INTRODUCTION

A song new to us was heard, ‘What shall we be when we aren’t what we are?’ It foretold one of the many tragedies of Peace.

Mrs C.S. Peel recalling Armistice Night in How We Lived Then (1929)

 

The Great War ended at 11:00 a.m. on 11 November 1918. Many people felt both huge relief and uneasiness. ‘[T]hank the Lord that’s over […] we have to face the perils of Peace now’, Augustus John wrote to John Quinn, while D.H. Lawrence harangued David Garnett: ‘The crowd outside thinks that Germany is crushed forever. But the Germans will soon rise again. Europe is done for; England most of all…’1 In early December Aldous Huxley wrote to Ottoline Morrell: ‘It is certainly very curious the way almost everybody has become extremely depressed at the arrival of peace. One could regard the War as a nightmare and unreal; but with peace one must look at facts as though they were real – and they are extremely unpleasant.’2

Ford Madox Ford, then stationed at Redcar in Yorkshire, where he was lecturing to the troops, wrote to Stella Bowen on Armistice Day: ‘Just a note to say I love you more than ever. Peace has come, & for some reason I feel inexpressibly sad.’ Yet to free his beloved France from German occupation was ‘like a fairy tale’, he told her.3 In June 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, or when, as Ford put it, peace was declared, he wrote to Charles Masterman: ‘It’s like a fairy world.’4 How seriously should we treat such statements? Ford was not alone in making them, or statements very like them, and it’s hardly necessary to point to the extreme contrast between the trenches of Flanders and the streets of central London or the fields of Sussex to grasp that there was a widespread sense of unreality among many returnees. Nor were such feelings restricted to those who had been to the war: ‘Unreal city […] I had not thought death had undone so many.’5

Biography

Ford’s post-war life in West Sussex began at Red Ford, Hurston, Pulborough, in the spring of 1919, after his demobilisation. From the beginning of September 1920 he and his partner, the Australian painter Stella Bowen, lived at Coopers Cottage in Bedham, near Fittleworth. Their daughter, Esther Julia (Julie), was born three months later on 29 November. Ford and Bowen moved to France in late 1922; their relationship faltered under the impact of Ford’s affair with Jean Rhys and failed in the face of his extended visits to the United States from 1926 onwards, and his further romantic entanglements there.

Bowen is central to the story of Parade’s End, both personally and artistically. She provided indispensable practical and emotional support but also served as the primary model for the character of Valentine Wannop; other models were Stella’s close friend Margaret Postgate (who married the Socialist historian and economist G.D.H. Cole) and, in Ford’s own telling, the actress Dorothy Minto (Nightingale, 191).6

From the outset, Last Post draws heavily upon the material details of their life together in Sussex. Bedham, Stella wrote, was ‘on a great wooded hill […] There was an immense view.’7 Douglas Goldring, Ford’s friend and editorial assistant on the English Review a dozen years earlier, wrote admiringly that ‘the views from hereabouts are unrivalled in Sussex’,8 and Ford later remembered: ‘They said locally that it looked over twelve counties, and I daresay we really could see three from the west window’ (Nightingale 117). The context of that memory was one of isolation from the outer world (though Ford and Stella had numerous visitors), ‘being hidden in a green – a far too green – corner of England, on a hill-top that was almost inaccessible to motor traffic, under an immense screen of giant beeches’ (Nightingale 138).

One constant concern in Ford’s post-war work, not always obvious or rendered in obvious ways, is a profound sense of loss, of grief, of mourning. This was, of course, an inextricable feature of the cultural landscape of that time: among the major combatants, Jay Winter has commented, ‘it is not an exaggeration to suggest that every family was in mourning’.9 In addition to the numerous deaths inextricable from his war service, Ford had lost many close friends in recent years, including Arthur Marwood, W.H. Hudson and Joseph Conrad, while the death of the painter Juan Gris in May 1927 was closely followed by that of Ford’s mother, just three weeks later.10

All these and other deaths and vanishings lie behind his asking of Isabel Paterson in Last Post’s ‘Dedicatory Letter’ if she does not find that ‘in the case of certain dead people’ she ‘cannot feel that they are indeed gone from this world’. He goes on to say that, for him, ‘the world daily becomes more and more peopled with such revenants and less and less with those who still walk this earth’.11

Remembrance of the dead and their resurrection in the pages of his books is, then, a crucial and constant feature of Ford’s post-war writings. He was, as John Coyle remarks, ‘a compulsive ghost-seer’ (Nightingale viii). More immediately, perhaps, the setting of Last Post is itself a shadowing of Ford’s life in Sussex. Fifteen years before, he had written of literary impressionism’s rendering of ‘those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass’, when you see, in addition to the view through that glass, the reflection upon it of a face or person behind you.12 That is often true of Last Post, with its overlaid images of alternative lives and disparate histories, its crowding of voices and memories into the spaces left by Mark’s determined silence and Marie Léonie’s absorption in her work. The novel is haunted by the unspoken or, at least, the understated: the war, as it is lived with in this ‘after-war world’,13 and what is gone from the lives of not only the characters but their author also. It is this haunting that may bring before the reader a sharp and unsettling sense of the short, almost invisible step between ‘last post’ and ‘lost past’.

The Title

The novel’s title lends itself to multiple interpretations.14 The OED offers a bewildering array of meanings for ‘post’ (as it does for ‘last’): half a dozen headings as a verb and a dozen as a noun. Those merely of obvious relevance to Ford’s novel are plentiful enough: support, boundary marker, horse-racing, the act of recording an entry in a ledger, the point at which a soldier is stationed when on duty, and the Latin word for ‘after’ or ‘since’, as in ‘post-war’. Yet the most immediately striking fact about the occurrences of ‘post’ in the novel is that more than half are specifically focused on beds and shelters. These are noticeably grouped towards the beginning and the end of the book. They relate particularly to the bed in which Mark lies and the shelter that contains it; but also the bed in which the pregnant Valentine Wannop lies and in which she expects and hopes that her child will be born.

The ‘last post’ is the bugle call sounded at the end of the military day, signalling the order to retire for the night. It is also sounded at military funerals and at services of remembrance, and this context is undoubtedly far more familiar to civilian ears, certainly since 1919 and the establishing of annual ceremonies on Armistice Day. Ford wrote of this – but also, tellingly, of what follows:

At a British military funeral, after the Dead March in Saul, after the rattling of the cords from under the coffin, the rifle-firing and the long wail of the last post, suddenly the band and drums strike up “D’ye ken John Peel?” or the “Lincolnshire Poacher” – the unit’s quickstep. It is shocking until you see how good it is as a symbol. (Nightingale 19–20)

That ‘long wail’ is heard several times in Last Post, both in the novel’s present, in which a neighbour’s sons (one of whom has been a bugler) play or attempt to play it, and in the memories of Armistice Night – variously painful for Mark Tietjens, Valentine, Marie Léonie and even Sylvia Tietjens – that such playing prompts.

The Novel

Last Post is set during a few hours of a June day, in the years following the First World War. Christopher Tietjens now makes his living as a dealer in old furniture. He and Valentine Wannop share a cottage in West Sussex with Christopher’s older brother Mark and Mark’s wife, Marie Léonie.

Much of the novel is presented from Mark’s point of view as he lies, mute and immobile, in an outdoor shelter; other sections are presented from the viewpoints of Marie Léonie and Valentine. The narrative also dips in and out of the consciousnesses of Christopher’s estranged wife Sylvia, their son, Mark Junior, and several minor characters. These interior monologues traverse the past, speculate on the future, illuminate details of the present and offer alternative perspectives on some of the events that have occurred earlier in the sequence, particularly ‘that infernal day’ and ‘that dreadful night’ of the Armistice, around which their memories circle obsessively.

The tensions of the novel centre, domestically, on Valentine’s advanced pregnancy in the context of her, and Christopher’s, financial precariousness. Mark is wealthy but a feud between the brothers, brought about by Sylvia’s promotion of scurrilous rumours about her husband, which were initially believed by Mark and, consequently, by their father, has made it impossible for Christopher to accept, either by gift or by inheritance, money or property from his brother. The threats to the Tietjens ménage derive directly or indirectly from the continued malicious scheming of Sylvia Tietjens, who has tried to turn their neighbour and landlord against them, and manoeuvred an American tenant of Groby (the Tietjens ancestral home) into cutting down Groby Great Tree, ‘the symbol of Tietjens’ (I.iv).15 Christopher has flown to York in an attempt to avert this threat. The invasion of the Tietjens domain by the American tenant and the Tietjenses’ son, by Sylvia and by other figures from earlier in the tetralogy closes with Sylvia’s retreat and change of heart. The novel’s fine and poignant ending focuses on the death of Mark Tietjens.

The Literary Context

The literary decade in which Ford published the four Tietjens volumes was a famously rich one. Those years saw Lawrence’s Women in Love and Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1920, then The Waste Land, Ulysses, the early Cantos, several major volumes by Yeats, The Great Gatsby, Mrs Dalloway, A Passage to India, The Sun Also Rises, To the Lighthouse and The Apes of God. Ford knew most of the writers of these works and had himself published Lawrence, Lewis, Pound, Yeats, Joyce and Hemingway.

Ford later cited the example of Proust as an influence on the conception of Parade’s End (though he had not at that stage read Proust’s work: Nightingale 179–80); and he was certainly familiar with the novels of Woolf and Joyce, as he was with the poems of Pound, Yeats and Eliot. It was surely the case that such examples and such literary company as he enjoyed in both Paris and New York encouraged his confidence in the immense project he was embarked upon, strengthening his belief that he was producing some of the best and most significant work of his life. Ford had enjoyed some critical successes (and one or two commercial ones) but it was with Some Do Not … and its successors that he was reviewed and discussed with the same seriousness and with the same recognition of literary significance as were the other major Modernists.

The constituent volumes of Parade’s End are usually – and, I think, quite rightly – viewed as closely, even inextricably, connected parts, though Last Post, as I discuss later, is sometimes not so regarded.16 Their initial publications were, though, interspersed with half a dozen other titles, including A Mirror to France in 1926 and two books of essays, New York is Not America and New York Essays, both published in 1927.

That international flavour is certainly significant. Perhaps, though, the books by Ford most closely related to Last Post – apart from the earlier volumes of Parade’s End – fall outside this period and the real context is not purely chronological. No Enemy shares many similarities of setting and post-war mood, as well as numerous echoes of both image and phrasing, while The Heart of the Country, though twenty years earlier – and, obviously, pre-war – foreshadows several elements of Last Post.17 There are echoes in the novel of two volumes of poetry, A House (1921) and Mister Bosphorus and the Muses (1923), and the later It Was the Nightingale has been described as ‘a companion volume to Parade’s End, reiterating the concerns of the tetralogy with renewed urgency’ (Nightingale xiv). In fact, though the war was a huge and trans-formative event in Ford’s life, as in countless others’, many of his preoccupations, manifested in his writing, long pre-dated it and continued to engage him later. The war did not invalidate them: rather, it added urgency, depth and a stronger sense of the fragility of our lives and their surrounding darkness.

