SOURCE: "Living as Ritual in Parade's End," in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 43-50.

[Page is an English author, editor, and educator whose works include studies of Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and D. H. Lawrence. In the following essay, he examines Ford's treatment of ritual and conformity as hallmarks of social stability in Parade's End.]

Certain novelists, in common with many of us who are not novelists, betray an addiction, usually unconscious, to certain words or turns of phrase; and in them, as in us, the reiteration may be more than a trivial mannerism—may, indeed, offer an insight, through a tiny verbal crack in the fence, into central preoccupations or obsessions. I do not think, for example, that any of Arnold Bennett's critics has pointed to his fondness for two words, one of them very unusual and the two of them in conjunction highly suggestive as to his individual vision and method as a writer of fiction. Dailiness seems to convey a sense of boring but reassuring routine, of the pattern or ritual of repeated actions which make up an individual life; mystical (somewhat loosely used by Bennett), a contrasting and complementary sense of life's unpredictability, of the unguessedat lurking just behind the humdrum. Less readily accounted for, but no less striking, is D. H. Lawrence's repeated use of vague, vaguely, vagueness, and (what seems to be lated) the adverb rather. From a small verbal fulcrum of this kind we may venture to weigh the novelist's world.

With Ford Madox Ford, such a word is convention, and I shall try to show in this essay how the word and the idea dominate his tetralogy Parade's End without being at all confined to that work. But we may note first that some of his critics have been infected by Ford's fondness for the word and its near-synonyms. Mark Schorer tells us [in his The World We Imagine: Selected Essays, 1968] that The Good Soldier "is about the difference between convention and fact" and that the narrator discovers he has "mistaken the conventions of social behaviour for the actual human fact"; whilst Arthur Mizener [in his The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford, 1971] sees the same novel as depicting "a society in which the life of men's feelings no longer flows into the beautiful, refined ritual of the society's most cultivated life" (italics mine). The antitheses suggested here are also fruitful in relation to Paade's End. The Good Soldier may be allowed to detain us a little longer, however, in order to show that Ford's concern with the place of convention or ritual in individual and social life antedates the tetralogy, in which nevertheless this theme was to receive much more extensive treatment. In the earlier novel Ashburnham is introduced in terms which imply an extreme, even caricatural conventionality in the sense of unquestioning adherence to the traditional way of life of a particular social class and an almost religious absorption in the material details of its prescribed life-style:

His hair was fair, extraordinarily ordered in a wave, running from the left temple to the right; his face was a light brick-red, perfectly uniform in tint up to the roots of the hair itself; his yellow moustache was as stiff as a toothbrush and I verily believe that he had his black smoking jacket thickened a little over the shoulder-blades so as to give himself the air of the slightest possible stoop. It would be like him to do that; that was the sort of thing he thought about. Martingales, Chiffney bits, boots; where you got the best soap, the best brandy, the name of the chap who rode a plater down the Khyber cliffs; the spreading power of number three shot before a charge of number four powder … by heavens, I hardly ever heard him talk of anything else.

This is very skilfully done: the tone is casual, but every detail tells, and the suggestion of simulation and calculation is not accidental (the "perfectly uniform" face, mask-like rather than of human flesh; the moustache resembling a toothbrush rather than hair). Not only Ashburnham's clothes and habits but his physical features and complexion imply a self-conscious deference to a mode of life acknowledged as appropriate to a member of the British upper classes. And what at first appears to be a genuine concern with quality ("where you got the best soap … ") is quickly shown to be a limitation of human freedom:

The given proposition was, that we were all 'good people.' We took for granted that we all liked beef underdone but not too underdone; that both men preferred a good liqueur brandy after lunch; that both women drank a very light Rhine wine qualified with Fachingen water—that sort of thing.

"That sort of thing" is seen, in a moment of ironic rebellion or humorous disillusion on the part of the narrator, to be:

… an almost unreasonably high standard. For it is really nauseating, when you detest it, to have to eat every day several slices of thin, tepid, pink india rubber, and it is disagreeable to have to drink brandy when you would prefer to be cheered up by a warm, sweet Kümmel. And it is nasty to have to take a cold bath in the morning when what you want is really a hot one at night. And it stirs a little of the faith of your fathers that is deep down within you to have to have it taken for granted that you are an Episcopalian when really you are an old-fashioned Philadelphia Quaker.

