Ford Madox Ford’s Letters, Life Writing, and Editing for a New Era

Introduction

The Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, a large-scale editorial project commissioned in 2023 by Oxford University Press, forms the culmination of the most recent wave of critical attention to Ford, the third since the writer’s death in 1939.¹ In scope and significance, The Complete Works promises much, inaugurating not only a new era in Ford studies and modern(ist) literature, but offering an intervention into activities and debates central to modern editorial scholarship and practice, itself a growing field.² How might textual assembly and recovery best work in Ford’s case, and what do they suggest about how critical attention might most profitably be directed, now and in the future?³ In what ways can we gather and re-present new material most effectively? How might we use a new edition to offer insights into the chronology, the biography, the relationships, networks and career of a writer? Our work on the edition has begun on six volumes of Ford’s Collected Letters and, as we hope to set out in this chapter, the answers to the questions above are closely and profitably related to the decision to start work there.

Additionally, and more broadly, those answers are shaped of course by current contexts ranging from generative AI (to what extent are editors invested in ‘the power of authenticity in the face of AI’, as one blogger has put it⁴); to the diasporic nature of literary archives (Philip Larkin mounted a passionate but doomed campaign in 1960 to keep British writers’ papers in the UK⁵); and a series of economic crises with demonstrably dire effects on research, library and university budgets in the UK and beyond (Sutherland, 57). Combined, these contexts provide persuasive drivers for focus on writers’ papers, especially acts of editorial attention designed to preserve and protect as well as to render works available in their most accurate and productive form. Many of those papers have been digitised, of course, aiding access to the raw data then represented in a range of ways: from print to digital, searchable, texts. Even digital space, however, especially when funded, can run out—the age of digitisation is also an age of ‘digital tidying’—begging further urgent questions of what textual states may or may not be preserved, and where. And one does not need to sympathise with the somewhat nationalistic tone of Larkin’s argument (Ford, committed to the Republic of Letters, would have questioned it) to appreciate the impact of writers’ collections being split and exposed to the financial market. Kathryn Sutherland notes that material documents—handwritten and ‘even’ typed—‘remain unique, un-estranged from the moment and place of production’ (50), while Laurence Davies, General Editor of the Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, cites in a fine essay on editing letters Walter Benjamin’s depiction of the way copies lose a quasi-sacred power and prestige.⁶ ‘Something similar happens’, Davies writes, ‘when script goes into print’ (Davies, 179). Manuscript may not last forever and is exposed to the risks outlined here: editions can both mitigate those risks and find ways to acknowledge its un-estranged power, or what Larkin called ‘magical’ qualities (cited Sutherland, 30). As General Editors of Ford’s Complete Works, we are keenly aware of the challenges and opportunities of these contexts, coupled to the unique set of circumstances that have combined to create Ford’s textual history. We have sought in our editorial decisions to find a balance between the materiality and specificity of manuscript and the readability of print.

A collected edition was something Ford wanted after the First World War. It was a mark of prestige, a future-proofing manifestation of professional respect accorded to fellow writers like Henry James and Joseph Conrad. But he never quite managed it. He came closest in the late 1920s, after the success of Parade’s End (1924–28). His main British publishers, Duckworths, bought the rights to some of his earlier books and produced an impressive list.⁷ The American publishers of Parade’s End, Albert and Charles Boni, did something similar, and put together what was called ‘The Avignon Edition’ of Ford’s works. But Ford left Duckworth in 1928, disappointed with their sales and advances; and he fell out with the Bonis then too. They had only published four volumes of the Avignon Edition, but had plans for at least 15.⁸

Ford published 79 books in his lifetime, and his History of Our Own Times was added to that list posthumously in 1988. The Oxford University Press edition offers more than a uniform edition or collected edition; it is a complete edition which will render Ford’s published literary output accessible and comprehensible in its entirety. Some of the planned additions are new in the sense that they have never been published as books, though the material has appeared in print. There will be a volume of his short stories, for example, and at least three volumes of his critical essays, which appeared in magazines, and few of which have been collected. Other additional volumes will include material never previously published, such as most of Ford’s c.3,000 extant known letters; a completed post-war novel; and the typescript entitled ‘Towards a History of English Literature’ which was cannibalized in Ford’s transatlantic review with substantial cuts and missing chapters.

Some of Ford’s original books were quite short: slim volumes of poems; small books of art criticism; slim volumes of criticism. We shall combine some of them, so that even including these new volumes, the entire edition will fit into about 50 volumes altogether. We hope the combining will add coherence; putting his fairy tales all together in one book will make his achievement in that field more visible; likewise with his three pocket books of art criticism. Another reason why we are at the dawn of a new era is therefore that the Complete Works edition is an opportunity to reshape his oeuvre.