‘Like a Fairy World’

Ford’s writing to Masterman that ‘Peace’ was ‘like a fairy world’ surely hints at the grounds on which a few critics of Last Post have described the novel as ‘retreating from history’ and existing in its own time – though other readers and commentators have regarded this element altogether more positively. ‘It is into the overgrown but still unblocked tunnels to dialect and faery England that the dying Mark Tietjens glimpses’, Hugh Kenner wrote, ‘it is from them that he extracts his legacy for the living.’18

Ford’s publishing history begins with fairy tales and many of his later books draw on elements of this tradition: the possibilities of transformation, the frequent instability of ‘reality’, the subtle tug of archetypes, the pressure of conflicting narratives.19 And fairy tale, like an undercurrent barely disturbing the surface of the water, is one example of the means by which Ford achieves that characteristic effect of glimpses, of sounds not quite heard, of objects vanishing or shifting in the moment of their detection.

Consider Valentine Wannop, under the several stresses of anxiety over her unborn child, her home under siege, having just emerged from the upstairs room in which she had unintentionally locked herself, needing to reach the doctor who attends to Mark Tietjens. She gazes down ‘her long room’ as she holds the telephone to her ear, looking ‘into the distant future’ when things will spread out ‘like a plain seen from a hill’. In the meantime, they have ‘to keep all on going’. All these are tiny echoes of details from earlier in the sequence or, like Meary Walker, the Bonnington agricultural worker about whom he wrote on several occasions, of recurring figures in Ford’s work. Valentine asks the doctor to come quickly: ‘Sister Anne! Sister Anne! For God’s sake, Sister Anne! If she could get a bromide into her it would pass like a dream. / It was passing like a dream’ (II.iii).

‘Sister Anne’ points us to Charles Perrault’s story, ‘Bluebeard’, in which the wife’s sister looks out from the top of the tower for their two brothers, who are riding towards them while Bluebeard calls his wife to meet her death at his hands.20 Within Parade’s End that in turn points back to the late pages of A Man Could Stand Up –, in which Valentine waits in the empty house while the ‘madman’, Tietjens, is coming up the stairs. ‘He was carrying a sack. […] A sack was a terrible thing for a mad man to carry. […] It was a heavy sack. Bluebeard would have had in it the corpse of his first wife’ (III.i). It is, of course, a sack of coal. Even carried by a madman, a sack may be benign. It is not always so. In an earlier passage, marked by high anxiety and hallucination preceding an expected enemy attack, Tietjens sees a pile of wet sacks and notes their appalling resemblance to ‘prostrate men’. A few pages later:

Noise increased. The orchestra was bringing in all the brass, all the strings, all the wood-wind, all the percussion instruments. The performers threw about biscuit tins filled with horseshoes; they emptied sacks of coal on cracked gongs, they threw down forty-storey iron houses. It was comic to the extent that an operatic orchestra’s crescendo is comic. Crescendo! … Crescendo! CRRRRRESC … The Hero must be coming! He didn’t! (A Man Could Stand Up – II.i)

In Some Do Not …, when Valentine learns from Mark Tietjens that her mother will be provided for under the terms of Mr Tietjens’ will, she reflects that it is ‘as if a novel had been snatched out of her hand so that she would never know the end’. Ford adds: ‘Of the fairytale she knew the end’ – that is, tailors and goose-girls. ‘But she would never know whether they, in the end, got together all the blue Dutch tiles they wanted to line their bathroom’ (II.v). We need both novels and fairy tales (which are, Ford wrote, ‘a prime necessity of the world’),21 though the question of degrees of separation lingers. In A Man Could Stand Up – that ‘small company’ of the Rag-Time Army that Tietjens currently commands, ‘men of all sorts of sizes, of all sorts of disparities and grotesquenesses of physique’, including two music-hall comedians, is called to attention and ‘positively, a dwarf concealed under a pudding basin shuffled a foot-length and a half forward’. It is ‘like a blurred fairy-tale’, Tietjens reflects (II.ii). So, of course, in many respects, is the entire experience of war. Blurred, senseless, incomprehensible, transforming fields into mud, houses into rubble and men into scraps, by turns deafening, terrifying and stupefyingly tedious. The fairy tale, in such conditions, can look unsettlingly like The Real Thing.

In No Enemy, when the poet (and Fordian persona) Gringoire relates the ‘psychological anecdote which gives the note of this book’, it concerns an envisioned landscape, or rather, ‘not quite a landscape’ but ‘a nook’ – ‘with a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm’. ‘A castle in Spain, in fact, only that it was in a southern country – the English country.’

‘I ask to be believed in what I am now saying.’ Gringoire uttered the words slowly. ‘It is just the truth. If I wanted to tell fairy tales, I’d do better than this. Fairy tales to be all about the Earth shaking, and the wire, and the crumps, and the beef-tins … You know. And that would be true too. Anyway this is…. ’ (33–4)

In Last Post’s teasing ‘Dedicatory Letter’ to his ‘fairy godmother’, Isabel Paterson, Ford reverts to the matter. He touches again on his attempt ‘to project how this world would have appeared’ to his friend Arthur Marwood ‘to-day’. He recalls the many years during which he tended to ask himself what Marwood would have said and how he would have acted in certain situations.

And I do so still. I have only to say to my mind, as the child on the knees of an adult says to its senior: “Tell us a fairy tale!” – I have only to say: “Tell us what he would here have done!” and at once he is there.

Little wonder, perhaps, that Valentine Wannop reflects ‘The age of fairy-tales was not, of course, past’ (Last Post II.iii).22 Little wonder, too, that something more is needed.

All this may simply enforce and emphasise the fact that, in practice, Ford’s writing draws on many genres within a single work, which can unsettle some critics just as it enthuses many of Ford’s readers. Is Parade’s End historical novel, comedy, pantomime, fairy tale, romance or satire? Is it realistic or fantastic, concerned with ‘public’ or ‘private’ events? The temptation is simply to say ‘yes, all of these’, though risking some readers’ inference that this means, necessarily, something unresolved, ungainly or untidy.

It does not.

Boundaries

If Parade’s End is a novel, or novel-sequence, of both war and peace – or, at least, ‘not-war’ – where does the boundary lie? Some Do Not … often gives the impression of being pre-war – but half of it is not. A Man Could Stand Up – technically covers the postwar but it is, quite literally, Armistice Day; and the first and third sections bracket a much longer second section – exactly 60 per cent of the book – that deals most vividly with the war, specifically Ludendorff’s great offensive of Spring 1918. The true post-war is limited to Last Post. And, though all four books were produced several years after the Armistice, Last Post is written, I believe, very much in the spirit of the immediate post-war: of that sense of fairy tale and of unreality, of wish-fulfilment, the rush of relief after the years of strain, but still a world turned upsidedown, riddled with hazard and uncertainty. The trick of it was that Ford in 1927 was casting his mind back to the years in Sussex with Stella Bowen: their cottage then was the setting for ‘Tietjens’s’ now. The tension, the tremendous effort of doing this, was heightened by the fact that his relationship with Bowen, so crucial to the conception, planning and production of Parade’s End, was fracturing, now, as he wrote it.

The book is Ford’s last, regretful, love letter to Stella Bowen, through which he is saying his farewells, and not only to her. He is in America, or rather in a ship off the coast of Canada taking him away from her – again – when he writes to say that his last ‘English’ novel is finished; she, the Australian, met and loved and lived with in England, then in France, to whom he dedicates not this last novel arising from their long intimacy (and, in a sense, the one rooted most deeply in their lives together) but a new edition of his pre-war masterpiece, The Good Soldier, written and published before he met her. That novel is about a divided Ford, about his portrait of the artist, the actor and the watcher. The actor cuts his throat and the watcher writes it down. Within a few months of its publication, Ford the actor was a soldier in uniform and the watcher could not write. And one version of how he came to be able to write again – or a parable of that – he set down at the beginning of their lives together, in a story called ‘English Country’, which was not published until a decade later, as No Enemy, after his life with Stella had ended.23

This is why, even within the fictional world of the novel, there are currents running towards the outside, the ‘actual’ world, sometimes of the early twenties soon after the war when there is a discernible rawness and fragility; but also a stronger current, I believe, running towards the writer’s present, the transatlantic movement itself bridging (but deceptively, over the surface of the sea) two worlds, Europe and America, an author whose work was, increasingly, bridging those same two worlds, and whose life – or one version of it – was ending: his mother recently dead, the news of other deaths seeming to confront him at every turn, an essay just published in which he mourned for his lost fellow writers and said that it was like dying himself.24 Lost, last.

Arts and Crafts

‘Writing’ is, in fact, a curious absence in Last Post – curious, in part, because it’s so prevalent in the other volumes. Some Do Not … opens with Macmaster correcting the proofs of his first book, though finding nothing to correct. Thereafter, as well as the many allusions to Fordian favourites (including Gilbert White, Christina Rossetti, Turgenev, Ezra Pound, James and Conrad), there are scores of instances of different arts and media: paintings and drawings, telegrams and telephone calls, military reports, the composition of music-hall sketches and sessions of bout-rimés. The many letters include those that Tietjens thinks of writing to Valentine and the one that he seems (to Levin) to be writing to her in his sleep, as well as those written by or about Sylvia. In Last Post, by contrast, the most significant letter appears to be that written by Mrs de Bray Pape to Mark Tietjens about her proposed cutting down of Groby Great Tree.

The foregrounding of the arts seems then to recede in Last Post – yet this is not in fact the case. Ford had always taken a broader view of ‘the arts’ than some of his contemporaries, and here the cider-making, furniture-restoring, planting, keeping of chickens and general maintenance, the multifarious tasks performed by Gunning, are treated with seriousness and respect. That is to say that the arts are less alluded to or described than enacted. Norman Leer commented of Last Post that Christopher Tietjens is ‘still the central character, but he remains in the background, like an accomplished fact’.25 I would suggest that this context is what has been accomplished; that Tietjens, through his ordeal at the hands of Sylvia, obtuse or malevolent civilians, incompetent or vengeful military superiors and the rest, has earned the right to the imperfections, fallibilities and makeshifts of everyday life; that he can now practise the arts of the ordinary processes of living, as did the Ford of the early 1920s and the 1930s.

There are two main elements to this: Valentine’s use of the phrase ‘keep all on going’ is Ford’s hommage to Meary Walker, who could turn her hand to many things and whom Ford revisited several times. In retrospect, she gained in symbolic strength, not only because of her honesty and sheer determination but also because Ford saw her as exemplifying a vanishing and, in part, regretted world (England 181).

The other element is the central positioning of Marie Léonie. That she has her absurdities is an essential point about her; that she possesses indispensable qualities is no less essential. The ideas of frugality and the avoidance of waste were ones that Ford long associated with the French, specifically, French women of a certain type and age.26 In the 1930s the Fordian persona of small producer, eco-warrior and prophet would dominate such books as Great Trade Route and Provence. But it was one of the foremost ideas he had brought away from the war, partly perhaps in reaction to what was now widely perceived as the wastefulness and over-consumption of the Edwardian upper and middle classes. No Enemy’s Gringoire noted of the war that ‘it did teach us what a hell – what a hell! – of a lot we can do without’ (52).27 Then, too, it was artistically admirable. Ford would write of Izaak Walton’s as an example of that kind of prose that is fresh ‘because its author sought for the simplest words and the most frugally exact adjectives and similes, having the exact eye and the passion above all to make you see’.28

History and Fiction; or, Some Racehorses

Several commentators have attempted to clarify Parade’s End’s chronology, sometimes listing inconsistencies and apparent contradictions of the sort almost inevitable in a long work written over several volumes and several years.29 These and other analyses include the likely date at which Last Post is set. There is no obvious consensus here: some readers have assumed that the action of the novel takes place very soon after the war, with 1919 or 1920 the most popular suggestions; others have opted for the mid- or late-1920s or, more simply and broadly, ‘post-war’.

