SOURCE: "The Tietjens Tetralogy," in Ford Madox Ford, Longmans, Green & Co., 1956, pp. 28-35.

[Young is an English author and editor whose works include book-length studies of D. H. Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford. In the following excerpt, he focuses attention on the characters of Parade's End and their function in what he considers to be Ford's melancholy treatment of society in transition.]

To pass from [Ford's novel] The Good Soldier to [his] Parade's End is to emerge from a room heavy with discharged passion into a city street full of vivid personalities. Up they pop like freshly painted jack-in-the-boxes: 'Breakfast' Duchemin, so called from his habit of giving lavish morning parties, the rich, cultivated parson who breaks without warning into loathsome Latin obscenities…'09 Morgan, the Welsh private in the trenches whose wife has run off with a pugilist‧ The sly, snobbish Macmaster rising suavely in the civil service and to a wartime knighthood for literary services … The Old Squire of Groby, master of vast acres, whose gardener lays out his filled pipes in the bushes every morning, for he is not allowed to smoke in the house … Lord Portscatho, the banker, whose world crumbles when one of his officials uses his position to injure an enemy … Miss Wanostrocht, the headmistress, 'her little fingers hooked together, the hands back to back: a demoded gesture … Girton of 1897'.

These minor characters are not accidentally so varied. In Parade's End it was Ford's aim to 'register my own time in terms of my own time'. His registrations of the period 1910 to 1920 are as accurate as are his backgrounds—country-house weekends, a golf course invaded by suffragettes, bachelor chambers in London, a trench in France and a hotel in the G.H.Q. area, and Groby estate in north Yorkshire. We pass briefly also inside Whitehall offices, a small cottage where a learned woman sits pounding out journalism for a livelihood, a great girls' school.

Amid these middle-class scenes ambles the central character of the' four novels—Christopher Tietjens, a lumbering 'meal-sack' sort of man, his fair hair patched with grey, clad usually in too bulky tweeds, exchanged for some of the time for khaki uniform. He is the younger son of the squire of Groby, a brilliant mathematician, a good Latinist, of whom it is said that he passes dull train journeys in tabulating from memory the errors in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He has a certain intellectual arrogance, an immense kindliness, even sentimentality, and he is a Tory—but a Tory whose principles were last heard of in the eighteenth century, that is to say, at a time when the Tory party was supported by the poor, the landowners and the 'clerks', in Julien Benda's sense of schoolmasters, parsons, and journalists.

Christopher has married Sylvia, a pale Society beauty and a hard, selfish and disloyal woman. He married her because, in his rather bumbling, high-minded way he believes he compromised her by chance kisses on a train in which they were returning from a weekend house party. Sylvia, of course, would never have looked at a younger son had she not been in a panic, believing she had become pregnant in one of her affaires. By chance Christopher learns of this. A child is born but, whether it is his own or not, he cherishes it. Sylvia leaves him for her lover; tires of the latter; confesses to her mother's friend, the Roman Catholic priest Father Consett, who has an important influence on Sylvia. She wishes to return to Christopher, and he, though having visions of 'certain Hell', agrees. And for all these things she hates him—for, as she tells a friend, it is 'his lordly full-dress consideration that drives me mad… He's the soul of truth like a stiff Dutch-doll… I tell you he's so formal he can't do without all the conventions there are, and so truthful he can't use half of them.'

She sets out to ruin him, by spreading stories of his living on her money, keeping mistresses and so on. This results in his being cut' in society and in various unhappinesses which he bears without saying a word in his own defence. His father, the old squire, 'accidentally' shoots himself when he hears that Christopher has seduced Valentine Wannop, the daughter of his great friend, Mrs. Wannop, the bluestocking. The seduction was one of Sylvia's rumours; but Christopher has in fact, in his slow way, fallen in love with Valentine, this clean-run girl, the best Latinist in England, athletic, a suffragette and something of a pacifist. The attraction is mutual; both recognize, however, that nothing can be done: Christopher has his duty to Sylvia; Sylvia, being a Catholic, will in any case never divorce him.

This insoluble situation haunts Christopher through three of the novels; it haunts him in France where he serves during the war, and so does Sylvia, still pursuing him with her malignity; and through her the disfavour of General Lord Campion, his godfather, also descends upon him, making his army life more miserable than it is of necessity.

