Ford Madox Ford: Further Bibliographies

Ford Madox Ford: Further Bibliographies Max Saunders King's College, London IT IS NOW well over a third of a century since David Dow Harvey compiled his pioneering bibliography of Ford.1 During that time, not only has much more scholarly work been done on Ford's life, work, and contacts, but also a substantial quantity of his own writing, and of writing about him, has been uncovered, and some of it published. Much of this material is now in the magnificent collection assembled in the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. This collection forms the basis of the present work, combined with other material discovered during the course of my research on Ford's life and work, and material listed in several brief bibliographies which have appeared since Harvey's book.2 The aim of the bibliographies published here is to provide a supplement that will bring the Harvey bibliography up to date. I have included only works, editions, or pieces of information which were omitted from his book, or have been published subsequently. Scholars will thus need to use the present bibliographies together with Harvey's to have access to the full range of Ford's writing and reception. A new and complete bibliography will be necessary in the future. The Cornell collection alone contains many variant printings and bindings of Ford's own books, for example, which Harvey does not describe. Such a volume will be properly gargantuan—too large to allow the generous degree of quotation that has made Harvey's book so valuable to Ford scholars. In presenting the material here as a supplement, I have tried—especially in the case of Ford's own writings—to provide a comparable degree of quotation, synopsis , and annotation to that given by Harvey; and thus to make readily available material from dispersed and often obscure sources. 131 ELT 43 : 2 2000 Ford's Contributions to Periodicals Three sections are published in this issue. This first section corresponds to Harvey's Section D. When a piece is readily available elsewhere , such publication details are given instead of quotation. References to Ford's books here and in the other sections are to the first English editions unless otherwise stated. Books Significantly Mentioning or Drawing upon Ford This corresponds to Harvey's Section F, but adds fictional representations of Ford, as well as some unpublished material. In general these works are readily available, so for reasons of space, abstracting and quotation have been kept minimal. Abstracts of some of the more important studies are available via ABES (Annotated Bibliography of English Studies). Dissertations on Ford Harvey excluded unpublished dissertations. As abstracts are readily available they have not been given here. The material described here—much of it unknown to most critics —clarifies and revises the picture of Ford's career presented by Harvey 's 611 pages, rather than transforming it. There are almost 100 new periodical items published in Ford's lifetime, and more than twenty published subsequently, here added to the 419 entries in Harvey's section D. All of the material is of considerable interest, whether biographical or critical. Several are substantial or vitally re-defining. One could in particular point to the following items: the essay "Nice People," revealing that Ford's autobiographic preoccupation was established as early as 1903, when he was not even thirty; the three Academy reviews of 1905; the "Critical Attitude" series of causeries in the Bystander, several short stories, especially the two war stories ("Pink Flannel" and "The Colonel's Shoes") which reveal in their quirkiness the importance to Parade's End of ideas about extreme psychological states. Indeed Ford appears as a more prolific short-story writer on the evidence here. The new essays on Conrad from 1923 and 1936 are valuable additions to the bibliographies of both writers. "The Passing of Toryism" sheds important light on Ford's conception of the figure of Christopher Tietjens. The reviews of Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Caroline Gordon show him alert to women's 132 Saunders : ford writing, and to the literature of the American South. And finally, in general his journalistic essays of the late 1920s and 1930s present a fresh demonstration of...