This edition takes as its copy-text the British first editions of the four novels. It is not a critical edition of the manuscripts, nor is it a variorum edition comparing the different editions exhaustively. The available manuscripts and other pre-publication materials have been studied and taken into account, and have informed any emendations, all of which are recorded in the textual notes.
The British first editions were the first publication of the complete texts for at least the first three volumes. The case of Last Post is more complicated, and is discussed further below; but in short, if the British edition was not the first published, the US edition was so close in date as to make them effectively simultaneous (especially in terms of Ford’s involvement), so there is no case for not using the British text there too, whereas there are strong reasons in favour of using it for the sake of consistency (with the publisher’s practices, and habits of British as opposed to American usage).
Complete manuscripts have survived for all four volumes. That for Some Do Not … is an autograph, the other three are typescripts. All four have autograph corrections and revisions in Ford’s hand, as well as deletions (which there is no reason to believe are not also authorial). The typescripts also have typed corrections and revisions. As Ford inscribed two of them to say the typing was his own, there is no reason to think these typed second thoughts were not also his. The manuscripts also all have various forms of compositor’s mark-up, confirming what Ford inscribed on the last two, that the UK editions were set from them.
Our edition is primarily intended for general readers and students of Ford. Recording every minor change from manuscript to first book edition would be of interest to only a small number of textual scholars, who would need to consult the original manuscripts themselves. However, many of the revisions and deletions are highly illuminating about Ford’s method of composition, and the changes of conception of the novels. While we have normally followed his decisions in our text, we have annotated the changes we judge to be significant (and of course such selection implies editorial judgement) in the textual notes.
There is only a limited amount of other pre-publication material, perhaps as a result of Duckworth & Co. suffering fires in 1929 and 1950, and being bombed in 1942. There are some pages of an episode originally intended as the ending of Some Do Not … but later recast for No More Parades, and some pages omitted from Last Post. Unlike the other volumes, Last Post also underwent widespread revisions differentiating the first UK and US editions. Corrected proofs of the first chapter only of Some Do Not … were discovered in a batch of materials from Ford’s transatlantic review. An uncorrected proof copy of A Man Could Stand Up – has also been studied. There are comparably patchy examples of previous partial publication of two of the volumes. Part I of Some Do Not … was serialised in the transatlantic review, of which at most only the first four and a half chapters preceded the Duckworth edition. More significant is the part of the first chapter of No More Parades which appeared in the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers in 1925, with surprising differences from the book versions. All of this material has been studied closely, and informs our editing of the Duckworth texts. But – not least because of its fragmentary nature – it didn’t warrant variorum treatment.
The only comparable editing of Ford’s work as we have prepared this edition has been Martin Stannard’s admirable Norton edition of The Good Soldier.83 Stannard took the interesting decision to use the text of the British first edition, but emend the punctuation throughout to follow that of the manuscript. He makes a convincing case for the punctuation being an editorial imposition, and that even if Ford tacitly assented to it (assuming he had a choice), it alters the nature of his manuscript. A similar argument could be made about Parade’s End too. Ford’s punctuation is certainly distinctive: much lighter than in the published versions, and with an eccentrically variable number of suspension dots (between three and eight). However, there seem to us four major reasons for retaining the Duckworth punctuation in the case of Parade’s End:
1) The paucity of pre-publication material. The existence of an autograph manuscript for Some Do Not … as opposed to typescripts for the other three raises the question of whether there might not have existed a typescript for Some Do Not … or autographs for the others. Ford inscribed the typescripts of A Man Could Stand Up – and Last Post to say the typing was his own (though there is some evidence of dictation in both). The typescript of No More Parades has a label attached saying ‘M.S. The property of / F. M. Ford’; although there is nothing that says the typing is his own, the typing errors make it unlikely that it was the work of a professional typist, and we have no reason to believe Ford didn’t also type this novel. So we assume for these three volumes that the punctuation in the typescripts was his (and not imposed by another typist), and, including his autograph corrections, would represent his final thoughts before receiving the proofs. However, without full surviving corrected proofs of any volume it is impossible to be certain which of the numerous changes were or were not authorial. (Janice Biala told Arthur Mizener that ‘Ford did his real revisions on the proofs – and only the publishers have those. The page proofs in Julies’ [sic] and my possession are the English ones – no American publisher had those that I know of.’84 However, no page proofs for any of the four novels are among her or Ford’s daughter Julia Loewe’s papers now at Cornell, nor does the Biala estate hold any.)
