The Edwardian Ford Madox Ford

98 6. THE EDWARDIAN FORD MADOX FORD Ann Barr Snitow. E.SLLÊ. ?i£Ê£2L £££.É âllil -EÕ 1£ X£Õ ££ 2.Ë. Uncertainty. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984. $25.00 Examining the "tone" of an author's works is a tricky enterprise. To give substance to this ethereal quality, one might include so many formal or biographical details that the study becomes ponderous and diffuse. And the subjective nature of "tone," which depends so much on the ear of the listener, could make one despair of ever framing a sound observation. With considerable skill, Ann Snitow has circumvented these problems to turn out a well-focused, fast-paced, and enlightening book on Ford Madox Ford's narrative voice. What gives the study its clear sense of direction, as well as its main value to Ford scholarship, is its solid grounding in Edwardian culture. Snitow duly acknowledges Ford's idiosyncrasies, so often emphasized by other critics, but "this book is, above all, about Ford as an Edwardian writer." She opens it with a description of the twentiethcentury voice—"subjective, ironic, indirect, often ludicrous or comic" —that Ford was one of the first artists to cultivate . The book demonstrates Ford's development of this tone, but not overly methodically. Ford's achievements were too dependent on accidents of his intellectual and emotional life to form an orderly progression. Rather, Snitow has shown what cultural forces may have been at work on Ford at each stage of his career, both to reduce some of the excess oddness that has built up around him and to reveal his distinguishing traits more precisely. The book's five sections are arranged roughly in the chronological order of Ford's artistic phases. In Part I, Snitow examines the Pre-Raphaelites' intellectual and artistic influence on Ford, making her analysis a valuable complement to studies that dwell on the Pre-Raphaelites' shaping of Ford's emotional makeup. With references to French impressionism , naturalism, and the decadents, she locates the PreRaphaelites in a widespread movement to "rejuvenate art," and shows that they valued what other factions valued as well: "the realism of everyday and the distilled, idealized memory of former times." Ford imbibed this paradoxical taste for the real and ideal, exhibited first in his fairy tales. They have a colloquial flavor, in the Wilde, Beerbohm, and Beardsley vein, yet recall the "romantic medievalism" of the Pre-Raphae1 i tes. Such eclecticism would always give his products a unique tonal richness. Snitow also covers some fresh ground in Part II, on a well-worn subject: Ford's collaboration with Conrad. She 99 examines Ford's first novel, The Shifting o_f_ the Fire, to reveal "a bedrock of temperament, tone, and world view never seriously modified" by "Conrad's technical influence." Comparing Ford's manuscript "Seraphina" to its later form, Ford and Conrad's Romance, she points out both authors' penchant for a "static and impersonal quality," but shows that Ford's concept of life as a "gnat dance" made him more the portrayer of everyday people than the Conradian puppeteer of personified abstractions. Conrad's main gifts to Ford were his "distancing devices," which, in Ford's hands, engendered an urgent, bewildered tone. Part III, covering the rest of Ford's fiction before The Good Soldier, could have been a tedious explication of bad novels. It is instead the most illuminating section of all, where Snitow's evocation of the Edwardian disposition most helps us understand Ford's artistic choices. With a chapter each on the romances, the fantasies, and the satires, Snitow has spotlighted the three genres that "represent the imaginative loci of the Edwardian age." The romance chapter centers too much on James, perhaps, but it does demonstrate how he revised the conventions of Victorian social comedy to give his novels a disturbing modern uncertainty that Ford liked. Ford also adopted James's tension between small surface events and portentous matters underneath, but the distinctions between the trivial and important were much less clear to him than to James. Ford's confusion about decorum, which spoiled his early social novels, generated a matchless blend of absurdity and seriousness in his best work. The sense of lost...