Parade's End

Introduction

The best novel produced by a British writer (and British has everything to do with culture, nothing to do with blood) is the tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford (previously named Ford Madox Hueffer) called Parade’s End. It is also the finest novel about the First World War. It is also the finest novel about the nature of British society. Ford is neglected. The finest editor of his time, he not only encouraged Joyce and Lawrence but actually wrote a good deal of Joseph Conrad’s fiction for him. If this judgment on the supremacy of Parade’s End be cavilled at, I am prepared to yield and to submit Ford’s The Good Soldier as the best novel ever produced in England.¹

These provocations from Anthony Burgess say much about Ford, and the series of four novels that make up his postwar masterpiece Parade’s End. They tell us, first of all, that it is more than a great war novel, or a great novel of historical change: it is a great novel. Ford was a prodigiously versatile writer, moving agilely between most genres. But he saw himself as above all someone constantly searching for a ‘new form’ for fiction. Parade’s End engages with culture, with the nature of British society, with the war, certainly; and with many other issues that these things imply, and which are still pressingly relevant: feminism; masculinity; the relation between the sexes; class; politics; questions of nation and race; aggression and destructiveness; trauma; memory; the environment; technology; survival; creativity; art; representation; history. None the less, we should not forget that these things are Ford’s material, to be worked into a novel rather than a document or a discourse.

In the summer of 1915 Ford was forty-one, much older than the average volunteer. He could have stayed in England, and continued to write propaganda for the government. But he enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment, and remained in the army until January 1919. His military experience was very varied. Although at the Front for only two months, he witnessed what he described at the time as ‘the two greatest strafes of history’, the Battle of the Somme, and the Ypres Salient.² He was frequently under bombardment, and suffered from concussion, shell-shock, and lung damage. He was attached to the First Line Transport, which kept him moving between the Front and the support lines. He was also in base camps, a casualty clearing station, army hospitals, even a bombed train. For a time he was responsible for a group of prisoners of war. From the spring of 1917 he was judged too unwell to serve in France, and was given light duty commanding a company of the 23rd King’s Liverpool Regiment, stationed in North Wales. Then he was posted to a training command at Redcar, on the Yorkshire coast, where he spent the rest of the war. In 1918 he was promoted to captain, and attached to the Staff, going ‘all over the N[orth]. of England inspecting training & lecturing’.³

The war redefined the rest of his life and work; and his experience of it was transformed into Parade’s End. This is not to say it is an autobiographical roman-à-clef. Many of Tietjens’ experiences were Ford’s – especially his shell-shock, and skirmishes with military authorities – but some were not. Tietjens is also partly based on Ford’s mathematician friend, the Yorkshireman Arthur Marwood, though Marwood was too unwell for the army.

Parade’s End isn’t exactly a ‘historical novel’ either, though it is intensely concerned with the texture and nature of history. Ford could write historical novels and romances as well as any Edwardian author. His best form the trilogy about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard, The Fifth Queen, also available in a Penguin edition, introduced by A. S. Byatt. Parade’s End’s central character, Christopher Tietjens, doesn’t brush with real historical figures, like heroes in Scott or Tolstoy. But one of the many strange qualities about Tietjens is that he sometimes seems to be history embodied. His encyclopaedic memory is the repository of the past. His name, too, compacts history and nationality. Is it British? How is it pronounced? We discover that his ancestors came to England from Holland with William of Orange. Ford’s own father, Franz Hüffer, emigrated to London from northern Germany, anglicizing his name to Francis Hueffer, and becoming music critic of The Times. If Tietjens thus reflects Ford’s composite European identity, he also looks back to past convulsions – the Reformation; the Glorious Revolution; the Napoleonic wars.

Ford said that in conceiving these novels he ‘wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time’.⁴ This may seem to confuse the two modes of fiction and history, or to suggest that the best novels are historical. But the novelist’s pride may have less to do with imitating the historian than with redefining history: saying that the best histories are in fact novels. There is a second kind of playful confusion in the turn of his phrase. In what sense can you write ‘history’ of your own time? Perhaps the novelist can write, or dares to write, the history that the historian generally doesn’t – though in the long twentieth century eminent exceptions such as Eric Hobsbawm and Francis Fukuyama have followed Ford’s lead, and attempted the history of the present. And, as in Fukuyama’s case, the historical significance of that present was that it seemed the end of history. Mary McCarthy has written of ‘the faith in History, which was shattered by an historical event – the impact of the First World War’.⁵ Warfare, of course, is particularly likely to make you feel that you could become history at any moment. But Ford was always profoundly attuned to the poignancy of the transient, and to the fact that to describe experience is to write its elegy. The individual and collective titles sound the elegiac note of the whole project: especially The Last Post: the bugle call marking both the end of a day and the end of a life. On a personal level, the elegy is for Tietjens’ brother, Mark. But it is also for all the war dead; for the passing of a way of life – of feudal estates like the Tietjens’ at Groby; for the end of history; and for the end of the old ways of writing about these things.

