[An English man of letters, Bradbury is best known as the author of such satiric novels as Eating People Is Wrong (1959) and Stepping Westward (1965). In the following excerpt from his comparative examination of post-World War I epic novels, Bradbury suggests that Ford juxtaposed in Parade's End Edwardian realism with Modernist experimental techniques to demonstrate the passing of Tietjens' way of life.]

Parade's End is the culmination of Ford Madox Ford's achievement, rivalled only by his novel of 1915, The Good Soldier, not directly about the war. But it came late in a long, mixed career; Ford—then Ford Madox Hueffer—had been writing since the turn of the century. An exemplary Edwardian novelist, he had steadily oscillated between the claims of liberal realism and experimentalism. He collaborated with Conrad, wrote historical novels, like The Fiftb Queen, and novels of contemporary political and social life (The Inheritors, A Call, etc.): novels in different ways devoted to the 'Condition of England' question central to the fiction of the day, and to its predominant theme, of the movement from the older, caring world to the new world of mechanism, atomism, indifference. Like Forster, in Howards End (1910), Ford was preoccupied with the ideal polity, the connected society, unifying reason with emotion, commerce with art. But his conservative-liberal politics and his avant-garde tastes were hard to reconcile; art, he felt, transcended issues, required an ultimate technical expertise, a Flaubertian perfection of form, which set the writer outside and beyond purposes, political commitments. In 1908 he tried to reconcile his interests in The English Review, the journal he edited; it was a valiant effort to merge the old-fashioned socio-political 'great review' with the modern 'little magazine'. But in the following years, perhaps because of increasing social tension and international stress, the avant-garde movement peaked in London. Ford moved excitedly with this, seeing a new experimental age. He intensified his commitment to 'impressionism'; he wrote The Good Soldier, just before the war; part of it appeared in the Vorticist magazine ominously called Blast. The Good Soldier intersects his social and aesthetic concerns. On the one hand, he sees society redeemed from its present crass materialism by the acceptance of social responsibility and duty; on the other, he sees it lost by virtue of the fact that society withholds and represses, especially in the sexual realm. From that ironic contrast, Heuffer gained a technical position, a detachment, the possibility of a rendered vision; the novel would be a 'hard', 'flawless' object of the modern Vorticist type, like 'a polished helmet', and it would interseam the causal, progressive, realistic novel, which sustained society in its substance and significance, with an oblique, fragmentary method of association and juxtaposition, which would question it.

Like many writers in England just before the war, then, Hueffer was experiencing a growing social disillusion coupled with a deepening interest in modernist technique. The war was to drive that process much further. In 1915, Hueffer published two propaganda books on behalf of the war effort. They attack German imperialist materialism, the threat of the new nation-state; they also attack the emergence of the same processes of materialism and statism in England. Ford confessed his own old-fashioned ideals, and realised the war was a general threat to them. Nonetheless, though over military age, he got a commission in the Welsh Regiment, and served for a time on the Western Front, an experience that produced in him a 'profound moral change'. Certainly he came back from the war with a vastly greater suspicion of vested interests and materialist forces, a strong identification with the men at the front, and a deep conviction that England was sinking back into negativism, commercialism, and anti-art. It was now that he changed his name from Hueffer to Ford, and, after various attempts at post-war pamphleteering, left London for Paris. This was partly because he felt London was betraying the effort of the war, partly because of personal and financial problems that made it unlikely he could live by writing at home; also in part because he had conceived an allegiance to the post-war international republic of letters, of which Paris now seemed the Anglo-American centre. There he joined the modernist expatriates, edited transatlantic review, associated with Pound, Stein, Joyce and Hemingway, and began Parade's End. An habitual, if not always an accurate, memoirist, he records much of this story in his novel-memoir It Was the Nightingale. His justifications for the sequence are partly modernist-aesthetic—he wanted to write a great cosmopolitan work—and partly socio-historical: 'I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time.' He saw himself as taking up the vacancy left by the death of Proust, as the creator of the 'ponderous novel'; yet the subject of the novel would be 'the public events of the decade' and 'the world as it culminated in the war'. It would be a work of 'rendering', but also a novel with a purpose: 'I sinned against my gods to the extent of saying that I was going … to write a work that should have for its purpose the obviating of all future wars.'

