Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women (review)

Conradists have always had an interest—though peripheral—in Ford Madox Ford's romantic entanglements, this interest arising from Jessie Conrad's antipathy to him. In 1978, while attending a conference of the Joseph Conrad Society, United Kingdom, I met Conrad's son, Borys. When he found out that I was working on Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, he said, "Ford? Ford? When he visited my parents, you could never tell what woman he'd bring." In Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women, Joseph Wiesenfarth faces the issue of Ford and his affairs as they relate to mutual literary and artistic influences. He notes that in the considerable biographical work that has been done on Ford, scholars have detailed Ford's affairs with Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala and the use he has made of them in his writing; but they have had neither time nor space to look at the women themselves as artists or to examine how "Ford's art interacted with theirs or how their work depicted him" (7). He intends to fill in this important hole in Ford studies by spending at least as much time on the women artists and writers as on Ford.

Wiesenfarth takes his book's title from Ford's own 1913 feminist pamphlet, This Monstrous Regiment of Women, which in turn takes its title from John Knox's 1558 The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which attacked Mary Tudor and "the 'most detestable and damnable' authority of women who presume to govern men" (25). The ironies here are hardly subtle. Ford left his wife (he told her that she couldn't expect him to be faithful) for Violet Hunt; he left Hunt for the younger (and perhaps more stable) Stella Bowen. He carried on a number of affairs—most notably with Jean Rhys—while living with Bowen and their child. She left Ford when he proposed to set up a parallel arrangement with a woman in New York, and he ended his life with Janice Biala. Ford had great difficulty subjecting himself to the regiment of, or even lasting relationship to, any single woman. Indeed, it is not difficult to see Ford, in spite of the feminist principles he avowed and supported politically and artistically, as being in his personal life a serial user and discarder of women.

The book begins with a chapter on Ford's memoirs, those odd volumes containing no personal life, no reference to the women with whom he is living, no "I." Ford appears in them only as "the writer," and that, Wiesenfarth contends, is the point: for Ford is a "proper man," one of the "creative artists who carry forward the work of the world" (13). He has no other identity or personality in the memoirs. Wiesenfarth argues that Ancient Lights was written "during the first flush of well-being that suffused [Ford] when Violet Hunt became his lover"; Return to Yesterday is "a lively memorial to Janice Biala's rescuing and reinvigorating Ford after his sense of abandonment by Stella Bowen and Rene Wright"; and It Was the Nightingale "remains a tribute to Biala's unstinting support of Ford's writing" (13, 16, 18). But none of these women appear or are actually named. "Because he thinks they are secondary to his life as a writer, Ford leaves out everything pertaining to his romantic entanglements. [ . . . ] His life is his art. Everything else is something else" (28). And yet, as Wiesenfarth takes pains to demonstrate later in the book, close reading of the fiction and nonfiction of Violet Hunt and Jean Rhys and of Ford's memoirs shows him explicitly countering their attacks on his character and on his standing as an artist among the literary artists of the early twentieth century. Ford used the memoirs to counter such claims as those of Violet Hunt that he was not nearly as close to Henry James...