Ford Madox Ford's LAST POST

A lot of people -- including no less a figure than Dorothy Parker -- have bagged on this final novel in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End quartet, but Last Post might actually be my favorite of the sequence. And largely for the same reasons that Parker et al have found it an unsatisfactory read.

I suspect this is largely because everyone expects this last novel to just wrap up Chrissie and Valentine's love story -- which it does, sort of -- but Last Post throws a bit of a curve ball, if I may use an American baseball metaphor about this veddy veddy British novel. For Last Post is told almost entirely from the points of view of Parade's End's ancillary characters, particularly Chrissie's much older brother, Mark Tietjens. And Mark Tietjens had some kind of stroke or attack or idiopathic something* on Armistice Day, leaving him paralyzed and speechless, communicating with eye blinks alone.

Sharing internal narrative duties are his life-long lady love, the French actress he "took up" in a very businesslike arrangement early in his youth and only married after his idiopathic violent unknown event left her potentially financially vulnerable to the machinations of Chrissie, or, really, Chrissie's estranged wife, the magnificent and malicious Sylvia.
Marie Tietjens has only been obliquely referenced before this novel, but swiftly becomes a character whose experiences and perspectives are a pleasure to share, the only Tietjens-or-Tietjens-by-marriage who actually appreciates the thousand-some acres of Yorkshire, the famously massive cedar tree and the ancient grey house of Groby. Marie has long had her heart set on someday retiring to the French countryside, marrying some nice undemanding landholder, and ending her days as mistress of a nice old agricultural establishment; since the war put paid to that and so Groby becomes her paradise instead, where she does a nice job dealing with the chickens and the cider presses and doesn't seem to mind that she also has to minister to an invalid.

Marie's pleasure is contrasted with the displeasure of Sylvia's life-long tantrum, which in this last book takes the form of renting out Groby (control over which Mark and Chrissie turned over to her earlier in the quartet) to an insufferable rich American woman who entertainingly claims "spiritual descent" from Madame de Maintenon (but who keeps insisting Marie Antionette was mean to her. Um.) and who considers it to be rich Americans' job to take over for the ancien regime, not by replacing it with democracy, but by supplanting Europe's hereditary aristocracy like a brash young understudy edging out the aging prima donna.The fact that the unseen (for the whole novel!) Chrissie is now making his living selling off the prima donna's clunky old unwanted antique furniture to furnish the understudy's homes in America is an enjoyable irony on which no one in the story comments. The hereditary aristocracy, both Tietjens brothers have been seen to observe in these novels, is pretty much played out, exhausted, never really up to the task of governing the simpler pre-War world they ruled, let alone this complicated modern one everybody sees coming.

It all serves to comment somewhat bitterly, perhaps, on how completely things both have and haven't changed as a result of the Great War. Which is really, after all, what these novels are for, pitting as they do "The Last Tory", the "18th Century" Chrissie Tietjens against the 20th century. We don't have to do much thinking to figure out who's going to win that one.

It would thus be easy to dismiss Parade's End as so much reactionary harrumphing, but that would be an error. As I've mentioned, both Tietjens brothers come around to the idea that maybe the existence of a hereditary "administrative class" was never all that great an idea to begin with, so while neither of them is eager to embrace the new world they see coming, unlike the types that nowadays bray about being conservative, the brothers Tietjens are trying neither to hang on to power nor to use what power they do have to thwart progress. The world can go harum scarum if it wants; they're going to stay in their little corner of the 18th century and enjoy it while it lasts; it looks like it can last at least until the next generation is grown up. That, they seem to say as "Last Post"** is blown over the story, will have to do.

*A doctor describes what's wrong with Mark as "fulminant hemiplegia" which is one of those Latin terms that basically just describe what is wrong (in this case, extremely sudden paralysis of half of the body) in Latin and sheds no actual light on what is wrong. Various others in the novel -- including Mark's lover and later wife Marie -- seem mostly to regard this as something Mark chose, as his final withdrawal from the stupidities of early 20th century social life and his responsibilities therein. There may be an actual medical component to Mark's problem, they concede, but it could have been overcome or at least accommodated had he wanted to, but Mark's not even going to try to overcome it, and prefers his new life as someone to be waited on hand and foot and propitiated like a god.

