Content To Be Superseded

‘CONTENT TO BE SUPERSEDED’?
:
FORD IN THE GREAT LONDON VORTEX
Andrzej Gasiorek
It is always instructive to consider the past; a foreign country – they

do things differently there. Frank Swinnerton’s The Georgian Literary
Scene: 1910-1935 was first published in 1935, right up close to the
period whose distinctive features he was outlining. How things have
changed; Swinnerton’s perspective is not ours. Much of what
appeared significant to him has faded away, and much that he slighted
or passed over in silence has gained in importance. T. E. Hulme and
Ezra Pound don’t even make his index, and Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti doesn’t receive a mention; T. S. Eliot is discussed in
passing, an instance of ‘new academicism’; Wyndham Lewis gets
three pages, but Blast doesn’t exist; and Ford, ‘one of the enigmas of
current literature’ because of his inconsistency as a writer, is dealt
with in one page, principally as editor of The English Review and the
writer of ‘immense and highly original works on literary history’.1
Swinnerton’s own literary history differs markedly from those being
written now. This is especially true of his account of the years 1910-
1914. For Swinnerton, this period is dominated by writers such as
Hilaire Belloc, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad,
Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. In
more recent critical discussions, which tend to focus on the emergence
of modernism, it is ‘movements’ and/or ‘styles’ such as Impression-
ism, Italian Futurism and Vorticism that loom large, as do the writers
who are seen to have originated modernism in pre-war Britain: Eliot,
Ford, Hulme, Joyce, Lewis, Marinetti and Pound.
Swinnerton’s is a wide-ranging survey, and he is alert to the
differences between his chosen writers, but he derives his sense of the
pre-war years’ iconoclasm from Shaw and Wells, or even from
Bennett and Galsworthy. He has little sense of what we now think of
as the modernist desire for radical change and its insistence on cultural
renewal. One thinks here of Hulme’s call for a paradigm shift in the
culture’s conception of poetry and painting; Marinetti’s invocation of
primitivist energeia and his assault on all established aesthetic
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82 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
traditions; Lewis’s Cubist- and Futurist-inspired raids on technological

modernity; and Pound’s programme of linguistic renovation, coupled
with his growing contempt for a ‘philistine’ public seemingly
incapable of valuing the new arts. Shaw was frequently caustic in his
denunciations, but we would be hard pushed to find anything like this
– from Pound – in his writing:
To the present condition of things we have nothing to say but ‘merde’; and
this new wild sculpture says it [. . .] we artists who have been so long the
despised are about to take over control [. . .] And the public will do well to
resent these ‘new’ kinds of art.2
Or this, from Marinetti:
Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the
museums! . . . Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbling adrift
on those waters, discoloured and shredded! . . . Take up your pickaxes, your
axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!3
Or perhaps this, from Lewis:
BLAST
Years 1837 to 1900
Curse abysmal inexcusable middle-class
(also Aristocracy and Proletariat).
BLAST
Pasty shadow cast by gigantic Boehm
(imagined at Introduction of BOURGEOIS VICTORIAN
VISTAS).
WRING THE NECK OF all sick Inventions born in
that progressive white wake.4
It isn’t just the tone of these invectives that is new, but also the desire
for cultural destruction. Marinetti’s indiscriminate hostility to all the
art of the past was not shared by Lewis or Pound, who targeted the
Victorian period and its decayed remnants, but these three diatribes
against existing conditions demand their overthrow. Two features of
this demand are noticeable: firstly, its belief in a ‘time of the now’, in
the present as a moment pregnant with emancipatory possibilities that,
when unleashed by avant-garde activism, are immediately realisable;
secondly, its fear that these very possibilities may in reality never be
brought to fruition because the uncomprehending public will not
follow the lead of avant-garde artists.5 The tension between these two
views – one expressing hope, the other anxiety – is evident in the pre-

FORD IN THE GREAT LONDON VORTEX 83
war years. We find Lewis asserting that English cultural stagnancy is

‘the reason why a movement towards art and imagination could burst
up here, from this lump of compressed life, with more force than
anywhere else’, and Pound, frustrated at the public’s confusion in the
face of modern art, declaring: ‘Damn the man in the street, once and
for all, damn the man in the street who is only in the street because he
hasn’t intelligence enough to be let in to anywhere else . . .’.6
There is no place for this heated rhetoric and its attendant
assumptions in Ford’s writing. Hugh Kenner rightly suggests that this
aspect of Pound’s thought disclosed ‘a glacial contempt remote from
th[e] central virtù’ of a creative spirit, which then badly weakened
Pound’s contributions to Blast.7 The extreme modernist conviction
that artist and public are locked in permanent opposition finds no echo
in Ford’s thought. He was fond of remarking that most human beings
were merely the stuff to fill graveyards, but he believed in writing for
them all, nonetheless. In his essay ‘On Impressionism’, which
appeared in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama in 1914, Ford took
issue with an unnamed ‘futurist friend’ on this very point. He insisted
that artists and writers should not address themselves to cultured elites
but to ordinary people, arguing that the latter had fewer aesthetic
preconceptions and were more open to new artistic experiments. This
was an obvious riposte to Pound, who was becoming increasingly
aggressive in his denunciations of the public at this time, though it’s
more than likely that the ‘futurist friend’ was in fact Lewis, since it is
Lewis who features in the various other stories Ford tells about being
rhetorically ‘blown up’ by the defenders of the new avant-gardism. Be
this as it may, the term ‘futurism’ had a pretty wide application at this
time, and Ford may also have been using it in a generic sense in order
to signal to the attentive reader that whatever else his writing was, it
was not this. By early to mid 1914 Futurism had become something of
a generic (and undiscriminating) label for modern art.8 By defining
himself against such views Ford was openly aligning himself with an
alternative conception of the aesthetic and of the function of the arts in
contemporary society.
But if this is so, then what was the opening section of the novel
that became The Good Soldier doing in the first issue of Blast? As is
well known, Blast drew inspiration from Cubism, Expressionism, and
Futurism, which it transmuted into Vorticism in an attempt to forge a
distinctive aesthetic and an accompanying avant-garde grouping that
could compete with these antecedent movements. Like Futurism, Blast

84 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
sought to inaugurate a cultural regeneration by undermining existing

civilisation from within. Combative in tone, iconoclastic in imagery,
and radical in style, Blast’s manifestos loudly promulgated an
aesthetic that took technological modernity as its point of departure,
declaring that machinery ‘is the greatest Earth-medium’ (B 39) and
that the modern artist should become conscious of ‘the new
possibilities of expression in present life’ (B 41). How was a poignant
tale titled ‘The Saddest Story’ (which later became The Good Soldier)
supposed to contribute to this regenerative effort? What was the
relationship between the subtle cadences of Ford’s prose and the
staccato rhythms of Blast’s verbal pugilism? What, finally, were the
implications for Lewis and Pound, on one side, and Ford on the other,
of printing an Impressionist work in a ‘little magazine’ that
everywhere proclaimed its hostility to Impressionism and interpreted
Futurism – which it also mocked throughout – as nothing more than
Impressionism speeded up? These are the questions I want to address
in this chapter. I shall focus on the Ford-Lewis-Pound nexus in the
years 1913-14 in order to suggest that, given the confused nature of
avant-garde skirmishing at this time, Ford’s presence in Blast isn’t as
surprising as it might initially seem, and that the publication of the
first section of The Good Soldier enabled him to mount a serious
challenge to Vorticism from within.
The Flicker of a Genre

