SOURCE: "Tietjens and the Tradition," in The Pacific Spectator, Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter 1952, pp. 23-32.

[In the following essay, Firebaugh contends that Parade's End is best read as an allegory. ]

Now that the extraordinary tetralogy, Parade's End, has been republished, we ought to reconsider it in the light of the message which Ford Madox Ford meant it to convey. For he did intend the "Tietjens Saga" to teach a lesson, although he was too much a product of his post-pre-Raphaelite times not to feel that he sinned against his literary gods by that intention. The meaning of the novels, however, is so much richer than his avowed purpose of denouncing warfare that he can have offended only the most dogmatic worshipers of artistic purposelessness.

The Tietjens cycle deals with the second decade of this century as those years were lived by Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory." It is of some historical interest that in creating Christopher, Ford had in mind one Arthur Marwood, with whose financial help the English Review had been founded under Ford's editorship. Ford's literary achievement consists in his making of Tietjens and his circle a subtle allegory of social decay and reform. This he does through a story of personal disintegration and recovery which, both for technical accomplishment and allegorical treatment of a typical human situation, demands its place with the important literary works of our time. Readers who are approaching the series now for the first time may be aided by a few suggestions as to how the story may be allegorically read.

Parade's End is an allegory of social decay. Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," is the England to which this decay is happening, and who must be saved if England is to be saved. He stands for the traditional virtues. The youngest son of his family, he has left the ancestral seat, Groby, for a berth in the Department of Statistics, where his brilliance would seem to augur a great career. But there is a certain fraudulence about the statistical profession—statistics can be made to mean many things; they deal with appearances, not realities. Fraud in its many forms is a dominant leitmotiv of the novel; it is against fraud that Tietjens-England must struggle.

Christopher has had the misfortune to choose a fraudulent wife as well as a fraudulent career. Sylvia is a beautiful, brilliant, neurotic young woman who embodies the chief symptoms of the contemporary social decay. A Catholic by birth, she retains the faith only superstitiously, superficially; thus she, too, has deserted her tradition. As the novel opens, she has deserted Christopher for another man, not because she loves the other man but because she wishes to hurt her husband. She has accepted the superficiality of her social circle, the group which gets itself photographed by the Sunday papers, which is constantly changing sexual partners, and which more than any other shows the decay of a stable, traditional social order. Tietjens she hates because he represents a stability to which she cannot attain. The only happiness of which her disordered mind is capable is the sadistic one of causing him pain. In one great symbolic scene she lashes to death a huge white bulldog which she identifies with Tietjens (and thus, in our reading, with England and tradition). For sheer horror, Sylvia is an almost unsurpassed depiction of beautiful female viciousness. Her neurosis is the neurosis of the modern world. Insanity and near-insanity make up another of Ford's persistent leitmotivs in Parade's End.

Sylvia's neurosis, though it impels her to create suffering for Tietjens, causes her to withdraw from the suffering world when the World War comes. She retreats to a convent, emerging from time to time with evil purpose toward her suffering husband, who as a member of the British aristocracy can only do his duty by entering the Army. Her humanitarianism is of the sort which withdraws in horror from the basic facts of human suffering, failing to see that suffering is involved in life, and that withdrawal creates even worse human agony. Sylvia is a kind of prototype of Munich, of the selfish avoidance of pain which leads only to its more violent affliction; Ford created Sylvia during the 'twenties, but in her he anticipated the fact that at the time of Munich he would seriously consider renouncing his English citizenship. Christopher Tietjens, by accepting his responsibility in the war, alleviates suffering in the very process of bearing it, and, inescapably, inflicting it. Thus, threatened with disintegration by Sylvia's conduct, he finds his way toward a new integration. Tradition, and England, is to be saved.

Tietjens and the tradition suffer not only from such neurotic dissenters as Sylvia, but also from those arrivistes who would become a part of the tradition: who aspire, through a certain coarse-grained ambition, to be received into the authentic tradition, but who understand it only in its superficial, apparent, aspects. These fraudulent persons offer another aspect of the decadent civilization which fascinated Ford so much. There are several representatives of this broad group, defeating traditional values by spurious emulation. One of the most important is Vincent Macmaster, a school friend of Christopher, whose university education has been paid for by Christopher's money, and who, though less brilliant than Tietjens, is so "circumspect and right" in observing the proprieties of the aristocratic class to which he aspires that he promises to have a fine career in the same Division of Statistics to which Tietjens belongs.