**Sort of the British version of "Taps".

Ford Madox Ford's A MAN COULD STAND UP

I read most of A Man Could Stand Up, the third volume of Ford Madox' Ford's Parade's End, on Armistice Day, which lent a certain extra poignancy to the central image evoked by the title, of a man being able safely to stand up to his full height, above ground, without worrying about thereby meeting instant and violent death. The experiences of trench warfare as evoked in the book's middle third reduce pretty much everybody there to longing for a world in which that simple act, which nearly everyone who has ever lived has probably never even thought about, so ordinary is it, would again be possible.

That the other two thirds of the book take place on Armistice Day itself, the very first one, was interesting too, in a way, but like those sections themselves that fact paled in comparison to the thought of thousands of Tommies dreaming of the day when they could stand up again.

In a similar way, the focus of Parade's End has also narrowed to something simple, elemental, and boring, its core as an (admittedly unconventional) love story. While the newly introduced and the already known subordinate characters -- the Head of the girls' school where Valentine Wannop has spent the war as a games mistress (aka gym teacher), the subalterns and brother officers and members of the battalion over which Christopher Tietjens assumes command -- are all fully realized and get their moments to shine, this book is really all about Valentine and Chrissie. This makes it a leaner and sharper (and yes, shorter) read than Some Do Not or No More Parades, but also, surprisingly for a story that contains all of the tension and drama and horror of the fighting in France during the Great War, rather a pallid one.

I attribute this mostly to its most glaring absence: Sylvia Tietjens. We do not know for certain that she has ceded the field to Valentine, but she is, at any rate, not on it at all; she is barely even mentioned except in passing. We feel her most strongly in another absence: all of the furniture is gone from the flat she shared with Chrissie in London, a plot point on which a lot of Valentine's story turns as Lady MacMaster, once Valentine's close friend but now "siding" with Sylvia out of hatred for the man who kept her husband financially afloat and supplied the idea that got MacMaster his knighthood (it has been observed before that sometimes there is no more hateful figure in one's life than one's benefactor) seizes on it as a way, perhaps, to manipulate Chrissie via Valentine into forgetting that MacMaster owes him pretty much everything. Look at to what a sad state of affairs Chrissie has come home, Lady MacMaster says, none too subtly hinting that Valentine owes it to everyone to be his reward. Ugly stuff, this.

But of course, Valentine doesn't care about the ugliness, even though the possibility looms that the gossip that this news has started could cost her her job. Though there has been no contact at all between Valentine and Chrissie since he returned to France at the end of Some Do Not, though they've never spoken of feelings for each other and have barely even admitted to themselves that they even have feelings, Valentine's thoughts go immediately to the notion that she shall live with Chrissie now that the war is over.*

That Chrissie's thoughts have gone in much the same direction is pretty much just conveniently coincidental. These are neither of them people who air out their feelings to their closest chums or analyze them or think about romance at all; indeed, the way in which they are actually very well matched is that both cherish an idea about couplehood that is very much outside the norm: that domestic and (presumably) sexual intimacy is merely the means to the end of getting to talk to each other whenever they want, to have the kind of long and deeply involved conversations that are impossible to have in public, where any old idiotic acquaintance can interrupt them, where any old busybody can half overhear and misinterpret and blow into a scandal or a misunderstanding with ridiculous consequences (as is pretty much the very nature of the overall story of Parade's End!), where closing time or the end of a party or a car crashing into the horse pulling their cart can put a premature end to things.