Cultural confusion reigned in the pre-war period. And nowhere more
so than in fast-moving and fast-changing avant-garde circles. Edgar
Jepson, who was there at the time, couldn’t have got things more
wrong when he claimed that there were ‘the Futurists, of whom Signor
Marinetti was the spokesman, in Italy, and the Cubists, who derived
from one of the stunts of the frolic Señor Picasso, of whom Mr
Wyndham Lewis was the leader in England, and the Vorticist group,
led by Ford, which in England absorbed them both’.9 Well, you could
have fooled Lewis and Ford. In light of bizarre claims like Jepson’s,
perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the reviewers were bewildered
by Blast and that some of them, such as the conservatively inclined J.
C. Squire, for instance, not only saw the whole thing as a pathetic joke
but, contra Jepson, couldn’t understand what on earth Ford was doing
in it:

We haven’t a movement here, not even a mistaken one; all we have is a

heterogeneous mob suffering from juvenile decay tottering along
(accompanied by the absent-minded Mr. Hueffer in a tail-coat) in reach-me-
down fancy-dress uniforms (some of them extremely old-fashioned), trying to
discover as they go what their common destination is to be.10
The tail-coat is a good touch. When we try to assess phenomena like

Futurism and Vorticism it’s tempting to think of them in terms of their
own self-presentations – that is, as movements that enacted decisive
breaks not only with the traditions of the past but also with most of the
art and writing of their time. But the truth is more complex, as
Squire’s admittedly hostile review shows. For in reality, Futurism and
Vorticism were engaged in ramified negotiations with various other
movements. Blast, moreover, went through several iterations when it
was being planned and only became the aggressive Vorticist flagship
after a quarrel with Marinetti over the significance of contemporary
art currents.11 It was pragmatically put together, and many of its
contributions (by Eliot, Ford, Gore, and Pound) neither exemplified
Vorticist doctrine nor advanced its cause. Some of its inclusions seem
to have been picked up by accident, as in the case of Rebecca West’s
‘Indissoluble Matrimony’. Allegedly found by Lewis in a drawer at
South Lodge, its appearance in Blast prompted a somewhat bemused
response from the author: ‘I have just seen about Blast in the Times
Literary Supplement. It is described as a Manifesto of the Vorticists.
Am I a Vorticist? I am sure it can’t be good for Anthony [her son] if I
am’.12 If Ford had got himself tangled up with Blast in a fit of absent-
mindedness, then he wasn’t the only one who was there peradventure.
Yet in truth Ford, though no Vorticist, had more reason to be there
than most, and we shouldn’t let Lewis’s later claims that Blast had
lacked artistic coherence blind us to this fact.13
The inclusion of the opening to The Good Soldier in Blast has
usually been explained with reference to the personal links between
Ford, Lewis, and Pound. There is no doubt that this is right. Ford had
recognised Lewis’s talent and had published his first story (thereby
enabling another much embellished anecdote to enter the treasure-
house of the Fordian tall tale). He had also supported Pound in
numerous ways (among them, providing an introduction to Yeats), had
freed him from his outmoded poetic sensibility, and had sharpened his
critical thinking. Ford, moreover, had been one of the very few of an
older, more established generation of writers who had actively
promoted the younger novelists and poets in The English Review. He

86 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
was on their side – even if he didn’t always agree with their aesthetics
– because he was just as committed to literary and cultural renewal as
they were. But how such renewal could be achieved and what forms it
should take were vexed questions that provoked fierce arguments. If
it’s right that we stress the reasons for which Ford might have been
published in Blast, it’s equally important that we address the artistic
debates taking place circa 1913-14. There are two sets of triangulated
relationships in play here: first, between Ford, Lewis, and Pound;
second, between Impressionism, Futurism, and Vorticism. And
although there are numerous overlappings among and across them,
these relationships can’t simply be mapped onto each other.
To begin with, take Pound. It’s well known that Ford and Pound
spent a lot of time discussing the new poetry in the years leading up to
the war. Pound was hugely indebted to Ford for helping him to clarify
his own undeveloped aims, and he said so publicly. Ford’s theories
about poetry aided him when he came to articulate his Imagist poetics.
But it was a noticeable feature of his responses to Ford that he tended
to value his criticism more than his poetry. Pound claimed, for
example, that Ford’s ‘flaw is the flaw of impressionism’, arguing that
the ‘conception of poetry is a process more intense than the reception
of an impression’.14 Impressionism was in Pound’s view passive (it
depended on the impact made by external events on the receptive
mind) and superficial (it failed to penetrate the surface of social
phenomena in order to expose their underlying relations).15 Pound was
willing to concede that it had been the first significant assault on a
dead poetic tradition, but he insisted that it had not gone far enough;
he explained to Ford that he wanted to ‘put a vortex or concentration
point inside each bunch of impression [sic] and thereby give it a sort
of intensity, and goatish ability to butt’.16 In marked contrast to
Pound’s missionary zeal, which would lead him to fuse politics and
aesthetics after the First World War, Ford was a sceptic who had a
more cautious view of art’s civilising power and a less sanguine view
of political ideologies. He wrote in his study of James: ‘We stand
today, in the matter of political theories, naked to the wind and blind
to the sunlight’.17
The differences between Lewis and Pound are no less telling.
Although they collaborated over Blast, they came to the project with
different agendas. For the previous few years Pound had been urging a
cultural renaissance to be brought about by the purification of poetic
language. Imagism had represented a step in the direction of a

renewed poetics, but by 1914 Pound had effectively been ousted from
Imagism by Amy Lowell and had switched his allegiance to
Vorticism. Yet Pound was as out of place in Blast as Ford: the poems
he contributed were flaccid and his attempts to reform poetry by
sifting tradition for its serviceable elements didn’t accord with Lewis’s
search for a completely new pictorial and literary language. ‘Vortex.
Pound’ assaulted Impressionism and Futurism – as did Lewis – but
saw Picasso and Kandinsky as Vorticism’s co-parents (a view Lewis
never accepted and which he dismissed in Blast 2), emphasised the
importance of the image, and concluded with H. D.’s ‘Oread’, a
straightforwardly Imagist poem (B 154). It’s perhaps understandable
that Lewis would later remark about Blast: ‘It was with regret I
included the poems of my friend Ezra Pound: they “let down”, I felt,
the radical purism of the visual contents, or the propaganda of same’.18
As for Ford, Lewis had never particularly liked him and he had little
patience with Impressionism, though he did have some sympathy with
Ford’s critical writing.19
Observers who were au fait with pre-war avant-garde groups
were puzzled by some of the alliances they generated. For John Gould
Fletcher, for example, there was a contradiction between Pound’s
view of Vorticism as a development of Imagism and actual Vorticist
art.20 A. R. Orage was simply dismissive about the link between
Imagism and Vorticism: ‘I imagine myself that the only connection
between the two was due to the accident of friendliness. Mr. Pound
happened to like Mr. Wyndham Lewis, and there you are!’21
Friendliness may have played a role, but it’s more likely that the really
significant issue here was Lewis’s and Pound’s desire to differentiate
themselves from rival groups: in Pound’s case, the ‘Amygists’ who
were in his view destroying Imagism and undermining his position as
a poetic leader; in Lewis’s case, the Futurists who were threatening to
annexe English avant-garde painting and position him as a mere
adjunct to their cause.
The need to distinguish oneself from others and to define one’s
stance publicly was important if one’s ‘name’ was not to get lost in the
din of contending voices. But despite various attempts at avant-garde
self-definition, confusion reigned anyway. And when it comes to Blast
this was at least in part because it was such a heterogeneous artefact.
The reviewers picked up on this. Squire, for example, wrote of Ford’s
‘The Saddest Story’: ‘If this is Vorticism, we have known it all our
lives’.22 The trouble is, it wasn’t; it was something else altogether.

