SOURCE: "Ford Madox Ford and the Tietjens Fulfillment," in The Lock Haven Review, No. 1, 1959, pp. 58-65.

[Issacs in an American author and educator. In the following essay, he contrasts Parade's End with The Good Soldier, evaluating the two works based on Ford's own criteria as a literary critic.]

In the dedicatory letter to an American edition of The Good Soldier (1915), Ford Madox Ford says that he put into that novel everything he knew of the technical art of writing. He also says that he expects to be considered homo unius libri and that The Good Soldier is the one book. Elsewhere he claims that The Last Post (1928) was no more than an afterthought to the first three Tietjens books, Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), and A Man Could Stand Up (1926). These statements are mentioned first in order to get them out of the way. They are all equally untrue. The novels themselves refute them. Moreover, the testimony of all who knew Ford is that anything he might say at any time could be untrue. The truth is that Parade's End must be considered as a single aesthetic entity and that it is patently and demonstrably superior in many ways to the earlier, slighter work.

Two basic ideas went into everything Ford wrote, one aesthetic and one moral. The aesthetic idea is twofold, consisting of the importance of literature—"The only activity that has always been of extreme importance to the world is imaginative literature. It is of supreme importance because it is the only means by which humanity can express at once emotions and ideas … nothing that is not an art is of any lasting importance at all, the meanest novel being humanly more valuable than the most pompous of factual works" [in Ford's Return to Yesterday, 1932]; and the importance of the word, the mot juste—" … the exact use of words seems to me to be the most important thing in the world. We are, in the end, governed so much more by words than by deeds" [in Ford's Between St. Dennis and St. George, 1915].

The moral idea is that the major concern of life is moral, that the most important thing an individual does is to decide what he should do. This becomes the large concern of his novels. He inherited this theme, of course, from Henry James, whom he called "cher maitre." But it was basic to Ford's technique of "impressionism" that no specific moral be drawn and that the author must not intrude into the work.

In evaluating the relative merits of Ford's works, then, it will not help to look for the philosophy of life which is revealed. Nor will it be useful to compare mood and tone, for his attitude toward his subjects was always sympathetic and serious, as, rightly or wrongly, he never failed to consider them important; and toward his readers he was at once apologetic and patronizing, as the simultaneous reaction to and product of the precocious dilettantism of his early career. His growth as a serious novelist from The Good Soldier to Parade's End can be seen, however, in the subject matter of the novels and the technical means of treating these matters.

Ford once said that The Good Soldier was the first of his works which was not a tour deforce. Quite the contrary, it is very consciously, almost sickeningly, a tour deforce. How else describe a novel whose author adopts as persona, narrator, and one of four principal actors, a character so far removed from himself or his experience as to be ridiculous? John Dowell is an independently wealthy American, without any knowledge of English society, literature, or any of the arts, without sensitivity in human relationships, and even without the ability to express himself interestingly. The only point of comparison between him and Ford is the naive sentimentalism which they share. The reader is made constantly aware of the great disparity between author and persona by the obvious artificiality involved. The repeated phrases, "Of course, I wouldn't know about…" and "This … was very new to me," serve to accentuate the painful presence of an author who intends complete absence and anonymity. Occasional fine turns of phrase, such as "cosmopolitan harpy," which are typical of Ford Madox Ford or Sylvia or Christopher Tietjens, are revealingly jarring when they come from John Dowell.

At first glance, the circumstances of the plot seem worthy of a Henry James treatment. Two couples are constant companions for the better part of ten years. The American's wife is the mistress of the Englishman with the complete knowledge of his wife and the equally complete absence of suspicion on the part of the American. In Ford's treatment, however, the effect is closer to that of a bad fourteenth-century French fabliau, with the dupers punished by death and the duped living to tell "the saddest story I ever heard." True to the spirit of the fabliaux, however, the dupers have had their fun, while the duped have earned their horns by their own ignorance. The presentation of the incidents of the plot seems like an elaborate exercise in the use of the time-shift device. This succeeds artfully in creating a degree of suspense which is, however, overshadowed by the improbability of the complication and resolution and the dramatic ineffectiveness of the entire plot.

