Ford Madox Ford

A Pre-Raphaelite childhood

Ford was born Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer on 17 December 1873 at Merton in Surrey. His father, Francis Hueffer, was a German-born music critic who wrote for The Times. His mother, Catherine, was the daughter of Ford Madox Brown, the Pre-Raphaelite painter.

Painters, critics and writers were family friends and regular visitors to the house, and his family expected him to write or paint. He published his first two books in 1892, at eighteen.

In 1894, when he was twenty, he eloped with Elsie Martindale. They had two daughters, and the marriage eventually collapsed, but Elsie never agreed to a divorce. Because of that, Ford could never legally remarry, and he lived with his later partners without being married to them.

Working with Joseph Conrad

Between 1898 and 1908 Ford collaborated with Joseph Conrad. They lived near each other in Kent and Sussex and wrote three books together: The Inheritors in 1901, Romance in 1903, and The Nature of a Crime, written early and published later.

The collaboration mattered more for what it taught than for the books it produced. The two men spent years arguing about how a story should be told — how to get a character's past into a scene, how to move time around, how much a narrator should be trusted. Ford applied the results in The Good Soldier, and afterwards described the method at length in his book about Conrad.

The English Review

Ford founded The English Review in 1908 and edited it for about fifteen issues. The story he told was that he started it because there was nowhere to print a Thomas Hardy poem that other editors had refused.

The first issues carried Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and W. H. Hudson — the established generation. Then Ford began printing writers nobody had heard of. He published the first stories and poems of D. H. Lawrence, a coal miner's son from Nottinghamshire, and early work by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis.

The review lost money steadily, and Ford was removed from the editorship. In fifteen issues he had printed many of the writers who became central to modern English literature. He never got his money back.

The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier was published in 1915. It is narrated by an American named John Dowell. He tells the story of his wife and of an English couple they spent nine years with at a German spa. Affairs, blackmail and two suicides run through those nine years, and Dowell says he noticed none of it at the time.

The book is built on how Dowell tells it. He gives events out of order, doubles back, contradicts himself and repeatedly says he does not understand what happened. The reader assembles the real story out of a narrator who cannot or will not tell it straight. That method — the unreliable narrator — was not new in 1915, but The Good Soldier is the book that made it central to the modern novel.

Ford said he wrote it to show what he had learned from Conrad, and considered it his best book. He called it the finest French novel in the English language.

The war

Ford enlisted in July 1915, aged forty-one, and was commissioned into the Welch Regiment. He was sent to France and was at the Somme in 1916, where he was gassed, caught in a bombardment, concussed, and lost his memory for three days.

He came back with damaged lungs and damaged nerves, and spent the next decade turning what he had seen into fiction. He had served as a junior officer at forty-one, older than the men around him but not senior enough to be kept away from the front. The war he described afterwards is mostly waiting, paperwork and noise rather than combat.

In 1919 he changed his name by deed poll to Ford Madox Ford, taking his grandfather's name. He gave a plain reason: a German surname had become unbearable in England after four years of war.

Stella Bowen and the move to Paris

After the war Ford lived with the Australian painter Stella Bowen. Their daughter Julia was born in 1920. They spent several years in the Sussex countryside, keeping pigs and growing vegetables, and in 1922 they moved to France.

By 1923 they were in Paris, where hundreds of foreign writers were then living. Ford was fifty, had edited The English Review, and was broke.

The transatlantic review

Ford founded the transatlantic review in Paris in January 1924 and ran it for twelve monthly issues before it collapsed at the end of the year. He worked out of Bill Bird's printing office at 29 quai d'Anjou, on the Île Saint-Louis, and the collector John Quinn put up the money. It was printed in France and sold in Paris, London and New York.

In one year it published James Joyce's early Work in Progress — the book that became Finnegans Wake — long extracts from Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, poems by Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings, and early stories by Ernest Hemingway. Jean Rhys published her first work in it; she and Ford had an affair, which she later put in a novel and he denied.

Ford held a weekly party, first in his own studio and then at a bal musette behind the Panthéon, and the review was largely run out of them. Hemingway worked as an unpaid sub-editor and, when Ford was away in America, guest-edited an issue in which he printed his friends and cut some of Ford's choices. In A Moveable Feast, written decades later, Hemingway drew a cruel portrait of Ford as fat, snobbish and smelly. It is the version of Ford most readers meet first, and it has done lasting damage to his reputation.

Parade's End

Between 1924 and 1928 Ford published four novels — Some Do Not..., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up—, and Last Post — that are read together as Parade's End.

They follow Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant and deliberately old-fashioned English gentleman, through a disastrous marriage, the trenches of the Western Front, and England after the war. Tietjens keeps to a code of behaviour everyone around him has abandoned, and the novels show what it costs him: his marriage, his money and his standing.

Parade's End is one of the longest accounts of the First World War written by an English novelist who fought in it, and it gives as much space to the social order the war destroyed as to the fighting itself.

Last years in America and France

From 1930 Ford lived with the painter Janice Biala, and the two of them moved between Paris, Provence and New York. He kept writing and publishing at a steady rate, produced a large book about literature called The March of Literature, and taught at Olivet College in Michigan.

He died at Deauville, on the Normandy coast, on 26 June 1939, aged sixty-five, and is buried there. He was, at the time, largely out of print.

Why Ford Madox Ford matters

Ford's reputation rests on two novels and two magazines. The Good Soldier and Parade's End are read now as major modern fiction, the first for its narrator and the second for its account of the war and the class that fought it.

The magazines are the other half. Between The English Review and the transatlantic review, Ford printed the first work of D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway, and carried Hardy, James, Conrad, Pound, Joyce, Stein, Cummings and Rhys. He paid for both magazines with money he did not have, and lost it both times.