Appreciation: Parade's End

Well, Chez Buce has completed its readaloud of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End--all 836 pages of it, all four volumes including the one that Graham Greene seemed to feel shouldn't ever have been written. It was worth it (having done the work, how could we think otherwise?)--worth it, but I must say a bit of a slog sometimes. It's hard to remember a book that is such a conbination of dazzling structure, delicate insight and perverse, wrong-headed self-indulgent eccentricity--if I see another exclamation point or ellipse, I may break something!...but either way, I can't remember anything else quite like it.

I guess Parade's End is remembered (if at all) as a "war novel"--World War I again, as with so many others. But as Robie Macauley points out in a superb introduction, it is not about the war per se as it is about a whole way of life--call it "Edwardian" or more broadly "Tory," or for lack of anything more adequate, just "before the war."

Here it gets stylistically interesting. A second-rate novel would try to paint a panorama. Ford is acute enough to recognize that he can't do that so he focuses instead on a small number--half a dozen or so--incidents, carefully and lovingly developed: a progression d'effect, Macauley observes, channeling Flaubert. Most of these have little or nothing to do with the war itself, although I must say Ford's account of one German bomb landing on one English trench--and its aftermath--is as hair-raising a piece of war literature as ever I've read. Virtually all the others count as something closer to drawing-room drama, although the war is always somewhere in the background, a looming presence.

Reading the closing chapters this past week or so, I found myself to my own surprise reminded of another book I was reading at the same time --Gyula Krúdy's Sunflower. One of my problems with Sunflower is that I didn't know quite how to take it, because the world of rural Hungary seemed so far away. Oddly enough, Ford's Edwardian England seems almost equally distant, and I sometimes found myself just as wildered with Ford as I had with Krúdy. At one point, Mrs. B interrupted to say (testily?)--you're reading it as comedy. Are you sure it is comedy? The answers were no, I wasn't sure it was comedy, but yes, I was reading it as comedy because I couldn't think of it any other way. I suppose the fall of a civilization should not be lightly regarded but there may be something to laugh about in it even so.

I do think there is one insurmountable problem with Parade's End and that is a certain hollowness at the core--Christoher Tietjens, the hero, the protagonist, the one who acts or suffers (mostly suffers) through the tumultuous events of his time. Macauley reports that he was modeled on a real person. Maybe, but I suspect the really real person was Ford himself who, from his pictures, looks just about the same as Tietjens is described. I think the best you can say for Christopher is that he fits in the classic tradition of novelistic heroes, from Don Quixote to Prince Myshkin. The trouble is that both Don Quixote and Prince Myshkin are to be treated with irony, and it is the irony itself that makes them so rich and subtle. I suppose you can give an ironic reading to Tietjens, but I'm not sure Ford understood it or intended it.

In my mind, that is a major drawback, but it isn't fatal. Even given the difficulty with the protagonist, there is so much richness of detail in the individual scenes-comic or otherwise--that I'm delighted to have read it and will cherish the experience.

My Problem with Ford Madox Ford

is pretty much the same as my problem with Herodotus: I can't figure out to what extent he is in on the joke. Granted that Herodotus is a long way away; but it may be that Edwardian England, truly understood, is nearly as far. That's the thought foremost in my mind as a heave on midway through Parade's End, Ford's tetralogy of World War I.

Case in point: Ford, whom Hemingway with characteristic unkind accuracy described as a "golden walrus," apparently had an unaccountable Way with the Ladies. One can only gaze, and admire. But would Ford follow the pattern of his novelistic hero and proposition a potential new conquest with the phrase: "Will you become my mistress tonight?"--adding, with romantic suavity, "I am going out to-morrow at 8.30 from Waterloo,"

I know; it beggars all expectation to suppose that the Heir of Groby in 1917 would have offered anything on the order of "how 'bout droppin' your knickers, chickie babie?" But Ford's actual offering is so unfamiliar that Mrs. B thought it must be a misreading or a baroque form of parody. It was no misreading; Ford repeats it more than once.

Which leaves a question: is Ford's line: (1) straight reporting of what an Edwardian gent would (a) have said; or (b) be thought by Ford to have said--or (2) some sort of rich, subtle and complicated irony?

Despite a long career of watching PBS Sunday night soapers, I am sufficiently unfamiliar with Edwardian manners absolutely to reject (1)(a); I would like to believe it is (2), but I'm not so sure. Ford's irony, if that is what it is, is subtle to the point of evanescence.

A more general example. This protagonist, the Heir of Groby--Christopher Tietjens--is presented repeatadly as a paragon both of virtue and of competence. Again, the question is how we take this. For comparison: no question that novelistic ur-hero, Don Quixote is (a) the last of the gentlemen; and (b) bathed in irony. That is why he is so enduring. With Tietjens, the evidence is harder to evaluate. As to competence, we really don't have much evidence, except the suggestion that he is good at arithmetic. As to virtue, he seems to hew to a standard known only to himself.

Do we catch a twinkle in Ford's eye? It's hard to catch it--harder still when you realize as described, appears to look a lot like Ford himself.

I mock, I vulgarize. I suppose the nearest can offer as defense is the ploy of impatience: Ford's presentation is complex, leisured, loaded with ellipses and exclamation points. For these and other reasons, it can be maddening. And yet, and yet... and yet at the same time, it is oddly hypnotic. Ford seems to have put thought into every line; his presentation, if leisured, is also loving. One wants to throw it across the room--and yet one does not want to let go. I'm pretty sure I will stick with it. At least I will be to savor passages like this:

Obviously he was not immune from the seven deadly sins, in the way of a man. One might lie, yet not bear false witness against a neighbor; one might kill, yet not without fitting provocation or for self-interest; one might conceive of theft as reiving cattle from the false Scots which was the Yorkshireman's duty; one might fornicate, obviously, as long as you did not fuss about it unhealthily. That was the right of the Seigneur ina world of Other Ranks. He hadn't personally committed any of these sins to any great extent. One reserved the right so to do and to take the consequences.

I'm not at all sure I know what to make of all that, but I love it, and I know I want more.

That's The Guy!

A condescending Underbelly shoutout to Anonymous, who correctly fingered* the author our new tagline as this guy, acting as sock puppet for this guy, back in the days when you could have a jolly time condescending to the poor, the unwashed, the unlettered, or (come to think about it) just about anybody except the little knot of shared DNA around the Home Place.

Near-miss guesses included "Gilbert & Sullivan" and "Oscar Wilde," which seems to suggest that there really is a period style.
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*Actually, it never crossed my mind that the answer was just a Google away. Quizzes are no fun any more...

Say Again?

I’m still working on this one:

The only sure and solid pleasures of life—the only ones of which you cannot be deprived by any metaphysician—are those of the chase, of war, of love, of the table, of religious intolerance and of the stage.

Ford Madox Ford, Provence 185 (Ecco Press Ed. 1979)