A world war was unprecedented. Like many who wrote about it, Ford represents it in eschatological terms: as Armageddon, the last battle marking the end of mortal life. This sense of the war as an abyss in the substance of history figures in Parade’s End. Valentine Wannop, the woman who will become Tietjens’ lover, gets a job teaching at a girls’ school. On the day of the Armistice, recorded at the beginning and ending of the third novel, A Man Could Stand Up –, the staff are anxious that they will lose control of the girls in the excitement. Valentine thinks of the moment of the ending of the war as: ‘this parting of the ways, at this crack across the table of History’ (p. 510).

Henry James had used a comparable image for the war’s rending of history, in a clairvoyant time-defying sentence written at its outbreak:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.⁶

These words have been quoted apropos The Good Soldier, Ford’s other masterpiece, published in 1915: a novel which doesn’t treat the war itself, though it circles around the date on which war broke out the previous year – 4 August. Yet they are even more apposite to Parade’s End. The tetralogy plunges its central characters – Tietjens; his magnificently drawn, vindictive wife Sylvia; Valentine; Tietjens’ colleague Macmaster; and his lover Edith Ethel Duchemin – into the abyss of what George Dangerfield called The Strange Death of Liberal England. In the first volume, Some Do Not…, repressed Edwardian idylls figure only to be plunged into blood and darkness: the extraordinary breakfast scene in which the Revered Duchemin has one of his prurient insane outbursts; the dogcart ride that throws Tietjens and Valentine together, enveloped in magical Romney Marsh mist, ending in a crash with General Campion’s ominous car. The second volume, No More Parades, shows Tietjens at the Front, in danger of breaking down under the strain of bombardments, of military responsibilities, of being pursued by Sylvia right to the war zone, of being persecuted by his superiors. A Man Could Stand Up –, the third volume, has him waiting to face a German attack, being buried by a nearby shell explosion, and somehow coming out alive; all this sandwiched between the Armistice scenes taking place later, in London, after Tietjens’ return. Finally, in The Last Post, all the characters engage in what Ford called elsewhere ‘the painful processes of reconstruction’.⁷ Ford was justifiably proud of his and Conrad’s contribution to the use of the ‘time shift’ in fiction. If the fractured time-scheme of Parade’s End sometimes disorientates, it is because Ford is reconstructing the experience of disorientation – not only that produced by terror in battle, but by the time-montage of civilian memories superimposing themselves on army life; or war memories haunting survivors afterwards.

In fact, that multiple perspective, looking at the war in terms of the present – the plunge into the abyss – the past – which was supposed to be gradually progressing – and imagined and real futures – is a feature of much of the greatest war writing. Malcolm Bradbury, describing how postwar modernism ‘had to cast itself in the form of modern irony before it could begin to recover itself as myth’, noted:

this is apparent in many of the great twentieth-century works that were actually written across the war: Joyce’s Ulysses and Kafka’s The Trial, Forster’s A Passage to India and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.⁸

All these works were ‘written across the war’ in that the time of their composition spanned from prewar to wartime, or wartime to postwar, or both. But there is another sense in which Parade’s End, like these other works, is ‘written across the war’. They all reach back across the gulf that the war appeared to have torn open in the fabric of time, towards what Ford called ‘The World before the War’.⁹ The same could be said of Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920); Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927); Musil’s, The Man without Qualities (published from 1930). This sense of writing across the war, even when not writing directly about it, is the condition of postwar modernism, which seeks to understand how civilization and progress led to devastation and murderousness. To do this involves a recuperative project: to reconstruct and re-present what happened to time at the end of an epoch; to try to recapture what was lost: lost time; the magic of the past; the ending of parades.

The tetralogy thus needs to be set alongside other major works of European Modernism as much as other war novels, or other English texts. Modernism, after all, was essentially international; and Ford was himself something of a one-man international republic, living in France and New York while writing Parade’s End, founding and editing the transatlantic review to publish Joyce, Stein, Rhys and Hemingway. And in his memoirs of those tumultous days, he explains how it was the death of Proust that made him realize how he needed to write about the war.¹⁰ The case for seeing Parade’s End as a major European modernist fiction brings us back to the War and the question of history and time, due to the masterly way Ford combines war-book and time-book. Its broad social and historical concern with the war stops it collapsing into self-consciousness, solipsism and aestheticism. Conversely, Ford’s concern for time stops it being simply another war book. It is concerned with the history before and after the war too: the descent into madness, and the attempt to regenerate afterwards. And, as these terms already suggest, it is concerned not just with generalized categories of history and society, but individual experiences: memory, terror, amnesia, breakdown, recovery. Like Ford’s other war prose, it renders not just the experiences at the time, but the after-effects of war on the mind.

