Conrad First: Skinner

Skinner

“I can hear our voices”: Revisiting The Nature of a Crime

FOR years my consciousness of this small piece of collaboration has been very vague, almost impalpable, like the fleeting visits from a ghost.
—Joseph Conrad, “Preface” to The Nature of a Crime

On 8 November 1923, Ford Madox Ford wrote to Joseph Conrad from Paris. He mentioned, as the publication date of the first issue of his new journal the transatlantic review was approaching, that the Paris branch of J. M. Dent, who published the Conrad Collected Edition, had expressed an interest in “a sort of Conrad supplement of appreciations and the like.” Because of the short time available, Ford dismissed the proposal. He went on:

But it occurs to me that what would please me very much would be this: You remember that, shortly before the English Review was started we wrote in collaboration a short story called the Story of a Crime. This you gave over to me and it was published in the first number of the English Review under a pseudonym principally because as we were both writing in that number it would have seemed as it were tautological to publish a collaboration. I have looked at it again and it seems to me a pretty good piece of work. I had forgotten about it till the other day when Dents asked me if I could not print a page or two of ROMANCE with indications of which passages were your and which were my writing. They say they have received thousands of requests for this. I could do this as I have still a good deal of the original m. s. and all the proofs with corrections, but I could not reasonably print more than a page or so and I do not know how you would like the idea. But I think that to reprint the Story of a Crime as a collaboration with a note to the effect that it is old & was published under a pseudonym would have a certain literary and sentimental interest and I should very much like to do it.

Alluding briefly to the matter of copyrights, Ford added: “I hope you will agree, for it would give me real pleasure: in that case my original proposal would stand over till you can write something at your easy convenience. Indeed, if it would amuse you, a little later I would come over to a near-by pub & see if we couldn’t again evolve something like the original passage of the Mirror [of the Sea]” (Ludwig 1965, 156–57).
The Nature of a Crime—Ford’s attempts to recall the published title were not invariably successful—is the third and final collaboration between Ford and Conrad, following The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). By far the shortest of the three collaborative texts, it runs to a little under 15,000 words, and is rarely discussed as seriously or extensively by scholars and critics as are the two earlier works. The editors of the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad refer to it as “by common consent the least important” of the collaborations (Knowles and Moore 2000, 24) and few commentators would seriously contradict that view. Yet, whatever the assessment of the novella’s purely literary qualities, it remains of immense interest, even if, realistically, that interest will be greatest for those viewing the story through a Fordian lens. By “story,” I mean here, predominantly, less The Nature of a Crime’s content than its unusually protracted genesis, which extends over nearly twenty years (nearly as long as that of Conrad’s The Rescue), from a time in which Ford and Conrad were still intimately involved in one another’s lives—and both were producing some of their most lasting work—to the postwar years when Conrad was in decline, both artistically and physically, and Ford, having removed himself from England, had begun publishing his great and, in many ways, his most English work: Parade’s End. In this essay, I want to consider some aspects of that long history.

Beginnings
The earliest precursor to The Nature of a Crime appears to be the “bizarre” letter (Saunders 1996, 65) written by Ford in 1893, purportedly to be sent to Elsie Martindale, whom he would marry in 1894, after his death. “The imagination of his own death was a powerful lifelong impulse of his art,” notes Max Saunders, commenting that this can be seen as part of Ford’s inheritance from Christina Rossetti, his aunt by marriage (Saunders 1996, 520n).
More substantial is an unpublished fiction, entitled “The Old Story,” an early draft of the novella. Consisting of 34 pages, the undated typescript is divided into the “Argument,” with the name “Daniel Chaucer” typed at the end (7 leaves), and the story (27 leaves), itself divided into three parts. Ford used a good many pseudonyms during his career (Wiesenfarth 2005, 81) and returned to the name “Daniel Chaucer” for two satirical novels, The Simple Life (1911) and The New Humpty-Dumpty (1912), even writing a letter under that name to Violet Hunt to be passed to the publisher John Lane, and using it in another, to his agent, in 1921 (Ludwig 1965, 49–51, 131–32). He resuscitated the pseudonym once more for his series of articles in the transatlantic review in 1924, under the general title of “Stocktaking: Towards a Revaluation of English Literature.”
“Daniel Chaucer” identifies the narrator of “The Old Story” as his friend Ambrose Poindestre, it having occurred to Chaucer that “there were about it certain vaguenesses. Let me clear them up” (Ford, n.d. [1]). Poindestre is forty-seven: Ford was thirty-three, and Conrad forty-eight, in 1906. A curious footnote is that Arthur Marwood, an important figure in both men’s lives, would die, in 1916, at the age of forty-seven.
The “Argument” suggests an attempt to map out in greater detail and with greater clarity, the story that it prefaces. There is a slight contradiction in chronology and more than one foreshadowing of themes to which Ford was to return, such as the “second complication”—here, while the first is the decision of Poindestre’s ward to marry sooner than expected, the second is Poindestre’s falling in love with a married woman. Ford later asserted that “Henry James was our first Anglo-Saxon writer to perceive that this life of ours is an affair of terminations and of embarrassments. Mr. Conrad was our next” (Ford 1922, 706), and he himself was frequently drawn to a further “turn of the screw,” one striking example occurring in Parade’s End with “the impossible complication” for Christopher Tietjens of the fact that his own wife is in love with him (Ford [1924] 2010, 273).
In Return to Yesterday, Ford alluded to the story in his recollection of this final collaboration with Conrad:

I had however, much earlier, written about half a long short-story having the same subject. The story was one my grandfather [the painter Ford Madox Brown] used to tell about one of his wealthy Greek art patrons who imagining himself to be ruined, wrote a letter to his mistress to the effect that he was going to commit suicide rather than be detected in a fraudulent bankruptcy and then found that bankruptcy could be avoided. (Ford 1931, 199)

