The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [22]
On the other occasion I was on parade again, being examined in drill, on the Guards’ Square at Chelsea. And, since I was petrified with nervousness, having to do it before a half-dozen elderly gentlemen with red hatbands,12 I got my men about as hopelessly boxed as it is possible to do with the gentlemen privates of H.M. Coldstream Guards. Whilst I stood stiffly at attention one of the elderly red hatbands walked close behind by back and said distinctly in my ear, ‘Did you say, The Good Soldier?’ So no doubt Mr Lane was avenged. At any rate I have learned that irony may be a two-edged sword.
You, my dear Stella, will have heard me tell these stories a great many times. But the seas now divide us and I put them in this, your letter, which you will read before you see me in the hope that they may give you some pleasure with the illusion that you are hearing familiar – and very devoted – tones. And so I subscribe myself in all truth and in the hope that you will accept at once the particular dedication of this book and the general dedication of the edition.
Your
F. M. F.
New York,
January 9, 1927
NOTES
1. Stella Ford the Australian painter Esther Gwendolyn ‘Stella’ Bowen (1893–1947) was never actually married to Ford. Their relationship lasted from 1919–28 and it was with Bowen that Ford had his third daughter, Esther Julia, born in November 1920. The ‘Dedicatory Letter’ was specially written for the second American edition of the novel (1927) and was subsequently reprinted in the second British edition (1928).
2. 17th December 1913 was Ford’s fortieth birthday. He was born in Merton, Surrey, in 1873 and christened ‘Ford Hermann Hueffer’. He changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919.
3. the companionship of Conrad the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was one of Ford’s closest companions (especially between 1898 and 1909) and perhaps his chief literary inspiration. They collaborated on three novels, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924), and it is thought that Ford may have written part of Conrad’s Nostromo (1904).
4. literary Cubists, Vorticists, Imagistes… Jeunes the Franco-Spanish Cubist movement began around 1907 (and petered out c.1914) with the multi- perspectival paintings and sculptures of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963), though who, precisely, Ford has in mind as ‘the literary Cubists’ of Britain is harder to determine. Vorticism was an iconoclastic art movement that flourished in London between 1912 and 1915. Influenced by both Cubism and Italian Futurism, its chief exponent was the writer, painter and polemicist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). A 10-page excerpt from the beginning of The Good Soldier appeared in the first number of Vortidsm’s aggressively opinionated mouthpiece, the pink-covered Blast, edited by Lewis. Imagisme (or Imagism) was an Anglo-American literary movement inspired by the critical ideas of T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) which began in 1912. The Imagistes were dedicated to the concise expression of pure visual images, and an influential anthology, Des Imagistes, appeared in 1914. The French words tapageur (-euse) and jeune mean ‘loud, showy or noisy’ and ‘young’ respectively, so Ford has in mind riotous youth.
5. Eel… might as well die European and American freshwater eels swim to the Sargasso Sea to breed. The Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) was a flightless seabird which was hunted to extinction in 1844.
6. a formal farewell… the Thrush Ford contributed an essay to the Thrush, an ephemeral poetry magazine that flourished between December 1909 and May 1910, but he actually announced his intention to abandon fiction in a magazine called Poetry and Drama soon after completing The Good Soldier: ‘Writing up to my