Impressionism

Hello. My name is Max Saunders. I'm a professor of English at King's College London,

and I'm going to be giving this short series of lectures

about Ford, Maddox, Ford and his prewar masterpiece, the novel The Good Soldier.

And I'll start with a brief introduction about Ford

and then talk about the idea of Impressionism.

Ford had the luck to be in the right place at the right time,

at least insofar as modern art movements were concerned.

He was actually the grandson of the painter Ford Maddox Brown,

and so he knew all the pre Raphaelite painters and poets,

and he was actually related to the rosette ease by marriage as well.

Um, and then he moved down to the Kent Coast in the 18 nineties,

where he got to know a group of writers, Henry James and Joseph Conrad,

and the American Stephen Crane, who was living around there as well and also H.

G. Wells.

And he collaborated with Joseph Conrad for about 10 years,

producing three books together.

Then Ford moved to London just before the First World War and set up an important

literary magazine called The English Review and discovered

some of the major figures in British modernism

as a compound. Wyndham Lewis and D. H.

Lawrence and published them really for the first time in England.

So he's very transitional figure,

sometimes described as the last pre Raphaelite H.

Wells joked with him,

calling him the only uncle of the gifted Young because he liked sort

of picking up younger writers and and introducing them to the world.

And he did that again after the first World War.

He served in the infantry during the war, was in the battle of the song,

got Shell shocked

and later on he moved to Paris and lived there and in France

for most of the rest of his life.

And he set up another magazine in Paris, publishing James Joyce and Gertrude Stein,

but also discovering another generation of brilliant writers,

Ernest Hemingway and Jeane Risse in particular.

What he tended to call himself, though, was not a modernist.

People didn't call themselves that. Then.

The modernist movement is a retrospective label.

They tended to call themselves things like image ists or roboticists,

and what Forward called himself around the time

of the First World War was an Impressionist.

Now that is a slightly problematic term applied to literature.

We know what we mean when we talk of

Impressionism in painting the pictures of artists like Monet or

Manet,

um Sierra and so on Renoir.

But it's less clear in literature what Impressionism means,

though it's increasingly coming back into use as

a term for writers concerned with consciousness.

With perception, as the painters were as well, of course,

with the nature of experience and also with time

and Ford was an important critic and a major advocate of Impressionism,

as well as an author of Impressionist novels, poems, autobiographies

and books about places and culture. Like, for example, the Soul of London.

Wonderful early book about

the modern city

and Ford Saw Impressionism is a very broad category,

stretching from the second half of the 19th century,

with novelists like Gustave Flaubert and uh, no Pasa in France

took an F in Russia right through to the

19 thirties and including much of the work that's more

likely now to be called modernist by writers like

Lawrence and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and so on.

And I think he thought literary Impressionism

really peaked with his particularly close friends,

Henry James and Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane, uh,

writing around the turn of the century.

And while Ford was writing The Good Soldier,

his best known novel and the best one he wrote before the First World War,

he took time to write a long essay called on Impressionism,

explaining his method.

And it's included in the US, The World's Classics edition of The Good Soldier.

And it relates very closely to to the novel, I think,

um, the Good Soldier was written on the eve of the First World War.

In fact, Forward was just finishing it when war was declared,

and it's become a very influential novel, Um,

influencing not just later modernist writers,

but even postmodernists to works like F.

Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Jean Rhys's Quartet,

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers,

Julian Barnes's Flow Bears Parrot or Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day

are unlikely to have taken exactly the form they did without. For example, I think

uh huh

Impressionism for Ford is really an aesthetics about uncertainty.

It sees life as not unitary

and coherent and something that you can definitely know and understand.

Instead,

it's multiple

complex shifting,

contradictory. Even

Impressionism is about the difficulty of knowing, knowing other people,

knowing yourself, even

knowing the meaning of things, whether it's people's actions or their words,

or even the meaning of life more generally.

And it's clear from the first page of The Good Soldier

that knowing is going to be absolutely central to it.

But it's also clear that the narrator,

in trying to understand the story he's telling,

is going to be continually frustrated and bewildered.

He's an American in Europe. He's called John Dowell, and he says this.

We had known the Ash Burnham's for nine seasons of the town of now.

I'm with an extreme intimacy, or rather, with an acquaintanceship,

is loose and easy.

And, yes, as close as a good gloves with your hand.

My wife and I

knew Captain and Mrs Ashburn, Um, as well as it was possible to know anybody.

And yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.

This is, I believe, the state of things only possible with English people of whom,

till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair,

I knew nothing, whatever

and that profession of not knowing things becomes dowels. Refrain, he says.

I don't know,

and there is nothing to guide us. It is all a darkness,

mhm,

and I think in a way,

this sense of uncertainty is very characteristic of a lot of modernist writing,

sometimes described as a kind of epistemological uncertainty.

Epistemology is the science of knowing things, the science of knowledge, Um,

and it affects what people know of are able to

know or think they know about the spiritual about God.

It affects what they know about the physical world.

Of course,

the new physics was changing people's certainties

about what the physical world was like.

It affects psychology and what movements like psychoanalysis,

led by Freud were saying about the human mind and how difficult

it was to know a lot of what was going on there,

particularly the unconscious part of it, by definition, was impossible for for

an individual to see

the operations of,

and it affects the knowledge of society as well, understanding how society works.

And here's what Ford says in the essay on Impressionism, he says,

Always consider the impressions that you're making upon the mind of the reader

and always consider that the first impression with

which you present him will be so strong

that it will be all that you can ever do to efface it,

to alter it, or even quite slightly, to modify it.

And he goes on, say, indeed, I suppose that 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 the whole of life, says Ford.

Is really like that were almost always in

one place with our minds somewhere quiet other.

In that way, he says,

You were detained to the sort of odd vibration that seems in real life, really have.

You would give your reader the impression that he was witnessing something real,

that he was passing through an experience

in that sense of vibration, of things, shifting,

of one image being superimposed on another.

Creating a very complex,

layered picture is very much the method of Ford's Impressionism,

and in that passage he's describing exactly what he does in the Good Soldier.

He gives a very strong first impression of Ashburn,

and when he first meets him in the hotel in now, I'm

and and then he complicates it, goes over it and goes back to it.

In a brilliant memoir, he wrote of his friend Joseph Conrad, the novelist.

He gives a vivid example of how this difficulty in

the subject matter and knowing what to make of people,

um,

makes necessary a corresponding difficulty in the way you write

about the characters in the way you present the material.

And he says this and he gives an example,

which is very like the world of the good soldier and towels.

First meeting with Ashburn, Um,

you meet an English gentleman

at your golf club? Says forward, his

beefy,

full of health, the moral of the boy from an English public school of the finest type

you discover gradually that he's hopelessly nearest clinic,

dishonest in matters of small change but unexpectedly self sacrificing,

a dreadful liar,

but a most painfully careful student of lepidoptera

and finally,

from the public prince. The newspapers,

a bigger missed who was once under another name, hammered on the stock exchange.

Still,

there he is,

the beefy, full fed

fellow moral of an English public school product.

To get such a man in fiction,

you cannot begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically to the end.

You must first get him in with a strong impression

and then work backwards and forwards. Over his past,

that theory, at least we gradually evolved, he says.

He and Conrad working together,

and Ford call this technique the time shift,

and in the Good Soldier, he uses it

more intensively than anyone.