Parade's End
Ford Madox Ford's majestic tetralogy makes "Downton Abbey" look like "Barney & Friends."
I remember first falling for someone–a girl with thick, dark hair and a cute, button nose–felt a bit like losing control. Blundering, sensitive, and dim-witted, my movements on a kind of forceful autopilot, I remember with painful clarity the sensation of not having a plan. The scenes and action around me—around us–come back as occasionally upside down. Some are busy with other people, annoyingly talkative and many, who pried into my sacred space and stole away attention like it was their business. Secrets held tight miraculously still find their way around. And my own running monologue the safest place to be to muddle through the many unknowns and the dizzily nauseating ups and downs. One might think:
“Of the physical side of love she had neither image nor conception. In the old days when she had been with him, if he had come into the town in which she was, or if he merely been known to be coming down to the village, she had hummed all day under her breath and had felt warmer, little currents passing along her skin. She had read somewhere that to take alcohol was to send the blood into the surface vessels of the body, thus engendering a sense of warmth. She had never taken alcohol, or not enough to produce recognisibly that effect, but she imagined that it was thus love worked upon the body – and that it would stop for ever at that!
Or so thinks Valentine Wannop, passionate Suffragist, keen Latinist, and young heroine of Ford Madox Ford’s monumental four-novel Great War epic, Parade’s End (1924-1928). Valentine is a decent-ish foil for a thirteen year old me. Although in her early twenties, she has lived a chaste, cloistered life with little experience in the amorous whims of the heart or understanding of its mechanics. Of her many qualities, her boyish deftness, eloquent understanding of contemporary female slavery (she herself was once a domestic servant), and sharp intellect crown her character. This other, almost forbidden realm of sexual desire and love, is a fantastic, if often jagged and dangerous world for her. She is wonderfully out of her depth, and she describes the journey, the upside-down bits included, with equal wonder.
But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her. It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him, as being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself. The moon so draws the tides.” (Some Do Not…, p. 236)
Her tides draw for the unlikeliest of men: a Tory aristocrat and the heir to Groby (a Yorkshire manor as old as Protestantism) Christopher Tietjens (TEE-jens). Tietjens, although also young, is a veritable dinosaur. At face he is a plain Edwardian–an eminent statistician working for the government, with digs in London as well as Groby, with starched wing-collar to boot. But his heart resides in the 18th century, where–by his reckoning let’s be clear–England was at its best. When old-school Toryism kept politics clean, where poetry cut to the heart, where the ruling class cared for their tenets and servants or suffered for it, when the horse and plow was the premier relationship to the land. The 20th century, with its popular government, vast bureaucracy, and disdain for anything that didn’t run on petrol, was to be the death throw of Tietjens’ idealized world. “Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden” he calls it.
In the middle, Tietjens pursues a mantra he has difficulty phrasing earlier on in the story. It appears in tendrils as gentlemanly sacrifice, worldly rationalism, disdain for social cupidity, protection of horses, respect for women, and money for friends in need, no questions asked. All set upon a fiercely stoic visage. This chivalric honor–the heart of these fine qualities–is realized finally as “parade,” evoking Tietjens’ understanding of his position, class, and his role as both a public symbol–a man on display–and an energy to embody, to drive through life until the last, fatal stumble in the grass.
Tietjens also loves Valentine Wannop, and shares the meandering wordiness befitting of Ford Madox Ford’s Englishmen. While behind the lines in France in 1916, it finally hits him.
“He swore by the living God…He had never realized that he had had a passion for the girl till that morning; that he had a passion deep and boundless like the sea, shaking like a tremor of the whole world, an unquenchable thirst, a thing the thought of which made your bowls turn over…But had not been the sort of fellow who goes into his emotions…Why, damn it, even at that moment when he had thought of the girl there, in that beastly camp, in that Rembrandt beshadowed hut, when he thought of the girl he named her to himself Miss Wannop…” (No More Parades, p. 311).
The trouble is Tietjens is already married–to a classically beautiful, fantastically-bodied, Death Star of a lady: Sylvia, née Satterthwaite. Sylvia is in many ways an independent woman in a man’s world. Promiscuous, sharp, witty, bored of mansplainers–she moves with tangible power, making formidable men bend and slaver. Imperious on horseback (she threatens farm workers in the way with a riding crop), cruel with wraith-like persistency, languorous and warm like a recently fed dragon–Ford apparently modeled her on the likeness of Dante Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1867) and a former lover of his, the author Violet Hunt. Ford created one of the most infamous villainesses in literature in Sylvia Tietjens. Her one goal is to at best destroy Tietjens, at worst make his life a living hell. Although the genesis of this hatred is a bit vague, it’s clear Tietjens’ pompous quest for sainthood, his “lumpish” (“a kindly group of sacks,” “a lonely buffalo”) awkwardness, and perhaps his honest good-intentions drives her to obsessive malice. Pressed by her confessor (Sylvia is Catholic) to account for her hatred of Tietjens, Sylvia snaps out of her usual look of “virginal lack of interest,” and spits venomously:
“You want to know why I hate my husband. I’ll tell you; it’s because of his simple, sheer immorality. I don’t mean his actions; his views! Every speech he utters about everything makes me–I swear he makes me–in spite of myself, want to stick a knife into him, and I can’t prove he’s wrong, not ever, about the simplest thing. But I can pain him. And I will…He sits about in chairs that his back, clumsy, like a rock, not moving for hours…And I can make him wince.” (Some Do Not…p. 35).
