F ORD MADOX FORD, who was born Hueffer, is one of
those writers who come late into their heritage. Robert
Lowell, the American poet, inquired in a poem about
him:

But Master, mammoth mumbler, tell me why
The bales of your left-over novels buy
Less than a bandage for your gouty foot.

The answers to that question will perhaps become apparent
in the course of this essay. But today increasingly we find
mentions of him as 'that neglected writer'; his work is
receiving recognition in wireless programmes; and The
Good Soldier and his great Tietjens tetralogy, Some Do Not, No
More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and Last Post (con-
veniently known in the United States under the omnibus title
Parade's End) have been republished in the popular Penguin
series.

His output was large, ranging from poetry to history,
biography, criticism and novels, and it was uneven. I can
discuss in detail only The Good Soldier, the tetralogy and the
Tudor trilogy ( Fifth Queen, Privy Seal, and Fifth Queen
Crowned); but some others of his novels--for example, The
Rash Act and When the Wicked Man...--are of fine quality,
while his volumes of memoirs and discursive works are as
highly organized art as his fiction, and as entertaining.

He has been called a writer's writer; he had a deep insight
into the techniques of composition, and his views influenced
men so widely separated by time and nature as Ezra Pound
and Joseph Conrad, and, at the other end of his life Ernest
Hemingway, Allen Tate and Robie Macaulay. But the solid
and subtle construction of his best books makes them fresh and
attractive also to the general reader when many better-known
works by Ford's contemporaries begin to seem dated and stale.

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