The middle two novels—No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up—provide one of the most vivid, yet calm, pictures of the First World War in France, from trenches to headquarters. There is nothing harrowing; the mud and blood, the muddle and heroism, is real enough, but it is lifted to that plane where the mind reacts with breathless absorption and with the pity that classical tragedy evokes. 'The poetry', as Wilfrid Owen, the true poet of that war, wrote, 'is in the pity …' Ford, like Flaubert, looks at his characters from above; yet as Flaubert is half in love with his Emma Bovary though perceiving all her foolishness, so is Ford with his Christopher, his'09 Morgan, his little blinded lieutenant Aranjuez.

But the war changes Christopher. He returns to London to find that Sylvia has dismantled his flat and gone to Groby. In the flat he meets Valentine, but, before they can speak, former fellow officers arrive determined to celebrate the armistice with Christopher. Amid the laughter and noise Christopher realizes: That girl with the refined face, the hair cut longish, but revealing its inner refinement… That girl longed for him as he for her! The longing had refined her face … This then was the day! The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point where he would no longer stand unbearable things … What he wanted he was prepared to take. What he had been before, God alone knew. A Younger Son? A Perpetual Second-in-Command? Who knew? But today the world was changed. Feudalism was finished; its last vestiges were gone. It held no place for him. He was going—he was damn well going!—to make a place in it for … A man could stand up on a hill, so he and she could surely get into some hole together!'

The room is furnished only with a camp bed. Valentine sees it as her nuptial couch: why then are those three officers, glasses in hand, jigging up and down on it? Then comes one of the most moving endings in all fiction:

They were all yelling.

'Good old Tietjens! Good old Fat Man! Pre-war Hooch! He'd be the one to get it.' No one like Fat Man Tietjens! He lounged at the door; easy; benevolent. In uniform now. That was better. An officer, yelling like an enraged redskin dealt him an immense blow behind the shoulder blades. He staggered, smiling, into the centre of the room. An officer gently pushed her into the centre of the room. She was against him. Khaki encircled them. They began to yell and to prance, joining hands. Others waved the bottles and smashed underfoot the glasses. Gipsies break glasses at their weddings. The bed was against the wall. She did not like the bed to be against the wall. It had been brushed by …

They were going round them; yelling in unison:

'Over here! Pom Pom Over here! Pom Pom!

That's the word that's the word; Over here…'

At least they weren't over there! They were prancing. The whole world round them was yelling and prancing round. They were the centre of unending roaring circles. The man with the eyeglass had stuck a half-crown in the other eye. He was well-meaning. A brother. She had a brother with the V.C. All in the family.

Tietjens was stretching out his two hands from the waist. It was incomprehensible. His right hand was behind her back, his left in her right hand. She was frightened. She was amazed. Did you ever!

He was swaying slowly. The elephant. They were dancing. Aranjuez was hanging on to the tall woman like a kid on a telegraph pole. The officer who had said he had picked up a little bit of fluff … well, he had! He had run out and fetched it. It wore white cotton gloves and a flowered hat. It said: 'Ow! Now!…' There was a fellow with a most beautiful voice. He led: better than a gramophone. Better …

Les petites marionettes, fontl fontl fontl…

On an elephant. A dear, meal-sack elephant. She was setting out on …

One interesting aspect of Parade's End has been pointed out by Mr. Graham Greene: the four novels are, he writes, 'almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English'. There is nothing, in the relations of Sylvia and Christopher, Valentine and Christopher, Edith Ethel and Macmaster, Mark and Marie Leonie, of the mystical heights nor the crude depths of Lawrence; yet these thoughts of Christopher as he waits for the war to end are more like the sexual life as most men know it than Lawrence would ever admit, or perhaps could ever conceive:

If they could go home he would be sitting talking to her for whole afternoons. That was what a young woman was for. You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her. You could not do that without living with her. You could not live with her without seducing her; but that was the by-product. The point is that you can't otherwise talk. You can't finish talks at street corners; in museums; even in drawing rooms. You mayn't be in the mood when she is in the mood—for the intimate conversation that means the final communion of your souls. You have to wait together—for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained … and exhausted. So that…

That in effect was love.

