ABSTRACT

Ford Madox Ford So, out of a sort of cloud of almost infantile paralysis – I must have been eighteen to the day, I found myself telling a very, very kind, small, ageless, soft-voiced gentleman with a beard, the name of my first book1 which had been published a week before. And he put his head on one side and uttered, as if he were listening to himself, the syllables: ‘Ow ... Ow ...’. [...] It was plain that he considered that the vowel sounds of the title of my book were ugly and that, I supposed, would mean that the book could not succeed. [...]

‘But of course you meant to be onomatopoeic. Ow – ow – representing the lamenting voices of owls. ... Like the repeated double O’s of the opening of the Second Book of The Aeneid ...’.