Volume 5, Number 4 · September 30, 1965
"Old Man Mad About Writing"
By Edward Dahlberg
The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford
by Frank MacShane
Horizon Press, 298 pp., $6.50
Letters of Ford Madox Ford
edited by Richard M. Ludwig
Princeton, 335 pp., $8.50
In the last few years it has been the custom of Yahoo biographers to vilify the heroes of literature. Hardly one nineteenth-century author has been spared by the Cerberuses who bay the moon and bark at the shades they pretend to commemorate. This screed of vulgarity has dominated the English reviewers who lick up the dregs of man's worst traits while neglecting his contribution to the commonwealth. We are told that Coleridge was inert and lumpish and hated to write, but the same was true of Dr. Johnson, who was a fat better talker than an author. That Walter Savage Landor threw his cook out of the window because he fried a Hecate's supper, and not that he wrote the Imaginary Conversations, is important. We are advised that Oliver Goldsmith was a scantling for not supporting his nephew, and that Ruskin was immoral because he was impotent. Recently Mr. Swanberg has disclosed that Theodore Dreiser was a swindler and an implacable philanderer, and he has given us such a repulsive portrait that he has very likely buried Dreiser's works for a half century.
Review, 2430 words
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