Books: Amiable Gossip

IT WAS THE NIGHTINGALE — Ford Madox Ford—Lippincott ($3).

Ever since the War, Ford Madox Ford has been writing novels that read like autobiographies (Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, The Last Post). Now he has written an autobiography that reads like a novel. In It Was the Nightingale he has “employed every wile known to me as novelist—the time-shift, the progression d’effet, the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action.” Author Ford’s well-known three-dotty style is not likely to attract many new ‘readers at this late date. But his faithful followers will find the entertainment they expect, though they may be hard put to extract from it much essential information about the author which they had not already gathered.

Author Ford’s circuitous narrative begins in post-War London with his efforts to get a toehold in a world that had forgotten him while he was fighting for it. E. V. Lucas told him that he was not really English because he did not appreciate Punch. (He had served all through the War under his family name, Hueffer—his father was German—and changed it in 1919 for post-War reasons.) After a term of editing the English Review which he had founded in 1908, Ford retired to a tumbledown country cottage to live by writing and raising vegetables. He acquired a goat, a drake, a rook, a Blue Angora cat, and eventually two very large sows. In spite of his friendship with John Galsworthy and his admiration for George Moore, England finally became too depressing; he expatriated himself to Paris. There, with Ernest Hemingway as his sanest subeditor, the encouragement of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, and with the backing of the late U. S. backer, John Quinn. he started the transatlantic review. A helpful man, he was much put upon by the polyglot bohemians. He once made an appointment at the British Embassy for Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhofen; she showed up “simply dressed in a brassière of milktins connected by dog chains and wearing on her head a plum-cake.”

The transatlantic review went the way of all such reviews, but its business took Author Ford to the U. S., which he liked, especially Manhattan. “New York is not America because she is the expression of an ideal vaster and more humane.” An amiable but persistent sort, never bearing malice long (he thinks a lack of hatred is the secret of being a novelist) but going quietly on his way “like a nice old gentleman at a tea-party,” Author Ford had too much bounce in him ever to be cast down for good. Though for years his books brought him very little money he kept at them. “I have been accustomed to regard myself as of the family of the dung-beetle”—a stoical insect Sisyphus. With no audible repinings that he is an expatriate or not yet a best-seller he has settled down to live “in France where the Arts are held in great honor and as often as I can I go to the U. S. where the greatest curiosity as to the Arts is displayed.”