In a special collected edition of his works, Ford Madox Ford dedicated his previously undedicated novel, The Good Soldier, to his wife, Stella, whom he accredited with having offered him "the incentive to live". He expressed this dedication in a letter—the two being apart at the time of the reissue: "You, my dear Stella, will have heard me tell these stories many times. But the seas now divide us and I put them in this, your letter, which you will read before you see me in the hope that they may give you some pleasure with the illusion that you are hearing familiar—and very devoted—tones."
One paragraph resonated with me quite. He described having "always been mad about writing—about the way [it] should be done" but had himself at that time only "written rather desultorily a number of books" which he characterized as pastiches or tours de force, and then:
One paragraph resonated with me quite. He described having "always been mad about writing—about the way [it] should be done" but had himself at that time only "written rather desultorily a number of books" which he characterized as pastiches or tours de force, and then:
[O]n the day I was forty I sat down to show what I could do—and The Good Soldier resulted. I fully intended it to be my last book. I used to think—and I do not know that I do not think the same now—that one book was enough for any man to write, and, at the date when The Good Soldier was finished, London at least and possibly the world appeared to be passing under the dominion of writers newer and much more vivid. Those were the passionate days of the literary Cubists, Vorticists, Imagistes and the rest of the tapageur and riotous Jeunes of that young decade. So I considered myself as the Eel which, having reached the deep sea, brings forth its young and dies—or as the Great Auk I considered that, having reached my allotted, I had laid my one egg and might as well die. So I took a formal farewell of Literature in the columns of a magazine called the Thrush—which also, poor little auk that it was, died of the effort. Then I prepared to stand aside in favour of our good friends—yours and mine—Ezra, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, H.D., and the rest of the clamorous young writers who were then knocking at the door.
The feeling is perhaps common, when one has written a book, to feel exactly that way. The Requiem was my "auk's egg", and I thought—having produced it at the tender age of thirty-five or thirty-six—that there remained nothing else to be said; and I fully intended my retirement to be permanent.
As it turned out, I was wrong.
As it turned out, I was wrong.
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