: Ford Madox Ford
: The Good Soldier A Tale Of Passion
: Galley Beggar Press
: 9781913111670
: 1
: CHF 2.20
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 200
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'This is the saddest story I have ever heard' - so begins The Good Soldier, the novel that Ford Madox Ford regarded as his best - and with good reason. It isn't perhaps as sad as the storyteller claims - but it is a lesson narration, the use of flashback, and literary impressionism. It's also, crucially, a gripping story, brilliantly told; a shocking and constantly surprising tale of marital strife, sexual intrigue, deep deception, fathomless mystery and tragic death. There is nothing else like it. It is a modernist classic and one of the finest novels of the twentieth century. This edition features a new introduction by Sam Jordison. It details Ford Madox Ford's turbulent, fascinating life and career, explores his place in posterity, recounts his many loves and frequent feuds, and explains why he too was such an unreliable narrator of his own life story. The introduction also includes a critical commentary on The Good Soldier itself. It explains its influence as a work of pioneering modernism, investigates the many narrative tricks, conceits and deceits employed by Ford and makes the case for why this book should be recognised as one of the greatest stories ever told.

Ford Madox Ford was born in 1871 and lived until 1939. He wrote dozens of acclaimed novels and works of criticism and literary biography, as well as founding The English Review and the transatlantic review, where he was widely recognised as one of the finest editors of the 20th century.

INTRODUCTON


‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I’m now an old man and I’ll die without making a name like Hemingway.’

So said an aging Ford Madox Ford to the journalist George Seldes. ‘At this climax,’ Seldes tells us, ‘Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.’

That was in 1932. Ford died seven years later, on 26 June, 1939, in Deauville, France; a man whose time had been and gone, whose world was about to be smashed apart by war, whose books were falling out of print and whom almost everyone had forgotten. Picture him: despondent, in poverty, alone, watching his fame and his name – the very name he had chosen for himself – fading away into nothing.

A sad story. Or at least, a sad story if it’s told that way. But, if there’s one thing we learn fromThe Good Soldier, it’s that such narratives should always be doubted. That there are always other ways of looking at things. After all, here you are, reading these lines. Ford is still a going concern, remembered now as a pre-eminent modernist with a posthumous reputation burnished by writers and critics alike. In fact, Graham Greene got to work within a week of Ford’s death, writing inThe Spectator about his ‘magnificent books’ and declaring, correctly, that ‘a posterity which would care for good writing’ would care for Ford.

It’s easy to imagine that one of Ford’s own characters, so often sceptical, so often doubtful, might have a sardonic remark to make about the author’s apparent misreading of his destiny. But, if we’re thinking in the Ford mode, we must also imagine him complicating the picture further; taking us back over the same ground again, making us question our first and second impressions, undermining our suppositions and presenting the case anew. For the truth – as Ford so often demonstrates in his fiction – changes, depending on the angle from which you approach it.

It’s not just Ford’s posthumous reputation that that George Seldes quote misrepresents. He was talking to Ford towards the end of what might just as easily have been described as an eventful and successful career.

So:

Ford was born on 17 December 1873, in Surrey. His father was a German emigre called Francis Hueffer. His mother was Catherine Madox Brown, a model and artist and the daughter of the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown (whose biography our Ford would eventually write). The couple gave their first son the name Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer.

It was a name to contend with – and the younger Ford got going early. He published his first book, a fairy story calledThe Brown Owl, in 1891, at the annoyingly young age of 17. His first novel –The Shifting of the Fire – came in 1892, when he was