SOURCE: "Parade's End," in Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman, Wesleyan University Press, 1964, pp. 112-74.

[In the following excerpt, Ohmann compares Parade's End with The Good Soldier.]

More obviously than The Good Soldier, the four novels Some Do Not … (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up— (1926) and The Last Post (1928)—all republished in the United States in 1950 as Parade's End—are the culmination of Ford's efforts to record and to evaluate the life of his times. In their breadth of scene and their length, these novels are reminiscent of Victorian and Edwardian social realism. They present a picture of England, particularly of upper-class England, on the brink of World War I, in the trenches of the Western Front, and in the uneasy peace that followed the Treaty of Versailles.

Parade's End covers a more ambitious range of affairs than The Good Soldier, and it is a frankly intellectual work. It offers numerous passages of reflection, of discussion, of argument not only about men and women—the relationship which Dowell calls "the first thing in the world"—but also about English finance, politics, social reform, and the conduct of the war in Westminster and in Flanders and France. And where The Good Soldier works by implication, Parade's End is often explicit. Dowell, for example, questions the ideals and the actions of the Ashburnhams. But Valentine Wannop concludes that Edith Ethel Duchemin sincerely aspires to the virtues she can only imitate. "Valentine knew that Edith Ethel really loved beauty, circumspection, urbanity. It was no hypocrisy that made her advocate the Atalanta race of chastity."

This same shift from the implicit toward the explicit, from question toward conclusion, is evident in the whole thematic movement of the tetralogy. In the opening chapter of Some Do Not…, Christopher Tietjens, in a comically one-sided dispute with Vincent Macmaster, sets forth a scale of moral values: "I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again, no talking about it. He'd no doubt be in the end better, and better off, if he didn't. Just as it would probably be better for him if he didn't have the second glass of whisky and soda." The ethical contrast, of course, is typically Fordian. Tietjens stands for a scrupulous fidelity to Christian morality or, as he terms it on other occasions, "saintliness" or "Anglican sainthood." But next to that ideal he prizes direct self-expression. Both of these standards of conduct he terms "clean," and he opposes them to the absolute bottom of his scale, "lachrymose polygamy," whose practitioners disguise fornication with "polysyllabic Justification by Love" and attempt to "creep" into "heaven." Such self-deceit and pretentious virtue are "filthy" and "loathsome." And Tietjens measures more than private life with his scale of values: making a success of a public career is also a "dirty business."

Tietjens' apparently incidental argument—it arises from Macmaster's casual quotation of Rossetti—prepares for all that follows. The ethical attitudes Tietjens describes are echoed and re-echoed in the course of the tetralogy and spring, again in typical Fordian fashion, from a psychological basis. Tietjens thinks, "Stoic or Epicurean; Caliph in the harem or Dervish desiccating in the sand; one or the other you must be." The tetralogy qualifies his thought to one and the other you must be—for the impulse toward goodness lives in the human personality side by side with the impulse toward evil. Repression of passion, more likely than not, leads to its lawless expression. The Reverend Mr. Duchemin "acquired the craving for drink when fasting, from finishing the sacramental wine after communion services." Tietjens' promiscuous wife Sylvia knows the "stimulation to be got out of parsimonious living." Valentine, after a wartime term of service in a public girls' school, "a sort of nonconformist cloister," longs for "the sea of Tibullus, of the Anthologists, of Sappho, even." Even Tietjens, whose wish has always been for relentless self-control, has married Sylvia because he made love to her in a railway carriage.

Like these of its members, at once individual and representative, English society as Ford presents it is impelled both to goodness and evil, both to control and to express its pride, anger, jealousy, sexual passion. It subscribes officially to the Christian code of conduct. But it lives according to an intricate system of moral shifts and compromises. It pretends to virtue; it deceives itself; it goes on talking with "polite animation" as if it had never heard Mr. Duchemin's voice insistent with alcohol.

To introduce the particular compromises of his society, or rather, to expose them, is one of Ford's principal aims in Parde's End. Indeed, in Some Do Not … his characters so frequently take up and expand the title, the principal leitmotiv, that they virtually compose an ethical primer for gentlemen and women, witness the following quotations on love and marriage:

No gentleman thinks such things of his wife [as that she may have seduced him].

