The major books of the First World War – according to a truism of literary history – didn’t appear until a decade after the Armistice. True of the most famous of the memoirs: Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), or Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). True, too, of the best-known of the autobiographical novels, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928–9), Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929), or Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929; expurgated as Her Privates We in 1930); and also of R. C. Sherriff’s play of 1928, Journey’s End.
Yet the accuracy of this account fails in two fatal respects. First, much of the best-known writing of all coming from the war is its poetry, either written by men such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, who didn’t survive it, or by men such as Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney, who did, but who wrote powerfully and hauntingly during and immediately after it. Second, there were important war books appearing earlier: as early as 1922 in the case of C. E. Montague’s Disenchantment, and as early as 1924 for the first volumes of two major novel-sequences about the war: R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924–6) and Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy, Parade’s End (1924–8). These complex, ambitious, and ironic works may not have had the mass appeal of Remarque’s or Sherriff’s impassioned condemnations of modern total war’s brutality and degradation. Or it may be that a mass readership – many members of which had themselves borne witness to the horror – simply wasn’t ready to see war as aesthetic subject-matter. But it may also be that complex novelists take longer to mature than lyric poets, or cynically anti-lyric poets.
Ford Madox Hueffer (as he then was) enlisted in July 1915 and was given a commission in the Welch Regiment.1 His father was the German émigré Francis Hueffer, his mother the English daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. Ford went through the whole war with his father’s German name, only changing it in 1919. He was an unlikely Welshman: perhaps someone had associated ‘Madox’ with the Welsh folklore prince Madoc. Ford was an even less likely soldier: forty-one, not particularly fit, with a history of agoraphobic nervous breakdown and ‘dyspepsia’, and an extreme sensitivity to impressions and sensations. In his twenties, when he had lived on the Romney Marsh – where the Wannops and Duchemins live in Part I of Some Do Not … – he had gone for long walks, kept livestock, and grown vegetables. But those were recreations – however necessary to him from time to time – from his only true calling, which was to write. Since the breakdown of his marriage to Elsie Hueffer, he had lived an urban, sedentary London life. He joined up in the wave of patriotic recruitment, one of the two-and-a-half million men who volunteered for service before conscription had to be introduced when the numbers of volunteers fell away in 1916. But Ford had additional motives. His private life became increasingly troubled after he began an affair with the socialite and fashionably shocking novelist Violet Hunt from 1908–9. Elsie refused to divorce him (paradoxically, since he was the Catholic but wanted to divorce her). Ford went to live in Germany, having been led to believe he could get German citizenship and then a German divorce. He and Hunt returned to England claiming to be married, which seemed to satisfy her need for respectability. While it’s possible they went through a ceremony of sorts on the continent, it would probably have been deemed bigamous under British law. When in 1912, a newspaper, the Throne, referred to Violet as Mrs Hueffer, Elsie sued it and won. Violet later claimed that she and Ford hadn’t been able to document their wedding for fear of his being jailed. But most people – including most of their friends – thought the marriage a foolish fiction. Ford, like Christopher Tietjens, the male protagonist of Parade’s End, said nothing to defend himself. Violet’s less bohemian friends ostracised them. The scandal put an intolerable strain on their relationship. Ford felt bound to stand by her because of his part in their disgrace. But life with her had become unbearable to him. The army, and even the possibility of death, offered an escape.
Ford had published his greatest pre-war novel, The Good Soldier, in 1915, only four months before he took his commission. Looking back at that book in 1927, he described himself as having felt like a great Auk, who had laid his one egg ‘and might as well die’; a feeling intensified by his sense of the generation of young writers – les Jeunes – whose work he had encouraged and published, but who in return regarded him as out of date. ‘Those were the passionate days of the literary Cubists, Vorticists, Imagistes’, he said, and recalled the Vorticist Wyndham Lewis denouncing him as ‘Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact!’ and telling him: ‘Your generation has gone. What is the sense of you and Conrad and Impressionism?’2
Ford need not have volunteered. He was old for active service and could without shame have continued his writing for ‘Wellington House’, the secret propaganda department run by his and Violet’s friend, the Liberal Cabinet minister Charles Masterman, for whom Ford had already written two books of propaganda, When Blood is Their Argument and Between St. Dennis and St. George (both 1915), as well as numerous articles. But he appeared to want to go, and not to expect to return. When he was posted to France in the middle of July 1916, two weeks into the bloodiest battle in British military history, the Somme, it must have seemed very unlikely that he would return. He very nearly did not. At the base camp in Rouen, Ford and his fellow members of the Welch Regiment were attached to the 9th Battalion, and left Rouen on 18 July to join their units. Though he was anxious to experience the front line, his Commanding Officer thought he was too old, and Ford was stationed with the battalion transport near Bécourt Wood, just behind the Front near Albert, close to where the 9th Welch had seen heavy losses during the grisly battle of Mametz Wood and the Allied attempts to advance up ‘Sausage Valley’ to La Boisselle. On 28 or 29 July he was ‘blown into the air’ by a high-explosive shell and landed on his face, concussed, with a damaged mouth and loosened teeth. The concussion erased whole patches of his knowledge. He even forgot his own name for thirty-six hours. He was shuttled between Field Ambulances and Casualty Clearing Stations, none of which had the equipment to treat him.
About three weeks later Ford left the Casualty Clearing Station at Corbie to rejoin the 9th Battalion of the Welch Regiment, which was now stationed in the Ypres Salient near Kemmel Hill. His experiences on the Western Front are discussed in more detail in the introductions and notes to the later novels, in which Tietjens’ war experiences are represented directly. But Ford’s time in the Salient needs mentioning here, for two reasons: because it provided the basis for what happens to Tietjens between Parts I and II of Some Do Not …, which casts its shadow over the whole volume, though it is barely described; and because it was when Ford first started imagining writing about the war. He later said that it was while returning to the Front that he realised he was the only novelist of his age to be in the fighting. This made it all the more necessary that he should bear witness, and he recalled: ‘I began to take a literary view of the war from that time.’3 He also actually started to write about it while there, first in three extraordinary letters he sent to Conrad in the first week of September 1916, rendering his impressions of the war – including some striking ‘notes upon sound’. ‘I wrote these rather hurried notes yesterday because we were being shelled to hell & I did not expect to get thro’ the night’, he explained. ‘I wonder if it is just vanity that in these cataclysmic moments makes one desire to record.’4 Ford hoped Conrad might be able to use these impressions because he did not expect to live to be able to do so.
Margaret Atwood has written on how ‘all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.’5 War writing above all is motivated by that fear and fascination. For many participants, trench war seemed uncannily like a trip to the underworld – as imagined, for example, by Wilfred Owen in his poem ‘Strange Meeting’, in which the trenchscape leads into a nightmare vision of the dead speaking in an underworld no-man’s land. One of Ford’s first literary efforts after the war was to translate Euripides’ Alcestis, in which the heroine volunteers to die in her husband’s place, and is then in turn rescued from death by the demigod Hercules.6 Ford said that in working on it he had ‘recovered some shadow of power over words. But not much.’7 What struck him in the Ypres Salient was how little power he seemed to have over words, or how little power words had, to record the cataclysm. That was the motive for the piece he wrote dated 15 September 1916, which was signed ‘Miles Ignotus’ (‘the unknown soldier’) and headed ‘A Day of Battle’. Extended prose written at the Front is relatively rare compared to letters or even poems. Trench conditions scarcely conduced to novel-writing. This is an important document not only for what it tells of the experience, but for what it foretells about Parade’s End. After the war he wrote of his ‘first sight of the German lines from a down behind Albert in 1916’ – it was almost certainly while he was stationed near Bécourt in July, before his concussion – that it was ‘about the most unforgettable of my own experiences in the flesh ….’8 The literary impressionism Ford had developed with Conrad was always intensely visual. He often echoed Conrad’s dictum that the writer’s task is ‘before all, to make you see’.9 But ‘A Day of Battle’ begins by asking why it is that he cannot write about the war:
With the pen, I used to be able to ‘visualize things’ – as it used to be called […] Now I could not make you see Messines, Wijtschate, St Eloi; or La Boiselle, the Bois de Bécourt or de Mametz – although I have sat looking at them for hours, for days, for weeks on end. Today, when I look at a mere coarse map of the Line, simply to read ‘Ploegsteert’ or ‘Armentières’ seems to bring up extraordinarily coloured and exact pictures behind my eyeballs – little pictures having all the brilliant minuteness that medieval illuminations had – of towers, and roofs, and belts of trees and sunlight; or, for the matter of these, of men, burst into mere showers of blood and dissolving into muddy ooze; or of aeroplanes and shells against the translucent blue. – But, as for putting them – into words! No: the mind stops dead, and something in the brain stops and shuts down […]10
It is a deeply paradoxical piece, vividly recreating the predicament of someone who feels he can no longer create vivid representations: ‘As far as I am concerned an invisible barrier in my brain seems to lie between the profession of Arms and the mind that put things into words.’11 This is partly because of the predominant feeling of anxiety:
I used to think that being out in France would be like being in a magic ring that would cut me off from all private troubles: but nothing is further from the truth. I have gone down to the front line at night, worried, worried, worried beyond belief about happenings at home in a Blighty that I did not much expect to see again – so worried that all sense of personal danger disappeared and I forgot to duck when shells went close overhead.12
Doubtless Ford did worry about ‘happenings at home’ while he was in the army. The separation from friends and family, and the enforced inactivity of much of army life, must have opened up new spaces for anxiety. In No Enemy he wrote of ‘that eternal “waiting to report” that takes up 112/113ths of one’s time during war’.13 Yet this account of Home Front worries pursuing the soldier even to the battlefield (as Sylvia pursues Tietjens to France in No More Parades) could equally be read the other way around: as fear about death and physical harm being displaced somewhere as far away as possible. Either way, it became an integral part of his aim for the series to convey the sensation of this anxiety: ‘it seemed to me that, if I could present, not merely fear, not merely horror, not merely death, not merely even self-sacrifice … but just worry; that might strike a note of which the world would not so readily tire’.14
Anxiety is one of Ford’s major themes, and in Parade’s End it takes different forms in each novel. Some Do Not … details Tietjens’ anxieties over his tortured marriage to Sylvia, then his love for Valentine, and then his amnesia; and it details Valentine’s worry over their relationship, and then over whether he will survive the war. But the forms of anxiety in Parade’s End are all suffused with the anxiety of ‘shell-shock’ and Ford’s subsequent amnesia. Parade’s End is not the first novel of shell-shock (now clinically termed ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’). Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier had appeared in 1918. But it is an early rendering of trauma produced by the First World War, written at a time when trauma was still only beginning to be understood. As Tietjens thinks later in the series: ‘There was no knowing what shell shock was or what it did to you.’15 Some Do Not … preceded by a year Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, with its suicidal visionary veteran Septimus Warren Smith. The greatest war literature is concerned with what war does not just to bodies, but also to minds. Some Do Not … is the first and greatest novel of shell-shock written by a combatant, who had not only witnessed some of the appalling facts of trench warfare, but who had also had the experience of blast-concussion, and the resulting amnesia and terror.
