my time machine best friends: Ford Madox Ford edition
Someone with the time and skills should just go and make a Parade's End parody video to Robyn's "Call Your Girlfriend". With love, I mean. Go to!
He had to rush through his war office interview to get to Valentine Wannop. They would have only a few hours in which to recount the loves of two lifetimes. He saw her golden head and her enraptured face. He wondered how her face would look, enraptured.
Parade's End - "Some Do Not...", Ford Madox Ford, p. 232
As it turns out, Ford Madox Ford is one of those fellows to whom the history books give short shrift because maybe he didn't make enough noise or spill his gin on the right people. It would seem that, though his work mainly pre-dates the Jazz age, he bumped elbows with/mentored/what-have-you some of its writers - Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc. - and yet he rarely earns a mention when that period of astounding and immense creativity is discussed. He collaborated on a few novels with Joseph Conrad, though there is some disagreement as to who did the bulk of the writing, who took most of the credit vs. who deserved it, etc. He wrote 82 books during his lifetime, but only three people went to his funeral. He wrote a novel about Katharine Howard! I would have been there, old bean. I would have brought flowers, even. Nothing like historical fiction to set a girl's heart a-flutter. Also, The Heart of Darkness is a pretentious snore, so suck it, Conrad.