Michael Schmidt

[...]both of them provided an inclusive and "disinterested" space in which different generations of writers were able to enter into productive dialogue with one another and both of them played a vital mediating role between modernism and tradition'. One prospered for decades, the other for a season. Ford negotiated a transition from the fin de siècle taste of his boyhood environment to the disciplines of early modernism and then, as Greene puts it, after World War I in the transatlantic review he bridged the great gap, publishing the early Hemingway, Cocteau, Stein, Pound, the music of Antheil, and the drawings of Braque' and smoking those bent Gauloises that tasted and smelled of dust and dung'. It is less that he moved with the times than that he understood change and its consequences in art. The adjective 'clubbable' suggests a character who delights in social intercourse; it entails very English tones of politeness, irony, satire, sarcasm, the good laugh, the quietly struck understanding, with the emollient of tobacco smoke, spirits and wine, an agreeable and relatively secure closed environment. In Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), which Mrs Conrad made such a fuss about, Ford remembers the publication of their 1903 collaboration Romance and its succès d'estime' - or rather, Not much of that even, for the critics of our favoured land do not believe in collaboration'. And Ford was by instinct a collaborative artist, sometimes across generations and cultures (Conrad was 41, he was 24 when they met), sometimes across media. Who in this world knows anything of any other heart - or of his own?' Greene regarded Ford's success as rooted in his failure, yet, I don't suppose failure disturbed him much: he had never really believed in human happiness, his middle life had been made miserable by passion, and he had come through - with his humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing.' It has proven an intermittent and not very populous prosperity where his novels are concerned.