To recover more of his power over words, Ford needed to revisit the shades of his own war anxieties in Parade’s End. But he found an oblique method for doing it, and for solving the problem of visualisation. He characteristically gave several different accounts of the gestation of the sequence. First, he described a moment while still at the Front:
it must have been in September, 1916, when I was in a region called the Salient, and I remember the very spot where the idea came to me – I said to myself: How would all this look in the eyes of X … – already dead, along with all English Tories?16
‘X’ was Arthur Marwood, Ford’s much-admired close friend, and in many ways the prototype for Christopher Tietjens. Tietjens has Marwood’s family history. The Marwoods’ family seat was Busby Hall, which Ford reinvented as Groby Hall in Parade’s End. Busby is near Stokesley in Yorkshire, not far from Redcar, where Ford had been stationed in the summer of 1917 after being invalided home. Tietjens has Marwood’s mathematical prowess and education, his mannerisms, his thought-style. It was, said Ford, ‘as if I “set” my mind by his’:
If I had personal problems I would go and talk to him about anything else. Then the clarity of the working of his mind had an effect on mine that made me see, if not what was best to do then, what would be most true to myself.17
He imagined a series of Marwoodian fictional characters before and after the war. In Parade’s End, the reimagining of Marwood enabled him to see the war from another point of view – from a lofty, Tory perspective – to see the Western Front under another’s eyes. ‘A Day of Battle’ is the first half of a two-part piece called ‘War and the Mind’. In the person of Tietjens, Ford sends Marwood’s mind to the war. In actuality Marwood, who was five years older than Ford, had been ill with tuberculosis and had died in May 1916.18
In 1931, in his reminiscences of the pre-war years, Return to Yesterday, Ford identified Tietjens explicitly with Marwood. But, surprisingly, considering his memory of ‘the very spot where the idea came’ to him, the scene is now set in Menton, during Ford’s convalescence on the Riviera in the spring of 1917. He tells how he had been experimenting with Marwood’s ‘system’ for gambling at Monte Carlo:
It was whilst I was thus passing my time that it occurred to me to wonder what Marwood would have thought about the War and the way it was conducted. In the attempt to realise that problem for myself I wrote several novels with a projection of him as a central character. Of course they were no sort of biography of Marwood. He died several years before the War, though, as I have said, that is a fact that I never realise.19
The back-dating of Marwood’s death is surprising, though such inconsistencies are characteristic of Ford’s impressionism. Perhaps he was thinking of the death of their friendship (when Marwood got drawn into Ford’s estrangement from Elsie); or perhaps it is an impressionistic way of saying that Ford had heard of Marwood’s death before going to the war. Similarly, there is doubtless some truth in both accounts of where and when Ford had the idea of using Marwood’s mind to focalise a war novel: as he said, he already had the habit of wondering what Marwood would think about things.
It is in It Was the Nightingale (1934), his reminiscences about his post-war life, that Ford says most about the genesis and the writing of Parade’s End. Here, too, Marwood is involved, but this time for a story he tells about someone else. Ford recalls a conversation in a railway carriage in 1908 or 1909:
I said to Marwood:
‘What really became of Waring?’
He said:
‘The poor devil, he picked up a bitch on a train between Calais and Paris. She persuaded him that he had got her with child…. He felt he had to marry her…. Then he found out that the child might be another man’s, just as well as his…. There was no real knowing…. It was the hardest luck I ever heard of…. She was as unfaithful to him as a street-walker….’
I said:
‘Couldn’t he divorce?’
– But he couldn’t divorce. He held that a decent man could never divorce a woman. The woman, on the other hand, would not divorce him because she was a Roman Catholic.20
This provides the story-line of Tietjens’ marriage to Sylvia. (It also suggests how in both The Good Soldier and Parade’s End Ford came to reverse the religious contrast between himself as the Catholic and Elsie Hueffer or Violet Hunt as nominal Protestants.) But it includes nothing yet of the complications ensuing from Tietjens’ adulterous love for Valentine Wannop. In It Was the Nightingale this second stage comes when Ford was staying in Harold Monro’s villa at St Jean Cap Ferrat during the winter of 1922–3, having found the cold and mud of Sussex winters unbearable. Nearby lived ‘a poor fellow who had had almost Waring’s fate’. He does not name the man, but one reason why his story must have stuck in Ford’s mind is its similarities to the stories of Dowell and Ashburnham in The Good Soldier:
He was a wealthy American who had married a wrong ’un. She had been unfaithful to him before and after marriage. He had supported these wrongs because of his passion for the woman. At last she had eloped with a ship steward and had gone sailing around the world. The husband being an American of good tradition considered himself precluded from himself taking proceedings for divorce, but he would gladly have let the woman divorce him and would have provided liberally for her. She, however, was sailing around the world and he had no means of communicating with her. Almost simultaneously, after a year or so, he had conceived an overwhelming passion for another woman and the wife had returned…. What passed between them one had no means of knowing. Presumably she had announced her intention of settling down again with him and had flatly refused to divorce him. So he committed suicide….
The dim sight of the roof of his villa below me over the bay gave me then another stage of my intrigue […] It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what Marwood himself would have thought of the story – and then what he would have thought of the war […] I imagined his mind going all over the misty and torrential happenings of the Western Front […] I seemed, even as I walked in that garden, to see him stand in some high place in France during the period of hostilities taking in not only what was visible, but all the causes and all the motive powers of distant places. And I seemed to hear his infinitely scornful comment on those places. It was as if he lived again.21
One way that Ford could continue not to realise Marwood’s death was to realise him as a living character. Recovering Marwood, through a Herculean descent into the Western Front’s underworld of shadows, enabled Ford to recover his own powers of visualisation. Yet to say that is to acknowledge that Tietjens’ experiences in the novels are Ford’s rather than Marwood’s. His marital problems and his war service closely reflect Ford’s own life before and during the war. Ford is also summoning back the shade of his own past self. If he felt before enlisting that he might as well die, when he came back, having come through a near-death experience, he sometimes wrote as if he had died: as when he titled his 1921 volume of reminiscences Thus to Revisit, casting himself as the ghost of Hamlet’s father returning to the pre-war past. ‘In the end’, he said later, ‘if one is a writer, one is a writer, and if one was in that hell, it was a major motive that one should be able to write of it […].’22 By combining Marwood’s mind with his own experiences in the character of Tietjens, Ford had found the way to do that.
In which case, indeed, the stories of Marwood, Waring, and the ‘wealthy American’ might be strategically deployed to draw attention away from the autobiographical dimension of the novels. In particular, the female characters have been seen as drawing closely on Ford’s partners. The haughty and vindictive Sylvia Tietjens, Christopher’s estranged wife, has been identified with Violet Hunt (by her biographers as well as by Ford’s). Valentine Wannop owes much to the woman for whom Ford left Hunt, the young Australian painter Stella Bowen – though she also draws upon Stella’s friend Margaret Postgate, who had Valentine’s classical education. And the hypocritical Edith Ethel Duchemin has been seen as an unflattering portrait of Ford’s estranged wife Elsie. After the Throne scandal, it was in Ford’s interest for these parallels not to figure in the reviews of the books. His question ‘What really became of Waring?’ alludes to Browning’s poem, which begins: ‘What’s become of Waring / Since he gave us all the slip.’ Wrapping the question up in an allusion suggests that the name is a pseudonym, or that the story has already begun to turn into a fiction.
As the multiplicity of these stories indicates, the gestation of Parade’s End was a slow, oblique process. Ford said of his earlier masterpiece, The Good Soldier, that ‘though I wrote it with comparative rapidity, I had it hatching within myself for fully another decade’.23 This was written in 1927, by which time he had completed the first three novels of Parade’s End. And once again, a long process of conception and development had produced his best work. This time, it was seven years since he first had the idea while in the Salient in 1916 before he finished Some Do Not … in 1923, and more than a decade before he had completed all four novels in 1928. In the meantime, there had been several false starts. He had begun writing a more autobiographical novel, ‘True Love & a GCM.’ (‘General Court Martial’) in 1918–19, but left it unfinished. Also in 1919 he wrote most of the fictionalised book of reminiscences about the war that was published a decade later as No Enemy. He did complete a novel about the literary life and the war, but didn’t publish it.24 He wrote criticism, reminiscences, and some of his best poetry. But it was 1923 before he published his first post-war novel: The Marsden Case. This too is oblique about the war, though eloquent about why it needs to be:
This is not a war novel. Heaven knows I, who saw something of that struggle, would willingly wipe out of my mind every sight that I saw, every sound that I heard, every memory in my brain. But it is impossible, though there are non-participants who demand it, to write the lives of people to-day aged thirty or so, and leave out all mention of the fact that whilst those young people were aged, say, twenty-two to twenty-eight, there existed – Armageddon. For the matter of that, it would be wicked to attempt it, since the eyes, the ears, the brain and the fibres of every soul to-day adult have been profoundly seared by those dreadful wickednesses of embattled humanity.25
That is very much the project of Parade’s End too: to show how the war affected the generations of Ford and les Jeunes. The Marsden Case provided a structural model for Some Do Not … as well, since both are diptych forms, with a pre-war first half and a second after the main characters have been to the war. In both, the war itself is a disturbing absence between the two halves, though constantly suggested everywhere – as, in Some Do Not …, in the subtly connected outbreaks of violence in the regulated Edwardian civilisation of Part I.
Ford remembered another episode – this time an encounter in Paris – that heightened the urgency of writing about the war. In front of Notre Dame he met a man called Evans from his regiment. They went into the cathedral ‘and looked at the bright little tablet that commemorates the death of over a million men’.26 Inevitably, they began to reminisce about the war. They had met when Ford was on his way to rejoin his battalion from Corbie after his shell-blast and terrifying amnesia. Evans was in the same wagon, returning from England where he had been recovering from a wound in the thigh. ‘The wagon had jolted more abominably than ever’, recalled Ford, ‘and I could, in Notre Dame, remember that I had felt beside my right thigh for the brake. The beginnings of panic came over me. I had forgotten whether I found the brake!’ Panic because this small amnesia made him worry that it might herald a reprise of the larger, battle-induced one: ‘The memory that had chosen to return after Corbie must be forsaking me again.’ As often with him, such fear, and the ensuing urge to write novels, was associated with thoughts of death: ‘I thought Evans had been killed the day after we had got back to the line – but he obviously hadn’t.’ Ostensibly Ford was anxious that he would not be able to write a convincing war novel if his grasp of factual detail was weakening. The significance of such detail was more personal, however (he could, after all, have rediscovered factual details with some research). If he could not recall the matter of his past, it was as if he were becoming what he referred to as ‘the stuff to fill graveyards’; might himself be mistaken for dead.27
There were specifically literary motives for Ford’s decision to start writing about the war in the early 1920s, in addition to these more personal and psychological ones. His close involvement with fellow-Modernists, and especially with Ezra Pound, meant that he was well aware of the epoch-making work then being written. He would have known Pound’s poem-sequences Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Homage to Sextus Propertius, as well as the early stages of his epic sequence The Cantos. In January 1922 Pound sent Ford a draft of what was then Canto VIII, but would later be revised and incorporated into Canto II, asking Ford in his ‘infinite patience’ if he could ‘go through the enclosed with a red, blood-red, green, blue, or other pencil and scratch what is too awful’.28 Ford had already begun his magnificent experimental verse-satire Mister Bosphorus and the Muses when ‘The Waste Land’ was published in October 1922. Pound’s vivid evocation of Mediterranean gods may have influenced Bosphorus’s longing for the Southern muse; Ford’s use of music-hall and cinema in the poem may signal a debt to Eliot, though Ford had written about both media before he knew of Eliot.29 Then in July 1922 Ford wrote one of the important early reviews of Joyce’s Ulysses, which had appeared in book form that February.30 It was immediately apparent to him that, for all its baffling complexity, Ulysses had altered the literary landscape:
One can’t arrive at one’s valuation of a volume so loaded as Ulysses after a week of reading and two or three weeks of thought about it. Next year, or in twenty years, one may. For it is as if a new continent with new traditions had appeared, and demanded to be run through in a month. Ulysses contains the undiscovered mind of man; it is human consciousness analyzed as it has never before been analyzed. Certain books change the world. This, success or failure, Ulysses does: for no novelist with serious aims can henceforth set out upon a task of writing before he has at least formed his own private estimate as to the rightness or wrongness of the methods of the author of Ulysses. If it does not make an epoch – and it well may! – it will at least mark the ending of a period.31
The ‘ending of a period’ is, of course, also the subject of Parade’s End – Period’s End, perhaps… When Ford and Stella Bowen arrived in Paris in December 1922 they found themselves witness to another epochal ending: the mourning and funeral of Marcel Proust. Ford said that ‘even at that date I still dreaded the weakness in myself that I knew I should find if I made my prolonged effort’. But with the example of A la recherche du temps perdu added to those of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot, he now felt it was time he began his own prolonged effort. ‘I think I am incapable of any thoughts of rivalry’, he wrote. But he wanted to see some literary work done: ‘something on an immense scale’: ‘I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time. Proust being dead I could see no one who was doing that.’ Parade’s End thus originated in multiple acts of elegy: for Marwood; for the war-dead, or presumed-dead; for Ford’s pre-war Hueffer-self; for Proust; and for what he called ‘the world before the war’.32 Though the war is at its heart, its scope is much more ambitious: to trace the changes to individuals, society, and culture wrought by the war; and to do that, Ford had to start (as the stories of Marwood and ‘Waring’ indicate) with pre-war Edwardian society, and finish with post-war regeneration and reconstruction.
