Core of England

A MAN COULD STAND UP--Ford Madox Ford--A. & C. Boni ($2.50). Author Ford's three-volume metaphor for what the War did to the presumable core of England is herewith completed. There are deep scars, wrought by much cleaving to duty. The scene is littered with social and personal wreckage. But the core survives.

It is for an oldtime, blundering, self-crucifying British individualism; for an egotism whose one sinew is self-respect, that Author Ford's central figure stands. When the War came, Christopher Tietjens of Groby, ponderous, gentle, clumsy, omniscient, was already under the triply complicated strain of an abnormally faithless wife, financial difficulties and his love for Valentine Wannop, a young person of much head and spirit. In Some Do Not (1924) he resisted his need for Valentine as his mistress despite the facts that divorce from his Catholic wife was impossible; that Valentine was his perfect complement, and knew it; and that he was off for the War. In No More Parades (1925) he endured a very special and ingenious kind of hell in a base camp, where his wife, Sylvia, and scandal about himself and Valentine, turned up to torment him and to hamper his official conduct as not even red tape and a thousand childish soldiers could have done. His maddening integrity, that alone, was the factor that saved a bad local situation and led indirectly to the establishment of a Single Command.

This final book of the trilogy shows the triumph of the Single Command, the end of the War. Tietjens is in it to the finish, in very real and dismal front trenches where a man cannot stand up. When it is over he stands up, physically and spiritually. He foregoes revenge upon unjust superior officers, lays aside the battered taboos of the civilization he has helped preserve, returns to London, poverty and Valentine.

The Significance of Author Ford's work, aside from its having established him as never before in the forefront of contemporary writers, is its relentless penetration and comprehension of personal and social values too subtle to be more than hinted at by lesser men. The chronicle unfolds itself, chiefly through the disordered thought currents and abrupt conversations of the characters, with all the perplexing yet inevitable indirection of actual life. The versatility and incessant activity of Tietjen's mind--he is a mathematician, linguist and poet as well as a husband, lover, officer, sociologist and human being --do not contribute immediate lucidity to events which the reader must follow subjectively, by the impressionist method. A crucial telephone talk may last several chapters, the words actually spoken falling pages apart while numerous causes, consequences and chunks of mental and emotional background are tracked down in hurried asides. Yet such episodes, and much apparently meaningless detail--such as a sonnet composed on a challenge in two and one-half minutes --come into focus sooner or later. The total effect is vivid, clear and all the stronger for its slow fusing.

The Author. Born in 1873, grandson of Painter Ford Madox Brown and son of a London Times music critic, Author Ford evolved his present name out of the imposing nomenclature bestowed upon him by his Anglo-German parents, .Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer. Raised a Pre-Raphaelite, he started writing at 16. In 1894 he married an Englishwoman by whom he had two daughters. In 1909 he left her, going off to Germany to change his nationality and get, as he thought, a divorce. To join and marry him came Violet Hunt, British novelist, suffragette and social light. In 1913, Mrs. Hueffer the First obtained libel damages from a periodical which had published Violet Hunt's picture and name as Mrs. Hueffer the Second. His divorce and second marriage were subsequently held illegal. Lately he and Violet Hunt have parted company and a third companion to his soul is said to have come upon the scene. He is now in the U. S., writing for the New York Herald-Tribune.

All of which would be dull history but for the current publication of an extraordinary lively and intimate document by Violet Hunt,* revealing Author Ford as she knew him when he was founding the English Review, composing masterpieces in Joseph Conrad's bathroom, treating with Publisher S. S. McClure and the latter's secretary, "of delicate and virile power," Willa Gather; going to prison for the experience and to balk his wife's collecting alimony; receiving famed authors at his office; acting as novelist of the Vorticist art movement; suffering the slings and arrows of legal fortune, in the shape of writs and bills from his wife and agents of the Crown seeking to apprehend him as a German spy just when he had obtained a commission and was off for France. She describes him as "a cold, patient man, without fire, lazy of habit ... an Englishman a little mad about good letters" mooning about or dictating smoothly in a Velvet coat that was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's.

Nearly every one of contemporary literary importance appears full length and close to, notably:

Joseph Conrad, who bore Author Ford much love. They collaborated on many works.

Henry James, who called Violet Hunt his "purple patch." She fancied him, with his black beard, as a corsair when she first met him, soon discovering the paradox. He keeps aloof from all intimacy, a coy, correct lion, but squeezes gossips dry of their human news, for "copy."

Thomas Hardy contributes a poem to the first issue of the Review. H. G. Wells lends kind offices and has hockey parties. Hugh Walpole and Ezra Pound play tennis. Oscar Wilde lisps about Africa. Frank Harris reads his latest things. Walter De la Mare and Amy Lowell are present. Rebecca West conquers Fleet Street at 18, making "not so much a splash as a definite hole in the world."

Finally and not least, there is Violet Hunt, Ruskin's goddaughter, revealing herself without reservations--a fascinating, quickwitted, harum-scarum little busybody, a Yorkshire sparrow constantly braving the horses' hoofs. She turns out her books, chiefly love-novels and tales of the "uneasy" (ghosts), with unflagging industry; cares for her aging mother though it costs her a family feud; crusades with the Pankhursts; serves the Review, mothers Editor Hueffer, loves him (even with all his teeth gone), thinks she is married to him, keeps her chin up afterwards.

*I HAVE THIS TO SAY: THE STORY OF MY FLURRIED YEARS--Violet Hunt--Boni & Liveright (,$3.50).