Initially, the immediate post-war period seems entirely plausible. But what exactly does ‘plausible’ mean in this context? Ford’s book, despite the continued presence and symbolic importance of Marie Léonie, is strongly rooted in England, in considerations of the state of England. Yet most of his time after 1922 was spent in France and, increasingly, in the United States.30 He may well have seen English newspapers, of course, and if he were the kind of writer who required historical ‘accuracy’ and wanted to anchor the action of his novel to particular years, there were numerous candidates for such signposts. Clearly, such precise historical alignment was not his concern.

There are very few unambiguous chronological clues in Last Post. We know, for instance, that General Campion is now MP for the West Cleveland Division. But the ‘coupon election’ in December 1918 (candidates approved by the coalition between Conservatives and Lloyd George’s Liberals received a coupon) was followed by three more elections in successive years, from 1922 to 1924. Ford may have deliberately obscured the date he had in mind, not desiring to limit readers’ interpretations, but it seems now equally likely that he had no specific date in mind.

There are, however, two details in the novel that allow of only one time period (plus a couple that point towards it); and at least one other detail that contradicts it. We know that the novel covers part of a day in June and we have a number of references to horse races. The crucial one is not filtered through a character’s consciousness but is presented in the context of the newspaper that both Mark and Marie Léonie are reading: the King’s filly has won the Berkshire Foal Plate at Newbury and the Seaton Delaval Handicap at Newcastle has been won by ‘the horse of a friend’ (I.i).

At the beginning of the second chapter in both the English and American first editions, the reference to ‘Seattle’ having won a race was initially puzzling. Mr E. Gwilt’s six-year-old, Seattle, ran twice at Newbury, an also-ran in the Moderate Handicap Hurdle on the 1st of the month while coming in last of seven runners on the 30th! But that month was December 1921, not June.

Ford’s mother died on 3 June 1927. Ford was in London by the 7th and Max Saunders writes that he stayed about a week (Dual Life II 316 and 613, n.2). The funeral took place on 15 June and a letter to Ezra Pound from Paris is dated the same day,31 so Ford must have travelled back immediately after the ceremony if that date is correct. Was there another brief visit to London that month, perhaps in connection with the reading of his mother’s will?

On leaf 42 of the typescript of Last Post, the word ‘Thursday’ is typed across the top left-hand corner. On Friday 24 June 1927 The Times carried the previous day’s results from the Newbury summer meeting and from Newcastle. The Seaton Delaval Handicap was won by Carsebreck, owned by a Mr W.W. Hope.32 The Berkshire Foal Plate was won by Scuttle, a filly owned by His Majesty George V.

The conversation at the beginning of I.ii follows on from that of the opening chapter. It is the King’s filly, ‘Scuttle’, that is referred to and Ford’s typescript error had been carried over to both UK and US editions, probably occurring at the outset because reading those ‘endless, serried columns’ in The Times did allow the strong possibility of misreading one or two letters in a name – especially for a novelist who did not, as a rule, follow horse-racing.33

One other specific detail occurs in the course of young Mark Tietjens’ comparison of his ‘divinely beautiful’ mother’s athleticism with that of both Atalanta and Betty Nuthall. The same issue of The Times (Friday 24 June) carried a report of Miss Betty Nuthall’s defeat of the American Anna Mallory in the Third Round at Wimbledon the previous day, by two sets to one. The paper included a photograph of the two players, taken just before the match. Nuthall is described as ‘youthful’, and no wonder: born on 23 May 1911, she was barely sixteen on her Wimbledon début. Young Mark Tietjens’ admiring reference would, then, make no ‘historical’ sense at all before 1927.

In Some Do Not … it emerges that Mark ‘came up to town’ at the age of twenty-five (II.iii). Knowing the difference in age between Mark and Christopher, and that Christopher was twenty-six in 1912, we can place that ‘coming up to town’ in 1897. In Last Post Mark reflects on the government department that he had entered, in the first British edition, ‘thirty-five years before’. This points to a present of 1932, an obvious anachronism – but the reference in the US edition was ‘corrected’ to ‘thirty years ago’, which takes us back to 1927.34 Perhaps one more detail does: in the ‘Dedicatory Letter’, Ford refers to Tietjens, tongue in cheek no doubt, ‘at this moment’: ‘I here provide you with a slice of one of Christopher’s later days so that you may know how more or less he at present stands.’

In that opening chapter, though, the racing reports already quoted evoke in Mark the reflection that:

He had meant to go to the Newcastle meeting this year and give Newbury a by. The last year he had gone racing he had done rather well at Newbury, so he had then thought he would try Newcastle for a change, and, whilst he was there, take a look at Groby and see what that bitch Sylvia was doing with Groby. Well, that was done with. They would presumably bury him at Groby.

That ‘was done with’ because Mark is immobilised. The difficulties here are that, firstly, he is immobilised as a result of a stroke or a resolution on Armistice Night, that is to say, in November 1918.35 ‘He had meant to go to the Newcastle meeting this year’ implies that, when the decision was made, he didn’t know he would be immobilised, which means prior to November 1918. The decision to go to Newcastle could have been taken any time prior to 1918 but it would have centred on the next available racing year. In that context, ‘this year’ strongly implies 1919 and is thus wholly incompatible with other ‘historical’ data.

The typescript reading, ‘Last year’, makes it unmistakeably 1918, since he has been ill since that November and the latest he could have gone racing is that year. The US revision, ‘During the last year when he had gone racing’ merely elaborates the change in the UK edition (‘The last year he had gone racing’) but cannot remove the obstacle to rooting it in 1918–19.

And yet this ‘incompatibility’, in its peculiar way, is wholly in accord with my sense that Ford was precisely not focused on one time or, rather, was looking through the glass at 1927 and seeing, in addition to the view through that glass, the reflection upon it of – what behind him? Coopers Cottage, an orchard running up to the road at the top of the hill, the wood, the rough field. Stella, Julie. For Ford, in fact, the last of England.

The earlier volumes of Parade’s End were more obviously concerned with ‘such events as get on to the pages of history’ (No More Parades, ‘Dedicatory Letter’). Ford subsequently stressed the trouble he had taken to get details right, to check his memory, to affirm his Whitmanian power of witness (‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there’), while also emphasising the fact that he was writing a novel (though, unusually for him, one with a purpose: that of obviating all future wars) and seeking to disentangle, in the minds of his readers, the opinions of his characters from those of their author.

What does occur, in all four volumes, I think, is the phenomenon of the historical ‘fact’ that is not quite there, that is almost ‘right’, that may be slightly misremembered, that may confuse or blur two or more details. These instances generally occur under the umbrella of characterisation, that is to say, within the thoughts or expressions of a fictional character. They raise, in any case, the old question of whether there can be factual ‘mistakes’ in a work of fiction, in which characters inhabit an invented world, or at least one that, though very similar to the ‘real’ world, is not identical with it.36

One example of this tendency, representative in its curious collusion of ‘fact’ and ‘not quite fact’, is precisely the matter of racehorses. A few pages into Last Post, Ford writes of Mark Tietjens, referring to the elder brother’s great interest in horse-racing already alluded to in both Some Do Not … and No More Parades: ‘He knew the sire and dam of every horse from Eclipse to Perlmutter.’ Eclipse was, of course, one of the most famous racehorses of all time, ancestor of 95 per cent of contemporary thoroughbreds and unbeaten in eighteen starts. But what of Perlmutter?

Montague Glass’s highly successful stories about two Jewish business partners, ‘Potash and Perlmutter’, pre-date the First World War.37 His play of the same title was first produced in Britain at the Queen’s Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, on 14 April 1914. Further plays, then films, followed well into the 1920s. That ‘Potash and Perlmutter’ were fairly constant cultural references for at least a decade is confirmed by the fact that they were also the nicknames given to Charles John Green, cook, and Perce Blackborow, his assistant, on Shackleton’s last Antarctic expedition.38

In 1922, the same year in which Ford moved to France, two Dutch sisters arrived in Paris. They became artists’ models for Marie Laurencin and the photographer Berenice Abbott, among others. Tylia Perlmutter, born in 1904, died young. Bronja, two years her senior, became engaged to Raymond Radiguet, who died in 1923, and married the filmmaker René Clair two years later. Kay Boyle writes about them, in her revision of Robert McAlmon’s memoir, as does Djuna Barnes.39

‘Perlmutter’, then, was part of a great many people’s mental furniture for a decade or two, not only in London and New York but in Paris as well for those, like Ford, who moved in ‘artistic’ circles. Was this a slip of the pen while intending to write, say, Persimmon? That was a famous horse: first Royal winner of the Derby (in 1896) for 108 years (the Prince of Wales’ horse won both Derby and St Leger that year), later retired to stud at Sandringham. Persimmon died in 1908, nearly twenty years before Ford was writing Last Post – in Paris, then Avignon, then aboard ship en route to New York via Montreal. ‘What was that damned horse’s name?’ Yet it could not have been mere forgetfulness, since Ford does mention Persimmon in Last Post (I.iv, I.vii). It seems impossible to say how much of this is misremembered in haste, how much, if any, is Fordian mischief – perhaps at the expense of Mark Tietjens of Groby.

Continuities and Contrasts

Last Post has sometimes been viewed as differing in kind from the tetralogy’s three earlier volumes, perhaps because of the brevity of the time covered, shrinking here to part of a single afternoon, perhaps because of the shift in point of view from, primarily, Christopher Tietjens to a far more fluid and interior perspective, particularly that of Mark Tietjens, but also those of Marie Léonie and Valentine Wannop.

This apprehension of differences has sometimes tended to disguise the novel’s continuities with those other volumes, a tendency strengthened by critics disposed to accept at face value Ford’s complimentary address to Isabel Paterson, suggesting that it was at her insistence that Last Post was written.

It seems a very English novel or, rather, one reflecting a very particular vision of England. And as far as that vision is of Bedham, aligned with Ford’s early post-war removal from the centre of things, Last Post is, in that sense, a novel of the periphery.

The metropolitan and the rural run curiously and characteristically through Ford’s life and writerly preoccupations. Though strongly associated with London, with Paris and with New York, much of his time (and a good deal of his work) was devoted to Kent, to Sussex and to Provence, to fields and hedgerows, gardens and terraces. Ford was well aware of this doubleness, noting that the first thing he did on arrival in a city was to plant some seeds in a window-box.40 Similarly, while he introduces ‘peace’ into ‘war’, assaulting his soldiers with domestic crises and anxieties, the reverse is also true. The assault on ‘Tietjens’s’ curiously resembles a military campaign, and several phrases suggestive of more warlike contexts have bled into this outwardly peaceful setting in the course of the novel: ‘mopping up’, ‘the air of a small army’, ‘surrendering his body’, ‘desultorily approaching cavalry’.41 Reconnaissance is followed by the artillery barrage of Mrs de Bray Pape and son Mark, and that in turn by the heavy armour of Sylvia Tietjens, while Christopher’s wartime nightmare of hearing voices beneath his bed – ‘Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze!’ – still recurs (II.iii).