Some Do Not … begins with the two young friends, Christopher Tietjens and Vincent Macmaster, on the train to Rye for a golfing weekend in the country. The year, probably 1912, is only indicated later.33 They both work in London as government statisticians, though Macmaster aspires to be a critic and has just written a short book on Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He plans to call on a parson who knew Rossetti and who lives near Rye. The first of the novel’s two parts covers the ensuing weekend, which changes both their lives. Tietjens is preoccupied with his disastrous marriage. The second chapter switches to his elegant socialite wife, Sylvia, who is staying with her mother at Lobscheid, a quiet German resort, with their priest, Father Consett. Sylvia had left Tietjens for a lover, Major Perowne, but became bored with him. She’s bored in Lobscheid too, but needs the alibi of being there to look after her mother to account for her absence when she returns to London. Consett probes the state of her marriage, and senses that her anger towards Tietjens is far from indifference. Back in England, Macmaster has called on the Rev. Duchemin, but was received by his wife and is instantly infatuated by her Pre-Raphaelite ambience and elegance. He rejoins Tietjens for a round of golf with General Campion and his brother-in-law. At the clubhouse they meet a Liberal Cabinet minister. While they are playing, the game is interrupted by two Suffragettes haranguing the minister. Some of the men start chasing them, and the chase threatens to become violent, but Tietjens manages to trip up a policeman as if by accident and the women escape. The next morning Macmaster takes Tietjens back to the Duchemins, where he has been invited for one of their celebrated breakfasts. Mrs Duchemin is apprehensive about her husband, who is prone to fits of lunacy. He becomes paranoid that the two guests are doctors coming to take him to an asylum, and destroys the decorum of the occasion, first ranting about sex in Latin, then starting to describe his wedding night. Macmaster saves the day by telling Duchemin’s minder how to neutralise him, and Mrs Duchemin is soon holding his hand and admiring his tact. One of the other guests is Valentine Wannop, who lives nearby with her mother, a novelist. Valentine turns out to be one of the Suffragette protesters. Mrs Wannop is also there, and is delighted to meet Tietjens, since his father had helped her when she became widowed. She is one of the few writers he admires. She insists that Tietjens come back with them for lunch. He and Valentine walk back through the countryside. When they’re overtaken by Mrs Wannop on her dog-cart, he notices that the horse’s strap is about to break, and potentially saves her life by fixing it. The Wannops are sheltering the other Suffragette, Gertie, and worry that the police might be looking for them. So Tietjens agrees to drive with Valentine in the cart to hide Gertie with some of the Wannops’ relations. They leave at ten on Midsummer night, so as not to be seen, and drive all night. On the way back, Tietjens and Valentine are alone, conversing, arguing, and falling in love, until, in the dawn mist, General Campion crashes his car into them and injures the horse.
Part I ends on that scene of carnage. Part II begins several years later, in the middle of the war, probably in 1917. Tietjens is back in London, lunching with Sylvia. He has been fighting in France, where he was shell-shocked, and much of his memory has been obliterated. He is reduced to reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica to restock it. He sees Mrs Wannop regularly – she has moved to London, near his office – and has been helping her write propaganda articles. Sylvia thus suspects he has been having an affair with Valentine, though he has hardly seen her since she is working as a gym instructor in a girls’ school. Macmaster has married Mrs Duchemin (Mr Duchemin having died). He holds literary parties that have become celebrated, but they have kept their marriage secret, and Valentine always accompanies her to the parties to keep up appearances. Sylvia tells Tietjens that the cause of his father’s death was the rumours he heard that Tietjens lived on women and had got Valentine pregnant. The banker, Lord Port Scatho, arrives. His nephew, Brownlie, who is infatuated with Sylvia, has unfairly and humiliatingly dishonoured Tietjens’ cheques to his army Mess and his club. Tietjens reveals that he has been ordered to return to France the following day, and is determined to resign from the club. Tietjens’ elder brother, Mark, arrives, and the two brothers walk from Gray’s Inn to Whitehall, speaking candidly, as Tietjens disabuses Mark about the rumours defaming him and Valentine. It turns out that Mark, asked by his father to find out about Tietjens (in case he needed money), had asked his flatmate Ruggles to discover what people were saying about Tietjens, and that it was Ruggles who relayed the malicious gossip to their father. As they get to the War Office they run into Valentine, who has come to say goodbye to Tietjens. Mark talks to Valentine while they wait for Tietjens to come out of a meeting, and she recalls a rare conversation she had with Tietjens five or six weeks earlier, at one of Macmaster’s parties, during which she had realised he would return to the war. He told her how his memory was improving, and how he had been able to help Macmaster with one of his calculations. Macmaster has taken the credit for the work, and been awarded a knighthood on the strength of it. Mrs Duchemin/Macmaster, who has always disliked Tietjens (despite, or rather because of, all the help and money he has given Macmaster) has been trying to get him out of their lives, and tries to befriend Sylvia, inviting her to one of the parties. Valentine is shocked, and realises her friendship with Mrs Macmaster is finished. Outside the War Office, Valentine persuades the brothers to shake hands despite Tietjens’ anger. She and Tietjens agree to meet later that night – his last before returning to a likely death – and she agrees to become his mistress, after escorting her drunken brother home. But in the event, they … do not. The novel ends with Tietjens returning to his dark flat, recalling the events and non-events of the day and night, including his farewell to Macmaster, and especially his last conversations with Valentine.
The technical challenge Ford had set himself in The Good Soldier was to find a form to wring every drop of interest and emotion out of the story of a man, Edward Ashburnham, too stupid to be able to articulate what was happening to him, told by a narrator, John Dowell, too different, and probably too obtuse, to be able to understand the story he was telling. The challenge Parade’s End represents is comparable but inverse: in it, supremely intelligent characters undergo experiences that threaten to destroy their minds. Though Ford had not gone to university, he had nevertheless had an extraordinarily bohemian education, surrounded by writers and artists, and he had an unusually capacious and quick mind. The writer Marie Belloc Lowndes, for instance – Violet Hunt’s friend, and Hilaire Belloc’s sister – said he was ‘brilliantly clever’.34 In Parade’s End Tietjens’ intellect is matched by Valentine’s – deriving perhaps less from Stella Bowen, who was an accomplished painter and wrote beautifully, but was not an intellectual, than from Margaret Postgate and perhaps other ‘bright young things’ such as Rebecca West. Sylvia Tietjens, though not an intellectual either, has Violet Hunt’s rapier mind and wit. But then, how could Tietjens have married anyone whom he couldn’t respect intellectually?
Ford is not usually thought of as a philosophical novelist. He doesn’t proceed, certainly, with the rigorous analytical clarity of a Thomas Mann. Nor does he write ‘novels of ideas’ in which characters exist as mouthpieces for debating positions. But he often wrote about thought, which he tended to couple with the arts; as when, in the closing chapter of A Mirror to France (which was probably the chapter written first, while at Cap Ferrat), he writes of looking from the rocks above the Mediterranean and asks: ‘Let us attempt to consider the world solely from the point of view of pure thought – and the Arts […].’35 Or when, in an essay from 1927, he wrote: ‘For militarism is the antithesis of Thought and the Arts, and it is by Thought and the Arts alone that the world can be saved.’36 Or, in his later book about Provence, when he says: ‘What I – and civilisation – most need is a place where, Truth having no divine right to glamour, experiments in thought abound.’37 Parade’s End might be understood as such a thought-experiment. In it, Ford attempts to take stock of the impact the war had on the nature of thinking and consciousness. But it is also an art-experiment: investigating what literary forms and styles can best represent such processes.
It’s in the conversations that the characters’ qualities of mind especially flash. Some Do Not … contains some of the most brilliant dialogue in English fiction. Not the cleverness of Peacock’s conversation novels, nor the epigrammatic brilliance of Wilde, but rather, as in the dialogue of Shakespeare or Lawrence, speeches alive with a sense of the full complexity of the characters’ tangled lives behind them, felt through implication, association, hesitation, as the conversation jumps from one topic to another and they think with lightning speed. Some early critics were quick to grasp the nature of the achievement: ‘Mr. Ford manages, with quite extraordinary ingenuity, to dovetail into his admirable dialogue long passages of reflection which reveal the essentials of an extremely complicated tissue of events’, said one review; ‘Mr. Ford is one of the small band of novelists who can write dialogue that rings natural, though it is infused with wit and ideas’, said another.38 Bonamy Dobrée, who said that in Parade’s End ‘Mr. Ford proved himself a great novelist’, included a long excerpt from Some Do Not … in his 1934 book Modern Prose Style – from the extraordinary scene at the end of Part I, in which Christopher and Valentine argue as they ride through the silvery mist and begin to fall in love – as an example of a contemporary technique in which characterisation ‘is usually shown by small touches in conversation, sometimes directly revealing by the comments of another person’, and arguing that ‘This art of building up character entirely by conversation’ was taken to its limit by Ivy Compton Burnett.39 Some later critics have thought the dialogue parodic (‘Oh, no, Christopher … not from the club!’ etc.); but Ford’s contemporaries evidently considered he had a good ear for Edwardian idioms.
Ford had indeed long worried at how to represent conversation, and devotes some space to the problem in the section of his important memoir of Conrad discussing the techniques they developed:
One unalterable rule that we had for the rendering of conversations – for genuine conversations that are an exchange of thought, not interrogatories or statements of fact – was that no speech of one character should ever answer the speech that goes before it. This is almost invariably the case in real life where few people listen, because they are always preparing their own next speeches.40
The expressive problem he confronted in his pre-war fiction was the inexpressiveness of the English. Recalling one of his collaborative novels with Conrad, Ford wrote:
We both desired to get into situations, at any rate when anyone was speaking, the sort of indefiniteness that is characteristic of all human conversations, and particularly of English conversations that are almost always conducted entirely by means of allusions and unfinished sentences. If you listen to two Englishmen communicating by means of words, for you can hardly call it conversing, you will find that their speeches are little more than this: A. says: “What sort of a fellow is … you know!” B. replies: “Oh, he’s a sort of a …” and A. exclaims: “Ah, I always thought so ….” This is caused partly by sheer lack of vocabulary, partly by dislike for uttering any definite statement at all […].
The writer used to try to get that effect by almost directly rendering speeches that, practically, never ended so that the original draft of the Inheritors consisted of a series of vague scenes in which nothing definite was ever said. These scenes melted one into the other until the whole book, in the end, came to be nothing but a series of the very vaguest hints.41
Ford had written that first draft of The Inheritors (1901). Conrad’s role, he said, was ‘to give to each scene a final tap; these, in a great many cases, brought the whole meaning of the scene to the reader’s mind’.42 Some Do Not … has moments of such indefiniteness, reminiscent of Ford’s earlier work such as A Call (1910), when the influence of Henry James was at its strongest. (‘Macmaster had answered only: “Ah!”’) In The Good Soldier Ford’s technical solution to the problem of English vagueness was – in a move that anticipates his use of Marwood’s perspective in Parade’s End – to use as a narrator the loquacious American Dowell puzzling over the reticences of his English friends. In Some Do Not …, by contrast, the characters are hyper-articulate. Outstanding minds like Tietjens’ and Valentine’s have plenty to say, as do the dilettante literati Macmaster and Mrs Duchemin. From the first chapter, in which Tietjens and Macmaster argue over Rossetti, the novel is full of discussion about ‘pure thought and the arts’. Soon after Some Do Not … was published, Ford sent his former collaborator a copy, saying: ‘I’m pretty sure it’s the best thing I’ve done. You’ll notice I’ve abandoned attempts at indirect reporting of speech – as an experiment. How late in life does one go on experimenting?’43 Behind this experiment in dramatic presentation lay not only his Alcestis adaptation and recent verse-dramas – A House (1921) and Mister Bosphorus (1923) – but also the discipline of writing a full-length play in 1923 about Madame Récamier, since lost. But in Parade’s End Ford elaborates a technique particular to the printed page rather than the performed script, continuing his experiments in the use of suspension dots in the rendering of speech – something he had developed early, but uses concentratedly in the tetralogy. As he explained:
The man of letters is continually troubled by the problem that, – in cold print, the inflections and the tempi of the human voice are as impossible of rendering as are scents and the tones of musical instruments. It is to be doubted if there is anyone who ever used a pen who has not from time to time tried by underlinings, capitals and queerly spacing his words to get something more on the paper than normal paper can bear […] For ourselves we limit ourselves to the use of…. to indicate the pauses by which the Briton – and the American now and then – recovers himself in order to continue a sentence. The typographical device is inadequate but how in the world…. how in the whole world else? – is one to render the normal English conversation?44
He found a way of describing it, at least, in a marvellous image, saying that ‘the noise that is English conversation’ resembles ‘the sound put forth by a slug eating lettuce […]’.45 In Some Do Not … – where the dots are even raised up into the title, as if to indicate the importance of the processes of suppression and implication for the whole novel – the pauses marked by the dots are less a matter of people swallowing their words, or mumbling with embarrassment or indecision, nor of the Pinteresque pause of menace and power-play, but rather of the characters letting their minds race around and beyond the words they have heard or said or are about to say. By the same token, Ford is concerned with how people express more than their words say, or can say. Rather than giving the eloquent dramatic speech of George Bernard Shaw, in which characters express themselves perfectly, saying everything they mean, Ford conveys the sense of powerful intellects through rich subtexts. The probing conversation between Sylvia, her mother, and the shrewd priest in the second chapter is another particularly fine example. If Ibsen and Chekhov were models for such techniques, so were Flaubert and Turgenev, whom Ford admired above all among writers.
