[Morris was an American biographer, critic, social historian, essayist, and pioneering educator who is credited with introducing contemporary literature courses to the American university system in the 1920s. In the following review of Parade's End, he suggests that Ford is the literary equal of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kajka.]

Here, finally presented as its author wished, is one of the major English novels of the twentieth century. Parade's End brings together four books by Ford Madox Ford, first published between 1924 and 1928, and long out of print: Some Do Not …; No More Parsdes; A Man Could Stand Up and The Last Post. Issued separately and at intervals, these books were read as a series of novels having the same central characters and a common theme. But Ford intended them to be read as a unit. The single massive novel which he conceived is now offered under the title he chose for it. Parade's End gives us—for the first time in its organic unity—his greatest achievements.

Ford died in 1939 at the age of sixty-six. Readers who were then middle-aged remembered him as a very distinguished writer and a remarkable literary figure. He was the contemporary of Joyce, Proust and Kafka, but he had won no fame comparable to theirs. As a result, he is virtually unknown by the rising generation of today. But publication of Parade's End should establish him, belatedly, in the company of the great trinity of his period. This novel, so curiously neglected for a quarter of a century, now emerges as one of the few real masterpieces of fiction that have been produced during our era.

In common with Proust, Ford portrayed a distintegrating society; his picture is large in scope and thickly crowded. Like Joyce, he conceived his novel as an epic and made it the vehicle of a prophecy. Like Kafka, though not as explicitly, he designed his novel as an allegory, expressing abstract meanings through concrete, material forms. This indicates how far, in Parade's End, Ford deliberately transcended his own concept of the novelist's primary function. He wanted the novelist, he said, to assume "his really proud position as historian of his own time" and he declared that "fiction should render, not draw, morals." In the last twenty-five years, history has elaborately confirmed the prophecy contained in Ford's novel, so that the book has even more relevance to our world today than to the world which Ford was portraying. Yet, however impressive Ford now seems as the historian of his own time and the prophet of ours, Parade's End shows that he was something more important than either. He was one of the very few writers of his generation who understood the moral significance of the tragedy he attempted to record in dramatic narrative.

Parade's End deals with the private fortunes of Christopher Tietjens, an English gentleman, during the first world war, and thus appears to be a representative example of the psychological and social novel. It can be so read, and on this level it is an astonishing, magnificent achievement. The central characters of the story, Christopher and his wife Sylvia, are memorable both for their extraordinary complexity and their absolute convincingness. In rendering their domestic situation and the prolonged disastrous conflict of their personalities, upon which the story largely turns, Ford has given us a treatment of modern love as illuminating, in its exposure of the secret recesses of the heart, as that contrived by Proust. No less subtle in his insight, probing as deeply as Proust did, Ford used the dramatic rather than the analytical method of presentation. The long, intolerably painful luncheon scene which first reveals the relationship of Christopher and Sylvia is a characteristic and brilliant illustration of his method. For sheer intensity for cumulative dramatic power, the scene has few equals in the modern novel. Yet it is not a mere episode; it harvests an entire past and, as the reader discovers on finishing the story, it forecasts the outcome. Ford set his central characters in the midst of a society; he did not pose them against it as a background and it is this society, represented by the many other characters of the novel, which gives the cases of Christopher and Sylvia a significance far greater than that of individual circumstance. They are not only protagonists, but allegorical figures. They personify the civilization which Ford regarded as doomed to ruin and the chaos which he envisaged as succeeding it.

Ford portrayed English society as already in process of breakup, and the first world war, as it appears in the novel, is both the symbol and the consequence of that process. Christopher Tietjens, whom he described as "the last English Tory," is a surviving example of a species already extinct. He possesses the "clear eighteenth-century mind" that Ford admired. He exemplifies the kind of social order, the kind of world toward which Western civilization, after the Renaissance, appeared to be progressing. He illustrates the ideals of private honor, public responsibility, humane conduct, incorruptible justice, order and harmony that were intrinsic to Western culture. He regards his own life as, in essence, a moral career; convinced that all his choices are free, he knows that all of them must be decided by ethical principle. In the twentieth-century world, as Ford shows, Tietjens is an anachronism. His fundamental sanity and security inspire fear in those around him; his inherent virtue arouses hostility everywhere. His wife cannot endure his excellence; both loving and detesting him, she is obsessively bent upon accomplishing his ruin, and her successful enlistment of others in this destructive enterprise forms the plot of the novel. The society portrayed in Parade's End is the world of Sylvia Tietjens. It is becoming a world of moral chaos in which all principles will lose their validity, in which the great cultural tradition will be bankrupt, in which conduct will be motivated by the lust for power and dictated by expediency. Writing a quarter of a century ago, Ford made Sylvia prophetic of the future. She represents anarchy, terror and the sense of guilt.

Parade's End has an excellent introduction by Robie Macauley, who was a student at Olivet College when Ford, the year before his death, was "author in residence" on the campus. Ford's eagerness to serve youth never flagged during his long career and it seems singularly appropriate that an illuminating discussion of his art should come from a member of the last generation with which he was to have personal contact.