Like most of the other works discussed here, and many more – Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo, Gertrude Stein’s ‘Composition as Explanation’, Heidegger’s Being and Time – Parade’s End shares a widespread postwar perplexity about memory and time. ‘Well, then, what is time?’ asks Mann’s protagonist Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain.¹¹ ‘When you thought of Time in those days your mind wavered […]’, thinks Valentine (p. 517). To Wyndham Lewis, who was writing his polemic Time and Western Man while Ford was publishing the Tietjens novels, modernists seemed tiresomely obsessed with what he called ‘The Time-doctrine’: something he blamed on the philosophy of Bergson and William James, or Einstein’s ideas about ‘space-time’.¹² For the war’s survivors, though, it was not only the new philosophy and physics that had destabilized matter and time. Characteristically obtuse even at his most acute, Lewis doesn’t grasp that it was the war that provided the main context challenging the realities of time, memory, history and sensation. Whereas Ford does in Parade’s End, composing it with that crucial relation between war, time, and consciousness at its heart. In his memoirs of his postwar life, It was the Nightingale, Ford writes hauntingly of how civilization had been defamiliarized after the experience of the abyss:

No one could have come through that shattering experience and still view life and mankind with any normal vision. In those days you saw objects that the earlier mind labelled as houses. They had been used to seem cubic and solid permanences. But we had seen Ploegsteert where it had been revealed that men’s dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. Man and even Beast… all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields […] Nay, it had been revealed to you that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos.¹³

This is more discursive than what Parade’s End does with perceptions. (Perhaps it’s more like the ruminative digressive mode of Proust and Mann?) But it gives a good idea of the effect Ford sought in the tetralogy.

Parade’s End was successful in its time, making Ford more money that any of his other works. It was also ahead of its time, though, anticipating a shift in the way we tend to think about war. In the 1960s and 1970s, the era of student revolution, Vietnam and the demise of the deference society, the ‘myth’ of the First World War was an Oedipal one, of young men persecuted by their father-figures, whether by malice or stupidity: ‘lions led by donkeys’ (as presented in Oh What a Lovely War, say). The madness of authority. Poets like Owen and Sassoon were valued above all for the anger of their social truth-telling. For our more psycho-therapeutic times, it is trauma that most interests us: shell-shock. Sassoon and Owen with W. H. R. Rivers at Craig-lockart Mental Hospital. The authority of madness. It is hard to see how Pat Barker could have written Regeneration and the rest of her Ghost Road trilogy without Ford’s example here.

It was for his inventive re-mapping of the psychological that Ford admired Joyce. He wrote a pioneering appreciation of Ulysses, before the better-known defences by Pound and Eliot, which demonstrates his critical insight when encountering the really new:

‘Ulysses’ contains the undiscovered mind of man; it is human consciousness analyzed as it has never before been analyzed. Certain books change the world. This, success or failure, ‘Ulysses’ does: for no novelist with serious aims can henceforth set out upon a task of writing before he has at least formed his own private estimate as to the rightness or wrongness of the methods of the author of ‘Ulysses.’ If it does not make an epoch – and it well may! – it will at least mark the ending of a period.¹⁴

Less than a month after reading the book, Ford knew that his next fictional task would inevitably be influenced by Ulysses. And of course ‘the ending of a period’, or period’s end, is very much the core of Parade’s End.

Ford experiments with the Joycean stream of consciousness, especially in the final novel, The Last Post. Joyce’s example mattered in another way too. It showed Ford that he could give freer play to qualities that had always permeated his writing: the subliminal, the hallucinatory, pastiche and parody. Readers approaching Parade’s End as realism or impressionism are sometimes disturbed by its excesses. Three aspects in particular have been criticized: the analogy between the world war and the sex-war; the caricatured presentation of English society; and the stylistic shifts from one volume to the next. But all three indicate that rather than not quite succeeding at documentary realism, Ford was instead attempting something closer to Joyce’s achievement: a work that would register the mentality of his time through an ‘impressionism’ that allowed for the play of the parodic. It should be read as more like Georg Grosz’s expressionist visions of humanity distorted by war, perhaps, than as a finicky Pre-Raphaelite detailing of surfaces. In his novels as well as his anecdotes, Ford was a master of exaggeration – a trait to which Burgess pays homage in his claims that are truer than they sound.