As might be expected, there are innumerable echoes and allusions between the four volumes of Parade’s End, and some of these are reflected in the notes. A few such echoes – or series of echoes – prompt and propose larger thematic or structural ones. Several commentators, for instance, have noted the comparison that is invited by the army hut in which No More Parades opens with Ford’s 1921 poem ‘A House’, a comparison explicitly suggested by the description of the space as ‘shaped like the house a child draws’. The poem begins: ‘I am the House! / I resemble / The drawing of a child / That draws “just a house.”’42 But beyond this, all four novels can be seen as opening in comparable spaces, amid striking variations of greater or lesser threat.

Some Do Not … opens in a railway carriage, with many assurances of stability and power; yet the coming war, with its permanent destruction of such perfect assurance and confidence, is subtly inserted into this picture. The absolute terms applied to the pristine carriage cannot help but carry with them implications of imminent change, even subversion: ‘perfectly appointed’, ‘virgin newness’, ‘immaculate’ and, more playfully, ‘the train ran as smoothly […] as British gilt-edged securities’. A muted threat is present in the German-designed upholstery pattern, and the ‘bulging’ of that upholstery is unsettling in the way that ‘bend’, ‘swell’ and ‘o’erbrimm’d’ are in Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’.

That pristine railway carriage can be set against No More Parades’ army hut, but may also be set beside the ‘whiteenamelled, wickerworked, be-mirrored lounge’ of the Rouen hotel in which Sylvia and Perowne sit (II.i), discussing sexual morality and adultery, as did Tietjens and Macmaster on that earlier occasion. Against the carriage mirrors that had ‘reflected very little’, we can place the hotel mirror in which Sylvia sees Tietjens enter the lounge. The novel ends with General Campion’s inspection of the cook-houses with, again, several subtle reminders of Parade’s End’s very first scene (‘spotless […] mirrors that were the tops of camp-cookers’).

The carriage in that first scene is surrounded by threatening forces, still distant but on an unimaginably vast scale. That same threat encloses the army hut but there is also a more immediate, direct danger, dramatised in its effects by the blood-soaked demise of O Nine Morgan. Around the hotel in Rouen hangs an air of insanity: in the midst of war, Sylvia Tietjens’ inexhaustible appetite for the persecution of her husband has brought her, with the connivance of General Campion, into that ‘theatre’, where she functions for many onlookers, presumably, as an emblem of ‘peace’.

At the beginning of A Man Could Stand Up – Valentine Wannop’s immediate danger is a personal one: the re-emergence of the malicious and self-serving Edith Macmaster, formerly Duchemin. Valentine has been called to the telephone which, ‘for some ingeniously torturing reason, was in a corner of the great schoolroom without any protection’. But the ‘threat’ beyond that is the peace that has broken out that day, its new dangers as yet undefined. At the end of the novel, in a symbolically stripped room, with the camp-bed ‘against the wall’, Valentine and Tietjens, dancing together within the – now – protective circle of khaki, celebrate their ‘setting out’.

In Last Post the hut has no walls but is nevertheless safe within the ambience of an eccentric and unorthodox but still highly significant community, though the shelter is open to something more than mere weather.43 Mark is accessible to invading Americans, to the Marxian Communist youth of Cambridge – and to his hated sister-in-law. He also – willingly – shares his space with a multitude of creatures, birds and dormice and tiny rabbits, and is sharply aware of others: night birds, foxes, stoats. He despises himself a little ‘for attending to these minutiae’ when it is ‘really’ those ‘big movements’ that have always interested him. But behind those musings stands an author who has mastered the art of the double view, of detail and map, of a finger’s touch on a bare wrist or a man walking under elm trees as well as that westward shift of political and economic power that largely defined the twentieth century.

Mark’s reflections on small mammals and big movements are set in the context of his recollection of ‘a great night’. The multiplicity of creatures around him is a part of this but so is his sense of great spaces and the transcendence of ordinary time, the night as a fragment of eternity: ‘The great night was itself eternity and the Infinite … The spirit of God walking on the firmament.’ The earlier volumes also have their great nights or, at least, their periods of stretched or fractured or recalibrated time. In Some Do Not … it is Christopher’s extraordinary night-ride with Valentine, through the dense mist, with time the object of intense speculation and calculation: ‘He had not known this young woman twenty-four hours: not to speak to […] Then break all conventions: with the young woman: with himself above all. For forty-eight hours.’ No More Parades has its bizarre and farcical night in the Rouen hotel. What has occurred there, the actual sequence of events, the conflicting witnesses, the piecing together of muffled, partial and reluctant stories, all unfolds in slow motion: but the consequences for Tietjens are rapid and inexorable. In A Man Could Stand Up – the fantastic closing scene on Armistice Night is preceded by an even more extraordinary scene: the explosion in the trenches. Though this takes place in daylight, ‘There was so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age! The earth moved.’ Again, time is stretched, curiously cinematic (‘like a slowed-down movie’), the earth settles again, over dead and wounded men and those in mortal danger of suffocation. And Mark’s own vigils, in those long, largely silent nights, fittingly in this post-war world, with their poignant sense of the vastness of the universe and the nearness of God, look back, perhaps, to the beginning of The Young Lovell, where the young knight rises from his knees, having kept his vigil from midnight until six in the morning.

For all his fabulous wealth and power, the Master of Groby is seen in Last Post only as master of a thatched shelter, a miniature Groby, overhung by apple boughs as Groby itself is overshadowed by its Great Tree. Ian Baucom has written of how the ruined country house can not only represent but actually define a dominant model of Englishness.44 Groby is not a ruined country house but, in the pages of the first three volumes of Parade’s End, it is certainly incomplete, removed and distanced. It is part of a title, ‘Tietjens of Groby’, a sign, a symbol that has no solidity. Nor has it, of course, in Last Post but it is noticeable that, though the shortest in extent, this last volume of Parade’s End mentions Groby nearly twice as often as do the first three volumes together. By the end of it, Groby is, indeed, if not ruined, then certainly damaged, both materially – ‘Half Groby wall is down. Your bedroom’s wrecked’ – and symbolically, with the Great Tree gone and ‘the curse’ (perhaps) lifted.

We see, in the course of Parade’s End, many interiors but it is only ‘Tietjens’s’ that is described in any extended way: its exterior and its context, its situation, its trees and outbuildings, as well as some details of its interior. The earlier drawing-rooms, army huts, hotel foyers and bedrooms have been the settings for ‘incidents’ and for the symbolic representations of power, class and money. The house in Last Post has a more extensive function: paradoxically, though the novel has sometimes been seen more in romantic or symbolic terms than the earlier volumes, its range of uses accords more with the tenets of realism; it must serve as the context in which these lives are set, not in any temporary sense, but fully, daily, over years. Here people work, think, love, conceive.

A further theme, established on the first page of the tetralogy, that persists through many changes and in many guises to the last may be mentioned here: ostensibly ‘foreignness’ – but reaching beyond this and perhaps better called difference. The book begins with Tietjens, an Englishman, and Macmaster, a Scotsman, though this overt distinction is deceptive, a feint. There is a related difference, that Tietjens is ‘Tietjens of Groby’ while Macmaster is a son of the manse, yet while having his mother provide a little money for Macmaster to get through university would have left ‘a sense of class obligation’ had Macmaster been ‘an English young man of the lower orders’, with Macmaster being a Scot, ‘it just didn’t’. There are plenty of other apparent tensions between the English Tietjens (his absurdly un-English name so boldly foregrounded that its foreignness becomes quite invisible) and ‘un-English’ others, such as Levin, Aranjuez, and, at greatest length, Marie Léonie. Yet it is Tietjens and Valentine who are most obviously set apart: and this is not simply because they care – because their moral sense is not steered by expediency or pragmatism – but because they notice. Tietjens is ‘an exact observer’; he notices not only the details of things, places, horses, people but also the direction in which history is tending (‘Christopher was always right. Sometimes a little previous. But always right.’) And Valentine Wannop, ‘New Woman’ and suffragette, while securely rooted in her own time, is also, as a classicist, well equipped for access to others.

The first novel begins with two men in an enclosed space, threatened but as yet in an abstract way, hinted at through the carriage’s furnishings, friends and colleagues yet still foreign to one another in terms of class, connections, their sense of entitlement and expectations.

The second novel begins with men, most obviously four men in two pairs (the third pair, the sergeant-majors, play a lesser role), in an enclosed and threatened space, the two men on the ground clearly foreign to the two others by nationality, class and rank – and height; the two officers foreign to one another; the first cannot get the other’s name right; the second has misunderstood the relationship of the first to General Campion.

The third novel begins with two women connected by a telephone and threatened by the peace that is now breaking out. One woman does not immediately realise that she knows the second: they are, in many ways, foreign to one another. One is a disembodied voice – in reality each would be so to the other but, in the novel, it is Valentine who is solid, athletic, bursting with health and vitality, listening to the disembodied and broken utterances of Lady Macmaster who is, indeed, insubstantial. Near the end of Last Post, Valentine observes that Edith Ethel is ‘not much changed’.

The fourth novel begins with two men, one in an enclosed space but in a different sense; if threatened, also in a different sense. They differ in class but – differently. One speaks in dialect that the other understands; he himself does not speak. All power and authority is seemingly concentrated in him: yet he is powerless to move or speak.

Last Post is, in fact, largely dominated by two men: Mark and Christopher Tietjens, doubles, with that telepathic connection that Ford identified as existing between his brother Oliver and himself: ‘when one of us broke the silence it was to say exactly what the other had been about to bring out’ (Nightingale 255).45 Mark serves, in fact, as a Fordian distancing device, enabling the confrontation with, and exploration of, intimate material, a role filled by ‘the Compiler’ in No Enemy. Nevertheless, unlike the Compiler, Mark is not there for that purpose: he is introduced for good reasons and earns his indispensability in the novel as in his government department. The similarities between the two brothers are rendered almost in order to accentuate their differences.46

Indeed, on a larger scale, consider these endings: No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up – both end on a note of madness, the first threatening, the second more benign. On either side of these two, Some Do Not … contains the superb derangement that is the Duchemin breakfast but ends with Christopher, apparently alone,47 in silence, reflecting on recent events, while Last Post contains the smaller-scale irruption of assorted characters into Tietjens’s and ends with Mark’s emergence from silence and sustained reflection on past events: speaking to, and touching, the pregnant Valentine, before returning into silence, finally and completely.

Endings and Un-endings

Just as Parade’s End is concerned with both the end of the old order and the emergence of a new, so Last Post is concerned with both birth and death. That birth, not yet accomplished, is of the child that Valentine carries, but the novel also engages with the idea of rebirth: the confirmed resurrection of Christopher Tietjens, pulled out of the mud – and then saving others – in A Man Could Stand Up –; and the possible rebirth or reinvention of ‘England’, perhaps even that of Ford himself. He had lost and recovered his memory; moved to France; presided over the birth and death of a literary review; and was now engaged in another, though partial, move to the United States. A double fording. ‘Ford’ is related, through its Germanic origin, to ‘fare’. Ford Madox Ford (né Hueffer, of Germanic origin) might have savoured that.

War, as so many have attested, is hell: and it was very obviously so on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. There had been nothing comparable on earth, at least. But there had been Homer, Dante, Virgil; epics, myths and legends. And hell was increasingly preoccupying novelists, painters, autobiographers – and poets.

