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Lot 71

FORD (FORD MADOX)

22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £312.50 inc. premium

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FORD (FORD MADOX)

Typed letter signed, to his translator, Georges Pillement, in French, urging him to inform his agent W.A. Bradley, of his progress in translating No More Parades into French; he also asks if he could help his friend Guy Fangel, who wants to translate some short stories into French; with autograph envelope, one page, headed paper, 4to, Villa Paul, Cap-Brun, 3 June 1932

Footnotes

FORD ON NO MORE PARADES, THE SECOND OF HIS TIETJENS TETRALOGY, the novels through which, along with The Good Soldier, he is most widely remembered; the Tietjens sequence being described by William Carlos Williams as 'the English prose masterpiece of their time', by Graham Greene as 'almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English', and by Malcolm Bradbury as 'the most important and complex British novel to deal with the overwhelming subject of the Great War'. However, notwithstanding the tretalogy's status and the fact that it is by virtue of its settings, circumstance and characters a profoundly European rather than merely British work, only the second volume – the subject of the present letter – was translated into French; with the only other European language represented being Italian, for the first two volumes. Our translation, credited to Fernande Bogatyreff as well as Georges Pillement, was published by the Librairie de la Revue Française, Paris, in 1933 as Finies, les parades (see the Ford Madox Ford Society Newsletter 6, 10 May 2000). Pillement himself was to go on to enjoy a distinguished career, his novel Plaisir d'amour winning the Prix des Deux Magots in 1937. Ford's agent was William Aspenwall Bradley, of the William A. Bradley Literary Agency, who counted James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, as well as Ford among his clients.

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