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Max Saunders. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. I: xix + 632 pp. II: xvi + 696 pp. Paper $55.00
TOM STOPPARD'S BBC television dramatization of Parade's End may have been the impetus for the somewhat revised edition of Max Saunders's hefty Ford Madox Ford (1996), reviewed on first publication as "irresistible" in ELT. Although it is the longest, and very likely the best life of Ford, it violates a basic canon of biographical writing. Saun- ders's hundred-plus references in the text to Arthur Mizener's biogra- phy, The Saddest Story (1972), are meanly carping and, if ad hominem rebuttals and refutations were really crucial, could have been limited to the hundreds of pages of endnotes. As early as page nine of his preface Saunders claims that the Mizener approach (and that of some others) to Ford's reimagining his past tends to "belittle the writing, by seeing it ultimately as neurotic distortion rather than conscious elaboration and transformation of reality." That a Mizener interpretation "doesn't stand up to scrutiny" or is "single-minded" is repeated in various ob- jections throughout both volumes. "What Mizener doesn't notice" and "Mizener casts doubt" both appear on the same page. The repetitions of such cavils are peevish and wearying.
It is the ouevre rather than the author that counts, Saunders avers; yet he, too, cannot separate the author from his works. Ford worked that way. "It would not be an exaggeration to say, with Janice Biala," Saunders writes, "that his"-Ford's-"life was a fiction." And he quotes Kenneth Rexroth as confirming that "Ford's life was a novel," and that he was "constantly writing and re-writing that novel."
Ford Madox Hueffer-as he was until 1919-was born into a Pre-Raphaelite world. Although he embellished the story of his life in a plethora of memoirs, and exploited his life creatively in fiction, he is re- membered, despite Saunders's pages and pages analyzing every work over sixty prolific years, for two undoubted masterpieces. The Good Soldier (1915) has been called the greatest French novel in English. The assessment stands up. The absorbing, claustrophobic, sexually du- plicitous narrative reads as if it were written by Vladimir Nabokov at the top of his form. The expatriate narrator is a timid, self-deluded Philadelphia...