marginalia

Ford Madox Ford
17 December 1873 ~ 26 June 1939
is the one talking.
With James Joyce, Ezra Pound, John Quinn, and Diana,
Pound’s studio and courtyard,
70 Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris, October 1923

There passed from us this June a very gallant combatant for those things of the mind and of letters which have been in our time too little prized. . . . For ten years before I got to England there would seem to have been no one but Ford who held that French clarity and simplicity in the writing of English verse and prose were of immense importance as in contrast to the use of a stilted traditional dialect, a “language of verse” unused in the actual talk of the people. . . .

In 1908 London was full of gargoyles, of poets, that is, with high reputation, most of whose work has gone since into the discard. At that time, and in the few years preceding, there appeared without notice various fasciculae which one can still, surprisingly, read, and they were not designed for mouthing, for the “rolling out” of “ohs.” . . .

I did not in those days care about prose. If prose meant anything to me, it meant Tacitus . . . a dangerous model for a young man. . . . Start with Tacitus and be cured by Flaubert via Ford, or start with Ford or Maupassant and be girt up with Tacitus.

Ezra Pound, 1939, Pound / Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship, edited by Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (New Directions, 1982), 171, 173.

Images:
• A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, by Humphry Carpenter (Delta, 1988), from the collection of Mary de Rachewiltz.
• Ezra Pound: The Solitary Voclano, by John Tytell (Anchor, 1987), from the Photography Collection, Henry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
• The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915-1924, edited by Timothy Materer (Duke UP, 1991), from the John Quinn Memorial Collection, New York Public Library.

Ford Madox Ford, The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2001, Bartleby
Ford Madox Ford pages maintained by Max Saunders, King’s College London
Ford @ Books and Writers
Ford @ Wikipedia
Ford @ firstworldwar.com