FORD’S EARLY FICTION AND ‘THOSE QUEER EFFECTS OF REAL LIFE’

The Inheritors, Mr. Apollo, and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes might be called sports - playful, wilfully charming, and, in the evolutionary sense, odd.1 Although they are infused with ?Modemist openendedness',2 their author's resort to the modes of fantasy and, to a lesser extent, science fiction appears to distance these works from The Good Soldier or the Tietjens sequence. To use Samuel R. Delany's scheme of narrative subjectivities, they are speculative fictions whose events either ?have not happened' (as in science fiction) or ?could not have happened' (as in fantasy), rather than naturalistic fictions which ?could have happened'.3 It is tempting to frame these texts as generic potboilers, driven by the need to be amusing. Yet, far from being byblows, they are the creations of an evolving literary agenda, experiments in narrative rendering engaged with issues of the day and inspired by Ford's tireless interest in the nature of perception. In these Fordian ventures into the fantastic, we find delayed decoding, derangement of the senses, moments of epiphany, and an awareness that ?we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other'4 - this awareness embracing time as well as space. Thus their narrative practices overlap with those of Ford's more ?serious' or ?ambitious' realist, or rather ?impressionist' fiction. To borrow a concept derived from the Russian formalists and favoured mainly by critics of science fiction, his novels, perhaps even his entire oeuvre, exemplify the literature of cognitive estrangement.5The Inheritors: An Extravagant StoryThe initial reception of The Inheritors was a mixture of curiosity, admiration, bewilderment, and dislike. A good few early reviewers found the novel ?clever', period code for intelligent but not too solemn.6 Others, such as the reviewer for the London Daily News, heard a note of the macabre: ?the authors are in cap and bells, but the dance they dance is a Dance of Death - the death of loyalty and love and all the social virtues' {Reviews 357-8). The Manchester Guardian praised the ?extraordinary delicacy of its literary presentment' and its ?exquisite humour of phrase' {Reviews 353). Conversely, a significant number of reviewers complained that the book was too elliptical, too disjointed, too imprecise. According to the London Daily Chronicle, ?The style is spasmodic, the dialogue gaspy [....] We cannot find words strong enough to express our irritation at that asthmatic dialogue' {Reviews 354). The Brooklyn Daily Eagle judged the plot ?a ridiculous hotchpotch' and the writing ?as bad as the style of Henry James' {Reviews 369). Both its style and its allusions to the fourth dimension piqued The Times: ?The Inheritors [. . .] leaves the bewildered student with the impression that it is a very clever book, and that he is a very stupid person for not seeing what it is all about' {Reviews 364).I do not quote these reviews to pit critical sagacity against critical obtuseness, or wonder about their effects on the collaborators' morale, or make the obvious point that reviewers usually don't agree. The most noteworthy feature of these responses is the divide between those drawn to what Yeats calls ?the fascination of what's difficult' and those appalled by it.7 There is something close to a consensus that The Inheritors makes demands upon its readers, that its authors are trying something new, that in terms of plot and language, the writing makes a virtue of opacity.8 In his letter of remonstrance to the New York Times Saturday Review, Conrad acknowledges these objections: ?Doubtless a novel that wants explaining is a bad novel: but this is only an extravagant story - and it is an experiment'.9 Five paragraphs later, he ends with what Max Saunders rightly calls ?a magnificent statement of joint purpose';10 in language echoing the Preface (strictly speaking an Afterword) to The Nigger of the ?Narcissus', Conrad affirms that ?the writer's self-forgetful fidelity to his sensations' transforms fiction's ? …