Ford Madox Ford

Con una complicada cronología escalonada de los argumentos, admirablemente graduados por los flujos del tiempo y la narración, Ford Madox Ford descompone en El buen soldado (1915) el cuadro de una supuesta normalidad familiar tardo-victoriana y lo recompone en un laberinto de complejidades e interrogantes: toda vida parece esconder muchas otras en su seno. Este descubrimiento novelesco no se limita a la evocacion de algunos personajes y de sus complejas historias de amor, si bien es cierto que Edward Ashburnham, Leonora, Florence y John Dowell cobran existencia para nosotros, despues de unas pocas paginas, con una concrecion irrevocable y casi dolorosa.

En una novela tan breve como El buen soldado, Ford Madox Ford relata dos suicidios, dos vidas arruinadas, una muerte y el descenso a la locura de una joven muchacha. Mediante la historia de pasión protagonizada por los matrimonios Ashburnham y Dowell, se nos muestran las interioridades de lo que se dio en llamar la sociedad internacional y los asuntos crueles y oscuros que la gente bien del periodo de entreguerras intentaba a toda costa mantener ocultos.

Ford Madox Ford spent his last years in the south of France, near Toulon. In Provence (1935), written four years before his death, he explores both the place and the idea of it: not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind. Suffused with a northern Europeans love for the Roman province that lies beneath the sun, Provence evokes scents of rosemary and thyme in the dry air, games of boules amid shadows of ancient ruins, the food and flinty local wines. Part memoir, part travel narrative, part history of the region, Provence displays Fords wise, beguiling curiosity. Humorous, informed digressions take in the Albigensian heresy, bull-fighting, a favourite recipe for bouillabaisse, Henry James and Ellen Terry, the Troubadours and much else. Over the gaiety looms the coming barbarism, the fixed bayonets, machine guns, uniforms and arresting fists, against which Fords Provence is a fragile, precious hope for civilised values. This edition is based on the authoritative 1935 Lippincott edition and includes the original illustrations by Fords companion, the outstanding American artist Biala.

Some Do Not..., the first volume of Parades End, introduces the central characters: Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant mathematician; his dazzling, unfaithful wife Sylvia; and the young Suffragette Valentine Wannop. It starts with the cataclysmic weekend that throws Tietjens and Valentine together. It ends in 1917 as the two are on the verge of becoming lovers, before Tietjens prepares to return to the Front and probable death. Some Do Not... is an unforgettable exploration of the tensions of a society facing catastrophe, as the energies of sexuality and power erupt into violence. Some Do Not... includes: the first reliable text, based on the manuscript and first editions; a major critical introduction by Max Saunders, Fords acclaimed biographer; an account of the novels composition and reception; a reconstruction of Fords dramatic original ending, published complete for the first time; annotations explaining historical references, military terms, literary and topical allusions; a full textual apparatus including transcriptions of significant deletions and revisions; a bibliography of further reading.

Ford Madox Fords post-war masterpiece, Parades End, is recognised as one of the great British novels about the First World War. This selection from his other extensive writings about the war, published and unpublished, sheds light on the tetralogy. It includes reminiscences, an unfinished novel, stories and excerpts from letters. Ford was in his forties when he enlisted: this made him one of the few writers of his maturity to fight on the Western Front. His experience of combat was limited, but he was in the Battle of the Somme, was often under bombardment, and suffered from shell-shock. His largely psychological response to the war anticipates the recent renewal of interest in trauma and shell-shock (as, for example, in Pat Barkers Ghost Road trilogy). This book provides important testimony by one of the best writers of his generation.

During a Christmas leave in London, Ford Madox Ford attended a party at the French Embassy, a heavy blond man in a faded uniform, wearied by years of war, recalled to a longing for the life of a writer. The evening marks the beginning of a new phase of Fords life, the years of It Was the Nightingale. Ford evokes the literary milieux of London, Paris and New York between the wars with sparkle, wit and energy. Recollections range across time in a subtle and flexible narrative that fuses fiction and memoir. A memory of a dark January day in Paris, in the weeks between dog and wolf, when Ford read the news of the death of the novelist John Galsworthy, triggers an exploration of the transition from an entire pre-war world: a ghost had passed, writes Ford, and Nancy Cunard steps forward like a jewelled tropical bird. Here is James Joyce, whom Ford found dull company with his thin little jokes; Ezra Pound playing Provencal songs on the bassoon; Gertrude Stein driving through the streets of Paris with the solemn snail-like precision of a Pharoah. Behind the vivacity other ghosts, too, are always present: men killed and damaged in the war, mental breakdown and betrayal, out of which Ford was to create his best-loved novel, Parades End.