What was originally the second half of Ezra Pound’s ‘Third Canto’ became by 1925 the opening of his ‘long poem including history’. Based on Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, it recounts his hero’s journey to the underworld to consult the shade of the soothsayer Tiresias: the sacrifice there of a sheep furnishes that ‘blood for the ghosts’ that became not only a familiar metaphor for Pound’s extraordinary translations but, in large part, his poetic practice.48 Ford and Pound exchanged letters about ‘Canto VIII’ (later Canto II) in 1922, the year of Ford’s move to France (Pound/Ford 64–7). He was, of course, familiar with the classical uses, in Virgil as well as Homer, of the underworld descent, but Pound’s (eventual) Canto I, together with the ‘Hades’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, would have kept the story vividly – and modernly – before his eyes.49

Ford is, then, hardly unusual in his references to Hell: but they are remarkably many. Hell is there in the first chapter of Some Do Not …, Dantescan and literary; theological in its second chapter, in Sylvia’s conversation with her mother and Father Consett; grimly unavoidable, as Tietjens in the Wannops’ cottage reflects that he is going back to Sylvia, ‘and of course to Hell!’ In No More Parades’ first chapter Tietjens has a vision of McKechnie against a background of hellfire, and when Dante’s underworld reappears, it is in the context of Tietjens making a pact with destiny, willingly ‘to pass thirty months in the frozen circle of hell, for the chance of thirty seconds’ talking to Valentine Wannop. It is also in the wry comment of the French soldier on the ‘moving slime’ that is German deserters disconsolately passing: ‘On dirait l’Inferno de Dante!’ As A Man Could Stand Up – begins, ‘Hell’ is a matter of language, the sort of thing that Valentine must learn again not to say, but in the mind and in memory it has lost neither force nor relevance, as she reflects on the history of her relationship with Christopher Tietjens: ‘But you don’t seduce, as near as can be, a young woman and then go off to Hell, leaving her, God knows, in Hell.’

Myth is a structural device in the works of Joyce and Pound but Ford’s approach is typically more oblique. A recurrent classical allusion in Parade’s End is to Euripides’ Alcestis, which Ford referred to as his favourite of the Greek dramas and himself translated in 1918–19.50 More than one aspect of the play is alluded to in Last Post. Marie Léonie refers to Apollo and Admetus, the god serving the man in expiation of a violent act; but more insistent are the references to the theme of sacrifice, of Admetus’ wife Alcestis offering herself to Death in order that her husband may live, and of Hercules going down to the underworld to bring Alcestis back.

Tietjens’ recurrent nightmare of a world quite literally undermined is one among several Fordian uses of the underworld motif. Sylvia remembers Tietjens plunging the feverish body of their critically ill son into a bath of split ice, risking the strain on his heart: ‘She knew it was true: Christopher had been down to hell to bring the child back’ (No More Parades II.ii).51 In the trenches, Tietjens is temporarily buried, immersed in mud above his waist, Aranjuez swallowed up to his neck, and Lance-Corporal Duckett completely engulfed when their position is struck by a high-explosive shell.52

Characteristic of Ford’s ironic use of mythic parallels, there is a neat reversal of the Orphean quest here, with Tietjens bringing back his Eurydice in a double sense: firstly, the young, fair Duckett, who reminds Tietjens so strongly of Valentine Wannop, is rescued and resuscitated; secondly, Tietjens himself begins to look decisively forward, primarily to his reunion with Valentine, emerging from his earthly encounter with an image of her as a woman to be lived with, rather than an image of renunciation, one of those who ‘do not’.53

The closing of A Man Could Stand Up –, carnivalesque, a little drunk, a little unhinged, is wonderful. That’s the ending that Graham Greene wanted. But it’s not the ending we have. Nor should it be. ‘I can remember seeing everyone looking happy,’ Stella Bowen writes of Armistice Day, ‘for the first time. And perhaps the last.’ She comments of that day: ‘I can’t remember how we got home’ (Drawn from Life 61).

Parades end – and the revellers go home. They must also remember, and live with what is remembered. ‘It is not the horrors of war but the atrocities of peace that are impelling me to write this book in favour of pacifism’, Ford wrote a few years later.54 Last Post has a good deal to say about that Armistice Night and the ways in which wars do not end with signatures, salutes and handshakes.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the sheer scale, as well as the complex materials, of the Tietjens novels,55 Ford had difficulty with – or expended a good deal of trouble on – endings. As the notes to the earlier volumes indicate, he reworked material from the manuscript of Some Do Not … and finally relocated some of it in No More Parades; the ending of that second novel was heavily revised, as was the conclusion of A Man Could Stand Up –. The ending of Last Post – and thus the ending of the entire sequence – must have presented a formidable challenge. Writing to Stella just after its completion, he remarked:

I worked nearly night & day to finish it & I think it is all right. Crandall cried over the death of Mark – et moi aussi! It is short – but I found I had said all I had to say & thought it best to stop. I had planned another chapter – but felt it wd. come as an anti-climax.56

We don’t know what that ‘planned’ chapter would have contained, except that it would, presumably, have concerned events after Mark’s death. Perhaps Ford had said all he needed to say because, though the futures of Christopher and Valentine and the unborn child are not assured, they are, to some extent, implicit in their natures, as well as their shared pasts, and in the terms of the present that they have made together.

One word, one idea that resounds throughout Last Post is that of change. But this is true of the whole tetralogy and has begun on the second page of Some Do Not …, with the information that Christopher (‘a Tory’) ‘disliked changing his clothes’, so sits in the train already attired in his golfing boots. In No More Parades Tietjens knows that ‘The world was foundering’ (I.iv), and Valentine in A Man Could Stand Up – acknowledges a ‘World Turned Upside Down’ (I.i) on Armistice Day. Christopher too thinks ‘But to-day the world changed’ (III.ii). In Last Post Mark Tietjens must acknowledge that ‘times change’, that ‘The world was changing.’ Ruminating on his father now, he exclaims inwardly: ‘Great stretches of time! Great changes!’ On Armistice Night, Valentine had interrupted his political rationale for there being more suffering ‘to say that the world had changed’. And what has not? The land. Mark states, as does Christopher, as did Ford himself, that ‘the land remains’, while Valentine contemplates the procession of ‘Gunnings’ through the ages, the rocks on which the lighthouse is built.

Yet one of the most telling instances of such reflections comes in connection with Sylvia Tietjens: ‘Her main bitterness was that they had this peace. She was cutting the painter, but they were going on in this peace; her world was waning. […] In her world there was the writing on the wall.’

‘They had this peace’: the peace is not Sylvia’s, nor Campion’s, since their world is ending. It is not for Mark either, though this is presented more as a question of choice: a man who will not himself change but feels no bitterness towards those who are ‘going on’. Ford touches on both Sylvia’s retreat and this aspect of Mark’s death in a letter to Stella:

Yes, I suppose the volte face in Sylvia surprised you – but I had thought of it a long time and it occurred to me that, after all she was a ‘sport’ and it takes a pretty unsporting woman to damage an unborn child. Besides Mark could not have let himself die if something of the sort had not happened … And it would have been too melodramatic to kill Tietjens: he could not die whilst any worries remained for him. So I think I have done it right.57

This surely lies behind Mark’s reflection, after Sylvia has appeared beside his bed, wet-eyed and swearing that she would never harm another woman’s child, ‘Well, if Sylvia had come to that, his, Mark’s, occupation was gone. He would no longer have to go on willing against her; she would drop into the sea in the wake of their family vessel and be lost to view.’

It would, I think, take a dedicated optimist to find, in the marvellous conclusion of Last Post, an unambiguously serene and cloudless future. Most of the plot’s uncertainties are ‘resolved’ only in the mind of Mark Tietjens, a man on his deathbed with, let us say, a vested interest in the settling of those questions that disturb him. It is articulating an answer to ‘unanswerable’ questions that frees Mark, just as his articulating the old song learned from his nurse may help to free Valentine Wannop, classicist and expectant mother, who has already told – to herself – the story of how futures evolve from pasts as well as presents. Marie Léonie would ‘like to have had his last words’, Valentine says to the doctor. ‘But she did not need them as much as I.’

The real ending of Ford’s novel, the unanswerable question, the abiding problem, as great as the mystery of how to engross the minds of the reading public with your stories of ordinary lives, is given to Valentine: ‘How are we to live? How are we ever to live?’ It is in response to this question that Mark finally speaks – and it is, too, this question that the whole novel seeks to answer.

The Writing of Last Post

On 22 September 1927 Ford wrote to Stella: ‘I finished Last Post ten minutes ago.’ Two days later he wrote again to say that his friend Charles Crandall, journalist and former editor of the Montreal Daily Star, ‘will be posting you for the Last Post to-day, registered. As soon as you have read it forward it to D’worth [Duckworth]: I am writing to him to send you 50 quid on receipt. […] Correct any obvious printer’s errors, will you?’ (Ford/Bowen 323).

Last Post was begun in Paris in the summer of 1927, worked on during a month’s stay in Provence and continued to completion aboard the Canadian Pacific S.S. Minnedosa, off the coast of Labrador. It was Ford’s sixty-sixth published book58 and his twenty-sixth novel.

The dates of composition given in the British and American editions differ, though not hugely. Ford gives both an earlier commencement date and a later date of final completion, 12 November rather than 2 November,59 in the British edition, thus making its stated period of composition nearly six weeks longer than that in the American edition. The date of the ‘Dedicatory Letter’ (13 October 1927) is, however, common to both.

On 6 October Ford planned to ‘work a bit at revising Last Post’ and five days later commented that he had ‘done a certain amount of work – correcting up Last Post and so on’. Stella’s letter of 14 October contained her initial reaction to the novel: ‘But first let me say how splendid I think the “Last Post” is. (By the way, Duckworth has acknowledged receipt of MSS, so that’s all safe.) […] I let Bradley [Ford’s literary agent in Paris] read the MSS before sending it to Duckworth’ (Ford/Bowen 331).

Thus far, then, Ford finishes the novel and has it posted to Stella two days later. The bulk of the novel would have been completed before he set sail: we don’t know for sure whether he was typing from a corrected manuscript or composing on the typewriter. The further ‘correcting up Last Post’ that he refers to would probably be a carbon copy of the typescript destined for his US publisher.

Ford had written to Bradley, of No More Parades, that ‘I usually get Duckworth to print a set or two of proofs off right away and thus save myself the bother and expense of typing’; he refers to both slip proofs and page proofs in a later letter and, in a third, asks Bradley of A Man Could Stand Up –: ‘Would you just put this copy in your safe? It is incomplete but nearly complete. When I get towards the end of a book I always hate to have all the copies of a ms in one place for fear of fire.’ And he adds: ‘You have already had duplicates of the earlier chapters.’60 It was not just the achingly sensible ‘fear of fire’, of course: ‘until you have written the last word it is no more than a heap of soiled paper. I fear preposterous things – that one of the aeroplanes that are for ever soaring overhead here might drop a spanner on my head…. Anything’ (Nightingale 254). The salient difference here was Ford’s position – geographically, emotionally and financially – when he was revising and ‘correcting up’ Last Post: some of his usual procedures were simply not practicable and he may necessarily have had more recourse to carbon copies of his typescript.61

The next phase of the Ford/Bowen correspondence is primarily concerned with negotiations over both the US publication of Last Post and its selection by the Literary Guild, which would virtually guarantee a substantial sale: the figure of 37,696 subscribers was mentioned with the short extract from Last Post that the Guild Annual published.62 In mid-October, the contract with Albert & Charles Boni had not been signed and Ford was not yet absolutely certain who was publishing his novel. And, while Carl Van Doren had recommended the novel to the Guild (of which this eminent critic and editor was one of the founders), there was some hesitation, largely due to Last Post’s being a sequel. Eventually, on 8 November, a telegram confirmed that the Book Club sale was accomplished: ‘GUILD PREND LAST POST SI CONTENT MILLE BAISERS, FORD.’