Hardly any critical editions of Ford’s writing have been published. Only The Good Soldier, edited by Martin Stannard (Norton, 1995), and Parade’s End edited in four volumes by Saunders, Joseph Wiesenfarth (2011), Haslam (2011), and Paul Skinner (2011) (Carcanet, 2010–11) have received full, annotated critical editions (see Haslam et al, ‘Editing Ford’ for more detail) (Haslam, 2019). Ford worked notoriously quickly, often while reviewing and editing at the same time, and he was careless of his proofs. His works demand thorough editorial scrutiny, including assessment of pre-publication manuscripts and typescripts, in order to render a reliable text. Essential emendation of the first publication has been (and will continue to be) very rare, as demonstrated in both editorial policy and practice, but one good example of the opportunities of a critical edition in this respect is offered by Some Do Not…. In the first edition field guns are referred to, jarringly, as ‘tiny pet things’, a clear mis-reading of the ‘tin pot things’ that study of the manuscript revealed (Some Do Not…, 98).

The foremost way in which the Complete Works will enact the reshaping of Ford’s oeuvre is through approaching the edition as a life writing project. To some extent that ambition is implicit in a complete edition. To totalise an oeuvre, to put letters, poems and articles alongside fictional and non-fictional books, is bound to make the shape of that oeuvre, and the life which produced it, clearer. Some editions articulate the aspiration more explicitly. Oxford University Press’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (with which the Ford edition shares several editors) has begun a series of twelve volumes of ‘Personal Writings’, consisting mainly of letters and diaries. Ford did not write diaries. But many of his published works have diary- or letter-like qualities. His personal experiences, acquaintances, and thoughts about his own work are spread through his reviews and memoirs. We believe that the ability to connect the letters and ephemera with his published books, and vice-versa, will enrich both, generating a new generation of Ford scholarship that will in turn provide a richer, more nuanced understanding of his work.

The six volumes of Ford’s letters are the biggest example of the reshaping of his oeuvre, partly because only a minority have appeared in print before, and those which remain are important and extensive. Perhaps because Ford did not write diaries, his letters—especially the regular ones to his partners—detail his daily life very much as a diary might. But it is also true that most of the previously published letters focus on his career; whereas the new material sheds an often surprising and surprisingly personal light on his life from the early 1880s to a matter of days before his death in 1939.

Modernism, Letters and Ford’s Epistolary Nature

Ford was born in 1873, so readers are firmly located in the nineteenth century when encountering his earliest letters. The Penny Post launched in the UK in 1840, meaning the sender, not the recipient, paid for a letter. In that one year, as a result, the number of letters dispatched through the Post Office doubled from 82.5 million to 168.8 million. It became 350 million in 1850, and 2 billion in 1895 (Koehler, 5; see also Golden, 1). Ford and his first love, Elsie Martindale, with whom he eloped in 1894, accounted for quite a few amongst that most dramatic increase.

Reformers such as Rowland Hill (1795–1879) sought to democratise the post with these changes, to make it ever more accessible and inclusive as a network. W.H. Auden’s later poem ‘Night Mail’ (1936) demonstrates this idea beautifully. The sheer chaotic energy of all this material, both emphasising and crossing distance after 1840, is crucial for Ford as a letter writer, but also as a modernist writer. He tells us to pay attention to letters in major works in major ways.

In The Good Soldier, for example, John Dowell’s frustrated letters to The Times about the trains not running on time go unpublished, a mark of his outsider status and impotence (40). Letters to The Times are also mentioned at the start of Some Do Not… (10), a shorthand signifier as well of class status. More significantly, though, in a spectacularly modernist version of the ‘postal plot’ (Kate Thomas, quoted in Koehler, 10), hiatus, distance, time shift, the tension between interior and exterior worlds are all brought into play by the plot bombshell that is Christopher Tietjens’ estranged wife’s letter. Sylvia has run off with another man. Four months later, in the first plot event Ford devises to have emotional impact in his tetralogy, Tietjens opens and reads her letter telling him she wants to come back. Ford spends nearly 100 brilliantly-structured pages exploring what happened next, fully exploiting the time shift, and ideas of absence and presence signalled by any letter (Altman, 129–140). The shock turns Tietjens’ hair white and by the time Ford has finished with us we comprehend why. Tietjens’ friend Macmaster is employed to provide material detail: ‘Macmaster had looked up from his coffee cup and had taken in a blue grey sheet of notepaper in Tietjens’ fingers, shaking, inscribed in the large broad nibbed writing of that detestable harridan’ (19; Macmaster is a graphologist in the making, then, as well as statistician). So Ford himself says notice letters, for the technical (and characteristically modernist) gifts they can bestow. He sees them not just as extensions of private intimacies, but as social facts—affecting those around the writer and reader—and potentially as public interventions. An acute cultural observer of and participant in all that was new and different in his urban environment, Ford had also learned about the work letters can do, in part, from his earliest relationships.