She does battle well. Tietjens, by his own rules, can only fall back until there’s nothing left to give up. Julian Barnes in an excellent review in The Guardian says of them both: “Christopher is a mixture of chivalry and masochism (if it hurts, I must be doing the right thing); Sylvia a mixture of recklessness and sadism (if it hurts him, I must be doing the right thing).” They are perversely right for each other.
One can be forgiven thinking Tietjens might deserve it–his insufferable idealism, his unromantic bookishness, his great wealth, so out of place in the now and no doubt a pain to live with. But Tietjens, like Sylvia, reads as real people, and consequently grows on you. Their rich dimensions and depth, stitched into a carefully-built world, well on its way to falling apart, make “Downton Abbey” look like “Barney the Purple Dinosaur” (no offense, Barney).
Parade’s End–published serially as Some Do Not…(1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928)--essentially charts the wider dissolution of a long-corrupt ruling class through Tietjens’ decline and fall: marriage, position, and reputation to boot. Although the First World War–in its pieces as stupidly inevitable and poorly executed–is foremost a symptom of this decaying England, Ford details its crumpling, deafening violence as an expedient (he himself fought in the Somme). Parade’s End’s arc is not unlike Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, with a great swath of characters expertly set in a highly detailed socio-political reality across ten-ish years. The four books together offer a sophisticated dome of completeness–if a bit on the chatty side.
At its outset, we come to understand (through a style that thrusts you back and forth–we’ll touch on later) Tietjens married Sylvia when he discovers she is pregnant. Whether the child is his, or that of Gerald Drake, a rough former lover of Sylvia’s, we never find out. But Tietjens sees giving the kiddo a future and sparing Sylvia from potentially irreparable scandal as the right thing to do. Although he grows soft for the boy and seems content with marriage, Sylvia can’t quite take living with him and runs off with a manly though simpering “Potty” Perowne. The two eventually reach a delicate peace when Tietjens welcomes her back with a telegram: “Accept resumption yoke,” and she replying “Righto.” In a non-verbal admission of his new designation as cuckold, Tietjens lets his grand London townhouse and moves them both into a flat (still very fancy), telling his friend Vincent MacMaster “Anything beyond a flat looks like impudence in a man who can’t keep his wife.” MacMaster–a son of a Glasgow grocer–is also a statistician, but far less talented than Tietjens. Tietjens, in his true fashion, names MacMaster as the progenitor of his own brilliant work, giving him the limelight and accolades that eventually win him royal favor and a knighthood. He also supports MacMaster financially–silencing any mention of the word “loan” and elevating MacMaster’s side gig as a poet and artiste. The taps of Tietjens’ great vats of generosity, honor, and stoic endurance are on full blast.
It is with MacMaster that Tietjens meets Valentine Wannop. While golfing with his Godfather (General Edmund Campion) and some other politico types, Valentine and a friend ambush and harangue a liberal cabinet minister who had been slow to support women’s suffrage. Tietjens—wallowing unhappily in the moors and way over par—sees Valentine outpacing a policeman, huffing in pursuit. Something about her doggedness and plain beauty appeals to Tietjens in the moment, and instead of stopping her he trips the constable (he apologizes for his clumsiness and gives the policeman a nip of whiskey). So begins the long, long courtship and eventual love affair, and Tietjens’ nose-dive in the public eye. Putrid, incredible rumors begot by Sylvia and jealous men circulate at his club, his bank, in government, and eventually—when war is declared and Tietjens volunteers—in the Army. His mother, then his father, die of what is suggested to be shame. His only sibling—a brother also in government—is initially taken in by what is so obviously grotesque, sexual slander. And MacMaster quietly distances himself from his friend as he rises higher and higher.
Ford does an excellent job at knitting in the damage and embarrassment--bounced checks, passed over promotions, cold shoulders--showing the wear and tear on Tietjens’ granite countenance. His great physical strength is visibly diminished by shellshock, pneumonia, French mud, and unspoken pain. After being wounded twice, he’s finally transferred from his behind-the-lines mobilization post to help command a deteriorating battalion at the front, where most expect him to die.
This thick, verbose, 700+ page saga is, frankly, pretty sexy. Although confined to the age’s prudish standards, Ford masterfully engages both brawn and brain. And as my old history teacher Mr. Murray would say, Ford can “turn a phrase.” His wording can pile artfully on top of each other in long, wry sentences:
“There resulted a singular mosaic of extraordinary, bright coloured and melodramatic statements, for Levin, who first hobbled down the hill with Tietjens and then hobbled back up, clinging to his arm, brought out monstrosities of news about Sylvia’s activities, without any sequence and indeed without any apparent aim except for the great affection he had for Tietjens.” (No More Parades, p. 303).