Three days later Ford reported to Bowen that he was ‘doing the Mss. Proofs of Last Post’ and on Wednesday 16 November he wrote to her: ‘on Saturday [12 November, i.e., one day later than that given in the previous note] the English proofs of Last Post descended on me and on Monday the American one’s [sic] and I literally could do nothing else as Boni’s wanted the proofs back on Monday night. That however was impossible but I got them finished yesterday and then was too exhausted to do anything’ (Ford/Bowen 353). The American proofs were, then, completed in less than two days. A letter from Caroline Gordon confirms that the English proofs had been sent to Duckworth ‘by registered mail’ on the Tuesday, 15 November.63

The publication date was fixed for ‘early in January’, and at the end of November Ford told Stella that ‘both A & C Boni & Gins-berg [Harold J. Guinzburg of the Literary Guild] want me to stay over the publication of Last Post in January’ (Ford/Bowen 360). On 21 December he sent off to her ‘the first copy of the Last Post’. This was a copy of the Literary Guild edition rather than the Boni edition.64 On 3 January 1928 Stella wrote to acknowledge Ford’s letter and the copy of Last Post.

The Reception of Last Post

Due to its selection by the Literary Guild, and following a path prepared for it by the earlier volumes in the sequence, Last Post was the most commercially successful title of Ford’s career. In a letter to Perceval Hinton in February 1928 he mentioned sales in the first two weeks of some 50,000 copies: a remarkable claim but not impossible, given the figure of almost 40,000 Guild subscribers.65

Reviews were generally positive although some were a little uncertain, qualifying praise for the novel’s technical qualities with regret that the war was no longer central to this concluding volume. The Daily Telegraph reviewer asserted that ‘If the true art of writing were in the habit of receiving its legitimate reward, Mr. Ford Madox Ford would be one of the most widely read novelists in England’, adding that Last Post was ‘a perfect example of Mr. Ford’s wayward, witty, allusive talent at its best’.66

L.P. Hartley wrote that ‘of all the “Tietjens” novels “Last Post” is surely the greatest tour de force’, a term also employed by the English Review, while the Spectator reviewer commented: ‘Now that the magnificent war-passages no more transfigure the lives of the group into smoke and flame, the tone is naturally more quiet […]. But one is left with a real sense of having lived through this surprising afternoon.’

Cyril Connolly, though claiming that the novel suffered from its being a sequel, acknowledged as Ford’s great strength ‘his ability to describe the quality of life, the bristling, tangled, harassed stream of consciousness as it flows through the minds of highly prejudiced, intelligent, and emotional people’.67 Dorothy Parker’s characteristic piece, in which she set Ford’s novel against a recent newspaper story, expressed her reservations about the ‘grave hardships for the reader’ in the long interior monologues, ‘a novel to be read with a furrow in the brow’, but concluded that Last Post was:

a novel worth all its difficulties. There is always, for me, a vastly stirring quality in Ford’s work. His pages are quick and true. I know of few other novelists who can so surely capture human bewilderment and suffering […] all the books of the Tietjens saga have in them some of the same power, the same depth, the same rackingly moving honesty that makes The Good Soldier so high and fine a work.68

The Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted the novel’s need to convey much of the sense of the preceding volumes for new readers. Though Last Post was ‘less tumultuous and not lifted up by the tremendous war-passages of its predecessors’, the reviewer expressed an admiration ‘anything but diminished’ and asserted of the whole series: ‘this tetralogy has an originality, a robustness and a tragic vigour which make it worthy of inclusion in the great line of English novels’.69

Gerald Gould, though feeling that the ‘accumulated oddity’ of the characters gave ‘the general impression of a nightmare in a lunatic asylum’, nevertheless remarked on the success of Ford’s method: ‘the artist in Mr. Ford reaches out to the more difficult task of catching the untidiness, the blur, the jumble, the inconsequence, the this-way-and-thatness of experience’. The war, though, had been ‘left behind’ and he thought the incidents treated of in Last Post ‘too commonplace to merit the treatment they receive’.70

Gould’s review touches on two significant points. The timing, the marketing, the reviews of the constituent volumes of the tetralogy – and the considerable sales of the second and third volumes – together with Ford’s best-known novel remaining The Good Soldier (reissued in the spring of 1927) had the unsurprising result of a strong emphasis upon the sequence as comprising a ‘war novel’. In total, of course, a little over one-third of Parade’s End is set at the Front. In 1928, though, among reviewers of Last Post, the war, or at least a related atmosphere of stress and nightmare, was never far away: ‘at times […] terribly like a psychopathic ward in some fabulous hospital for world-war wreckage’.71

As for ‘commonplace’ material, Ford himself was concerned that the obvious ‘importance’ of the themes of the earlier volumes would be perceived as having fallen away with the ‘post-war’. In The English Novel he says of the novel as a genre: ‘It is, that is to say, the only source to which you can turn in order to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire lives. I use the words “entire lives” advisedly.’72 He had always distrusted the Victorian (and later) use of ‘the Strong Scene’, commonly to meet the cliffhanger demands of serialisation.73 War, conventionally treated, holds out the promise of little else, while peacetime presents markedly different challenges and possibilities.

Ford’s sense of those challenges surely reinforced his willingness to experiment stylistically in Last Post with his treatment of time and a striking freedom of movement within the interior monologues of his characters. As with the earlier volumes, much of the novel is necessarily retrospective, perhaps more noticeably so in Last Post because its structural importance is never diminished or drowned out by the clamour of war. And retrospection is hardly out of place: one of the major themes of both this volume and the sequence that it concludes is memory: what is recalled and what is lost, both in individual lives and in the collective life of a nation.

The more negative reactions to Last Post have tended to fall into two distinct but not unconnected groups: assertions that it was an afterthought and never originally planned as part of the sequence; and claims that the last novel does not belong with the other three, that its ‘differences’ somehow disqualify it. Notoriously, Graham Greene, not content with critical diagnosis, moved directly to surgery, publishing three-quarters of Parade’s End in the Bodley Head edition, later reprinted in paperback.

Like Greene, a few critics have simply repeated one of Ford’s several statements about the series, to the effect that he wanted it republished as a trilogy: ‘I strongly wish to omit the Last Post from the edition. I do not like the book and have never liked it and always intended the series to end with A Man Could Stand Up.’ So Ford wrote to his agent, Eric Pinker, in the summer of 1930 (Letters 196). Three years later, he referred to the series as his ‘trilogy’ (Nightingale 188) and maintained that position in a letter of 1937 (Reader 505). What is one to say to this?

The first and simplest answer is one made by Arthur Mizener and others: the book exists, and Ford’s changing his mind does not affect that. Change it he did, several times – in 1932, he was again referring to it as a tetralogy (Letters 208) – though he is hardly the first or last writer to fluctuate in his opinion of a published work.

Secondly, it is evidently not the case that Ford ‘always intended the series to end with A Man Could Stand Up’. His dedicatory letters to No More Parades and to A Man Could Stand Up – (‘the series of books of which this is the third and penultimate’) make it perfectly clear that (certainly by 1925) four books were planned, and Ford himself was enthusiastic about the book until some of the later reviews proved disappointing.

Thirdly, there are so many echoes and interconnections between all four volumes, as well as several passages in the first three that appear to point towards the fourth, that it seems frankly implausible that Last Post was ‘a kind of afterthought, separate from the main design’.74 These include many smaller details, such as the scene in Some Do Not … (I.vi) where Tietjens sits in the Wannop cottage, his reflections on his surroundings pointing in several particulars to the setting of Last Post; and those of more significance, such as Valentine’s forgetting – and then remembering – the name ‘Bemerton’, as Tietjens does in a central passage of A Man Could Stand Up – (II.ii). The image of Herbert at Bemerton links Christopher, Valentine and Mark – but it also links the imagined or remembered past to the imagined futures of both individuals and, by extension, the country. The fact that the name is lost and recalled is highly suggestive in the context of a nation in danger of losing its memory.

An example of larger, more fundamental thematic continuities is the tetralogy’s concern with furniture. Ford wrote to Ezra Pound in 1920:

You are in fact bored with civilisation here – very properly – and so you get bored with the rendering of that civilisation. It is not a good frame of mind to get into – this preoccupation with Subject rather than with rendering; it amounts really to your barring out of artistic treatment everything and everyone with whom you have not had personal – and agreeable – contacts. There is the same tendency in your desire for the STRONG STORY and in your objection to renderings of the mania for FURNITURE […] You might really, just as legitimately, object to renderings of the passion of LOVE, with which indeed the FURNITURE passion is strangely bound up. (Pound/Ford 44–5)

This is both acute and suggestive about the two writers’ differing aesthetics. Eighteen months later, a revealing note in a letter from Pound to Ford reads: ‘Am not really interested in anything that hasn’t been there all the time’ (Pound/Ford 66).

From the beginning, in Some Do Not …, Tietjens’ eye for furniture is presented as an ability far transcending cabinets, chairs and tables. The recurrent figure of Sir John Robertson is introduced early in Part II, simultaneously with the notion of wealthy and rapacious Americans: ‘the Moiras had sold Arlington Street stock, lock and barrel to some American’ (II.i).75 More specifically, Tietjens’ intention to enter the old furniture trade is made explicit: ‘Oh, I shall go into the old furniture business’, he says to Valentine Wannop.

She didn’t believe he was serious. He hadn’t, she knew, ever thought about his future. But suddenly she had a vision of his white head and pale face in the back glooms of a shop full of dusty things. He would come out, get heavily on to a dusty bicycle and ride off to a cottage sale. (Some Do Not … II.iv)

Clearly, Tietjens’ creator has thought about his future.

In No More Parades Tietjens still receives the circulars of old furniture dealers (I.i); no other mail reaches him on this tour of duty but ‘They never neglected him!’76 In a deleted typescript passage, Ford allowed Tietjens to answer when General Campion asks what he will do after the war. Tietjens replies:

“I, sir…. I shall make a living as an old furniture dealer …” He continued into the general’s speechlessness: “I’ve got a certain gift for it. I can detect fakes extraordinarily without knowing how. You needn’t be alarmed sir. I know what I’m doing. Sir James Donaldson [Sir John Robertson in the published volumes]77 has offered to take me into partnership, he’s been so impressed with my knack. It probably comes from my being in harmony with the seventeenth century to some extent. That’s my period. In furniture, I mean….”