88 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
This point was made by Violet Hunt, who then immediately gave it an
evaluative spin when she claimed that it was ‘serious work too heavy
for the dashing advertisement poster that Blast really was’, before
going on to suggest that Vorticism was ‘a meet name for the flicker of
a genre that flourished just before the appearance in the world of the
Maelstrom of woe that sucked us all down into its vortex’.23
Advertising and Avant-gardism

One reason why ‘advanced’ artistic and literary positions weren’t
easily distinguishable was because the individuals articulating them
were mostly involved with one another in all sorts of ways, alliances
were made and remade with great regularity, and viewpoints
overlapped in complex patterns. Another was that the pre-war years
were marked by a strangely symbiotic relationship between the press,
aristocratic/bohemian social fractions, advertising, and the emergent
avant-gardes; the various outrages perpetrated by the latter were
gleefully seized upon by newspapers (especially in London) and given
a good deal of publicity. The new artists needed this journalistic
attention, needed to advertise themselves widely, because without this
kind of publicity their work would be passed over in silence. (Hence
the comment by Hunt that Blast was a ‘dashing advertisement poster’
and that Ford’s work was more ‘serious’ than this overt self-display.)
The relationship between artists, press, and public was an
ambivalent one.24 The press tended to trivialise the new movements by
discussing their antics rather than their art, to stress this art’s shock
value rather than any qualities it might have, and to focus on
personalities rather than ideas. Yet this treatment was in a sense
invited by the new movements themselves, as William Wees has
pointed out: ‘While the popular press helped create the public image
of the avant-garde movement as we know it today (no such image
existed until there was a popular press), the avant-garde, in effect,
endorsed the headline approach by producing leaders and followers,
schisms, dogmas, and common denominators that suited the
journalistic formulae’.25 The danger, of course, was that avant-gardism
(just one fad among many) took on the lineaments of fashion, building
its own obsolescence into its very modus operandi. This paradox
produces an impossible situation: if avant-garde work is not simply to
become coterie art, then it requires publicity; but if it risks being
reduced to publicity alone then the only alternatives are silence or a
self-defeating abandonment of the public domain.

Blast borrowed from newspaper culture in its approach to page

layout, typography, bullet-point itemisation of arguments, editorials
(manifestos), and its use of bold face type, eye-catching headlines, and
interspersed illustrations. Its whole self-presentation would also have
been unimaginable without the spread of advertising in the pre-war
years, since the composition of its pages adapted techniques deployed
by posters but also found in the newspapers of the day, where images
of commodities were routinely printed alongside articles.26 Paige
Reynolds has suggested that Blast resisted the simplistic messages
promoted by advertising, but still ‘displayed and celebrated’ a ‘merger
of English avant-garde and commercial art through the journal’s
aesthetics’.27 According to this reading, Blast tried to have it both
ways, using advertising techniques to promote itself but also to attack
a culture in thrall to advertising. Douglas Goldring put it as follows:
‘The list of the blasted appears to have been compiled from the
eminent figures whose publicity was considered boringly excessive.
We used, in those days, before we became case-hardened, to tire
easily of the much-advertised’.28
Blast engaged in this battle by turning early twentieth-century
culture’s weapons against it, a strategy that always carries with it the
risk of complicity with what is being attacked. Ford took a different
line. His Impressionism was part of an alternative strategy, which in
my view Lewis and Pound misunderstood when they dismissed it as
irrelevant to the modernity they were trying to critique. Ford’s
strategy, especially in the satires he wrote just before the war, was to
caricature a society given over to the logic of advertising, but without
using any of the techniques assembled by advertising. Mr. Fleight
(1913) is the exemplary text: it analyses a ‘society of the spectacle’
from within, displaying its inner workings through the jaundiced eyes
of the Svengalian Mr. Blood, but stylistically it refuses to indulge in
the self-display associated with advertising – the form of the novel, in
other words, eschews techniques that are flashy, attention grabbing, or
visually arresting. A bitter text, Mr. Fleight satirises the social world
that Blast also wants to destroy but in its sardonic tone and its
pessimistic diagnosis it differs fundamentally from Blast. It holds out
no hope that a new life could imminently burst through the cultural
permafrost identified by Lewis – his belief that England in the here
and now represents ‘the Siberia of the mind’ (B 146) – and suggests
that the techniques of advertising have no emancipatory potential
whatsoever. Mr. Fleight is then a proleptic critique of Blast, calling its

90 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
avant-garde project into question a year before it has been fully

articulated.
Mr. Blood is the scion of one of England’s leading families. He
is so disgusted by the state of contemporary society (above all, by the
decline of moral and political values) that he has retreated from public
life altogether, just as Mark Tietjens will do after the First World War
in Parade’s End, and for similar reasons. Blood’s inertia mirrors that
of the stagnant society he condemns. Unwilling to bestir himself to try
to alter the direction in which an increasingly plutocratic society is
heading, he is trapped in the pose of sardonic observer and is thus
himself a sign of the decadence he deplores. The newly enriched
Fleight is his puppet, a stalking-horse put forward by Blood to prove
his case, while he (Blood) smirks in the background. Fleight initially
hopes for more, thinking that with Blood behind him he might be
effective: ‘I know you’re too lazy even to mock at Society, let alone to
hit it or destroy it. But say I’m the fox with the tail on fire that you
could set going into the corn’.29 But in this ironic version of the
Bildungsroman Fleight will learn how naïve he has been and will in
the end want nothing more than to escape from the pointless whirl of
political activity that ensues. As a satire, Mr. Fleight reworks in comic
mode what Ford saw as James’s most serious subject: ‘He gives you
an immense – and an increasingly tragic picture of a Leisured Society
that is fairly unavailing, materialist, emasculated – and doomed’.30
For my purposes, what’s particularly interesting about Mr.
Fleight is its implicit disavowal of the strategy Blast will undertake a
year later in its bid to galvanise art and culture into life. Once Blood
decides to embark on the experiment of seeing if he can make a
member of the governing class out of Fleight, he proceeds to outline
how this is to be done: ‘If you’re going to succeed at it you’ll have to
do it by backing light arts. The people who make your reputation
nowadays are the cheap novelists, the cheap journalists – any kind of
cheap talker who will talk about you in return for meals in marble
halls [. . . .] The way you rise nowadays is through the bookstalls’
(MrF 12). Blood is referring specifically to ‘popular’ print journalism
(the ‘light arts’), because this is part and parcel of his contempt for
mass democracy and the diet of husks on which the populace is fed,
but the principle he enunciates has a wider application. A society that
in a burgeoning information age communicates with itself through
daily newspapers and popular magazines offers the possibility of self-
advertisement and self-fashioning via print journalism.31 Yet this

promotion of the self (as artist or as politician, say) could be seen as

inseparable from a debasement of the self, which was now being
produced for public consumption as an invented construct. So Blood
holds the monarchy in contempt, for example, since in his view the
country has been ‘given up to advertising agents’ and ‘the Throne is
the worst agency of the lot’ (MrF 14). Blood – like Christopher
Tietjens after him – sees himself as the ‘only thing of [his] kind left in
the world . . . the last mastodon’ (MrF 14). He thus positions himself
outside the modernity he denounces, committing himself to a life of
lordly disdain and stubborn inactivity. If his diagnosis is similar to the
one offered by Blast, namely that society has become enervated and
corrupted, then it’s also the case that, unlike Blast, with its aggressive
polemics and blunt proposals, he has none of the vigour required to
intervene in this state of affairs:
The Chancellor looked in a depressed manner at Mr. Blood.

