3 posts tagged “ford madox ford”
I too dislike putting corpses on the couch, but even apart from the biography it's damned hard to get through Parade's End without confronting the portly specter of Henry James as the father that Ford's trying to kill. In his self-congratulatory phase, James points us to Isabel Archer's fireside meditation in Portrait of a Lady as a scene in which the highest dramatic interest is achieved solely through presenting the young lady's own consciousness; but of course this is a disingenuous description, since at this point in the novel we've been out of Isabel's head for years, have access only to rumors traded by the other characters, and want only to know how it is with her. Ford gives us the same desire, but--take this, Harry!--no corresponding satisfaction. All we want from Last Post is to be told how it is with Tietjens and Valentine; whether they have succeeded in their joint escape from a poisoned society. We barely see them. Instead we spend half the book with Tietjens's brother, who for complex and implausible reasons has been pretending for years to be a speechless stroke victim, and half with Tietjens's hateful wife--and I cannot remember a fictional character whose company I've enjoyed less.
By the end of the book, one does at least understand the design of marrying a war novel to an excruciating marriage plot; political and social forces alike are arbitrary and tormenting holdovers from an obsolete past, no more comprehensible to their victims than the sordid adult world is to James's Maisie. Tietjens, the most perceptive of the lot, is also a statistician by training and understands the futility of trying to graft causal laws onto a rudderless world. At its best, which is very good, Parade's End does homage to those brave enough to nonetheless attempt some version of a moral life. At its worst, conviction turns into caprice and the plane takes a nosedive. My edition's earnest afterword explains the thematic closure and valediction which the weird and hasty ending is meant to imply; and indeed, if you check the accounting the balance does work out. But any reader who accepts that kind of resolution has got to be a Martian.
Oh, but the Martian books I've read in my time.
Ford, Ford Madox. No More Parades (Parade's End, Volume Two). New York: Signet Classics, 1964 (1925).
Tietjens losing his memory turns out to be a red herring; this volume is narrated a little more chaotically, but that's because the whole world is falling apart -- we're on the Western Front now, which means, as we are reminded perhaps slightly too often, that there are no more parades. Tietjens's marital life overshadows the blood and guts; for murky reasons his wife desires only to torment him, and follows him all the way to France simply to twist the knife. It's to Ford's credit that this unpromising premise actually yields a lot of good writing.
Ford's conceiving of the tetralogy, as recounted in his autobiography, is an associative episode weird enough to be right at home in the fiction; a chance encounter with Sir Edward Elgar reminds him of Henry James and suggests the idea of writing the war à la "What Maisie Knew" -- history not described from a remove but registered at ground level, in all its disorder, with no explanations imposed. Ford likes to throw bizarre situations at the reader and then loop backward for their causes; but since his characters always seem to act slightly in excess of any possible justification, Tietjens's mess of a private life ends up seeming as wrongheaded and inexplicable as the war itself. Public parade, private parade; it's all in bad shape.
Ford, Ford Madox. Some Do Not... (Parade's End, Volume One). New York: Signet Classics, 1964 (1924).
Ford's third-person narrator doesn't have the personality of Dowell in The Good Soldier, but the trade-in gains him a sharper lens on his characters, who are really wonderful, especially our hero Tietjens, a Tory statistician blessed with an eidetic memory until he steps too close to an exploding shell, and our heroine Valentine Wannop, a sharp-tongued suffragette who corrects Tietjens's Latin. We don't see the trenches in this volume; it's a comedy of British manners, folded origami-style into a series of magnificent and maddening chronological divagations that find their way home only after the location of home has been forgotten. Temporal confusion and characters with mental impairment are of course modernist fixtures -- what's odd here is that the two aren't formally linked; everyone's point of view zooms through time as freely as Tietjens's. More to come!
