After 1,300 pages, I've finished the Max Saunders biography of Ford Madox Ford
10/02/2023
That was a long book. There are big books that feel big, and books that don't. This felt big, and the problem was that Saunders not only went into excruciating detail about his subject's movements, incidental friendships and even meals, he also broke up his narrative with extensive discussions of Ford's literary works.
I tallied 83 pages on on the Parade's End series, which is fine in terms of criticism, but if you want to find out more about the author, it's a heck of a digression.
I'm also going to call Saunders out for being a truly impressive fanboy. I like Ford's work, admire his turn of phrase, but I'm sorry, Last Post was a clunker of a book, and there's a reason why Graham Greene did not want it included in his reprint. As he points out, the book was not part of the original scheme of the work and was added on later to explore what happened to Tietjens and Miss Wannop.
Having read the biography, it's pretty clear that Ford is creating an idealized version of his postwar life, one starkly at odds with what eventually happened. Ford should have updated it ten years later, including Wannop's bastard child and the fact that Tietjens has abandoned her for another young woman and regularly keeps his eye open for new talent.
Saunders desperately tries to excuse Ford, emphasizing his art over his morally abhorrent behavior (well, this was written in the 1990s), but there is no inherent contradiction between moral uprightness and literary worth. G.K. Chesterton was a brilliant writer as was J.R.R. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh had a wild youth, and was by no means the model father, but he didn't abandon his wife and children and let himself constantly be led astray. There was quite literally no woman he had a relationship with on whom he did not seriously consider cheating. The only reason he remained true to his final mistress, Janice Biala, was that he was too ill to consummate any more adulteries.
To his credit, he never truly abandoned his Catholic faith and tried to raise his children in the Church.
Though the work is quite long enough, I would have liked to see less literary analysis and more about his extended family, including his illegitimate daughter and his brother Oliver, who pops into and out of the narrative without much explanation. An epilogue on his descendants would also have interested me.
Instead, Saunders - like his subject - regarded Ford's death as the end of the line, and wrote no more.