‘It’s only too true,’ he said. ‘There’s much too little enthusiasm. If only
men like you with your brains and intelligence would try to waken the nation
up ––’
‘Heavens!’ Mr. Blood said, you don’t expect me to care about the nation!’
He left the Chancellor slowly shaking his immense head. (MrF 275)
The game Blood plays is to demonstrate that his is the right course of
(in)action: Fleight can be elevated to the top of the social pile in spite
of his lack of qualities and his inability to do anything (to act) because
public life has become a spectacle in which candidates for parliament
are interchangeable products of modern advertising: ‘What have they
put him up for? Just money? I thought so. He’s cotton; our man’s
soap. There’s nothing to choose between those two commodities’
(MrF 124-5). Having ordered Fleight’s would-be wife to puff him for
all she’s worth in a specially created literary review, Blood describes
his strategy as “bribery on a wholesale scale” (MrF 192). Blood’s
stance de haut en bas implicates him in Ford’s satire, since he is
caught up in the political farce he is mocking. But this is a hard issue
to resolve. On the one hand, his unwillingness to try to change this
situation suggests that he is colluding with the social debasement he
decries. In Vorticism’s terms, then, he can be seen to be as much a
part of ‘VEGETABLE HUMANITY’ as those he contemns, and thus
to deserve the opprobrium that Lewis heaps on passive observers:
‘BLAST all products of phlegmatic cold Life of LOOKER-ON’ (B
15). But on the other hand, what this misses is that Blood’s strategy

92 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
can be read differently – namely, that he hopes to expose the absurd

nature of contemporary politics by depicting it as a branch of modern
advertising. His experiment, an act of making visible, of exposure,
might then be read as a different form of cultural intervention, and not
simply as self-defeating political quietism.
Mr. Fleight participates in what Patrick Collier describes as the
‘crisis in journalism’, which was such a key feature of this period.32
The novel conflates journalism and advertising in order to suggest that
the public in a modern democracy is prey to the latter’s hypnotising, if
ephemeral, power: ‘They were such extraordinarily fleeting persons –
the journalists – because their hold on the public taste was so fleeting
itself. They caught people now with ladies’ costumes and actresses.
But in five years time it would be perhaps slumming and field sports –
something like that’ (MrF 185). Newspapers are presented here as no
longer participating seriously in the political life of the nation, a
complaint that had become familiar by the early years of the twentieth
century. The opening issue of the Daily Mail was a significant
milestone in this context: ‘Four leading articles, a page of Parliament,
and columns of speeches will NOT be found in the Daily Mail on 4
May, a halfpenny’.33 Social and political life is in Mr. Fleight depicted
as so dominated by what Blood calls ‘the giddy whirl of fashion and
corruption and inquests and entertainments’ (MrF 254) that the
viability of the modern public sphere is called into question. The novel
thus raises questions about what role the arts might play in a public
sphere seemingly overtaken by manipulation of various kinds.
On Impressionism
Long before Blast came along, Ford had been arguing that modern
writing should deal with contemporary life in the language of the day,
and especially in the spoken language. In ‘Impressionism – Some
Speculations’ he wrote of the importance to him of trying to ‘register
my own times in terms of my own time’.34 This article of faith was
inseparable from his belief that lucidity of thought went hand in hand
with clarity of language. Mr. Fleight’s hostility to a perceived debase-
ment of the public sphere by advertising was bound up with Ford’s
view of its equally deleterious effects on communal language. So in
this respect, Ford was caught on the horns of a dilemma: he wanted to
engage with modernity on its own terms and in the idiom of his time,
but he also wanted to preserve language from the corrupting influence
of modern life. Ford’s use of the spoken voice in The Good Soldier is

in one sense a defence mechanism, an attempt to ward off the frenetic

and exaggerated rhetoric of popular journalism, but in another sense it
is a positive statement of intent, the avowal of a particular literary
position. And given that it is articulated in Blast, sandwiched between
Lewis’s volcanic ‘Enemy of the Stars’ and West’s highly charged
‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, this avowal takes on extra force. It can be
understood best through a reading of Ford’s reflections on the craft of
writing in ‘On Impressionism’, the first part of which was published
just before Blast came out, the second several months later.
‘On Impressionism’ is a fascinating and much discussed piece.
I’m interested here not in Ford’s account of Impressionist technique
but in how he positions himself vis-à-vis competing movements. His
opening gambit is to state casually that he isn’t bothered about labels
because he sees himself simply as a writer, but since others have
called him an Impressionist he’s content to accept the designation.35
This move already distances him from the likes of Lewis, Pound, and
of course Marinetti, who were at this time so sedulously concerned to
identify themselves as one ‘-ist’ or another. Ford, in contrast,
implicitly dismisses this obsession with naming as a trivial matter,
since what is more important, he suggests, is the writing itself. This
strategy positions Ford as someone who belongs to an earlier
generation and as someone who has a more inclusive view of literature
and the arts. It would be naïve to think that this isn’t a form of self-
promotion. The point is that it’s different in tone and style from
contemporary avant-gardist tub-thumping, and in being different it
suggests an alternative conception of the arts and their public function.
Ford is suggesting that he belongs to an earlier modernist generation,
and his casual modesty brilliantly underlines the difference between
himself and the importunate self-display of sundry Futurists and
Vorticists: ‘I am not claiming any great importance for my work; I
daresay it is all right’ (‘OI’ 34).36
Ford goes on to insist that ‘all art must be the expression of an
ego’ (‘OI’ 34), but his understanding of what this means is far
removed from the ‘egoism’ being discussed in the pages of The New
Freewoman or The Egoist during these pre-war years: here the
emphasis falls on authorial self-effacement and the reader’s active role
in deducing meaning from the narrative presentation of events.37 That
this is so is made absolutely clear in Ford’s later evocation of the
avant-garde challenge to his work offered by Mr. D. Z. (Lewis): ‘“I
display myself all over the page. In every word. I . . . I . . . I . . .” He

94 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
struck his chest dramatically and repeated: “I . . . I . . . I . . . The

Vortex. Blast all the rest.”’38 If Impressionism is ‘a frank expression
of personality’ (‘OI’ 36), then it is emphatically not to be confused
with, say, Marinetti’s claim that poetry should be ‘a violent attack on
unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man’, or with
Lewis’s exploration of the conflict between ‘Personality’ and
‘Mankind’ in ‘Enemy of the Stars’, where it is suggested that: ‘Self is
the race that lost. But Mankind still suspects Egotistic plots, and hunts
Pretenders’.39
But inasmuch as Impressionism is contrasted with punchy
assertions of self, it is aligned with Futurism in another way. Stressing
the transience of the impression and the multiple perspectives it can
generate, Ford notes that Impressionism is ‘very like a Futurist
picture’ (‘OI’ 42) and then suggests that Futurism is only doing what
he’s been doing ‘for many years’ (‘OI’ 42). He thus asserts himself
after all, attributing primacy to the movement he has been
championing for some time and positioning Futurism as a belated
newcomer. (There are obvious parallels here with Lewis’s strategy
vis-à-vis Futurism in Blast.) By the time we get to Ford’s conversation
with the ‘young man whose avowed intention is to sweep away
Impressionism’ (‘OI’ 43) – described as Ford’s ‘futurist friend’ (‘OI’
44) – his own credentials have been established. This isn’t to say that
he’s entirely confident of his ground. When he is attacked for his
belief that the novel should create an illusion of life, Ford asks a key
question: ‘is it possible, then, that I have been entirely wrong?’ (‘OI’
44). It’s clear, I think, that he doesn’t for one minute believe he’s
wrong, but he is being forced to confront the unpalatable truth that a
new generation of writers has absolutely no time for his approach.
Ford, in short, is really having to deal with the transition from one
conception of literature to another, a transition that is being couched in
generational terms. Given that he had for years seen himself as one of
the few fighting for a serious conception of literature, this is a doubly
painful predicament. Recalling Hardy’s problems with censorship in
Mightier Than the Sword (1938), Ford loftily declares that Hardy ‘was
already a Classic – and a Classic is a thing you do not read’; Jude the
Obscure was ‘Official Literature’, and ‘we, les jeunes, had other fish
to fry’.40 But in 1914 he was facing Hardy’s fate: perhaps he wasn’t
‘official literature’ exactly, but once again les jeunes were
uninterested in established writers and had other fish to fry. This time
it was Ford who was being consigned to the category of les vieux.

