Echoes of Conrad
J. I. M. Stewart
Return to Yesterday Ford Madox Ford (Liveright $10.00) Edwardian Occasions Samuel Hynes (Routledge £3.00) Ford Mad ox Ford: Modern Judgements edited by Richard A. Cassell (Macmillan £3.50) "On the day I was forty I sat down to show what I could do — and The Good Soldier resulted." Thus Ford, in a letter dedicating to Stella Bowen what is widely acknowledged to be his best novel. It is a revealing statement, particularly when read in its context. Previously, Ford says, he had written a great number of books (the actual count is more than thirty), but they had all been "in the nature of pastiches, of pieces of rather precious writing, or of tours de force." He had always felt that he should turn forty before attempting to extend himself; moreover, he "definitely did not want to come into competition with other writers whose claim or whose need for recognition and what recognitions bring" was greater
I have always been mad about writing — about the way writing should be done; and partly alone, partly with the companionship of Conrad, I had even at that date made exhaustive studies into how words should be handled and novels constructed.
Five years later, Ford sharpened this statement in Thus to Revisit: "I am interested only in how to write, and . • . I care nothing — but nothing in the world! — what a man writes about." This manifesto of Conscious Art must have gone down well with young people tired of H. G. Wells. Yet such `•` exhaustive studies" as Ford speaks of are indeed important to the novelist. Neither The Good Soldier nor the subsequent Tietjens tetralogy could have been written by a man who had not pursued them seriously. Nevertheless, Ford's reminiscing voice is an uneasy one, and sometimes it turns merely defiant. "I don't believe," we read in the diffusely entertaining Return to Yesterday (now available in an American reprint), "a creative artist can have any intellect; he is an observer and a recorder." Few will now accept this notion of the artist as merely a scanning device. Any theory of the novel based on it can, we must believe, present only a partial view of the impulses likely to lead to major fiction. Moreover, it is obvious that Ford's success as a novelist is very much a matter, if not of the intellect, at least of the intelligence.
He was not, indeed, sufficiently Intelligent to detect his own spots and change them — but, at that fatal forty, how' many of us are? The Good Soldier continues to exhibit an element of pastiche. Conrad — that collaborator whom Ford scarcely hastened to acknowledge as 11 miglior fabbro — echoes in it. Conrad's Chance, in particular, echoes; it had been serialised in the New Yorlz Herald when Ford was thirty-nine. Professor Hynes, whose gathering of admirable essays has much to say about Ford, sets Conrad's general influence on his junior in a clear light. The Good Soldier Is the first novel to which Ford applied all the techniques that had evolved during his long association with Conrad — the intricate organisation of time, tht manipulation of narration to express a limited narrative consciousness, the controlled notation Of impressions, the authorial aloofness — and it demonstrates beyond question that WS technical skills were of the first order.
But the discipleship goes deeper than this. Ford's narrator gropes as Conrad's Marlow gropes, and offers the salve helpless gestures before the inscrutabilitY of things. "It was Florence clearing up one of the dark places of the earth," We are startled to read in Ford. And "It is all a darkness "; and "I don't know. I know nothing. I am very tired "; and "After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't." In thus, 111 Professor Hynes's words, "devising narrative which raises uncertainty about the nature of truth and reality to the level of a structural principle," and in pursuing, (both here and with Christopher Tietjens) the theme of honour as our sole buckler against the inimical cast of the universe, Ford — gallantly enough, we may say --takes a little too much on his plate, and the result is a coarsening and even trivialising of the Conradian vision. It is on record that he had difficulty in finding a title for his novel. He might have gone to Montaigne: Que scay-je? would have been appropriate for a work which John Rodker was to describe as " the finest French novel in the English language." But Montaigne's question is that of a Pyrrhonist philosopher, whereas Ford's comes from one of a small group of idle people, puzzled over who sleeps with whom, and why. We are reminded here that Henry James was another potent influence with Ford, and it would be open to any ingenious commentator (such as those contributing to Mr Cassell's collection) to contrive some sort of comparison of The Good Soldier and The Sacred Fount. Ford's is much the more readable novel. Indeed, it is a compulsive read. But inquiry among those who recall being 'absorbed by it a number of years ago suggests that it is not particularly memorable. James's strange performance is. James is obsessed — morbidly, perhaps — by his mysterious subject; Ford is obsessed by his technique.
Obsession in the more clinical sense, however, is surely evident in the four novels constituting Parade's End. Perhaps the most interesting of the twelve essays (eleven by American writers) brought together by Mr Cassell is one by Professor Melvin Seiden devoted to the theme of persecution and paranoia in this, Ford's most ambitious work. Or, rather, to the absence of the theme. Tietjens is clobbered by pretty well everybody all the way through his history in the totally unverisimilar manner of a paranoid vision, but neither he nor his creator understands that imputing a vast conspiracy to ,society is a form of mental illness. If Professor Seiden is right in this, if "deep resentments " in Ford elude the artist and Slip into his grand design in ways unreckoned with, the reason may lie Precisely in Ford's having accustomed himself to rely too much on the contriving intelligence, and too little on rigorous intellectual analysis of the dynamics of his own imagination.
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