Mister Bosphorus and the Muses or a Short History of Poetry in Britain Variety Entertainment in Four Acts by FORD, Ford Madox - 1923

London: Duckworth & Co, 1923. Jacket a bit toned and faded, chips at ends of spine and corners, discoloration on endpaper crossing inscription. 4to. 126, [1] pages. Woodcuts by Paul Nash. Original quarter black cloth, pictorial boards; pictorial dust jacket. FIRST EDITION. A REMARKABLE ASSOCIATION COPY, inscribed on the front free endpaper: "Joseph Conrad from Ford Madox Ford 16.xi.MXMXXIII." Written in pencil in an unidentified hand on the rear free endpaper is a quotation from p. 57, with the first line differing in syntax from the published line ("The Gods ascribe to each a differing lot!" in manuscript versus "The Gods to each ascribe a differing lot!" in print). These lines are of importance in Ford's biography: Ford's last partner was the artist Janice Biala. When Ford was buried in Deauville, France, his funeral was scarcely attended due to the war. A drunken gravedigger buried him in the wrong place, in unhallowed ground reserved for temporary graves. When Biala returned after the war, she was told that the grave needed to be moved. "That was Ford all over," she commented. "He couldn't rest quietly even in his grave. As he so often said, "The gods to each other ascribe a differing lot / some enter at the portals, some do not" again a variation on the printed text, but clearly indicative that these lines were flush with meaning for Ford and those closest to him. (See Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford, Cambridge, 1991, p. 444). Ford and Conrad collaborated on three novels: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924, though written earlier). Always the champion of the writers of his generation, Ford in his later years bitterly complained to George Seldes "I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway" (Witness to a Century, 1987, p. 259). Mister Bosphorus is Ford's wry fantasy poem, dramatizing his need to turn from the cold and philistine North to the Latin-based civilization of the Mediterranean. This edition includes an engagingly formalized series of woodcuts by the important British artist Paul Nash (the cut on the cover especially foreshadows his movement towards abstraction and surrealism in the 1930s).