Impressions of War: Ford Madox Ford, Reading and Parade’s End

Abstract

Ford Madox Ford wrote strikingly about reading during the First World War, both in his reminiscences and in his major war fiction, the tetralogy Parade’s End. His own choices of reading material are unusual, and the reasons he gives for them revealing. He often thematised reading and writing in his fiction; and he discussed the nature of reading extensively in his criticism. This chapter argues that his engagement with the phenomenology of reading is a constitutive element of his Modernism (which he tended to define as ‘impressionism’).² Such engagement is particularly intensive in his war prose, in ways that suggest not only that reading experience represented a significant aspect of his war experience, but also that the war elicited a more intense engagement with the experience of reading. This chapter will move from a discussion of Ford’s descriptions of reading to a consideration of how his representation of the experience is bound up with questions of space and time. While his emphasis on reading as a vicarious experience might be characterised as escapist, expressing a desire for other times and places, I shall argue that Ford’s returns to pre-war fiction are construed in terms of trying to reconstruct a future: to imagine a post-war world, and a post-war literature.3

Never has so much been read or so passionately as during the war […]. (Paul Valéry)¹