Tag Archives: Ford Madox Ford

The Flexibility Factor: The Art of Browsing

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I’m grateful – very grateful – to be well after an illness, but I have lost the ability to do “the crouch-and-spring” pose at bookshops. This combination of yoga and bad ballet, practiced by Frank Sinatra and Trevor Howard in the trenches in old war movies, is excellent for examining the books on the bottom shelves.

On a recent tour of bookshops, I rode my bike for the first time in a month. It was a challenge.  There was smashed glass on the bridge. I was too fatigued to carry the bike over the glass.  There is always glass on bridges. Why bridges?

But I did not get a flat tire, fortunately. I went to Barnes and Noble and the independent bookshops, where the display tables glittered with new books. I lowered myself slowly to the floor to squint at the titles on the bottom shelves. There was no question of dignity. There was no squatting like a frog. I rose slowly, trying not to lean on the bookcase.

And I was too fatigued to hang out and buy a drink at the cafe. This damned virus…

But I found some excellent books. 

Here’s what I’ve been reading.

Cesar Aira’s The Famous Magician, reissued by New Directions in the ND Storybook series, is a combination of magic realism and literary criticism.  A magician who does real magic approaches the narrator-writer: he will teach him magic if the writer gives up writing. The narrator needs time to think. Is magic more important than writing? There is musing, there is humor, and there is tension. The writer-narrator agonizes over the question.  Don’t jump, we say.  A brilliant, entertaining novella.

Ford Madox Ford’s clumsy first novel, The Shifting of the Fire, published in 1892, is an uneven tale of star-crossed lovers. The plot is melodramatic, though not without humor.  Edith Ryland’s rich parents refuse to let her marry Clem Hollebone after his business fails.  Absurdly, she marries an 80-year-old man for his money, thinking she will inherit and be able to support Clem. I’m on a break from this book, because the second half is even worse than the first, but Ford was only 18 when he wrote it.  Recommended only for hardcore Ford fans.

I recently wrote that librarians were the perfect spies, then deleted the post because it was over the top. But who knew? I was right, sort of. Elyse Graham’s new book, Book and Dagger:  How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II,  describes the recruiting of English professors, librarians, historians, and other academics to work as undercover spies by the agency that morphed into the CIA.  This book might be fun, but it is poorly-written, so I will not attempt it.

What have you been reading or not reading?

The Classic Nobody Reads: Ford Madox Ford’s “Some Do Not…”

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"The gods to each ascribe a differing lot:
Some enter at the portal. Some do not!"
--MacMaster’s version of a refrain in Ford’s poem,Mr. Bosphorous

In Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not, the first novel in his tetralogy, Parade’s End, the phrase “Some do not” is repeated like a prose refrain.  It is from at couplet in Ford’s poem, Mr. Bosphorous, which was slightly altered to fit the context of the novel. It is quoted by Macmaster, a hard-working social climber, who has just spent a day in the country successfully networking with General Lord Edward Campion, to whom he was introduced by Christopher Tietjens, his best friend.

MacMaster loves and respects Tietjens; they roomed together at Cambridge. In fact, Tietjens found a job for him at the Imperial Department of Statistics, where he also works.  But the class-conscious MacMaster is glad that he is catching up socially. He cannot forget he went to Cambridge on a scholarship.

Set during World War I, Some Do Not… charts the violence, shell shock, and waste of life in battle. But on this lovely day in the country, MacMaster quotes the couplet softly to himself. Tietjens is late for the train, but confidently runs beside the carriage and throws his enormous kitbag through the window.  MacMaster “reflected that if he had done that half the station would have been yelling, ‘Stand away from there.'” 

“Some enter at the portal. Some do not!” MacMaster knows he has not entered by the portal, but he has found his way.

Meanwhile, generous, honorable Tietjens is on a downward spiral. Most people like him: he is a brilliant statistician with a photographic memory, a Latinist who has memorized reams of Ovid, an expert on antiques, and a fact-checker for his late father’s friend, Mrs. Wannop, who “has written the only good novel since the eighteenth century.”

