[An American author and educator whose publications include well-received biographies of Ford, Raymond Chandler, James Jones, and John O'Hara, MacShane has specialized in studies of the so-called "stepchildren of literature. "MacShane's works combine narrative and critical insight in an effort to rescue some relatively forgotten authors from what he considers their undeserved obscurity. In the following excerpt, he examines form and technique in Parade's End.]

Parade's End is an immensely suggestive panoramic novel that at the same time provides a profound psychological analysis of a small number of human beings. Superficially, it has much in common with Vanity Fair and, in so far as it presents a study of the war between the sexes against a background of rising and falling social classes, it resembles Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Yet comparison with these books or even with Joyce's Ulysses succeeds only in placing it in a class of literature. The success of Parade's End depends on Ford's skill in combining the intimate psychological techniques of James with a large social framework. This milieu is itself original in the sense that while the ordinary nineteenth-century novel seems to present an apparently static society with only an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and turmoil, and the twentieth-century novel shows a society whose institutions are wholly disrupted and discredited, Parde's End, standing half-way between these two, portrays the actual disruption as it took place during the war. Yet even in its psychological aspects, this tetralogy is not merely the sort of book James might have written had he attempted the 'big subject' of a Galsworthy or Balzac. For, as Granville Hicks remarked, Ford 'has done certain sorts of things that James could never have done and would not have attempted.'

The substance of Parade's End would never have come through without the technical skill with which Ford treated his subject, and here the two are perfectly suited to each other. Hitherto, with the exception of The Good Soldier, Ford's work was uneven and his conception of his subject rarely lived up to the technical brilliance of his writing. Often his heroes were too extraordinary for belief, and sometimes, as Arnold Bennett wrote in a review of A Call, Ford endowed his characters 'with a comprehensive fineness of perception, and a skill in verbal expression which it is absolutely impossible that they, living the life they do live, could possess.' Other faults like an excessive reliance on coincidence or an overpopulation of characters come from Ford's avowed notion that it mattered little what a man's subject was so long as the treatment was admirable. In his letters to other writers and during the long hours of conversation with Conrad, Ford had been concerned solely with the way in which a writer could best get his effects. For a novelist like H. G. Wells, this preoccupation was meaningless, and it is true that whatever may be the faults of Wells's work, it is strong where Ford's early work was weak: Wells's characters and situations were real; Ford's were not. Ford's devotion to technique, however, paid its dividends in such works as The Good Soldier and Parde's End, whereas much of Wells's later work suffers from the very sloppiness Ford was endeavouring to avoid.

In conceiving the characters of the Tietjens tetralogy, what Ford has done, as Melvin Seiden has pointed out, is to make Christopher into an anti-hero who has affinities with Dostoievsky's Idiot, and to make his heroine the precise opposite of the typical British heroine. As the world has turned upside down, he seems to be saying, so also have people, so that a modern version of Pamela would necessarily have to be different from Richardson's. But the real point Ford makes is that Sylvia is neither extremely virtuous in the tradition of the British heroine of romance, nor fiendish in the manner of Lady Macbeth. Rather, she is merely a decent enough woman of the world. In an early essay, 'The Woman of the Novelists', Ford criticized the English fictional heroine for always being an extreme—either a representative of the 'fair sex' or some sort of monster. Recognizing the falsehood of this notion, he tried in Sylvia Tietjens to create a real woman rather than a 'super-woman' of the type of Desdemona, Juliet or Sophia Western.

Thus in all his work Ford was a self-conscious writer who was always able to say, 'I know exactly how I get my effects as far as those effects go. Brought up in Victorian times when literature was more a matter of morality than of art, he found relief in the works of foreign writers lent him by his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown. And after reading such books as Madame Bovary, Le Rouge et le Noir and the Lettres de Mon Moulin of Daudet, along with all the usual classics of nineteenth-century English fiction, he perceived that the modern French novel was less amateurish than the English. He therefore strove to learn as much as he could from such Continental writers as Stendhal, Maupassant, Turgenev and Flaubert and from such writers in English as Marryat and Henry James who followed the same path. In the years of his apprenticeship, both alone and with Conrad, he gradually consolidated his method. The first product of it is The Good Soldier, the first detailed exposition of it occurs in his book on Joseph Conrad. The job of writing The Good Soldier was doubtless hard enough, but for a psychological novelist like Ford, the effort of maintaining tension and interest for the eight hundred pages of Parade's End must have been extremely difficult.

In an article on Ford [in National Review, August 1948], Edward Crankshaw pointed out that both he and Conrad were rebelling against the traditional panoramic novel, preferring instead to limit their subject to an 'affaire'. In Paade's End, however, Ford goes beyond this limitation and adds what Crankshaw calls a 'mirror of society'. The result is a work that 'combines the intensiveness of the new school with the extensiveness of the old masters.'