Ford always recognized the fact, as did James, that character is the most important intrinsic element of a novel. It is strange, then, that he employed a remarkably unsuccessful method of characterization in The Good Soldier. Edward and Leonora Ashburnham and Florence Dowell are seen through the insensitive, indiscriminate eye of the narrator, and emerge as little more than two-dimensional caricatures, as does John Dowell himself. Leonora is the best of a poor lot, anticipating Sylvia Tietjens in her sexviciousness and Catholicism, and suggesting Kate Croy in her coarse gentility. Edward is, perhaps, an embryonic Tietjens without honor, that is, without Christopher's most important trait.

Ford, then, has utterly failed in his twofold intention. A work of art has not been created in The Good Soldier, nor is the effect on the reader that of experiencing the decisions of people as to what they should do under their circumstances. These people, their circumstances, and their decisions are gauche and blatant in their unreality.

How Ford attained his amazing artistic maturity in the decade between The Good Soldier and Parde's End can never adequately be explained. His war experience certainly provided him with richer material and greater insight into human relationships and psychological operations. In addition, he must have been guided by some aesthetic intuition in combining his knowledge of the technical aspects of his art and his comprehension of people and the workings of their minds into the fine novel that the Tietjens saga is.

The fourth part, The Last Post (to dispose first of the one major fault of the book), is unsatisfactory in its partial reversion to the method of The Good Soldier. The events which make up the action of the novel are here viewed through the consciousness of a handful of minor characters, and the "centres," to use Jamesian terminology. Christopher, Sylvia, and Valentine, are seen only obliquely. Thus, much extraneous matter is brought in, such as Michael's multiple Freudian involvements (surprisingly overlooked in Robie Macauley's introduction), and such central matters as the fulfillment of the major characters are imaged forth from relatively dim reflectors.

The time-shift, which had been laboriously practiced in The Good Soldier, is used to such effect here that realistic concern with chronological time is obviated, and the dramatic use of time, à la Proust, appears natural and necessary. In addition, Ford uses here, with equal accomplishment, those "accoutrements and attributes of a work of art in all its glory," which he so admired in Flaubert—progression d'effet, charpente, façade, cadences, mots justes.

What is even more important to the success of Parade's End is the addition of what he called the chief factor in James' late work—"more and more detail, so that the exact illusions and the exact facts of life may appear." Thus, upon entering a room, the reader is not given a journalistic report of the entire room as in Dickens, but the room is seen in the infinite detail with which the particular observer would see it. In Christopher's eye, an old piece of furniture is observed, appreciated, categorized; in Sylvia's, the dust on the brandy decanter is noted and sardonically commented on; in Valentine's, a poor edition of Catullus is immediately and violently noticed on the bookshelf. Scenes, then, are vividly portrayed, not materially objective scenes, but scenes of the sensibilities and the psychologies of the observers.

These devices, along with much skillful use of interior monologues, produce a verisimilitude so complete that the probability of the work cannot be called in question, and the arrangement of the materials has a satisfying dramatic effect, with the exception of the resolution in The Last Post.

The development of character throughout Parade's End is the greatest accomplishment of the book. Christopher Tietjens is the most remarkable figure in English or American literature of the twentieth century. Christopher is observed by and revealed through the consciousness of people who love him, hate him, admire him, misunderstand him, sometimes all at once. His own consciousness accentuates the complexity of his character. He is the "soul of honor," but he sets up housekeeping with Valentine Wannop, who is to have his child. He is incapable of hurting a living being, yet is unconscionably cruel to his wife. He is a mathematical genius, but he loses much of his prodigious memory through his experiences at the front. He is, in short, unbelievable. Yet he becomes as real and warm as a father or an admired uncle. One knows what he has done and why, what he should do and must, what he can do and will. The reader's concerns become the novelist's concerns, which are Christopher's moral dilemmas. Moreover, the solution of the character, the author, and the reader, is one and the same. And the twofold intention of the writer is almost absolutely fulfilled.

In addition to being a novelist, Ford achieved some degree of notoriety, if not success, as a propagandist, an editor, an art critic, a writer of fairy stories, a poet and a literary critic. Literature was the great love of his life, and he devoted a large part of his tremendous energy to criticism. It would be interesting and fitting to examine, in conclusion, how The Good Soldier and Parades End might fare under the scrutiny of Ford's own critical theory and under the terms of his own criteria.

