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It was the Nightingale

Always on the side of the wolf

Ford Maddox
Ford Carcanet, pp. 272pp, ££14.95,

Carole Angier

Wednesday, 2nd January 2008

Carole Angier

Poor old Fordie. That was Ford’s eternal cry, and it is repeated often here. His father called him ‘the patient but extremely stupid Ass’, his very name — Huffer — meant ‘Ass’, so was changed first to Hueffer, then to Ford. As a writer he was disliked (‘It is me they dislike, not the time-shift’), as a returning Great War soldier loathed; even as a Sussex smallholder he is a figure of fun, followed everywhere by a dog, a drake and a goat. Above all, after years of war he is forgotten as a writer, ‘as good as dead’, convinced he could no longer write. He is an outsider, a dung beetle, a ‘ruined author’, misunderstood and despised.

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