The continuity is maintained in A Man Could Stand Up – with the episode of Tietjens attempting to sell the model cabinet to Sir John Robertson, which connects to Last Post, but also with so marked a number of references to the fact of Tietjens having no furniture left – more than a dozen such allusions – that we may quite reasonably suspect some symbolic significance.78

As usual – I mean, particularly, as with gardening and cookery – Ford does not labour the connections between furniture and his primary art, nor that between furniture and, let us say, the ordinary processes of living. Valentine, in A Man Could Stand Up –, thinks that ‘You do not run when you are selling furniture if you are sane’ (III.i), while, on the telephone to her mother, Tietjens connects (in the same sentence) dealing in old furniture with a possible vice-consular post in Toulon (II.ii). This will also recur in Last Post where the impermanence of the furniture that fills the cottage and the significance of all that ‘furniture’ that Tietjens has relinquished (as, indeed, has Valentine) becomes apparent. Indeed, the image recalled by Mark of Christopher ‘with a piece of furniture under his arm […] his eyes goggling out at the foot of the bed’ (I.iv) subtly prepares for the closing pages, when Christopher stands ‘at the foot of [Mark’s] bed’, holding ‘a bicycle and a lump of wood […] his eyes stuck out’ (II.iv). That ‘piece of furniture’, devalued by virtue of its owner having fought in the war, has become a mere lump of wood, a piece of debris, salvaged from the partial collapse of a great house.

The question of Ford’s planned intention to include a fourth volume seems to me largely settled by the dedicatory letters to the second and third volumes, and reinforced by such internal evidence. But the burden of several more negative responses to Last Post, if not the specific charges, seems to be that Ford ‘retreats’ from history, that the novel is a pastoral or a fairy tale that does not connect with the ‘real’ world. Perhaps such a view implies that the war was Parade’s End’s only authentic subject, and that the post-war could only be an anti-climax, a slackening of tension, an easing. But is that how Ford regarded it?

Though he recalled the days before the Great War as a lost world – ‘London was adorable then at four in the morning’ (Return 320) – Ford was often at pains to play down his own suffering in that conflict. Fifteen years after the Armistice he would write: ‘War to me was not very dreadful’ (Nightingale 205). Joseph Conrad was written closer to the war, though published at a time when Ford felt that he was ‘able at last really to write again’ (Letters 154), and there he remarked: ‘A great many novelists have treated of the late war in terms solely of the war: in terms of pip-squeaks, trench-coats, wire-aprons, shells, mud, dust, and sending the bayonet home with a grunt.’ But, he went on, ‘had you taken part actually in those hostilities, you would know how infinitely little part the actual fighting took in your mentality’ (Joseph Conrad 192). Ford wants to emphasise how much of the war was spent in waiting, in suspension, in boredom: ‘that eternal “waiting to report” that takes up 112/113ths of one’s time during war’ (No Enemy 33). It is into just such spaces that worry, anxiety and the painful imagining of what is going on at home clamour and crowd, to the detriment of men’s peace – and, not rarely, balance – of mind.

There were certainly times during Ford’s war when it was ‘very dreadful’ indeed, yet, for the most part, he managed to maintain that double perspective, that precarious balance of participant and observer. And the problems of peace were, I think, exercising him quite as much as his experiences in the recent war, while he worked on successive volumes of Parade’s End.

In an acutely challenging essay, Robert Caserio remarks: ‘What is crystallized, of course, in Last Post’s pastoral world are the values that most can serve the public sphere.’ Referring to Robert Green’s justly admired book on Ford, Caserio cites Green’s criticism as the kind that ‘considers itself too tough to countenance the idea that public virtues can be kept alive in spheres of narrowed and hidden endeavour’.79 We are, perhaps, more comfortable now with the idea of individual choices, actions and modes of living not only representing but, to varying degrees, affecting and shaping public discourse and eventually, in many cases, public policy. No doubt this is frequently for negative reasons, in that elected public bodies are widely perceived to be failing to fulfil their intended functions, but it is in precisely this way that they were then perceived by Ford.

Ford’s view of the true ‘governing classes’ was based neither on social status nor on money. In No Enemy he made this explicit, referring to

the homines bonae voluntatis [men – and, implicitly here, women – of goodwill] who must be preserved if the State is to continue.80 They have rather abstracted expressions; they have aspects of fatigue, since the salvation of a world is a large order, and they bear on their backs the burden of the whole world; but they look at you directly, and in their glance is no expression of pride, ambition, profit, or renown. They have expressions of responsibility, for they are the governing classes. (139)

They are, that is to say, the constructive spirits, the makers of gardens – the kitchen-gardeners who feed the world – and the makers of art. Ford was not unaware of the forces ranged against them. Sondra Stang remarks of the novel’s ending that ‘Ford cannot offer an ideal solution for Christopher and Valentine, and that is the point.’81 It is true that Ford didn’t know how things would turn out – and such uncertainty was not, of course, confined to his own immediate circumstances. He didn’t know what England would become, or was in the process of becoming.82 Inevitably, he was writing a good deal about death and endings.

Yet Parade’s End is concerned not only with the end of an age but also with the beginning of another, or the evolution of one into another. Last Post (like No Enemy) is concerned with reconstruction, with the process of reconstruction, a man in process of being reconstructed. The apparent paradox here is that the man is not ostensibly ‘present’. Yet Christopher Tietjens is everywhere in the book – because that ‘everywhere’ is the thoughts and memories of Mark, Valentine, Marie Léonie, Sylvia and Mark, Junior. And they, pre-eminently Mark but all of them, according to their lights, do ‘reconstruct’ Christopher and accord him a different kind of solidity than is derived directly from his actions. This reconstructive process is, then, not hidden but is everywhere apparent. It is almost indistinguishable from ‘ordinary living’ – though this is fiction, not life – but it is a life lived in the knowledge of terrible things having happened (and the enduring possibility that they may happen again). It is to live with – but not in – the past, in both personal and collective senses. And Ford, in almost everything he writes after the Great War, confronts and engages with such uncertainty, with the unresolved and the provisional. Indeed, they increasingly become his primary materials.

1 Stanley Weintraub, A Stillness Heard Round the World. The End of the Great War: November 1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 286; for other expressions of conviction that another war was already inevitable, see 325, 381, 394 fn.

2 Ottoline Morrell, Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915–1918, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 210.

3 The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, ed. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 32, 35.

4 No Enemy, ed. Paul Skinner (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 46; It Was the Nightingale, ed. John Coyle (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), 106, 116; Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 94.

5 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll.60–63, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), 65. Vivien Eliot wrote to her brother-in-law Henry in November 1918 about the difficulty of realising Peace: ‘I must say it is difficult to feel anything at all. One is too stunned altogether.’ Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (eds), The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume I: 1898–1922 (London: Faber & Faber, rev. edn, 2009), 303.

6 Stella wrote to Ford (8 February 1927): ‘But if they don’t like Valentine, – what is the use of my ever coming to America??!’ See Ford/Bowen 315. Katherine Hueffer, Ford’s younger daughter by his wife Elsie, also saw herself in Valentine: see Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), II 597 n.46.

7 See Stella Bowen, Drawn From Life (London: Virago, 1984 [1941]), 69.

8 Douglas Goldring, Nooks and Corners of Sussex & Hampshire (London: Eveleigh Nash, n.d. [1920]), 115.

9 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2. ‘The post-war world’, Juliet Nicolson writes, ‘was in large part a world paralysed by grief’: The Great Silence 1918–1920: Living in the Shadow of the Great War (London: John Murray, 2009), 4.

10 Janice Biala believed that Marie Léonie was based on Juan Gris’s wife Josette: see Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford (London: Collins, 1990), 61, where he also mentions, as a possible model, Dora, the wife of Stephen Crane. Ford certainly described Dora Crane as ‘large, fair and placid’: see Return to Yesterday, ed. Bill Hutchings (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), 48.

11 In Last Post I.vii, Marie Léonie is fearful of encountering such ghosts, but the revenants would crowd ever more insistently into Ford’s books of the 1930s.

12 ‘On Impressionism’, usefully reprinted in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank MacShane (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 41.

13 ‘The world before the war is one thing and must be written about in one manner; the after-war world is quite another and calls for quite different treatment’: Ford to T.R. Smith (27 July 1931), quoted in Saunders, Dual Life II [iii].

14 I have discussed several of these in ‘The Painful Processes of Reconstruction: History in No Enemy and Last Post’, in History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, 3 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), 65–75. Mark Tietjens uses ‘last post’ twice in the course of the book, once quite explicitly as ‘a grim joke’ (I.v, I.vi).

15 There is a Groby Old Hall in the Leicestershire village of Groby, built by the Grey family, whose members included both Elizabeth Woodville, Queen Consort of Edward IV, and Lady Jane Grey. But Ford probably based his idea of Groby (and its Great Tree) on the Marwood family seat, Busby Hall, near Stokesley (and close to Redcar): Saunders, Dual Life II 51, 565 n.16. At Bedham he was also very close to other great houses, notably Parham and Petworth.

16 Ford himself refers to ‘the first part of my book’, ‘my large work’ and ‘my long book’ (Nightingale 223, 326, 344). See Letters 204, on reading ‘the Tietjens books as one novel in which case the whole design appears’.

17 The Heart of the Country (London: Alston Rivers, 1906), reprinted, together with The Soul of London (1905) and The Spirit of the People (1907), in England and the English, ed. Sara Haslam (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003).

18 Hugh Kenner, ‘Remember That I Have Remembered’, in Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958), 160.

19 No Enemy repeatedly refers to Gringoire and the cottage where he lives with his partner, Madame Sélysette, in terms of fairy tales. In Nightingale Ford comments that ‘to date, this fairy-tale has found its appropriate close’ (xxi).

20 The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 2002), edited with an introduction by Maria Tatar, who points out that the story is ‘unique in the way that it begins with marriage and moves its protagonist back to her first family, a reversal of the conventional trajectory of fairy-tale heroes and heroines’ (155).

21 Ford, Portraits From Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 109.

22 In the typescript Ford had ‘The age of windfalls’ but changed this. ‘Windfalls’ now appears in the next sentence but in the pluperfect tense (‘They had had windfalls’): one further back, in a sense.

23 Appearing in 1929 in the United States, No Enemy was not published in Britain in Ford’s lifetime, nor, indeed, until the Carcanet edition of 2002. It is dedicated to Julie, Ford and Stella’s daughter (‘Très, très, chère petite Princesse’).

24 Of Conrad, James and Crane, he wrote: ‘They are all three now dead … But it is only at this moment that for the first time in my life I have actually realized that they are all three dead, so vividly do I still see them and still feel their wonderful presences. I have known hitherto that, as it were, one of them was dead or then another – but never that all three were so, so that my intimate contact with artistic life is completely at an end with the death of the last of them. To realize that is like dying oneself.’ See ‘Stevie & Co.’, in New York Essays (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1927), 24–5. See also Ford/Bowen 273: ‘This morning whilst I was writing the article I quite suddenly realised for the first time that Crane and Conrad and James are all three dead together and I just could not go on with the article.’

25 Norman Leer, The Limited Hero in the Novels of Ford Madox Ford (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 147.

26 See, for instance, Between St. Dennis and St. George (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), 195–6; A Mirror to France (London: Duckworth, 1926), 178–84. Cornelia Cook discusses Marie Léonie in her perceptive ‘Last Post: “The Last of the Tietjens Series”’, Agenda, 27:4–28:1, Ford Madox Ford special double issue (winter 1989–spring 1990), edited by Max Saunders, 23–30.