But his wife, Sylvia, a beautiful, angelic-looking, cruel adulteress slanders him, libels him, and ruins his reputation. She insists that he is the adulterer.

So perhaps the original couplet in Ford’s poem (below) is most suitable for Tietjens’ situation.

The Gods to each ascribe a differing lot!	
Some rest on snowy bosoms!  Some do not!

No snowy bosoms for Tietjens.

I must confess, I was in love with Tietjens at 24. Now I see his flaws, and even understand some of Sylvia’s complaints, but he is an honorable gentleman, an eighteenth-century man, really, and is one of my favorite characters in literature. 

Is “Parade’s End” a Tetralogy or Trilogy?

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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.

An illustration from the Folio Soceity edition

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.

Perfect Reading for the Pandemic: Ford Madox Ford’s “Parade’s End”

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I have found the perfect book to read during the pandemic:  Ford Madox Ford’s  Parade’s End, an elegant Modernist tetralogy set during World War I.  The four books, published during the 1920s,  are spellbinding:  Some Do Not…, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up–, and The Last Post.   I blogged about the second book here.  I have just finished rereading the third book. 

There is no one in life like Christopher Tietjens, the hero of Parade’s End. Although he is awkward, he is the most honorable gentleman you will ever meet. He is courteous, gallant, awkward, fat, yet attractive, seemingly has a photographic memory, is probably Aspergers, quotes Ovid in conversation, and is a brilliant statistician. His society wife, the gorgeous, evil Sylvia, is determined to ruin his life, though she herself has left him to have affairs with various men.  Even her priest tells her how evil she is.  On her return to England, Tietjens declines to live with Sylvia, but is too much the gentleman to divorce her because she is Catholic .  He provides money for Syliva and their son (probably not his son) to live on his estate, Groby, but Sylvia  ruins his reputation by claiming he is the immoral adulterer. And so he enlists in the Army, though he is over forty (as Ford Madox Ford did), because he knows he can be a good officer, and because there is no life for him in England anymore.

In the second novel, No More Parades, we see the extent of Sylvia’s depravity and viciousness:  she hates Tietjens but wants him back so she can humiliate him.  She even visits him at an army base in France, to spread more calumny:  she lies about his politics (she says he is a socialist) and again claims that he is having an affair with a young woman Valentine Wannop, a virginal suffragette. With her lies, Sylvia gives her husband a death sentence.  A general who is infatuated with Sylvia’s beauty ships Tietjens to the front, believing and hoping he will die there. 

In the third novel, A Man Could Stand Up– (which I have just finished), Tietjens waits for the war to end so “a man could stand up.” He is tired of crouching in the trenches, but standing up can get people killed.  The account of a day in the trenches is harrowing.  He is first in command by default, much loved by the men, but he has shell-shock and is afraid of going mad.  But he wants to keep the command for the money.

…Damn it, he was going to make two hundred and fifty quid towards living with Valentine Wannop–when you really could stand up on a hill…anywhere!

Tietjens was in love with Valentine Wannop, but  he would not make love to her before the war, because she was the daughter of his father’s oldest friend.

A Man Could Stand Up begins in  Valentine’s consciousness, and ends by alternating her point-of-view with Tietjens’.   On Armistice Day Valentine hears from Lady MacMaster, a woman who is indebted to Tietjens and says Tietjens is back in London, mad from the war and asking for Valentine.

And so Valentine thinks about her relationship with Tietjens.

She had never–even when they had known each other–called him anything other than Mr. So and So… She could not bring herself to let her mental lips frame his name…. She had never used anything but his surname to this gray thing, familiar object of her mother’s study, seen frequently at tea-parties…. Once she had been out with it for a whole night in a dogcart!  Think of that!… And they had spouted Tibullus one to another in moonlit mist.  And she had certainly wanted it to kiss her–in the moon-lit mists a practicality, a really completely strange bear!

A Man Could Stand Up– is a remarkable, harrowing novel about love and war.  In a different, modernist style, Ford’s book is as moving as War and Peace.