There are brilliant set-pieces of hallucinatory dialogue in the later volumes, especially in No More Parades, as Tietjens composes poetry with McKechnie during a bombardment, and as he argues with Levin. But over the sequence as a whole, dialogue recedes and interior monologue becomes more prominent. Admittedly there are compelling interior monologues in Some Do Not … too, as when Tietjens walks with Valentine through the marshes in I.vi, or when she goes to meet him in Whitehall in II.v. But even these monologues partake of the dialogic, as when Tietjens imagines the kinds of comment people would make about the countryside, or when he remembers his earlier words coming back to him ‘as if from the other end of a long-distance telephone. A damn long-distance one! Ten years …’ In the ‘Preface’ to his Poems (1853), Matthew Arnold famously declared: ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced’.46 Parade’s End traces the continuation of this process, in which an eighteenth-century-style public sphere of rational exchange gives way to an alienated modernity. It is as if the war, in taking people out of their normal social contexts, forces them in on themselves, making them confront their inner lives – emotional, moral, sexual – as never before. The tetralogy that begins with the dialogue experiments of Some Do Not … ends with Last Post’s series of internal monologues, Christopher’s absence, and Mark’s mutism.
Some Do Not … doesn’t explore intelligence for its own sake, though, but in its ethical dimension. Tietjens stands not just for mind, but for ethical principle. ‘Principles are like a skeleton map of a country—you know whether you’re going east or north’, he says. They can only be a rough guide, because, as Ford had written in the period the novel is set: ‘Modern life is so extraordinary, so hazy, so tenuous with, still, such definite and concrete spots in it […].’47 Tietjens is often described as an anachronistic figure: an eighteenth-century throwback; the last Tory or last English gentleman. The reality is more conflicted. In The Spirit of the People, Ford sees Englishness as the product of sustained immigration, writing of ‘that odd mixture of every kind of foreigner that is called the Anglo-Saxon race’.48 Tietjens’ name indicates that he is no exception. Sylvia speaks of how ‘The first Tietjens who came over with Dutch William, the swine, was pretty bad to the Papist owners….’ of the Groby estate. The Spirit of the People discusses Ford’s surprise at his grandfather Madox Brown writing of the unpicturesque king ‘I love Dutch William!’49 Yet, Ford argues, William III ‘stands for principles the most vital to the evolution of modern England’, and goes on to imagine Brown, ‘inspired by the Victorian canons, by principles of Protestantism, commercial stability, political economies, Carlylism, individualism and liberty’, evolving a picture of ‘a strong, silent, hard-featured, dominant personality’. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ is one of the moments Ford picks out in British history (like the Reformation and the Great War) as a turning-point at which the world enters a new phase of modernity. ‘Philosophically speaking’, he wrote, ‘it began that divorce of principle from life which, carried as far as it has been carried in England, has earned for the English the title of a nation of hypocrites.’50 Tietjens thus paradoxically inherits and represents this legacy, and exemplifies its qualities; but he is intellectually and morally opposed to its values and represents its fiercest critique. He is the subtlest of Ford’s many portrayals of embattled altruists. However, Some Do Not … is more nuanced than the earlier historical analysis. If Tietjens and Valentine stand for principles as against hypocrisy, Macmaster and Mrs Duchemin don’t so much represent pure hypocrisy as principles sliding into hypocrisy, under the banner of being ‘circumspect’. The ethical dimension of the novel is constructed through a series of such contrasts: Tietjens/Macmaster, Christopher/Sylvia, the Tietjens/Duchemin marriages, and so on. Certainly the more hypocritical don’t come out of the contrasts well. Yet Ford is not without sympathy for the forces pushing them towards their hypocrisies. Macmaster’s modest background means he can’t afford Tietjens’ seigneurial outspokenness (though the novel also shows how ill Tietjens can himself afford it, given the trouble it keeps landing him in). He has to be circumspect if he’s to work his own way up into ‘Society’.
The Spirit of the People is illuminating, too, about the contrast between Tietjens’ Protestantism and the Catholicism of his wife, mother-in-law, and Father Consett. ‘Catholicism, which is a religion of action and of frames of mind, is a religion that men can live up to’, Ford writes. Whereas ‘Protestantism no man can live up to, since it is a religion of ideals and of reason’. Thus as the Revolution ‘riveted Protestantism for good and evil upon the nation’s dominant types’ it stands as the defining moment of the divorce of principle from life.51 In fact Tietjens has little to say about Protestantism or the established church as such, though he does view it in such ideal terms: ‘His private ambition had always been for saintliness’ we are told: ‘his desire was to be a saint of the Anglican variety … as his mother had been’. His quest, which could be described as actually trying to live up to the Protestant ideal, is what incites Society at once to accuse him of delusional identification with Christ, and to assume he is in fact an adulterous hypocrite. His Marwoodian sweeping statements, many of which sound like cynical rationalism rather than Christianity, don’t help. One such is that which frames the novel, appearing in the first and last chapters: ‘I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course, if a man who’s a man wants to have a woman he has her.’ At such moments he sounds more like a Fordian Catholic, seeing religion as freedom from abstract ideals rather than adherence to dogma – though the point is that he refuses to countenance hypocrisy. To that extent Tietjens represents a fusion of ethical viewpoints, whether religious or political. Ford wrote of ‘the true Toryism which is Socialism’.52 That’s the sense in which Tietjens is a Tory. Rather than representing an eccentric and anachronistic position, he is really a compendium of aspects of Englishness through history. Such complexities appealed to Ford as a novelist because he viewed the novel as a form that should rise above Victorian moralism, which in turn mattered to him because he saw individuals as themselves too contradictory and conflicting to be explicable in moralistic terms. In a novel with so intricate an architecture, pure thought and the arts are not just discussed but embodied by the characters, and by the patterns the novelist makes out of them.
The novel’s title-phrase, which echoes through it, is richly suggestive. One set of connotations is this kind of ethical discrimination, between those who do have principles, or adhere to the principles they advocate, and those who do not. The Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley had defined Hegel’s view of tragedy as consisting in ‘the self-division and intestinal warfare of the ethical substance’ – the clash of equally unanswerable moral imperatives, as when Antigone is torn between the obligations of family piety and the demands of civil law.53 Novels are more often driven by a sense of a division between the ethical and the social – what Ford calls the divorce of principle from life. Some Do Not … depicts a world in which social convention has become so hypocritical that if you use the conventional moral skeleton maps you get lost. The title-phrase acquires this resonance, suggesting social codes (‘Gentlemen don’t’, etc.) as well as the ways in which some (like Sylvia) get away with transgression and others do not. Part of Tietjens’ oddity stems from the way his personal code of honour seems in conflict with that of his society. Ford subtly suggests that his principles are at once a sign of intense personal integrity, but also sound perverse – especially to a society whose integrity is compromised: as for example his argument that Sylvia’s action in tricking him into marriage because she feared she was pregnant by another man was right; or his refusal to initiate a divorce despite her subsequent infidelity. Divorce law was newly topical as Ford was writing the novel: in 1923 the law was amended so that a wife no longer needed to prove ‘aggravated adultery’ (that is, adultery plus incest, cruelty, bigamy, sodomy or desertion), but needed only to prove adultery without collusion – the same grounds that applied to husbands. Sylvia has not only committed adultery, but has absconded with Perowne and stayed with him in a French hotel, though she has ensured that only Tietjens, her mother, and their priest know of it. Her defamation of her husband’s character is equally shameless but humiliatingly public. Yet such is her social cachet that it’s as if she can do no wrong; she is still treated as a goddess in polite society. Whereas her husband, struggling not to commit adultery for most of this novel, is treated as the sinner, partly because Sylvia’s denunciations spread the idea that he already has a mistress and a child by her, but also because Tietjens’ outsider status, his sheer oddity, make people only too quick to believe the false rumours about him and to condemn him. Sylvia does the things society says it condemns – committing adultery, bearing false witness, and so on – whereas Tietjens does not. Yet he gets punished, ostracised; she does not.
In the first chapter, Macmaster quotes a couplet that includes the phrase, and that is almost a quotation from Ford’s own poem Mister Bosphorus. In that poem, the phrase connotes fortune and fate. That’s the sense in which Macmaster uses it, to consider who gets chosen to enjoy privilege or rewards. In Some Do Not … it’s about these things too, as well as social and personal codes of behaviour. By suspending the verb, and just leaving the auxiliary ‘do’, the phrase becomes not only multivalent but also a powerful innuendo. Some do, or do not, what? Ah, I thought so! Through its echo of Grant Allen’s notorious ‘New Woman’ novel, The Woman Who Did (1895) and also of the novel that answered it in the same year, The Woman Who Didn’t, by ‘Victoria Crosse’, it is sexuality and ‘free love’ that the elision especially implies. As the novel progresses, the phrase comes to stand increasingly for the central contrast that unfolds between the relationships of the two pairs of lovers: some do commit adultery (but pretend not to), like Macmaster and Mrs Duchemin; some do not, like Tietjens and Valentine (though their lack of subterfuge gives their enemies ammunition to say they do).
‘Some do not …’ doesn’t just hint at the things the some do not do, but also foregrounds the process of repression. ‘As Tietjens saw the world, you didn’t “talk.”’ The Spirit of the People includes a story of how as a boy Ford was taken aside by the mother of a friend and forbidden to talk to her about ‘things’. He explains how he has since discovered that these ‘things’ include:
religious topics, questions of the relations of the sexes, the conditions of poverty-stricken districts – every subject from which one can digress into anything moving. That, in fact, is the crux, the Rubicon that one must never cross. And that is what makes English conversation so profoundly, so portentously, troublesome to maintain. It is a question of a very fine game, the rules of which you must observe.54
Trying to represent this form of society in which none of the major human interests and challenges can be expressed is a finer game for a novelist, who has to convey not only the repressed surface, but what it is that is being repressed. This introduces a central idea of the tetralogy, of the pros and cons of British upper-class repression of feelings and language. This code of conduct already looked outmoded before the war, at least to those of more advanced outlooks; ‘a sort of parade of circumspection and rightness’, as Valentine thinks of Mrs Duchemin’s attempts to conceal her liaison with Macmaster. From a post-war perspective of new sexual and verbal freedoms, it began to look alien and incomprehensible, as when the travel writer Archibald Lyall titled his contribution to the excellent To-Day and To-Morrow series to suggest a piece of reverse-anthropology: It isn’t done; or, the future of taboo among the British islanders.55
Ford was fascinated by the expressive possibilities of this linguistic taboo. The climaxes to both parts of Some Do Not … are such extreme versions of ‘stiff-upper-lip’ English reserve as to verge on parody: the two love scenes between Tietjens and Valentine, towards which the narrative has been building, but in which they are fantastically articulate about everything but their feelings for each other, which they don’t so much as mention directly.56 (The novel includes a bitter-sweet comic counterpart to these scenes, when Tietjens and his brother Mark are brutally honest about how they view each other, in a caricature of Yorkshire taciturnity.) It isn’t just that the characters have internalised the social taciturnity around them, but that that taciturnity is what enables them to carry on in a world in which violence, war, and death irrupt and threaten to destroy them, and their hopes:
She knew she was crying out like that because her dread had come true. When he had said: “I’d have liked you to have said it,” using the past, he had said his valedictory. Her man, too, was going.