In March 1906, Ford wrote to Elsie that he was working on a book described as “a series of letters from a man about to commit suicide!—wh. Pinker wants me to publish anonymously. I think it will ‘go’. It’s awful piffle” (quoted in Saunders 1996, 211). Alan Judd refers to The Nature of a Crime as “in effect a disguised letter to [Ford’s] wife” (Judd 1990, 76): Elsie had embarked the previous month upon an extended trip to the continent, beginning in Paris and Rome, then moving on to other Italian cities in the later spring and summer (Saunders 1996, 207). The novella is indeed an epistolary work, of which Max Saunders has commented that it “must be one of the longest suicide notes in literary history” (Saunders 2010, 221).
The collaborative writing, as far as it went, dates from May 1906 when the Conrads stayed at The Bungalow in Winchelsea for twelve days, during which time Ford travelled down from London for two long weekends. Work on the manuscript was apparently finished by July, when Ford sent it on to Conrad. Writing to his agent J. B. Pinker, Ford made clear both his confidence that the story could be amplified and his unwillingness to devote more time to it unless there were a strong likelihood of publication (Mizener 1972, 118).
For Conrad, 1906 was, substantially, the year of those stories later collected in A Set of Six. His “collaboration” on The Nature of a Crime in May was preceded by the completion of “An Anarchist” (by late December 1905), “The Informer,” and “The Brute,” and by mid-April he had drafted three chapters of The Secret Agent. After the sojourn in Winchelsea, the Conrads spent several summer weeks in London. Between July and October, the Pall Mall Magazine serialised “Gaspar Ruiz” (completed in October 1905) and, by early December, Conrad had completed “Il Conde.” The sixth and longest story, “The Duel,” was begun either in that same month or in January 1907, completed in April and serialised, again in the Pall Mall Magazine, between January and May, 1908. In October 1906, The Mirror of the Sea appeared in book form from Methuen, and in America, on the same date, from Harper.
The Mirror of the Sea had begun, Frederick Karl notes, “as a somewhat loose collaboration with Ford” (Karl 1979, 452). Zdzisław Najder reluctantly concedes that “his [Ford’s] contributions to the six earliest essays […] cannot be doubted. I suppose that the idea for the whole series came from Ford; in terms of literary technique the book is more Fordian than Conradian” (Najder 1983, 298). Conrad wrote to Pinker in March 1906: “If you should happen to get proofs of Mirror from Methuen soon please send them on to Hueffer who in his letter asks to be allowed to see them through for me. It’s very good of him because proofs do worry and disturb me” (Karl and Davies 1988, 323–24).
Appropriately, Ford published three books in this year of the third collaboration. Christina’s Fairy Book, the last to be published, just before Christmas, was a collection of stories and poems; earlier, maintaining the marked triadic aspect, The Heart of the Country was the second of what became Ford’s England and the English trilogy, and the Conrads’ presentation copy, like Henry James’s, is dated 9 May (Harvey 1972, 21); while The Fifth Queen: And How She Came to Court was the first of Ford’s three novels about Katherine Howard. It was dedicated to Conrad, who acknowledged receipt of his copy from Montpellier on 29 March, claiming to have read it twice already: “A triumph: my dear boy, a triumph!” (Karl and Davies 1988, 324).
The editors of Conrad’s letters of the English Review period refer to “the final collaboration” between the two men as “uneven in every sense” (Karl and Davies 1990, 220 n.2), and Conrad’s contribution to this brief text does seem to have been negligible, probably no more than a few hundred words. Ford’s reciprocal effort concerned the story that Conrad was working on, which had begun as “Verloc” and had recently been retitled The Secret Agent. Conrad’s 1920 “Author’s Note” refers to his “omniscient friend,” whose comments had helped formulate the idea of the novel. A decade later, recalling how he heard the “inner story of the Greenwich Observatory outrage,” Ford added that he “happened to tell the story [to] Conrad […] and, since he detested all Russians and the Russian Secret Police in particular, he made his novel out of it” (Ford 1931, 111).
Robert Hampson’s reference to Romance as “a genuine collaboration” reasonably distinguishes that novel from both The Inheritors, which was predominantly Ford’s work, and The Nature of a Crime, which was almost exclusively so (Hampson 2012, 93). Nevertheless, as Alan Judd remarks of Conrad, “for him as for Ford what was important was the process of collaboration, not its results” (Judd 1990, 74), and if that process was only briefly and weakly operative in the case of The Nature of a Crime, in comparison with The Inheritors, let alone that of Romance, the text could, and did, still serve as a sometimes poignant reminder of that earlier period—of what had been lost. Nor was the loss felt only by Ford. Even after their breach in 1909, and following the partial rapprochement of 1911, Conrad wrote to Ford in response to his December 1911 article, “Joseph Conrad”:

What touches me most is to see that you do not discard our common past. These old days may not have been such very “good old days” as they should have been—but to me my dear Ford they are a very precious possession. In fact I have nothing else that I can call my own. (Karl and Davies 1990, 525)

Appearing first in Ford’s English Review in April and May, 1909, The Nature of a Crime was republished in the transatlantic review, also edited by Ford, which ran for twelve issues from January to December 1924 (I, January 1924, 15–36; February 1924, 15–35). Ford made numerous, mostly minor, revisions for this second serialisation, and the text as it appeared in the transatlantic review was published in book form (London: Duckworth, five shillings; New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., $2.50) on 26 September 1924, together with prefaces by both Ford and Conrad. (For further detail on the variants, click here; for a full list, click here.) Also included was an appendix, reprinted from the February issue of the transatlantic review, in which pages from the collaborative Romance were discussed, analysed and assigned to their respective authors, though some copies of the Doubleday, Page edition precisely reversed these attributions (Harvey 1972, 61; Ludwig 1965, 170).