The opening section of The Good Soldier was printed in Blast

between Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ and West’s ‘Indissoluble
Matrimony’. Peter Nicholls has suggested that this was ironic because
‘Ford’s valedictory gesture towards a society in which “tradition” and
class-structure could still mask the drift towards psychic uniformity
clearly placed the novel outside Lewis’s own conception of the
modernist avant-garde’.41 I’m not entirely sure about this, though I
certainly agree that Lewis’s view of modernism was not Ford’s. It’s a
question, rather, of how the differences between them are to be read.
‘Enemy of the Stars’ was stylistically and structurally experimental in
ways that ‘The Saddest Story’ was not, but was the latter really so
valedictory? Was it not, rather, a critique of the sentimental nostalgia
expressed by Dowell, which mercilessly exposed how his sexual panic
(manifested as hysteria) is displaced onto a fantasised social order
rooted in the perceived safety of the past? Should it not be seen as a
text in which the social and cultural stasis blitzed by Blast is taken
apart in a more forensic fashion?
Mr. Fleight is again relevant here, because it touches in a satiric
vein on the issues that Ford explores in a darker register in The Good
Soldier. The earlier novel is too monochrome to be really effective; as
Blood himself admits, he’s crushing up ‘the dirty comedy of life’
(MrF 193) into ‘a short period so as to make the affair all the more an
object lesson – or, rather, all the more of a joke’ (MrF 194). Mr.
Fleight is a typical example of Fordian satire, which blends pathos and
discontent to produce what Blood calls ‘dirty comedy’. The Good
Soldier turns this type of comedy into tragedy, and at the heart of its
tragedy is a society of surfaces in which behaviour is determined by
the absolute need to keep up appearances and to maintain carefully
policed public facades. This society is in thrall to the image no less
than that depicted in Mr. Fleight, but whereas the earlier novel focuses
on the power of the media over political life, the later text concentrates
on the power of publicly visible norms over psycho-sexual life. Mr.
Fleight depicts a society dominated by the modern spectacle, whereas
The Good Soldier presents a society ruled by an older emphasis on the
preservation of decorum. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) – a novel that
is also centrally preoccupied with the power of advertising – is the text
that best shows the temporal overlap between these two forms of
social life, disclosing a world that looks as though nothing has altered,
whereas in reality a concealed internal process of transformation has
long been under way:

96 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
The great houses stand in the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on
their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers, the English countryside
[. . .] persists obstinately in looking what it was. It is like an early day in a fine
October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for a while,
as it were half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for ever. One frost
and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience end, our fine
foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire.42
Everything that occurs in The Good Soldier turns on repression. Blood

touches on this issue in Mr. Fleight when he refers to the ‘intricate,
incomprehensible life’ to which he has introduced Fleight: ‘No one
has ever sounded it, and no one ever will. We’ve all got too polite, you
see, and too kindly and too friendly ever to look anything in the face.
That’s the real trouble – Civilisation’ (MrF 254). And his caustic view
of marriage – ‘In this country the business of marriage is to join two
loving hearts in a union that it’s better not to talk about, compounded
of sympathy and bearing up and not letting the servants know that you
quarrel’ – elicits a revealing response from Fleight’s foreign wife-to-
be: ‘It’s like living in a lunatic asylum, where you do nothing but play
blind man’s buff all day long’ (MrF 291).
We are moving onto the terrain of The Good Soldier, for this
expression of bewilderment brings to mind Dowell’s later claim that
his relationship with Florence and the Ashburnhams ‘was a prison – a
prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down . . .’.43 Hysteria is then
figured in the novel as the direct outcome of the repression that ensues
when appearances (not quarrelling in front of anyone, never mind the
servants) must at all costs be kept up. So when towards the end of the
novel Dowell arrives at Bramshaw Teleragh in the middle of the worst
crisis, the public façade is impeccably maintained:
[T]hose three presented to the world the spectacle of being the best of good
people. I assure you that during my stay for that fortnight in that fine old
house, I never so much as noticed a single thing that could have affected that
good opinion. And even when I look back, knowing the circumstances, I can’t
remember a single thing any of them said that could have betrayed them . . . It
was just a pleasant country house-party. (GS 156)
Remarking on the price paid for this extraordinary behaviour (suicide

and madness), Dowell notes: ‘It was a most amazing business, and I
think that it would have been better in the eyes of God if they had all
attempted to gouge out each other’s eyes with carving knives. But
they were “good people”’ (GS 158).

The Good Soldier is no less of a ‘Condition of England novel’

than, say, Howards End (1910) or Tono-Bungay. The point is worth
stressing because in its search for ‘knowledge’ the novel consistently
blurs the distinction between the psycho-sexual realm and the social-
national context. This is evident from its opening paragraph: ‘My wife
and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to
know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about
them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English
people . . .’ (GS 9). This isn’t a novel about the unknowability of
others in a generalised sense: it is about a particularised social and
national milieu, which is then shown to be resistant to interpretation
because duplicity, concealment, and performativity are so fundamental
to its survival as a system.44 Hence the force of the contrast between
two possible descriptions of Dowell’s foursome either as expressive of
a ‘long tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet’ (GS 11) or as
‘a prison full of screaming hysterics’ (GS 12). It isn’t just personal
(sexual and emotional) repression that’s depicted here, though there’s
certainly plenty of that, but a wider social suppression of desire, which
is closely connected, I think, with the text’s view of passion, energy,
and the drives – in short, the will-to-life. The anaemic Dowell is
another version of the parodically named Blood. He identifies with
Nancy and Ashburnham but cannot himself act. He is a pale shadow,
an abject figure who has ‘followed, faintly, and in [his] unconscious
desires – Edward Ashburnham’ (GS 151), while ‘splendid and
tumultuous creatures with their magnetism and their passions’ are
‘steamrollered out’ in the name of ‘the greatest good of the body
politic’ (GS 152).
Alternative Modernisms
The body politic is shown to be rotten to the core in The Good Soldier,
and Dowell’s stance of passive observer is depicted as no less
ineffectual than Blood’s role as mocking impresario. They are both
implicated in Ford’s social critique. The Good Soldier depicts national
stagnancy as the result of a deep-rooted need to preserve the norm.45
It’s easy to see why, when the novel’s opening section appeared in
Blast, it might have looked as though it were harking back rather than
looking forward. A further point is that it can hardly be denied that
when compared to the vigour and originality of ‘Enemy of the Stars’ it
might have seemed like part of the problem, an instance of the kind of
aesthetic decorum that Blast was committed to overthrowing. From a

