Paraphrasing Hokusai, Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) once called himself an “old man mad about writing.” Ford’s phrase is apt: during his lifetime in England, France, and the United States, he published eighty-one books, produced four hundred and nineteen periodical articles, and contributed poems, stories, introductions, and the like to fifty-seven other volumes. Among Ford’s works are thirty-two novels, twelve volumes of poetry, seven memoirs, literary criticism, commentary, history, and biography. Writing was what Ford most wanted to do, and nothing—illness, poverty, discouragement, or personal calamity—kept him from it.
Ford devoted his best efforts to fiction, and it is primarily for his novels that he is now remembered. The Good Soldier (1915), a story of marital infidelity which Ford called “my best book,” is an acknowledged masterpiece. Parade’s End (1924-28), a tetralogy set during World War One in England, is widely admired. Some other Ford books are reasonably well known, but most of his novels have been out of print for fifty years or more and are virtually unobtainable.
Writers usually think better of Ford’s work than the public does. W. H. Auden, for example, wrote in 1961 that Parade’s End
has never yet been a popular success and few critics, I believe, have paid much attention to it. This neglect passes my comprehension. Of the various demands one can make of a novelist, that he show us the way in which a society works, that he show an understanding of the human heart, that he