Ford had known Elsie Martindale at their equivalent of primary school, and they were already thought of as a couple there. But it was after she had left school, and they were ‘courting’, and her parents were trying to keep them apart, that the plot thickened in their letters. The 1893–1894 letters between Ford and Elsie are often frenzied in both tone and frequency. Kate Thomas argues that postal plots locate both excitement and pleasure in the distance, delays, and occasional precarity of deliveries, while Karen Koehler explores how the penny post offered new opportunities in the period for sustaining and expressing affective ties (Koehler 5–10). They certainly did in Ford and Elsie’s case, and for experimenting with them also. Just days before they eloped in 1894, Ford celebrated in a letter the improved penny post (probably a version of a ‘dead drop’ to evade her parents’ scrutiny (Cornell 33.058),⁹) while weeks earlier, in November 1893, Ford had written to Elsie wondering if the postman has stolen all the kisses she sent him (33.035). The couple also share anxieties about her parents reading or taking their mail, which itself counterintuitively fuels agitated additional post. On 7 June 1893, for example, Ford writes, ‘it just occurred to me after I had posted the letter—supposing you were out when it reached and your mother and aunt had taken it into their heads to hold an inquisitorial superintendence’ (33.019). The postal service itself, therefore, in multiple daily deliveries fuelled their fire.

Ford and Elsie’s postal plot culminated in a marriage. The narrative they created in their letters of scrutinising and punitive parents depriving them of each other and their freedom simultaneously generated a significant part of Ford’s early identity as an author. In an April 1893 example, Ford rails against the ‘petty tyranny, the obtuse rectitude and the spiteful malice’ behind the ‘threats of parting’ (Image 1).

Image 1

And after the elopement—during the legal proceedings that resulted—Ford sought to stir up publicity for his fairy story, The Queen Who Flew (Saunders I, 82–3), by implying a relation to Elsie’s flight from her family. Indeed, the fairy tales Ford was writing and those he was, apparently, living, can be seen to inform one another in the ways he was presenting his life in writing as both lover and author, a fact that is made more persuasive given the creative manuscripts he was working on were sometimes posted for Elsie’s comment as well (Haslam 2020, 33–35). Rebecca Earle’s suggestive phrase ‘epistolary self-creation’ helps us to understand why (2). They were young, they were trying to find ways toward an autonomy Ford would have to fund—the ire they could both generate and express in their letters was further necessary fuel to the dramatic attempt at self- and joint-actualisation of their elopement.

Despite the richness of this material, none of these early epistolary effusions make it into collections of Ford’s letters, most of which are skewed towards his relations with other writers, publishers, agents, and editors. Richard Ludwig’s 1965 selection misses out Ford’s private life almost entirely. His was pioneering work, however, completed at a time when few of Ford’s letters had been quoted from, let alone published.

Ten years and two daughters later,¹⁰ Ford and Elsie’s marriage ran into trouble (amongst its problems was the fact that Ford had an affair with Elsie’s sister Mary; Saunders I, 131–2) and he suffered a severe nervous breakdown in 1904, leaving him depressed, unable to work, or even to walk. It was decided he would travel to Germany to stay with his aunts and undertake a ‘nerve cure’. His many letters to Elsie that year were known to biographers and quoted by them. But to be able to read them through in their entirety is to encounter a poignant journal of breakdown, protracted by feelings of guilt at not being able to be with her and their children. It is also to encounter a portrait of unusually engaged fathering for the time, even if (or because) at a distance.

The postcards, which the edition will also reproduce, mostly for the first time, are especially evocative. Christina and Katharine collected the postcards and stamps, so there was an expectation that he would send them each one from every place he visited, or saw an interesting card of. The messages are therefore often correspondingly brief; but nonetheless charming, often inventing little snapshots of fairy stories or folklore for them; touching in his ability to be a loving parent even under such duress.

Ford’s return at the end of 1904 did not mark the end of the estrangement which had grown up between the couple. Elsie was ill herself at the time, with a still-undiagnosed tubercular kidney. She travelled herself over the next couple of years, leaving Ford to act as an even more engaged single father to the girls (with the help of a Swedish nanny). ‘I had a letter from you this morning’, he wrote to Elsie in March 1906, ‘the one in which you speak of the children’s clothes. —I will see about new dresses for them as soon as this wintry spell is over: at present snow lies everywhere and it would be dangerous to put them into thinner things’ (Cornell 36.057). He continues in that letter to discuss the girls’ hair, an update to a long-running battle with the effects of ring-worm since the previous summer.¹¹

Ford had also begun to achieve professional success by this point, first with The Soul of London in 1905, then its sequel The Heart of the Country the following year, along with the first volume of his trilogy The Fifth Queen (Saunders I, 195; 212). The boost this gave him appears to have brought him out of the depression that had characterised some, but by no means all, of his letters of recent years.