He is certainly not alone in his admiration for Parade’s End. W. H. Auden wrote: ‘There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.’¹⁵ Graham Greene called the Tietjens books ‘almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English’.¹⁶ William Carlos Williams judged the four books ‘the English prose masterpiece of their time’.¹⁷ Samuel Hynes has described the sequence as ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’.¹⁸ These judgements are provocative too, in their own way. Whereas Malcolm Bradbury’s double claim best expresses how Parade’s End has been increasingly seen over the last few decades: as ‘the most important and complex British novel to deal with the overwhelming subject of the Great War’; and as ‘central Modernist novel of the 1920s, in which it is exemplary’.¹⁹

Max Saunders

Notes

1. Anthony Burgess, in The Best of Everything, ed. William Davis (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 97.

2. Ford to his mother, Cathy Hueffer, 6 Sept, 1916: House of Lords Record Office.

3. Ford to his daughter Katharine Hueffer, 13 March 1918: Cornell University.

4. Ford Madox Ford, It was the Nightingale (London: Heinemann, 1934), pp. 177–80, 270.

5. Mary McCarthy, ‘The Unresigned Man’, New York Review of Books, 32:2 (14 February 1985), p. 27.

6. Henry James to Howard Sturgis, continuing a letter of 4 August 1914: Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1920), vol. 2, p. 398.

7. Ford Madox Ford, No Enemy (New York: Macaulay, 1929), p. 9.

8. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Introduction’, Parade’s End (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992), pp. xiv-xv.

9. Ford Madox Ford to T. R. Smith, 27 July 1931: Cornell University.

10. Ford Madox Ford, It was the Nightingale, pp. 179–80.

11. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), p. 66.

12. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), pp. 449, 100–01.

13. Ford Madox Ford, It was the Nightingale, pp. 48, 49.

14. Ford Madox Ford, ‘A Haughty and Proud Generation’, Yale Review, 11 (July 1922), pp. 703, 716–17.

15. W. H. Auden, ‘Il Faut Payer’, Mid-Century, no. 22 (February 1961), pp. 3–10.

16. Graham Greene, quoted on the dust jacket of the Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, vols. 3 and 4.

17. William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 316.

18. Samuel Hynes, ‘The Genre of No Enemy’, Antœus, no. 56 (Spring 1986, pp. 125–42), p. 140.

19. Malcolm Bradbury, op. cit., pp. xv, xii.

Textual Note and Select Bibliography

The individual novels of Parade’s End were published as follows:

Some Do Not… (London: Duckworth; New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1924)

No More Parades (London: Duckworth; New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925)

A Man Could Stand Up — (London: Duckworth; New York: Boni, 1926)

Last Post (London: Duckworth, 1928); The Last Post (New York: The Literary Guild of America, then Boni, 1928)

There are significant differences between the British and American editions, and an authoritative, annotated text has not yet been produced. The novels were republished individually by Penguin in 1948 – when the aftermath of the Second World War perhaps made them seem newly relevant. The current text follows that of the first one-volume edition of the tetralogy (New York: Knopf, 1950). Only the first three novels were included in The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, ed. Graham Greene (London, 1963) as volumes III and IV. The important Dedicatory letters Ford wrote for the first editions of the last three novels were collected in the edition of his War Prose (see below).

Related Works by Ford

The Good Soldier (London: John Lane, 1915)

When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915)

Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915)

Zeppelin Nights, with Violet Hunt (London: John Lane, 1915)

The Trail of the Barbarians, translation of war pamphlet by Pierre Loti, L’Outrage des barbares (London: Longmans, Green, 1917 [actually published 1918])

On Heaven and Poems Written on Active Service (London: John Lane, 1918)

The Marsden Case (London: Duckworth, 1923)

Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924)

No Enemy (New York: Macaulay, 1929)

It was the Nightingale (London: William Heinemann, 1934)

The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, ed. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994)

War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet,1999)

Selected Criticism on Parade’s End

W. H. Auden, ‘Il Faut Prayer’, Mid-Century, No. 22 (February 1961), pp. 3–10

Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Denuded Place: War and Form in Parade’s End and U. S. A.’, in Holger Klein, ed. The First World War in Fiction (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 193–209

Michela A. Calderaro, A Silent New World: Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Parade’s End’ (Bologna, CLUEB, 1993)

Ambrose Gordon, The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1964)

Robert Green, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)

David Dow Harvey, Ford Madox Ford: 1873–1939: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962)

Robert Holton, Jarring Witnesses: Modem Fiction and the Representation of History (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994)

Rita Kashner, ‘Tietjens’ Education: Ford Madox Ford’s Tetralogy’, Critical Quarterly, 8 (1966), pp. 150–63

Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)

Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Volume 2

Melvin Seiden, ‘Persecution and Paranoia in Parade’s End,’ Criticism, 8/3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 246–62; reprinted in R. Cassell (editor), Ford Madox Ford: Modem Judgements (London: Macmillan, 1972)

Ann Barr Snitow, Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984)

Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)

William Carlos Williams, review of Parade’s End, Sewanee Review, 59 (January-March 1951), pp. 154–61; reprinted in Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 315–23

Joseph Wiesenfarth, Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)