[Gordon was an American author and educator whose works include The Good Soldier: A Key to the Novels of Ford Madox Ford (1963). In the following excerpt from a review of Parade's End, Gordon contends that the work is best understood from a historical distance.]

Ford's work—the body of it—may be compared to a huge stone cast into a pond; only the water which is displaced by its presence will have intimate contact with the stone, but the tiniest ripple will in time carry its impact to the shore. Ford was the best craftsman of his day; we are only now beginning to realize how widespread and pervasive such a literary influence can be.

The wielder of this powerful influence was born in London in 1873 (he died in 1939), the grandson of the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. His youth was thus spent among the Rossettis and their circle. At 17 he published his first book. His international background gave him ready access to the leading literary and artistic movements of his generation: his finest short novel, The Good Soldier (1941), he himself rewrote in French. And, indeed, as John Rodker said of this book, it is the greatest French novel in English.

Breadth of view, immense knowledge of many literatures, and an unwavering loyalty to his great profession marked Ford as perhaps the last great man of letters in the nineteenth-century style. Whatever concerned the vitality of letters was within his province. He was one of the few great editors of this century. In reckoning his value one must not forget that as editor of The English Review, founded in 1908, he brought what we know now as "modernism" to England.

In the Knopf edition just published Ford's four war novels, commonly known as "the Tietjens series," appear at last for what they are: one great novel under the title Parade's End. The novels which make up the tetralogy were written at the close of World War I and achieved a brief popularity. They were held to be a not too realistic account of one soldier's disillusioning experience in that war. They are being published on what is perhaps the eve of a third world war, with a preface by Robie Macauley, a young writer whose own work will doubtless be better known later on than it is today.

Mr. Macauley points out in his preface that Parade's End begins, as many great works of fiction have begun, with a journey: two young men sit in a perfectly appointed railway carriage; everything in the carriage is of the best material; the window straps are of the finest leather, the mirrors immaculate, "as if they had reflected very little"; the air smells faintly of an excellent varnish. Christopher Tietjens, the hero, and his friend, Vincent Macmaster, are on their way to spend a week-end in the country. They are of "the class that administers the world." If they see anything wrong anywhere—a policeman misbehaving, an insufficiency of street lamps, a defect in public service—they feel it their duty to set the matter right. The train they are riding runs as smoothly (Tietjens thinks) "as British gilt-edged securities." However, it is running on the wrong track.

"Actually," Mr. Macauley; says in his brilliant preface, "it is not running from London to Rye as they think, but from the past into the future, and ahead of them on their one-way journey is a chaotic country of ripped battlefields and disordered towns. Their fellow-passengers will grow hysterical and unpredictable; station masters will put up the wrong signals, troops will come aboard and get off again, the good furnishings of the train will get worn and broken, the schedules will go to pieces. And, experiencing all this, Christopher Tietjens will learn to expect that somewhere, beyond some bridge or tunnel, the tracks themselves will finally disappear into the dry sands of the wasteland."

It is easier now to read the Tietjens novels than when they were first written. It is becoming apparent that when he wrote them Ford was writing history, as any novelist is writing history when he records faithfully the happenings of his times. (It was Henry James who observed that the novelist's obligation to record faithfully is as binding, "as sacred" as that of a Thomas Macaulay or an Edward Gibbon.) Ford was one of the most brilliant and faithful recorders of his time. There is no one, not even James, who can bring a scene before us with more vividness.

In some of Ford's writing, however, there is too much going on. If the reader relaxes his attention he will soon not know where he is. Then, too, he must pay attention with his ear as well as with his eye, for sound plays an important part in Ford's dramatic effects. The first part of the tetralogy ends with the words: "He had caught, outside the gate of his old office, a transport lorry that had given him a lift to Holborn." These cadences, which tell us that Tietjens' future life will be sober, if not mournful, fall on deaf ears if the reader has not read every word that precedes them.

Such demands were not made on English readers at the time when Ford began writing novels. They had not been made by Thackeray and were made only sporadically by Dickens; Arnold Bennett and Swinnerton and Galsworthy did not make them—and Joyce had only just been published.

It is easy to see why Ford's work was not popular in his own day, but it is hard to see why it has been neglected in our own, for he would seem, in these times, to have a special claim on our attention. He is a superb historical novelist, seeming as much at home in a medieval castle or in Tudor England as in Tietjens' twentieth-century railway carriage. At his touch some of history's driest, barest bones take on flesh. Yet he is comparatively unknown as a historical novelist in an age in which the historical novel enjoys the greatest vogue it has ever enjoyed.

It seems highly suitable that the preface to Parade's End should be written by a young, comparatively unknown writer, since Ford himself has as yet hardly been recognized as a writer. Or perhaps it is more exact to say that he has been recognized only intermittently. Certainly he lapsed after his two modest successes—the publication of the Tietjens series and The Fifth Queen trilogy—into obscurity greater than he had known before.

It has been fashionable to regard this obscurity, deeper and darker than that surrounding any comparable talent of our time, as no more than he deserved: the proper reward for a misspent life. Ford during his lifetime was often the subject of gossip, his actions often seemed ill-advised; he made powerful enemies. In his late fifties his powers failed him: he was no longer able to write fiction and kept himself going by writing over and over a sort of fictionalized autobiography.

Yet all this was part of one story, the same story he was all his life telling, for like most novelists he had only one story to tell. His novels are all either rehearsals for that story or variations of its pattern. The action is presented very vividly in the Tietjens series and it is possible that that is the version of the story by which Ford would prefer to be remembered.

Christopher Tietjens may be thought of as "the last Tory." Indeed Ford himself says that he so conceived him, a man who through no apparent fault of his own is at odds with his times. However, "he and she," as Chekhov sagely observed, "are the engine that makes fiction move." Tietjens is a fine fellow, but for all his virtues he is not at peace with himself; for one thing, he has made a bad marriage. Sylvia Tietjens, his wife, is a belle dame sans merci. Tall, beautiful, wealthy, she alternately hates and loves her husband and is hell-bent on his ruin. When she is not tormenting him she suffers from boredom. She is too fastidious to take a lover and, instead, practices on men "every variety of turning down."

As a novelist Ford is much preoccupied with those life-giving and death-dealing attributes of woman. Ford's heroes are all involved with some belle dame sans merci who looms to them a little larger than life.

The heroines who battle with these apparitions for the love of Ford's heroes are usually little, fair women, possessed of great filial piety, who have recently had reverses of fortune. In the earlier novels the white goddesses are triumphant. The hero and the woman who is attached to him are nearly always ruined.

Still, no matter how his fortune turns, Ford's hero stands always between two women whose natures are diametrically opposed, inclining a little toward the belle dame sans merci. Man naturally seeks his own ruination, the author seems to say, particularly if there is no exterior order to which his case can be referred. A priest usually broods over the conflict: in Parade's End, Father Consett; in A Call, a Greek Orthodox priest who sardonically points out to Robert Grimshawe what his own loss of faith has cost her. Man's plight, the novelist seems to say, is always the same: he must exercise his free will and choose between the good and the bad.

It does not seem to matter where or when Ford sets his stage; he is always able to make the action immediate and convincing. In The Young Lovell the young knight praying over his arms, "in the new French fashion," succumbs to the temptations of a sorceress, passes three months and a day in her company and thereafter finds his family, friends and fiancee unendurable. He finally follows her into barren pastures to spend his life in a long enchantment. In Ford's hands this variation of an ancient legend symbolizes the plight of the modern man; Tietjens' expensive railway carriage is heading for the same trackless wastes.