Ford wished, then, to write a book about large social tendencies and forces, and considered using the method whereby 'all the characters should be great masses of people—or interests.' In this notion, he came close to the method of Dos Passos's U.S.A., which sustains its massiveness by following the story of many characters, some fictional, some historical, and certain systems of interest through an historical process. But Ford felt this method was not for him; it was too large, and also risked inhumanity, the turning of men into statistics; and, wanting a greater humanism, he resolved to focus his sequence around one central character who experiences the tribulations of peace and war. He also noted that observation of active warfare had led him to 'a singular conclusion', that what preyed most on the minds of non-professional soldiers were not the horrors—'you either endure them or you do not'—but 'what was happening at home'. In particular, what was happening at home was a massive change in mores, in the dispositions of political and class power, and in men-women relationships. This, of course, is Dos Passos's concern too; but Ford's resolved method is not to amass a large society behind the events of war, rather to a create a central character who has a place in peace and war, and is capable both of suffering and critically observing change: a character based, in fact, on an old, dead friend, Arthur Marwood, a Yorkshire Tory. His central character, then, would be a man torn both in public and private life by the pressure of the times, 'a poor fellow whose body is tied in one place, but whose mind and personality brood eternally over another distant locality'. To give his hero the right kind of intersection with history and with public life, he would be an officer and a gentleman, but, more, a member of the Ruling Classes—a landowner with Westminster connections. In all this, then, Ford went in the classic direction of the realist historical novel, the Lukáczian prescription, the novel about the representative historical agent who carries the forces of the time with him, who is the man of history. And in this, one might say, Ford is opting for a very English possibility, the novel of social and historical life in which individuals can clearly represent their class, can function as a primary social focus.

However, Christopher Tietjens is more than the embodiment of his class; he is, indeed, at odds with it. For Tietjens is also 'the last Tory', the 'Christian gentleman', the witness to the chivalric view of life, a man whose roots go down into English society and life; but who is already lost and suffering amid the new dispositions of power, the new sexual mores, the new habits and standards of Georgian England. Tietjens' world has, indeed, already newly disappeared before the War starts; he has already become absurd in his chivalry, his code of honour, monogamy and chastity. From the start a certain comic absurdity attaches to him; he is a mealsack elephant. His enduring values are already part-displaced; misfortunes accumulate around his ideas and ideals, around his house, Groby, around his attempts to establish his standards in life. He is in fact a comic character, and Parade's End is indeed a certain sort of war comedy, in a species that was to reappear in fresh form in the parallel English trilogy for the Second World War, Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour. Like Waugh's Guy Crouchback, Tietjens retains ancient, hereditary notions of chivalry; he quests for just causes and true wars. He is a man of 'clear Eighteenth-Century mind,' passionate yet constrained, agonised yet expressionless, living out the contradictions of the old code to their last possible conclusion, hoping to take 'the last train to the old Heaven'. He is a romantic figure caught at the point of extinction, a man of parades in a new world in which, socially as well as militarily, there are no more parades. And like Guy (or Don Quixote) he is thrust into a world of chaotic and lowered history. So, comically, he has to be taken along the path of disillusionment; the bleak and terrible events of the war are that path, and he follows it, with elephantine blundering, to base reality. At the same time his ideals function as an essential criticism of that lowered world, and subtract political significance from most of the events that take place. His war thus starts long before the outbreak of hostilities, in the strange, chivalric marriage he makes to a deceitful wife, pregnant by another man, and in his growing, but chaste, emotional relationship with the new woman, Valentine Wannop.

W. H. Auden once noted that the sequence 'makes it quite clear that World War I was a retribution visited upon Western Europe for the sins and omissions of its ruling class, for which not only they, but also the innocent conscripted millions on both sides, must suffer'. It is true that Ford is much concerned in these novels with the debasement of the ruling class, the selfish corruptions and false motives, 'the swine in the corridors' of Whitehall, the bungled political issue of the Single Command, with the horror and boredom of the battlefield. Yet Parde's End is not primarily a sequence about the system, nor about the horrors of trench warfare and bombardment. Ford saw the battlefield as part of a larger experience, as a place always intruded on by 'money, women, testamentary bothers'; hence the social war and the sex war move to the lines, with Tietjens' bitch-wife Sylvia and the malicious General Campion, who wants her as his mistress and who misuses Tietjens in his pursuit, always in the background. War is thus always connected in the book with political and social events, but those events are themselves part of the larger victimisation of Tietjens and his ancient values. It is Tietjens' purgatory, a version of the great, pressing machine of modern life. And through it Tietjens is pressed into adaptation. He suffers, is buried, wounded, persecuted, forced into action and heroism, split away from the past. If he recognises the flaws in his own class, and the demanding democracy of the front, he is also insistently deprived of his more chivalric hopes; it is a gross, modern, material, selfish war. The war in fact deprives him of many of the social meanings that have made him the potential hero of the story in the first place; he loses his old values, his old heaven, his world of parades and moral prohibitions. But he gains his new woman and a new life, becoming, ironically, an antique dealer in the new, paradeless world: 'The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him… It had made him reach a point at which he could no longer stand unbearable things.' The world too has changed accordingly:

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 now stand up on a hill, so he and she could surely get into some hole together!

