War Prose E-Book

Ford Madox Ford

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Ford Madox Ford's post-war masterpiece, Parade's End, is recognised as one of the great British novels about the First World War. This selection from his other extensive writings about the war, published and unpublished, sheds light on the tetralogy. It includes reminiscences, an unfinished novel, stories and excerpts from letters. Ford was in his forties when he enlisted: this made him one of the few writers of his maturity to fight on the Western Front. His experience of combat was limited, but he was in the Battle of the Somme, was often under bombardment, and suffered from shell-shock. His largely psychological response to the war anticipates the recent renewal of interest in trauma and shell-shock (as, for example, in Pat Barker's Ghost Road trilogy). This book provides important testimony by one of the best writers of his generation.

Leseprobe

FORD MADOX FORD

War Prose

EDITED BY MAX SAUNDERS

For there is no new thing under the sun,

Only this uncomely man with a smoking gun

In the gloom…

What the devil will he gain by it?

Digging a hole in the mud and standing all day in the rain by it

Waiting his doom,

The sharp blow, the swift outpouring of the blood,

Till the trench of grey mud

Is turned to a brown purple drain by it.

[…]

And what in the world did they bear it for?

I don’t know.

And what in the world did they dare it for?

Perhaps that is not for the likes of me to understand.

[from ‘In October 1914’, later titled ‘Antwerp’]

Man is to mankind a wolf – homo homini lupus – largely because the means of communication between man and man are very limited. I daresay that if words direct enough could have been found, the fiend who sanctioned the use of poisonous gases in the present war could have been so touched to the heart that he would never have signed that order, calamitous, since it marks a definite retrogression in civilisation such as had not yet happened in the Christian era. Beauty is a very valuable thing; perhaps it is the most valuable thing in life; but the power to express emotion so that it shall communicate itself intact and exactly is almost more valuable.

[‘From China to Peru’ (on Pound’s Cathay), Outlook, 35 (19 June 1915), pp. 800–1]

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

INTRODUCTION

A Note on the Texts

Acknowledgements

I REMINISCENCES

An Englishman Looks at the World

‘Pon… ti… pri… ith’

Arms and the Mind/War and the Mind

A Day of Battle

I: Arms and the Mind

War and the Mind

II. The Enemy

Trois Jours de Permission

Epilogue

From I Revisit the Riviera

Preparedness

II FICTION

True Love & a GCM

Six Short Stories: The Scaremonger

‘Fun! – It’s Heaven’

Pink Flannel

The Colonel’s Shoes

Enigma

The Miracle

III PREFACES

Preface to Their Lives, by Violet Hunt

The Trail of the Barbarians

From ‘A Note by way of Preface’ to All Else is Folly by Peregrine Acland

The Three Dedicatory Letters to Parade’s End

IV MISCELLANY

Early Responses to the War

Joining Up

Shell Shock

Western Front

Reading Behind the Lines

Illness and Regeneration

Wartime England

Lecturing to the Army

Immediate Effects on the Mind and on Literature

After-Effects on the Mind, Literature and Society

Memorialising the War

About the Author

Also By Ford Madox Ford From Carcanet

Copyright

Introduction

Ford Madox Ford is now recognised not just as a central modernist author, but as one of the major writers about the First World War. His best-known treatment of war, the sequence of four novels known collectively as Parade’s End, has been regularly in print since 1948, when perhaps it felt newly relevant after a second world war. It has been achieving broad recognition as the best English novel about the First World War. William Carlos Williams wrote that the four novels ‘constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time’. Malcolm Bradbury describes Parade’s End as ‘the most important and complex British novel to deal with the overwhelming subject of the Great War’. He judges it ‘the greatest modern war novel from a British writer’; Samuel Hynes calls it ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’.1

It was unusual for a man of forty-two to serve in the line. Though Ford’s experience of combat was limited – he was at the Front for about two months – he took part in the Battle of the Somme, and was in the Ypres Salient. He was frequently under bombardment, and suffered from concussion, shell-shock and lung damage. His army experience was varied; and it proved to be the decisive episode in his life.

The shadow of the First World War fell on almost everything Ford wrote after the 4th of August 1914. When it broke out, he was finishing his Edwardian masterpiece, The Good Soldier. The date of the 4th August sounds through that novel like the death-knell of the era. The story ends in private devastations – madness, enervation and death – which have been read as metaphors of the public cataclysm. Ford rightly saw the war as the defining experience of technological modernity. ‘The world before the war is one thing and must be written about in one manner,’ he wrote: ‘the after-warworld is quite another and calls for quite different treatment.’2

Ford was at Mary Borden Turner’s literary country-house party near Berwick-upon-Tweed when war was declared. Other guests included Wyndham Lewis and E. M. Forster. Ford was writing weekly ‘Literary Portraits’ at the time, and registered his shock at the conflict immediately. His wartime journalism was extraordinarily far-sighted. (Some excerpts are included here.) Within a few days of the outbreak, he was pondering the effects on his mind, on national psychologies, on literature and society. This moving between questions of war and questions of psychology and aesthetics is, as we shall see, deeply characteristic of all Ford’s war writings. Even before he saw active service, he realised that the war presented a new kind of challenge to literature, and to his own form of literary impressionism in particular.

Ford’s response to the war was as much European and transatlantic as it was English or British. His allegiances were cosmopolitan and complex. He was the son of a German father and English mother. He had tried to acquire German citizenship in 1912 (in order to get divorced). Like his father, Francis Hueffer, and his English grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, he had a deep love of France, and was appalled by the thought of its devastation. His multiple sympathies are evident in many of the pieces here, which remind us that Parade’s End too is an international work, adopting the techniques of European and American modernism to render France and Germany as well as Britain.