The Nature of a Crime in 1909
Launched in December 1908, The English Review was edited by Ford for fifteen issues, though contributions that he had commissioned or accepted continued to appear for several more months. The Nature of a Crime appeared in the issues of April and May 1909 (II, 70–78, 279–301), under the pseudonym of Ignatz von Aschendrof, combining Polish and German elements, as, of course, did the two collaborators, Korzeniowski and Hueffer. Ford wrote to his agent, James B. Pinker, on 16th October 1908: “My cousin Baron Ignatz von Aschendrof has been in communication with me about the M. S. called ‘The Psychology of Crime’ which you forwarded me” (Ludwig 1965, 26). As has often been pointed out, the name ends with “Ford” backwards; it also combines this with the German for “ashes” (Davies and Moore 2008, 218, n.1). The publishing company owned by the Hüffer family, who were based in Münster, was called Aschendorff (Saunders 1996, 18; Rademacher 2002, 120), and there is a town called Aschendorf in Lower Saxony, on the railway line between Emden and Münster.
Referring to Ford’s 1911 sojourn in Germany, during his abortive efforts to obtain a divorce there in order to marry Violet Hunt, Douglas Goldring, who served as sub-editor on the English Review, wrote of their “daydream of returning proudly to South Lodge as ‘Baron and Baroness Hüffer von Aschendorf’ [sic]” (Goldring 1949, 161). Elsewhere, Goldring recalled Ford’s explaining that he was “a “baron” five times over: “He was Baron von Aschendrof, several other sorts of baron and finally baron of the Cinque Ports! I gazed at him with astonishment and awe” (Goldring 1935, 95).
In his letter of November 1923, quoted earlier, Ford offers an answer to a question—why use a pseudonym?—that would later be posed by Conrad: “principally because as we were both writing in that number it would have seemed as it were tautological to publish a collaboration.” The first issue of the English Review did not, of course, include the serialisation of The Nature of a Crime but it did indeed carry writings by both Conrad and Ford. Conrad contributed a review of Anatole France’s L’Ile des Pingouins and the first instalment of “Some Reminiscences,” later collected as A Personal Record. In September 1908, Conrad wrote to his agent, J. B. Pinker, that Ford had suggested the sketches (“intimate personal autobiographical things”) and had “offered to take me down from dictation.” He added: “These are things which I could not dictate to anyone but a friend—and such a friend is Hueffer who consents to hold the pen for me—a proof of friendship and an act of great kindness.” Later that same month, he remarked in a letter to H. G. Wells: “Ford persuaded me to some reminiscences for the E. R. (may its fate be ever propitious!) A megalomaniac’s stuff but easy to spin out comparatively speaking” (Karl and Davies 1990, 125–26, 129).
Ford wrote an editorial, the first part of “The Function of the Arts in the Republic,” but the observation that “we were both writing” perhaps signified also his memory of involvement in Conrad’s reminiscences. Suggestion, encouragement and, taking down dictation perhaps do not constitute “collaboration” for the purist, but one more “presence” can be detected: an essay on “The Personality of the German Emperor” by “À. D.” was translated (and possibly written) by “I. v. A.,” surely representing Ford as “Ignatz von Aschendrof,” the “author” of The Nature of a Crime (see Saunders 2000, 139–40).
The story of The Nature of a Crime is very simple in outline. A man, outwardly a highly successful businessman in London, writes to his married lover, who is in Rome, expressing his intention to kill himself because his embezzlement of a trust for which he has held sole responsibility for a number of years is bound to be discovered in a matter of days. The man whose trust fund he administers is shortly to come of age, and is to marry; under the existing arrangement, the accounts are to be audited in such circumstances, and the narrator, who has latterly, he claims, plundered the trust less for monetary gain than for the fun of the thing, will inevitably be exposed. He has, he says, “half a score of hours” in which to write—or talk—to his lover. Having committed to paper the confession of financial crime, he is abruptly reprieved when the young man, having confessed an indiscretion of his own, insists on accepting the accounts unaudited and unexamined, to confirm his trust in the narrator, who remarks at the end of the final letter that he has now given his fate over into his lover’s hands.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, critical interest in the novella has tended to focus on what light it sheds on accounts of the two writers’ collaboration, the question of their postwar relations, and the affinities and echoes between it and subsequent writings, particularly those of Ford. Precisely halfway between the composition of The Nature of a Crime and its appearance in hard covers, he published his pre-war masterpiece, The Good Soldier (1915). A number of commentators have seen it as somehow prefigured in The Nature of a Crime, and have cited its use of the first-person narrator (Snitow 1984, 164-65), as well as instances of similarity between the narrative voices and the implied use of the narrator’s situation if the story had been extended along the lines suggested in his letter to Pinker, developing the story of Edward Burden rather than returning to the narrator’s concern with his impending death (Mizener 1972, 118–19). Thomas Moser also cites the narrator but further asserts that The Nature of a Crime is “important because it initiates Ford’s custom of bringing into his fictions suggestions of both Conrad and Marwood” (Moser 1980, 66), while Eric Meyer suggests that The Good Soldier’s haunting by “criminality and adultery, suicide and passion” constitutes “an extended reprise of the pathological themes” of the novella (Meyer 1990, 506).
Certainly, in both “The Old Story” and The Nature of a Crime, there are details, sometimes specific images or phrases, that tug at the attention and tilt it towards some later Fordian writing. Poindestre describes himself as “a sentimentalist,” as does The Good Soldier’s John Dowell (Ford 1915, 193), having repeatedly referred to Edward Ashburnham’s sentimentalism in the course of the novel, while Dowell’s concern with clarity and the order in which his tale is best told echoes such passages as this, also in “The Old Story”: “I am getting into a great muddle as the random ideas come into my mind and, as I set them down. I glance back over the few pages that I have written to see what hares I have startled [sic]. I will run them down one by one . . . . . ” (Ford, n.d., [12]).
Again, very early in The Good Soldier, the narrator, John Dowell, remarks that:

Someone has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event. (Ford [1915] 2012, 12).

Max Saunders’ recent edition of The Good Soldier cites the physician Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton, who wrote in his An Introduction to Modern Therapeutics (1892), that:

a likeness may be observed between the body corporeal and the body corporate, and that the death of a mouse from anthrax may be compared with the destruction of the Roman Empire by the savage hordes who invaded it. (Ford [1915] 2012, 230n).

The Nature of a Crime, too, has its mouse, first glimpsed emerging from “beneath one of the deed-boxes”:

Let me return to my mouse. For you will observe that the whole question revolves, really, around that little allegorical mite. It is an omen: it is a symbol. It is a little herald of the Providence that I do not believe in—of the Providence you so implicitly seek to obey. (Ford 1924b, 29-30)

The exaggeratedly precise measurement of elapsed time employed by the narrator of The Nature of a Crime—“all the years we have known each other—seven years, three months and two days” (Ford 1924b, 26) is echoed in Dowell’s musing upon the period during which—being in ignorance of the true state of affairs—he “possessed a goodly apple,” that period amounting to “nine years and six months less four days” (Ford [1915] 2012, 13).
The most striking “family” resemblance, though, is surely the ways in which the written—the letter within the novel, the novel itself—is punctuated by the endlessly recurring insistence that we are listening to a voice talking. In The Good Soldier, Dowell must keep talking if he is ever to understand the world in which he sits, the situation he has lived through, the deaths and secrets and madness which have conspired to define him. He is, of course, writing, but almost the entire novel is couched in terms of talk, if not of conversation, although his listener is mad and has such a limited vocabulary—the single word “Shuttlecocks!” together with the expressed belief in an omnipotent deity—that estimates of the likely scope and nature of his narrative’s reception are not encouraging. The Nature of a Crime’s narrator is both embezzler and, as Joseph Wiesenfarth notes, “a master of plots—whose masterplot can continue only if the unnamed woman to whom he writes will continue to talk and write to him.” He adds: “This is analogous to the Ford/Conrad collaboration. Conrad can continue as a novelist if Ford is there for him” (Wiesenfarth 2000, 46).
But readers of the novella, and of the story which represents an early draft of it, are not only reminded of The Good Soldier (“The Old Story,” in particular, has several teasing hints of details in Parade’s End, nearly twenty years away). The closing sentence of The Nature of a Crime, “So then, I stand reprieved—and the final verdict is in your hands” (Ford 1924b, 103) seems to anticipate, with its air of thoroughgoing capitulation (whatever the element of underlying calculation), the closing lines of Ford’s 1910 novel A Call (completed in the spring of 1909 and serialised in the English Review between April and November of the same year, thus overlapping with The Nature of a Crime):

“So that you get me both ways,” Robert Grimshaw said; and his hands fell desolately open at his side.
“Every way and altogether,” she answered Ford 1910, 292)

