Ford Madox Ford Biography

BOOK REVIEWS Ford Madox Ford Biography Max Saunders. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. Volume I, The World Before the War. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. Volume II, The After- War World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xvii + 632 pp. $55.00 / xiv + 696 pp. $49.95 AT ONE POINT in the last volume of Paul Auster's celebrated New York Trilogy, the narrator, who has reluctantly signed a contract to write a biography of a long-lost friend, reflects as follows: "No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books and this battle or that bridge—none of that tells us very much. We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them the same way we did when we were young." It is the burden of the scholarly biography, we might say, to overcome this resistance to some idea of a fundamental truth. Therefore, facts are important. Details matter. Indeed, in the most vital ways, the importance of a scholarly biography lies not so much in the story as in the facts and details. The two volumes of Ford Maddox Ford: A Dual Life total just over one thousand pages (not counting over one hundred pages of notes to each volume) and weigh five pounds. Although Max Saunders tells more about Ford than even perhaps Ford himself would have wanted to know, I found this biography irresistible. For the moment, let me set aside its notion of the essential thing. Saunders's considerable sophistication about facts and the enormous authority of his details make this one of the best scholarly biographies I've ever read. Consider a minor example. On 3 April 1918, Ford—recently demobbed and living in a single-room flat—visited alone the cottage that his lover, the Australian novelist, Stella Bowen, had just purchased for the two of them. The date is incontrovertible. But what are the facts? How did he feel about the dilapidated condition of the place? What did he make for his first meal there? These are not easy questions with respect to a writer as remorselessly literary as Ford, and so, according to Saunders, his experience of the cottage is necessarily mediated through Henry James and W. H. Hudson, as well as on the basis of a visit to Corsica a few years previous and more recently the Battle of the Somme. Saunders's first note to his discussion of this moment makes reference to three letters by Ford as well as a volume of autobiographical reminis321 ELT 40:3 1997 cence, a novel, and a magazine article, along with a letter by Violet Hunt, a book by Bowen, a scholarly study, and an earlier article by Saunders himself. His second note cites two previous biographers of Ford as well as a book on fairy tales in his work. So many texts, just in order to clear away empirical space for a single day in Ford's life! Meanwhile, back in Saunders's own text, the reader can be forgiven for becoming confused about exactly where the facts for 3 April 1918 can most reliably be found, especially since the biographer reminds us that it really doesn't matter whether Ford cooked shallots (as he wrote in an autobiography fourteen years later) or chicken (as he wrote to Bowen that evening). What matters instead? "The patterning of [It Was the Nightingale] is so intricately ambiguous," Saunders writes, "that even its exaggerations don't seem to be forced into untruth." He continues thus about this whole autobiographical volume: "Its impressionistic energy in reimagining the meal, and cooking up an entire story from the new ingredients, is the proof of his having come back, renewed, as a writer of fiction." Precisely. Whether triumphantly or ingloriously, Saunders's Ford is always a writer. The last sentence gives an idea of how in these two volumes Ford's own energies...