Telling the City

Abstract

A guide to London wntmg published by Waterstone's in 1999 includes a section on Ford Madox Ford. He finds himself sandwiched between Conan Doyle and Gissing, both of whom are well-known explorers of London's secrets and vices, perhaps better-known than Ford. And yet his inclusion in this guide is justified, more so than is appreciated by the section editor who claims that Ford 'never really wrote about the city of his birth again' (after 1905 and The Soul of London). I Not so. Throughout Ford's career, when he wrote about cities, it was most often London that he took for his subject or its background. He also loved, lived in and wrote about, for example, Paris and New York, but it was the English capital that he found to be 'the final expression of the Present Stage,.2 Generalizations are and can be made about 'the city' in Ford, or 'the city' as modernist construct. When such abstract notions become concrete in his work it is often the shapes of London that are assumed. Urban EnergyThe view from a palace window in an early Ford tale is, we are told, 'very fine'. 'A dark wood grew in the foreground', and 'far away over the tree-tops were the blue hills, behind which the sun was just preparing to retire'. 3 Though Ford was certainly not averse to telling stories, and even fairy stories, of the country (the subtitle of The Brown Owl is A Fairy Story), it is his stories which draw at least some of their energy from urban sources for which he is best-known. In A Call (1910) and The Good Soldier (1915), for example, that energy springs from the chaotic potential in communications offered by the city, and is manifested in illicit sexual liaisons, or confessions, in its diverseness rendering ambiguous things characters know and say. Affective to a lesser degree, but still present in Parade's End , that energy is associated with institutions for government, commerce, or education, or generated by the crowd. On Armistice Day in London Valentine Wannop is 'jostled by the innumerable crowd', having been 'deafened by unceasing shouts'. She is Sara Haslam -9789401201667 Downloaded from Brill.com03/13/2023 04:32:15AM via free access 'The Modern' promises pleasure too. 'So appealing' is the 'ragout of tit-bits' Ford has just described that we might be justified in identifying an anticipatory dash of futurism in his fulsome prose. (Futurism's Manifesto, published in 1909, exalted speed, 'aggressive action', and crowds. s ) The city in Ford, then, on this first approach seems to be the locus of a force for progressive challenge and change: its energy is liberating, vital, exciting, always new. Fairy tales for Ford were rural affairs -think for example of the anti-city parts of A Call, during which Kitty is cured as well as, more obviously, The Brown Owl, or Ladies Whose Bright Eyes -but G. K. Chesterton published what he called a 'London fairy tale' in 1904, a year before the appearance of The Soul of London. The Napoleon of Nolting Hill is set in the future, towards the end of the twentieth century, but it is plain that Cheste...