Towards the close of “Part I” of “The Old Story,” Poindestre remarks: “Yet when we were together we developed a third self. It is odd that third self. There is you and there is I—and then there is that; there is Us” (Ford, n.d., [20]). This is strongly reminiscent of the passage in Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, where Ford is reading aloud from the third draft of the second part of Romance: “And then Conrad, interrupting. . . . ‘By Jove,’ he said, ‘it’s a third person who is writing!’”—an idea that Ford pursues over the following few pages. He then relates the visit by Conrad and himself to Lower Sandgate Road, to see “the author of the Invisible Man.” The chapter has begun with the visit to Sandgate during which, on arrival at Wells’s doorstep, the electric bell-push, “all of itself went in and the bell sounded. . . . Conrad exclaimed: ‘Tiens! . . . The Invisible Man!’ and burst into incredible and incredulous laughter. In the midst of it the door opened before grave faces” (Ford 1924c, 45–48, 42). That element of the invisible or later, the ghostly, becomes an increasingly important factor in Ford’s postwar writings, not least in his recollections of writers, and not least, again, recollections of Joseph Conrad.
Part II of “The Old Story” begins: “I will tell you how this thing began,” repeated verbatim as the fifteenth line of Ford’s 1914 poem, “On Heaven” (Ford 1918, 80). But Ford’s poetry and prose were often intermingled, particularly in the pre-war period. As well as the use of his own poems in his 1909 novel The “Half-Moon” (Ford 1909, 20, 21, 280) the opening of The Nature of a Crime:

You are, I suppose, by now in Rome. It is very curious how present to me are both Rome and yourself. There is a certain hill—you, and that is the curious part of it, will never go there—yet, yesterday, late in the evening, I stood upon its summit, and you came walking from a place below. (Ford 1924b, 15)

is, as has often been noted, intimately related to Ford’s poem, “Views,” which begins:

Being in Rome I wonder will you go
Up to the Hill. But I forget the name. . . .
Aventine? Pincio? No: I do not know.
I was there yesterday and watched. You came. (Ford 1913, 71)

One more element in the story with a curious forerunner is the addiction to chloral of the woman’s husband. In his review of his uncle William Rossetti’s edition of D. G. Rossetti, Letters and a Memoir, Ford recalled that:

Various people made attempts to wean him [Rossetti] of the habit, but achieved little in that direction. Madox Brown himself claimed to have reduced the quantity taken to a minimum. This he brought about partly by reasoning, partly by “bullying,” and partly by clandestine adulteration, thus uniting the methods of other workers in the same cause. (Ford 1896, 470)

This finds a clear echo in The Nature of a Crime:

Quite simply then: I have been doing two things. In the first place I have persuaded your chemists to reduce very gradually the strength of chloral, so that the bottles contain nearly half water. [...]
But that alone would hardly be satisfactory: a comparatively involuntary cure is of little value in comparison with an effort of the will. [...] He has not, of course, the incentives usual to men: you cannot, in fact, “get” him along ordinary lines....But apart from his physical craving for the drug he has that passion for clearness of intellect that he says the drug gives him—and it is through that that, at last, I have managed to hit his pride. (Ford 1924b, 87–88)

What do these echoes and mirrorings signify? If anything, it is cumulative, associative. They may comment, in miniature, on the kind of writer that Ford was and so, by implication, on the kind of writer that Conrad was since there must be enough similarities or affinities—and enough differences—to allow for successful collaboration. That very few critics rate the published results of that collaboration among their important or even wholly achieved works has no real bearing, I think, on the truth, the fact of that success. Conrad was helped, was stimulated, was encouraged, was enabled; Ford was extended, enlarged, strengthened in focus and ambition. The Nature of a Crime, in itself, remains provisional, remains to some extent a draft, unfinished, though a fascinating indicator. In 1906, Ford was producing some fine and lasting work, yet was still, to some extent, provisional, in that he could yet have become several kinds of writer. A few more years and he would have become the kind of writer that he would essentially remain, with a highly individual stance towards the emerging strategies of modernism, capable not only of producing The Good Soldier but of negotiating the distances—personal, psychological, artistic—between the claustrophobic compression of that novel and the hugely ambitious scope and mastery of Parade’s End.

The Nature of a Crime in 1924
When The Nature of a Crime was republished in 1924, Ford had to contend with three different responses to the novella above and beyond that of the wider reading public. These were the individuals associated and involved with the magazine, primarily the contributors; the reviewers of the volume edition; and Joseph Conrad.
It is generally accepted that Ford envisaged the transatlantic review as, if not a continuation of the English Review, then at least strongly connected to it. But this was essentially a matter of his intention to adhere to the original model’s double focus: that of introducing and promoting new talents in the setting of established writers. The only criterion would be that of “good writing.” Recent critical essays make several points here: first, that Ford mistook in some ways the nature of “the new,” showing little interest in Dada and even less in the movement that was already succeeding it, Surrealism. Second, that many of those associated with the review or with the milieu in which the review operated had no wish for continuity or maintaining “the tradition” and had little or no interest in some of the older contributors whom Ford published. Third, that Ford, though he subsequently stressed the importance of the Midwest, failed to realise the extent to which the young American writers wanted to break free of the European tradition and to which they were already constructing a new national literature which owed little or nothing to the past (Gasiorek 2010, 199–201; Lamberti 2010, 219–21; Rogers 2010, 190–93).
In this context, in what became less a site of collaboration and co-operation than an arena of struggle, the last, brief collaborative text sat a little uncomfortably. The first thorough historian of Ford’s Parisian enterprise remarks that:

the clock was turned back fifteen years with the first half of The Nature of a Crime [...]. This text could not possibly appeal to young readers; as for older men, the story of the Hueffer-Conrad collaboration belonged to a remote past. Ford’s “Communications,” with long quotations from Conrad’s letter to the editor and details about their collaboration in the writing of Romance between 1900 and 1902, made the whole scheme appear so ponderous that it was bound to irritate Conrad’s admirers and to bore those who thought Conrad was passé. (Poli 1967, 49)

There was some criticism of Ford, and suspicion of his motives—not just from Jessie Conrad—in reprinting the novella and publishing his memoir of Conrad within months of Conrad’s death. The assumption was often made that Ford was simply seeking to ride on Conrad’s coat-tails in this period of the older novelist’s greatest popularity.
Ford had certainly sought to re-establish closer relations with Conrad, something that Conrad had doggedly resisted. The beginnings of the transatlantic review clearly recalled to Ford the period before the launch of the English Review, a significant part of which had been those intimate discussions with Conrad at a time when their formal collaboration was over. The most lasting result of that period, of course, or rather, the one closely following it, had been the rupture in their personal relations. This was now nearly a decade and a half ago. They had continued to correspond, though fitfully, and Ford must, at some level, have known that a complete reconciliation was neither possible nor, probably, advisable.
Both men had known, or been aware of, the strength, the creative force of that “third person.” Conrad may have suspected, or feared, that so much of his finest work being achieved when he was in closest collaborative contact with Ford was not coincidental. Ford had always shown remarkable loyalty to Conrad and his work, tirelessly promoting it and always wishing—and waiting—for some reciprocal public gesture from Conrad. It never came. The closest to this desired manifestation of support may well have been simply Conrad’s acceding to the republication of The Nature of a Crime. In truth, Conrad was too tired and too ill to care overmuch about this brief piece of writing to which he had contributed so little and of which he recalled even less. He wrote to J. A. Allen: “It is such a long time ago that I do not remember whether there is any more of it written, or really anything about it. Of course I remember the mere fact of collaboration and of course there is some of my work in it.” On the same day, he wrote to Eric S. Pinker, referring to “a piece of work we began together in the dim past somewhere, called ‘The Nature of a Crime’. I had forgotten all about it. Some or all of it appeared in the early E R. It is apparently extremely short and I suspect it isn’t finished at all. My part is very small” (Davies and Moore 2008, 285). He had no real objection to republication, though: “the thing is not wholly contemptible” (Davies and Moore 2008, 286).
Ford may well have managed to find some comfort in this, able to regard as an indication of trust what was only a lack of engagement. For his part, Ford had not been hugely interested in, or impressed by, Conrad’s later work but continued to defend him to writers of a younger generation, such as Herbert Read, who was, Ford remarked in a letter clearly written from one ex-soldier to another, “unjust, rather, to Conrad”:

You may say that Conrad’s prose is always a Ceremonial Parade of words, with a General Salute and a March Past twice in every chapter. . . . “And her mute glance conveyed to me the silence of an ineffable love; the glory of pain which is without end; a profound and unalterable. . . .” and so on. . . . And Trench Boots [...] must not be worn on ceremonial parades! That is true. . . . But you must have gallant and splendid shots at Prose with a Panache. . . .

Conrad was, Ford reiterated, “A great Master!” (Ludwig 1965, 127–28)
It may not be insignificant that, around the time that Ford was writing to Conrad, recalling those English Review days and proposing some contribution to the new periodical from Conrad, in effect, some semblance of collaboration, that he was completing Some Do Not. . ., the first volume of his Parade’s End tetralogy. In the closing pages, he has Christopher Tietjens, in conversation with Valentine Wannop about whether they could “wash out” the moment earlier that day when he had asked her to be his mistress and she had agreed:

“Yes, you can,” he said. “You cut out from this afternoon, just before 4.58 it was when I said that to you and you consented . . . I heard the Horse Guards clock. . . . To now. . . . Cut it out; and join time up. . . . It can be done. . . . You know they do it surgically; for some illness; cut out a great length of the bowel and join the tube up. . . . For colitis, I think. . . .” (Ford [1924] 2010, 346)

One significant part of Ford’s success in his best fiction—and much of his non-fiction too—is his marked ability to work with two or more chronological layers, one glimpsed through another, as though through glass or through a doubled reflection.
If Ford played with the idea of joining time up, of overlaying—while not obscuring—the irrefutable present with selected elements of a celebrated past, the transatlantic review curiously exemplifies this configuration and never more so than in the opening issue. Still, a reaching back across such a violent and transformative period as separated the historical locations of his two reviews could only result in tremendous strain.
In the “Communications” section in the later pages of the review’s initial number, Ford writes that “the birth is in truth a re-birth.” He touches on the launch of the English Review in 1908: a version of the story that has it begun for the purpose of printing Thomas Hardy’s poem “A Sunday Morning Tragedy,” already refused by another paper on account of its subject matter (an unmarried pregnancy, an attempted abortion which kills the girl as her lover retracts his earlier refusal and comes to offer her marriage). A later version of the review’s beginnings describes his own “most urgent motive” as that of raising some money for Conrad through the serialisation of his reminiscences (Ford 1931, 195). Ford also pays tribute to his friend Arthur Marwood as one of the prime movers in the original scheme. Marwood died in 1916 but recurred frequently in Ford’s writings thereafter, most famously as one of the primary models for Christopher Tietjens. There are letters of support from H. G. Wells (a major contributor to the English Review, his Tono-Bungay appeared as the Review’s first serialised novel, followed by Stephen Reynolds’ The Holy Mountain and Ford’s own A Call)—“it gladdens my heart to think that you are creating a successor to the wonderful English Review”—and from T. S. Eliot at the Criterion, very much an influential figure of the new generation. Ford mentions that he had hoped once more to open the review with a poem by Thomas Hardy but a letter from Mrs Hardy, reproduced here, explains that Hardy has been unwell.
After listing some of the other contributors—Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon. Mary Butts, Philippe Soupault, Marc Casson, Luke Ionides and “Daniel Chaucer” (Ford in pseudonymous guise again)—Ford closes with a brief discussion of The Nature of a Crime which consists largely of extracts from Conrad’s letter “authorising the re-publication.” This is immediately followed by the opening chapter of Some Do Not. . ., the first volume of Parade’s End. This in turn was followed by a section of publishers’ advertisements, the first from J. M. Dent & Sons, announcing a new and uniform edition of the complete works of Joseph Conrad, 19 volumes at 10s. 6d each. The last advert was from Duckworth and featured two books by Ford. The first was his 1923 novel, The Marsden Case, which dealt with much of the same material as his tetralogy and is a very effective fiction which has found some strong advocates. The second was Mister Bosphorus and the Muses, his long satirical poem, illustrated by Paul Nash, which celebrated his departure from England to warmer and more welcoming Southern climes and which also demonstrated Ford’s ability to pick up and use such overtly modernist procedures and materials as music-hall comedy, collage and typographical experimentation.
The “Preface” that Conrad contributed to the volume publication of The Nature of a Crime begins: “For years my consciousness of this small piece of collaboration has been very vague, almost impalpable, like the fleeting visits from a ghost.” It (almost) ends: “For it would be delightful to catch the echo of the desperate, earnest, eloquent and funny quarrels which enlivened those old days.” Ford, in his preface, writes at one point:

When an old friend, last year, on a Parisian Boulevard, said “Isn’t there a story by yourself and Collaborator buried in the So and So?” I repudiated the idea with a great deal of heat. Eventually I had to admit the, as it were, dead fact. And. having admitted that to myself, and my Collaborator having corroborated it, I was at once possessed by a sort of morbid craving to get the story republished in a definite and acknowledged form. One may care infinitely little for the fate of one’s work, and yet be almost hypochondriacally anxious as to the form its publication shall take—if the publication is likely to occur posthumously. (Ford 1924b, 9–10)