98 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
Vorticist perspective, The Good Soldier was compromised by its quiet

register and its seeming inability to imagine a way out of the impasse
it described. Timothy Materer puts it well: ‘By its very name, Blast
promised to do this demolishing and at the same time to liberate the
energy needed to produce new life [. . .] Blast also provided two more
essentials for a renaissance, “enthusiasm and a propaganda”’.46
But this critical view of Ford takes everything on Blast’s terms.
It implies – rather as Squire did – not only that Ford didn’t belong in
Blast’s pages but also that he had no idea what he was doing there. On
the contrary. I’m suggesting that Ford knew exactly what he was up to
and that The Good Soldier wasn’t overwhelmed by the rest of Blast
but challenged its assertive avant-gardism by offering an alternative
modernism. Lewis’s anti-empathic style, so vividly enacted in ‘Enemy
of the Stars’, rested on the programmatic view that: ‘Dehumanization
is the chief diagnostic of the Modern World’ (B 141). When Dowell
ponders how best to approach his narrative he imagines himself ‘at
one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul
opposite me’, and proposes to ‘go on talking, in a low voice’ (GS 15).
The novel into which Ford said he put everything he knew about the
art of writing (much of which he articulated in ‘On Impressionism’)
functions as an explicit counterweight to ‘Enemy of the Stars’ and to
the manifestos, vortices, and notes surrounding both texts in Blast. It
was propaganda of a different sort. It isn’t so much that Ford
positioned ‘sympathy’ against ‘dehumanization’ (after all, Dowell
can’t exactly be taken as Ford’s spokesman) but that he provided an
alternative to Blast’s Expressionist pyrotechnics in the form of The
Good Soldier – its multi-perspectivalism, its Impressionist rendering
of subjectivity, and its sardonic exposure of the inevitable doom
awaiting its emblematic social types, whose life, ‘which was just
stepping a minuet, vanishe[s] in four crashing days’ (GS 11). And
perhaps we should credit Ford with a degree of political insight that
Lewis and Pound lacked. Maybe his pessimistic depiction of a stifled
and stifling social order, which was incapable of the kind of
transformation urged by the Vorticists, provided a more accurate
diagnosis of the situation circa 1914 than Blast did. As Lewis was
himself later to remark of those involved in pre-war avant-gardism:
‘We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong
to a “great age” that has not “come off”’.47
How we read Ford’s contribution to Blast depends on our angle
of vision. Looked at from a Vorticist perspective, it’s obvious that he

added nothing to the movement’s doctrine or practice. (Leader of the

Vorticists, indeed!) Considered from a ‘little magazine’ viewpoint, it’s
no less obvious that Blast was an overdetermined artefact, which was
put together in haphazard fashion, evolved its ideas in constant
reaction to unfolding events, and included a wide variety of styles –
The Good Soldier is in my view an integral part of this polyglot and
heterogeneous mix, a mix that amply attests the complicated reality of
pre-war avant-garde activism. Ford, we need to remember, was
actively involved in the pre-war avant gardism of Lewis and Pound,
even if he used it to develop and to further his own particular aesthetic
project.
What, then, can we say about Ford’s own outlook on all this?
We’re familiar, of course, with the self-deprecating, self-ironising
remarks he routinely made about his inclusion in Blast, through which
he downplayed the significance of his contribution and presented
himself as a writer on the verge of obsolescence. These remarks,
scattered throughout his reminiscences, always interpret Blast as the
outcome of a generational revolt and the sign of a fundamental
cultural transition. Here he is, discussing the second (and last) issue of
Blast in very revealing terms:
I confess to finding a certain strangeness in the cubes, the revolving astral

bodies, the periphrases, the notes of exclamation of Vorticism [. . .] I say to
myself: The aspect of the world must be vastly different to those born within
the last quarter of a century. My existence began, consciously at least, in the
country [. . .] But, for those born since the nineties the earth is a matter of
hurtling, coloured squareness, of the jar of telephone bells, of every kind of
rattle and bang, of every kind of detonation, of every kind of light in shafts, in
coronets, in whirls and blaze and flash. The ocular and phonetic break
between today and the historic ages is incredible [ . . .] And the business of the
young artist of today is to render those glooms, those clamours, those iron
boxes, those explosions, those voices from the metal horns of talking-
machines and hooters.48
This account insists that a cultural ‘break’ has already occurred and
that Blast (among other manifestations of aesthetic modernity) proves
the point. Ford reinforces this argument when he goes on to place
himself even more clearly on the wrong side of the generational
divide: ‘I am curious – I am even avid – to see the method that shall
make grass grow over my own methods and I am content to be
superseded’.49

100 ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
I have suggested throughout that this kind of neat periodisation

won’t do. It might have suited both Ford’s and Lewis’s attempts at
self-fashioning to insist on such a division between past and present,
but it is misleading about the convoluted nature of pre-war avant-
garde groups and the overlapping of individuals, ideas, and practices
that characterised them, rightly described by Peter Brooker in terms of
a complex ‘infolding of the modern and the pre-modern’.50 Ford
seemed to delight in the irony that placed his work in the pages of an
avant-garde ‘little magazine’ whose avowed goal was to blow up him
and all his kind. But apart from the fact that Ford was never one to get
in the way of a good story, might there have been a sound reason for
this relaxed attitude? Could it be that although Ford was in one sense
threatened by this thrusting younger generation, in another sense he
knew two things about himself: first, that he had been engaging with
and rendering technological modernity for several years prior to the
war (see especially The Soul of London (1905) and A Call (1910)) and
therefore well before Lewis and Pound arrived on the scene; second,
that in light of this fact he felt that he had his own job of work to do
and, confident that it was worth doing, simply stuck to his last?
Ford recounted the story about Lewis telling him that he was de
trop so many times, in so many versions, and with such evident relish
that it appears as though Lewis was doing nothing else with his time
except chasing Ford around town and bawling in his ears. But by a
deliberately worked paradox, it is Ford who gains in stature in these
successive retellings: he subtly implies that if Lewis and the new gang
were so desperate to overthrow him, there must have been something
there that was worth overthrowing. Max Saunders gives an excellent
analysis of these numerous Fordian retellings:
The monologue dramatises the triumph of the new forms over the old, the
young over those who are about to die. And yet. It is not just that, through
Lewis’ blast, Ford manages to make heard the voiceless and will-less
principles he respects. Described like this there is nothing ambiguous about
the scene. Ford would be satirising an uncongenial movement in order to
defend his own aesthetic position. But the ambiguity enters in the field of
aesthetics itself. For, above all, the episode is a bravura performance. In part it
is Lewis’ performance, and one cannot but admire the vigour and concision of
his assault. But it is also Ford’s performance, a stunning impersonation of
being stunned by an explosive character. As such, it is not ‘impressionism’ by
the canons blown up by Lewis.51

Saunders highlights the difficulty here of driving a simple wedge

between Ford and Lewis, or, in other words, between Impressionism
and Vorticism. This is not to say that Ford was somehow doing the
same thing as Lewis (he wasn’t) but rather that his Impressionism
can’t be separated out from Vorticism as easily as literary historians
sometimes suppose. His inclusion in Blast demonstrates that he was
practically involved in that complex production; his descriptions of
Lewis’s hostility to his aesthetics suggest that he was also influenced
by Blast and that his writing felt the effect of it. In the end, though,
Ford knew that his job of work was not the same as that of either
Lewis or Pound. And he wasn’t all that sure that he had been entirely
overthrown by their aggressive polemics. In 1921 he explained that in
evolving an Impressionist method he had been ‘preoccupied with the
simple expression of fine shades’ and had seen the novel as the
‘rendering of an affair’, thus reiterating once again those aspects of his
work condemned by Lewis. He would, of course, triumphantly bring
these aspects into play in Parade’s End, but a careful reading of that
tetralogy discloses that the Lewisian Vorticist influence has not been
negated but is very much at work in it, as David Trotter persuasively
argues in this volume. Ford both sticks to his position and subtly
amends it. In 1915 he had claimed that he was ‘content to be
superseded’, implicitly admitting that his Impressionism had indeed
been blown sky high. But in 1921, three years after the end of the war,
and seven years after Blast made its bow, his view was still, and
stubbornly, that the ‘vocabulary that we shall ultimately achieve by
the methods of Flaubert and Maupassant – the vocabulary achieved
indeed by the Imagistes – will be the vocabulary for both the prose
and the verse of the future’.52
NOTES
1 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene: 1910-1935, London:

Hutchinson, 1969, p. 187.
2 Ezra Pound, ‘The New Sculpture’, Egoist, 1:4 (16 February 1914), 67-8 (p. 68).
3 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909’,
Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, London: Thames and Hudson, 1973,
p. 23, original ellipses.