The absence of family correspondence and personal material from Ludwig’s selection was very much of its time. Modernism was taught as a movement predominantly about ‘impersonality’ and ‘tradition’ and objectivity, the words on the page, rather than about the individual talent and the personality or intention of the artist. Ford was not being singled out for non-attention of this kind. Genres of life writing which have traditionally put personality at their heart—genres like biography and autobiography and letters—were less regarded, seen as irrelevant to the thing that mattered: the impersonal work. Opportunities for seeing the full range of connexions between the letters and the work—connexions, we want to suggest, that are especially vibrant in Ford—were therefore either missed or avoided.

Of course people carried on writing biographies of modernists. As in Ford’s case, there were selections of letters by major figures like Joyce, Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Henry James. They were mostly chosen for their literary criticism—for what light they would shed on the author’s works, their critical views. What there did not seem a call for, was the collected or complete letters of modernist writers.

But in the later years of the twentieth century they began to appear. First D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, from the late 70s into the 80s. Then Conrad’s began appearing from 1983. And various collections of exchanges between Pound and individual correspondents: Pound/Joyce; Pound/Ford; Pound/Lewis and so on.

Ford’s correspondence with the American novelist Caroline Gordon appeared in 1999. There is also a life writing volume about Jeanne Foster, who worked for the lawyer and patron of modernism, John Quinn, entitled Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford (Lindberg-Seyersted, 1983), including Ford’s letters to her. Presumably those volumes were published because their editors thought they were the best or most important examples or shed new light on an important literary friendship. The test case was always going to be T. S. Eliot, the master of impersonality. But a ‘volume 1’ of his letters too appeared in 1988 (Lindberg-Seyersted, 1999), taking us up to the annus mirabilis of The Waste Land. Times appeared to be changing. But then the Eliot letters froze, and it would be 23 years, and another century, before volume two came out in 2011.

This century it is a different story. One might say that this is the great period of modernist letter editing. The Conrad collected letters were completed in 2007, in nine volumes. The Ezra Pound Society’s website lists over thirty published volumes of Pound’s correspondence.¹² Even Beckett, of whom we should never have expected it, managed four volumes. The first nine volumes of T. S. Eliot take us only up to 1941; still another 24 years to go. Most have covered two-three years so that could mean up to a further 12 volumes. And there are major complete letters projects underway for numerous modern and modernist authors: Henry James, May Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway (volume six was published in 2024, taking readers up to 1936), Evelyn Waugh and many others. And now including Ford.

We have made a case above about what our edition will add to the scholarly record. As part of returning to that in more detail we want to address the case for an edition of any writer’s collected letters—or indeed complete works. Modernism has moved on by at least one generation and critics are now more receptive to the idea (the engagement of feminist scholars and scholars of race, postcolonial and queer theorists with the New Modernist Studies offers one way of understanding the shift; Mao 3); but it also increasingly suits academic publishers to produce scholarly, critical editions and complete works because they know they can sell them to libraries, at a time when it is becoming harder to sell books to anyone. These are often vast projects, running over several decades. It suits academics to edit them, because they correct and expand knowledge and understanding of the writers they research, and provide quality publications for CVs and Research Assessment exercises. But does it suit readers? Who has time to read them, when people are devoting less time to reading text in book form? And do we need them for every writer of any stature, given that most of us are unlikely to wade through the complete letters of more than a few of the writers we are most interested in. As soon as the Conrad edition was complete, Cambridge University Press immediately issued a selection from it, priced much lower than the individual volumes of the Collected Letters—as they had done with D. H. Lawrence too; conceding that that shorter form was what most readers would prefer.

That suggestion that most of the letters in such editions may be little read taps into a long-standing and more swingeing criticism, often condensed into the quip that scholars are dredging up the laundry lists of famous figures—the paper trails generated by any life, and which have no conceivable interest to readers interested in important public figures or important writers. Of course we now take material culture more seriously than we used to, and it’s not hard to imagine scholarly careers being built upon the laundry lists of Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf. But the force of the objection remains: some of the letters may simply not seem worth publishing. They doubtless were necessary at the time: to write to the bank or the literary agent about money; to let someone know what train they were catching; to order something from a shop and so on. What use can the editing and publishing of such material serve? And if it seems like many of the major writers of the period already have such monuments, do we really need them for the less well-known figures?

