Volume 1, Number 2 · June 1, 1963
FMF
By Allen Tate
Ford Madox Ford: A Study of His Novels
by Richard A. Cassell
Johns Hopkins, $5.50
Ford Madox Ford's Novels: A Critical Study
by John A. Meixner
University of Minnesota Press, $5.50
Novelist Of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford
by Paul L. Wiley
Syracuse University Press, $5.50
From 1927 to the year before his death in 1939 I knew Ford very well, as well as a man so much younger could have known him. I knew him first in New York, where he had for a few months rooms in a brownstone house in Perry Street in which I had a free apartment in exchange for being the janitor. In the winter of 1929, while he was in the United States again, he lent us his flat in Paris at 32 rue de Vaugirard. In the thirties he visited me several times in Tennessee, first at Memphis, and then at my farm near Clarksville where in the summer of 1937 he wrote much of The March of Literature. In that summer he brought with him his wife Janice Biala, the painter, and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Tworkov, his secretary; Robert Lowell lived in a tent on the lawn, where he intoned the Miltonic blank verse that he wrote every morning. My wife Caroline Gordon, with one idiotic servant, ran the precariously balanced menage. Ford could eat French food only, but Ida, with the occasional assistance of her mother Electra, the washerwoman, could not even cook Tennessee, much less French. Ford was unhappy in the 95° F. but every morning he paced the columned gallery—which had nothing but the earth to support it—and dictated to Mrs. Tworkov several pages of The March of Literature. There was a persistent tide that seldom ebbed, of visitors from Nashville, from Louisville, from New York, from Europe. It was a situation perversely planned by fate to expose human weakness. There were no scenes. Were we not, like the Ashburnhams and the Dowells, 'quite good people'? Yet much became known to us about one another that we could have written, as 'trapped spectators,' of what might have happened but didn't.
Review, 1923 words
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