And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would say farewell to her: like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just occasionally, using the word “we”—and perhaps without intention—he had let her know that he loved her.57
It draws on, but goes beyond, a Flaubertian technique. In Madame Bovary Flaubert had written apropos Emma’s entrapment within romantic clichés that ‘human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing-bears when we wish to conjure pity from the stars’.58 Ford’s characters are too self-aware to fall back on sentimental cliché. And the novelist is too aware of the limits of language, whether in fiction or in conversations: ‘Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence than words can enhance a love that exists.’ This is followed by the Flaubertian touch of bathos: ‘He might as well have recited the names of railway stations.’ In Flaubert the clichés are seen as ridiculous, yet acquire pathos and even beauty through their failure to move the stars. Ford inverts the technique, turning the bathetic itself into an expressive resource. It is precisely when the characters suppress emotion to the point that they might as well be reciting the names of railway stations that they do manage to express their depth of feeling:
The greatest love speech he […] could ever make her was when, harshly and angrily, he said something like:
“Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better”—brushing her aside as if she had been a midge.
Thus the love scenes in Some Do Not … are the opposite of Emma’s romantic outpourings:
From that she knew what a love scene was. It passed without any mention of the word “love”; it passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin. Yet with every word they had said to each other they had confessed their love: in that way, when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of your lover beating upon your heart.59
In an earlier version of this passage, Valentine thinks:
The day of her long interview – for she named to herself the occasions of all their intercourse: The Walk; the Drive; the Long Interview; the Short Talk – that day then, she marked as the day of her great love scene. From that she knew – and she knew that she knew it better than any of the Poets – what a love scene was.
Ford cancelled this version in the manuscript – perhaps because the capitalised episodes sound too much like the ‘strong scenes’ he criticised in less artful fiction.60 Yet it offers a clue to how he may have conceived of the structure of Some Do Not … as a sequence of love scenes in which love isn’t actually voiced. Of course taciturnity wouldn’t be especially interesting in itself; what makes it so is when the characters have something to be taciturn about. Tietjens is the almost immovable object trying to stand up to the almost irresistible forces of love and war. Ford appears to have taken particular care in revision at these moments of great intensity, such as Tietjens’ parting from Valentine and then from Macmaster. As in his reminiscence about The Inheritors, the first version was even more elided, and he evidently felt a ‘final tap’ was needed to make it more specific.
After Tietjens has escorted Valentine home, and her drunken brother begins to snore (in another Flaubertian touch), making ‘enormous, grotesque sounds’, the seduction they both expected turns instead into an unbearably intense farewell, mostly conducted in broken, choking fragments:
He said, he remembered:
“But … for ever …”
She said, in a great hurry:
“But when you come back … Permanently. And … oh, as if it were in public … I don’t know,” she had added.61
But the point is, for all their reticence and obliqueness, these are love scenes (as Tietjens recalls this parting in No More Parades: ‘We never finished a sentence. Yet it was a passionate scene’); and Tietjens and Valentine are, eventually, able to recognise and act upon their love. Tietjens becomes more critical of the social codes throughout the tetralogy, musing that ‘Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don’t do anything. They exist. Perfuming the air like Madonna lilies.’62 Which isn’t to say that he is passive in Some Do Not …. He does act decisively in several key scenes: intervening on the golf course to enable the Suffragettes to escape; saving Mrs Wannop’s life by noticing her horse’s girth-strap was about to break and tip up her cart; then saving the horse when Campion crashes into the cart when he’s driving it. But these are all efforts to save others. In the war he learns the necessity of acting on his own impulses as well, and cuts loose from the social world that relentlessly misprises him.
Graham Greene called the Tietjens books ‘almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English’.63 Several crucial moments in Some Do Not … reveal the power of sexuality to disturb social life. Tietjens recalls a Groby neighbour whose wife was ‘habitually unfaithful to him’, and that this led to ‘All sorts of awkwardnesses’. Reflecting on his own situation too, Tietjens muses: ‘that’s why society distrusts the cuckold, really. It never knows when it mayn’t be driven into something irrational and unjust.’ In the golf clubhouse the two lower-middle-class city men talking lasciviously about their mistresses enrage General Campion’s party, and this sexual rage then flares up when the golf is interrupted by Valentine’s Suffragette protest. Later, when Campion crashes his car into Tietjens’ and Valentine’s dog-cart, his outrage is as much because he feels his suspicion confirmed that they are already having an affair (and that Tietjens was lying when he reassured him they weren’t), and because at some level he feels jealous and frustrated, as it is the result of the accident itself. The connection between sex and violence was topical, as psycho-analytic ideas became pervasive amongst intellectuals. Some Do Not … mentions the notion of sadism twice, and Sylvia’s sexual feelings tend to express themselves in violent actions or fantasies.64 Influenced by her brother’s radical friends, Valentine develops ‘an automatic feeling that all manly men were lust-filled devils, desiring nothing better than to stride over battlefields, stabbing the wounded with long daggers in frenzies of sadism’. Just as her pacifist views on militarism (like Stella Bowen’s) have to accommodate the fact that a man like Tietjens can go to war for other, more honourable, motives, so her primness about sexuality is challenged as she comes to understand that sexual feeling can express love and need not imply sadism or degradation. But Parade’s End not only presents the world war and the sex war as parallel, but wonders whether they might not mutually incite each other.
‘A Tale of Passion’: Ford’s subtitle for The Good Soldier could also describe Some Do Not …. Like many of the greatest novels, Parade’s End is focused on what it is to be an embodied mind, a consciousness with a body, and stresses Tietjens’ bulky corporeality as much as his intelligence. ‘One is either a body or a brain in these affairs. I suppose I’m more brain than body. I suppose so. Perhaps I’m not.’ He and Valentine both start by assuming they are more brain than body. Their love is intensely cerebral, verbal. Yet the book is about how an intellectual passion disconcerts them as it turns into a physical one. First, they try not to acknowledge the intellectual attraction; then they try not to acknowledge the physical. But ‘she had felt the impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him’.
Or (Ford’s subtitle for A Call) ‘The Tale of Two Passions’? Sylvia Tietjens, for all her insolent hauteur, only has to think of Drake, the man with whom she had been having an affair, and ‘she would stop dead, speaking or walking, drive her nails into her palms and groan slightly….’ She is haunted by a masochistic vision of how he came to her hotel on the eve of her wedding to Tietjens and, ‘mad with grief and jealousy’, assaulted her; she becomes transfixed by ‘the mental agony that there she had felt: the longing for the brute who had mangled her: the dreadful pain of the mind’. She too is a mistress of suppression. She has to invent a pain of the body – ‘a chronic stitch in her heart’ – to account for the involuntary groan. Yet when she actually sees Drake again in the flesh she feels nothing for him. She realises that the longing she experiences ‘was longing merely to experience again that dreadful feeling. And not with Drake….’ The suppression dots imply she knows who she does want to experience it with. And there are several hints in the text that despite giving the appearance of indifference or even contempt for Tietjens, she has developed a passion for him – perhaps fanned by his indifference towards her. This is the aspect of the story brought out by Ford’s reminiscence about the ‘wealthy American’, though it is one rarely commented on in accounts of Parade’s End, perhaps because Tietjens tries to avoid entertaining it explicitly: ‘An appalling shadow of a thought went through Tietjens’ mind: he would not let it come into words.’65 But his brother Mark puts it into words for him. And later that afternoon, when at the War Office Tietjens is offered a chance of service in Britain rather than in combat, the force of the problem hits him:
For the moment he had felt temptation to stay. But it came into his discouraged mind that Mark had said that Sylvia was in love with him. It had been underneath his thoughts all the while: it had struck him at the time like a kick from the hind leg of a mule in his subliminal consciousness. It was the impossible complication. It might not be true; but whether or no the best thing for him was to go and get wiped out as soon as possible. He meant, nevertheless, fiercely, to have his night with the girl who was crying downstairs….
As long as he and Sylvia are locked into a loveless marriage, adultery might be a social or even a religious problem, but it doesn’t seem to Tietjens an ethical one. As long as his actions don’t shame Sylvia publicly, she wouldn’t be hurt by his having an affair with Valentine. But if she loved him, it would be the ‘impossible complication’ because he would feel honour-bound not to hurt her. This possibility gives Sylvia’s character a powerful motivation for her furious pursuit of her husband, as well as making her a more sympathetic character than the wicked witch-figure she is sometimes presented as being. Given Tietjens’ love for Valentine, Sylvia’s belated longing for him is an unrequitable love, which would make it another version of ‘The Saddest Story’, as Ford had originally wanted to call The Good Soldier.
Such uncertainties are deeply characteristic of Parade’s End, and of Ford’s method of impressionism. Many of the crucial facts tantalise us, and the characters, with uncertainties as to whether they are facts. Rumours breed doubts, which are reasoned away but keep returning. Is Tietjens the father of Sylvia’s son or not? Could it be possible that Valentine is his half-sister? Did his father die by suicide or accident? And if suicide, was it because Ruggles had just reported to him all the malicious rumours about Tietjens as if they were facts? – including the rumour that he had already had a child by Valentine. And if so, would that lend credence to the possibility of his having been Valentine’s father too? Was incest the ‘impossible complication’ for him? The first novel Ford published after Parade’s End was a historical romance turning on incestuous love, A Little Less Than Gods (1928). While planning it, he also wrote that Conrad had desired to write about
incest: not ‘the consummation of forbidden desires’, but ‘the emotions of a shared passion that by its nature must be most hopeless of all’.66 Tietjens’ and Valentine’s passion doesn’t tell this saddest of stories, but it is heightened by such possibilities of hopelessness flickering around the peripheries.
There’s a psychological realism behind Ford’s uncertainty principle. We must all live and speak and act despite there being so much we don’t know or can’t be sure of. The love scenes work through these uncertainties, not just because the characters have to read between the lines of each other’s words, but because they aren’t always sure what those words were. Indeed, the strain of excitement and hope means that where they are most uncertain is over whether anything has actually been declared: ‘He wasn’t certain she hadn’t said: “Dear!” or “My Dear!”’; ‘In the tumult of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said “dear”’.67
Though Tietjens begins as a stickler for accuracy – a statistical genius with an encyclopaedic memory – error is part of the novel’s texture. Tietjens devotes time to correcting the errors of others – such as General Campion or the pathologically inaccurate novelist Mrs Wannop – but he is the cause of errors himself: not only the rumours he inspires, but even his telegram to Sylvia in Germany, which Father Consett reads out, saying: ‘What’s this: esoecially; it ought to be a “p”’. Names are regularly mixed up.68 As Edith Ethel Duchemin becomes more vindictive towards Tietjens, Valentine for a time convinces herself – wrongly – that he must have been having an affair with her.
There is a peculiar form of uncertainty where one might expect a more conventional writer to be especially definite: quotation, allusion, attribution. Verse is regularly misquoted. Sometimes the deviations are attributable to a character’s faulty memory, as when Tietjens is struggling to remember the words of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Somewhere or Other’. Macmaster’s misquotation of Ford’s Mister Bosphorus might pass for authorial modesty or, conversely, for an author claiming the right to rewrite his own words if he wishes. So far, so realist. In life, most quotations are misquotations. Other examples are more baffling. Macmaster argues with Duchemin over how to translate a phrase from Petronius’s Satyricon that isn’t in it. He also quotes a poem, supposedly by D. G. Rossetti, on whom he’s writing a monograph (as Ford had done), but the poem is in fact by a lesser-known poet, E. B. Williams; and yet Tietjens also knows it, and quotes from it as if it were by Rossetti. This is an especially complex example, and is discussed further in the notes. Readers will have to decide whether they think the errors are the sign of a careless author, or of a cunning one using them for characterisation, or to show how (in Tietjens’ phrase) ‘all these useless anodynes for thought, quotations, imbecile epithets’ are indicative of an intellectually bankrupt society. Are they fictional facts, supposed to be taken as true within the world of the novel (as if to say the poem by Williams is the sort of thing Rossetti might well have written)? Or, allied to the last but more mercurial, did Ford simply enjoy creating just such a sense of impressionist uncertainty in his readers?
The feature that generates most uncertainty in readers of Some Do Not … is probably the handling of time. Ford saw the ‘time-shift’ as central to the techniques he developed with Conrad during their collaboration. As he wrote in the year Some Do Not … was published:
it became very early evident to us that what was the matter with the Novel, and the British novel in particular, was that it went straight forward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintance with your fellows you never do go straight forward.69
To render a complex character, he continues, ‘you could not begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically to the end. You must first get him in with a strong impression, and then work backwards and forwards over his past.’70 As Malcolm Bradbury wrote of Parade’s End:
Ford’s novel shares with Proust’s deeply organic work a number of plain modern elements: a method of indirection, the story not told in conventional chronological sequences but by means of lines of association, dislocated memory and time-shift.71
This can make for a disorientating read, as the narrative flashes backwards and forwards so often (sometimes, as Valentine has it, with merely ‘the inflexion of a verb’) that we can lose a sense of when we are, of what the present moment of the narrative is from which these shifts are being made, and we encounter the after-effects of an event before we quite realise what the event was. The plot summary above is misleading in putting the events into a more chronological order, but probably all the more necessary for that.
