MR GRAHAM GREENE, whom I admire quite as much as Monsieur Jacques Médecin, Maire de Nice, though for different reasons, expressed sorrow in the correspondence columns of the Observer that I should rebuke him for omitting Last Post from Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End in its Bodley Head version. He cited a letter from Ford attesting to his own dissatisfaction with the book, dissatisfaction which, in my view, Mr Greene too eagerly seized upon.
One must not take over-seriously an author’s dissatisfaction with his own work, of which he is not, after all, necessarily the best judge. Shakespeare never even published his collected works, which may be taken as a gesture of dissatisfaction with them or certainly an unpardonable insouciance. Should Heminge and Condell have declined editorship? I say nothing of Kafka’s dying demand that all his works be destroyed, nor of Mr Greene’s suppression of his own admirable early adventure novels. In this critic’s view, Last Post is the right ending for the Tietjens sequence, and there was a time when Ford thought so too.
C.H. Sisson says of Last Post that it is the weakest of the four books, but it contains too much of the essential Ford to be cast aside; and that it would be a pity if the Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford was regarded as a sort of canon. I agree. The Rash Act ought to be bought and read by all interested in the novel as an art-form. I know that there are not many of these, but for the few, which ought to include all British novelists, even Booker Prizemen, this is a testament of the modernism which our own carelessness has allowed to die.
The Rash Act was first published in 1933, and Ford told Ezra Pound that the book ‘is more like what I wanted to write than anything I have done for years.’ Six years later, in the year of his death, he told Caroline Gordon: ‘It was my best book – more, that is to say, like what I really wanted to write than anything I have yet done.’ Ford’s denigration of Last Post reminds us to take none of this too seriously. But The Rash Act is so patently what fictional modernism is, or was, about that we can do without Ford’s adjudication and rationalise our own admiring response.
The problem for all fiction writers is to decide who is telling the story. This may not seem, for the average mere novel reader, much of a problem, and he may scoff at the agony I allege I have been undergoing for the past year in deciding how to narrate a new long novel which is, as regards characters, actions, mise en scène and even conclusion, quite clear in my mind. If the story is to be told by one of the characters in it, that limits this narrator to what he can see and understand, which may not be enough for a wide and various canvas. If the narrator becomes God, seeing and knowing all, this means that he himself is only a character in the novel since he cannot be identified with a real personage outside it. Omniscience signifies unreliability. The man who says he knows all is bound to be lying, therefore his story is a fraud. Novels are supposed to be about truth.
Ford’s solution in Parade’s End was to provide a multiplicity of viewpoints and, hence, of styles. In a more flamboyant manner this was also Joyce’s solution in Ulysses. The first thing that the subjective viewpoint imposes is a concept of time which does not accord with objective chronology. Time does not really exist outside ourselves, and our memories do not function in the manner of history books. Subjective time is spatialised, and we can wander over it freely, moving from August back to January and forward to October. The essence of fictional modernism is the subjective viewpoint – which is in accordance with experience as we know it – and a kind of time which has little to do with clocks.
If The Rash Act is a smaller work than Parade’s End, it is because it is tied to only one viewpoint. We don’t have the thrilling shifts from Tietjens to Sylvia Tietjens and Valentine Wannop and back again; we have solely the sensibility of Henry Martin Aluin Smith, Rhodes Scholar and son of a candy tycoon, who, in a bright August in 1931 and in sight of the Mediterranean, has decided to kill himself.
The title of the book comes from The Times Law Report of 14 July 1931, in which the rash act of suicide is presented by a coroner as a consequence of, inter alia, ‘the prevailing dissoluteness and consequent depression that are now worldwide.’ In other words, it is the period of the Wall Street crash. This Smith meets by chance another Smith – Hugh Monckton Allard – an Englishman whom he had known briefly during the war. An easy, successful fellow, thinks Henry Martin, and wishes he could change identities with him. Ironically, he does. The Smith who seems to have everything to live for actually kills himself, while the Smith who has nothing dithers, evades, but, to save the other Smith’s reputation, pretends to be the true suicide.
This sounds an artificial story, but the minimal plot is the armature which supports the web of subjective impression and reminiscence, the notation of the world, both inside and out, as it really is – shifting, luminous, unreliable. Strictures about unsound syntax and deformed vision don’t apply: this is how the human mind perceives the world in all its unsyntactical variety. This is modernism, which died in 1939, along with Ford Madox Ford.
If we want a separable content – another bone, like plot, to throw to the dogs of reason – we shall find it in Ford’s changed view of things between the last post of the war and the economic and social breakdown of a period which prefigures out own. The action takes place in the French South which Ford loved, but man no longer sustains the tradition of myth and history which that region once represented. Tietjens was, finally, not on his own. Last Post shows him building a new life and accepting a future. Here, in The Rash Act, we have the death of morality and responsibility – a forbidding theme, but, in the paradox of art, it is made to serve a tapestry of rich colour and galloping vivacity.
Observer, 11 April 1982
Review of The Rash Act by Ford Madox Ford
(Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1982)