An amateur literary critic, Macmaster has just published a monograph of Rossetti. Ford, so closely related to the pre-Raphaelite group—his grandfather was the painter Ford Madox Brown—sees its members and imitators as fundamentally fraudulent—more concerned with appearances than realities. Macmaster sets up an elaborate establishment, chiefly paid for with money borrowed from Tietjens, and never repaid. His one stroke of official brilliance, which gains him a knighthood, he has stolen from Christopher, who threw it out playfully, as the sort of unscrupulous statistical juggling that could be done by an unprincipled man. Macmaster rises rapidly in the world while the more scrupulous Christopher falls. The "circumspect and right" classes, the career men, the arrivistes, continue to rise; the downright, forthright, honest Christophers of the world lose out. The world is topsy-turvy.

Macmaster is abetted by the "lady of his delight," who is "so circumspect and right," Edith Ethel Duchemin, a post-pre-Raphaelite beauty. She has been married to a former pupil of Ruskin, the Reverend Mr. Duchemin, who has long been afflicted in his clerical office with a scatological mania which is regularly brought on by overindulgence in communion wine. Here the theme of insanity again, to which is added the idea of a tradition perverted through the degeneration of a symbol. Edith Ethel becomes Macmaster's mistress long before her husband's death—always trying, however, to preserve appearances. When she can finally marry Macmaster, it is to preside brilliantly at the salon which she creates for him, to insist that he now desert Tietjens entirely, and to advance his career by methods of her own. We last hear of Macmaster as the victim of a nervous breakdown. Thus, to rise in the modern world is to lose one's integration. Insanity and neurosis nearly always accompany success, in the topsy-turvy world of Paade's End. To cross the lines of class, to embrace the goddess of getting on, as the arriviste does, is to spoil both the world and his place in it.

Adultery in Parde's End serves as a kind of symbol of social disintegration. We meet it both in Sylvia's affair and in the affair of Edith Ethel and Vincent Macmaster. It is later to befall Tietjens himself, but not until, after long years, it becomes, in a disintegrating world, a symbol not of decay but of salvation.

The girl with whom Christopher falls in love is Valentine Wannop, the daughter of his father's old friend. Valentine's allegorical part in the novel is that of the social radical: she is an active, demonstrating, suffragette, and a pacifist. One of Ford's ironies is that through Valentine, the Tory Christopher is to achieve his salvation. Although they realize at once that they are in love, they do little about it during the years of war. Partly this is because of a sense of abstract right, a feeling that "some do not"; partly also their restraint is due to the excesses of Valentine's brother, far more radical than she, who drunkenly comes between them—symbolically, I think—on a crucial evening. Both the radical Valentine and the conservative Tietjens are repelled by his youthful excess—repelled at least to the extent of renouncing their own indulgence. The conjunction of the two—Tory and social radical—cannot take place in the atmosphere which her brother creates, composed about equally of Communist principles and self-indulgence. Thus their love forms a nice contrast to the Vincent Macmaster-Edith Ethel affair—a contrast between their own forthrightness and the arriviste circumspection.

Christopher and Valentine are separated throughout the war years, Valentine teaching in a girl's school and Christopher filling the traditional aristocratic role of Army officer. As a captain he suffers with his men, agonizing when a decision of his deprives one of them of life, identifying himself with them as he tries to straighten out their problems—all of which, he observes, are essentially his own problems of money and women. In suffering for his men and identifying himself with them, he is a sort of Christ symbol, as indeed his name suggests. And in caring for them like a shepherd he fulfills—to borrow one of William Empson's insights—the pastoral function of the aristocracy.

Christopher's Army career is kept rather unsuccessful by the troubles Sylvia has made and continues to make for him. She seems deliberately to be trying to drive him to madness, and she nearly succeeds. Following him to the Front, she informs his commanding officer that he imagines himself to be Jesus Christ, and that he is a Socialist, either charge being enough to prejudice the conventional military mind of his superior. Confronted with the latter charge, Tietjens explains that he has "no politics that did not disappear in the eighteenth century": "Of course … if it's Sylvia that called me a Socialist, it's not astonishing. I'm a Tory of such an extinct type that she might take me for anything." He is so nearly of an extinct type, indeed, as to be quite indifferent to personal wealth, and seriously concerned with the welfare of the lower classes. Very early in the first novel Tietjens has discovered the similarity of his Tory program to a Labour minister's socialism:

Over their port they agreed on two fundamental legislative ideals: every working man to have a minimum of four hundred a year and every beastly manufacturer who wanted to pay less to be hung. That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as it was the extreme radicalism Left of the Left.

Thus Ford prepares, early in the series, a synthesis of the Right and the Left. (One might note here, partly for those who think that "cradle-to-grave planning" is a heretical invention of modern socialists, that Arthur Marwood, Christopher's prototype in real life, had contributed to the English Review, under Ford's editorship, an article called "A Complete Actuarial Scheme for Insuring John Doe against all the Vicissitudes of Life.")