Mark Tietjens, Christopher's elder brother and heir to Groby, who has reached high position in the civil service, is the central character of the last of the four novels, Last Post, but until the final page he does not speak. For when the armistice drew near he as head of the Ministry of War Transport, is told that the Allies do not intend to pursue the Germans into their own country. To him this is so evidently a betrayal of France—indeed of all those who have fought—that he determines never to speak again. The doctors call it a stroke. So he lies in a thatched hut without walls in Groby grounds: the master of Groby, who never wished for the country life, has returned—paralysed and speechless. He wishes to give Christopher money, for Christopher to take over the estate. Christopher, being a stubborn Yorkshireman, refuses; he goes into business with a Mr. Schatzweiler, selling antique English furniture to the Americans. But when Sylvia, whose son will be the heir to Groby, tries to let the house furnished to some nouveaux riches, and has the great tree cut down, Christopher and Valentine go to live there. The son has been brought up by Sylvia and 'was by now a full fledged Papist, pickled and oiled and wafered and all'.

In the end, while Valentine is pregnant, Sylvia arrives—and relents. With the words of her son 'Be sporting, mother!' in her ears, she tells Valentine: 'They can all, soon, call you Mrs. Tietjens. Before God I came to drive out those people' (the nouveaux riches who came to view the property) … But I wanted to see how it was you kept him …' There is the old flash as she says: 'Damn it, I'm playing, pimp to Tietjens of Groby—leaving my husband to you!' But the influence of Father Consett is too strong; she will get her marriage dissolved by Rome.

So there is some light in the darkness, and as Mark dies he mutters to Valentine the old story about the Yorkshireman on Mount Ararat, his chin scarcely above the waters, who remarked to Noah that it was bound to clear up; and he adds: '"Never let thou thy child weep for thy sharp tongue to thy good man … A good man! Groby great tree is down …" He said: "Hold my hand."'

Parade's End is a moving study of human beings and a beautiful work of art; but through it, if we listen carefully, we shall catch a note of lament, of elegy. The bell tolls for the passing of old ways of living and thinking. Christopher, the most obstinately Conservative and deeply virtuous of men, is forced to accept the new sexual morality and to install an unmarried woman as his and Groby's mistress. It was all very well to have mistresses hidden away and from the proper class: 'In their sardonic way the tenants appreciated that: it was in the tradition and all over the county they did it themselves. But not a lady: the daughter of your father's best friend! They wanted Quality women to be Quality.' Again, it was right for Mark to have his mistress; but not to marry her; yet marry Marie Leonie he does.

The nouveaux riches, the traditionless, are battering at the gates. Groby Great Tree is down—the tree that for centuries has been regarded by the country folk as having magical properties, and whose roots reach deep into ancestral consciences. 'A Papist at Groby and Groby Great Tree down … The curse was perhaps off the family!' Mark thinks. In some old families, whose property came to them as a result of Henry VIII's dispossession of the monasteries, a sense of guilt lingered through the generations. Groby had originally been monastic land; perhaps, now that a Papist would inherit, the crime would be expiated. It was an idea that had haunted Ford all his life: it was, it will be recalled, for the restoration of these properties that Katharine Howard had striven in Fifth Queen Crowned.

So there is interwoven in this strange and vivid story something of what Jung might call 'the collective unconscious' of the English nation. But the strangeness does not end with the last page of Last Post. Christopher, as we know, was based on a real person, Arthur Marwood, and long after the novels appeared Ford said that he felt him to be still alive:

With him I set out on several enterprises—one of them being a considerable periodical publication of a Tory kind—and for many years I was accustomed, as it were, to 'set' my mind by his comments on public or other affairs. He was, as I have elsewhere said, the English Tory—the last English Tory, omniscient, slightly contemptuous—and sentimental in his human contacts … And still I have only to say: 'Tell us what he would here have done!' and at once he is there. So you see I cannot tell you the end of Tietjens, for he will end only when I am beyond pens and paper … He will go jogging along with ups and downs and plenty of worries and some satisfaction, the Tory Englishman, running his head perhaps against fewer walls, perhaps against more, until I myself cease from these pursuits.

But Mark was also based on a real person—Arthur's elder brother, Sir William Marwood, whose estate was called Busby and, like the fictional Groby, it lay on the Cleveland hills in north Yorkshire. Last Post was published in 1928: Sir William, the hale and hearty squire, did not read it, for Ford was held in somewhat bad repute in that house on account of the scandal over Violet Hunt and because he had had a difference of opinion with Arthur shortly before the latter's death during the war.

In 1934, Sir William Marwood was struck down with cancer of the throat. 'He lay', a member of his family wrote to me recently, 'without speaking for weeks unless he was desperate. The Great Tree at Busby is really a marvellous Spanish chestnut which is still there, but a huge cedar began to split the flags round the walls and had to be cut down when Sir William was ill. He died a few days later from grief about this, and at the end he said: "Hold my hand."'