Parade's End - Part Three - A Man Could Stand Up

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Madox Hueffer in Merton, Surrey, England on 17th December 1873. The creative arts ran in his family–Hueffer’s grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was a well-known painter, and his German émigré father was music critic of The Times–and after a brief dalliance with music composition, the young Hueffer began to write. His first book, a fairy story entitled The Brown Owl (1891), was published at the age of just seventeen.

Although Hueffer never attended university, during his early twenties he moved through many intellectual circles, and would later talk of the influence that the Middle Victorian, tumultuously bearded Great–men such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle–exerted on him. In 1894, Hueffer eloped with his school-girlfriend, eventually settling in Winchelsea, close to the coast in East Sussex. It was while here that he met Arthur Marwood (1868-1916), on whom he was to base Christopher Tietjens, the protagonist of Parade’s End (1924-1928).

Over the next few years, Hueffer produced a number of works, including three novels co-authored with Joseph Conrad. The lukewarm reception received by the second of these–Romance (1903)–combined with Hueffer’s struggling marriage, saw him suffer a mental breakdown in 1904. He was sent to rural Germany as a ‘nerve cure’–an experience which provided the setting for much of his later work, The Good Soldier (1915).

Upon his return to London, Hueffer began gradually to find literary success. His study of the capital, The Soul of London (1905), was well-reviewed, and he followed this with his The Fifth Queen trilogy. Comprised of The Fifth Queen; And How She Came to Court (1906), Privy Seal (1907) and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908), the novels presented a fictionalized account of the life of Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, and achieved both commercial and critical success.

In 1908, Hueffer founded the English Review, and over the next 15 months published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and W. B. Yeats, and gave débuts to many authors, including D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. Hueffer’s editorship consolidated the classic canon of early modernist literature, and saw him earn a reputation as of one of the century’s greatest literary editors.

A prolific author, between 1908 and 1914 Hueffer produced twelve more books–including Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), an interesting example of early science fiction, and a critical study of Henry James. In March of 1915, he published one of his most famous works: The Good Soldier. Set just before World War I, and told using a series of non-chronological flashbacks typical of Hueffer’s pioneering literary impressionism, critics now consider it to be amongst his finest achievements.

At the outbreak of World War I, Hueffer was recruited by Charles Masterman, the head of Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau (WPB), to write opinion-shaping pamphlets. Hueffer, who had always been embarrassed by his German name and heritage, was an enthusiastic propagandist, producing When Blood is Their Argument (1915), an attack on German art, and Between St. Dennis and St. George (1915), a rejoinder to George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense about the War and a scathing attack on Britain’s pacifist intellectuals.

In July of 1915, aged forty-one, Hueffer joined the British army as an officer. A year later, at the Battle of the Somme–the bloodiest battle in British military history–he was nearly killed by a shell explosion. Concussed, he lost his memory for three weeks, developed pneumonia, and was eventually invalided home. Hueffer’s wartime experiences would provide much of the material for his famous tetralogy, Parade’s End (1924).

In 1919, Ford Madox Hueffer changed his name to Ford Madox Ford, as a way of downplaying his German origins. Three years later, the poet Harold Monro invited Ford and his wife to come and live with him on Cap Ferrat, South-eastern France. Ford began Some Do Not . . . (1924), the first volume of Parade’s End, while living here. He finished it in Paris, where Ford was to be based for the rest of the twenties.

While living in the Parisian artists’ colony known as the Cité Fleurie, Ford established himself once more as an influential literary editor capable of shaping the path of literary modernism. In 1924, with the help of poet Ezra Pound, Ford founded the Transatlantic Review, and over the following years published James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, Jean Rhys and many others. Ford also took on a young Ernest Hemingway, first as a sub-editor and later as a writer. (Ford would later lament that Hemingway disown[ed] [him] as soon as he bec[a]me better known than [him]–and Hemingway was less than kind about him in his 1964 memoir, A Moveable Feast.)

During the late twenties, Ford published the rest of his Parade’s End tetralogy: No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up--(1926), and Last Post (1928). He also gave lecture tours in the US, and bought a flat in New York. Ever-prolific, Ford continued to write through the thirties, producing fiction, non-fiction, and two volumes of autobiography: Return to Yesterday (1931) and It was the Nightingale (1933). In his last years, he taught literature at the Olivet College in Michigan. Ford died on 26th June 1939 in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.