Being a Tory of a nearly extinct breed, Tietjens dreams, at the Front, of the quiet seventeenth-century countryside. One morning, before a great German strafe, he hears a comet player in the English trenches practicing an air of Purcell, to which Christopher fits a poem by George Herbert:

Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright,
  The bridal of the earth and sky.

The tune, a kind of symbol of sanity, of order, in a world gone mad, leads him into a reverie in which he imagines himself, like George Herbert, to be the occupant of Bemerton parsonage. That he may save what he can of the seventeenth century, he decides to order the musician's transfer to the rear lines. And before the strafe begins, he sees, at right angles to the trench, but leading to the left, a channel which he feels an almost overwhelming urge to follow, imagining in his reverie that it will lead him both to seventeenth-century peacefulness and to the quiet arms of the little radical, Valentine. Thus the synthesis of the Left and Right is anticipated.

The synthesis finally occurs when, after the war, in the last novel of the four, Christopher and Valentine go to live together in the country near Bemerton parsonage. Their life is complicated by Sylvia's continued troublemaking. She is now determined upon the destruction of Groby Great Tree, a symbol of the family, which

had been planted to commemorate the birth of Greatgrandfather who had died in a whoreshop—and it had always been whispered in Groby, amongst the children and servants, that Groby Great Tree did not like the house. Its roots tore chunks out of the foundations and two or three times the trunk had had to be bricked into the front wall of the house.

Groby Great Tree, in commemorating an ancestor whose death had occurred under circumstances which showed a certain falling away of greatness, becomes a symbol of family decline. Not only has the great-grandfather died in a brothel; the Tietjens family has survived into a century which is very like a brothel—cultivating appearances rather than realities, preferring money to quality, glitter to worth.

Christopher, like his great-grandfather, has fallen prey to some of these attractions. Specifically, he has done so in marrying Sylvia. In deserting her for Valentine, he has deserted falsehood for truth. But his devotion to Groby Great Tree is a weakness—a pride of family, of even its least perfect monument. The tree is felled, and part of the house falls with it. The American tenant will have to pay for repairs to the house; but with the removal of the aristocracy, the establishment has been badly damaged; not even American wealth can restore it. Sylvia is able to gloat:

She had got down Groby Great Tree: that was as nasty a blow as the Tietjens' had had in ten generations.

But then a queer, disagreeable thought went through her mind.… Perhaps in letting Groby Great Tree be cut down God was lifting the ban off the Tietjens'. He might well.

In uprooting the tree, Sylvia suddenly realizes, she has provided Christopher the way to salvation. For he has now achieved the full detachment for which he had longed: from lands, from money, from family. One had almost said from tradition. Rather, Tietjens' task, with Valentine, will be to re-establish tradition.

Tietjens has always had aristocratic respect for the lower classes. The last novel presents a specimen of these classes, Gunning, who has become a servant to Tietjens. Valentine's reverie reflects Christopher's attitude:

The Gunnings of the land were the rocks on which the lighthouse was built—as Christopher saw it. And Christopher was always right. Sometimes a little previous. But always right. Always right. The rocks had been there a million years before the lighthouse was built, the lighthouse made a deuce of a movable flashing—but it was a mere butterfly. The rocks would be there a million years after the light went for the last time out.

Gunnings had been in the course of years, painted blue, a Druid-worshipper, later, a Duke Robert of Normandy, illiterately burning towns and begetting bastards—and eventually—actually at the moment—a man of all works, half-full of fidelity, half blatant, hairy. A retainer you would retain as long as you were prosperous and dispensed hard cider and overlooked his blear-eyed peccadilloes with women. He would go on.…

During the war, Christopher has often expressed respect for the men serving under him, and has gone to considerable trouble for them, identifying their problems with his in a self-sacrificial manner. This is the aristocratic attitude toward the lower classes; the aristocrat is the protector and defender of his retainers—that is to say, of his own protectors and defenders. If, as William Empson thinks, one of the pastoral traditions has been the descent of the man of birth into the lower ranks, there to learn how better to rule, and if that descent can further be identified with the idea of the sacrificial god dying for his people, that they—and he—may be born again, we then see Tietjens performing the functions both of aristocratic defender and of sacrificial god. The close of the novel shows him and Valentine living together in peaceful frugality, in circumstances similar to those of their retainers. In one of her reveries, Valentine agrees with Christopher's position "that if a ruling class loses the capacity to rule—or the desire!—it should abdicate from its privileges and get underground." They must descend, to rise again. Groby Great Tree is felled. Tietjens is living a pastoral life, beginning as his ancestors had begun. The rebirth of the tradition is thus being prepared. It is dead, but it will rise again.