Or he can hit a moment like an opening stanza by Sassoon or Owen:
“He had lost all sense of chronology…In November…A beginning of some November…With a miracle of sunshine: not a cloud: the mud towering up shut you in intimately with a sky that ached for limpidity.” (No More Parades, p. 429).
He successfully pushes the envelope. That doesn’t mean Parade’s End is easy. Time-shifts compel the reader to look at the facts belatedly and information is revealed backwards. Ford makes frequent use of what the Introduction to my version call “delayed decoding,” essentially placing the reader in the middle of a scene and letting them figure out the where and what. In these instances he rarely provides familiar words or frames that guide you through murky water–in fact he believes you figuring it out is part of the art and part of the fun. The Introduction gives this section as an example:
“When you came in the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light. It was shaped like the house a child draws. Three groups of brown limbs spotted with brass took dim highlights from shafts that came from a bucket pierced with holes, filled with incandescent coke, and covered in with a sheet of iron in the shape of a funnel. Two men, as if hierarchically smaller, crouched on the floor beside the brazier; four, two at each end of the hut, drooped over tables in attitudes of extreme indifference. From the eaves above the parallelogram of black that was the doorway fell intermittent drippings of collected moisture, persistent, with glasslike intervals of musical sound. The two men squatting on their heels over the brazier – they had been miners – began to talk in a low, sing-song of dialect, hardly audible. It went on and on, monotonous, without animation. It was as if one told the other long, long stories to which his companion manifested his comprehension with animal grunts…” (No More Parades, p. 259).
It’s like I’ve been bundled in a bag after being kept in the dark for hours and dumped in the middle of the room. Shapes, colors, people, some recognizable objects—it feels and looks like a dark, Impressionist painting (I get Paul Cezanne’s “The Card Players” (1892), curious what you get).
And much like Proust, Ford lets his characters carry on and meander in and out of narration, with a great bounty of ellipses, exclamation points, and “By God!”s. The third person narrator is also not a strong one in Parade’s End (and a far cry from that omniscient first-person observer mentioned in posts past). The thread shifts from characters without preamble and chapters begin in the midst of a train of thought: lonely wrestling matches, familial analysis, silent venting, Tietjens, Sylvia, and Valentine all eloquently talking their way around the shape of what they want from each other.
The final book, Last Post, finds Tietjens’ brother Mark—essentially mute and paralyzed from a stroke—making heavy use of a watchful, towering inner monologue. The war is over, and he sits beneath a pastoral arbor outside a crude cottage, watching wildlife flit about, listening to airplanes drone over, and waiting for the approach of interlopers from the busy, modern world. This last book is the weirdest of the four—where the internal narration mixes with snatches of conversation heard through hedgerows and stands of wheat. Mark’s French mistress, Marie Léonie, strains cider into old wine bottles, wasps buzzing around the heady, golden foam; a woman with a thick country accent talks over Marie’s anxious train of thought. Valentine is also there, staring at their wild garden and wishing for changes next year. Meanwhile, Sylvia circles the grassy scene in silken finery on horseback, contemplating an approach. It’s a brilliant denouement that credits the end to the Tietjens psychological struggle and to Christopher’s agrarian idealism: a quiet death told through Ford’s beautifully complex modern gears.
Flaws there are of course. Julian Barnes adds a good qualifier for Ford’s style.
“To be a Fordite is rather like being a member of one of those volunteer groups who help restore Britain's canal system. You run into them, muddy and sweaty, spending their Sunday afternoons digging out some long-disused arm which once brought important goods to and from, say, Wendover. You are fairly sure that they are doing a good thing, but unless you jump down and get muddy yourself, the virtue of the task, indeed of the whole canal system, might well escape you.”
Although Ford Madox Ford wrote hundreds of books and periodicals, Parade’s End and The Good Soldier (1915) (another great one which I intend to re-read and review) remain his only truly known works. It may be the canals appear too daunting on most days.
Then there is Ford’s apologism for old-school conservatism, a crime not so heinous but may wear slightly on those tired of glorifying the British upper class. It’s worth wrapping up with American critic and writer Monroe Engel thoughts in Commentary in 1950:
“…it would be too bad for the novel to leap from obscurity to too great an eminence, for despite Ford’s accomplished storytelling, his ability to write a panoramic novel and to create characters who transcend their individuality, there is in his thinking about people and society, parallel to his positive conservatism, a tinge of nostalgic softness which makes of the old county families a kind of never-never society in which the rich were responsible, the poor proud though tractable, and all lived in bucolic splendor—this despite the fact that Ford saw only too clearly the reasons for the death of the Tory culture he must have loved very deeply.”
But if you can’t tell, I loved it all the same. If Parade’s End sits farther down on your reading list, you’re forgiven. But I highly recommend a fantastic mini-series rendition on HBO with Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall. Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay and preserves Ford’s complex world and people, while putting a shine on the story’s funnier bits. For those of you tired of Masterpiece Theater rehashes, and I know you’re out there, give this one a shot.