We'll never know for sure. However, I can state with certainty that the article on Ford by novelist Edmund White in the current New York Review of Books is a coincidence, and not a strategy designed by me to make our authors seem topical - which, clearly, they are.
It's a great piece and you should read it. Here is a highlight relevant to Monday's lecture:
In prose he said he was an “impressionist,” which meant several things to Ford, though he and Joseph Conrad, who worked out their ideas together, believed that fiction is primarily a visual art and that the writer should be more concerned with the vividness of his remembered or invented images than with facts. Ford wrote:And there are also juicy tit-bits about Ford's personal life - not that we are interested in such topics in ARTS2036, of course.
Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass—through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you.For Ford experience was rarely ordered or hierarchical. It was all a jumble and the function of literature was to reproduce that confusion, though in a fashion that was clear and intentional, never random. Simultaneity was one of his artistic strategies, which is most clearly seen in Parade’s End [Ford's series of four novels about the First World War].
Although Ford was physically awkward and wheezed and was obese and looked like a seal with his limp blond hair and mustache and liquid eyes, he was a successful womanizer and moved from Elsie to her sister to Violet Hunt, an ex-lover of H.G. Wells, and on to half a dozen other women, and each time he was convinced he was in love.
Enjoy. You should also dip into Edmund White's own dazzling fictional oeuvre as soon as possible.
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