Beautiful Birds and Hun Planes: Ford Madox Ford in the Early Age of Flight

Reactions to the Wright brothers’ achievement of the first sustained, controlled powered flight in December 1903 ranged from complete indifference to voluble celebration and evolved into convictions that ranged from a belief that war would be rendered impossible to confident predictions of invasion and widespread destruction. The policies and perceptions of institutions, governments and individuals were subject to constant revision and often abrupt reversal. When war came, the aeroplane, which began as an instrument of reconnaissance, rapidly became one more hazard among many for those at the front and a further point of division between combatants and civilians, for whom airships and air raids tended to loom larger. The first dynamic phase in the story of the aeroplane overlaps with the major early modernist period. This essay seeks to map, within that wider context, the experiences and responses of Ford Madox Ford. He began, like many others, with images of beauty and the natural world in that early stage when a functioning range of descriptive or comparative terms had yet to emerge. He encountered them next in the theatre of war during his service in France. His ambivalence towards aeroplanes was both similar to and different from his earlier responses to trains, cars and telephones. Their relative rarity, as well as their both physical and metaphorical distance, and Ford’s own apparent immunity to the glamour and dynamism of aviation enabled him to view them retrospectively and employ them in anecdote, autobiography and fiction as both threat and saviour.