A Second Look at Max Saunders’s Ford Madox Ford

TOM STOPPARD’S BBC television dramatization of Parade’s End may have been the impetus for the somewhat revised edition of Max Saunders’s hefty Ford Madox Ford (1996), reviewed on first publication as “irresistible” in ELT. Although it is the longest, and very likely the best life of Ford, it violates a basic canon of biographical writing. Saunders’s hundred-plus references in the text to Arthur Mizener’s biography, The Saddest Story (1972), are meanly carping and, if ad hominem rebuttals and refutations were really crucial, could have been limited to the hundreds of pages of endnotes. As early as page nine of his preface Saunders claims that the Mizener approach (and that of some others) to Ford’s reimagining his past tends to “belittle the writing, by seeing it ultimately as neurotic distortion rather than conscious elaboration and transformation of reality.” That a Mizener interpretation “doesn’t stand up to scrutiny” or is “single-minded” is repeated in various objections throughout both volumes. “What Mizener doesn’t notice” and “Mizener casts doubt” both appear on the same page. The repetitions of such cavils are peevish and wearying.

It is the ouevre rather than the author that counts, Saunders avers; yet he, too, cannot separate the author from his works. Ford worked that way. “It would not be an exaggeration to say, with Janice Biala,” Saunders writes, “that his”—Ford’s—“life was a fiction.” And he quotes Kenneth Rexroth as confirming that “Ford’s life was a novel,” and that he was “constantly writing and re-writing that novel.”

Ford Madox Hueffer—as he was until 1919—was born into a Pre-Raphaelite world. Although he embellished the story of his life in a plethora of memoirs, and exploited his life creatively in fiction, he is remembered, despite Saunders’s pages and pages analyzing every work over sixty prolific years, for two undoubted masterpieces. The Good Soldier (1915) has been called the greatest French novel in English. The assessment stands up. The absorbing, claustrophobic, sexually duplicitous narrative reads as if it were written by Vladimir Nabokov at the top of his form. The expatriate narrator is a timid, self-deluded Philadelphia Quaker, John Dowell, who discovers in his apparent intimacies with his insidious wife, Florence, and their closest friends, the rapacious Leonora and the manipulative Edward Ashburnham (the retired, seemingly noble, “good soldier” of the novel), that the quartet, ripe with deceit, is “a goodly apple that is rotten at the core.” Despite the multiple ironies in the narrative about repressed and covert sexuality, Saunders does not seem to realize that a john is a prostitute’s client, and that a dowel—a round rod—is suggestively phallic.

The Good Soldier was published early in the Great War, its title contributing to misunderstanding, and to relatively poor sales. Little of it was written after the war began, yet it deals with the chaos lurking under ordered, genteel prewar life. “Permanence? Stability? I can’t believe it’s gone,” mourns Dowell, a survivor. “I can’t believe that that long tranquil life, which was just [like] stepping a minuet, vanished.…” The novel, subtitled The Saddest Story, utilized by Mizener as the title of his biography in 1972, remains an elegy to “civilized” ritual, one of those “minute contacts,” Ford wrote in an impressionistic contemporary history, “with immense happenings.”

While Saunders fittingly calls the novel “the greatest example of Ford’s mastery of the unspeakable,” perhaps that praise belongs more usefully to Parade’s End (1924–1928). The four-novel cycle (Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and Last Post), in which parade refers to imperial pomp and circumstance fractured although not entirely foreclosed by the Great War, deals with societal circumstance as well as military convention. But for a few exceptions published abroad (such as the prototypical Le feu—Under Fire—Henri Barbusse’s 1916 novel of devastated landscapes and bloated corpses), war...