Specifically, it will arise again through the birth of Valentine's child, for whom she and Christopher have definite plans. Chrissie, as Valentine names him in her reverie, is to become the type of seventeenth-century country parson that his father would like to have been, reading Greek and watching his flock in the pastoral-aristocratic manner. His parents want, indeed, to buy a living for Chrissie, if possible at Bemerton, where George Herbert had been pastor. Through Christopher's illegitimate union with Valentine, then, one aspect of British tradition is to be reaffirmed and regenerated.

What of his other union? Through this legitimate union Christopher had allied himself with a woman who represents the decadent society of her day, the world of appearances. By Sylvia, he has become the father of a boy, Michael Mark, who, at his brief appearance in the novel, is a callow but charming student at Cambridge University, where he has embraced the political and economic doctrines of Marxian communism. As heir to Groby, Michael Mark will become owner of vast coal lands, which have once been primarily pastoral. But as a young Marxist, the boy chiefly represents the ideas of industrialism and progress. To be sure, Ford makes fun of his callow Marxism, his assumption of a belief in industrialism; but even undergraduate poses have their reality. England, like this youth, has followed an industrial program not in its tradition. This through its legitimate conduct, which is really illegitimate, because out of character.

The paradox exists also in the fact that the boy is both Catholic and Marxist. As Catholic, he is an authoritarian pastoral traditionalist; as Marxist, an authoritarian perfectibilitarian. That he can be both is, perhaps, due to their common basis in authority. Two aspects of English tradition are at war in Michael Mark's adolescent breast: tradition and progress, pastoral and industrial civilizations. In one particularly amusing scene, his reverie concerning the coming industrial society is interrupted violently when his agricultural sensitivities are wounded by a stupid American woman who clumsily walks through a field of standing hay. He may not for long, then, be a Marxist; but for the time being he is; and when he ceases to be, he no doubt will remain an industrialist. Chrissie, on the other hand, is to be prepared for the England that loves the old, that lives the traditional life of the shepherd and flock. Tietjens-England has sired both and will understand both; but there is no doubt that his sympathies will be with Chrissie, the child who, ironically, has for a mother a fine English girl who is also both a social radical and a pacifist. Even more ironically, Chrissie's birth has had to be achieved through illegitimate means—through, that is, a defiance of the world, which is at such sixes and sevens that only through illegitimacy can one achieve integrity.

Through legitimate capitalist-industrialism, then, the land is inherited by a person in whom there is conflict of the old pastoral tradition and the new proletarian-industrialist ideologies. The latter may win for a while. But the new synthesis is likely to be that achieved by an antithetical and illegitimate union, which is to produce Chrissie, the peaceful pastor, the lover of old books, who, for all his illegitimacy, may in fact prove to be the new legitimacy. Into his making have gone equal parts of the Left and Right; one was as essential as the other. Let who will have the coal lands and the industrial plants—for these, indeed, only seem to be England. Give Chrissie his living in Bemerton—he, with his Greek Testament and his fundamental humanity—he will be England. Nor will his legitimate elder half-brother, Michael Mark, remain a stranger to him. Michael Mark is already wavering. He may someday desert his world of appearances for the world of realities, industrial acquisitiveness for pastoral humanity. The real is the human. Man is the synthesis, not goods, not goals. Man will suffer trials; he may die symbolically or actually; his fundamental value is the synthesis, the humanity, not the various partisanships or greeds to which he may be subject.

To partisans of the Left or Right this solution will be unsatisfactory, for they have always been drawn to the apparent differences which conceal fundamental humanity from view. To condemn or praise Ford Madox Ford as a conservative or as a man who moved in the direction of the Left would be equally beside the point. He moved in a more significant direction than either—toward a comprehension of human life in all its tragicomedy.

His fictional statement of this ambiguity is neither propagandistic nor didactic, whatever he himself may have said. Neither is it withdrawn from life; hence it is not "aesthetic" in the pejorative sense of that term. It is rather an able conjuction of fable and idea, symbol and concrete fact, allegory and event. It teaches, as literature somehow always does. It lacks both the preciosity of the self-conscious art-novel and the confident affirmations of those novelists who know all the answers. It embodies the tensions of its author's times, and it invites us to reflect upon them—for they are still with us. Ford's irony and humor draw us on with the sure charm of art to reflect upon the human problem. We are not likely much longer to ignore either his wit or his comprehension of mankind.