In his system, an acceptance of certain classical and Aristotelian doctrines is evidenced side by side with strong idealistic tendencies. The attempt at combining these incongruous elements results in a hotchpotch which breaks down at every turn. In trying to be empirical, he gives himself away by the use of such terminology as "attuned," "pixy-like," "reöxygenation of the blood," and "aura in the air." And, in trying to be definitive, he often uses vague or loaded words such as "life," "lived," "pure," and "purely." He has pretensions to vast learning, but tries to be unlearned in his presentation. He is scientifically unscientific, dualistically empirical, and historically antihistorical. Nor do the antitheses end there. He proclaims himself a classicist and a realist, but in practice is a romanticist and an impressionist. Only his sentimentalism is acknowledged. His methods do not agree with his preconceived notions, and, since he fails to recognize the insurmountable difficulties in all these contradictions, his system has to be a failure. He is a dualist who calls Aristotle the most brilliant of philosophers and an idealist who says that Plato was the enemy of all the arts. Ford presents the strange phenomenon of a man who tries to combine opposites which he himself says are impossible of uniting—quaint observation and tranquil generalizings.

When not concerned with combining his idealism with Aristotelian classification, however, Ford achieves some degree of consistency by the rigorous application of certain criteria which he sets up for a good or great work.

1. The work must be a work of probability, or what Ford calls common sense.
2. The great work must have a dominating quality of omniscience.
3. A work of art must use stylistic devices in order to portray life, give verisimilitude, and take the reader out of himself.
4. A work cannot be good without a good style, founded on the vernacular, as near as possible to the common speech of the day without having a shocking, comic, or gross effect.
5. No moral should be drawn, nor should the author intrude into the work. This, the absence of the author, is what Ford calls "impressionism" and, in conjunction with criterion three, is the most important standard for the novel.

Ford's ideals of probability are the works of Turgenev and Jane Austen. That Parade's End stands up quite favorably and that The Good Soldier fails miserably under this test has already been shown.

By omniscience, Ford does not mean the technical term referring to the Thackerayan point of view. He means the quality, without regard to point of view, which a novel by James, or even by Conrad, has. The reader senses the author's complete and intimate knowledge of, and the overall rightness of, the created world of the novel. Once again, Parade's End is quite successful where The Good Soldier fails.

I have already spoken of Ford's successful use of stylistic devices in Parade's End. One has only to experience the complete lack of verisimilitude in The Good Soldier with all its devices to wonder whether they are indeed concomitants or if verisimilitude may be achieved in spite of artificialities. Nevertheless, the superiority of the later novel is apparent here, too.

On the question of style, it would appear that The Good Soldier is closer to Ford's criterion. The language is often common, while that of Parade's End is often unusual. The language, then, corresponds roughly to the characters, who in The Good Soldier are common types and in Parade's End are rare individuals. It is not the style of Parade's End which should be criticized here, but the criterion which sets up this Wordsworthian standard. The language of The Good Soldier is flat, dull, and uninteresting, while that of Parade's End is alive and believable in its frequent novelty and infinite variety.

Neither novel draws a moral or seeks to generalize from particulars, although individual moral concerns are central to both. Author-intrusion is another matter, however. The disparity between Ford and Dowell, his persona in The Good Soldier, creates an unconscious intrusion not only of the author but also of the artificiality of his technique. Even fully accepting the narrator and the devices, the reader would still find irritating and intrusive his many digressions outside the area of the plot, which, after all, only serve to put in bold relief the obvious tour deforce. The technique ought to be unobtrusive, as in Parade's End, and there Ford achieves his greatest success in keeping himself out of a book. There is only the barest suggestion of intrusion in the observations of Mark Tietjens in The Last Post.

This method of cross-comparison, however valid or invalid it may be, has served the function of a check to reconfirm the validity of judgments previously arrived at. But any consistent critical approach to these two novels must find as great a distance between them as there is between Christopher Tietjens, the powerful embodiment of Ford's humanistic and Christian ideals, and either Ashburnham or Dowell, who represent all that Ford came to mistrust and detest. The distance—surely it is a gap of quality—may be measured by the insensitive and weak souls at one pole and the "soul of honor" at the other.