That sense of death, of vanishings, of burial and exhumation, of ghosts, of the posthumous—it is all powerfully familiar in Ford’s work of these years. He had come back from the war, shell-shocked, his memory shaken and damaged, having, like so many who had served, known and lost many friends. The “dead fact” followed by the close proximity, almost intertwining, of collaboration and corroboration, carries a curious but undeniable cumulative force. Two influential figures in his life, Henry James and Arthur Marwood, had died during the war; now, in the 1920s, he would lose many more friends, not least, Conrad himself, bare weeks later, on the 3rd August. The Nature of a Crime was published a little under two months after that; Ford finished writing his Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance on 5th October and it appeared in November. But what of Conrad? His own wartime troubles had begun with the onset of the conflict catching the Conrad family in Poland, that difficulty followed by illness and depression, Jessie’s major surgery and his son Borys’s problems, including shell-shock. His “manner now was of weariness, of waiting for the end” (Karl 1979, 904).
The two men had had relatively little contact during the war. In 1916, Henry James, an important figure in the professional lives of both Conrad and Ford, died on 28 February; on 13 May, Arthur Marwood died. The following month, Ford, waiting to be posted to France, had a “valedictory interview” with Conrad (Ford 1931, 198), during which, he recalled, they resolved several matters, such as Conrad’s accepting the post of Ford’s literary executor and the writing of the “Napoleonic” novel that they had long discussed.
In July 1916, Ford was stationed with battalion transport near Bécourt Wood: the Battle of the Somme had begun four weeks earlier but their position was still shelled “two or three times a day” and, on or just after the 28th of that month, Ford was blown into the air by a high explosive shell. Landing on his face, his mouth was injured, his teeth loosened and he was badly concussed (Ludwig 1965, 66; Saunders, 1996b, 2). Twenty years afterwards, he recalled that when he was “blown up at Bécourt-Bécordel in ’16 and, having lost my memory, lay in the Casualty Clearing Station in Corbie, with the enemy planes dropping bombs all over it and the dead Red Cross nurses being carried past my bed, I used to worry agonizedly about what my name could be” (Ford 1938, 265). In September, Ford wrote a remarkable series of letters to Conrad on artillery sounds and collaboration.
The letters are remarkable not only for the vividness and accurate detail of their descriptions but also for their often oblique connections to scenes and images in Parade’s End, still years away, and the occasional curious illumination of Ford’s relationship with Conrad, whether actual, remembered, desired, assumed or imagined. They focus on those matters of abiding interest whose importance is unaffected by the vicissitudes of personal relations but they also embrace and enfold the notions of both communication and collaboration. The first letter begins: “I have just had a curious opportunity with regard to sound wh[ich]. I hasten to communicate to you—tho’ indeed I was anyhow going to write to you today.” He has been at the centre of “a very big artillery strafe.” Years later, he recalled a time when, “in pitch blackness, in the midst of gunfire that shook the earth, I did once pray to the major Heavenly powers that my reason might be preserved” (Ford 1934, 100); for now, to his former collaborator, for that former collaborator, it was an “opportunity.” Ford pictures himself “under the table and frightened out of my life” but then abruptly alters the register of what he is rendering: “It was of course thunder.” In “the very vortex of the storm” but also “right among the guns too,” he is unable to distinguish one from the other, in this context at least, the “nature” from the “crime.”
Ford dwells here on “a constatation of some exactness” and will, towards the end of his letter, offer an example of the “mot juste.” His second letter is largely devoted to cataloguing the effects of various climatic and topographical factors on artillery sounds. The third letter is brief, alludes to the “rather hurried notes” of the previous day (“we were being shelled to hell and I did not expect to get through the night”) and wonders if “it is just vanity that in these cataclysmic moments makes one desire to record. I hope it is, rather, the annalist’s wish to help the historian—or, in a humble sort of way, my desire to help you, cher maître!—if you ever wanted to do anything in ‘this line’” (Ludwig 1965, 75)). That distinction between “historian” and “annalist” clearly alludes to the pressures of an overwhelming present weighed against the more leisurely, the longer view of the novelist able to concentrate upon his or her craft. In 1913, Ford had discussed “the more significant type of novel which, in essence, is a work of history,” noting that Henry James was “doing it all the time” and that “Mr. Conrad was a separate genius” (Ford 1913, 353). Ford’s book on James, published shortly afterwards, is unambiguous about James’s role as historian “of one, of two, and possibly of three or more, civilisations” (Ford 1914, 22) but Conrad’s status as “a separate genius” leaves his relationship with the discipline just a little uncertain.
Of course, Ford went on, Conrad never would want to do anything “in this line,” but

a pocketful of coins of a foreign country may sometimes come in handy. You might want to put a phrase into the mouth of someone in Bangkok who had been, say, to Bécourt. There you wd. be! And I, to that extent, shd. once more have collaborated. (Ludwig 1965, 71, 73, 75)

Responding to Ford’s letters about sounds and artillery, Conrad wrote: “Methinks that to make anything of it in our sense one must fling the very last dregs of realism overboard. Nothing will do—except here and there a technical phrase than which there is nothing more suggestive” (Karl and Davies 1996, 683).
It was, of course, collaboration that was on Ford’s mind as he planned the initial issue of the transatlantic review in Paris in the closing months of 1923. Collaboration to some, to any, extent with Conrad; but more broadly and more complicatedly, some manner of collaboration between the past of the English Review and the present of the new journal. That present was in a foreign country and dominated increasingly by Americans but Ford, though certainly not wishing in any sense to deny or diminish the war, still desired some evidence of continuity, of certain survivals to set against the immense and irrefutable losses.