In his journalism Ford took a controversial stand against the prevailing rhetorical hysteria, urging that the war should be fought in chivalric mode: against a ‘gallant enemy’. This was brave for someone with a German surname. (He remained ‘Ford Madox Hueffer’ throughout the war, only changing his last name around the time of the Versailles peace treaty.) His anti-propaganda stance may have suggested that he would be a useful propagandist. Soon afterwards, he was recruited by his friend Charles Masterman, the Liberal Cabinet Minister put in charge of British propaganda. The ‘Literary Portraits’ turned into sketches of German and French culture, and these were revised into two large propaganda books in 1915, When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture, and Between St Denis and St George: A Sketch of ThreeCivilisations. His propaganda was of an unusually cultural and humane kind. He had a horror of the rhetoric denouncing the enemy as ‘mad dog’, ‘mercenary’, ‘brute’, ‘tyrant’. He claimed that his poem ‘On Heaven’ was circulated by the Ministry of Information to cheer up the troops. Some of the pieces here should perhaps be read in a similar spirit. Yet he soon found himself affected by the tide of popular patriotic aggression. In a fascinating exploration of the origins of hatred (which he characteristically relates to aesthetics and to sexual conflict), he turns his formidable psychological acumen on himself, revealing himself as disturbed to find that after only a few months of war he too had begun to wish Germans dead.

There is thus a large body of work written between August 1914 and Ford’s joining the army. Most of it has been excluded here, partly for reasons of space, but also to give a more coherent concentration on the effects and after-effects of first-hand experience of military life and military conflict. But I have included the passage from Between St Denis and St George about his state of mind as war was declared; two propagandistic stories that give a sense of the rumours and sentiments that were circulating; and excerpts from his ‘Literary Portraits’ that were too personal to be incorporated into the propaganda books.

Ford enlisted in the summer of 1915, and got his commission as a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment (Special Reserve). He probably took an introductory course at the Chelsea Barracks, before joining his battalion for training first at Tenby, then Cardiff Castle. He had to wait until 13 July 1916 before he left Cardiff for France. The journey is described here in the propaganda article, ‘Pon… ti… pri… ith’.

At Rouen Ford was attached to the 9th Battalion, and sent to the Somme, where the fiercest battle in British military history had been raging since 1 July. He wanted experience of the front line, but his CO thought he was too old, and stationed him with the battalion transport, just behind the front line near Albert. He described the battle in a letter to Lucy Masterman on 28 July:

We are right up in the middle of the strafe, but only with the 1st line transport. We get shelled two or three times a day, otherwise it is fairly dull – indeed, being shelled is fairly dull, after the first once or twice. Otherwise it is all very interesting – filling in patches of one’s knowledge […] The noise of the bombardment is continuous – so continuous that one gets used to it, as one gets used to the noise in a train and the ear picks out the singing of the innumerable larks…3

Either that day or the next he was ‘blown into the air by something’ – a high explosive shell – and landed on his face, with concussion and mouth injuries. ‘I had completely lost my memory,’ he said, so that ‘three weeks of my life are completely dead to me’. He even forgot his own name for thirty-six hours. When the battalion went into rest camp he was sent to a casualty clearing station at Corbie for treatment. He was suffering from what was becoming known as ‘shell shock’. His sense of patches of knowledge being blasted away, and the terrors and hallucinations that followed, were to become some of his most compelling subjects.

By 23 August he had rejoined the 9th battalion, which was now stationed in the Ypres Salient near Kemmel Hill. He found it ‘quiet here at its most violent compared with the Somme’ – even during the ‘strafe that the artillery got up for George V’, whom he said he’d seen strolling about on a royal visit to the Front. But Ford was still very tense and harassed. He didn’t get on with his Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Cooke, an ex-Eastbourne Town Councillor who doubted Ford’s power as a leader of men. (He thought this unfair, telling Lucy Masterman that the First Line Transport was ‘composed mostly of mules’.) He tried using the Mastermans’ influence to get transferred to a staff job, where he realised his abilities would be put to better use. But the move was blocked, not only by Cooke, who wanted Ford out of the army, but also by MI6, on the grounds that his German ancestry made him unsuitable for intelligence work.4

Ford was sent back to the first line transport, where he found the war exhilarating as well as nerve-wracking: ‘it is very hot here & things are enormously exciting & the firing all day keeps me a little too much on the jump to write composedly,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘However it is jolly to have been in the two greatest strafes of history – & I am perfectly well & in good spirits, except for money worries wh. are breaking me up a good deal – & for the time, perfectly safe.’5

He later said that it was while returning to the Front that he realised he was the only novelist of his age to be in the fighting. This made it all the more necessary that he should bear witness; and he recalled: ‘I began to take a literary view of the war from that time’. This is evident in three extraordinary letters he sent to Conrad in September 1916, rendering his impressions of the war – particularly ‘notes upon sound’.

The first of the letters describes suddenly finding himself under a table during an artillery barrage:

Well I was under the table & frightened out of my life – so indeed was the other man with me. There was shelling just overhead – apparently thousands of shells bursting for miles around & overhead. I was convinced that it was up with the XIX Divn. because the Huns had got note of a new & absolutely devilish shell or gun.

It was of course thunder. It completely extinguished the sound of the heavy art[iller]y, & even the how[itzer] about 50 yds. away was inaudible during the actual peals & sounded like stage thunder in the intervals.6

It is these paradoxes of subliminal consciousness and surprised perception that fascinate him. He later gave an example of the converse situation. He heard three of the younger officers discussing who was ‘the coolest person on a certain night in Jy. 16 when we were suddenly shelled behind Bécourt Wood’. They agreed that ‘old Hoof was by a long chalk & that old Hoof ought to have had the MC only the CO didn’t like him’; one of them added: ‘But then, one expected it of Hoof!’ The rest of the letter is quintessential Ford: ironising the very egotism it risks; attending to the art of the novelist; and unobtrusively shaping a vignette of lethal comedy:

I remember the occasion quite well: I was so busy looking after an officer who had got very drunk & was trying to expose himself, that I never really noticed the shelling at all except that I was covered with tins of sardines & things that had been put out for our dinner.

