[In the following review of A Man Could Stand Up, Crawford characterizes Ford's Tietiens series as a modern-day epic.]

Ford Madox Ford has now reached the third of his monumental series of novels. There are those who say the epic is a dead form which can never be made to function in such a complicated and rational and disillusioned age as ours. The epic is not dead, for its impulse has surely impelled the setting down, in passionate narrative prose, of the adventures of Christopher Tietjens. If the heartbreaking, quixotic Christopher is not of the stuff of great legends, a sort of contemporary Bayard, with much honest fear and many undeserved reproaches, then there is no heroism left. If the personal and public battles in which Christopher takes part are not action, in the strict epic sense, then contemplation and indecision and irresponsibility have been the lot of the twentieth century. The only point where Mr. Ford may possibly be conceded to have omitted to write an epic in fiction is in his language. The tone of these three novels is not elevated and noble. It is as if men, in a house about to be blown up, knowing that a time fuse has been set, calmly occupy themselves with getting their cigars well lighted and talk of ordinary things in the vernacular of the day.

This very quality of Mr. Ford's style is indubitably a chief factor in enabling him to speak directly to a reader where he lives. This series makes it apppear that literature is, after all, not a superfluous affair. Books, such books as these three, do matter, and matter enormously. It is incredible that a reading of them can leave a receptive mind untouched. It means a definite and ponderable gain in experience, a measurable and welcome deflection of the course of being. And it is all done with such simplicity and absence of exclamation that the full brunt of the thing is not felt until some time after the last page has been turned. A Man Could Stand Up, like its predecessors, lives on, happily, in the reader's mind, when the printed page is no longer before the eye, and the materials of the novel incite endless associations and recreations and suppositions as if it actually were a block out of the reader's own life.

That is not at all to say that Mr. Ford has been faithful to life. It is just his triumph that he has taken notable and identifiable landmarks, scattered them throughout his three books, and yet left them significantly books and nothing else. Some Do Not—dared to take the heated years of the woman suffrage militancy in England, boil them down to one intense passage on a golf course and present the first meeting of Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens as a contact of personalities, which took on a little color from a political conflict. Yet that episode gave a more vivid picture of the suffragette fight than volumes upon volumes of more pretentious history. No More Pardes called up a graphic vision of a civilian population and corridors upon corridors of intriguing Government officials behind a small outfit of men on their way to the front. A Man Could Stand Up gives a more complete picture of what fighting meant and what the war was about to the men actually in it than oceans of rhetoric might do or have done. It's all there in the title, in fact.

Mr. Ford has a felicitous knack for titles. The name of the present book calls up lines of stooping men, cramped in their lungs, soggy in their feet, waiting for a bit of "Morning Hate," ordered by their own superiors to surprise those boresome gray men over yonder, or by the German superiors to impress the Allies. The aching wish to stand up once more on a hill in the sunlight and the enforced duty, instead, of digging for two buried men in a pit of slime, with the roar of a shell still in the ears, is Christopher at war, and, somehow, entire armies of men at war with him, engaged with him in this tedious business of wearing away the patience of the adversary. There it is, the whole impact of a military tactic of attrition, of sitting, or standing, and waiting for something to happen and longing all the while for nothing more than "to stand up on a hill."

Of course, that would be Christopher's way of going to war—wanting with all his might to do something that he could not do, being a Major and the personal property of his King. Christopher is the indomitable Tory, still, abiding to the letter by an intricate code of conduct, resentful of infringement and invasion of his individuality, anxious to establish personal relations even with the enemy. Christopher, in No More Paades, passing thousands of men under review and trying to give each one what he wanted, and what he ought to have, instead of what the regulations prescribed, and getting into endless difficulties with his commanding officer, was a typical view of that tall, graying blond man with the meal-sack torso and the khaki tubes of legs. In the front-line trenches he continues to regard his men as his personal responsibilities and to receive as reward echoes of Sylvia's pursuing spite. That remarkable woman, his wife, who figured in the amazing scene with her mother and the priest in Some Do Not—and in the entanglement with three men, one Christopher's godfather and chief of staff, General Campion, in No More Pardes, appears only indirectly in A Man Could Stand Up. But it is the same vindictive yet incredibly sympathy-provoking Sylvia.

To admirers of Christopher the re-emergence of Valentine Wannop in the present book will be a welcome item of news. Throughout the second book, whether Christopher is writing a sonnet in two and a half minutes, or wangling leave for a lovesick soldier, or making extraordinary wills, there runs through his mind as a sort of refrain: "Shall I send at least a picture postcard to Valentine Wannop?" He has left her in a desperate state of uncertainty, and he knows it. It is the act of a cad not to write, he cannot communicate without conveying too much, and it is the act of a cad to let her know how much he cares when he may "stop one" before the war is over.

It is delightful to meet Valentine Wannop again, and on the very first page. She is still in a Girl Scout uniform, acting as physical instructress in a girls' school. She is talking over the telephone to, of all unlikely yet inevitable people. Lady Macmaster, she that was Edith Ethel Duchemin, wife of the bawdy priest in Some Do Not—and hostess at that magnificently contrived breakfast party. Edith Ethel manages to hint to Valentine, over the din of the Armistice Day celebration, that some one has returned, mad, to his eighteenth century house; that his wife has been in a nursing home, that he has no furniture, and that he does not recognize the porter. It is, of course, Christopher. In this indirect, allusive fashion Mr. Ford establishes that much has happened to Christopher. He then gives a glorious cut-back of Christopher at the front and as fine a picture of a party of men during and just after the explosion of a shell as could be desired.

The book closes with a reunion of Christopher and some of his buddies from the front, all come to celebrate peace with the Major. Valentine is there, in the bare house which Sylvia has stripped of all its furniture and which Christopher has refurnished, frugally and austerely, as if it were his hut at the front. The next book may tell much of peace in England, and more, unquestionably, of Christopher and Valentine and of the wicked woman, Sylvia. Mr. Ford has promised four novels about Christopher, the last to deal with his demobilization. It will undoubtedly be different, yet continuous. Each of the three now issued is an entity, with a separate mode of development, and distinct climaxes and problems, yet each grows out of the preceding book or books, and all taken together are a whole and gradually enlarging and invincibly civilized vision of contemporary life. It is about the most exciting thing that has happened to the novel since The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler.

Perhaps the notable contribution of A Man Could Stand Up is its oblique picture of the horror of up-to-date war. Christopher stands on a ledge to look toward the Germans and a lark flies almost into his mouth, as a bullet might very well have flown into his mouth. There is this unreal menace become immediate, in terms of a common, everyday circumstance—a lark flying from its nest. Mr. Ford then uses that same lark to distinguish between the viewpoint of Christopher and of his men. The argument as to whether the lark is merely obstinate or filled with trust in humanity itself becomes an exposition of Christopher's way of diverting the strain from the minds of his men. That, of course, brings back overwhelmingly the nature and the quality of that tension under which these men at war are living and breathing. Further, the reader is led into the very stuff of this life by such imperceptible stages as this, until it is brought all but intolerably close. This series begins more and more to look like that fiction for which a lot of parsimonious, grudging superlatives have been saved. There is, however, one more volume to come.