There are great authors whose lifework one could read in an afternoon. In the case of Ford Madox Ford—even assuming that one could gather his essays, reviews, editorials, and all eighty-odd of his books in one place—it would take at least a day simply to sort through them and to begin working out some sense of the shape of his career. To be sure, one need not go to such trouble in order to read Ford’s best writings: for virtually everybody who has written about him since his death in 1939 has noted that the highlights of his oeuvre are The Good Soldier (1915)—which is not only Ford’s best novel but one of the major English novels of the twentieth century—and the splendid tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28). Yet even these achievements, despite the high regard in which they are held in some quarters, have never been as familiar to serious readers as they ought to be; and one cannot help thinking that Ford’s sheer productivity, his long-time reputation as a literary jack-of-all-trades, is at least partly to blame for this relative neglect. Certainly, for a fervent admirer of The Good Soldier, the profoundly dispiriting experience of sitting in a library and paging one’s way through the mediocre books that make up the bulk of Ford’s legacy can help one to understand why his contemporaries might well have had the notion of him as a literary hack so firmly fixed in their minds that it was simply impossible for them to conceive of his writing a masterpiece.

And yet he did write at least one masterpiece. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Ford