2) Ford was an older, more experienced author in 1924–8 than in 1915. Though arguably he would have known even before the war how his editors were likely to regularise his punctuation,
3) On the evidence of the errors that remained uncorrected in the first editions, the single chapter proofs for Some Do Not …, and Ford’s comments in his letters on the speed at which he had to correct proofs, he does not appear to have been very thorough in his proofreading. Janice Biala commented apropos Parade’s End:
Ford was the worst proof reader on earth and knew it. Most of the time, the proofs were corrected in an atmosphere of […] nervous exhaustion & exaperation [sic] with the publisher who after dallying around for months, would suddenly need the corrected proofs 2 hours after their arrival at the house etc, etc, you know.85
At the least, he was more concerned with style than with punctuation.
4) Such questions may be revisited should further prepublication material be discovered. In the meantime, we took the decision to retain the first edition text as our copy-text, rather than conflate manuscript and published texts, on the grounds that this was the form in which the novels went through several impressions and editions in the UK and the US during Ford’s lifetime, and in which they were read by his contemporaries and (bar some minor changes) have continued to be read until now.
The emendations this edition has made to the copy-text fall into two categories:
1) The majority of cases are errors that were not corrected at proof stage. With compositors’ errors the manuscripts provide the authority for the emendations, sometimes also supported by previous publication where available. We have corrected any of Ford’s rare spelling and punctuation errors which were replicated in the UK text (the UK and US editors didn’t always spot the same errors). We have also very occasionally emended factual and historical details where we are confident that the error is not part of the texture of the fiction. All such emendations of the UK text, whether substantive or accidental, are noted in the textual endnotes.
2) The other cases are where the manuscript and copy-text vary; where there is no self-evident error, but the editors judge the manuscript better reflects authorial intention. Such judgements are of course debatable. We have only made such emendations to the UK text when they are supported by evidence from the partial pre-publications (as in the case of expletives); or when they make better sense in context; or (in a very small number of cases) when the change between manuscript and UK loses a degree of specificity Ford elsewhere is careful to attain. Otherwise, where a manuscript reading differs from the published version, we have recorded it (if significant), but not restored it, on the grounds that Ford at least tacitly assented to the change in proof, and may indeed have made it himself – a possibility that can’t be ruled out in the absence of the evidence of corrected proofs.
Our edition differs from previous ones in four main respects. First, it offers a thoroughly edited text of the series for the first time, one more reliable than any published previously. The location of one of the manuscripts, that of No More Parades, was unknown to Ford’s bibliographer David Harvey. It was brought to the attention of Joseph Wiesenfarth (who edits it for this edition) among Hemingway’s papers in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library (Columbia Point, Boston, Massachusetts). Its rediscovery finally made a critical edition of the entire tetralogy possible. Besides the corrections and emendations described above, the editors have made the decision to restore the expletives that are frequent in the typescript of No More Parades, set at the Front, but which were replaced with dashes in the UK and US book editions. While this decision may be a controversial one, we believe it is justified by the previous publication of part of No More Parades in Paris, in which Ford determined that the expletives should stand as accurately representing the way that soldiers talk. In A Man Could Stand Up – the expletives are censored with dashes in the TS, which, while it may suggest Ford’s internalising of the publisher’s decisions from one volume to the next, may also reflect the officers’ self-censorship, so there they have been allowed to stand.86
Second, it presents each novel separately. They were published separately, and reprinted separately, during Ford’s lifetime. The volumes had been increasingly successful. He planned an omnibus edition, and in 1930 proposed the title Parade’s End for it (though possibly without the apostrophe).87 But the Depression intervened and prevented this sensible strategy for consolidating his reputation. After Ford’s death, and another world war, Penguin reissued the four novels as separate paperbacks.
The first omnibus edition was produced in 1950 by Knopf. This edition, based on the US first editions, has been reprinted exactly in almost all subsequent omnibus editions (by Vintage, Penguin and Carcanet; the exception is the new Everyman edition, for which the text was reset, but again using the US edition texts). Thus the tetralogy is familiar to the majority of its readers, on both sides of the Atlantic, through texts based on the US editions. There were two exceptions in the 1960s. When Graham Greene edited the Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford in 1963, he included Some Do Not … as volume 3, and No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up – together as volume 4, choosing to exclude Last Post. This text is thus not only incomplete but also varies extensively from the first editions. Some of the variants are simply errors. Others are clearly editorial attempts to clarify obscurities or to ‘correct’ usage, sometimes to emend corruptions in the first edition, but clearly without knowledge of the manuscript. While it is an intriguing possibility that some of the emendations may have been Greene’s, they are distractions from what Ford actually wrote. Arthur Mizener edited Parade’s End for Signet Classics in 1964, combining the first two books in one volume, and the last two in another. Both these editions used the UK texts. Thus readers outside the US have not had a text of the complete work based on the UK text for over sixty years; those in the US, for forty-five years. Our edition restores the UK text, which has significant differences in each volume, and especially in the case of Last Post – for which even the title differed in the US editions, acquiring a definite article. This restoration of the UK text is the third innovation here.
