10-12 September 2009
The Society’s conference ‘Ford in France/Ford en Provence’ was held in Aix-en-Provence from the 10th to 12th September 2009. Thanks are due to Professor Claire Davison-Pégon for organising it locally for the University of Provence, our partner, and to Dr Gil Charbonnier for both hosting the conference and providing insight into Ford’s French connections.
Gil Charbonnier opened the doors of the Institute for French Studies, a charming hôtel particulier opposite the Cathedral, complete with inner courtyard and Provençal fountain, to welcome both Jason Andrew’s exhibition of Biala’s illustrations for Ford’s Provence and our conference.
Jason Andrew’s exhibition of works and photographs by Biala was all the more timely as Carcanet had just re-issued Provence, edited by John Coyle, who in his afterword calls Ford the Lieutenant Columbo of prose writers, an apt comparison. John kindly gave a presentation of the book in French, and Julia K. Gleich gave a memorable dramatised reading of a new selection of letters by Biala which Jason had selected from the Biala Estate.
The keynote lecture was delivered by Professor Hélène Aji, and we were delighted to be joined by Professor Hermione Lee, who delivered the Annual Ford Madox Ford Lecture. Both talks were well attended and very much enjoyed by the audience. While Professor Aji, a distinguished Poundian scholar, devoted her lecture to Pound’s and Ford’s common love for Provence and their letters to and from Toulon, Professor Lee took us to Proust’s funeral with Ford and other literary figures, and talked of his connections with French literary networks while in Paris in the 1920s.
The friendly spirit noted by Jason Harding in Durham continued, and in the frame of mind that is Provence, the quality of the papers addressing the subject of Ford and France proved consistently good, spanning the whole of Ford’s ‘dual life’. They connected his love of France to his beloved grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, and to the love of the troubadours he had inherited from his father, seeing Provence from the English heart of the country, passing from the mud of the trenches to the Mediterranean, from Between St. Dennis and St. George to the later novels, The Rash Actcommanding quite a lot of interest.
A session was held in French to attract prospective publishers – one reason the Ford Society had decided on 2009 for the conference in France being that Ford would then be coming out of copyright. Though publishers did not attend in the numbers that had been hoped for, there has been some positive response since the conference, particularly in the form of interest in Ford’s non-fiction. Meanwhile, the project at hand remains to have Parade’s End published in French for the centenary of the Great War.
The Society now looks forward to mapping more of Ford’s intellectual life, in New York City in September 2010.
Dominique Lemarchal
[Papers from the conference, including the lectures by Hélène Aji and Hermione Lee, will be published in Ford Madox Ford and France, International Ford Madox Ford Studies 10, ed. Dominique Lemarchal and Claire Pégon-Davison (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011).]