Of course, Sylvia might very much have liked to have that, too. As we learned in No More Parades, Chrissie is the only man she's ever talked to who didn't bore her to death. And he was hers by law. But she'd gone about accomplishing this all wrong: Chrissie was probably the only man left in England for whom the first move of jumping his bones in a railway carriage was the worst way to begin the relationship. Had she let her brains show first instead -- and Sylvia, though perhaps not a great Latinist, is no dumb blonde -- she might have gotten all she could wish for. But how was she to know that, in Edwardian England?

Yeah, I'm still Team Sylvia, even though I also find myself kind of happy for Valentine as she stands shyly next to her man, holding his hand for the first time as he toasts the very first Eleven Eleven toast with his army buddies. I missed Mrs. Tietjens terribly, this novel, and hope against hope to see her again in the last volume, The Last Post.

Otherwise, I'm not sure there's any point to finishing this. Hmph.

*Though she does entertain some thoughts against making a move toward him, and they're very good thoughts:  "What was the coming together that was offered her? Nothing... but being dragged again into that man's intolerable worries as machinists are dragged into wheels by belts..." I read that and punched the air, but alas, Valentine gave herself very good advice and didn't follow it. Le sigh.

Ford Madox Ford's NO MORE PARADES

Where the Great War was just a trace element of Some Do Not, the first volume of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End tetralogy, in the second, No More Parades, it's the main event, the setting. From its first pages we are plunged into the tumult and confusion of Christopher "Chrissie" Tietjen's efforts to get a brand new draft of over 2000 Canadian soldiers ready for their posting -- and they've turned up with their uniforms and nothing else. All part of a day's work for Chrissie, pulling tin hats and identification discs and soldiers' wills out of thin air all because some military bureaucrats back in Blighty are earning themselves knighthoods by cutting corners and saving the taxpayers' money.*

Interestingly, for the first several chapters of the novel I found a certain ambiguity as to where these events fit chronologically with those of Some Do Not. From that first novel, we know that Chrissie has gone to the Front at least twice: which time is being depicted here? The ambiguity adds an extra intensity to Chrissie's struggles to outfit soldiers, survive a German air attack, not think about his wife, Sylvia, or about "his girl" (who is not named for quite some time but whom we know is Valentine, but... does he know that? Has he sustained his traumatic brain injury and come through it or is that in his future?) and to write a sonnet in two and a half minutes.** Which his fellow captain is then to render as Latin hexameters in the same amount of time as a sort of friendly competition to divert them a bit from the pressure and the horror. Good God I love this book!

But mere scenes of war and chaos are never enough for writers like Ford Madox Ford, who (quite properly) cannot resist messing with things by introducing his other brilliantly vivid characters into the mix at the worst possible times for them to be introduced. Enter Sylvia Tietjens, beautiful and bored and cruel like a neglected cat, who as a high society beauty, a lady of fashion, a veritable queen in her own right, can pull all sorts of strings (an image that recurs towards the end of No More Parades when Chrissie phrases her actions in terms of her having "pulled the string of a shower-bath", meaning her thinks of them as pranks and nothing worse) and manages to barge in on Tietjen's commanding officer demanding to see her husband.

Oh, Sylvia! I feel for her even more after the second half of this novel, which is mostly told from her point of view. Her respect and admiration for Chrisse have only grown together with a strong sexual desire for him that makes her "tremble" and "vibrate" even when discussing him with the man she once eloped on him with (who is in every way Chrissie's inferior and who, we learned, bored Sylvia to tears almost before they made landfall in France back in 1912 in Some Do Not). Nothing she has managed to do from home seems to have gotten a rise out of her husband, so she'll do her best to achieve that in person, war and duty be damned. This is selfish of her, of course, but the reader has already decided that the surname "Tietjens" is probably the word for "the most stubborn person like ever" in some obscure dialect of medieval Dutch; Chrissie is stubborn in his clinging to his rationality and his outmoded ideals (he tells his C.O. at one point that he took all his public school education on morals and conduct seriously, never outgrew it, and seems to be the only member of his generation so afflicted); Chrissie's brother Mark was stubborn, last novel, in believing the worst of his little brother and in determining to bring Chrissie's imagined shortcomings to their father's attention whatever the cost, and, in this novel, in making all of that up to Chrissie in well-intentioned but unworkable ways that only wind up making things worse for Chrissie; Sylvia is only a Tietjens by marriage but is just as stubborn as the born Tietjens about how her marriage was supposed to be and how she must settle for nothing less than exactly what she wanted, which was a loving and passionate life-long twosome with the most brilliant and capable man she has ever known: her husband.

