Return to Yesterday

Ford Madox Ford can never quite keep out of it. The more self-effacing he seems, the more his the writing becomes: scenes of preternatural clarity. 'Memory doesn't work like that,' said one critic. Well, Ford's does. 'Truth to the impression' was his aim. How it seemed, how memory took it in, is more alive than how it 'actually' was, whatever that means. Memory is for Ford as for Wordsworth re-creation. His memoirs have the authority of fiction because they are half way between fiction and fact. Return to Yesterday (1931), his most fascinating memoir, follows on Ancient Lights and covers the years from 1894 to the outbreak of World War I - his transition from privileged godson of the Pre-Raphaelites to the great Modern writer and editor he became. Here he evokes England at large, and London in particular, its literary community, the political world of anarchists (the world of his friend Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent). If the Rossettis, Ford Madox Brown, Swinburne and Morris gave their blessing to his youth, it was Pound and Lawrence, Joyce and Rhys, who were blessed by his maturity. C.H. Sisson writes: 'Ford remains a profound influence on the poetry as on the prose of the century, for he found English literature poetical and left it spare.'

Auteur

FORD MADOX FORD (the name he adopted in 1919: he was originally Ford Hermann Hueffer) was born in Merton, Surrey, in 1873. His mother, Catherine, was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. His father, Francis Hueffer, was a German emigre, a musicologist and music critic for The Times. Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were his aunt and uncle by marriage. Ford published his first book, a children's fairytale, when he was seventeen. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad from 1898 to 1908, and also befriended many of the best writers of his time, including Henry James, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy and Thomas Hardy. He is best known for his novels, especially The Fifth Queen (1906 - 8), The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade's End (1924 - 8). He was also an influential poet and critic, and a brilliant magazine editor. He founded the English Review in 1908, discovering D.H.Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, who became another close friend. Ford served as an officer in the Welch Regiment 1915 - 19. After the war he moved to France. In Paris he founded the transatlantic review, taking on Ernest Hemingway as a sub-editor, discovering Jean Rhys and Basil Bunting, and publishing James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In the 1920s and 1930s he moved between Paris, New York, and Provence. He died in Deauville in June 1939. The author of over eighty books, Ford is a major presence in twentieth-century writing. Of his novels, Carcanet publish The Good Soldier, Parade's End, The Rash Act and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. Carcanet also publish The English Novel, The Ford Madox Ford Reader, A History of Our Own Time and Selected Poems, War Prose, Return to Yesterday, and other titles. Some of these have been released as part of The Millennium Ford series, which aims to bring all his major work back into circulation. BILL HUTCHINGS, programme editor of Carcanet's Millenium Ford programme, is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Manchester.