Ford Madox Ford was a hugely prolific novelist, essayist and literary critic in the first half of the twentieth century whom few contemporary American readers are likely to have heard of and even fewer to have read. Yet two of his myriad publications are so highly admired that they regularly appear on “Greatest Novel” lists. Ford’s most often cited book is The Good Soldier from 1915, which appears on the Modern Library’s, the Guardian’s, the Observer’s, and the BBC lists of 100 greatest novels. Anthony Burgess called Ford the ‘greatest English novelist” of the twentieth century, and other great admirers on record include Graham Greene, William Carlos Williams and Julian Barnes, so I am in good company in my own admiration for Ford.
Ford, who lived in Winchelsea in East Sussex in the first decade of the twentieth century, found himself with neighbors who included Stephen Crane, Henry James, H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad. Conrad he became particularly close to, and the two collaborated on three novels together: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of a Crime (published in 1924, but written decades earlier). Ford’s most admired work from this period, however, was The FifthQueen trilogy (1906-08), three historical romances based on the life of Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII.
But for my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” I’m going with Ford’s later powerful work, the tetralogy known as Parade’s End (1924-28). On the Modern Library list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the 20th century, Parade’s End appears as number 57. Curiously, it was also ranked as number 57 on the BBC list of the 100 greatest British novels of all time. And it appears here as number 34 (alphabetically) on my own list.
The four novels that make up Parade’s End are set in England and on the Western Front during and immediately after the First World War. It chronicles the upheavals of British society taking place during and after the Great War, particularly as they affect the protagonist, the upper class Christopher Tietjens, his shrewish wife Sylvia, and a young rebellious suffragette named Valentine Wannop.
In the first novel, Some Do Not (1924), we are introduced to Christopher Tietjens, a highly intelligent but socially awkward government statistician whose views are conservative, his morals Victorian, and his demeanor emotionless. He’s not popular with his fellows and even less so with his wife Sylvia, a vain socialite who left him four months previous and as this book gets underway is asking to come back. Even in this situation, we are told, he “seemed to have no feelings about the matter.” Divorcing his wife, no matter what she may have done to him, would be immoral in Tietjens’ view, though he would accept it if she divorced him. This, however, she cannot do, being a strict Roman Catholic, and so she devises devious ways to hurt and humiliate her husband, while he considers her a “tremendous discipline,” essentially his cross to bear.
By chance Tietjens meets the audacious suffragette activist Valentine Wannop on a golf course, where he deliberately throws off a policeman who is chasing her. Thrown together again by chance, the two become intimate friends, but not sexually, that being anathema to Tietjens’ moral code.
The second part of Some Do Not begins several years later, in 1917, with a shell-shocked Tietjens home from the war and trying to get his mind back to normal with the clear intention of returning to the war. In the second novel, No More Parades (1925), we are in the mist of the war, with Captain Christopher Tietjens at a base camp in Rouen trying to move 3,000 troops, many of them Canadian volunteers, to the front line trenches and ably dealing with the frustrating incompetence of the English army and their French allies. And doing so while trying to carry on in a hut constantly being shelled by Germans, whose shrapnel kills a Welsh soldier who’s asking for leave, and who ultimately bleeds to death in Tietjens’ arms. After the all clear, a colonel arrives from the commanding officer, Tietjens’ godfather General Campion, to tell him a lady has come from England to see him. It is Sylvia, who wants him to sign an agreement to allow her to live at Tietjens’ ancestral home, and to name their son Michael as heir to the estate (given Sylvia’s promiscuity, Tietjens cannot even be sure Michael is his own son). While Sylvia is staying in a room at the best hotel in Rouen, she entices two possible lovers, one a general, to come to her room, and Tietjens physically throws them out one at a time. For this he is brought before General Campion, who gives him a choice between a court martial and reassignment to the front. Since a court martial will make public Sylvia’s infidelities, Tietjens moves toward the front for the third novel.
Volume III, A Man Could Stand Up (1926), begins on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, at the school where Valentine Wannop is teaching, amid great celebration, when Valentine receives a phone call telling her that Christopher Tietjens is in London and needs help. Valentine, who loves Christopher, emotionally commits at this point to attaching herself to him. The second part of the book takes us back to the front six months earlier where Tietjens, under constant bombardments, is beginning mentally to commit himself to being with Valentine when the war is over. In the last part of the book, Valentine arrives at Gray’s Inn in London, where Valentine’s mother attempts to dissuade the couple from becoming lovers, and where soldiers from Tietjens’ unit keep arriving to celebrate the Armistice with him.
Graham Greene thought the final book of the tetralogy, Last Post, “was more than a mistake—it was a disaster,” and he left it out of his edition of 1962-63. He called it sentimental and said that it cleared up too many of the “valuable ambiguities” left unresolved after the climactic book three. Most readers have disagreed. I will skip any summation of Last Post, since I certainly don’t want to spoil things for anyone reading this tetralogy. Let me just say that the mad conflict and emotional turmoil that has always been characteristic of Tietjens’ war experiences as well as his private life have not been eliminated by the armistice or his finally succumbing to his love for Valentine. This is no romantic idyll. And remember, Sylvia still resides at the family homestead.
Ford must be one of the most psychologically insightful novelists in all of English history. His exploration of what could possibly motivate a man like Tietjens to act as he does, or a woman like Valentine, is fascinating to watch, but his most significant creation must be Sylvia. Greene called her “surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel,” but the genius of Ford is to make us understand her not simply as a bored, promiscuous socialite with sadistic and narcissistic tendencies—though that is not an inaccurate description—but as a woman who married a man whose “saintliness” she recognizes but cannot appreciate, and who wants to punish him for refusing to react like other men would to her infidelities. Her sadism is a product of her sexual attraction to her husband. Ford’s narration, which spends much of the time inside the minds of Christopher, Sylvia, and Valentine, is perfectly geared toward understanding their psychology.
It may seem a fool’s errand to take a work so interior and turn it into a story for the screen, but in a critically acclaimed joint BBC/HBO effort in 2012, British director Susana White brought Parade’s End to the screen in a five-part television serial written by acclaimed dramatist Tom Stoppard. It starred Rebecca Hall as Sylvia, Adelaide Clemens as Valentine, and a brilliantly cast Benedict Cumberbatch as the stiff-upper-lip, don’t-ever-let-on-that-you-have-actual-feelings Christopher Tietjens. The series managed to catapult the century-old tetralogy into the best seller ranks again. So if you are hesitant to commit to a four-volume read, check out the series to get your feet wet first. Or better yet, use the promise of the series as a potential reward for finishing the books. I suspect you’ll be glad you did.