Always on the side of the wolf

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.

Poor old Fraudie. For most of this, like much of what he said and wrote, is not true. I’ve never heard of first world war soldiers meeting the hatred he describes; and he wrote several books in Sussex, as he cheerfully admits. But truth was not the point of Ford. The opening of It Was the Nightingale promises a book about Paris in the Twenties, and this new edition picks up the promise for its blurb. But if you want to read about Paris in the Twenties, It Was the Nightingale is almost entirely useless. There is the odd line about Hemingway, Joyce and Gertrude Stein, and a bit more about Ezra Pound and the great patron of writers John Quinn; but nothing about Jean Rhys (from whom Ford had parted with mutual loathing) or anyone else, and nothing at all about Paris. There is a good deal about the birth and early death of the transatlantic review, but none of it is remotely reliable.