Ford Madox Ford(1873–1939)

Ford Hermann Hueffer was born at Merton in Surrey on 17 December 1873, eldest son of Francis Hueffer, the German-born music critic of *The Times*, and Catherine Madox Brown, daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. The household he grew up in was the post-Pre-Raphaelite extended family that ran through Brown's studio at Brookbank in Hampstead and through the household of his aunt Lucy Madox Brown and her husband William Michael Rossetti at Endsleigh Gardens. Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Burne-Jones moved in and out of the rooms of his childhood; the dinner-table conversation was art-history, German music criticism, and the gossip of the *Athenaeum* circle through the 1880s. His father died when he was sixteen and the boy went to live with his Madox Brown grandfather at Hampstead. He converted to Catholicism at eighteen, took the standard nineteen-and-twenty-year-old's drift through University College School and a year at Bonn University, and published his first novel *The Shifting of the Fire* in 1892 at nineteen.

He met Joseph Conrad in 1898 at the Romney Marsh cottage of Edward Garnett (the publisher's reader who had recommended Conrad's *Almayer's Folly* to Unwin five years earlier and who married Ford's sister-in-law Constance Black, the translator of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky). Conrad and Ford were neighbours on the Marsh between 1900 and 1909. They wrote three novels together: *The Inheritors* (1901), *Romance* (1903) and *The Nature of a Crime* (written 1906, published 1924). The collaboration was Ford's apprenticeship and was the longest sustained working partnership of Conrad's career. Ford taught Conrad how the English sentence sat together; Conrad taught Ford how to write a novel under technical scrutiny. The friendship survived through the 1920s, ended in mutual exhaustion through Ford's eight or nine increasingly mythologised retellings of it across the post-war decade, and produced the editing techniques that ran through everything Ford did with younger writers later in his life.

He founded the *English Review* at his own flat at Holland Park Avenue in December 1908 with a five-hundred-pound stake from Arthur Marwood, a Yorkshire-baronet friend. The first twelve months of the *Review* (December 1908 to November 1909) published Thomas Hardy, Henry James, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad in the front of the magazine, and discovered the new generation of writers at the back. The November 1909 issue carried D. H. Lawrence's first published poems (under the byline *Lawrence*, without the initials, because Ford had not yet decided whether he was a man or a woman from the Nottinghamshire schoolteacher's letter), and through 1909 the magazine printed the first appearances of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, F. T. Marinetti and Norman Douglas in English-language print. Ford was thirty-five and was, for those twelve months, the editor of the most consequential English literary magazine of the early twentieth century. He lost the *Review* in November 1909 in a financial mess of his own making, mostly debt, partly a domestic separation from his wife Elsie Martindale and the public scandal of his affair with the novelist Violet Hunt. He spent the next four years writing himself out of the hole.

He enlisted in 1915, aged forty-one, in the Welch Regiment, and went to the Western Front as a junior officer in 1916. He was gassed and concussed by a shell-burst at the Somme on 28 July 1916, evacuated, returned to the front in 1917, and was invalided home in 1918 with what was then called shell-shock and is now post-traumatic stress disorder. He came out of the war with the experience that would underwrite *Parade's End*. He changed his surname by deed poll from Hueffer to Ford in 1919, both because the German name had become unworkable in post-war England and because he was claiming a clean break from the failures of the *English Review* decade. *The Good Soldier*, written before the war but published by John Lane in 1915 in the middle of his enlistment, was already on its way to being the modernist novel his reputation would rest on. The *Parade's End* tetralogy (*Some Do Not...* 1924, *No More Parades* 1925, *A Man Could Stand Up...* 1926, *The Last Post* 1928) was the post-war work. He wrote it across his Paris years with the artist Stella Bowen, in a small flat on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in the Latin Quarter, and finished it after Stella left him for Tom Stanford-Smith and he had taken up with the Polish-American painter Janice Biala.

He edited *The Transatlantic Review* in Paris in 1924, a one-year project that ran fourteen issues and published Ernest Hemingway (his first stories in print), James Joyce (the early *Work in Progress* fragments that became *Finnegans Wake*), Gertrude Stein and E. E. Cummings, before the magazine folded for the same reasons the *English Review* had folded fifteen years earlier (debt, plus Ford's inability to manage commercial subscriptions). He spent the 1930s between Paris, the Provençal village of Cap Brun outside Toulon where he and Biala kept a small house, and the writer-in-residence post at Olivet College in Michigan that gave him a salary in his last three years. He died at the hospital in Deauville in Normandy on 26 June 1939, sixty-five years old, on a transit stop on his way back to Olivet from a French summer. He is buried in the Deauville cemetery. The Ford name in its English-side catalogue is the locative *ford*, the river-crossing place-name behind half of England's market towns; the surname-change of 1919 fixed it on him in place of his father's Hueffer, and through him on the Conrad-edited, Lawrence-discovered, Hemingway-published continuity of early-twentieth-century English-language literary modernism.