Ford is a good test-case of such questions precisely because his status has been contested; as Frank Kermode argued, ‘He has somehow hovered on the threshold of immortality’ (Kermode, 1). When you start work on, or even contemplate, a Collected Letters, there are usually already some road-blocks in place, in the form of selections of that writer’s letters having already been published somewhere, not only in an arbitrary way but sometimes in quite different forms: a selection across their life in letters; the grouping together of letters to just one recipient; the publication of both sides of other epistolary relationships. All of these apply to Ford. And yet: the letters read differently in these different types of collection. A volume such as Pound/Ford constitutes a case for the significance of their friendship, both to them and to modern literary history. A letter read in that context speaks primarily to the ebb and flow of that friendship and their shared aims. The same letter read in Ford’s collected letters will encourage comparison of what Ford wrote to Pound with what he was writing to others. Also, it’s not just the case that more of the letters can productively be brought to the fore in a proper edition, as demonstrated with regard to Elsie: the letters show better from being re-edited in coherent, consistent and modern form.

We offer two key illustrations here.

On his first visit to the US, in 1906, Ford wrote his agent J. B. Pinker a rather moany letter (Image 2) cursing him for having encouraged him to make the trip, which was proving expensive and frustrating because everyone he wanted to see was on holiday in August:

Image 2

Well, moany in a self-dramatising, funny way.

Ludwig reproduced the letter (23–24), which he has ending rather abruptly, with ‘Well: farewell.’ [Then a square bracket with just the word ‘Illegible’; then] ‘Yrs,’.

But that illegible sign-off is really the best bit: ‘May the Lord avert his face from you when you desire to sin’. It brings it full circle, since he started by saying ‘May the Lord pardon you’ to Pinker for wanting him to go there. But it shows Ford’s sly humour to great effect. Pinker is such a sinner the Lord cannot do anything to stop him; all he can do is turn away and not see how bad the sin (or the desire to sin) is. It leaves the letter feeling much more like friendly banter than misery or bitterness.

In another example, Ford wrote to Conrad after being shell-shocked on the Somme in 1916 (Image 3), and later being taken to a Red Cross hospital in Rouen. On the way, he said, he’d seen the ‘something’ of Flaubert out of the back of the ambulance. Ludwig had made of this ‘the trésors[?]’ (79) of Flaubert. Which doesn’t quite make sense, but perhaps he thought it was an ironic comment on the provincial beauties of the city. Sondra Stang (with the help of several colleagues) worked out when she republished these wonderful war letters to Conrad, that what he actually saw, looking up at the statue of Flaubert, was not his ‘trésors’ but his ‘trousers’ (Stang, 177).

Image 3

So another value we hope to add to Ludwig’s selection is providing better readings of the handwritten letters. As illustrated by these examples, Ford’s handwriting is often difficult. This is more than a scholarly fetish for accuracy. Care for what Ford actually wrote, and the presentation of as much of it as possible, furnishes readers with a more rounded sense of his personal life; of his dealings with the literary marketplace; and of his interactions with other important writers. Also, Ludwig’s annotations are minimal, and we can now draw on much richer contextual knowledge about Ford and his milieu in the ways that we showed at the beginning of this section. Then there is the fact that Elsie is not the only serious absence from the narrative of Ford’s life that Ludwig creates. None of his subsequent long-standing relationships with women figure in his selection either. The Collected Letters address this collective silence as part of its most important work.

That said, we need to recognize that letters are normally a sign that people are apart, and so may not be the best guide to what they were like when together. (Altman notes in her classic study of epistolary fiction that in the epistolary ‘situation’, ‘both time lags and absence play a large role’, 132.) We must resist the temptation to assume the archival record takes the same shape as the writer’s life. In some ways it can be the inverse, because they’re writing to the people they’re not spending their time with. Though of course, from another point of view, writing a letter to someone is spending time with them, at least in imagination; devoting part of your day to them rather than the people you’re sharing your space with.

Ford had three long-term relationships after his separation from Elsie: one with the novelist Violet Hunt (1862–1942) before and during the First World War, then two more after the war, with two painters: the Australian Stella Bowen (1893–1947), and the American Janice Biala (1903–2000). Ford’s relationships are notable in that they all begin, or certainly intensify very rapidly, in correspondence; his relationship with Elsie certainly started a pattern in this regard.

Life/Writing Discoveries

Up to 1990 biographers thought they had the main contours of his private life charted. But there was something of a gap, in 1928–29. Ford had been with Stella Bowen, whom he’d met during the war, for a decade. He had started going on lecture tours to the USA on the strength of the success of his Parade’s End sequence of novels. And there he met and became involved with another woman, Rene Wright. Ford and Stella decided to separate. But the relationship with Rene Wright did not work out, and by 1930 Ford was on his own, and very despondent; until he met Janice Biala, the American painter with whom he would spend the rest of his life.

Biographers understandably assumed his despondency was due to loneliness; and that because he was miserable he wasn’t writing many letters. It was odd, because there was quite a long period—well over a year—about which we knew very little; and almost nothing about what he was doing in America in the early months of 1929.