Sylvia's desires are natural and understandable; her "villainy" if such it must be called lies in her limitations: she is a wealthy, well-born Lady of Fashion; men fall at her feet; her job is simply to keep herself beautiful because her purpose in life is decorative, is as an object of desire. She's more than doing her job, but the rest of society is not living up to the bargain she has always understood to have been struck since someone first noticed she was pretty. The rapt adoration and constant attendance on her of her chosen consort is her due! But having never had to be anything but pretty and fashionable and socially adroit, she's never learned how to actually deserve said adoration and attendance. It's tragic, really.

As is the way things are left at novel's end, which leaves Chrissie with no choice but to go to the front and probably be killed. His marriage is his undoing in every way: the lies he allowed to be spread to protect Sylvia the consequences of her earliest tantrums, the malice and jealousy exercised upon him by her other admirers, and, yes, the feelings he's allowed himself to develop for "the girl" who is his true match -- feelings he's not acted upon, but is believed to have done so by everybody, including his wife, which is what set her on her trajectory to pull the string of the shower bath. Oh, if only what had doused Chrissie had really only been water!

*This puts the current war's ongoing controversy over body armor and lack of toiletries into a certain perspective, doesn't it? Except of course the modern counterparts to Tietjen's faceless adversaries don't get knighthoods; they just get to keep their jobs.

**Of course I love this bit above all others, though I find his methods differ strongly from my own. My own record for speed sonnetry before witnesses is two minutes and about ten seconds, on October 8, 2009 at Chicago's Argo Tea House. But I was among friends only and no one was bleeding out at the time.

Ford Madox Ford's SOME DO NOT

The first volume of Ford Madox Ford's brilliant tetrology later called Parade's End*, Some Do Not is the story of a deeply rational man living in deeply irrational times and the consequences of his irrational clinging to outmoded standards for proper conduct far more than it is, as generally marketed, that of a love triangle.**

Christopher Tietjens, youngest son of "the" Tietjens, a family who originally came over with William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution, is an unprepossessing figure of a man, fair, doughy, of a "good old family" but otherwise of no real consequence except for that some freak of heredity has left him a mathematical genius. As the novel opens, he is wrestling with the issue of whether it would be correct of him to accede to fudging some numbers for the government that employs him to be a brilliant but pliable mathematician. Which "Chrissie" is not, even when it is in his very best interests possible to be so.

For this is also a guy married to a seriously beautiful woman, the gorgeous and careless Sylvia, who was already pregnant when she jumped his bones in a railway carriage and thereby convinced him to throw in his lot with her for good or ill. When a child is born not quite enough months after the wedding, he claims it anyway and fiercely refuses to care that it might not be his, because that is not rational and it would create unseemly drama were he to do otherwise (and, actually, he loves the boy). Avoiding drama is his highest priority, making him a deeply relate-able figure for this reader.

And so later on when a bored Sylvia, who would, thank you very much, have preferred a row over the child's parentage as a sign that the man she married actually gave a damn about her and their life together, not only cuckholds him but runs off to France with a guy, he is so drama- and gossip-phobic that he lets it be generally believed that he is the cheater and Sylvia recovering from her being so very ill-used on the Continent. Better, he reasons, that the Public thinks him as just another philandering jerk like all the other philandering jerks out there, than for that same Public to regard his wife as a whore.

