Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 314-316

Vita Fortunati & Elena Lamberti, eds., Il senso critico. Saggi di Ford Madox Ford. Firenze: Alinea, 2001; 327 pp.; ISBN: 8881254980; €20.64

In recent years, the critical evaluation of Ford Madox Ford's works and essays has grown steadily, giving life to a strong "Ford connection," especially between England and Italy, thanks to the "mad passion" of Professors and scholars such as Vita Fortunati, Giovanni Cianci, Max Saunders and Elena Lamberti. Countless conferences and seminars, workshops and books on the great "impresario" of modernism have rejuvenated a critical attitude towards his works, works that were underrated by the critical taste of the 1950s and 1960s. They have also aroused a new interest for the common reader, who, more often than not, was completely unaware of Ford Madox Ford's existence.

The present volume, Il senso critico ("The Critical Attitude"), edited by Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti, titled after the heading of Ford's editorials on The English Review from April 1909 to February 1910, undoubtedly fills a gap in the knowledge of Ford and his critical work. This is especially true for the Italian Academia, which is here offered a view of the subtle interconnection between Ford's critical essays and monographs and his writing practice. Lamberti's essays, which introduce the five sections of the volume, debate various aspects of Ford's poetics, demonstrating the skilful mixture of modernism, impressionism and Victorianism in his critical works. In the words of R. Greene, quoted by Vita Fortunati in her "Introduction" to the volume, "[p]erhaps Ford was trying to combine two incompatible aesthetics — a modernist view of art alongside a Victorian notion of the artist's deity and a seer, prophet, teacher, commentator." [end page 314]

Reading Ford's pages, which are full of anecdotes and digressions, opens us to the possibility of understanding why some of the tenets of modernism lived suspended between innovation and tradition. These two aspects dialectically coexisted in the figure of Ford: on the one hand the necessity to develop a new language and a new technique (because "the old order... is changing; the new has hardly arrived") and on the other hand, the necessity of preserving the knowledge and "craft" of writing, which was to be transmitted by the great innovators in the English Novel, such as James, Conrad, Crane, all of whom — as Ford himself pointed out — were expatriates and outsiders of English literature; who revived a narrative canon that Ford's pessimism saw as being in decline since the age of Fielding, the father of the "nuvele."

In these pages, we can re-read — translated into good Italian — the wonderful description of Conrad in Joseph Conrad: A personal remembrance (1924), memorable for its physical and psychological details, the essay on Hans Holbein the younger (1905) or the wonderful definition of Hemingway's style in the "Introduction" to A Farewell to Arms (1932).

Lamberti's short essay on Ford and the visual arts, placed at the beginning of part IV, while valuable in itself, cannot and does not intend to give a full discussion on this quite complicated and ambivalent relationship. We certainly need more critical work on the dialectic between literature and painting in Ford's essays. In fact, he considered himself as an Impressionist writer, but also thought that what the Futurists were trying to accomplish in painting was not so different from what he had been trying to do in his writing practice, that is, "a juxtaposition of different situations." But the implications of Ford's experience in the Paris environment during the 1920s — a cultural milieu full of American expatriates of the "lost generation" and imbued with artistic ideas, especially cubism — haven't been fully accounted for.

Ford's impressionist criticism, his notion of "time-shift," of "juxtaposition of situation," of "progression d'effet," the search for "le mot juste," are part of his strong and enduring passion for literature that brought him to become the "Grand Master of Ceremonies" of English Modernism, and the inspirer of important critical reviews such as The English Review and The Transatlantic Review. This latter in particular, which had among its contributors great writers and publishers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Robert McAlmon and William Bird, contested the oftentimes artificial cleavage line created between American and English literature. Ford's acute sense of the interconnection between the two great literatures in the English language represents, even today, a healthy attitude in the academic world, especially in Italy, where excessive specialization has taken the place of a wider and more 'humanistic' view of literature. [end page 315] Ford was the standard bearer of world literature, of an "International Republic of Letters", of a literature "out of bounds" and without boundaries, so fashionable today (but only in academic chitter-chatter and not in the critical practice of intellectuals) that would give a new critical perspective to the two great literatures in the English language. In fact, while nobody would object to including Henry James's novels as part of "world literature," there are still Professors who object to scholars of American literature writing essays on, for example, James G. Ballard, a writer whom it would be reductive to describe simply as an 'English novelist.' From this point of view, the necessity of a world literature (and consequently, the necessity of comparative literature) is still with us, and Ford's daring attempt at spanning the whole of literature "from Confucius' day to our own" (in The March of Literature), has still the force of an intellectual challenge, similar to what Harold Bloom has attempted to do in The Western Canon (1994).

But the most modern accomplishment of Ford's criticism is certainly the "Wildean" and "deconstructive" discovery that "the real criticism is the one that uses the work of art as a pretext for a new creation." Lamberti is certainly aware of that, and her volume represents a new and engaging contribution to the study of such a complex and fascinating figure of English modernism.

Paolo Prezzavento

University of Verona