Then in 1990 the novelist Alan Judd published an engaging new biography of Ford which was widely reviewed. A young man in America wrote to him and told him that his grandmother had just died, and had been keeping 60 love letters from Ford Madox Ford. The grandmother was someone called Elizabeth Cheatham—a name unknown till then to Ford’s biographers. Except that Alan Judd had discussed the ‘women in Ford’s life’ with Janice Biala, the last of them, who had mentioned one who she said she knew nothing about but thought her name was Elizabeth (Judd, 365).

And suddenly we had that whole part of the story. Cheatham had been visiting Paris with a friend and had met Ford at a party in the spring of 1928, and they had immediately become very close. Then—it appears a genuine coincidence—they were both on the same transatlantic liner to New York in May, and he wrote her a poem nearly every day of the voyage. She was clearly flattered and entranced by him, and described this time in her journal as ‘the realest, most wonderful love affair of my life’ (Saunders, A Dual Life, II, 337). Now they too were trying to see a way to get married. Though yet again, Elsie Hueffer refused to divorce Ford, even though they had not seen each other for twenty years.

This cache of letters completely changed our understanding of Ford’s life in this period, and filled in that blank patch in surprising ways. Where Arthur Mizener had thought Ford’s despondency in 1929 was due to being unable to marry Wright (385), it turned out that it was because he couldn’t marry Cheatham. The letters are candid about his difficulties in trying to disentangle himself from Wright; as they are about Ford’s love for Cheatham; and how he was weaving thoughts about her into the novels he was writing in this period. Because the situation unfolded in such a fraught way, which precluded them being together much, let alone going about together in public, this touching relationship had little existence outside their letters.

That is the most dramatic example of new material coming into the public domain, and in letter form; but there have been two others since Mizener’s and Judd’s biographies, which both add much to the biographical account. One was a cache of the letters Ford had written to Violet Hunt from that ill-fated stay in Germany in 1910–11; the other is the cache of the letters he wrote to Janice Biala on the two occasions they were apart in their nine-year life together. What these both show, like the letters to Elizabeth Cheatham, is the extent to which Ford put so much of himself, and what mattered to him, into the letters to his lover of the time. That’s why there is often relatively little anywhere else, such as in letters to others. Ford was a private man, and did not believe in writing about his personal life in his memoirs, or in letters to other people. His love letters are the best window we have into his private life and, more surprisingly, his mind. We see him creating and recreating his personality, his literary, personal identities, by letter, in ways that earlier editors either could not, or chose not to, show. Moreover, they offer a different sense of the shape of Ford’s life: in particular his tendency to focus on a single recipient. Mostly women, and usually the one he was in love with: Elsie; Hunt; Bowen; Cheatham; Biala.¹³

The latest cache of personal letters has only recently become available, and is one of the most interesting: over 40 letters from Ford to his last partner, the American painter Janice Biala, together with some of Biala’s revealing replies. There is a brief account of them in Ford Madox Ford: Critical Lives (Saunders 2023, 154–61; see also Andrew and Stannard in International Ford Madox Ford Studies, volumes 10 and 15, ¹⁴). But otherwise these will be new to Ford scholars and everyone else when published in the Collected Letters.

They are extraordinary letters. They were mostly written just a few months after Ford and Biala had got together. He had to go to New York in the autumn of 1930 to try to get better publishing contracts. It was the Depression and he and Biala had very little to live on. They both write very passionately, but he also keeps her posted about all the gossip. We’ve chosen one good example as an illustration here. Despite being broke Ford managed to get a publisher to pay for a large party for him at the Plaza—he was supposed to be working for them as a sort of talent scout. A lot of drink flows. Then he and some friends go on to another party at Harold Loeb’s, with more drink—this all during Prohibition of course. Then, at two o’clock that morning, and despite the drink, Ford set off with Harold Loeb and his girlfriend, and a publisher friend, to drive down to Tennessee to visit Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon:

Biala echoed this last thought, writing: ‘I hope you won’t think me indecent and that you don’t leave these letters around but the fact is that nothing can happen to me till I’ve slept with you again. I hate to be so immodest but what the hell!’ ([15 November] 1930: Cornell.) These letters give us a much more physical Ford than those to his other partners. Stella Bowen portrayed Ford as too needy to allow her the space to develop her own work. But with Biala, he’s constantly reassuring her about her talent; and telling her that being with her has given him back his power over words.