In Time and Western Man Wyndham Lewis launched a swingeing attack on what he defined as the ‘Time-mind’.72 His arch-villains are the time-philosophies of Bergson and Einstein, but he sees the preoccupation with time and process as pervasive, and damaging to novelists like Proust. Parade’s End is certainly a time-book, but it is one that sheds light both on the general preoccupation and on Lewis’s unease with it. In taking the time-mind to the war, it diagnoses a crisis in the experience of time as a result of the war. As Ford was to put it later in the series: ‘When you thought of Time in those days your mind wavered impotently like eyes tired by reading too small print….’73 Tietjens’ sense of time is in a specific crisis due to his amnesia: there are passages of his past he can no longer call to mind. Shell-shock produces new relations to time, makes it seem both fractured and recurrent: some traumatic memories won’t come back; others won’t stop coming back. But the war struck many as an event that appeared so cataclysmic as to be out of time; to signal the end of time, as in the last battle, Armageddon. From our retrospect we know it wasn’t the end of time or of history. But it certainly felt like a seismic fault in time to many witnesses (as it may have done to Lewis, who fought as an artilleryman). Valentine later thinks of it as a ‘crack across the table of History’.74 Ford’s friend, and later successful war-novelist, Richard Aldington, wrote that:
Adult lives were cut sharply into three sections – pre-war, war, and post-war. It is curious – perhaps not so curious – but many people will tell you that whole areas of their pre-war lives have become obliterated from their memories.75
People’s experience of time during the war also changed, as they were lifted out of familiar routines and subjected to new modes of waiting, anticipating (what Ford called ‘the process of the eternal waiting that is War’),76 and new modes of anxiety about possible futures. This can produce the hyper-reality, or sometimes even the unreality, of Fordian impressions: the wavering of the mind trying to think out of time or trying to think time itself, as when Tietjens and Valentine wonder whether they couldn’t erase the moment when their restraint faltered and they agreed to become lovers, and Tietjens insists they can ‘Cut it out; and join time up’.
Some Do Not … is structured around a larger time-gap, from about 1912 to about 1917, and ends on the eve of Tietjens’ return to the Front. He tells Sylvia a little about the experience of losing his memory. Otherwise, his war experience remains a disturbingly felt blank. Though the second and third volumes show him at war during his second tour in France, the full story of his first tour is never filled in.77 Otherwise the proliferation of time-shifts means that Some Do Not … proceeds largely by missing out events, then filling in in fragmentary and sometimes uncertain retrospect.
These kinds of formal difficulty are what makes Parade’s End something far more modern than the anachronistic, panoramic Realist novel it has sometimes been mistaken for.78 Its occasional old-fashioned quality is usually a signal of free indirect style, in which the narrator remains in the third person but echoes the vocabulary and cadences of the focalising character. This is usually Tietjens, whose eighteenth-century-isms thus colour the narrative. But when it is another character – some of the narrative is seen from Macmaster’s point of view, more of it from Valentine’s – it can sound equally quaint. Take Macmaster’s thoughts about women:
His life had necessarily been starved of women, and, arrived at a stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution, be considered as a legitimate feature of his life, he had to fear a rashness of choice due to that very starvation. The type of woman he needed he knew to exactitude: tall, graceful, dark, loose-gowned, passionate yet circumspect, oval-featured, deliberative, gracious to everyone around her.
Ford, who himself had little respect for caution, nor for the conventionality that prescribes where respect is due (he thought it due to artists, who rarely received it), would never have written a phrase like ‘even with due respect to caution’ as his own. What makes it an example of a Flaubertian stylistic technique is the way it imagines Macmaster’s way of imagining. Ditto ‘passionate yet circumspect’. It becomes clear, as the extent of the Macmasters’ hypocrisy is revealed, that circumspection is but another name for it.
One way Parade’s End traces the massive changes through its period is that its styles and techniques evolve from volume to volume. In some ways this follows from the use of free indirect style, since in the second and third volumes, where the characters are from a broader social range, and are at war, their language is less formal and more slangy than Macmaster’s. The changing techniques also reflect the changes coming into Modernist writing through the period, from the experiments in point of view, selection, and the time-shift of Edwardian modernists such as James and Conrad, to the Joycean stream of consciousness monologues in the last two volumes. Ford’s terms for literary techniques often seem chosen for their rapport with his material: as when he describes a subject as ‘an affair’, or an experience as an ‘impression’. The crucial term ‘parade’ that resounds through the series is one that had for him a similar technical valency. He wrote to Herbert Read: ‘You may say that Conrad’s prose is always a Ceremonial Parade of words, with a General Salute and a March Past twice in every chapter […].’79 ‘But you must have gallant and splendid shots at Prose with a Panache’, he told Read, another Yorkshireman like the Tietjenses, continuing: ‘Yorkshire needs them more than anything else in the world! More than anything! Because we can always do the “A-Oh!,” reticence stunt. Nothing, nothing is easier…. And then we call it selection.’ Parade’s End combines the two, moving between the ‘reticence stunts’ of Tietjens and Valentine in Some Do Not …, and Mark’s silence in Last Post, on the one hand, and a ceremonial parade-prose that owes much to writers such as James and Conrad on the other. The friction between these two modes causes sparks to fly, which takes the writing beyond both reticence and panache, giving the series a rare intimacy and depth.
Some Do Not … experiments even more strikingly with point of view, and in a way that relates to its experiments in time and style, and constitutes another strong claim to its technical modernity. In Part II, the same crucial scene, in which Tietjens and Valentine meet outside the War Office, is told twice: first from his point of view, as he arrives there walking with his brother (II.iii) then from hers, as we trace her steps there (II.v) and learn what has impelled her to go and find him. The effect is extraordinary. First the meeting appears a coincidence, as it seems to him. Then we learn it wasn’t, because Sylvia has told her he is going to be there, as if perversely to set the meeting up (or, as later emerges in No More Parades, to try to seduce him herself afterwards, to upstage Valentine). In an ingenious development of his impressionism, Ford conveys how an episode can mean different things to different participants, and thus appears unstable in retrospect as we have to keep assimilating others’ views.80 Tietjens himself finds a startlingly contemporary image for this perspectival relativism:
“Do you know those soap advertisement signs that read differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read ‘Monkey’s Soap’; if you look back when you’ve passed it’s ‘Needs no Rinsing.’ … You and I are standing at different angles and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet a third […].”
In a sense, the story the novel tells is of how they do gradually come to stand side by side – at least mentally, since the society that has relentlessly brought them together no less relentlessly obstructs their attempts to spend time with each other. It’s characteristic of Ford’s art to suggest that third perspective, beyond even these clairvoyant characters’ perceptiveness, through the novelist’s sense of form, as Tietjens’ words echo the poem Macmaster had quoted years before, purportedly by Rossetti: ‘Since, when we stand side by side’.81
Ford said he began Some Do Not … while at Harold Monro’s villa on Cap Ferrat.82 The manuscript has no start date, but we know Ford and Stella Bowen had arrived at Cap Ferrat on 20 December 1922 and remained till late April 1923. It Was the Nightingale says at one point: ‘I have used this digression about the mechanics of writing to indicate the lapse of time that I spent at St. Jean Cap Ferrat, writing away at the first part of my book.’83 While this suggests he may have written all or most of the first part there, it doesn’t entirely say that, nor that by ‘first part’ he means Part I – the entire first half – rather than just the opening chapter or chapters. However, the recollection that he only wrote part of the novel there must be correct, given the difficulties in getting back to work, and then the other demands on his time. In January he told Anthony Bertam: ‘I can’t write at all.’84 He did begin to write again in the first half of 1923, but he was working on several other books. He finished the long verse-drama Mister Bosphorus and the Muses.85 He began A Mirror to France.86 And he also completed the play about Madame Récamier, the progress of which was regularly reported to Stella Bowen in the letters Ford wrote to her while she was touring Italy to study paintings with Dorothy and Ezra Pound.87 Ford was looking after his and Stella’s daughter, Julie, while Stella was away. The play was finished on 11 May 1923, by which time he and Julie had moved to one of his favourite Provençale towns, Tarascon, where he recalled writing ‘in a great dim old room […] the jalousies tight-closed against the sun and the nightingales singing like furies….’88 Much of the work on Some Do Not … was thus probably done between then and 22 September 1923, the completion date given on the manuscript. From the middle of June to the end of August Ford was staying at the Grand Hôtel Veuve Porte, St Agrève, in the Ardèche, where Stella rejoined them. They probably got back to Paris on 3 September.89
It was the writing of Some Do Not … that made Ford feel he was finally beginning to recover his form as a writer. Working on it, he could say: ‘I have only quite lately got back the faculty of being able to write at all well or regularly.’ When he finished it, he told H. G. Wells: ‘I’ve got over the nerve tangle of the war and feel able at last really to write again – which I never thought I should do.’ He also wrote to Conrad: ‘I think I’m doing better work as the strain of the war wears off.’90 Pound thought his renewed sense of his powers justified when Ford read to him from the manuscript: ‘best he has done since Good Soldier, or A Call’, he told his father.91
Ford had had some success before the war, especially with his trilogy of books about England and the English and his Fifth Queen trilogy of historical novels about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard. The Good Soldier didn’t get the recognition it deserved because it came out during the war, when populist reviewers attacked it as denigrating the moral fibre of the military. It was only in the 1920s, with Parade’s End, that critics began to acknowledge his significance as a major modern novelist, though the correspondingly large sales didn’t come until the later volumes. Ford said Some Do Not … sold ‘like hot cakes, in England’, as opposed to the later volumes, which did better in America.92 D. D. Harvey’s bibliography doesn’t give sales figures for the UK edition, but notes that it was reprinted twice in 1924, and again in 1929 and 1935.93
The Duckworth edition of Some Do Not … came out in Britain around 23 April 1924. Most of the British reviews were enthusiastic, and some included the highest praise Ford had ever received. The Daily Mail called it ‘one of his cleverest and grimmest studies of mankind’ (but paused to complain: ‘why is it that the post-war novelist must always covertly discredit the marriage tie?’ – a rather bizarre objection given that the hero and heroine do not commit adultery in this volume). ‘There is no need to worry about the state of the English novel while books like this are being produced’, said the Manchester Guardian. The Yorkshire Post made the striking connexion that ‘What Mr. Ford does is to rewrite “The Idiot” in terms of the immediate pre-war and war years in England’, adding: ‘it is a piece of unusually great realistic art’. The Observer found it more modern than that:
There are several chapters in this book—the scene on the golf-links with the Suffragettes and the politician; the terrible breakfast party at the Duchemins; the discussion between Christopher Tietjens, home on leave, his wife Sylvia, and the great banker, and the heart-rending, bitter controversy between Sylvia, her mother, and the priest-—which are not only better than anything Mr. Ford has yet given us, but must be ranked with the best work in modern fiction.94
Several reviews agreed with the Daily News, which called it: ‘one of the best novels that have appeared for a long time’.95 The Bystander reviewer found it ‘one of the most stimulating works of fiction’ he had read in some time – perhaps because: ‘In places it is amazingly, almost shockingly, outspoken.’ ‘[H]ere is something big and startling and new’, he said, urging his public: ‘read it’. The English Review called it ‘the biggest novel of the century […] the twentieth century Vanity Fair’. Even the Times Literary Supplement, which had doubts about whether the methods of The Marsden Case were as suitable to a serious story like Tietjens’, recognised ‘a novel of unusual power and art’. The few dissentient voices worried about the inconclusiveness of the structure, the fact that ‘it points no noteworthy moral’, and the book’s strangeness. But even these praised the gifts they felt Ford was wasting. The Weekly Dispatch thought ‘The worst thing about this novel is its title, which needs a poetical quotation to explain it’; but went on to say: ‘Otherwise Mr. Ford’s new book is a brilliant piece of work, erratic though it be in parts. It presents a satirical picture of society just before and during the war, and the satire emphasises rather than exaggerates truth.’ The Nation and Athenaeum felt this satire edged close to caricature, claiming Ford presented ‘an England that Englishmen generally will have some difficulty in recognizing; a strange, erotic land inhabited principally by sexual monomaniacs’, yet being won over by the vision:
This country and people […] are made astonishingly real to the reader […] It is really a triumph of mind over matter. The mind is always there, acutely observing even when most grotesquely misunderstanding; a distinguished mind that moulds everything to its will […] given its premises its argument is almost flawless.