What made this achievement possible was Ford's attention to over-all form: every individual element of the book is subordinated to the central issue. The difficulty of achieving what Poe called 'unity of effect' is, of course, increased when the writer thinks not in terms of short stories but in sequels. But even in his first trilogy, The Fifth Queen series, he took care to plan the work in terms of three books. The result, he found, was that the second volume was better than the first, as it was intended to be, because he had already got in his setting and descriptions in the earlier book. In his later work, Ford's planning was necessarily more complex than simply deciding where to put descriptions and where to put action. He had, for example, to consider the rôle particular scenes would play in the book as a whole. The use of a strong scene is often tempting for a writer, since climactic moments are dramatic and exciting. They are sometimes also very false, however, and tend to stick out from the surface so that the reader remembers one particular scene, but not the book itself. The writer who considers his work as a progression in which motives and actions will be made clear only at the very end, must therefore suppress strong scenes. For however attractive they may be in themselves, they will interfere with his final effect.

Ford's willingness to obey this rigorous code so as to protect the architecture of his whole book is made clear in the suppression of the scene with which Some Do Not was to have ended. This scene, which now exists only in manuscript, depicts the last dramatic interview that takes place between Christopher and Sylvia before Tietjens leaves for the front; it stresses the sexual antagonism that has grown up between them and it contains a good deal of violence. Had Some Do Not been designed to stand alone, this ending would have been satisfactory, but as it was only a part of a tetralogy, it was suppressed, and Ford put its substance in the next novel in the form of Tietjens' reminiscences.

Mention of form brings up the question of the final book of the series, The Last Post. It is clear from a letter Ford wrote in 1930, in which he said that he did not like this book and 'always intended the series to end with A Man Could Stand Up, 'that Parade's End was intended as a trilogy. In recent years, however, it has been twice published as a tetralogy. The Last Post differs from the preceding three novels in so far as the focus turns from Christopher Tietjens to his brother, Mark. Compared to the others, The Last Post is static and involves a certain amount of recapitulation of previously narrated events. Yet, as Robie Macauley points out, without this novel, the work as a whole would be 'sadly truncated,' for not only does one find out, as Ford wrote in his preface, 'what became of Tietjens,' one also finds in this denouement that Tietjens is perpetuated as a symbol, thus making him not merely one man who walked a stage and was heard of no more, but a representative of a whole class. Those who live at Groby—Mark Tietjens and his retinue—constitute a kind of Greek chorus that serves to connect Tietjens with the Yorkshire soil, and indeed, with present reality. Artistically, it was also essential that the focus be changed; the Christopher-centred novel was designed for three novels, and to stretch it would have spoiled its form. A coda, then, was the only possible solution.

With regard to the various techniques Ford employed in this book—the time-shift, the purposed longueur, progression d'effet and the others—enough has been said of them as they were applied to the collaborated works and to The Good Soldier. In a sense, it is remarkable that Ford knew for so long what Impressionism was supposed to do. Thus what he wrote in 1914 was wholly applicable to the Tietjens books of the 1920's. Not for a long time, however, did he succeed in doing himself what he had for so long set up as a model.

The statement [from "On Impressionism—I," by Ford Madox Hueffer, in Poetry and Drama, June 1914] that appears below was the intention, but it was not really fulfilled until he wrote Parade's End

For the first business of Impressionism is to produce an impression, and the only way in literature to produce an impression is to awaken interest. And, in a sustained argument, you can only keep interest awakened by keeping alive, by whatever means you may have at your disposal, the surprise of your reader. You must state your argument; you must illustrate it, and then you must stick in something that appears to have nothing whatever to do with either subject or illustration, so that the reader will exclaim: 'What the devil is the fellow driving at?' And then you must go on in the same way arguing, illustrating and startling and illustrating—until at the very end your contentions will appear like a ravelled skein.

And then, in the last few lines, you will draw towards you the master-string of that seeming confusion, and the whole pattern of the carpet, the whole design of the net-work will be apparent.

This method, you observe, founds itself upon analysis of the human mind. For no human being likes listening to long and sustained arguments. Such listening is an effort, and no artist has the right to call for any effort from his audience. A picture should come out of its frame and seize the spectator.

One technical change in Parade's End which increased the accessibility of Ford's prose is here worth noticing. Whereas much of the success of The Good Soldier had depended on Ford's use of a narrator whose very mannerisms contributed to the point of the book, in the tetralogy he returned to his own voice and emphasized dialogue. While this method may owe something to Hemingway, it differs from Hemingway in being far less abrupt and telegraphic, for Ford's greatest gift, as distinct from an acquired technique, was his mastery of flowing prose rhythms. Coupled with this new directness of manner is Ford's abandonment of the endlessly modified sentence of James and the highly coloured phraseology of Conrad. The result therefore is a novel that is at once complex in its over-all form and extraordinarily lucid in its language. The work as a whole has an individuality of style that makes it an original contribution to the world's literature. As Caroline Gordon said, in writing it Ford 'succeeded in doing the thing that Poe said could not be done. He produced a long work whose tensions are so nicely adjusted, whose tone is sustained as that of a short tale or lyric poem.'