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<\/a>Ford Madox Ford PublicDomain, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=51044<\/p><\/div>\n
Through this experience, I came to realise to what extent we tend to view the lives of authors, especially of authors who are no longer alive, through a lens of the literature they have left behind. A great example of this is the abysmal J.R.R. Tolkien<\/a> biopic Tolkien<\/em> that came out earlier this year, in which the novelist\u2019s life is portrayed as a series of events that all, in some teleological way, contribute to his creation of The Lord of the Rings<\/em>. The film gives Tolkien\u2019s life meaning purely based on its relevance for our \u201cunderstanding\u201d of his books, resulting in a strange cocktail of dragons and melodrama that seems far removed from a realistic depiction of life.<\/p>\n Although Tolkien<\/em>\u2019s portrayal of J.R.R.\u2019s life is an especially cringe-inducing instance of us viewing an author through their oeuvre, it does point to what I think is a more general trend: because we have a tendency to approach authors through their stories, we seem to consider their lives, to a degree at least, as we would consider a story: as a linear narrative where elements introduced in the beginning are shown to have relevance at a later point. From our own lives we know, however, that life is expressedly not<\/em> a singular, linear narrative, but rather a messy amalgamation of a great many different narratives, or perhaps not even a narrative at all.<\/p>\n I had never considered this difference between the way we view authors and the way we view ourselves until, through this assistantship, I spent time with the letters of Ford. Reading his correspondence, especially his correspondence with family and close friends, I was struck by the familiarity of the language \u2013 the letters appeared to me more like postcards from a good friend than the work of a high-brow modernist. The words were not stern and stately, as I had (perhaps ignorantly) expected, but often playful: they were the words of a little \u201cFordie\u201d writing to his grandad, or of a playful \u201cPumpums\u201d sending postcards to his \u201cdearest little kid\u201d.<\/p>\n The more I read, the more I began to form a picture of Ford which was very different from the image that I had had before. It was a picture of a man in whose life writing was admittedly a large, but far from an all-consuming part. I found that where I had initially seen the person Ford as peripheral to his oeuvre, I began instead to consider Ford\u2019s oeuvre as peripheral to its creator. As a result, where initially the smooth surface of the literature had lured me subliminally into an artificial view of the writer\u2019s life, viewing the literature from the perspective of the writer dissolved this smooth surface into a messy process of writing and rewriting.<\/p>\n Now, this is not to say that viewing a book \u201cthrough\u201d its author is necessarily always a good thing (Roland Barthes<\/a> would have something to say about that) \u2013 rather, I would say that Ford\u2019s letters have showed me how it can be a refreshing and demystifying experience to get to know an author and their literature not through the polished works of art, but rather through their rough, everyday correspondence.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Professor Sara Haslam and Professor Max Saunders would like to thank the Open University and King’s College, London for their financial support for this initiative.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pablo Scheffer, BA English Literature student, King’s College, London This summer I had the pleasure of spending a month as a research assistant at the Cornell University library, working on the digitalisation of the letters of Ford Madox Ford. When … Continue reading