L. P. Hartley was more ambivalent, writing in the Spectator that he found it:
hard to believe that the War and the years before the War produced the colours and patterns Mr. Ford’s kaleidoscope gives them; that they were as wicked or as witty or as wrong-headed. But we are sorry when the pageant comes to an end.
He called it ‘a bewildering book’, but one which ‘fascinates while it baffles’; ‘no writer was ever more self-conscious’, he adds, acknowledging that ‘It is a triumph of Mr. Ford’s method to have made his portrayal of Tietjens moving and organic.’ Punch agreed, praising it as ‘a portrait gallery of living persons’, and also finding that ‘the dialogue is often astonishingly clever’. But it warned that, despite its virtues, ‘like the electric eel, it gives the reader a number of unnecessary shocks’: ‘some of the characters are also extremely unpleasant’; and it voiced the objection made by several reviews to the strong language – a response that perhaps affected the handling of army swearing in the later volumes.96
The book was less widely reviewed when it was published in America by Thomas Seltzer around 18 October 1924, bearing out Ford’s later comment that the American edition sold ‘relatively little’.97 The sales figures for the Seltzer first American edition aren’t known. But the A. & C. Boni royalty statements (at Cornell) show that after they took it over, they had sold 926 copies by 30 June 1928. However, the book was reissued as a cheaper reprint by Grosset and Dunlap in 1927 – on the strength of the stronger reception of the second and third novels. By the end of June 1928 Some Do Not … had sold 6,000 copies in this edition, perhaps also boosted by the much larger circulation of The Last Post, which was chosen by the Literary Guild of America and thus benefited from the highest print run of any book of Ford’s during his lifetime.
The American reviews of Some Do Not … were also very positive. One from the New York Evening Post said it ‘dwarfed most current fiction to negligibility’.98 The New York Times Book Review praised ‘a technique and a prose that have gone through the fires of a large knowledge and a deep experience’, judging that ‘Mr. Ford achieves not only what is probably his own best work but what is certainly one of the ablest of recent English novels’.99 The New York Herald Tribune Books ran a long review entitled ‘Vanity Fair in 1924’ (again noting the parallel with Thackeray’s war novel).100 It thought ‘the narrative movement […] leaves something to be desired, being rather choppy’, but conceded: ‘it contains three or four chapters of extraordinarily brilliant writing’. It commented astutely on the relation between past and present: ‘His most daring artistic innovation is in assigning the chief male role in a modern novel, up to the minute in every other respect, to a man with inhibitions, which he doesn’t desire to be rid of, any more than Conrad’s officers desire to be rid of the code of an officer.’ The judgement that ‘The conclusion of the tale is, I think, of a most devastating cynicism’ is curious. The ending seems now rather to risk sentimentality, but such a comment shows how finely Ford had balanced the love scenes between Tietjens and Valentine against the more critical portraits of the Macmasters, Sylvia’s social world, and the conduct of the war. Understandably, to American readers the novel seemed especially concerned with Englishness (as indicated here by inhibitions and the officer code); and equally understandably, they seemed readier to accept Ford’s heightened, partially satiric presentation of English society. Louis Bromfield wrote in the New York Bookman that ‘If it were buried now, to be dug up three hundred years hence, the men who dug it up would have an extraordinarily sound picture of the England of the past quarter century.’101 But he added, in a comment that captures its more experimental qualities as well, that it was:
a book that is built with a sense of form, one that tells a story admirably, one in which the characterization is excellent, and one which has that quality of all great novels – a sublimation of reality, and an inherent glamor that is quite beyond such labels as realism or romanticism.
The last page of Some Do Not … bears the words ‘The End’; perhaps teasingly in a work that was to have three sequels. (The only other volume to close thus was the truly final one.) It wasn’t advertised as to be continued, though on the dust-jacket of the Duckworth edition, with a design by Stella Bowen, the front flap blurb’s description of it as ‘inconclusive in the sense that it is no tragedy of the approved pattern’ was perhaps what incited some of the comments about narrative movement and inconclusiveness. So much subsequent discussion of the tetralogy has turned on the relation of the last volume to the whole that it is hard to recover the sense of what it would have been like for contemporary readers to read the first as a free-standing novel. One surprising feature of its reception in retrospect is that it wasn’t viewed as the beginning of a sequence (at least until the appearance of a sequel a year and a half later), despite the fact that its ending leaves so many questions hanging – will Tietjens survive the war? Will he and Valentine ever be united? Would they ever be free from Sylvia’s harassment? How would they live after the war? That it could be read as satisfying and complete in itself says much about how readers of Modernist fiction were already attaching much less importance to conventional plotting.
This raises the question of whether Ford had written Some Do Not … intending to write sequels, or whether it was the success of the novel that encouraged him to continue it. His reminiscences about wondering what Marwood would have made of the Western Front suggest that showing Tietjens there had always been part of the plan. The dedicatory letter prefacing the next volume, No More Parades, describes the plan for a ‘series’ as formulated from the start:
To this determination – to use my friend’s eyes as a medium – I am adhering in this series of books. Some Do Not – of which this one is not so much a continuation as a reinforcement – showed you the Tory at home during war-time; this shows you the Tory going up the line. If I am vouchsafed health and intelligence for long enough I propose to show you the same man in the line and in process of being re-constructed.
Presumably the disavowal that No More Parades is a continuation is designed not to deter potential readers by making them feel they won’t understand this novel if they haven’t read the last, rather than denying that No More Parades continues the characters and story of Some Do Not …, which it certainly does.
Some Do Not … carefully plants some seeds for future plot-complications for Tietjens, in ways that support the idea that Ford had always intended to take the story further. As Macmaster and Mrs Duchemin begin to get involved, she doubly resents Tietjens, not just for his influence over his friend, but because his insight into her puts her at his mercy. Her enmity becomes crucial to Tietjens’ social ostracism, not only towards the end of this novel, but in A Man Could Stand Up – as well. It is paralleled by General Campion’s increasing anger towards Tietjens. It becomes clear that in part this is motivated by the General’s infatuation with Sylvia. But Tietjens’ outspokenness becomes increasingly irritating to a man unused to people standing up to him. He gets annoyed that Tietjens also stood up to his Civil Service boss, asking ‘What would become of the services if everyone did as you did?’ This anticipates the way the second and third volumes put Tietjens in the army and also directly under Campion’s command. This argument over principle then becomes something he has to live through in the subsequent volumes. Tietjens also deliberately picks a quarrel with Campion after their car-crash. He tells Valentine it’ll give her an alibi for no longer being invited to Campion’s grand sister’s house. But it only heightens Campion’s anger, contributing to his putting Tietjens in mortal danger in the third volume.
Ford’s plotting in Some Do Not … is superbly intricate – comparable to the Machiavellian intrigues of The Fifth Queen and the temporal and moral involutions of The Good Soldier. If he began his ‘prolonged effort’ in trepidation, he soon found his form. These anticipations of further, future complexities, together with his revision of the ending (a variant version is printed in an appendix, and discussed in the Note on the Text below), indicate that by the time he had finished drafting Some Do Not … he had indeed already thought out how the story would continue.
By the end of Some Do Not … Tietjens and Valentine know their love is mutual, but their scruples stop them from consummating it. As he puts it, ‘We’re the sort that … do not!’ Their parting is shot through with hopes for a future reunion. This too has to be suppressed. As we have seen, the closest Valentine comes to articulating it is to say ‘But when you come back …’ Yet now she has another, more sombre reason for suppression: the anxiety over whether he will come back, alive, uninjured, sane. Thus Ford’s decision to leave his readers uncertain as to whether the story will continue is more than a suspense-device to arouse a desire for future instalments; it also leaves us in a similar position to Valentine’s, who, now she knows how much she wants a continuation, can’t know whether there can be one.
As a structure of suspense Some Do Not … is innovative too. It is a sustained intensification of the question ‘will they/won’t they?’, which builds up to a final crisis in which the answer is again deferred. This final prolongation of the uncertainty sheds light back and forth over the whole tetralogy’s preoccupation with uncertainties over what characters said or didn’t say, what they did or didn’t do. The Spanish novelist Javier Marias – one of many modern writers who admire Ford’s fiction – has argued, in a lecture called ‘What Does and Doesn’t Happen’ (1995), that what we do not do is as constitutive of our life as what we do:
We all have at bottom the same tendency … to go on seeing the different stages of our life as the result and compendium of what has happened to us and what we have achieved and what we’ve realised, as if it were only this that made up our existence. And we almost always forget that … every path also consists of our losses and farewells, of our omissions and unachieved desires, of what we one day set aside or didn’t choose or didn’t finish, of numerous possibilities most of which – all but one in the end – weren’t realised, of our vacillations and our daydreams, of our frustrated projects and false or lukewarm longings, of the fears that paralysed us, of what we left behind or what we were left behind by. We perhaps consist, in sum, as much of what we have not been as of what we are, as much of the uncertain, indecisive or diffuse as of the shareable and quantifiable and memorable; perhaps we are made in equal measure of what could have been and what is.102
That ‘equal measure of what could have been and what is’ could stand as a definition of all successful fiction, which stands in just such a relation to our own reality, imagining possible but nonexistent situations. More specifically, though, it can also describe the kind of fiction Ford attempted in this novel, in which the characters feel the weight of ‘what could have been’ as forcefully as that of ‘what is’. William Empson – who had much in common with Tietjens: a Yorkshire squirearchical background, mathematical training, pithy irony, subversive unconventional brilliance – put much the same idea with characteristic piercing lucidity, just two years after Ford completed Parade’s End, and in terms that bear even more sharply on Some Do Not …:
people, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind.103
That was very much Ford’s view of how novels needed to work too: by bearing different, often contradictory, possibilities in mind about individual characters, so as to capture the complexities and nuances of their experience. While it would matter to a coroner whether Tietjens’ father died by shooting accident or suicide, and to a divorce lawyer whether Tietjens were the biological father of Sylvia’s son, or whether or not he and Valentine became lovers on his last night in London, what matters to the – Impressionist – novelist is that it’s in the nature of our experience that we keep being forced to worry about such questions and to recognise that we might so easily not have done what we did, or have done what we did not.
1 For a fuller account of Ford’s war-service, see Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), II.
2 ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’, first published in the ‘Avignon edition’ of the novel (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927); reprinted in The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 4. Ford, Mightier Than the Sword (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), 282.
3 F[anny] B[utcher], ‘Ford Madox Ford a Visitor Here Tells of His Work’, Chicago Tribune (22 Jan. 1927), 8. Ford to Stella Bowen, 20 Jan. [1927], identifies ‘F. B.’: The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, ed. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 302.
4 Ford to Conrad, 7 Sept. 1916: The Presence of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Sondra J. Stang (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 176.
5 Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (London: Virago 2003), 140.
6 ‘The Alcestis of Euripides: freely adapted for the Modern Stage’, 1918–19; typescripts at Cornell. Discussed further by the editors of A Man Could Stand Up – and Last Post.
7 Saunders, A Dual Life II 78.
8 Ford, Thus to Revisit (London: Chapman and Hall, 1921), 77–8.
9 Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: first printed as an ‘Author’s Note’ after the serialisation of the novel in the New Review, 17 (Dec. 1897), 628–31.
10 Ford, War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), 36–7.
11 War Prose 37.
12 War Prose 41.
13 Ford, No Enemy, ed. Paul Skinner (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 33.
14 Ford, It Was the Nightingale, ed. John Coyle (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), 206.
15 Ford, A Man Could Stand Up –, ed. Sara Haslam (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), II.vi. C. S. Myers is credited with having coined the term ‘shell shock’ in the Lancet in 1915 (i: 316–20). So the name was still novel at the time Sylvia’s friends cynically consider it a ‘purely nominal disease’ (207).
16 Ford, ‘To William Bird’, Dedicatory Letter to No More Parades: War Prose 198.
17 Ford, Return to Yesterday (1931), ed. Bill Hutchings (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), 281 (italics added).
