Book description
Ford Madox Ford can never quite keep out of it. The more
self-effacing he seems, the more his the writing becomes: scenes of
preternatural clarity. 'Memory doesn't work like that,' said one
critic. Well, Ford's does. 'Truth to the impression' was his aim. How
it seemed, how memory took it in, is more alive than how it 'actually'
was, whatever that means. Memory is for Ford as for Wordsworth
re-creation. His memoirs have the authority of fiction because they
are half way between fiction and fact. Return to Yesterday (1931), his
most fascinating memoir, follows on Ancient Lights and covers the
years from 1894 to the outbreak of World War I - his transition from
privileged godson of the Pre-Raphaelites to the great Modern writer
and editor he became. Here he evokes England at large, and London in
particular, its literary community, the political world of anarchists
(the world of his friend Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent). If the
Rossettis, Ford Madox Brown, Swinburne and Morris gave their blessing
to his youth, it was Pound and Lawrence, Joyce and Rhys, who were
blessed by his maturity. C. H. Sisson writes: 'Ford remains a profound
influence on the poetry as on the prose of the century, for he found
English literature poetical and left it spare.'