Such calamities [as a wife's infidelity] are the will of God. A gentleman accepts them.

A woman who has been let down by one man has the right—has the duty for the sake of her child—to let down a man.

If a man who's a gentleman suffers the begetting of his child he must, in decency, take the consequences.

No one but a blackguard would ever submit a woman to the ordeal of divorce.

There's no reason why a man shouldn't have a girl [a shopgirl, not a lady], and if he has he ought to keep her decently.

The confrontation of human nature is obviously oblique, and the license allowed sexual passion arbitrary. The English "tradition," to choose one of the many words with which Ford describes society's de facto moral code, is a system of checks and balances; gentlemen and women may err with impunity—in certain prescribed ways.

So many rules of conduct should at least render men secure. But from the opening chapters of Some Do Not…, it is apparent that the class that "administered the world" in "nonchalant Balliol voices" is uneasy and fearful. Its order is threatened by the clamorous voices of those who share neither its responsibilities nor its privileges. In a hitherto circumspect golf club at Rye, for example, prosperous and overfed city men frankly compare the merits of Gertie and the Gitana girls, and suffragettes disturb the rituals of the game on the links. The two groups of interlopers clash with such violence that even gentlemen become involved. Tietjens hears himself threaten to knock the head off one of the city men and, "exhausted, beyond thinking or shouting," trips the policeman who reluctantly tries to arrest the girls. The final result is conflict, albeit verbal rather than physical, among gentlemen themselves:

Mr. Sandbach refused to continue his match with Tietjens. He said that Tietjens was the sort of fellow who was the ruin of England. He said he had a good mind to issue a warrant for the arrest of Tietjens—for obstructing the course of justice. Tietjens pointed out that Sandbach wasn't a borough magistrate and so couldn't. And Sandbach went off, dot and carry one, and began a furious row with the two city men who had retreated to a distance. He said they were the sort of men who were the ruin of England.

While this treatment of the disruption of tradition is primarily comic, the scene has its sinister implications.

Even when they are undisturbed by the impertinences of nouveaux riches and radicals, gentlemen scarcely live in amity. Their polite animation often gives way to dissent, direct contradiction, expressions of grievance, insults, or simply inattention to one another's remarks. Macmaster, Sandbach, and Tietjens are already at odds before the suffragettes and city men antagonize them. (I quote only the spoken discourse from the text):

(Macmaster to Sandbach): "Don't you know that you don't shout while a man is driving? Or haven't you played golf?"

(Sandbach to Tietjens): "Golly! That chap's got a temper!"

(Tietjens): "Only over this game. You deserved what you got."

(Sandbach): "I did.… But I didn't spoil his shot. He's out-driven the General twenty yards."

(Tietjens): "It would have been sixty but for you."

(Sandbach, after a pause): "By Jove, your friend is on with his second … You wouldn't believe it of such a little beggar! He's not much class, is he?"

(Tietjens): "Oh, about our class! He wouldn't take a bet about driving into the couple ahead."

(Sandbach): "Ah, I suppose he gets you out of scrapes with girls and the Treasury, and you take him about in return. It's a practical combination."

Often Ford's gentlemen and women reveal their hostility to one another even more directly—in such phrases as "look here," "listen here," "damn it all," and "oh no you don't."

While traditional morals and manners permit a considerable exercise of aggressive impulses, human nature is continually tempted to take still greater license. The city men—the "little competition wallah head clerks" of the government and the "beastly squits" of commerce—are, after all, merely exaggerations of the Tietjens, Macmasters, and Sandbachs, different in degree of self-expression rather than kind. As Valentine in the confines of her nonconformist cloister sums up the motivations of the ruling class, "You had to keep them—the Girls, the Populace, everybody!—in hand now, for once you let go there was no knowing where They, like waters parted from the seas, mightn't carry You." If tradition is obviously menaced from without, it also clearly has enemies within. Order itself is always tempted to anarchy. Hence the insistence, the fervor, with which society continually voices its ethical premises and the panic with which it conceals infractions even of its own imperfect code.