Parade’s End

The tetralogy Parade’s End warrants special attention within Ford’s oeuvre because it is both the author’s most ambitious and most enduring work of fiction. Published in four parts–Some Do Not . . . (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up--(1926), and Last Post (1928)–it is considerably more expansive than his other famous work, The Good Soldier, and considerably more complex.

Parade’s End’s high-functioning protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, was modelled on Ford’s much-admired close friend, the mathematician Arthur Marwood (1868-1916). In his 1931 memoir, Return to Yesterday, Ford identified the genesis of Parade’s End as being his musing on what Marwood would have thought about the War and the way it was conducted. In an attempt to solve this question, he resolved to write several novels with a projection of him as a central character.

This characterisation is important, as the narrative of Parade’s End is intensely interior, especially during Last Post (1928), in which Ford flirts with full-blown Joycean stream of consciousness. It is enlightening to bear in mind, while reading, that a large part of the appeal of Marwood/Tietjens’ perspective lay, for Ford, in what he perceived as his friend representing the last bastion of true Toryism. Ford’s politics were complex and contradictory: he was obsessed with what construed gentlemanly conduct, and possessed a sentimental fondness for feudalism, but he also wrote of the true Toryism which is Socialism, and opposed liberal democracy because it promoted plutocracy. Marwood/Tietjens is a fascinating protagonist precisely because he apparently embodied Ford’s convoluted idea of what constituted a proper Englishman, at a time when World War I had shattered many previous illusions about morality and the human project.

Whatever the politics of Parade’s End or its author, there can be no doubt that it is an important work within both World War I literature and English literature more generally. As both a defining modernist text, and a straightforward character drama, it remains an excellent text. Of the tetralogy, W. H. Auden said There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them. Graham Greene, meanwhile, called the books almost the only adult novels dealing effectively with the sexual life that have been written in English, and Malcolm Bradbury described the four works as the most important and complex British novel to deal with the overwhelming subject of the Great War.

Furthermore, Parade’s End continues to endure as a compelling and alluring vision of an English society largely vanished, as evidenced by its recent BBC/HBO dramatisation. Ford passed away before the four novels were first combined into an omnibus, and he reportedly lamented, towards the end of his life, that 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. Had he lived to see the fate of his tetralogy, he might have been more sanguine about his ongoing literary reputation.

PART ONE

I

Slowly, amidst intolerable noises from, on the one hand, the street and, on the other, from the large and voluminously echoing playground, the depths of the telephone began, for Valentine, to assume an aspect that, years ago, it had used to have--of being a part of the supernatural paraphernalia of inscrutable Destiny.

The telephone, for some ingeniously torturing reason, was in a corner of the great schoolroom without any protection, and, called imperatively, at a moment of considerable suspense, out of the asphalte playground where under her command ranks of girls had stood electrically only just within the margin of control, Valentine with the receiver at her ear was plunged immediately into incomprehensible news uttered by a voice that she seemed half to remember. Right in the middle of a sentence it hit her:

‘. . . that he ought presumably to be under control, which you mightn’t like!’; after that the noise burst out again and rendered the voice inaudible.

It occurred to her that probably at that minute the whole population of the world needed to be under control; she knew she herself did. But she had no male relative that the verdict could apply to in especial. Her brother? But he was on a minesweeper. In dock at the moment. And now . . . safe for good! There was also an aged great-uncle that she had never seen. Dean of somewhere . . . Hereford? Exeter? . . . Somewhere . . . Had she just said safe? She was shaken with joy!

She said into the mouthpiece:

‘Valentine Wannop speaking . . . Physical Instructress at this school, you know.’

She had to present an appearance of sanity . . . a sane voice at the very least!

The tantalizingly half-remembered voice on the telephone now got in some more incomprehensibilities. It came as if from caverns and as if with exasperated rapidity it exaggerated its s’s with an effect of spitting vehemence.

‘His brothers.s.s got pneumonia, so his mistress.ss.ss even is unavailable to look after . . .’

The voice disappeared; then it emerged again with:

‘They’re said to be friends now!’

It was drowned then, for a long period in a sea of shrill girls’ voices from the playground, in an ocean of factory-hooters’ ululations, amongst innumerable explosions that trod upon one another’s heels. From where on earth did they get explosives, the population of squalid suburban streets amidst which the school lay? For the matter of that where did they get the spirits to make such an appalling row? Pretty drab people! Inhabiting liver-coloured boxes. Not on the face of it an imperial race.

