23-25 September, 2010
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York
The conference opened on a beautiful September afternoon, in an amazing location. The skylight room of the Graduate Center, at CUNY, offered an up-close view of the Empire State Building through its glass roof, impressively suggestive of windows, perspective, and vertical living in general, all ideas that would recur.
The opening panel compared James, Wells, and Ford in differing combinations. Papers by Angus Wrenn and Joseph Wiesenfarth considered the alienating modern metropolis as constructed by the ‘Rye group’, and looked at the essentially different responses to the First World War in James, Wells and Ford. Cosmopolitanism, which proved a touchstone throughout the conference, received its first treatment as an example of James’ and Ford’s differing political and cultural perspectives.
The second panel explored the role of American identity in several of Ford’s fictions. Sara Haslam examined aspects of physical space, from cities to war trenches, and noted how Ford builds his characters through travel. New York was assessed for its biographical importance to Ford, as well as its role (from financial powerhouse to ‘good time’ city) in his fiction. Adra Raine argued that The Good Soldier was a work of “total fiction,” and not, as is most commonly read, a drama of an epistemological crisis. Dowell thus has an American identity, but it is purely fictional and constructed. Anne-Marie Flanagan re-examined The Half-Moon, noting that it is more about the Old World than the New.
On Friday morning, the conference began with papers from Christopher GoGwilt and Patrick Deer, who examined Ford’s place in genealogies of English modernism, and transatlantic modernism, with particular reference to war. It Was the Nightingale and the transatlantic review featured prominently in each account, as did Ford’s critique of Englishness, both refracted through the idiosyncratic primacy of Fordian memory. GoGwilt explored the ambiguity of Englishness as manifested in Ford’s work as editor, and Deer similarly reads the transatlantic as a highly unstable place.
Panel 4 brought together papers with a sociological and political bent. Stan Green analysed Ford’s attempts to disentangle imagism from impressionism (preferably also upstaging Pound), using some provocative images to illustrate his discussion of two important dinners which took place two days apart in July 1914: one to celebrate Vorticism, the other Imagism. Meghan Hammond unpacked the 15 issues of Ford’s English Review to reveal that the apparently slight transatlantic interest is in fact made much more rich and complex with detailed study of James’ ‘The Jolly Corner’. One purpose of the English Review was to ‘overcome strange ignorances’. Ford wrote that editorial before James wrote his story, but Hammond’s paper examined the interest in the American mind fundamental to James’ text alongside ideas about American individualism propounded in Dickinson’s Letters from America series. Gene Moore’s paper tackled the legacy of slavery in the Great Trade Route. Beginning with Ford’s letter to Stella Bowen in which he described being ‘buried among southerners’ at the Tates in the West Village in 1927, Moore proceeded to explore what exactly Ford meant by various ‘souths’, how this affected his art, and why he was less programmatic in his politics regarding slavery in particular, than some of the women in his life.
In the last panel, Ford’s When the Wicked Man, and the New York context – chaos, claustrophobia, sexual incontinence and violence, financial and commercial energies – were re-introduced. While Elizabeth Foley brought Ford’s constructions of masculinity and femininity under scrutiny (partly via Jean Rhys), Rob Hawkes addressed the boundaries between fiction and autobiography in Stein’s ‘lost generation’, with a particular interest in the intertextual relationships between Hemingway and Ford. Bob McDonough’s paper offered a treatment of When the Wicked Man that reads it as an unsuccessful grafting of a depiction of the protagonist’s consciousness onto an American adventure story.
The Ford Madox Ford lecture was delivered by the novelist Mary Gordon. Best known for her novels and memoirs, Gordon also teaches creative writing at Barnard College. Her illustrated talk offered an evocative and persuasive examination of the different, and shared, impressionism of Ford and Janice Biala. Their ‘habit of response’ and ‘passionate dialogue’ were seen as the basis of a characteristic mode in both artist and novelist, which sustained them. Each could be rooted in Biala’s background in, and Ford’s ideas about, New York. Gordon took questions afterwards, in which she was asked what aspects of Ford’s technique she had found most influential as a writer and more on her views about Ford’s relationships with other women artists. The discussion developed into one about genre, and the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction in particular, and concluded with further details as to Gordon’s responses to Biala’s art.
Saturday morning offered a rare conference treat. Jason Andrew, representative of the Biala estate, opened a room at the Tibor Nagy gallery, further up Fifth Avenue, for a private view. Biala’s paintings and drawings were on view, as was a bound copy of Ford’s handwritten Buckshee Poems, and Biala’s copy of the Collected Poems, inscribed by Ford, but with a poem by William Johnson Cory copied out in the front by Biala, on June 26th, 1940, a year after Ford’s death.
Sara Haslam and Seamus O’Malley, conference organisers.
October, 2010.
The conference programme is available in PDF format [49 KB]