That was really the worst of the Front from the novelist’s point of view. One was always so busy with one’s immediate job that one had no time to notice one’s sensations or anything else that went on round one. H. G. [Wells] wd. no doubt do it very much better!7

The novelist of perplexity and displaced sensation was particularly suited to presenting this psychology of battle, in which the obtuseness and subliminal noticings of the protagonist become an index to the mental strain he is under. He told Conrad: ‘I have been for six weeks – with the exception of only 24 hours – continuously within reach of German missiles &, altho’ one gets absolutely to ignore them, consciously, I imagine that subconsciously one is suffering.’ The second letter describes his attempt to buy flypapers in a shop while a shell lands nearby, and the Tommies joke as if the noise was made by the flies. ‘No interruption, emotion, vexed at getting no flypapers,’ writes Ford: ‘Subconscious emotion, “thank God the damn thing’s burst”.’

Despite all this, he could say with strangely detached irony: ‘It is curious – but, in the evenings here, I always feel myself happier that I have ever felt in my life.’ It is indeed curious that he can say this in a letter beginning ‘I wrote these rather hurried notes yesterday because we were being shelled to hell & I did not expect to get thro’ the night.’ It was, as often, a sense of death’s imminence that made him want to go on writing: a paradox he addresses in the third letter to his former collaborator:

I wonder if it is just vanity that in these cataclysmic moments makes one desire to record. I hope it is, rather, the annalist’s wish to help the historian – or, in a humble sort of way, my desire to help you, cher maître! – if you ever wanted to do anything in ‘this line’. Of course you wd. not ever want to do anything in this line – but a pocketful of coins in a foreign country may sometimes come in handy. You might want to put a phrase into the mouth of someone in Bangkok who had been, say, to Bécourt. There you wd. be! And I, to that extent, shd. once more have collaborated.8

Violet Hunt, with whom Ford had been living before the war, sent him the proofs of her latest novel, Their Lives. He wrote the brief preface (included here), signed with a bitter, ironic anonymity ‘Miles Ignotus’ (‘The Unknown Soldier’), in which he described reading them on a hillside watching the Germans shelling Belgian civilians in Poperinghe. It seemed an example of senseless Prussian cruelty, and is described as such in the passage in No More Parades where the protagonist Christopher Tietjens recalls having watched the same sight. There, as in Ford’s other description of the scene – in No Enemy – he records a disturbing conflict between a kind of aesthetic pleasure in the spectacle, and the thought of the human suffering it represented.9 There was also a feeling of joy at the sight of allied shells bursting over the German trenches. This volatile emotional mix of awe, pity, excitement and outrage recurs in his war prose, particularly in the most significant piece he wrote while on the Western Front: the essay ‘A Day of Battle’, dated 15 September 1916, and also signed ‘Miles Ignotus’.

Always an intense reader, Ford also managed to spend some of ‘the eternal waiting that is War’ reading. He reread the authors who had meant most to him: Flaubert, Turgenev, Maupassant, Anatole France, and his friends Henry James, W.H. Hudson, Conrad and Stephen Crane. He never forgot the moment of disorientation produced by The Red Badge of Courage: ‘having to put the book down and go out of my tent at dawn,’ he remembered, ‘I could not understand why the men I saw about were in khaki’ rather than the blue or grey of the American Civil War; ‘the impression was so strong that its visualization of war completely superimposed itself for long hours over the concrete objects of the war I was in’. Rereading James gave him the same disorientating feeling of double vision.10 In the companion piece to ‘A Day of Battle’, ‘The Enemy’, he gives another instance of this double vision, and how important it was to his activity as a novelist. He recounts a near-death experience, when shot at by a sniper. He imagines the German, then imagines the German looking at him through his gun-sight.

He spent a weekend in Paris for the publication of a translation of his second ‘propaganda’ book, Entre Saint Denis et Saint Georges, and was thanked by the Minister of Instruction. The leave was scarcely less stressful than the line. Ford worked so hard revising the translation that he collapsed, and was told he was ‘suffering from specific shell-shock & ought to go to hospital’. But he wouldn’t go. He was back in the Salient by 13 September. None of this stopped him writing about the episode, in the article ‘Trois Jours de Permission’.11

Soon after this he was sent back to the 3rd Battalion’s home base in North Wales, at Kinmel Park, near Rhyl. Ford found his new posting a new waste of his abilities, and – without overseas pay – a strain on his financial resources.

When the War Office did eventually order him back to France at the end of November, he tried without success to avoid being re-attached to Lieutenant-Colonel Cooke’s 9th Welch. He was given ‘various polyglot jobs’ such as ‘writing proclamations in French about thefts of rations issued to H. B. M.’s forces & mounting guards over German sick’. But he fell ill himself in December. ‘As for me, – c’est fini de moi, I believe, at least as far as fighting is concerned,’ he told Conrad: ‘my lungs are all charred up and gone’. The Medical Board wanted to send him home, but he protested that he ‘didn’t in the least want to see Blighty ever again’.12

Ford said his respiratory illness was due to ‘a slight touch of gas I got in the summer & partly to sheer weather’.13 He has been accused of lying about being gassed; not least because he elaborated the story later, telling a marvellous tale about how, while on leave in a Paris hotel, he opened his portmanteau and inadvertently released gas trapped there since he had begun packing during an attack. But there may be some truth in this. Clothes do give off yesterday’s fumes, and someone with breathing difficulties would have been sensitive to even a hint of the lethal chemicals. However, the fictionalised version given in one of the pieces here, ‘True Love and a GCM [General Court Martial]’, suggests another possibility. The protagonist, Gabriel Morton, is so furious after being accused of cowardice by his CO that he walks through a low gas-cloud in a shelled building. He is only subliminally aware that it is gas, and his repression of the fact makes the gesture virtually suicidal.