Ford considered himself an Impressionist writer, according an article by Max Saunders, Ford’s biographer, in The New Statesman (Sept. 7, 2012).  There is action, dialogue, and stream-of-consciousness punctuated with dashes, ellipses, and exclamation points.

A very fast read!  And you don’t have to read the entire tetralogy at once.

The Ovid-Quoting Contest: Tietjens vs. Miss Wannop in “Parade’s End”

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In one of my notebooks, I scribble down references to Ovid I chance to find in novels. There are a surprising number of novels in which characters quote Ovid, or, conversely, in which Ovid himself appears.  Two of the best are about Ovid’s exile, David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and the Austrian novelist Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World.  These classics seem entirely forgotten.  But my book club so far has voted me down every time I suggest them.

I have been smitten with Ovid for years. Reading his epic poem Metamorphoses, a collection of myths of transformation, was transformative.  And  Ovid’s Amores (love poems) might well be adapted as a Netflix film about the problems of modern couples. In one of the poems, Ovid mockingly consoles his girlfriend Corinna when her hair falls out after a bad dye job; in a diptych, he fumes and fulminates about Corinna’s abortion, which he learns about only after she almost dies.  

So who is my favorite Ovidian in a novel?  One of my favorite characters is Christopher Tietjens, the statistician-gentleman-soldier-linguist hero of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, a Modernist tetralogy set in England and Europe during World War I.  In the first novel, which has the unpromising title Some Do Not…, he argues with Miss Wannop, a suffragette and classicist, about the wording of some lines from Ovid’s Fasti.  

Tietjens is a true gentleman, of the kind we never meet in real life. Let us say that Ovid would not have believed in him.  When Miss Wannop and a suffragette friend appear on a golf course to shout their slogans and the friend falls down, Tietjens courteously helps them get away.   And he and Miss Wannop (Valentine), a daughter of an old friend, turn out to have much in common.  Both are bookish–well, intellectuals really–and not at all snobbish.  Tietjens, a genius, unfortunately irritates many people with the breadth of his knowledge.

And so he is not at all upset when Miss Wannop turns out to know more Latin than he does.  “Upon my soul!” Tietjens said to himself, “that girl… is the  only intelligent living soul I’ve met for years.”

Even if you don’t know Latin, you’ll feel the sexual tension.

And I admire Miss Wannop’s stubborn bluestocking style:  she does not resort to flirtatious self-denigration, which is still a problem in women’s discourse.  She proves her familiarity with the vocabulary of Ovid, who really does use certain words more than others, and points out alliteration and matters of the ear.  

She says, “The reason why I’m unconcerned about your rudeness about my Latin is that I know I’m a much better Latinist than you.  You can’t quote a few lines of Ovid without sprinkling howlers in….  It’s vastum, not longum….  “Terra tribus scopulis vastum procurrit“… It’s alto, not coelo…  “Uvidus ex alto desilientis…”  How could Ovid have written ex coelo?  The “c” after the “x” sets your teeth on edge.” 

Adelaide Clemens as Miss Wannop and Benedict Cumberbatch as Tietjens in “Parade’s End”

Tietjens’ world is peopled by characters who know poetry.  In the second novel, No More Parades, Tietjens is an officer in the army, but even when he  has just been splattered by the blood of a man blown up by a bomb, he finds an opportunity to write a sonnet.  While scribbling some paper work for men who are about to go to the front, he declares he will write a sonnet in under two and a half minutes if Captain Mackenzie provides him with end rhymes.  Captain Mackenzie agrees to do so, and adds, “If you do I’ll turn it into Latin hexameters in three.  In under three minutes.”

Just so you’ll know Tietjens has real problems, let me tell you that his wife Sylvia, a beautiful adulterous villain, hates him so much that she slanders him and ruins his reputation.  And it seems she won’t stop till she kills him.  You’ll never believe what she tells the colonel.

Parade’s End is one of the best books (well, quartets) I’ve ever read.