ABSTRACT
The point of departure for Alan Judd and Max Saunders is Arthur Mizener's relentless carping about Ford's 'inaccuracy'. Mizener appears in these revisionist accounts as drearily pedantic and patronising, unsympathetic to the vagaries of the creative artist. Certainly his The Saddest Story (1971) displeased Janice Biala, Ford's last partner and executrix. Judd clasped Ford firmly as a fellow writer, typically abused by packs of scavenging dons. Saunders, writing with the consciousness of a sensitive don conversant with the complexities of postBarthesian thinking, defends the instability of Ford's statements as essential to his self-reflexive art. Thomas C. Moser in his 'psychobiography', The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton University Press, 1980), plays Freudian variations on the tunes he detects in the fiction and presents these as biographical data. In the long run, Saunders's is by far the best portrait: as scholarly as Mizener's, as well-written as Judd's, and sensibly sceptical about biographers who play the amateur psycho-analyst or corrective moralist. There is a sense though, in
(eds.), The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 456. Cited hereafter as 'Ford/Bowen'.