The Prefaces
Conrad’s brief preface—“It is a very small item,” he wrote to George Keating, “but it is unique as the only Preface I have written for any collaborative piece of work” (Davies and Moore 2008, 368)—begins by almost denying the text’s existence: his consciousness of it “has been very vague, almost impalpable, like the fleeting visits from a ghost.” Shocked to discover that it was “rounded,” he nevertheless maintains that “it remains yet a fragment from its very nature and also from necessity. It could never have become anything else. And even as a fragment it is but a fragment of something that might have been—of a mere intention.” It contains, though, some of the “crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time of its origin, the time when the English Review was founded.” As Conrad remarks, “No doubt our man was conceived for purposes of irony; but our conception of him, I fear, is too fantastic.” He recalls a moment when he “burst into earnest entreaties that all those people should be thrown overboard without much ado. This, I believe, is the real nature of the crime. Overboard. The neatness and dispatch with which it is done in Chapter VIII were wholly the act of my collaborator’s good nature in the face of my panic.” He then passes the pen to his collaborator in the hope (a word he stresses) that Ford might contradict him on “every point of fact, impression and appreciation.” Because, he concludes, “it would be delightful to catch the echo of the desperate, earnest, eloquent and funny quarrels which enlivened those old days. The pity of it that there comes a time when all the fun of one’s life must be looked for in the past!”
The preface is dated June 1924.
Ford’s preface is longer, characteristic and highly suggestive. Like Conrad, he all but denies the existence of the story. As Conrad has been convinced by his collaborator, so Ford had the story “recalled to my mind by a friend.” He cannot remember “the houses in which the writing took place, the view from the windows, the pen, the table cloth.” He goes on to allude to the period during the war when he suffered a complete loss of memory as a result of concussion from a high explosive shell. He would later recall the result: “three weeks of my life are completely dead to me” (Ford 1934, 175), a period during which, for thirty-six hours, he forgot even his own name. “At a given point in my life I forgot, literally, all the books I had ever written; but, if nowadays I reread one of them, though I possess next to none and have reread few, nearly all the phrases come back startlingly to my memory, and I see glimpses of Kent, of Sussex, of Carcassonne—of New York, even; and fragments of furniture, mirrors, who knows what?” Those glimpses of Kent and of Sussex certainly look back to the days of working with Conrad. Carcassonne points to the spring of 1913, when Ford and Violet Hunt, in retreat from the Throne scandal, travelled around the South of France. Ford worked on The Young Lovell, an historical novel linked in his mind to The Fifth Queen (Ludwig 1965, 56), and mention of New York looks back to 1906 once more, Ford having travelled from Hamburg to New York with his wife Elsie in early August of that year, three months, that is, after the brief period of collaboration on The Nature of a Crime.
Of Romance, Ford remarks that “I can hear our voices as we read one passage or another aloud for purposes of correction. Moreover, I could say: This passage was written in Kent and hammered over in Sussex; this, written in Sussex and worked on in Kent; or this again was written in the downstairs café, and hammered in the sitting-room on the first-floor of an hotel that faces the sea on the Belgian coast.” He alludes here to the summer of 1900 when Ford and his wife went first to Bruges, encountering anti-British hostility due to the Boer War. When Conrad and his family arrived, they all moved on to Knocke-sur-Mer. A series of ailments ensued, Borys developing dysentery and Conrad afflicted by gout. They returned to Britain in mid-August. By way of stark contrast, Ford then asserts that, when it comes to The Nature of a Crime, he is prompted to recall neither “the tones of a voice” nor “the colour of a day” (Ford 1924b, 9). When asked by “an old friend” about the story, Ford denied its existence. When forced to retract that denial, and his collaborator “having corroborated it,” Ford was, he says, “at once possessed by a sort of morbid craving to get the story re published in a definite and acknowledged form.” He then lodges his protest against the word “quarrels” that Conrad has used at the close of his preface. A short time later, of course, he will use precisely that quotation (“For it would be delightful to catch the echo of the desperate, earnest, eloquent and funny quarrels which enlivened those old days”) for the epigraph to his Joseph Conrad. Significantly, Ford then expresses his desire to “make the note that our collaboration was almost purely oral. We wrote and read aloud the one to the other. Possibly in the end we even wrote to read aloud the one to the other : for it strikes me very forcibly that the Nature of a Crime is for the most part prose meant for recitation, or of that type” (Ford 1924b, 11 ).
Ford frequently aligned his desired style with the conversational; almost the whole of The Good Soldier, as mentioned earlier, adopts the guise of a man talking, “in a low voice” (Ford [1915] 2012, 18). In the wake of the modernist “revolution,” the virtues of “common speech” or colloquial language were widely accepted. But Ford is unusual in continuing to stress conversation rather than monologue. His reading aloud generally connotes a listener; and “people who listen must be gripped more firmly than people who read” (Ford 1922, 704). That listener is frequently, and unsurprisingly, Joseph Conrad, as Ford himself is often the listener, in those tales of telling, of reading aloud, that Ford sets down. He writes elsewhere of Conrad’s talking to a sympathetic audience: “When he talked on such occasions, he was like his Mirror of the Sea. Indeed a great part of his Mirror of the Sea was just his talk” (Ford 1924c, 30). The novelist, the storyteller, may well envisage some other reader, perhaps reading aloud, something rather more common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That reader’s listener is, then, doubly distanced from the writer. But again, in Ford’s telling, the speaker and the auditor are often invisible to one another, “with nothing visible but the glow of [Conrad’s] cigarette,” as he walks up and down “in the darkness of a midnight verandah,” talking (Ford 1907, 2). And, just as Ford’s stress on the importance of “keeping mum” only heightens the significance of those moments when immense stress breaks down a man’s taciturnity, so it is in Ford’s telling of Conrad’s response to his collaborator’s reading: “I would grow aware of an exaggerated stillness on the part of my Collaborator in the shadows. [...] You are to remember that we were very serious about writing. I would read on. After a long time it would come: ‘Oh! . . . Oh, Oh! . . . Oh, my God. . . . My dear Ford. . . . My dear faller. . . .’” (Ford 1924b, 12 ).
Almost concluding Ford’s preface is his frank recognition of the temporal distance across which such scenes must travel, yet which reach him still fresh, still vivid, still mattering: “All this took place long ago; most of it in another century, during another reign whilst an earlier, but not less haughty and proud, generation were passing away.” Two years earlier, Ford had published an article, “A Haughty and Proud Generation,” in which he reviewed the emergent novelists. In its opening sentence, Conrad heads the names of “our British novelists of the first flight” (Ford 1922, 703).

Conclusion
In his “personal remembrance,” Ford recalled how, during those early discussions about “Seraphina,” the story he had written which would become Romance, Conrad had listened to his “apologia” with “a certain frigid deference”:

He remained however shut up in the depth of his disappointment and still more in his reprobation of the criminal who could take hold of such a theme and not, gripping it by the throat, extract from it every drop of blood and glamour. . . . He disliked the writer as a criminal, fortune thrown away, a Book turned into the dry bone of a technical feat. He exclaimed, “Let me look at it. Let me look at the manuscript’; shuffled the leaves distastefully as if they had been the evidence of a crime. . . . To throw away fortune—that was not shipshape: to murder a subject—that was murder, foul, unnatural. . . . (Ford 1924c, 28–29)

And again:

That any officer should be indifferent to promotion then becomes painful: as if you should not care about the dressing of the men of your unit upon inspection by the Field Marshal Commanding-in-Chief. . . . It is, in effect, the same crime as not squeezing the last drop of blood out of your subject when you are writing a book: the real crime against the Holy Ghost. (Ford 1924c, 128)

The true nature of the crime lies here. True collaboration required conversation. This was not a social, nor a trivial nor an everyday, matter. Conrad wrote to Elsie Hueffer in 1907: “Dear Ford. Tell him that I need a long talk. I long for it as the Arab for a drop of water in the desert” (Karl and Davies 1988, 450).
The 1906 “collaboration” had never come to life. For personal and professional reasons—both men were intensely engaged in significant and demanding work—Ford and Conrad failed to engage, probably with each other to the extent that they had previously succeeded in doing, certainly with the material that Ford was able to offer. The first appearance in print of the novella in the spring of 1909 seems to have made no great impact on either of the collaborators: but then they were, alas, already embarked upon the dismantling of their close relationship. The Nature of a Crime found itself in a shallow grave, and especially relevant here are Ford’s remarks in his “Preface,” to the effect that he was “at once possessed by a sort of morbid craving to get the story re published in a definite and acknowledged form” (Ford 1924b, 10). Perhaps that last phrase already looks forward to volume publication; yet it could also—or instead—look towards his former collaborator.
During the birthing travails of the transatlantic, Ford’s mind was on both new life and resurrection—“Ford, we might say, was committed to modernism but did not on that account seek a rupture with history” (Gasiorek 210, 212)—and part of that “resurrectionary” impulse concerned the English Review, with its general programme, a medley of old and new, and specific personnel. Another part, more hazardous, was the revivification of personal relationships, with H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy—and Joseph Conrad.
Ford and Conrad ending up by writing to read aloud to one another. Voice and place are intimately linked yet Ford cannot summon up images of place in connection with the writing of The Nature of a Crime. But this was because Conrad showed no interest and the project was stillborn. It is a ghost-child that Ford now seeks to resurrect because the voices of the dead have become more insistent; and Conrad’s own voice is becoming weaker. Conrad, of course, had his own ghosts to contend with: the stresses caused by such contention were, quite plausibly, a significant factor in his estrangement from Ford in 1909 (Harding 2009, 227–29). For his part, brought up in a relentlessly artistic milieu, ringed around by Rossettis and “the rest of the Middle Victorian, tumultuously bearded Great,” those towering figures who were “a childish nightmare” to him (Ford 1938, 264), Ford had long lived with the dead. Since the war, however, his ghosts were more urgent, numerous and clamorous of attention. He was hugely more conscious now of the recent dead: of all those lost with whom he had served in the war, of Marwood, Henry James, W. H. Hudson—and Proust, whose significance, both in broad cultural and more personal terms Ford detailed a decade later (Ford 1934, 177–80). The death of Conrad would have perhaps the strongest and most immediate impact of all, powerfully affecting the books that so closely followed: Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, written in barely two months; and the novel that he began writing less than four weeks after completion of the memoir: No More Parades (Ford [1925] 2011, xvii–xviii; Skinner 2003, 165–67).
Those two volumes were the true Fordian memorial to Conrad. Yet in 1924 The Nature of a Crime also functioned, on a smaller scale, both as hommage to the still-living writer and as memorial to an earlier, regretted period of their lives. That “morbid craving” reinforced, if it did not initiate, the desire to resurrect that novella, so obscurely and shallowly interred fifteen years before, to exhume and re-site it, so that voice and narrative and physical location might finally come together. That relocation and attendant reburial would be achieved without great pomp—in this brave new world of no more parades—but, nevertheless, with honour.

