Ford Madox Ford.

'FOR HAD a vast and dismal studio. . . . He was a great fat Englishman . . . [who] took into his house a series of mediocre and respectable women who took care of him and were all called Mrs. Ford . . . a vast room badly heated by a very small oil stove and furnished with all sorts of uncomfortable chairs and day beds, most of them too far from the stove to be reached by its faint glow . . . making conversation with Ford, who for some occult reason fancied himself a lady-killer, but in spite of this was witty in the best manner of the English and really fun to talk to. Around me was greatness and fame . . . the Hemingways, the F. Scott Fitzgeralds, the Archie MacLeishes."

This account, by Mary Blomfield, of a visit to the English novelist Ford Madox Ford in his Paris flat in 1926 captures (perhaps unwittingly) a good deal of the famous fordian essence. Ford's appearance; his women; his life-long penury; his erudition; his charm; his shabby majesty--all are suggested. In a life that lasted not quite 66 years he wrote 81 books and better than four hundred articles; but the books almost never sold well (many of them hardly at all), critical acclaim was not widely forthcoming (painful for a serious artist who was a personal friend of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ezra Pound, and who "discovered" D.H. Lawrence), and the author himself remained for most if not all of his life profoundly uncertain of his own genius.

On the other hand, as editor first of the English Review (in London before the First World War) and later of the Transatlantic Review (in Paris in the middle Twenties) he created a large reputation as an unparalleled literary impresario; while his finest novels were quietly recognized by the discriminating few to be major contributions to English letters. Also, what appreciation he failed to win from his literary contemporaries was compensated for by the administration of women, who adored him. He had a wife and three "wives." The wife, Elsie, went to her grave nearly ten years after the death of her husband, still bearing proudly the name he had surrendered thirty years before. (In 1919, Ford had his surname legally changed from Hueffer to Ford, avowedly to escape the anti-German bias of the period; perhaps also, as Judd suspects, to permit his "wives" to style themselves "Mrs." without facing lawsuits from Elsie, such as the one she launched against Violet Hunt.) He was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 18, and spent the rest of his life as what Judd calls "a king of Catholic, or agnostic, or Catholic-agnostic--what he would have said would have dependend upon his audience and when he was speaking."

As many of the reviewers of the English edition of Ford Madox Ford, and some of the advance readers of the American one, have observed, Judd's biography is attractively impressionistic and non-academic. "I wanted," Judd says, "to write a book in which the spirit of its subject could be at ease," and in this he has largely succeeded despite certain obliquities and instances of vagueness, which diminish as the book proceeds.

Ford, Judd writes, "was in origin and early literary influences a man of the nineteenth century, a Victorian and a Pre-Raphaelite whose achievement it was to grow from that into a properly twentieth-century writer." As with the writer, so with the man. The young bohemian of Romney Marsh, Kent, whom the local peasantry called "Frenchy" behind his back, left forty years later, when he died in the arms of his mistress, only a little furniture, a few clothes, and scarcely any cash; the older bohemian was as well a patriot and a self-described "hard-shelled Tory," who at the age 41 had taken a commission in the British Army and been shell-shocked behind the lines in France.

Judd describes him as having served in the 1920s as a "a bridge" between the young literary radicals and the tradition they thought they were opposing, but he accomplished this feat only by "extending" the tradition itself. As a mature man and artist, he was indeed a modernist, but he never became the compleat modernist--and that is the key to all his trials and tribulations, personal as well as professional. Whether as a British citizen or as a citizen of the Republic of Letters he so admired, he never quite fit either the mold whose fashion and influence was immediately past, or the one whose day had just arrived.

That inability or disinclination (or both) to be one thing or the other made him seem an unformed personality to many of his contemporaries, and ruined his chances for the kind of intense--though often relatively narrow--popularity that more easily attached itself to less indefinable artists. It was also the alembic of his genius and the source of his greatness as a writer. In spite of the literary precepts formulated by himself and Conrad early in their friendship, he was never the theoretical artist, but always the electic one. He never wrote his Ulysses or his In Our Time, let alone his Finnegans Wake; what theories he did have he ever pressed to their extremes.

As a prose writer, he strove for what he described as "a combination of impressionism and narration whose technical virtuosity is belied by the apparent ease with which the book flows." His modernism never stretched into experimentalism, and his unspoken motto was not "Make it new" but, more simply and honorably, "Make it good." He belonged to no literary school and founded none; he believed that literary tastes run in cycles; and he thought of great literary works and their creators, of no matter what place and period, as being always contemporary. He encountered numerous literary styles and traditions in the course of an intensely bibliophilic life, and seems to have borrowed quite naturally and unselfconsciouly from them what he needed to bring whatever was his current project to fruition.

This method, not the perfevid determination to create something "new" and "revolutionary," is the almost secret engine of literary, and indeed of all, artistic progress. It is also the quiet and untiring engine, of modest design but great power, that produced within a period of 13 years (1913--1926) four great novels of modern British literature. They are The Good Soldier and the first three volumes of the Tietjens tetralogy -- Some Do Not, No More Parades, and A Man Could Stand Up. In these books Ford Madox Ford accomplished, beyond all possible doubt, what he himself must have recognized ultimately as "the real right thing."

Chilton Williamson Jr., senior editor for books with Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, is the author most recently of The Homestead (Grove Weidenfeld).