The sibilating voice on the telephone went on spitting out spitefully that the porter said he had no furniture at all; that he did not appear to recognize the porter . . . Improbable-sounding pieces of information half-extinguished by the external sounds but uttered in a voice that seemed to mean to give pain by what it said.

Nevertheless it was impossible not to take it gaily. The thing, out there, miles and miles away must have been signed--a few minutes ago. She imagined along an immense line sullen and disgruntled cannon sounding for a last time.

‘I haven’t,’ Valentine Wannop shouted into the mouthpiece, ‘the least idea of what you want or who you are.’

She got back a title . . . Lady someone or other . . . It might have been Blastus. She imagined that one of the lady governoresses of the school must be wanting to order something in the way of school sports organized to celebrate the auspicious day. A lady governoress or other was always wanting something done by the School to celebrate something. No doubt the Head who was not wanting in a sense of humour--not absolutely wanting!--had turned this lady of title on to Valentine Wannop after having listened with patience to her for half an hour. The Head had certainly sent out to where in the playground they had all stood breathless, to tell Valentine Wannop that there was someone on the telephone that she--Miss Wanostrocht, the said Head--thought that she, Miss Wannop, ought to listen to . . . Then Miss Wanostrocht must have been able to distinguish what had been said by the now indistinguishable lady of title. But of course that had been ten minutes ago . . . Before the maroons or the sirens, whichever it had been, had sounded . . .’ The porter said he had no furniture at all . . . He did not appear to recognize the porter . . . Ought presumably to be under control! . . . Valentine’s mind thus recapitulated the information that she had from Lady (provisionally) Blastus. She imagined now that the Lady must be concerned for the superannuated drill-sergeant the school had had before it had acquired her, Valentine, as physical instructor. She figured to herself the venerable, mumbling gentleman, with several ribbons on a black commissionaire’s tunic. In an almshouse, probably. Placed there by the Governors of the school. Had pawned his furniture, no doubt . . .

Intense heat possessed Valentine Wannop. She imagined indeed her eyes flashing. Was this the moment?

She didn’t even know whether what they had let off had been maroons or aircraft guns or sirens. It had happened--the noise, whatever it was--whilst she had been coming through the underground passage from the playground to the schoolroom to answer this wicked telephone. So she had not heard the sound. She had missed the sound for which the ears of a world had waited for years, for a generation. For an eternity. No sound. When she had left the playground there had been dead silence. All waiting: girls rubbing one ankle with the other rubber sole . . .

Then . . . For the rest of her life she was never able to remember the greatest stab of joy that had ever been known by waiting millions. There would be no one but she who would not be able to remember that . . . Probably a stirring of the heart that was like a stab; probably a catching of the breath that was like an inhalation of flame! . . . It was over now; they were by now in a situation; a condition, something that would affect certain things in certain ways . . .

She remembered that the putative ex-drill-sergeant had a brother who had pneumonia and thus an unavailable mistress . . .

She was about to say to herself:

‘That’s just my luck!’ when she remembered good-humouredly that her luck was not like that at all. On the whole she had had good luck--ups and downs. A good deal of anxiety at one time--but who hadn’t had! But good health; a mother with good health; a brother safe . . . Anxieties, yes! But nothing that had gone so very wrong . . .

This then was an exceptional stroke of bad luck I Might it be no omen--to the effect that things in future would go wrong: to the effect that she would miss other universal experiences. Never marry, say; or never know the joy of childbearing: if it was a joy! Perhaps it was; perhaps it wasn’t. One said one thing, one another. At any rate might it not be an omen that she would miss some universal and necessary experience! . . . Never see Carcassonne, the French said . . . Perhaps she would never see the Mediterranean. You could not be a proper man if you had never seen the Mediterranean: the sea of Tibullus, of the Anthologists, of Sappho, even . . . Blue: incredibly blue!

People would be able to travel now. It was incredible! Incredible! Incredible! But you could. Next week you would be able to! You could call a taxi! And go to Charing Cross! And have a porter! A whole porter! . . . The wings, the wings of a dove: then would I flee away, flee away and eat pomegranates beside an infinite wash-tub of Reckitt’s blue. Incredible, but you could!