27 Such qualities transcend nationality: so Valentine recognises that the things in Tietjens’ room in A Man Could Stand Up – are not, in fact, ‘sordid and forlorn’: ‘They looked frugal. And glorious!’ The words – and the qualities – are then attached to the man: ‘Frugal and glorious! That was he!’ (II.i). In Last Post Valentine reflects that ‘[i]f the war had done nothing else for them—for those two of them—it had induced them, at least, to install Frugality as a deity’ (II.iii).

28 Ford, The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939), 542. ‘To make you see’ is a reference to Conrad’s ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897). That ‘exact eye’ has occurred earlier, in Some Do Not …: ‘Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver: if you looked at it with the eye of the artist … With the exact eye! […] The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man’s work. The only work for a man’ (I.vii).

29 See particularly Thomas Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 217–18, 318–20; Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (London: Bodley Head, 1972), 495, 506–07, 510–15; also his ‘Afterword’ to the two-volume Signet Classic edition of Parade’s End (New York: New American Library, 1964), II, 337–50.

30 ‘I am terribly out of touch with English affairs. I do not suppose I shall ever get into touch with them again’: Ford to Stella, 4–9 January 1927 (Ford/Bowen 286).

31 Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship, ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 89–90.

32 ‘The horse of a friend’: conceivably, the ‘real’ owner, W.W. Hope, is connected with the ‘Teddy Hope’ mentioned in I.iv.

33 We know that both brothers read The Times, and that Mark had the old habit of ‘airing’ his newspaper, ‘on a chair-back before the fire’ (No More Parades II.ii). Cricket was, of course, a different matter (as were, in various contexts, golf and boxing) and heads the litany of personal predilections and habits designed to prove Ford’s ‘Englishness’ to E.V. Lucas (Nightingale 57); see also England 125–7; Great Trade Route (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937), 246–9; No Enemy, Chapter VII and ‘Envoi’.

34 There is also some slight inconsistency in the ages of the brothers. In Some Do Not … Mark is fifteen years older (I.vi), in Last Post, fourteen – though the typescript, before revision, had ‘eighteen’. Mark’s birth date of 1872 makes him just one year older than Ford.

35 Referring to Mark’s silence in the novel, Max Saunders splendidly remarks: ‘whether out of obstinate principle because he disapproves of the peace terms, or because of a stroke, or both, is left wonderfully uncertain’ (Saunders, Dual Life II 251).

36 There is a highly diverting discussion of such ‘mistakes’ and related matters in Guy Davenport’s ‘Ernst Machs Max Ernst’, in The Geography of the Imagination (Boston: David R. Godine, 1997), 373–84.

37 ‘Potash and Perlmutter’ was rhyming slang for butter from c.1910.

38 ‘These two, black as two Mohawk Minstrels with the blubber-soot, were dubbed “Potash and Perlmutter”’: see Ernest Shackleton, South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 105 (there is an illustration of the two men facing 106).

39 Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), 114–16: the sisters appear under the names of ‘Sari’ and ‘Toni’. Djuna Barnes, ‘The Models Have Come to Town’, collected in I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband (London: Virago, 1987), 297–303; also her story, ‘The Grande Malade’ (previously published in This Quarter in 1925 as ‘The Little Girl Continues’), in Collected Stories (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996), 393–403.

40 Great Trade Route 89. Robert Green notes the significance of the ‘change in location’ but is sceptical: ‘Too much weight is being placed on the virtue of the countryside’: Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 164, 165. Ambrose Gordon explores the point, ‘with respect to form’, that ‘it seems wrong to let the novel come to an end in London’, in The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964), 133.

41 Cf. No Enemy 13, ‘The plants in the garden wave in stiffness like a battalion on parade – the platoons of lettuce, the headquarters’ staff, all sweet peas, and the colour company, which is of scarlet runners.’

42 Ford Madox Ford, Selected Poems, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), 126.

43 Ambrose Gordon comments on Ford’s use of interiors as a structural principle, whereby each interior ‘come to suggest all the rest’, in The Invisible Tent 115.

44 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4.

45 Similar assertions are made of Tietjens and his father (‘thinking so alike that there was no need to talk’, in Some Do Not … I.i); ironically, it is the fact that ‘the same qualities’ in Valentine Wannop appeal to the father as to the son that helps convince Mr Tietjens that Christopher is guilty of the charges made against him by Ruggles (Some Do Not … II.iii).

46 One small example is the delay in identifying Mark by name at the beginning of Last Post; the naming of Christopher is similarly (though longer) delayed at the beginning of No More Parades.

47 In fact, as is subsequently made clear, Sylvia is waiting in the darkness at the far end of the dining-room (No More Parades I.iii and see Some Do Not …, Appendix).

48 In 1935 Pound wrote to W.H.D. Rouse: ‘The Nekuia shouts aloud that it is older than the rest, all that island, Cretan, etc., hinter-time, that it is not Praxiteles, not Athens of Pericles, but Odysseus’: Selected Letters 1907–1941, ed. D.D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 274. Praxiteles was an Athenian sculptor, fourth century BCE. ‘Blood for the Ghosts’ is the title of a classic essay by Hugh Kenner in Eva Hesse’s landmark volume, New Approaches to Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 331–48.

49 As would William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920). He was ‘indebted to Pound for the title’: I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet (New York: New Directions, 1978), 29.

50 Alcestis recurs in Ford’s next published novel, A Little Less Than Gods (London: Duck-worth, 1928), 110. The typescript of Ford’s translation of Alcestis is at Cornell.

51 Tietjens has earlier remembered the same moment, in similar language (No More Parades I.i). The echoing of thoughts and images in the minds of different characters is a device that Ford uses often and with great skill.

52 C.E. Montague also has a character buried alive by a ‘big shell’ in Rough Justice (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), 293; D.H. Lawrence’s Captain Herbertson recalls being buried by an explosive shell in Aaron’s Rod (1922), ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 114–15; his Charles Eastwood is also buried (under snow) for twenty hours and then dug out in The Virgin and the Gipsy, written in 1926: The Complete Short Novels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 531.

53 On the underworld motif, which is central to Parade’s End, most explicitly in A Man Could Stand Up –, see the introduction and notes to that volume; also Saunders, Dual Life II 214, 569–70 n.24; Pound/Ford 104; Nightingale 131–4, and my ‘“Not the Stuff to Fill Graveyards”: Joseph Conrad and Parade’s End’, in Inter-Relations: Conrad, James, Ford and Others, ed. Keith Carabine and Max Saunders (Boulder, CO: Columbia University Press, 2003), 169–70.

54 Great Trade Route 97.

55 The dust-jacket of Last Post uses this phrase (‘the Tietjens novels’), simultaneously confirming the centrality of Christopher Tietjens and allowing the possibility that the series is, wholly or in part, about the family.

56 Ford to Stella, 24 Sept. 1927: Ford/Bowen 323.

57 Ford/Bowen 336, italics added. In a cancelled typescript passage (II.iii), Ford did indeed toy with the idea of killing Christopher in an aeroplane crash.

58 This figure includes five collaborations (three with Conrad, two with Violet Hunt) and a translation (of Pierre Loti’s wartime pamphlet, L’Outrage des Barbares).

59 12 November is the date specified by Ford as that on which he received the proofs of the UK edition.

60 All quotations from letters in The Ford Madox Ford Reader, ed. Sondra J. Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), 487–90.

61 A letter from Gerald Duckworth to Ford, dated 3 November, confirms that two sets of proofs had been sent the previous day but, puzzlingly, adds that Duckworth is ‘sending herewith a copy of the Last Post’ (Cornell). This may be an extra set of proofs, perhaps a bound set for ease of handling. If Duckworth was returning Ford’s typescript, he would presumably have referred to it as such (‘your MS’ or ‘your TS’).

62 The Annual extract runs from the beginning of I.vii to ‘What the unfortunate Elle has not suffered!…’, excising a page about the missing prints. The extract is identical with the US text, including the slightly eccentric punctuation, with the exception of one corrected spelling and two French words italicised (which they are not in the US text). The introductory note refers to Valentine as Christopher’s wife, while the note on the author is quietly entertaining in its laconic way (‘He was educated at Westminster School and studied at the Sorbonne. […] In 1919 he changed his name, for family reasons, to Ford Madox Ford’).

63 Carolyn [sic] Gordon to Gerald Duckworth, letter of 16 November (Cornell). She began using ‘Caroline’ with the publication of her story ‘Summer Dust’ in November 1929: see Nancylee Novell Jonza, The Underground Stream: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 71.

64 This copy was offered for sale in the Serendipity Books catalogue 189; information from Max Saunders.

65 The letter is quoted and the figure mentioned by Douglas Goldring in Trained for Genius: The Life and Writings of Ford Madox Ford (New York: Dutton, 1949), 244, where he recalls Ford’s comparison of UK and US sales.

66 ‘Books of the Day: New Novels’, Daily Telegraph (10 Feb. 1928), 15 (review of Last Post and five others).

67 Extracts from these reviews are in David Dow Harvey, Ford Madox Ford 1873–1939: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism (New York: Gordian Press, 1972), 376.

68 ‘A Good Novel, and a Great Story’, in The Collected Dorothy Parker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 487–91 (489).

69 Harvey, Bibliography 376.

70 Harvey, Bibliography 377. Three of the reviews excerpted in Harvey are included in Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage, ed. Frank MacShane (London: Routledge, 1972), 110–16.

71 MacShane, Critical Heritage 113.

72 Ford, The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), 8.

73 See Return 158–9; ‘Literary Portraits – XX. Mr. Gilbert Cannan and “Old Mole”’, Outlook, XXXIII (24 Jan. 1914): ‘The fact is that the “strong scene” is the curse of the novel.’

74 John A. Meixner, Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 217. Ford wrote – in 1924 – that he had ‘seldom begun on a book without having, at least, the intrigue, the “affair,” completely settled in his mind’: Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), 173.

75 See Douglas Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties: A General Survey and Some Personal Memories (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1945), 19, on ‘a large number of owners of stately homes’ forced to sell ‘their estates, their pictures and their furniture’ to ‘Canadian, American or native profiteers’. There are several other such references in novels of the period, including Violet Hunt’s The Last Ditch (London: Stanley Paul, 1918) and Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1921).

76 Sylvia is stopping all his personal letters, as we learn a little later (No More Parades II.i).

77 Sir John Robertson had already been mentioned four times in Some Do Not … so this was presumably just a slip on Ford’s part.

78 In the context of Ford’s wife Elsie’s removal from Winchelsea to Aldington, in 1908, Max Saunders comments: ‘It was not to be the last time that Ford, like Tietjens, lost his furniture’ (Saunders, Dual Life I 236).

79 Robert L. Caserio, ‘Ford’s and Kipling’s Modernist Imagination of Public Virtue’, in Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, 2 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), 175–90 (181).

80 Cf. Ford’s 1907 review of a work by G.S. Street: ‘He writes hominibus bonae voluntatis … And, after all, like Mr. Street, I, alas! write for a small circle of men of goodwill.’ See ‘Literary Portraits: XXII. London Town and a Saunterer’, Tribune (21 Dec. 1907), 2. The Latin phrase, also with hominibus rather than homines, occurs in The Cinque Ports (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1900), ix, 184 and is used – now with hominem! – elsewhere in No Enemy (63).

81 See Sondra J. Stang, Ford Madox Ford (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), 121.

82 He has Valentine reflect that ‘she did not know what she wished, because she did not know what was to become of England or the world’ (II.iii).