But the point is that Ford does not tell this as a simple fable of moral growth; indeed so detached in his method, so ironically placed his narrator, that the book can be, and has been, read in several ways: as a tragedy of Tietjens' accumulated suffering, or a comedy of his emergence into a new life, as a conservative assault on the decline of English society, its cold, bureaucratic mechanism exposed by the war, or a celebration of the greater democracy and justice of the post-war world. The peculiarity of the tone arises in part because Ford is always trying to merge a coherent structure, a historical fable, with an impressionistic technique; the technique qualifies the structure. The problem of relating an intense impressionism with a 'hidden long logic' is one Ford must have known from Crane's Red Badge of Courage, that ambiguous novel set on another battlefield, in the American Civil War. But Crane was above all concerned with the consciousness of his central character; hence his impressionism. Ford's is a less interior technique; he uses impressionism for private and public purposes at the same time, to relate inward motions of consciousness with compounded exterior circumstances. Moreover Ford was dealing not with a brief set of incidents but a long historical span, embodying a logic and an evolution, indeed an extended Spenglerian cycle from feudalism to modern class war and materialist democracy. His task was more broadly spread; he was using impressionist modes not to suggest the freedom or independence or even the mechanisation of consciousness, but the motion of mind amid historical coercions; men are subject to historical facts and historical change. Likewise the war itself is a reality prior to any aesthetic intervention in it. What the novelist is responsible for creating is therefore not the facts, which are historically predetermined objects of representation, but the 'treatment'. Thus far Ford himself saw impressionism as a heightened realism, a mode of dealing with the reality of life; his war is not, like Crane's, a metaphor. But he also saw it as a technique for coping with the perceptual chaos of the times, with the novelist's incapacity to intervene; it was a mode of detachment and irony. And it was also a way of representing the subjective motions of consciousness moving not only parallel with, but atemporally against, the significant motion of history, the insistent realities of war. In any case, those realities were in part a dislocation of reality; as he said in It Was the Nightingale, war damaged confidence in substance: 'it had been revealed to you that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos.'

Thus, if one part of Ford's effort went into substantiating the historical novel as a form for dealing with the times, another part went into taking it away again. The first book, Some Do Not …, begins on a prose of apparent solidity, realistic weight:

The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly—Tietjens remembered thinking—as British gilt-edged securities …

This is England in 1912, given with weighty realism. But it is of course a very hard-edge realism, which does not so much humanise as render things stark and abstract. The train has a glossy brittle newness; the two young men are at a temporal distance; the language, like the upholstery, has an abstract foreign geometry. Ford is opening up an aloof space between the material and the novelist, an indirect, angular form of presentation, and it is into this space that technique comes. History and form alike will tell against this solid world; the desubstantiation of this reality will be manifested both by the novelist and the war. Using the method he calls progression d'effect, Ford accumulates, by juxtaposition, a sequence that establishes this world of 1912 as one of already breaking principles, muddled history, colliding forces. Harsh machinery intersects with organic life; subjective consciousness struggles with public responsibility; sexual instincts subvert moral codes. In this increasingly chaotic world Tietjens attempts to stabilise life by asserting the need for principle, 'a skeleton map of a country'; but his mind wanders, the knacker's cart comes round the corner, and—in using a larger structural irony he will make into a basic device of the sequence—Ford shifts the action in time directly to 1917, to a war-wounded Tietjens, socially absurd, publicly unpopular, lost in the chaos he has attempted to control. Impressionism thus becomes a technique for dematerialising the solid world, partly in order to extend its historical significance, relating one part of life to another, partly in order to move the action inward into consciousness and allow for its anguish and disordered movement, the movement that itself mirrors a decomposing world.

It is this double motion that allows Ford to make impressionism into an effective technique for coping with the war, for creating a significant historiography. It allowed Ford to merge realism with technical modernism, treating a disjunctive history but granting it historical significance. In No More Pardes, the next volume, the impressionistic mode can dominate as a method for representing the contingency and fragmentation of the battlefield itself, the chaos of conduct, the loss of rule and order, the massing of perceptual and mental chaos. Historical solidity and substance are shattered.

Now, in the next volume, A Man Could Stand Up, which passes between the battlefield and the Armistice, between the consciousness of Tietjens and that of Valentine Wannop, a painful, disorderly new coherence can start to emerge. With The Lost Post, Ford faced his most difficult problem, that of dealing with a post-war world in which both chaos and a new economy of order exist. The technique is fragmentary, as is Tietjens' past and the present form of his social being; but, as with [D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928], the book gestures toward the need for a new life and a new language amid the ruins. Ford settles for a modernist technique with vague organic overtones, a tentative and ironic resolution. It was an answer he seems to have been uneasy with himself; he proposed on occasion dropping the book from the sequence. In fact it has stylistic validity, and enforces the ironic meaning of the whole; what it lacks is the urgent strength the war sections gave to Ford's entire technique. It is indeed the war part of the novel that makes it Ford's most triumphant work, an extraordinary probe into a culture, wherein the double inheritance of technique he carried with him—part realistic, part modernistic—fuses itself into a historical meaning. In his fable of Tietjens entering a lowered history, a world of reduced substance and solidity, Ford led the way for many subsequent English novelists who found the world of the twenties and thirties, or indeed the sixties and seventies, capable of acquiring meaning only if treated with something of Ford's comic and modernistic indifference.