Ford was certainly ill enough for the army to send him to No. II Red Cross Hospital at Rouen, whatever the cause. As he knew, the damage wasn’t only physical. ‘I wasn’t so much wounded as blown up by a 4.2 and shaken into a nervous breakdown,’ he told his daughter Katharine, adding that it had made him ‘unbearable to myself & my kind. However, I am better now & may go up the line at any moment – tho’ I shd. prefer to remain out of it for a bit […]’. Two days later the Medical Board said he was too unwell to return to the Front before the summer: ‘the gas of the Huns has pretty well done for my lungs – wh. make a noise like a machine gun,’ he told her:

Of course it is rather awful out here – for me at least. Of the 14 off[ice]rs who came out with me in July I am the only one left here – & I am pretty well a shattered wreck – tho’ they say my lungs will get better in time. And I sit in the hut here wh. is full of Welsh officers all going up – and all my best friends – and think that very likely not one of them will be alive in a fortnight. I tell you, my dear, it is rather awful.14

Survivor’s guilt only exacerbated his despair. ‘It wd. be really very preferable to be dead,’ he wrote to his mother: ‘but one isn’t dead – so that is all there is to it.’15

When he had a relapse on Christmas Eve, the terror he had experienced in the Casualty Clearing Station returned:

all night I lie awake & perceive the ward full of Huns of forbidding aspect – except when they give me a sleeping draft.

I am in short rather ill still & sometimes doubt my own sanity – indeed, quite frequently I do. I suppose that, really, the Somme was a pretty severe ordeal, though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. Now, however, I find myself suddenly waking up in a hell of a funk – & going on being in a hell of a funk till morning. And that is pretty well the condition of a number of men here. I wonder what the effect of it will be on us all, after the war – & on national life and the like.16

It was the kind of experience he needed to write about many times: in several of the pieces here; in a letter to Conrad; and in Parade’s End. When he was well enough, he was sent to Lady Michelham’s convalescent hospital at Menton. The opulence of the Riviera was a surreal contrast to the war, and he wrote about his time there too, in the essay ‘I Revisit the Riviera’. In February he left Menton, and took a train to the frozen, snow-covered north. At Rouen he was assigned to a Canadian casual battalion for three weeks, then put in charge of a hospital tent of German prisoners at Abbeville. On the evidence of Parade’s End he found it ‘detestable to him to be in control of the person of another human being – as detestable as it would have been to be himself a prisoner … that thing that he dreaded most in the world’.17

He was back on leave in London in the spring of 1917. The Medical Board would not pass Ford as fit to return to France, so he was given light duty commanding a company of the 23rd King’s Liverpool Regiment, stationed at Kinmel Park. He got on well with his new Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel G.R. Powell, whose commendation in Ford’s service record must have gone a long way towards redeeming him from Cooke’s criticisms:

Has shown marked aptitude for grasping any intricate subject and possesses great powers of organization – a lecturer of the first water on several military subjects – conducted the duties of housing officer to the unit (average strength 2800) with great ability.18

He was posted to a training command at Redcar, on the Yorkshire coast, where he spent the rest of the war. Despite the frustrations of army life, and the increasingly fraught meetings with Violet Hunt, the life suited him. He never minded frugal living and hard work. In the spring of 1918 he was attached to the Staff, and told Katharine proudly that he would go ‘all over the N[orth]. of England inspecting training & lecturing’:

It is in many ways lucky for me as I was passed fit & should have gone out to my Bn. again just the day after I got the order to join the Staff – & my Bn. has been pretty well wiped out since then, so I suppose I shd. have gone west with it.19

He was given the temporary rank of brevet major (meaning extra status without extra pay), and was even offered ‘an after the war post as Educational Advisor to the Northern Command, permanently’, with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. (He considered it, but thought it would stop him writing.) He lectured on the Ross rifle, on ‘the Causes of the War or on any other department of the rag-bag of knowledge that we had to inflict on the unfortunates committed to our charge’. His other topics included ‘Censorship’, ‘War Aims’, ‘Attacks on Strong Points’, ‘Salvage’, ‘Military Law’, ‘Harmonising Rifle Fire’, ‘Cyphers’, ‘Geography and Strategy’, ‘Hospitals’, and – of course – ‘French Civilisation’ – ‘So I must be some sort of Encyclopaedia,’ he said. His fictional alter-ego in Parade’s End, Christopher Tietjens, loses his encyclopaedic memory when shell-shocked. Clearly Ford was beginning to feel himself again.

He had an ‘exhausting and worrying time’ after he was given the task of defending someone in a Court Martial (an experience which would presumably have gone into ‘True Love & a GCM’ had Ford completed it): ‘the wretched man […] began to go mad last Sunday,’ he wrote, ‘was certified yesterday, and the Court-martial washed out. This morning he rushed into my tent, having escaped from his escort: tried to strangle his father, bit me, and has just been carried off to an asylum’. He added: ‘If there is anything of that sort going I am generally in it!’

In Yorkshire he again found himself in conflict with his new Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Pope, who appears to have been a less conscious satirist than his namesake:

My rows with the CO are only funny – not worrying, because he is desperately afraid of me and only speaks to me as it were with his cap in his hand. The last one arose after he had said to me at a dance: ‘Well, H., I suppose now peace is here you are the great man & I am only a worm at your feet.’ And I cordially agreed. The dance, however, lasted to 0400 hours[.]20

Ford was expecting to be sent back to France with a large draft of troops on 7 November 1918. But he was told he was ‘indispensable to the Bn’. Four days later the Armistice was declared. He remained in the army until 7 January 1919, when he took a single room ‘studio’ in a small London house in the next street to Violet Hunt’s in Kensington. They had scandalised London society in 1912 by claiming, without proving, that Ford had divorced his wife Elsie Hueffer in Germany, and that they had married. He now tried to protect Hunt’s reputation by appearing at her parties. To abandon her would have cast more doubt on their truthfulness and their marriage. Yet their relationship had been collapsing before he joined the Army. In the spring of 1919 he moved to a cottage in Sussex, ‘Red Ford’, and was joined by his new love, the Australian painter Stella Bowen.

