​Ford was a superb letter-writer, and yet the vast majority of his c.3,000 known letters remains unavailable in published versions. The Society is delighted to announce a new project to address this significant gap in twentieth-century literary scholarship. Its General Editors are Sara Haslam and Max Saunders, and Oxford University Press will be publishing the volumes, which are organised as follows:
 
Volume No.     Date Range                       Editors 

Volume 1:        to 1904                              Dr Helen Chambers and Prof Sara Haslam
Volume 2:        1904-Aug. 1914                Dr Lucinda Borkett-Jones and Prof Max Saunders
Volume 3:        Aug. 1914-Nov. 1922       Dr Paul Skinner
Volume 4:        Nov. 1922-30                    Prof Laurence Davies
Volume 5:        early 1930s                       Dr Barbara Cooke and Prof Martin Stannard
Volume 6:        later 1930s                        Dr Barbara Cooke and Prof Martin Stannard
 
The Collected Letters will be a major contribution to the study of the various milieux in which Ford was so influential: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Fin de Siècle; the group of writers based on the Kent/Sussex coast at the turn of the century (James, Conrad, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells); early modernism in Edwardian London; expatriate circles in 1920s Paris; the Riviera in the 20s and 30s; and New York in the same period. The edition will therefore make visible Ford’s massive contribution to the literature of the period, not only through his writing and editing, but also his reading and advising of aspiring writers.
 
Do please get in touch if you are aware of any Ford letters in private collections, or ask the owners to contact us.
 
We look forward to updating you as work progresses!
 
Sara.haslam@open.ac.uk
m.saunders@bham.ac.uk

Last Post: A Literary Journal from the Ford Madox Ford Society was launched at the Authors’ Club on Tuesday 27 November. Given the unpleasant weather, there was a pretty good turnout, around thirty people in total, with a generous sprinkling of Fordians, from as far away as Scotland and France. Sara Haslam, Chair of the Ford Society and our first panellist, dispensed welcomes and thanks. She spoke of Ford as an antidote to neo-liberalism (saving our presence in the National Liberal Club), and then discussed three key aspects of Ford’s literary identity: as a writer with a keenly tuned historic sense, able to learn from the past; as a writer who valued energy, and ideas, and mentored the next generation; and as a creator of space in which to think and talk. Alluding to the recent Armistice centenary, she quoted a few lines from Ford’s article ‘Et in Terra Pax’, published in Outlook (26 Dec 1914), which our membership secretary Lucinda Borkett-Jones, currently working on Ford’s propaganda, had mentioned: ‘I wish that, if nowhere else, then at least in some deep inner chamber of the mind we could hold a little armistice and think what peace is doing all this time…’

Max Saunders quoted Ford’s description of the British military funeral practice of shifting from the Last Post into exuberant march music, seeing the vertiginous movement between elegy and exhilaration as an example of  classic Ford. He traced that effect through the endings of the last three volumes of Parade’s End and, noting the appropriate nature of the journal’s title, he suggested it was also an excellent time to launch it, close to Ford’s birthday and to the centenary of Armistice Day. He recalled Ford and Biala’s voyage to New York in 1934 and their encounter with the ‘Nazi Professor’, who wanted to put all Jews, Catholics and Communists up against the wall and shoot them, suggesting that Ford would have strongly disliked everything about Donald Trump. Reviewing Ford’s changing reputation over the past twenty years or so, he pointed out that Ford has become a usual subject in studies of modernism and that, largely because of the International Ford Madox Ford Studies series, comparative studies have increased dramatically, helping to clarify and enforce Ford’s place in literary history. Knowledge of Ford’s lesser-known works is also far more extensive now. With the prospect of a complete edition from Oxford University Press, Max predicted Ford entering ‘a new phase of visibility’, in which the journal can play a significant part.
 
The journal’s general editor, Paul Skinner, had brought a couple of dozen copies of the inaugural issue—they’d arrived from the United States on the previous day—which prompted a very positive response. He touched on the differences between Ford’s and his own editorial experience, the latter offering no dances, parties, dinners or music-hall outings but a frequent exchange of updates and queries with the editorial board. 

Our guest speaker was Delia da Sousa Correa, senior lecturer at the Open University and general editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. She talked about the beginnings of the Society and the journal, and its subsequent development over many years (its first Newsletter emerged in December 2008). The extent and ambition of the Society’s activities and publications was hugely impressive and Delia also showed some superb images that had appeared in various Society publications or as jacket designs. Her talk certainly stimulated a number of ideas about possible future collaboration and journal themes.

All the omens are good. We’re already looking forward to the next issue.

​Paul Skinner

​“I envy you going to Provincetown for the summer. If only I had two lives—I’d spend one by the sea and the other traveling the world.”

These were the words of an artist who, at the time of this declaration, had already lived two lives: one, painting in France during the 1930s with her companion the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, and the second, as one of only a few women to gain critical acclaim during the male dominated era of New York School of Abstract Expressionism.
 
Biala (1903-2000) was a feisty and articulate painter whose career spanned eight decades and two art capitals: New York City and Paris. A Polish èmigrèe, born Schenehaia Tworkovska in 1903, she arrived in New York from her native Biala in 1913 with her older brother Jacob (who would later become the noted Abstract Expressionist Jack Tworkov). Opinionated and tough, the young brunette with a soft Eastern European face was a free thinker of the highest order. She had a passion for life that fueled a rather aggressive social independence. She was a true bohemian.
 
Provincetown loomed large in the life of both Biala and Tworkov having first hitchhiked their way to study with Charles Hawthorne in the summer of 1923. However, their intellectual attraction toward modernism had them rebelling against Hawthorne’s ridged traditional plein air approach. While Jack sought out the artist Karl Knaths, Biala sought out another highly respected and revered painter, Edwin Dickinson. It was through Dickinson that she received her earliest and most informed art training. Because of Dickinson, Biala said, she “found her true way.”
 
Although that first year spent in Provincetown would be the only time Biala would reside on the Cape with any duration, it would prove to be most critical in defining her path and sensibility. It was soon thereafter at the suggestion of William Zorach that she changed her name. “I decided to change my name,” she wrote, “My name is now Biala.”
 
The Cape was the place Biala returned to after a decade in France during the 1930s at the side of the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Ford told Ezra Pound that Biala was “rather modern,” and introduced her to all the artists working at the cutting edge of modernism including Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Searching for a place to heal following Ford’s death and her heroic escape from the growing threat of Hitler’s regime, Biala spent the summer of 1940 with the Dickinsons in Truro. It was there that she plotted to re-establish herself in America while vowing to return to France.
 
Biala believed that “all art is sensual before it is anything else. The art of painting is for the eye first and last..." It was this statement that set her apart during the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Although she counted among her closest friends Willem de Kooning, she never fully embraced pure abstraction, as the attention to subject was paramount in her work.