Each of the novels of the tetralogy develops a major thematic movement. In Some Do Not…, Tietjens vacillates between saintliness and tradition. His wife's beauty and her recklessness, for the present, no longer tempt him. But his hopeless love for Valentine Wannop, which develops in counterpoint to Macmaster's illicit passion for Mrs. Duchemin, brings him to the edge of a clandestine affair. After the war begins, Tietjens and Valentine decide to indulge their love secretly, like Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin, with due arrangement for the preservation of appearances, of propriety; but at the last instant they both change their minds. Tietjens, who has since left the civil service for the army, goes to France rejecting both his own initial premise of lawlessness and society's proposition of permissible vice: "If then a man who's a man wants to have a woman.… Damn it, he doesn't!" In his personal life, Tietjens decides for saintliness.

No More Parades, however, discovers him still a public man of tradition. In a base camp outside Rouen he trains and equips his men for the front as if he were a "Chelsea adjutant getting off a draft of the Second Coldstreams." Just as there are rules for love and marriage, so there are regulations for the proper conduct of violence. Yet when Sylvia appears in Rouen, her passion whetted by her husband's indifference, Tietjens very nearly succumbs to her attractions and hence to lawlessness. Because of his involvement with his wife, he does, in fact, strike a superior officer; and when his godfather, General Campion, puts him informally on trial and asks him why he does not rid himself of Sylvia for good, by divorce, he cannot answer. After a strained discussion in which even the General—the most stalwart defender of tradition in Parde's End—is "in disorder," both men take refuge from their personal difficulties in the performance, at once comic and pathetic, of army duty: they inspect Tietjens' cook-houses. Saintliness is a remote possibility. And tradition, a slim bulwark against anarchy.

In A Man Could Stand Up—, as psychological drama and historical event continue to interact, both Tietjens and Valentine pass beyond even the limited protection of tradition. Each of them confronts a world bereft of order and each experiences a mental strain so severe that it borders on insanity. On the morning of the Armistice, against the background of all London celebrating, Valentine controls her thoughts with difficulty and quarrels to the point of insult with Miss Wanostrocht, the prudent and prudish head of her school. Tietjens, a member now of the ragtag army at the weakest sector of the front, saves his sanity only by the memory of Valentine. They meet again, on Armistice Day, determined to live together in spite of both the old dictates of tradition and the chaos that now surrounds them. They choose to effect a new compromise between self-denial and self-expression; and The Last Post, carrying them into peace-time, confirms and elaborates the nature of their choice. The main thematic movement of Paade's End, reminiscent of A Call and The Good Soldier, is dialectical.

Ford's art is almost always equal to his ambitious purposes in Paade's End. Yet it should be remarked that the tetralogy is a less perfect work than The Good Soldier. The last two volumes, particularly, show momentary lapses in artistic control. Some flaws—for example, an awkward explanation of a time shift in Part One of A Man Could Stand Up—and a few pages of sing-song prose in The Last Post—seem to be due simply to carelessness. Some, like a mock-heroic digression on Chantecler and Madame Partlet, apparently proceed from an enthusiastic but inappropriate sense of whimsy. Other yieldings to old temptations, however, are more extensive and more serious. At the end of Part Two of A Man Could Stand Up—, Tietjens suffers two heavy strokes of sheer bad fortune. He receives a virtually unmotivated and wholly unjustifiable reproof from General Campion, and he learns that one of his junior officers was shot as he carried him to apparent safety. For the moment, Tietjens appears to be simply the innocent victim of a malevolent universe. A somewhat similar kind of simplification occurs in The Last Post when, at the very end, Ford sentimentalizes Sylvia. Momentary kindness, particularly kindness that springs from defiance, is typical of Sylvia. Thus when Tietjens' hired man accuses her of trying to make Valentine miscarry and she calls him a "damn fool" in reply and canters down the hill to announce her decision to divorce Tietjens, Sylvia is convincing. But when she says to Valentine, "I have a fine [child] but I wanted another," she ceases to be the Sylvia of familiar acquaintance. Here, as in Part Two of A Man Could Stand Up—, Ford may be misled by excessive sympathy for his character, or he may be overstating the resolution of his forces of conflict. (Certainly The Last Post shows other unmistakable signs of thematic insistence, notably in the pagan and Christian symbolism with which Ford rather awkwardly overlays his narrative.) All of these moments of carelessness, of whimsy, of sentimentality, and of overstatement are, admittedly, very uncomfortable ones. But though they detract from they certainly do not destroy an otherwise impressive performance.