The aim of the present volume is to assemble most of Ford’s unpublished or uncollected prose explicitly about his experience of the war and its after-effects, to produce a new volume of unfamiliar work, but also to form a companion volume to his other important writings about the war, namely: Parade’s End; the fictionalised memoir No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction and the autobiography It Was the Nightingale (which both deserve to be republished in full); his published correspondence;21 and his war poetry (the best of which can be found in the Selected Poems in Carcanet’s Millennium Ford series).

The prose is ordered into four sections: Reminiscences, Fiction, Prefaces, and a Miscellany. Such discriminations by genre are not intended as absolute – indeed, the distinction between autobiography, fiction and criticism is rarely an easy or useful one in Ford’s writing, and the parallels to be found here often bring out how the fiction draws upon autobiography, how the reminiscences are fictionalised, and how Ford’s critical intelligence is constantly at work in all genres. The ‘Reminiscences’ are eight pieces ranging from the declaration of war to anticipations of the next war.

The section of ‘Fiction’ contains the entire novel fragment ‘True Love & a GCM’ – arguably the centrepiece of the volume – and six complete short stories. ‘True Love & a GCM’ is the first novel Ford began after the war. Though unfinished, it possesses a form of imaginative completeness; and it has an arresting quality that the other unpublished novel of the period (‘Mr Croyd’, alias ‘That Same Poor Man’) often lacks, despite being finished – partly because in ‘True Love’ Ford is concerned with rendering states of mind rather than getting involved in elaborate plotting. Actually the ‘True Love’ and the court martial of the title hardly figure at all in the typescript. (The fact that the court martial Ford was to act in was cancelled may have been one obstacle to completing the novel.) Instead, the piece reads as a novella about how the disturbing experience of war affects the protagonist’s mental processes, and how this induces a reverie of reappraising his past, and in particular his relationship with his father, thoughts about sexuality and about literature. These concerns recur in the short stories too. The first explores the fear of German invasion. The other five are all examples of a popular wartime genre, turning on paranormal or uncanny experiences.

Three of the ‘Prefaces’ are to other people’s books: two written in war-time, the other, written just after Ford had completed Parade’s End, offering a substantial discussion of the issues confronting a war-novelist. These are placed alongside the prefaces he wrote to three of the volumes of that tetralogy. Editions of Parade’s End have indefensibly excluded Ford’s dedicatory letters for half a century. But they are obviously significant documents. Their omission made it easier for Graham Greene to suppress the final volume, Last Post, from the Bodley Head edition in 1963, claiming that Ford had ‘not intended to write’ it; yet the dedicatory letter to No More Parades shows that from an early stage he intended to present Tietjens in the ‘process of being re-constructed’.

The Miscellany consists of short works and excerpts covering the entire range of Ford’s war experiences. They are drawn from many published books and articles, as well as unpublished essays and letters. Some excerpts of the complete but unpublished novel, ‘That Same Poor Man’, appear here for the first time.

The war changed Ford’s life utterly, as it did the lives of most Europeans. It affected almost everything he wrote. It is thus hard to draw a line between his ‘war prose’ and other writings. Confining this volume to writing directly about the Western Front would misrepresent the breadth and complexity of his responses to the war. He wrote in and across many genres: novels, stories, reminiscences, poems, propaganda, letters.

Curiously, what he didn’t write was the kind of first-person testimony that became one of the central First World War genres: something comparable to Goodbye to All That, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Undertones of War. Indeed, the war falls silently between his two major autobiographical books, Return to Yesterday and It Was the Nightingale. The first ends with the outbreak of war; the second begins with Ford’s demobilisation. He did write the fascinating book of war reminiscences, No Enemy, but it is strangely oblique and fictionalised. In a sense, the present volume attempts to sketch what the unwritten book of Ford’s war memoirs might have covered.

He was above all a novelist, of course, and it is in Parade’s End that he treats his war experiences definitively. As in that work, in the pieces published here he is preoccupied with the cultural, historical, moral, and literary after-effects of the war.

Even while the war was still being fought, Ford was creating an interpretation of the experience with which the twentieth century finally caught up, in novels such as Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. Ford’s war, that is, is primarily psychological: presented in terms of its effects on the mind, on habits of perception; its terrors, anxieties, traumas; its disturbances of memory, identity, and language. He used two forms of the collective title for the pair of essays ‘A Day of Battle’ and ‘The Enemy’: first ‘Arms and the Mind’, then, ‘War and the Mind’. The first has Virgilian echoes, and suggests the start of an epic project (realised in Parade’s End) to record not the founding of a civilisation, but its foundering. Both versions indicate that this epic is to be a psychological one. In a sense, ‘War and the Mind’ is the project of all Ford’s writing about the war.

His novel The MarsdenCase asserts the universality of the psychological damage: ‘the eyes, the ears, the brain and the fibres of every soul today adult have been profoundly seared by those dreadful wickednesses of embattled humanity’.22 Ford felt it took him until 1923 to recover, when he told his old friend H. G. Wells: ‘I’ve got over the nerve tangle of the war and feel able at last really to write again – which I never thought I should do.’23 That was when he was beginning Parade’s End. Much of the work included here was written earlier, while he was still himself in the process of reconstruction. Its occasional unsurenesses, the sense of a damaged personality, make it revealing about precisely the damage caused by the war.