This pattern of behavior is very much his stock-in-trade, even though it never comes out well (his careless generosity with his inheritance, for example, earns him far more hatred than gratitude; far better, it would seem, if he'd just blown it on whores and coke women and the ponies like a proper entitled douchebalrog). The seeds thus planted bear wicked mutant fruit and flower; once the Public thinks of him as just another philandering idiot, everybody's ready to believe the worst of him in every encounter. Whether it's being caught comforting his best friend's mistress in a train cabin not unlike the one in which Sylvia thrust herself into his life, or driving a young woman home through the fog and having their horse and cart smashed up by an idiot in a motorcar, circumstances always conspire to make Chrissie look like a jackass.

All of this would be drama -- and comedy, for sometimes the piling on of woes and misunderstandings evokes the work of P.G. Wodehouse -- enough, but there's oh so much more going on. Such as the young woman he was driving home when her horse got nearly killed by a car, one Valentine Wannop, whose name gossip has linked with Chrissie's already because Chrissie's father was close friends with Valentine's and has basically supported Valentine and her novelist mother since Professor Wannop died (so naturally some of the gossip is that Valentine could be Chrissie's half-sister). The plot here reminds me a lot of that of Robertson Davies' Leaven of Malice, in which false and malicious rumors of a young woman's engagement have similar results; towards the end of Some Do Not Valentine compares their situation to having been caught in a vice and forced together. It's an apt comparison. But there is, apparently one thing you must never, ever put in a trap vice, and that is Christopher Tietjens, a Good Soldier even before he becomes one.

Where Some Do Not excels the most is in its little scenes -- conversations between Chrissie and Sylvia (who actually is in love with her husband), exquisitely uncomfortable breakfast parties, slow and thoughtful interludes in mid-golf game, philological arguments in a horse-drawn cart -- where the dialogue only tells a tiny bit of what is going on. The plot developments are extraordinarily subtle, revolving around things like bounced checks and the way Sylvia does or does not walk into a room.*** And the simple, ordinary prose style is glorious; if Ford Madox Ford isn't one of your literary heroes, it's gotta just be because you haven't read him.

I haven't even come to the fascinating sub-plots: the stories of Chrissie's best friend and semi-toady MacMaster and Mr. and Mrs. Duchemin; the faint background struggles over the inheritance of the Tietjens' estate since a combination of death and desultoriness bump Chrissie from youngest son to heir (once his father has died) and thus render his own-not-his-own son the heir's heir even though he's not really a Tietjens -- and a Roman Catholic to boot, like his mama, and like the original owners of the Tietjens' estate of Groby before the Glorious Revolution led to some good Protestant Dutchmen taking over the place; Sylvia's own entire life apart from her husband. Trust me: it's all fantastic, though.

Oh, and then there's the Great War.

World War I is really just a backdrop for this first novel in the quartet, but what little of it there is, explodes the plot to an extraordinary degree: Some Do Not and, presumably, its sequels, may call it "shell shock" as that was the contemporary term but what is really being dealt with is, not post-traumatic stress disorder, but traumatic brain injury, giving the whole work a chilling present-day resonance that makes me think Parade's End might be a wonderful candidate for another modern high school update the way Emma became Clueless and The Taming of the Shrew became 10 Things I Hate About You. Say, high school and the years right after, to accommodate Chrissie's going to war.

Which is to say that this book, these books, are truly timeless.

And they're on all those best ___ novels of ____ period or category or whatever for a reason.

*Yes, yes, recently adapted as a television miniseries by HBO, but I found said adaptation a disappointment about which I decline to speak further.

**Which the fact that this very phrase makes me vomit in my mind and yet I love this book to pieces should tell you something right there about marketing and how people who have only skimmed a book cock up trying to describe it to others. Hurl.

***And while we're on the subject of Sylvia, whom I suspect was maybe sort of intended as the villain of the piece but is actually the character who most captured my sympathies, Ford Madox Ford writes women extraordinarily well. By the middle of the novel, the reader understands perfectly everything that Sylvia does and feels she might have done much the same; by novel's end Valentine has gone from annoying diversion with LOVE INTEREST in neon over her head to a person whose struggles feel as real and well-realized as any heroine's ever have.