Michael's Bookshelf: Ford Madox Ford - 'The Good Collaborator'

from the Ford Madox Ford Conference Keynote Lecture 2011: 

'The Good Collaborator'

Michael Schmidt

[Ford Madox Ford] might seem eminently clubbable, but wasn't, in the terms of the English clubs of the day. It was his conduct, his character, his enthusiasm. A man who said he knew everyone and was a child of the establishment, but who didn't play by the establishment rules and could not be what he seemed, or be reduced to a predictable type, was hard to fathom. In Return to Yesterday he says he thought he belonged 'by right of birth to the governing classes of the artistic and literary worlds'. In a way he didn’t need to work at it.

Ford Madox Ford

And no wonder, when his lifestyle became irregular, he found his way into the Bohemia of writers younger than himself, whose disenchantment with the establishment made them at first wary of this rather stuffy and harrumphing fellow, but also alert to his genius. Biography can be a key to Ford the editor as to Ford the writer. And the crucial years of his alienation were the very years of The English Review, the years in which The Good Soldier was taking shape and in his heart Tietjens was beginning to gestate.

Alienation meant that he looked at England in an elegiac rather than a nostalgic spirit. He looked forward with anticipation rather than unease. He had roots but was not bound to a narrow geography. As George Steiner said to me when I spoke of 'putting down roots' in England, 'I am a Jew, I have had to learn to use my legs.' Ford was not a Jew, but he certainly could move fast, and across borders, when he had to. Unlike Bennett and Walpole and other traders in literature, he was bad with money because it interested him only when he didn’t have it...

Michael Schmidt

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Paperback • ISBN 978 1 857543 00 1 

Imprint: Carcanet Fiction • 236 pages

Part of the November promotion at Carcanet.co.uk

For nine years, John Dowell and his wife have spent the summer season at a German spa town in the company of the respectable Ashburnhams, but behind the placid exterior of their lives lie the destructive passions of men and women. When Dowell's world breaks apart, he tells his story as intimately as to a silent listener across the fireplace of a country cottage. 

The Good Soldier, Ford's best-loved novel, is part of The Millennium Ford project which aims to bring all the major writings of this great writer back into circulation. The Good Soldier is presented here by the Ford project editor, Dr Bill Hutchings, Lecturer in English at the University of Manchester.