Ford realised with astounding prescience that the mind’s repression of war-suffering made it difficult to exorcise the suffering, and by the same token difficult to convey in prose. About a month after the outbreak he found himself ‘absolutely and helplessly unable – to write a poem about the present war’, and attributed it to ‘the hazy remoteness of the war-grounds; the impossibility of visualising anything, because of a total incapacity to believe any single thing that I read in the daily papers’.24 But being in the war-grounds didn’t make the experience much easier to visualise in words. ‘A Day of Battle’, which is a key document in the genesis of Parade’s End, is a deeply paradoxical piece, vividly recreating the predicament of someone who feels he can no longer create vivid representations. It is all the more effective for being one of the few such prose testimonies actually written at the Front. As in his letters, he is concerned with what the mind doesn’t perceive – or at least not quite consciously. This comes across in a curious fantasy of protection and exposure that recurs in several of his war works.

I used to think that being out in France would be like being in a magic ring that would cut me off from all private troubles: but nothing is further from the truth. I have gone down to the front line at night, worried, worried, worried beyond belief about happenings at home in a Blighty that I did not much expect to see again – so worried that all sense of personal danger disappeared and I forgot to duck when shells went close overhead.25

Three central aspects of Ford’s psychology of war emerge here. First, that war mobilises powerful fantasies of escape: from domestic anxiety, from life altogether, and from war itself. Second, that the doubling of civilian and military suffering recreates the situation crucial to Fordian impressionism, of being in one place with one’s mind somewhere quite other: ‘he is indeed, then, homo duplex: a poor fellow whose body is tied in one place, but whose mind and personality brood eternally over another distant locality’. Hence the ‘double pictures’ discussed in ‘True Love and a GCM’. Thirdly, as he puts it in Parade’s End’s dedicatory letters, that this ‘never-ending sense of worry’ produced ‘mental distresses’ that were as significant as the ‘physical horrors’: ‘The heavy strain of the trenches came from the waiting for long periods of inaction, in great – in mortal – danger every minute of the day and night.’26 It is not that he ignored the physical horrors. The point is that they were so extreme, so unprecedented, that they seemed beyond the real. One of the most disturbing, apocalyptic passages comes in the piece entitled ‘Epilogue’:

We don’t know how many men have been killed ……. One is always too close or too remote. On the Somme in July 1916, or under Vimy Ridge in February 1917 one saw […] such an infinite number of dead – and frequently mouldering – Huns […] when you see the dead lie in heaps, in thousands, half buried, intact, reposeful as if they had fallen asleep, contorted as if they were still in agony, the heaps of men following the lines of hillocks, of shell holes, like so much rubbish spread before an incinerator in the quarter of a town where refuse is disposed of ….. Well, you think of Armageddon, and on any hill of that Line, as I have seen it, from the Somme up to the Belgian Coast where you see, and can feel, the operations of counted millions of men moving million against million – you think again of Armageddon.27

He would refer to the war as a ‘crack across the table of History’, and later described its psychological aftermath in equally apocalyptic terms: ‘it had been revealed to you that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos’.28 He had been haunted by that uncanny vision of the dead since the Somme, and much of his war prose is impelled by the need to exorcise it; and by another vision – of what, in ‘A Day of Battle’, he calls ‘most amazing fact of history’: the presence of those ‘millions of men moving million against million’ in the lines along the entire Western Front. The immense scale of the war makes it seem equally unreal.

He was already beginning to think through the central problems of Parade’s End: how is it possible to see such a vast panorama as a world war? From what vantage point can the novelist gain a perspective? What hill can he stand up on? How can he avoid being ‘always too close or too remote’? And how can he make his readers see experiences characterised by a displacement of the perceiving mind from those things so fundamental to the conventional novel: time, place and action?

Ford’s impressionism was already well-developed before the war. Its fragmentation of time and plot, and foregrounding of haunting visual scenes, should have been well-suited to rendering war’s traumas and hyper-reality. The war could only be expressed in terms of vivid impressions – it didn’t make any other kind of sense – narrative, moral, philosophical, historical. But dwelling on those memories is too disturbing: his mind wants him to forget them, to suppress them. The nerve specialist tells the young hero of ‘Mr Croyd’: ‘keep out of the way of what you call vivid words’. Human kind could not bear very much war reality. He found himself in a double-bind.

Which is why Ford approaches crucial memories from several angles in the pieces here. These reapproaches have been left uncut, because the overlappings (both with other material in this volume, and with other books – Parade’s End, No Enemy, Provence, and others indicated in the prefaces and notes) give a valuable insight into the creative processes of Ford’s memory and writing, and into the intractability of the material. It was partly because he was bravely treating difficult topics – fear, madness, humiliation, guilt, rage – that he needed to return to them.

Ford’s writing from 1916 onwards – especially his letters to Conrad from the war, ‘True Love & a G.C.M.’, ‘Mr Croyd’, No Enemy (on being a ‘creature of dreads’), and Parade’s End – bears the impress of that blind terror he later characterised as his ‘Corbiephobia’: above all, terror of losing control of his mind. It weighed on his mind to the end of his life.

There can have been hardly an Englishman who ever expected to engage in actual warfare, so that when he did so his entire moral balance called for readjustments; his entire view of life, if he had one, was smashed to fragments; and, if he survived the war, his reaction against all its circumstances resulted in a very terrible mental fatigue from which he has not yet recovered […] The results in the case of myself, with literary training enough in all conscience, were such that for several years after the armistice I was unable to write a word that had not about it at least, let us say, a touch of queerness.29

That sense of disturbance to one’s sanity, shaken by war’s mad unreality, produces a specific effect in several of the works here; a disturbance of identity, in which the familiar boundaries dissolve. Sometimes it is the boundary between the conscious and unconscious minds, as in ‘Pink Flannel’ and ‘The Miracle’. More uncannily, it is sometimes between one person and another; as in ‘The Colonel’s Shoes’, another eerie story of psychological strain, concerning a seemingly paranormal experience in which a young lieutenant momentarily assumes his uncle’s identity.30 Or, more uncannily still, this slippage of identities can occur between the living and the dead, as in ‘Fun! – It’s Heaven’; or ‘True Love …’, at the point when Gabriel Morton ‘did not know if it was he or his father’ who has a vision.

