Always on the side of the wolf

Poor old Fordie. That was Ford’s eternal cry, and it is repeated often here. His father called him ‘the patient but extremely stupid Ass’, his very name — Huffer — meant ‘Ass’, so was changed first to Hueffer, then to Ford. As a writer he was disliked (‘It is me they dislike, not the time-shift’), as a returning Great War soldier loathed; even as a Sussex smallholder he is a figure of fun, followed everywhere by a dog, a drake and a goat. Above all, after years of war he is forgotten as a writer, ‘as good as dead’, convinced he could no longer write. He is an outsider, a dung beetle, a ‘ruined author’, misunderstood and despised.

Poor old Fraudie. For most of this, like much of what he said and wrote, is not true. I’ve never heard of first world war soldiers meeting the hatred he describes; and he wrote several books in Sussex, as he cheerfully admits.