No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction

‘No Enemy is Ford Madox Ford’s little-known First World War novel, musing and reflective, published for the first time in Britain by Carcanet and ably edited by Paul Skinner. Congratulations to them both.’ Alan Judd, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 30th June 2002 No Enemy is one of Ford Madox Ford’s most fascinating books and an act of witness to the First World War. Ford left the army in 1919 to settle in rural Sussex with the young Australian painter, Sheila Bowen. Suffering from shell-shock and erratic memory, he struggled to set down his experiences of the previous four years. Ford’s protagonist is the poet Gringoire, who has survived the war and represents aspects of the writer. With his fictional frame in place, Ford created the distance necessary to confront, as Paul Skinner writes, the pains of ‘having lost friends, of being terrified, afraid of going mad, afraid of dying’. No Enemy is often funny, but also profoundly moving, because Ford so clearly recovered his artistic strength in and through the writing of it. In his introduction, Paul Skinner explores the world in which No Enemy was written, and considers how, by reinventing himself, Ford also reivented the strengths of his own writing.