For all its frank intellectuality, for all its plain social and moral concerns, Parade's End does not read like a Fabian tract or a paper in ethics. Just as Ford's impressionism in The Good Soldier achieves more than a gradual, hence lifelike, introduction to a complex set of characters, so his very similar methods in the tetralogy offer more than a record of a particular period of English life. His detached and superior narrative voice speaks intermittently throughout the series; in Some Do Not…, which primarily introduces the principal characters and their social milieu, it speaks at length. To forget the tone of this voice, to fail to note the absurd human behavior in many of the scenes it presents, and to overlook the fact that Ford's juxtapositions of episode are often funny as well as thematically significant, is to forget, as some critics have done, one of the most engaging and characteristic features of the Tietjens series. From beginning to end, Parde's End is, in part, social comedy. In Some Do Not …, for example, Mrs. Duchemin gives a traditionally elegant breakfast to Macmaster, Valentine, Tietjens, and a handful of other guests. In its setting of Turner paintings, old woodwork, expensive tableware, and caviar ordered from Bond Street, the scene is historically and socially accurate. But it is also broadly comic. Mrs. Duchemin's position at her own table is "strategic" and her silver chafing dishes, épergnes, and rosebowls form a "fortification"—behind which the Reverend Mr. Duchemin will presently rise to shout obscenities in his "Oxford Movement voice."

Of course, despite Ford's disposition to be explicit in Parade's End, he nonetheless involves us intellectually in his fiction. We need not work our way through such intricate deceits as Dowell's self-defense, but we are induced to participate, to organize the discrete, and to make complex moral judgments.

In his treatment of the recurrent themes of saintliness, self-expression, and tradition, Ford favors none of his characters with consistent sympathy or approval. As he insists in his preface to A Man Could Stand Up—, even Tietjens is "not, not, NOT" the author's spokesman. Tietjens criticizes tradition, but he belongs to it all the same; and Ford arranges many of the incidents in Some Do Not … in order to contrast what Tietjens says with what he does. Immediately after he rudely sets his scale of values before Macmaster, Tietjens descends from the train at Ashford to confront the "extraordinarily blue, innocent eyes" of General Campion. When the General asks, "How's your mother-in-law?" Tietjens answers, "I believe she's much better. Quite restored." With these words, Tietjens supports a fiction invented to save traditional appearances. In reality, his mother-in-law has not been ill; she has gone to the Continent to disguise the fact that Sylvia has fled there with a lover. Tietjens also conceals Macmaster's affair with Mrs. Duchemin and fails to expose a fraudulently low report of French war losses that Macmaster submits to His Majesty's Ministry of Imperial Statistics.

Tietjens is neither a hypocrite nor a coward. His actions are influenced by personal loyalty—to his wife, to his friend, to his godfather. They are also influenced by a genuine attraction to the very tradition he criticizes. Like most men, in Ford's world and the real one, Tietjens is morally inconsistent. As Sylvia sums up his dilemma: "I tell you he's so formal he can't do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can't use half of them." His inconsistency alone accounts for many of the contre-temps he suffers.

All the principal characters of Parade's End may be aligned on Tietjens' moral scale. But, like Tietjens, they too are inconstant, sometimes saintly, sometimes rebellious, sometimes traditional. Indeed, since Ford's attitude transcends those of his characters, the points of the scale themselves frequently change their relative positions. And, as a summary of the dialectic movement of the tetralogy has already suggested, the entire scale is finally superseded by a further definition of goodness. While the characters are in the process of living, they are also learning. Each of them at times speaks truthfully about himself, about others, about the way they all act, and about the way they should act. But their statements and their actions must always be judged by the immediate context in which they occur and by the context of the whole tetralogy.

Tietjens, Sylvia, Valentine, Mr. and Mrs. Duchemin, and Macmaster all live lives larger than their various thematic roles. They carry their ethical burdens easily, even incidentally, because they are strong in their fidelity to human nature. They compel our belief—and also our sympathy. Ford involves us emotionally as well as intellectually in the moral dilemmas of his characters; and just as in The Good Soldier he elicits an indulgent response to the longing for innocence, so in Parade's End he forces us to recognize the attractions not only of saintliness, but also of tradition and even of anarchy.