One could say these disturbances anticipate the episode of Tietjens’ shell-shock in Parade’s End, but they should also be seen as a development of Ford’s concept of the ‘sympathetic identification’ which enables the novelist (think of Dowell in The Good Soldier, saying he loves Ashburnham ‘because he was just myself’).31 They also suggest the impact of Ford’s war experience on the notion of exchanged and mistaken identity which governs his late novels, especially The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh.

These things aren’t unprecedented in Ford’s pre-war writing, nor indeed in the paranormal fantasies or science fiction of other Edwardian writers. Where they do occur, though – in A Call, say, or in Ladies Whose Bright Eyes and The Good Soldier – the intimations of insanity are precipitated by sexuality. (Freud, after all, analysed the uncanny in terms of the return of the repressed.) Ford’s war fiction makes this connexion more explicit, by using a trope central to the history of war literature – that of the ‘sex war’. ‘True Love and a GCM’: that juxtaposition is crucial. The marital and the martial: sex and violence. In the propaganda story ‘Fun! – It’s Heaven’, the innocent love between the dead soldier and his fiancée is supposed to redeem his sacrifice. (That it grants her a vision of him in Heaven is a denial of the finality of his death.) In ‘Pink Flannel’ the instinct of self-preservation causes the soldier to protect his adulterous liaison with Mrs Wilkinson. In ‘The Miracle’, the marital conversation frames the memory of war. In these stories, as in ‘Epilogue’, intimacy between men and women is posed as war’s antithesis, as its cure. In other pieces here – ‘True Love …’, or the Preface to Their Lives, there is a darker suggestion, and one which was to become central to Parade’s End: that war’s violent conflict is somehow analogous to, or even an expression of, sexual conflict. Ford is representative here, too. Many war novels – Rebecca West’s The Return of The Soldier, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, R. H. Mottram’s Spanish Farm Trilogy in the First World War, say, and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead or James Jones’ From Here to Eternity in the Second – turn on comparable contrasts between the Home Front and military hostilities; all bring war and sexuality into relation. And as in many such novels (and indeed in other contemporary ones, such as Lawrence’s Women in Love), the heterosexual conflicts imply, and are implied by, relations between men. The literature of the First World War is now regularly read in terms of the homoerotic and homosocial bonding between soldiers. Ford’s prose is characteristically sensitive to the question of male intimacy, as one might expect from the author of The Good Soldier; and as is most explicit in the ‘Epilogue’ to Women & Men. But his war writing (again, like most of his work) is valuable, too, for its exploration of the relations between the sexes, and how they were being transformed.

The fact that it took him nearly a decade to find the right fictional form to make sense of his haunting visions of the war, only impresses on us how disturbing those visions must have been. Several of the pieces here read like first attempts at rendering experiences that recur in Parade’s End, or in Ford’s later reminiscences. Yet his mastery of language and effect means that they are all readable for their own sake. The material here presents a valuable picture of how one of the best writers of his century responded to one of its profoundest crises. Ford often argued that a good writer should be the historian of his own times. ‘In the end,’ he said of his experience of the war, ‘if one is a writer, one is a writer, and if one was in that hell, it was a major motive that one should be able to write of it […]’.32 Most of the work here – even when fragmentary or unachieved – gives rare glimpses of that hell. Willem Honig, Department of War Studies, King’s College, London; Bill Hutchings; Professor Samuel Hynes; Robyn Marsack; Ana Mejia; Anthony Richards, Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum; Margaret Sherry, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Harold Short, and the staff at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London; Paul Skinner; Mike Stevens; Dr Rivkah Zim.

1 Williams, Sewanee Review, 59 (Jan.–Mar. 1951), pp. 154–61; reprinted in Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 316. Bradbury, ‘Introduction’, Parade’s End (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992), pp. xii, xiii. Hynes, ‘The Genre of No Enemy’, Antaeus, 56 (Spring 1986), p.140.

2 Ford to T. R. Smith, 27 July 1931: Cornell.

3Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton, 1965) – henceforth Letters – pp. 66-7.

4 Ford’s service record is at the Public Records Office, Kew, file WO 339 / 37369. MI5 blocked Ford’s brother’s application for Intelligence work in similar terms. Oliver Hueffer’s service record is also at Kew, in file WO 339 / 44941.

5 Ford to Cathy Hueffer, 6 Sept. 1916: House of Lords Record Office.

6 F[anny] B[utcher], ‘Ford Madox Ford a Visitor Here Tells of His Work’, Chicago Tribune (22 Jan. 1927). Ford to Stella Bowen, 20 Jan. [1927], identifies ‘F. B.’. Ford to Conrad [first week of Sept.], 6 and 7 Sept. 1916: Letters, pp. 71–6. There are more accurate transcriptions of these letters in The Presence of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Sondra J. Stang (Philadelphia, 1981), pp. 170–7.

7 Ford to Stella Bowen, 22 Nov. 1918: The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, ed. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 40.

8Letters, pp. 75–6.

9No More Parades (London, 1925), pp. 308–10 . No Enemy (New York, 1929), pp. 82–7.

10Return to Yesterday (London, 1931), p. 49; New York Essays (New York, 1927), p. 30; ‘Literary Causeries: IV: Escape…..’, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine (Paris) (9 March 1924), pp. 3, 11.

11 Ford to C. F. G. Masterman, 13 Sept. 1916: Letters, p. 76. ‘Trois Jours de Permission’, Nation, 19 (30 Sept. 1916), pp. 817–18.

12 Ford to Masterman, 5 Jan. 1917: Letters, pp. 81–3. Ford to Conrad, 19 Dec. 1916: The Presence of Ford Madox Ford, pp. 177–8; Ford to Cathy Hueffer, 15 Dec. 1916: House of Lords Records Office.