Works Cited

Davies, Laurence, and Gene M. Moore, eds. 2008. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 8: 1923-1924. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Ford, Ford Madox, n. d. “The Old Story.” Box 15 Folder 19.3, 34 leaves. Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University.

Ford, Ford Madox, 1896. “D. G. Rossetti and his Family Letters” [review of W. M. Rossetti’s D. G. Rossetti: Letters and a Memoir]. Longman’s XXVII.CLXI (March 1896): 465–74.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1907. “Literary Portraits. VIII.—Mr. Joseph Conrad,” The Tribune (14 September, 1907), 2.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1909. The “Half Moon”: A Romance of the Old World and the New. London: Eveleigh Nash.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1910. A Call: The Tale of Two Passions. London: Chatto and Windus.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1913. “Literary Portraits. Mr Compton Mackenzie and ‘Sinister Street.’” Outlook XXXII (13 September 1913): 353–54.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1913b [dated 1914]. Collected Poems. London: Max Goschen.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1914 [dated 1913]. Henry James: A Critical Study. London: Martin Secker.

Ford, Ford Madox. 2012. The Good Soldier . . ., edited by Max Saunders. First published in 1915. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1918. On Heaven and other poems. London: John Lane.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1922. “A Haughty and Proud Generation,” Yale Review, XI (July 1922), 703-717.

Ford, Ford Madox. 2010 [1924]. Some Do Not . . ., edited by Max Saunders. Manchester: Carcanet Press.

Ford, Ford Madox and Joseph Conrad. 1924b. The Nature of a Crime. London: Duckworth.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1924c. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. London: Duckworth.

Ford, Ford Madox. 2011 [1925]. No More Parades, edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth. Manchester: Carcanet Press.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1931. Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894–1914. London: Gollancz.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1934. It Was the Nightingale. London: William Heinemann.

Ford, Ford Madox. 1938. Mightier Than the Sword. London: Allen & Unwin.

Gasiorek, Andrzej. 2010. “Editing the transatlantic review: Literary Magazines and the Public Sphere.” In Harding, ed., 2010, 197– 214.

Goldring, Douglas. 1935. Odd Man Out: The Autobiography of a “Propaganda Novelist.” London: Chapman and Hall.

Goldring, Douglas. 1949. Trained for Genius: The Life and Writings of Ford Madox Ford. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

Hampson, Robert. 2012. “Afterword,” The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, edited by Robert Hampson, 93–107. Hastings: ReScript Books

Harding, Jason. 2009. “The Right Accent: Conrad and the English Review,” Conradiana, 41, 2-3, Summer/Fall 2009, 221-43.

Harding, Jason, ed. 2010. Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Harvey, David Dow. 1972. Ford Madox Ford 1873–1939: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism. New York: Gordian Press.

Judd, Alan. 1990. Ford Madox Ford. London: Collins.

Karl, Frederick. 1979. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. London: Faber & Faber.

Karl, Frederick and Davies, Laurence. 1988. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 3: 1903-1907. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Karl, Frederick and Davies, Laurence. 1990. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 4: 1908-1911. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Karl, Frederick and Davies, Laurence. 1996. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 5 1912-1916. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Knowles, Owen and Gene Moore. 2000. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lamberti, Elena. 2010. “‘Wandering Yankees’: The transatlantic review or How the Americans Came to Europe.” In Harding, ed., 2010, 215–28. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Ludwig, Richard M. 1965. Letters of Ford Madox Ford. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Meyer, Eric. 1990. “‘The Nature of a Text’: Ford and Conrad in Plato’s Pharmacy,” Modern Fiction Studies, 36, 499–512.

Mizener, Arthur. 1972. The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford. London: The Bodley Head.

Moser, Thomas C. 1980. The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Najder, Zdzisław. 1983. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Poli, Bernard J. 1967. Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic Review. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Rademacher, Jörg W. 2002. “Tracing a Biographical Habit: Notes on the Lives of Franz Hüffer and Ford Hermann Hüffer.” In Modernism and the Individual Talent, edited by Jörg Rademacher, 120–29. Münster: Lit Verlag.

Rogers, Stephen. 2010. “The transatlantic review (1924).” In Harding, ed., 2010, 185–96. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Saunders, Max. 1996. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. Volume I: The World Before the War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Saunders, Max. 1996b. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. Volume II: The After-War World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Saunders, Max. 2000. “Ford Madox Ford: Further Bibliographies,” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 43:2, 131-205.

Saunders, Max. 2010. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, & the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Skinner, Paul. 2003. “‘Not the Stuff to Fill Graveyards’: Joseph Conrad and Parade’s End.” In Inter-relations: Conrad, James, Ford, and Others, edited by Keith Carabine and Max Saunders, 161–76. Boulder, Col.: Columbia University Press.

Snitow, Ann Barr. 1984. Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. 2000. “Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance as Metafiction; or, How Conrad Became an Elizabethan Poet,” Renascence, 53, 1, 43–60.

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. 2005. Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, Janice Biala. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press.

Paul Skinner took his first degree at the University of the West of England and his Ph.D. at the University of Bristol. He edited Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy for Carcanet Press (2002) and Ford Madox Ford’s Literary Contacts (Volume 6 of International Ford Madox Ford Studies, 2007). He has published essays on Ford, Ezra Pound and Rudyard Kipling, and has written a pocket guide to the Museums of London (Westholme Publishing, 2007). He lives in Bristol, where he now works in publishing, and continues to work (mainly) on Ford Madox Ford. His most recent publication is the critical edition of Ford’s Last Post (Carcanet, 2011).

LINKS

Last Post
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847770158

No Enemy
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781857545654

Ford Madox Ford’s Literary Contacts
http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=IFMFS+6

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