Portrait of a Gentleman
Parade’s End.
by Ford Madox Ford.
Knopf. 836 pp. $5.00.
The publication of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy in one volume is a long overdue act of justice. Read together in this way—as one novel really and even at that a somehow incomplete one—these four books take on a stature and pertinence they do not seem to possess when read separately. It is possible for those of us who have been up to now innocent of Ford’s genius to see what it is his adherents have been talking about.
The unique accomplishment of Parade’s End is its central character, Christopher Tietjens, a kind of corpulent, ratiocinative ghost of the 18th century. For Tietjens is one of the few characters in either English or American fiction. who can present his own position—whose intelligence, that is, is equal to that of his creator, and before whom the creator can therefore abnegate himself, so that the novel becomes a completely dramatic confrontation. The European novel has such characters, the novel of France and Russia, but the English and American novel customarily has instead such monoliths as Pickwick or Ahab or, driven to its logical conclusion, the behemoth, the great White Whale itself.
The four books of Parade’s End (Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post), published originally between 1924 and 1928, constitute a saga of the passing of an old order. What was going with the old order, what made it more than a change of climate, was the very idea of order. The rationalism of the 18th century was the last body of ideals of sufficient breadth and humanity to form a basis for a more or less stable order of life. The optimism of the 19th century, the belief in infinite improvement, was no substitute. Whatever its philosophical ramifications, it was essentially a mercantile euphoria, premised on limitless commercial expansion. And when business went, not bankrupt perhaps but dangerously unstable, all that optimism began to fall apart, persisting only in the blind whistling in the dark of the die-hards—a whistle, to be sure, that may still be heard in our day.
The latter-day Victorian and the Georgian writers were already a pretty somber lot, and by 1924 anyone of Ford’s perspicacity knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were in rats’ alley. A lot more time has gone by since then, and today our writers for the most part have their eyes on the abysmal future. But for Ford in the mid-20’s it was possible to look both ways and see what he thought he was losing, as well as what he was getting into.
In his introductory letter to A Man Could Stand Up, Ford says: “I hope . . . that this series of books, for what it is worth, may make war seem undesirable.” Well, his friend William Carlos Williams described Ford in a poem as fat and lying, and it is not hard to imagine him, with his delicate sense of the lie, laying a trap for his readers, and wishing them to fall into it even at his own expense. For many writers have done a more effective job of making “war seem undesirable” than Ford. But this isn’t what he was up to, or not primarily. War isn’t, in the pattern of Parade’s End, an unforeseen outbreak of horror, but an unavoidable step in the process of a world three-quarters gone to pot, and the other quarter well on its way.
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Christopher Tietjens is the last Tory—which is not the same as being an exponent of Toryism, for as such he would have had company. He is rational, aristocratic, and humane. This all involves certain contradictions, of course. Tietjens will not divorce his wife, though given outrageous cause, because a man does not bring charges against a woman—gentlemanly certainly, but not entirely rational. Nor is it quite rational to refuse the money left you by your father because he believed certain falsehoods against you, but allow that you will accept money left you by one of his friends who believed the same things.
Tietjens’ rationalism then, as it is subsumed in his Toryism, is not an originating so much as a regulating force. The code by which a gentleman lives is complicated and often irrational, but, once given the code, a good Tory gentleman—Christopher Tietjens—subscribes to reason in any given circumstances for the application of the code, and what reason dictates, nothing short of extreme physical measures can keep him from doing. Thus Tietjens sticks to perfectly cranky notions with an unheated steadfastness that makes him a kind of saint of reason. And like any saint he must be loved jealously, hated wickedly, universally maligned, and finally more or less crucified—finding, of course, peace of a sort in his martyrdom.
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It is a measure of the success of the novel that this saint who within his own terms (and they are pretty good terms) can do no wrong, should, despite our suspicions of any but unsavory motives, take on flesh—quite a deal of worn flesh, in fact, until he might be an alter ego of Ford himself. He is a Quixotic saint whom we see first as a clumsy, unkempt, ineffectual, rich man’s younger son, cuckolded, his name given to what may well be another man’s child. By the time we are finished, only one of these circumstances has changed, but we are nevertheless prepared to concur in his canonization.
There is some sleight of hand in all this—sudden overripe flushes of virtuosity that purport to contribute more than they really do. But despite this, we have at the end seen an antique, superannuated, anachronistic, noble man in action, and the distance our civilization has come beyond him seems, in good part, a measure of our moral poverty.
Christopher Tietjens does most to carry the novel, but he is far from alone. Ford was a prodigal writer, and he has created what Hollywood would call a “galaxy of stars.” Mark Tietjens, Christopher’s elder brother, who when he heard on the eve of the Armistice that the Allies were not going to march into Berlin, vowed never to utter a word again—and except for one break on his deathbed, never did. Sylvia Tietjens, Christopher’s Catholic wife, who is the chief victim of his saintliness, as he is of her sexual madness. The Wannops, mére et fille, the elder a writer, the younger a suffragette, a singular strain in the society of that age. Mark Tietjens’ French mistress, Marie Léonie Riotor, who had lived with him thirteen years, fixing his mutton chops and his baked potatoes, before she ever knew his full name. And there are many more. But It is their reference to Christopher Tietjens that binds them into the novel, so that even though in The Last Post Christopher appears only once, and then briefly, there is no doubt that he is still the chief character.
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Ford, then, was writing the story of a man who lived beyond the end of his world. The power and the beauty of the book will be a shock to a whole generation of readers who, coming of age after its popularity, have for the most part never heard of its existence, and know of its author only that he once changed his name. The book will doubtless be overrated in those quarters where it will have the partisan value of being in some sense a traditional novel—though its tradition is that of France, not England, and even to that tradition its adherence is far from strict. But it would be too bad for the novel to leap from obscurity to too great an eminence, for despite Ford’s accomplished storytelling, his ability to write a panoramic novel and to create characters who transcend their individuality, there is in his thinking about people and society, parallel to his positive conservatism, a tinge of nostalgic softness which makes of the old county families a kind of never-never society in which the rich were responsible, the poor proud though tractable, and all lived in bucolic splendor—this despite the fact that Ford saw only too clearly the reasons for the death of the Tory culture he must have loved very deeply.
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