4 Wyndham Lewis, ‘Manifesto’, Blast 1, ed., Wyndham Lewis, Santa Barbara:

Black Sparrow Press, 1981, p. 18. Hereafter cited as B in the main body of the
text.
5 See Janet Lyon, Manifestos: Provocations of the Modern, Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 29-30 and Morag Shiach, Modernism, Labour
and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890-1930, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 211 and pp. 215-16.
6 Wyndham Lewis, Blast, p. 32; Ezra Pound, ‘Wyndham Lewis’, Egoist, 1:12. (15
June 1914), 233-4 (p. 233).
7 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1971, p. 243.
8 See, for example, Lewis’s comments on this use of the word ‘futurism’ (B 143).
9 Edgar Jepson, Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian, London: Richards,
1937, p. 150.
10 Solomon Eagle [J. C. Squire], ‘Books in General’, The New Statesman, 111:65 (4
July 1914), 406.
11 Most of Blast had been type-set when the row occurred; a new manifesto was now
written and the ‘Vortex’ statements by Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska were added.
See Paul O’Keeffe, ‘The Troubled Birth of “Blast”: December 1913 - June 1914’,
International Centrum Voor Structuuranalyse En Constructivisme Cahier 8/9:
Vorticism (Brussels: Oplage, 1988): pp. 43-57. For O’Keeffe’s view that
Vorticism was a ‘pragmatic’ response to fast moving events, see p. 43 and p. 54.
12 Rebecca West, Selected Letters of Rebecca West, ed., Bonnie Kime Scott, New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 23. Violet Hunt claimed that
it was she who helped West get into Blast and that everyone misunderstood
‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, which had been written as a comic jeu d’esprit. See
Violet Hunt, I Have This to Say: The Story of My Flurried Years, New York: Boni
and Liveright, 1926, p. 216. West supported this account, claiming (rather
implausibly?) that she hadn’t even met Lewis at this time. See West, Selected
Letters, pp. 119-20.
13 See, for example, Wyndham Lewis, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed., W. K.
Rose, Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, pp. 491-2.
14 Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, ed., Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship,
London: Faber and Faber, 1982, p.10.
15 Ibid., p. 10.
16 Ibid., p. 43.
17 Ford, Henry James: A Critical Study, London: Martin Secker, 1913, pp. 47, 120.
18 Lewis, Letters, p. 491.
19 Ibid., pp. 440-41 and p. 554.
20 John Gould Fletcher, Life Is My Song, New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937, p.
137.
21 R. H. C. [A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, New Age, 15:19, No. 1148 (10
September 1914), 449.
22 Eagle, ‘Books in General’, p. 406.
23 Hunt, I Have This to Say, p. 216 and p. 212.
24 See Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism,
London: Palgrave, 2004; Lisa Tickner, ‘The Popular Culture of Kermesse: Lewis,
Painting, and Performance, 1912-13’, Modernism / Modernity (Wyndham Lewis

Number) 4. 2 (April 1997), pp. 67-120; and William Wees, Vorticism and the
English Avant-Garde, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972.
25 Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, p. 40.
26 Ibid., pp. 172-73. See also Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde,
Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 180-84.
27 Paige Reynolds, ‘“Chaos Invading Concept”: Blast as a Native Theory of
Promotional Culture’, Twentieth Century Literature, 46:2 (Summer 2000), 238-68
(p. 245).
28 Douglas Goldring, South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford
and the English Review Circle, London: Constable, 1943, p. 68.
29 Ford, Mr. Fleight, London: Howard Latimer, 1913 – henceforth MrF; p. 4.
30 Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences, 1894-1914, London: Victor Gollancz,
1931, p. 216.
31 For a good overview of these issues, see Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet
Street, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
32 Ibid., p. 11. See also the useful discussion on pp. 11-37.
33 Cited in Jamie Camplin, The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in
Edwardian England, London: Constable, 1978, p. 83.
34 Ford, ‘Impressionism – Some Speculations’ in Frank MacShane, ed., Critical
Writings of Ford Madox Ford, Lincoln: Nebraska, 1964, pp. 139-52 (p. 141).
35 MacShane, ed., Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford: ‘On Impressionism’: pp.
33-55 (p. 34). Hereafter cited parenthetically as ‘OI’.
36 In such discussions a good deal hangs on how one defines the terms ‘modernist’
and ‘avant garde’. I see Ford as a writer who proselytised on behalf of his
conception of modernism, but who wasn’t ‘avant garde’ in the way that Marinetti
or Lewis were. It’s arguable, of course, that he belongs to an earlier avant garde,
rather than to no avant garde at all.
37 See Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism,
Science, Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1996 and Jean-
Michel Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001, pp. 24-53.
38 Ford, Return to Yesterday, ed., Bill Hutchings, Manchester: Carcanet, 1999, p.
312.
39 Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, p. 21; Lewis, Blast 1, p. 66.
40 Ford, Mightier Than the Sword: Memories and Criticisms, London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1938, p. 124 and p. 131.
41 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, London: Macmillan, 1995, p. 186.
42 H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, ed., Patrick Parrinder, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2005, p. 15.
43 Ford, The Good Soldier, ed., Martin Stannard, New York and London: Norton,
1995 – henceforth GS; p. 12.
44 See, for example, this description of Leonora: ‘Leonora was extraordinarily fair
and so extraordinarily the real thing that she seemed too good to be true. You
don’t, I mean, as a rule, get it all so superlatively together. To be the county
family, to look the county family, to be so appropriately and perfectly wealthy; to
be so perfect in manner . . . No, it was too good to be true’ (GS 13). It is, of
course, not true – it is a carefully cultivated image.

45 See especially Dowell’s closing remarks (GS 160-2).

46 Timothy Materer, Vortex: Pound, Eliot, and Lewis, Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1979, p. 30.
47 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914-1926),
London: John Calder, 1982, p. 256.
48 Ford, Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang, Manchester:
Carcanet, 2002, pp. 183-4.
49 Ibid., p. 184.
50 Brooker, Bohemia in London, p. 41.
51 Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996, Vol. 2, p. 189.
52 Ford, Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences, London: Chapman and Hall, 1921, p.
40, p. 44, and p. 161.