A Man Could Stand Up -the third volume of Parades End, brings Fords characters to the crack across the table of History, across which lie their uncertain post-war futures. Divided into three parts, the novel is a kaleidoscopic vision of society at a climactic moment. The Armistice Day fireworks heard by Valentine Wannop in London with which the novel opens are echoed in the nightmare bombardment of the second part, as we are taken back to the war and Christopher Tietjens, staggering through the mud of No Mans Land with a wounded soldier in his arms. The final section returns to Armistice Day and joins the two characters in a frenetic dance, while Tietjens wartime comrades smash glasses drunkenly around them. For the first time, the four novels that make up Ford Madox Fords First World War masterpiece Parades End are published in fully annotated editions, with authoritative corrected texts. Each novel is edited by a leading Ford expert. A Man Could Stand Up - includes -- the first reliable text, based on the hand-corrected typescript and first editions -- a major critical introduction by Sara Haslam, Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University and author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War -- an account of the novels composition and reception -- annotations explaining historical references, military terms, literary and topical allusions -- a full textual apparatus including transcriptions of significant deletions and revisions -- a bibliography of further reading. Cover painting: Paul Nash, The Menin Road,1919, IWM Art 2242 (detail). By permission of the Imperial War Museum. Cover design StephenRaw.com

'All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked.' In 'the saddest story I have ever heard', a naive American abroad unfolds a devastating tale of two seemingly respectable Edwardian marriages destroyed by infidelity and lies.

El buen soldado es una obra donde se aplican de manera revolucionaria y magistral la narración en primera persona y los flashbacks cronológicamente desordenados. Ambientada en la época inmediatamente anterior a la Primera Guerra Mundial y en la que se trata el declive y la disolucion de dos matrimonios amigos aparentemente perfectos, tienen cabida muchas cosas convulsas, excesivas: ruina, mentiras, amor adultero, escandalo, suicidio, locura. Con semejantes ingredientes, el lector podria estar tentado de creer que se encuentra ante un folletin, pero son la excelencia de la escritura de Ford Madox Ford y el habil uso del narrador no fiable los que hacen de este libro una obra maestra que merece ser leida y disfrutada.

In 1911 some of D.H. Lawrences poems and his story Odour of Chrysanthemums found their way, without his knowledge, to the desk of the editor of the English Review, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford). Ford was astonished and invited Lawrence to meet him, which the poet did with superb reluctance. Ford reinvents the meeting in 1937, recalling how, He had come, like the fox, with his overflood of energy - his abounding vitality of passionate determination that seemed always too big for his frail body. Ford included the work in the English Review, talked up the new writer, and handed on his first novel, The White Peacock, to Messrs Heinemann. It is hard to understate the impact that Ford had on the literature of his age. His work as a magazine editor alone ensures him a place in the annals of Modernism; his patronage, his successful as much as his squandered aid - to Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Hudson, Pound, Conrad, Joyce, Stein, early Hemingway, Cummings, Rhys and others remembered and forgotten - is a huge chapter of literary history. As well as being an enabler, he was also a great critic, with the ability to read the present and re-read the past with independent vision. Series Editor: Bill Hutchings

Last Post, the fourth and final volume of Parades End, is set on a single post-war summers day. Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex with Tietjens brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing perspectives, Ford explores the tensions between his characters in a changing world, haunted by the experience of war, facing an insecure future for themselves and for England. The Tietjens ancestral home has been let to an American, its great tree felled; those like Tietjens who have served in the war find there is no place for them in a demoralised civilian society. The celebrations of Armistice Day have been replaced by the uncertainties of peacetime. How are we to live? asks Valentine, as a death and an imminent birth bring Fords great sequence to a close.Last Post includes:-- the first reliable text based on the hand-corrected typescript of first editions-- a major critical introduction by Paul Skinner, editor of Fords novel No Enemy and of Ford Madox Ford: Literary Contacts (International Ford Madox Ford Studies 6)-- an account of the novels composition and reception-- annotations explaining historical references and literary and topical allusions-- a full textual apparatus including transcriptions of significant deletions and revisions-- a bibliography of further reading

Ford Madox Ford Introduction and notes by Caroline Patey Activities by Peter De Ville Passion, intrigue and deception lie behind the facade of the Edwardian gentleman in Ford Madox Fords 1915 novel of tragi-comedy. This modernist tale of friendship between two couples, one American, one English, is charted by an unreliable narrator world-weary American millionaire John Dowell, one of the protagonists.

`The Rash Act ought to be bought and read by all interested in the novel as an art form... The action takes place in the French South which Ford loved, but man no longer sustains the tradition of myth and history which that region once represented... Here in The Rash Act we have the death of morality and responsibility - a forbidding theme, but, in the paradox of art, it is made to serve a tapestry of rich colour and galloping vivacity.''