13 Ford to Masterman, 5 Jan. 1917: Letters, p. 82.

14 Ford to Katharine Hueffer, 10 and 12 Dec. 1916: Cornell.

15 Ford to Cathy Hueffer, 15 Dec. 1916: House of Lords Record Office.

16 ‘I Revisit the Riviera’, Harper’s, 166 (Dec. 1932), p. 66. Ford to C. F. G. Masterman, 5 Jan. 1917: Letters, pp. 81-83.

17A Man Could Stand Up – (London, 1926), pp. 186–7. Other accounts of German prisoners are in Letters, pp. 79–80, ‘War & the Mind’, p. 47 below, and Return to Yesterday, pp. 118–19, 329.

18 Quoted by Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story (London, 1972), p. 296.

19 Ford to Katharine Hueffer, 13 Mar. 1918: Cornell.

20 Ford to Stella Bowen, 22 Aug. 1918; The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, p. 7.

21 Besides the Letters, and The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, sixty letters were published in Carcanet’s Ford Madox Ford Reader, ed. Sondra J. Stang (Manchester, 1986).

22The Marsden Case (London, 1923), p. 144.

23 Ford to Wells, 14 October 1923: Letters, p. 154. He also wrote to Conrad: ‘I think I’m doing better work as the strain of the war wears off’, 7 October 1923: Yale.

24 ‘Literary Portraits – LIII: The Muse of War’, Outlook, 34 (12 Sept. 1914), pp. 334–5.

25 ‘A Day of Battle’, p. 41 below. Compare the similar passage from The Marsden Case, included in the Miscellany, p. 241 below; and A Man Could Stand Up–, pp. 63, 124–5.

26It Was the Nightingale (London, 1934), p. 197; compare Joseph Conrad (London, 1924), p. 192. No More Parades (London, 1925), p. 6; A Man Could Stand Up – (London, 1926), pp. [vi–vii]; both reprinted here. Compare Great Trade Route (London, 1937), p. 96.

27 ‘Epilogue’, pp. 59–60 below.

28A Man Could Stand Up –, p. 13. It Was the Nightingale, p. 49.

29 ‘From a Paris Quay’, New York Evening Post Literary Review (13 Dec. 1924), pp. 1–2.

30 I discuss these works in greater detail in Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, volume 2 (Oxford, 1996), where a fuller treatment of Ford’s wartime experiences can be found.

31 (London, 1915), p. 291.

32It Was the Nightingale, p. 100.

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

The texts given here of works published during Ford’s lifetime have been based on the texts of the first book or periodical publications, with the following exceptions: ‘Arms and the Mind’, ‘War and the Mind’, ‘Pink Flannel’ and ‘The Colonel’s Shoes’. These have been based on the manuscripts and typescripts at Cornell, and my readings of them differ in several respects from the versions previously published.

With the previously unpublished material, ‘Epilogue’, ‘True Love and a G.C.M.’, ‘Enigma’, the letters and military lectures, ‘Years After’, and the excerpts from ‘Just People’, ‘Last Words about Edward VIII’, ‘O Hymen’, ‘Pure Literature’, and ‘That Same Poor Man’, typographical errors and other inconsistencies have been silently emended. Any editorial additions or expansion of abbreviations appear in square brackets. Ford uses varying numbers of suspension dots for emphasis, and these have been retained here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The manuscript material here is published with the kind permission of Ford’s executor, Janice Biala; the Manuscripts Division of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library for ‘Epilogue’; the Honourable Oliver Soskice and The House of Lords Record Office for Ford’s letters to his mother; and of the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, for all the rest.

I am very grateful to the following for their help in the preparation of this volume: Lucy B. Burgess, and the staff of the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; Alfred Cohen; Sara Haslam; Dr Jan

Reminiscences

An Englishman Looks at the World

From the second of Ford’s two propaganda books, Between St Denis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations (Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), Part II, chapters 1 and 2. Ford’s heading echoes H.G. Wells’s 1914 book of the same title.

Let us attempt to recapture, in as precise a phraseology as we may, what was the British psychology immediately prior to the outbreak of the present war, and what was the state of affairs in England then. So remote does that period seem that the task is one of some difficulty, and the field is singularly open to those who are anxious to prove that Great Britain at that date was a militarist menace to the rest of Europe. So absolutely are our minds now fixed upon the affairs of the present, so bellicose in consequence has every proper man become, that, if Mr Bernard Shaw or Herr Dernburg choose to assert that before July 1914 every Englishman was a raging fire-eater, there are few of us with our minds sufficiently concentrated upon the immediate past to be able to question, much less to confute, those generalisations. And that is partly a matter of shame. Because the necessities of the day are so essentially martial we are ashamed to think that we were ever pacifist; because Germany – the German peoples as well as the Prussian State – have now put into practice precepts which they have been enjoining for the last century and a decade, I am ashamed to think that less than a year ago I had, for the German peoples, if not for the Prussian State, a considerable affection and some esteem. By a coincidence, then, which I must regard as the most curious of my life – though, indeed, in these kaleidoscopic days something similar may well have been the fate of many inhabitants of these islands – in the middle of July, 1914, I was in Berwickshire engaged in nothing less than tentative machinations against the seat in Parliament of – Sir Edward Grey! In the retrospect this may well appear to have been a fantastic occupation, but how fantastic do not all our occupations of those days now appear! On the morning of July 20th, 1914, I stood upon the platform of Berwick-on-Tweed station reading the London papers. The London papers were exceedingly excited, and I cannot say that I myself was other than pessimistic – as to the imbecility of human nature, and, more particularly, as to the imbecility of the Liberal Party, and, more particularly again, as to that of the editors of the — and the —, which are Liberal party organs. These organs at that date were, in veiled language, calling for the abdication of the King of England. That, again, sounds fantastic. But there it is; the files of the newspapers are there to testify to it.