But it was what came across in her letters to him that was the biggest surprise. After World War Two, when Ford scholars dealt with her as his executor, she was a very strong personality, fiercely defending Ford’s copyrights and trying to control his reputation. She felt, with justification, that gossip about his personal life had damaged his standing. Like Ford, she had a strong sense of privacy, and felt their private life should remain private, and that readers and critics should concentrate on his creative work. Indeed, it was largely because of her control of the Ford Estate that scholars like Ludwig were unable to publish the correspondence from his relationships—though she did graciously allow Saunders to see, and quote from, some of Ford’s letters to her; and magnanimously gave her permission for Ford’s entire correspondence with Stella Bowen to be published in the early 1990s (Stang, 1993). She seemed very assured; not just about Ford’s worth; but also—again with justification—about her own stylish, painterly work, her own identity as an artist. These early letters to Ford tell a very different story. She had walked away from a failed marriage and a failed relationship in America with two other painters. She was tortured with guilt about them, about what her parents would think about her involvement with the much older Ford; tortured with anxiety about her ability to paint; she was almost trapped in Ford’s flat in Paris, with not enough money to go out, not enough French to speak even to the landlady. She was isolated and appears to have been suffering from what were probably panic attacks. That vulnerability is perhaps why she didn’t want the correspondence to be made public—and not just during her lifetime. She asked one of her nieces to burn it. And the niece, in a stroke of brilliance, went and got her the matches and said ‘You do it’. She knew Biala wouldn’t be able to bear burning Ford’s writing. So the letters are now safely archived. What they show is how well Ford functioned in a relationship where his partner needed emotional support. He helped her to find herself, to believe in herself, and to come through what was clearly a major crisis.

New letters like these can transform our view of a writer. But new scholarship on the letters can make a difference too; sometimes modest; sometimes more consequential. The sheer process of collecting and editing and annotating all a writer’s letters tends to thicken the biography, in a variety of ways. When you’re doing biographical work, or even critical work with a biographical angle, questions keep arising: when did writer X meet writer Y, or read her manuscript? When did the writer move house from A to B? How long was he holidaying in France that summer? How often did he write to Z? Sometimes the evidence simply doesn’t exist, or hasn’t yet been found, to answer them. But usually, making jigsaws of the letters gets us as close as possible, closing down the date-range as precisely as possible.

One of our major challenges in this respect is that many of Ford’s letters are undated. Where the early letters to Elsie have been dated, it’s usually in pencil, in another hand—and for reasons, we think, related to the court case following their elopement as volume 1 of the letters will explore. Similarly, most of his letters to his agent Pinker are undated. A lot of these letters are quite short and have little information that enables us to date them. They do have a lot of information about the progress of his writing, which it would be good to be able to date more precisely. Another reason for needing a date is so we that we can place them, and accordingly events of Ford’s life and thought, in the right order. Editing and annotating all the letters is the best way of approximating to the ideal order. It is only when this activity is undertaken that patterns can emerge: a change in address or signature; a change of writing paper, or of the printed letterhead on it; a sequence of references to a publisher or a manuscript.

We have been clear from the start that this Collected Letters, and the projected plan for a Complete Works, is also a life-writing project. The letters are themselves life-writing texts, so in their case it is most evidently that. But the idea of producing them at the beginning of the Complete Works is that they will inform the editing of all the rest, providing much more detailed information about the sources, the writing, revision and publication of all his works. A writer’s Complete Letters gives a much finer-grained sense of what was he writing when; what he was thinking/saying about it. But it also offers a whole range of new or better insights into the writer.

These personal letters are all accessible in university or public libraries; but mostly in the USA and most had not been digitized before we began the imaging process. Access was not easy or cheap, and as we have outlined the script is often hard to decrypt. Having them all in print will enable scholars to read through, and read across them, easily and quickly; and in (we hope) that right order. And that will change our understanding of not only Ford’s letters, but, in the ways we have demonstrated, his life and his work, enormously, in turn re-shaping future scholarship and knowledge-building about Ford, his literary networks, and contemporary literature more widely. There are times, after all, when the dating of a letter can have much larger consequences.

In his 1996 biography of Ford, A Dual Life, Saunders wrote what may be the longest footnote in history, running over three pages of minute type (Saunders I, 557–9). This argues for a redating of an undated Conrad letter, which his Collected Letters editors are convinced is from either “28 April or 5 May 1909” (Karl and Davies, 220–23). There’s no editorial question mark to indicate any doubt. In our view, however, none of their evidence for the dating is conclusive, and we suggest that the letter was in fact written four or five weeks earlier, on 31 March—which is not really a contentious date, as it’s also when Ford’s earlier biographer Arthur Mizener placed it. But part of the comedy of this episode is that part of the evidence is another undated letter, this time from Ford to Elsie, which Mizener appears to have misdated (as 8 May instead of 7 April; Mizener, 184). Most of Ford’s letters, including the ones to Elsie, are now at Cornell and all carefully catalogued. When Mizener was working on them they were still in the possession of Elsie and Ford’s younger daughter Katharine Lamb—presumably kept in some kind of storage box. The letters of those two dates both have envelopes with postmarks which are the only evidence for their date; but they had probably been mixed up. The 8 May envelope is written with a broader nib than the 7 April one; but the letter in it matches the narrower nib of the earlier envelope. Of course we may be wrong. Maybe it was pressure on the nib that splayed it out; and maybe Ford was pressing harder writing the envelope because the ink was running dry. But it would have been very easy for the family, or an early biographer, to have inadvertently switched the letters round. To other eyes than those of letters’ editors, after all, the envelopes are more important as protective, rather than dating, devices.

