Ford Madox Ford - Essential Novelists - Ford Madox Ford

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The Good Soldier

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Ford Madox Ford, original name Ford Hermann Hueffer, also called Ford Madox Hueffer, (born Dec. 17, 1873, Merton, Surrey, Eng.—died June 26, 1939, Deauville, Fr.), English novelist, editor, and critic, an international influence in early 20th-century literature.

The son of a German music critic, Francis Hueffer, and a grandson of Ford Madox Brown, one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Ford grew up in a cultured, artistic environment. At 18 he wrote his first novel, The Shifting of Fire (1892). His acquaintance with Joseph Conrad in 1897 led to their collaboration in The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). In 1908 he founded the English Review, publishing pieces by the foremost contemporary British authors and also by the then-unknown D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and H.M. Tomlinson. At the same time, Ford produced works of his own: a trilogy of historical novels about the ill-fated Catherine Howard and novels of contemporary life in which he experimented with technique and style. It was not until The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be his best work, that he matched an assured, controlled technique with powerful content. This work skillfully reveals the destructive effects of contradictory sexual and religious impulses upon a quartet of upper-middle-class characters.

Ford took part in World War I, in which he was gassed and shell-shocked. Afterward he changed his name from Hueffer to Ford and tried farming in Sussex and Left Bank life in Paris. While in Paris he edited the Transatlantic Review (January 1924–January 1925), which published works by James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.

In his long literary career Ford had fruitful contacts with most of the important writers of the day and is remembered for his generous encouragement of younger writers. Of more than 70 published works, those on which his reputation rests are The Good Soldier and the tetralogy Parade’s End (1950; comprising Some Do Not [1924], No More Parades [1925], A Man Could Stand Up [1926], and Last Post [1928]). During his last years, which he spent in France and the United States, Ford produced important works of criticism, reminiscences, and a major novel, The Rash Act (1933), in which he continued his lifelong exploration of questions of identity and inheritance.

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THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy — or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we were unAmerican, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a “heart”, and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer.

Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence’s broken years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctor’s orders. They said that even the short Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing.

When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave from an India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three; Mrs Ashburnham Leonora — was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and poor Florence thirty. Thus today Florence would have been thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am forty-five and Leonora forty. You will perceive, therefore, that our friendship has been a young-middle-aged affair, since we were all of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams being more particularly what in England it is the custom to call “quite good people”.

They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the Ashburnham who accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as you must also expect with this class of English people, you would never have noticed it. Mrs Ashburnham was a Powys; Florence was a Hurlbird of Stamford, Connecticut, where, as you know, they are more old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of Cranford, England, could have been. I myself am a Dowell of Philadelphia, Pa., where, it is historically true, there are more old English families than you would find in any six English counties taken together. I carry about with me, indeed — as if it were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe — the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets. These title deeds are of wampum, the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham in Surrey in company with William Penn. Florence’s people, as is so often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, where the Ashburnhams’ place is. From there, at this moment, I am actually writing.