18 Thomas Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 212. Ford’s unusual step of making his protagonist a mathematician was thus more than an hommage to his friend. It was also a way of questioning how modernity has changed our modes of thinking about life, its complexity fostering ever-greater specialisation. ‘Practical politics’, said Ford, ‘have become so much a matter of sheer figures that the average man, dreading mathematics almost as much as he dreads an open mind, is reduced, nevertheless, to a state of mind so open that he has abandoned thinking – that he has abandoned even feeling about any public matter at all’: The Critical Attitude (London: Duckworth, 1911), 114–15. He saw art as countering such specialisation. Only ‘the imaginative writer’ can represent our lives, he argued, ‘because no collection of facts, and no tabulation of figures, can give us any sense of proportion’: Ibid., 33.
19 Return 281.
20 Nightingale 189–90.
21 Nightingale 201–2.
22 Nightingale 100.
23 ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’, The Good Soldier 5.
24 ‘True Love & a GCM’ was published for the first time in War Prose. The completed novel, ‘Mr Croyd’, was revised and re-titled as ‘The Wheels of the Plough’ then ‘That Same Poor Man’. The typescripts are at the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. Extracts were published in War Prose.
25 Ford, The Marsden Case (London: Duckworth, 1923), 143–4.
26 Nightingale 174–7 (174).
27 See note on 281 below. The Dedication to Ford’s first volume of reminiscences, Ancient Lights (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), vii–viii, x, describes a comparable impulse to ‘rescue’ memories ‘before they go out of my mind altogether’.
28 Pound to Ford [13 Jan. 1922]: Pound/Ford: the Story of a Literary Friendship: the Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and Their Writings About Each Other, ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 63. See 62–7.
29 See Saunders, A Dual Life II 124 for a fuller discussion of the relation between Ford’s and Eliot’s poems.
30 Ford may have seen some of ‘Ulysses’ in serial form in the Little Review, where it appeared from 1918–20, since his own work ‘Women and Men’ was serialised there in 1918, though Ford was still in the army then.
31 Ford, ‘A Haughty and Proud Generation’, Yale Review, 11 (July 1922), 703–17: in Ford, Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 208–17 (217).
32 Nightingale 177–80. See also 270–1. Ford to T. R. Smith, 27 July 1931: Cornell. Quoted Saunders, A Dual Life II [iii].
33 In No More Parades III.ii. and A Man Could Stand Up – I.ii. (In the last chapter of Some Do Not …, II.vi, Tietjens recalls his conversation with Macmaster in the opening chapter, thinking of it as ‘Ten years’ before. II.vi is probably set in 1917, which would push the opening back to 1907; but presumably Ford’s point is that the pre-war years seem much further back in the past than they were, and that at moments of extreme stress or excitement the experience of time distorts. As Valentine thinks in A Man Could Stand Up – I.ii: ‘Later she realised that that was what thought was. In ten minutes […] you found you thought out more than in two years. Or it was not as long ago as that.’) See Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford, 318–20, for further discussion of these and other possible inconsistencies in the tetralogy.
34 ‘Marie Belloc Lowndes on Ford and Violet Hunt’, ed. Susan Lowndes Marques, Ford Madox Ford’s Literary Contacts, ed. Paul Skinner, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, 6 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 95–100 (96).
35 Ford, A Mirror to France (London: Duckworth, 1926), 263.
36 ‘Preparedness’, New York Herald Tribune Books (6 Nov. 1927), 7, 18: War Prose 69–74 (73).
37 Ford, Provence, ed. John Coyle (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), 65–6.
38 [Orlo Williams] Times Literary Supplement (24 Apr. 1924), 252. ‘Books of the Week’, Weekly Dispatch (27 Apr. 1924), 2.
39 Dobrée, review of Ford’s The Rash Act, Spectator, 151 (8 Sept. 1933), 321. Dobrée was perhaps put onto Ford by their mutual friend Herbert Read, with whom he had edited The London Book of English Prose (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932), which includes an excerpt from A Man Could Stand Up –. Dobrée, Modern Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 167–9, 55–8 (55).
40 Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), 184–9 (188).
41 Joseph Conrad 135–6.
42 Ibid. 136.
43 Ford to Conrad [n. d., but written on the verso of a letter from Victor Llona to Ford, 16 Apr. 1924]: Saunders, A Dual Life II 152.
44 Ford, ‘Communications’, transatlantic review, 1:1 (Jan. 1924), 97.
45 Ford, ‘Preface’ to Transatlantic Stories (London: Duckworth [1926]), vii–xxxi (xxv).
46 Arnold, ‘Preface to First Edition of Poems, 1853’, Selected Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Signet, 1972), 27–8.
47 Ford, Collected Poems (London: Max Goschen [1913]), 15.
48 Ford, The Spirit of the People (London: Alston Rivers, 1907), xii. In Ford, England and the English, ed. Sara Haslam (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 232.
49 England 273. Ford had quoted the sentiment from Madox Brown’s diary in his biography of his grandfather: Ford Madox Brown (London: Longmans Green, 1896), 126.
50 England 276. Cf. ‘Literary Portraits – XX. Mr. Gilbert Cannan and “Old Mole”’, Outlook, 33 (24 Jan. 1914), 110: ‘sentimentality, Puritanism, and everything that is most beastly came into England together with Dutch William’. Cf. C. E. M. Joad, Thrasymachus, or the Future of Morals (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1925), 84, on ‘the gulf which separates public profession and private practice, a gulf which has made England a byword for hypocrisy […]’.
51 England 276.
52 England 277. While working on Parade’s End Ford wrote ‘The Passing of Toryism’, McNaught’s Monthly, 5:6 (June 1926), 174–6, arguing that Toryism was ‘a frame of mind – the frame of mind that produced, say, Dr. Samuel Johnson’; its profound individualism and scepticism a necessity to save the world from destructive crazes; its demise rendering individualism ‘almost impossible and standardization almost inevitable’; and its sense of class responsibility tending towards ‘an extraordinary solicitude and indeed a deep love’. ‘Of that,’ said Ford, ‘the fields of Flanders, I assure you, gave evidence enough.’
53 Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan and Company, 1909), 71.
54 England 312.
55 Lyall, It isn’t done (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1930).
56 The scene in I.vii in which Tietjens and Valentine ride through the mist recalls a comparable moment of climactically suppressed passion at the end of The Good Soldier, when Ashburnham takes Nancy, also in a dog-cart, to the station to be sent off to India.
59 See 322.
60 See for example Critical Essays 128 (on Dostoevsky); and Thus to Revisit 43 on serialisation and the need for suspense.
61 See 343.
62 No More Parades I.iii. A Man Could Stand Up – II.iii.
63 Greene, quoted in Strauss, Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End, inside front cover; Kenneth Young, Ford Madox Ford (Harlow: The British Council and Longmans Green, 1970), 30.
64 There is a third instance in MS, II.v, which reads ‘the sadic lusts of certain novelists’; however, ‘sadic’ has become ‘cruder’ in UK, whether through the compositor’s misreading or a revision to minimise repetition. For comparable examples later in the series see No More Parades II.i: ‘It was like whipping a dying bulldog….’ Also Last Post I.iii: ‘He had seen the old General whimper like a whipped dog and mumble in his poor white moustache…. Mother was splendid. But wasn’t sex a terrible thing….’
65 See 242.
66 Ford, ‘Tiger, Tiger: Being a Commentary on Conrad’s The Sisters’, Bookman, 66:5 (Jan. 1928), 495–8 (497).
67 175 and 286.
68 See 41; and ‘A Note on the Text of Some Do Not …’ lxxxvii.
69 Joseph Conrad 129. On the ‘time-shift’ see ‘Autocriticism: The Rash Act’, in The Ford Madox Ford Reader, ed. Sondra J. Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), 267; and Mightier 282.
70 Joseph Conrad 130.
71 Malcom Bradbury, ‘Introduction’, Parade’s End (London: Everyman, 1992), xvi
72 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), 3.
73 A Man Could Stand Up – I.ii.
74 A Man Could Stand Up – I.i.
75 Aldington, Death of a Hero (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 224.
76 A Man Could Stand Up – II.ii.
77 The only information we get comes in No More Parades, when Tietjens thinks: ‘This was practically his first day in the open during a strafe. His first whole day for quite a time. Since Noircourt! … How long ago? … Two years? … Maybe! … Then he had nothing to go on to tell him how long he would be inconvenienced!’ This takes place during the spring of 1918, so ‘Two years’ before would be early 1916, between Parts I and II of Some Do Not …. Noircourt is about 60 km east of St Quentin, which was incorporated into the Hindenburg Line in 1916, and the scene of heavy fighting throughout the war.
78 As for example by Vincent Sherry, in The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 226–32.
79 Ford to Herbert Read, 19 Sept. 1920: Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 127–8. Ford said most of his work was ‘based on historic contemplations and comparisons’, and worried that younger writers desired ‘to forget the standards of pomps and parades that used to sway us’: ‘Preface’, Transatlantic Stories (London: Duckworth, 1926), xxx.
80 Another example is the scene in which Macmaster disturbs Tietjens playing patience: first, seen externally, almost as if from Macmaster’s point of view, at the start of I.iii; then replayed from Tietjens’ perspective at the end of I.iv, by which time we understand why his nerves are so fraught.
81 See 22 and note; also 232 and 341.
82 Nightingale 207.
83 Nightingale 223.
84 Ford to Bertram, 20 Jan. 1923: Letters 147–8.
85 The poem was drafted before they left for France. See Saunders, A Dual Life II 577 n.10. But the composition dates in the published book are ‘Sussex: October 1922 – Tarascon: May 1923’; though it’s possible Ford wanted the process of composition to match the poem’s story of abandoning the north for the south.
86 Not published till 1926, though the composition dates have it begun in March 1923, which is probable since the last chapter, ‘From the Grey Stone’, was published in Eliot’s Criterion in October 1923.
87 See Ford/Bowen 173–200 passim.
88 Nightingale 225.
89 Pound told his mother on [Thursday] 30 Aug. 1923 (Yale) that Ford was expected back the following Monday: see Saunders, A Dual Life II 579 n.4.
90 Ford to Monro, 20 Feb. 1923: Texas; quoted Saunders, A Dual Life II 133–4. Ford to Wells, 14 Oct. 1923: Letters 154. Ford to Conrad, 7 Oct. 1923: Yale. See Saunders, A Dual Life II 126–8.
91 Pound to Homer Pound, 12 Sept. 1923: Pound/Ford 71.
92 Nightingale 326.
93 David Dow Harvey, Ford Madox Ford: 1873–1939: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 58–9.
94 Quoted from the dust-jacket to the first US edition (New York: Seltzer, 1924).
95 Quoted in the end-matter of Last Post (London: Duckworth, 1928), [293].
96 Daily Mail (25 Apr. 1924); ‘C. M.’, Manchester Guardian (25 Apr. 1924), 7; ‘Pages in Waiting’, Yorkshire Post (23 Apr. 1924), 4; Ralph Strauss, Bystander, 82 (7 May 1924), 409; English Review, 39 (July 1924), 148–9; T. L. S. (24 Apr. 1924), 252; Daily Express (3 May 1924) (on inconclusiveness and lack of a moral); Gerald Gould, Saturday Review, 137 (17 May 1924), 512 (‘I have had a nightmare. I have been lost in a strange country, full of fantastic emotion and desperate incident […] I have conversed with people whose conversation seemed as incoherent as their motives seemed incredible […] His gifts amazing: but he insists upon wasting them’); ‘Books of the Week’, Weekly Dispatch (27 Apr. 1924), 2; Nation and Athenaeum, 35 (24 May 1924), 258; L. P. Hartley, ‘An Elusive Allegory’ (the title refers to David Garnett’s A Man at the Zoo, reviewed here with Some Do Not …), Spectator, 132 (3 May 1924), 720; Punch, 167 (2 July 1924), 26.
97 Nightingale 326.
98 The New York Evening Post review is quoted from the dust-jacket of the first American edition of No More Parades (New York: Boni, 1925).
99 Henry J. Forman, New York Times Book Review (2 Nov. 1924), 9.
100 Stuart P. Sherman, New York Herald Tribune Books (16 Nov. 1924), 1–2.
101 Bromfield, Bookman (New York), 60 (Feb. 1925), 739.
102 Marias, ‘What Does and Doesn’t Happen’; quoted from Benjamin Kunkel, ‘Lingering and Loitering’, London Review of Books, 31:23 (3 Dec. 2009), 18, 20–1 (18).
103 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 66.