[An American novelist, biographer, and critic, Basso is best known for Sun in Capricorn (1942), a novel which, like much of his work, explores the societal structure and cultural mores of the American South. In the following review of Parade's End, he calls the tetralogy "a minor performance," asserting that Ford was unable to create a convincing portrait of a politically conservative character.]

Parade's End, by Ford Madox Ford, is an omnibus collection of four books that make up a single novel, along with an introduction by Robie Macauley. The titles of the books, as they originally appeared, over a period of five years (1924-28), are Some Do Not…, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up—, and The Lost Post. The author, who died in 1939 and who was one of the younger members of the generation of writers that included Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and H. G. Wells, built his novels around a central character named Christopher Tietjens. The time encompassed was the period of the First World War—before, during, and immediately after.

When the Tietjens novels were first published, they were regarded collectively by many as being in the same category as What Price Glory? and All Quiet on the Western Front—another story, though longer than most, of a soldier's disillusioning experiences in modern warfare. Ford himself fostered the notion. "This is what the late war was like," he wrote, in connection with A Man Could Stand Up—. "This is how modern fighting of the organized, scientific type affects the mind." But his actual purpose, as Mr. Macauley points out in his introduction, was infinitely more ambitious. Ford intended his four books to be a saga of a whole era; he was writing about what he saw as the collapse of modern society. Christopher Tietjens is not so much a character as a symbol of the old, comfortable, leisurely England that had the props knocked from under it by the first of this century's long series of wars. "His character," Mr. Macauley writes, "is synonymous with the character of an ordered, bounded, and harmonious past.… Tietjens is humane in his relationships, feudal in his outlook, Christian in his beliefs, a classicist by education." Ford at one point describes Christopher Tietjens as "the last English Tory"; Mr. Macauley, whose introduction is certainly the most sympathetic that Ford has ever had, agrees with this definition of him.

In his identity as the last English Tory, Tietjens finds himself entirely out of place in a disintegrating society. He undergoes one humiliation, embarrassment, and persecution after another. His friends, his acquaintances, his fellow-officers, and his superiors all attack, injure, discredit, or betray him. And most of all his wife, Sylvia. If Mr. Macauley is correct in his interpretation of Ford's symbolism, as I think he is, Sylvia is to be regarded as a personification of the moral anarchy of the new order. She and practically everybody else appear to look upon Tietjens as a kind of walking reproach. Driven by their individual varieties of compulsive hatred, they feel it necessary to destroy him. In the end they do.

There could hardly be a better theme for a novel than this. It suggests the dual note so often struck by Joseph Conrad—the individual's sense of moral isolation, and the fate of man, stripped of all the ordinary supports of friendship, love, and position, who is hunted to his doom. The size and nature of Ford's debt to Conrad, with whom he collaborated in his earlier years on three books, need not concern us here; more to the point is the use he made of his rather Conradian theme. Mr. Macauley feels that he completely succeeded with it. So does Graham Greene ("There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford"), Glenway Wescott ("the most grievously neglected of the major works of fiction of this century"), and Granville Hicks ("a brilliance that was at times almost too dazzling"). These appreciations, which appear on the book's dust jacket, are bolstered by others in a similar vein, contributed by William Troy, Arthur Mizener, and Carl Van Doren. In the glare of such admiration, fierce enough to cause a sun tan, it is moderately discouraging to have to enter a contrary opinion. It is my notion, however, that Ford made pretty much of a hash of things. He had a theme and he had an ambition. What he did not have, as I see it, was the ability to measure up to their demands.

The entire book, as is apparent, rests on the person of Christopher Tietjens; if he doesn't hold it up, the whole thing is bound to collapse. Moreover, he has to carry conviction not only as a character in a novel but in the larger, symbolic role that Ford assigned to him—the last English Tory. Ford asks us to believe that all Tietjens' misfortune and misery come to him as a result of his being in possession of a particular set of standards and values. This is especially true of his relation with Sylvia, a chronically unfaithful woman who has presented him with a son whose paternity is most uncertain. Disintegrating epochs and social landslides to the side, the heart of the book lies in the conflict between Tietjens and Sylvia. She makes life a hell on earth for him; she makes it a hell for some eight hundred and thirty-six pages. Why, then, doesn't he divorce her? It is in this connection that some of the Toryism of this last English Tory comes into play. Here, for instance, are three examples:

The lady was subsequently [after the birth of her child], on several occasions, though I do not know how many, unfaithful to me. She left me with a fellow called Perowne, whom she had met constantly at the house of my godfather.… My wife, after an absence of several months with Perowne, wrote and told me that she wished to be taken back into my household. I allowed this. My principles prevented me from divorcing any woman, in particular any woman who is the mother of a child.

I have always held that 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.

She had never been anything but unfaithful to him, before or after marriage. In a high-handed way so that he could not condemn her, though it was disagreeable enough to himself.… And now she was running about the world declaiming about her wrongs. What sort of a thing was that for a boy to have happen to him? A mother who made scenes before the servants! That was enough to ruin any boy's life …

These passages have their moments of comedy, but comedy was not even incidental to Ford's intention. In urging this fantastic point of view upon us as an integral part of the Tory faith, he is owl-solemn throughout. So is he in another place, when he writes about Tietjens' inner, secret character: "His private ambition had always been for saintliness: he must be able to touch pitch and not be defiled.… And his desire was to be a saint of the Anglican variety.… The desire of every English gentleman … A mysticism …"

It would be possible to fill up several pages with similar revelations of the Tory creed, but I hardly think it necessary. The truth of the matter is that all this huffing and puffing about Toryism caused Ford to blow his own house down; he ended up by making Christopher Tietjens more of a booby—because he is such a pretentious booby—than David Low's cartoon creation Colonel Blimp.

Reading Douglas Goldring's biography of Ford, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, one gets the impression that Ford's knowledge of the former ruling class in England was based largely on hearsay; the child of a professor-critic father and a painter-of-sorts mother, he moved all his life in what used to be called an artistic atmosphere. More important, it would appear that he stood in rather strenuous opposition—and this is borne out by some of his other books—to a large proportion of the established, conservative, traditional values that in his long novel he would have Christopher Tietjens adhere to. Yet, despite these limitations, he attempted to write from the ruling-class point of view. That he failed is not surprising; what is surprising is that he thought he could bring it off. There are some good things in his novel—many of the war episodes, glimpses of the English and European countryside, an occasional bit of crooked humor—but these come about when Ford is writing about matters that he has known or experienced at first hand. As a matter of fact, there is a rather large element of autobiography in the book; Christopher Tietjens is best seen not as the last, or any other kind of, English Tory but as a spokesman for Ford Madox Ford. Even so, I have my doubts about the book's being anything but a minor performance. H. L. Mencken once wrote of Ford, "The high, purple spot of his life came when he collaborated with Conrad, and upon the fact, I daresay, his footnote in the Literature books will depend." It was one of Mencken's more pugnacious judgments, but I wouldn't be surprised if it should stand.