Why might this matter—to biographers, editors, scholars? Well, the letter was written during one of the most fraught periods in Ford’s life. He had become involved with Violet Hunt; was trying to divorce Elsie. She then told him that spring that their close friend Arthur Marwood had ‘made advances’ towards her. This put Ford in an impossible position. Marwood was his best friend (and is often seen as a model for some of Ford’s key characters, including Ashburnham in The Good Soldier and Tietjens in Parade’s End). He was also financing the English Review, Ford’s magazine. Ford’s solicitor looked at what Marwood had written to Elsie and seemed to think there was something in the claim. So Ford felt he had to refuse to have anything more to do with Marwood, who was an invalid, and made miserable by the whole situation.

Also that spring, Ford managed to fall out with many of his other closest friends, especially Conrad and H. G. Wells, both of whom were also involved in the Review. Conrad wrote a couple of angry letters to Ford, accusing him of behaving egotistically and self-destructively.

Scholars—especially the previous generation of Conradians, such as Zdzisław Najder, but also Mizener—have seen the sequence as starting with Ford behaving unreasonably to Conrad and Wells, then freezing out Marwood (in a way Conrad thought cruel), as if he were behaving neurotically, and Conrad was the voice of sanity. It is true that Conrad does sound worried about the damage to Ford’s relationships. But it was Conrad who collapsed and took to his bed having conversations with the characters of Under Western Eyes on finishing it at the beginning of 1910—just months after his break with Ford (Karl, Joseph Conrad, 680–81).

It is also true that Ford’s letters to Wells, and what we gather of his letters to Conrad from Conrad’s replies, show him thrashing around, claiming to be indifferent when he’s clearly angry and hurt. But if Conrad’s letter rebuking Ford over Marwood is 4–5 weeks earlier, then the sequence is the other way around. It is Ford’s distress over Marwood, and the way their falling out jeopardizes the English Review, that puts a strain on his relations with their mutual friends, especially Conrad. And that makes Ford seem much less irrational and wantonly destructive, and his sensitivity and defensive letters much more understandable.

Sometimes editorial decisions about which order letters were written in, and which order they are then read in, therefore, become the basis for biographical and scholarly narratives with implications well beyond those of an individual writer. Collected Letters, like Complete Works, provide opportunities to corroborate or challenge such narratives—at the same time as developing them.

Conclusion

Modernism also used to be presented as a movement which leant towards ‘the disjointed, disintegrating and discordant’, with dominant critical narratives of alienation and fragmentation (Childs, 18). But letters connect, and in more ways than we knew. Access to all Ford’s letters enriches our sense of the progress and development of his work, his literary networks and his views. Letters to his agent, Pinker, are a constant thread from the early years of the century to Pinker’s death in 1922. Ford was even closer to Conrad while they were collaborating on three books between 1898 and 1908. But unfortunately Conrad did not keep most of his incoming correspondence, so although we know Ford wrote to him constantly (not least because we have many of Conrad’s replies), Ford’s letters to him have mostly not survived. This has produced a curious situation in which we know what was in a number of important letters that no longer exist. To address this phenomenon we provide in our edition formal entries for such ‘ghost letters’, giving readers a glimpse of their contribution to the record by quoting what others quoted from them or said about them. Ford knew so many other important writers through his friendships with Conrad, James and Wells; then through his editorships of the English Review in prewar modernist London, and the transatlantic review in postwar modernist Paris; and then in New York too in the 1920s and 1930s. A complete picture of Ford’s correspondence tells us a great deal about Modernism and its networks and those of other modern writing, at the same time as providing a freshly granular sense of what Ford was thinking, doing, and writing, often on a daily basis, as he composed his works. Preserving, comprehending, fully utilising and interpreting Ford’s letters is essential new era activity, especially applicable to this writer whose letters to the women that he loved, as we have demonstrated here, reveal so much that we could not appreciate about how he found his voice; where it came from.

Ford’s poetics—which he defined as quiet talking into the ear of someone he liked a good deal (Saunders I, 391–401)—would not have been formulated quite like that were it not for years of essential epistolary practice: writing to a sympathetic listener, a silent listener, with whom he was at least half in love. And the point is that that silence, the protected space of that conversation, enabled him to develop and express his personality; even to create it; and to create, through dialogue, his different loves. As he wrote of Edward Ashburnham in The Good Soldier:

But of course to put it like that is to demonstrate the impossibility of separating the private from the public in writers who must draw upon their personal experience in the creative work. Ford’s love letters, that is, do not just create his loves; they create his aesthetics, and create material for his aesthetic principles to work upon.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.