and Turgenev as, in part, "a close consideration of what 'literary contact' actually comprised for Ford" (18). While neatly summarizing what the volume as a whole sets out to provide, this sentence implies something of the multiplicity of meaning the term "contact" is shown to encompass. Ford's literary contacts are both the individuals—the writers he engaged with, responded to, promoted, encouraged, and influenced—and the instances, processes, and activities in and through which contact is made, not least of these being the acts of reading and writing.

As Skinner notes, the essays are "arranged, for the most part, in chronological order" (17), but this is more than simply a matter of convenience. The grouping of the essays into three sections—"predecessors," "contemporaries and confrères," and "successors"—is logical and coherent, allowing essays with broadly comparable subjects to sit alongside and "contact" one another. Furthermore, the divisions emphasize the fact that the collection deals with three essentially different kinds of contact. Ford's responses to his predecessors can be identified in his own work but not vice versa; for his successors the reverse is the case. Between Ford and his contemporaries alone reciprocity of influence can be identified. Different kinds of contact require different kinds of exploration and, as a result, there are two subtle yet significant shifts in emphasis within the collection. The essays in the first category center mainly on Ford's criticism and other non-fictional works where he discusses the writers under consideration. Of these contributors, only Monica C. Lewis devotes sustained attention to the fiction, discussing The Good Soldier in a productive comparison between Ford and Anthony Trollope. Both novelists, Lewis argues, "fashion author-narrators who engage in a self-conscious dialogue with the reader regarding the creation, construction, and depiction of character" (43).

In the second and third sections the range of styles and approaches is more diverse. Some offer biographical insights into Ford's contacts with others: Helen Smith, for instance, discusses his stormy relationship with Edward Garnett, and Susan Lowndes Marques presents previously unpublished reminiscences about Ford and Violet Hunt by Marie Belloc Lowndes, "prolific author of 'why-dunnits'" and sister of Hilaire Belloc (95). Others focus more resolutely on Ford's writing in comparison with his contemporaries: John Coyle, for example, provides an insightful analysis of the concern with memory in Ford's Parade's End and Proust's A la recherche. Finally, attention shifts more markedly towards the writing of others in order to identify Ford's influences on them. As a critic, A. S. Byatt has written engagingly on Ford in the past and was guest speaker at the annual Ford conference in Genoa in 2007. Laura Colombino's essay, which concludes the volume, takes on the task of "analysing surprising links between Ford's practice and Byatt's aesthetics" (238).

What might appear curiously absent from this collection is any discussion of Ford's best-known associations; he collaborated with Conrad, was friends with Pound (who is pictured alongside Ford on the front cover), discovered D. H. Lawrence, and printed an extract of Joyce's Finnegans Wake in the transatlantic review. It was, however, never...