"THERE WILL NEVER be a Ford Madox Ford revival "There will ...

That would be a bad mistake. No, there will never be a Ford Madox Ford revival. Ford didn't help matters by constantly reinventing himself. Born Ford Madox Hueffer in 1873, he changed his name in 1919. He had debts, numerous affairs, bad teeth and an astounding memory, which he did not religiously apply to the facts of his life. The teased accounts that characterize his novels were native to his personality.

Ford's most noted work is The Good Soldier, from 1915. A first-person narrative by John Dowell, it slowly spreads open the convolutions and destructive interactions among two couples, one American (the Dowells), the other English (the Ashburnhams). By making the narrator American, Ford places a neat tilt on his observations of English class and culture. But the core of the book is the repressed volcano within Dowell that forces him to write what he cannot bear to write or feel, to leak out detail bit by agonizing bit.

For 12 years, believing that his wife's health was so fragile that "her little heart might cease to beat," Dowell keeps himself under iron control every moment he's with her. This spiritual entrapment ruins him, and for what? For the unfolding revelations that bring death to two of the four main characters.

Dowell is a full human being, alternately spewing and retreating. In describing his friend, Edward Ashburnham: "So well set up, with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity, such a warm goodheartedness!" By the end, Dowell has plumbed the depths of feeling, yet we're left with a raft of questions. Dowell's life, like Ford's, can be reconstructed any number of ways.

I love Ford most for Parade's End, his WWI quartet. They recap the dislocation and collapse of old-culture England through the life of Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant but unambitious government administrator.

Again, what hits hardest is the alternately tightly wound and unleashed emotional springwork of the writing. Ford's women are remarkable for a male writer-intense, vivid, visceral. Tietjens' wife Sylvia is a beautiful bitch who finds him useless but will not let him go. There is an ironical dagger nestled in her splendid features.

An even finer creation is the ridiculously named Valentine Wannop, the feisty proto-feminist who never gives an inch to anyone yet somehow gives her heart to Tietjens. Their enforced parting at the end of the first volume (Some Do Not.) is emotionally eviscerating.

The second volume (No More Parades) is given over to the war and its pointless devastation. A Man Could Stand Up brings Tietjens back home to England and (thank God) Valentine. The final book, The Last Post, doesn't include Tietjens in the flesh, presenting a collection of almost disembodied ruminations on the inevitable wind-down of the old ways.

Ford's style is a mad race of incomplete sentences, colliding descriptions, exclamation marks, ellipses and question marks. It harnesses an almost juvenile effusiveness to a careening structural rigor that envelopes all of life with unembarrassed daring. There is confusion-internal and external-in Ford's characters, but there is no distance, no retreat in Ford's writing.