She felt eighteen again. Cocky! She said, using the good, metallic, Cockney bottoms of her lungs that she had used for shouting back at interrupters at Suffrage meetings before . . . before this . . . she shouted blatantly into the telephone:

‘I say, whoever you are! I suppose they have done it; did they announce it in your parts by maroons or sirens?’ She repeated it three times, she did not care for Lady Blastus or Lady Blast Anybody else. She was going to leave that old school and eat pomegranates in the shadow of the rock where Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, did her washing. With lashings of blue in the water! Was all your under-linen bluish in those parts owing to the colour of the sea? She could! She could! She could! Go with her mother and brother and all to where you could eat . . . Oh new potatoes! In December, the sea being blue . . . What songs the Sirens sang and whether . . .

She was not going to show respect for any Lady anything ever again. She had had to hitherto, independent young woman of means though she were, so as not to damage the School and Miss Wanostrocht with the Governoresses. Now . . . She was never going to show respect for anyone ever again. She had been through the mill: the whole world had been through the mill! No more respect!

As she might have expected she got it in the neck immediately afterwards--for over-cockiness!

The hissing, bitter voice from the telephone enunciated the one address she did not want to hear:

‘Lincolnss.s.s . . . sInn!’

Sin! . . . Like the Devil!

It hurt.

The cruel voice said:

‘I’m s.s.peaking from there!’

Valentine said courageously:

‘Well; it’s a great day. I suppose you’re bothered by the cheering like me. I can’t hear what you want. I don’t care. Let ‘em cheer!’

She felt like that. She should not have.

The voice said:

‘You remember your Carlyle . . .’

It was exactly what she did not want to hear. With the receiver hard at her ear she looked round at the great schoolroom--the Hall, made to let a thousand girls sit silent while the Head made the speeches that were the note of the School. Repressive! . . . The place was like a nonconformist chapel. High, bare walls with Gothic windows running up to a pitch-pine varnished roof. Repression, the note of the place; the place, the very place not to be in to-day . . . You ought to be in the streets, hitting policemen’s helmets with bladders. This was Cockney London: that was how Cockney London expressed itself. Hit policemen innocuously because policemen were stiff, embarrassed at these tributes of affection, swayed in rejoicing mobs over whose heads they looked remotely, like poplar trees jostled by vulgarer vegetables!

But she was there, being reminded of the dyspepsia of Thomas Carlyle!

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed into the instrument, ‘You’re Edith Ethel!’ Edith Ethel Duchemin, now of course Lady Mac-master! But you weren’t used to thinking of her as Lady Somebody.

The last person in the world: the very last! Because long ago she had made up her mind that it was all over between herself and Edith Ethel. She certainly could not make any advance to the ennobled personage who vindictively disapproved of all things made--with a black thought in a black shade, as you might say. Of all things that were not being immediately useful to Edith Ethel!

And, aesthetically draped and meagre, she had sets of quotations for appropriate occasions. Rossetti for Love; Browning for optimism--not frequent that: Walter Savage Landor to show acquaintance with more esoteric prose. And the unfailing quotation from Carlyle for damping off saturnalia: for New Year’s Day, Te Deums, Victories, anniversaries, celebrations . . . It was coming over the wire now, that quotation:

‘. . . And then I remembered that it was the birthday of their Redeemer!’

How well Valentine knew it: how often with spiteful conceit had not Edith Ethel intoned that. A passage from the diary of the Sage of Chelsea who lived near the Barracks.

‘To-day,’ the quotation ran, ‘I saw that the soldiers by the public house at the corner were more than usually drunk. And then I remembered that it was the birthday of their Redeemer!’

How superior of the Sage of Chelsea not to remember till then that that had been Christmas Day! Edith Ethel, too, was trying to show how superior she was. She wanted to prove that until she, Valentine Wannop, had reminded her, Lady Macmaster, that that day had about it something of the popular festival she, Lady Mac, had been unaware of the fact. Really quite unaware, you know. She lived in her rapt seclusion along with Sir Vincent--the critic, you know: their eyes fixed on the higher things, they disregarded maroons and had really a quite remarkable collection, by now, of first editions, official-titled friends and At Homes to their credit.

Yet Valentine remembered that once she had sat at the feet of the darkly mysterious Edith Ethel Ducheminwhere had that all gone?--and had sympathized with her marital martyrdoms, her impressive taste in furniture, her large rooms and her spiritual adulteries. So she said good-humouredly to the instrument:

Aren’t you just the same, Edith Ethel? And