The Saddest Story

‘Ford Madox Ford wrote eighty-one books during his life, thirty-two of them novels. These books were the purpose of his existence, the one commitment of his life that nothing — disaster, illness, despair — was allowed to interfere with. They are the meaning of his life, and its most valuable product...Every one of them shows something about a human imagination perhaps not radically different from other men’s but made to seem so by being revealed to us in unusual detail by these books, and every one of them helps us to understand the process by which Ford slowly learned to reveal his imagination.’

Ford Madox Ford is a legendary figure who, like his friends James Joyce and Ezra Pound, close to the very center of modern literature. He wrote the masterpieces The Good Soldier and Parade’s End, collaborated extensively with Joseph Conrad, and was the first editor of Finnegans Wake. As editor of literary magazines and one of the most important voices in the literary salons and clubs of the early twentieth century, Ford encouraged and published a truly remarkable group of writers. These include Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence.

The title of Arthur Mizener’s biography, The Saddest Story, is the title Ford wanted to give The Good Soldier. The life of Ford Madox Ford is one of wasted opportunities, ill-focused ambition and deserved but ungained recognition.

Out of the contradictory, fascinating jumble of Ford’s life, Mizener skillfully dissects the many messy affairs with women like Jean Rhys, as well as his explosive relationships with publishers and critics in London and Paris.

Praise for The Saddest Story

‘Assured, informed and highly sophisticated.’ – Saturday Review

Praise for Arthur Mizener
“Fitzgerald’s personality is so intriguing and his story so fascinating in itself that you are likely to overlook the skill required for an adequate presentment of him. Mizener’s presentment has a delusive air of simplicity. But that is a measure of the discretion and sobriety of the biographer and the rigor with which he has subordinated the author of the book to its subject.” — Yale Review

“Timely, scholarly but never dull” — Budd Schulberg, New York Times

“He [Mizener] tells it in an easy style throughout — with a scrupulous regard for fact that brings out the human values in the story. In the end it isn’t the rather commonplace story we had expected to hear, of success in the Golden Twenties and failure in the depression. It is the story of a highly gifted man who ruined himself by pursuing false ideals, who set out to redeem himself by patient effort and who had almost succeeded when he died — not of drinking but of overwork, Fitzgerald’s books are better known today than they were in his time, but his life as Mizener presents it is even more impressive than his fiction.” — Malcolm Cowley

Arthur Mizener (1907-1988) was a professor of English at Cornell University. As well as his biography of Ford Madox Ford, he also wrote one of writer F Scott Fitzgerald.

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