Is Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece,  Parade’s End, a trilogy or a tetralogy?  This question never crossed my mind when I discovered a copy of Parade’s End at Brentano’s years ago. I fell into this modernist quartet and spent all my leisure reading it.  No one needed great literature more than I:  I was strafed by long hours of work in a strange, dowdy city.

Ford’s modernist World War I novels, Some Do Not…, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up – , and The Last Post, are published as a tetralogy. Characterized by stream-of–consciousness, multiple points-of-view, ellipses, dashes, and smart dialogue, Parade’s End reads a bit like Virginia Woolf, had she been a modernist war correspondent.

The first three novels fit together well. In Some Do Not… , England is on the brink of war, and  Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant mathematician, statistician, and Latinist, is caught in reluctant battle with his vicious, adulterous wife, while his best friend Macmaster’s hysterical wife spreads the rumors spread by his wife that he is the adulterer.  He falls in love with Valentine Wannop, a suffragette and Latinist, but is too chivalrous to seduce her. In one comical romantic scene, they trade Latin quotes and Valentine corrects his Ovid.

The two middle novels chronicle Tietjens’ war experiences, based partly on Ford’s experiences. He records the boredom and noise, the horror of a man dying and falling bloodily on top of him, the worries about supplies and food, and the tedium of waiting   He ends up in the trenches because his wife persuaded a colonel to transfer him to the front, where he would most likely be killed. He writes in A Man Could Stand Up –

You hung about and you hung about, and you kicked your heels and you kicked your heels, waiting for Mills bombs to come, or for jam, or for generals, or for the tanks, or transport, or the clearance of the road ahead. You waited in offices under the eyes of somnolent orderlies, under fire on the banks of canals, you waited in hotels, dugouts, tin sheds, ruined houses.  There will be no man who survives of His Majesty’s Armed Forces that shall not remember those eternal hours when Time itself stood as the true image of Bloody War!

Ford’s description of the trenches is terrifying, though it is everyday life for the men.. In the trenches a working-class soldier says to him, “If only a man could stand up.” Tietjens, too, could not bear the trenches: he stands up and walks outside in danger. He survives the war, not without shell shock and memory loss, but when he returns to England, he is at least able to live with Valentine. 

And now we get to The Last Post, which does not quite belong with the others. There is less urgency here, though the tragedy of war lingers, and the  protagonist is Mark Tietjens, Christopher’s brother, who is paralyzed by a seizure. When Graham Greene edited the Bodley Head edition in 1963, he omitted The Last Post, which caused some controversy.  What had Ford intended?  In one letter Ford had said he intended to end the Tietjens saga with A Man Could Stand up…  and that he hated The Last Post. Elsewhere he wrote that The Last Post was essential to the Tietjens saga. Clearly Greene made the call because he did not admire The Last Post.

Having returned to Parade’s End for a third time, as a more experienced reader, I believe that Greene was right, and that Parade’s End  makes makes more sense as a trilogy.  Of course  I myself never read it as a tetralogy or a trilogy, either, but as one very long novel, which raises another question:  is Parade’s End  neither a trilogy nor a tetralogy but an epic novel, an  English War and Peace?  In Parade’s End, Ford depicts Edwardian  upper-class society, manners, and hypocrisy, contrasted with the brutal horrors of First World War and the demise of the 1910s English society Tietjens knew.

In fact, reading The Last Post reminds me of the last three disappointing books of  Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga: the first six books relate the drama of four generations of an upper-class family of materialistic businessmen. Then he switches in the last three books to a distant branch of the family whom we scarcely care about.

Greene’s choice of the trilogy did not catch on. All of the editions I found on Google are tetralogies.

Parade’s End is one of my favorite books of the twentieth century, though The Last Post is the weakest link in the tetralogy.