With the exception of paperback reissues of the Bodley Head texts by Sphere in 1969 (again excluding Last Post), the volumes have not been available separately since 1948. While there is no doubt Ford intended the books as a sequence (there is some doubt about how many volumes he projected, as discussed above), the original UK editions appeared at intervals of more than a year. They were read separately, with many readers beginning with the later volumes. Like any writer of novel sequences, Ford was careful to ensure that each book was intelligible alone. Moreover, there are marked differences between each of the novels. Though all tell the story of the same group of characters, each focuses on a different selection of people. The locations and times are also different. In addition, and more strikingly, the styles and techniques develop and alter from novel to novel. Returning the novels to their original separate publication enables these differences to be more clearly visible.
Parade’s End in its entirety is a massive work. Omnibus editions of it are too large to be able to accommodate extra material. A further advantage of separate publication is to allow room for the annotations the series now needs. This is the fourth advantage of our edition. Though Parade’s End isn’t as difficult or obscure a text as Ulysses or The Waste Land, it is dense with period references, literary allusions and military terminology unfamiliar to readers a century later. This edition is the first to annotate these difficulties.
To keep the pages of text as uncluttered as possible, we have normally restricted footnotes to information rather than interpretation, annotating obscurities that are not easily traceable in standard reference works. English words have only been glossed if they are misleadingly ambiguous, or if they cannot be found in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, in which case the Oxford English Dictionary (or occasionally Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang) has been used. Parade’s End is, like Ford’s account of The Good Soldier, an ‘intricate tangle of references and cross-references’.88 We have annotated references to works by other writers, as well as relevant biographical references that are not covered in the introductions. We have also included cross-references to Ford’s other works where they shed light on Parade’s End. To avoid duplication, we have restricted cross-references to other volumes of the tetralogy to those to preceding volumes. These are given by Part- and chapter-number: i.e. ‘I.iv’ for Part I, chapter IV. We have, however, generally not noted the wealth of cross-references within the individual volumes.
Works cited in the footnotes are given a full citation on first appearance. Subsequent citations of often-cited works are by short titles, and a list of these is provided at the beginning of the volume. A key to the conventions used in the textual endnotes appears on pp. 205–06.
83 The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (London and New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995).
84 Biala to Arthur Mizener, 29 May 1964, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; quoted with the kind permission of the estate of Janice Biala and Cornell University.
85 Biala to Arthur Mizener, 29 May 1964, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; quoted with the kind permission of the estate of Janice Biala and Cornell University.
86 If the decision to censor the expletives in No More Parades is what led Ford to use euphemistic dashes in the typescript of A Man Could Stand Up –, that of Last Post complicates the story, containing two instances of ‘bloody’ and two instances of ‘b––y’.
87 Ford wrote to his agent: ‘I do not like the title Tietjens Saga – because in the first place “Tietjens” is a name difficult for purchasers to pronounce and booksellers would almost inevitably persuade readers that they mean the Forsyte Sage with great damage to my sales. I recognize the value of Messrs Duckworth’s publicity and see no reason why they should not get the advantage of it by using those words as a subtitle beneath another general title, which I am inclined to suggest should be Parades End so that Messrs Duckworth could advertise it as PARADES END [TIETJENS’ SAGA]’. Ford to Eric Pinker, 17 Aug. 1930: Letters 197. However, the copy at Cornell is Janice Biala’s transcription of Ford’s original. The reply from Pinkers is signed ‘Barton’ (20 Aug. 1930: Cornell), who says they have spoken to Messrs Duckworth who agree with Ford’s suggested title; but he quotes it back as ‘Parade’s End’ with the apostrophe (suggesting Biala’s transcription may have omitted it), then gives the subtitle as the ‘Tietjen’s Saga’ (casting his marksmanship with the apostrophe equally in doubt). These uncertainties make it even less advisable than it would anyway have been to alter the title by which the series has been known for sixty years.
88 ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’, The Good Soldier 5.