CONTRIBUTORS
JOHN ATTRIDGE completed his doctorate on Ford and Conrad at the

University of Sydney in 2006. His thesis considered authorial self-
presentation, or “performance”, in the context of professionalism,
theorising expertise as a useful protocol for mediating between
modernists and the mass market, but also as a threat to the public
sphere. He teaches English literature at l’Université de Paris 7.
ISABELLE BRASME is completing a doctoral thesis at the

University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot. Her research topic is: ‘Ford
Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: Towards an aesthetics of crisis’.
ANDREW FRAYN is currently completing a doctoral thesis at the

University of Manchester on ‘The Development of “Disenchanted”
First World War Prose, 1918-1930’. Along with Ford’s works from
the period, he is particularly interested in Richard Aldington’s
writings about the war, on which he has previously published, and
C.E. Montague.
ANDRZEJ GASIOREK is a Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature

at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Realism and
After: Postwar British Fiction (1995), Wyndham Lewis and
Modernism (2004), J. G. Ballard (2005), and co-editor (with Edward
Comentale) of T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (2006). He
edits the electronic journal Modernist Cultures with Deborah Parsons
(Birmingham) and Michael Valdez Moses (Duke).
ROB HAWKES is a PhD research student and part-time tutor in the

Department of English and Related Literature at the University of
York. His thesis, which is founded on interests in literary modernism
and narrative theory, is entitled ‘Destabilising Narratives:
Characterising, Plotting, and Trusting in Ford Madox Ford’s Fiction’.
NICK HUBBLE is Lecturer in English at Brunel University. His essay

‘Beyond Mimetic Englishness: Ford’s English Trilogy and The Good
Soldier’ appeared in volumes 5 of this series. He is currently working

272 ABSTRACTS
ANDREW FRAYN, ‘“This Battle Was not Over”: Parade’s End as a

Transitional Text in the Development of ‘Disenchanted’ First World
War Literature’
This chapter argues that the novels of Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy
occupy a significant place in the development of ‘disenchanted’
fiction about the First World War. The values of Ernest Raymond’s
patriotic Tell England are contrasted with those of C. E. Montague’s
Disenchantment, providing a brief synopsis of the early 1920s
response to the conflict. Parade’s End is seen as introducing several
key themes into the post-First World War discursive field, including
national identity, psychology, memory, and time. The presentation of
these, aligned with the formal aspects of the novel, allows it to push
the boundaries of the readerly horizon of expectations. Frayn argues
that Ford’s readership, though moderately-sized, was influential from
a literary point of view, and thus facilitated the reception of later,
more vitriolic, criticisms of the war.
ANDRZEJ GASIOREK, ‘“Content to be Superseded”?: Ford in the

Great London Vortex’
Andrzej Gasiorek’s chapter focuses closely on the years 1913-1914 in

order to explore Ford’s relations with the various pre-war avant-
gardes that seemed to be threatening to overthrow his version of
Impressionism. This chapter argues that the eighteen month period
that led up to the outbreak of the First World War doesn’t lend itself to
a simple linear reading of the period, which would posit that
Impressionism was overtaken by events and destroyed in the process.
On the contrary, this chapter shows that the personal, intellectual and
‘professional’ relationships between Ford, Lewis and Pound in this
period overlapped in a variety of complex ways. It may have seemed
to Ford (and perhaps to other observers of the cultural scene) that his
conception of self-conscious artistry (which aligned Ford with figures
such as Conrad, James, Flaubert, and Turgenev) was no longer
relevant to a mechanized and violent modernity; however, this chapter
suggests that Ford was not superseded by a more au courant set of
avant-gardes but belonged to an overdetermined historical ‘moment’
(the great London Vortex) in which he fully participated. Ford,
moreover, was able to offer a defence of his aesthetic project from

ABSTRACTS 273
within the Vortex, articulating it most clearly in the opening pages of

The Good Soldier, which first appeared in Blast, in the essay ‘On
Impressionism’, and in the pre-war satire Mr. Fleight.
ROB HAWKES, ‘Personalities of Paper: Characterisation in A Call

and The Good Soldier’
This essay reconsiders Ford’s approach to characterisation in the light

of Alex Woloch’s recent work on the nineteenth-century realist novel
which envisions character as equally implicated in the analysis of
novelistic form as of content. In doing so, it challenges the charge of
‘extreme realism’ – which Michael Levenson levels at Ford’s
handling of character – and argues that Ford is more radical in this
aspect of his writing than has often been acknowledged. In particular,
Ford’s commitment to ‘justification’ in A Call and The Good Soldier
turns out to be an anti-realist gesture in its rejection of the ‘one vs.
many’ structure identified by Woloch. Furthermore, while the
abandonment of the realist ‘character-system’ destabilises Ford’s
texts, it also foregrounds his characters’ literariness – their very
construction as ‘personalities of paper’ – people made of words
printed on the page.
NICK HUBBLE ‘The Origins of Intermodernism in Ford Madox

Ford’s Parallax View’
This essay begins by relating Kristin Bluemel’s concept of

‘Intermodernism’ to Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View, in order to
unpack the asymmetric relationship between Modernism and social
realism. It is argued that Modernism is not an authentic presence, but
the product of a parallax shift from social realism that necessarily
incorporates interconnections with social realism within itself; a
situation which is explicitly acknowledged by the term
‘Intermodernism’. The equivalent understanding of the 1930s was
embodied in the particular definition applied to ‘proletarian literature’
by William Empson and George Orwell, a sense which Orwell traced
back before the First World War to the meeting between Ford and
Lawrence. This essay suggests, however, that the origins of
intermodernism can be found in Ford’s writing independently of
Lawrence and that Ford pursued his own intermodern project of
working towards a society in which everyone would rub along

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‘CONTENT TO BE SUPERSEDED’?

It is always instructive to consider the past; a foreign country – they

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traditions; Lewis’s Cubist- and Futurist-inspired raids on technological

Or this, from Marinetti:

Or perhaps this, from Lewis:

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war years. We find Lewis asserting that English cultural stagnancy is

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sought to inaugurate a cultural regeneration by undermining existing

The Flicker of a Genre

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We haven’t a movement here, not even a mistaken one; all we have is a

The tail-coat is a good touch. When we try to assess phenomena like

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Advertising and Avant-gardism

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Blast borrowed from newspaper culture in its approach to page

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avant-garde project into question a year before it has been fully

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promotion of the self (as artist or as politician, say) could be seen as

The Chancellor looked in a depressed manner at Mr. Blood.

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can be read differently – namely, that he hopes to expose the absurd

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in one sense a defence mechanism, an attempt to ward off the frenetic

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struck his chest dramatically and repeated: “I . . . I . . . I . . . The

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The opening section of The Good Soldier was printed in Blast

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Everything that occurs in The Good Soldier turns on repression. Blood

Remarking on the price paid for this extraordinary behaviour (suicide

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The Good Soldier is no less of a ‘Condition of England novel’

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Vorticist perspective, The Good Soldier was compromised by its quiet

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added nothing to the movement’s doctrine or practice. (Leader of the

I confess to finding a certain strangeness in the cubes, the revolving astral

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I have suggested throughout that this kind of neat periodisation

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Saunders highlights the difficulty here of driving a simple wedge

1 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene: 1910-1935, London:

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4 Wyndham Lewis, ‘Manifesto’, Blast 1, ed., Wyndham Lewis, Santa Barbara:

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45 See especially Dowell’s closing remarks (GS 160-2).

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JOHN ATTRIDGE completed his doctorate on Ford and Conrad at the

ISABELLE BRASME is completing a doctoral thesis at the

ANDREW FRAYN is currently completing a doctoral thesis at the

ANDRZEJ GASIOREK is a Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature

ROB HAWKES is a PhD research student and part-time tutor in the

NICK HUBBLE is Lecturer in English at Brunel University. His essay

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ANDREW FRAYN, ‘“This Battle Was not Over”: Parade’s End as a

ANDRZEJ GASIOREK, ‘“Content to be Superseded”?: Ford in the