But these things have to be done: it is the cock that the whole of this society owes to Aesculapius.

"These things have to be done": the class which appears to enjoy the greatest freedom, an enviable leisure and privilege and affluence, is constrained in matters great and small by the exactly ordained rituals of tradition. As we shall see, the subject of Parde's End is the death—throes of that tradition. In The Good Soldier, the antithesis of the conformity that is unquestioned by everyone except the narrator (who is in every sense an outsider) is Ashburnham's helpless infatuations: his romantic and sexual impulses constitute a rebellion against the demands of a society shown as tyrannically working through conventions at all levels from food and drink to morality and religion in order to restrict personal liberty. Much later in the book, when Nancy Rufford is "exported to India," we are told:

It was the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of Edward's house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of the body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but surely for the preservation of the normal type; for the extinction of proud, resolute, and unusual individuals.

At a moment of moral crisis, convention and tradition are the substitutes for individual judgement and decision, and they work in the interests of a social Darwinism with the elimination of individuality as its goal. The struggle in The Good Soldier is between passion and convention, but the big battalions are on the side of the latter.

This antithesis is developed further in Parade's End. In The Good Soldier, convention is tyrannical but makes for social cohesion: stability is purchased at the price of variety, spontaneity, eccentricity, unpredictability. Within the limits of this short novel the drama can only be shown as operating in the arena of private lives. In the tetralogy, the cohesion and stability of society are devastated by the upheaval of the Great War, and much of the action takes place on or near the battlefield; yet the historical cataclysm only dramatizes on a vast scale the upheaval in the Tietjens family caused by the unconventionality of Christopher. That quality is shown in the opening scene of the first novel, Some Do Not, the very title of which hints, of course, in one of its meanings at Christopher Tietjens' nonconformity. Almost every detail of the description of Tietjens and Macmaster in the "perfectly appointed railway carriage" works to convey the profound antithesis beneath their superficial similarity—the one man's eager obedience to society's rules (conformity being the price of worldly success), the other's disregard for them. Both belong to "the English public official class," a common educational background (as a fact of social history) going far to neutralize the difference in their social origins. It is the class that "administered the world," yet very quickly the point is made that Macmaster is readier than Tietjens to operate the machinery of ruling-class influence, to resort to the "nonchalant" yet authoritative Balliol voice or a letter to The Times. Macmaster's appearance recalls the conscious conformity of Ashburnham's, but Tietjens "could not remember what coloured tie he had on." As the first-class carriage runs smoothly and symbolically along the tracks, Macmaster reads the proofs of his belletristic efforts (for man of letters is one of the roles he plays)—and the detection of errors and lapses and their firm rectification is an entirely appropriate activity: his ambition, to pursue the metaphor, is to live his life as if it were a text beyond criticism. This long chapter ends with the first appearance of the title-phrase; it has begun with a suggestion of resemblance, almost uniformity, between the two men, but now it ambiguously foreshadows Tietjens' experience which is to be traced through four novels; for it is Macmaster, starting out with considerably less than Tietjens' advantages of birth, who becomes a "squire," acquires a title, and is accorded the public respect that eludes his friend. Tietjens' failure in worldly terms must in large part be laid at the door of his scant regard for convention; yet the antithesis between the man indifferent to society's dictates and the man enslaved by them is not over-simplified, for Tietjens himself is shown as cased in conventional reactions—in responses determined, that is to say, by what is prescribed and expected in a given case rather than by what proceeds from the special pleading of the mind or heart. Thus at the outset he is prepared to take back Sylvia, knowing her infidelity and suspecting that her child is not his, whereas Macmaster urges him to "drag the woman through the mud." That a gentleman does not initiate divorce proceedings is an article of faith with Tietjens; he is concerned with honour, Macmaster with honours. And this provides a solution to the apparent paradox: Tietjens, unlike Macmaster in both respects, is indifferent to conventionalities of surface but deeply conventional, even against his own interests, where honour is at stake. I borrow that last phrase from the lines of Hamlet's that come to mind as apposite:

Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake.

This reading of the two characters is confirmed by the similar contrast to be found (more dramatically heightened, however) between the two major women characters of the tetralogy. Sylvia's conventionality—she is a woman who is photographed for the society magazines, with all that this implies of conformity of appearance and social conduct—is a cloak for destructive malignity; Valentine Wannop is as unconventional as she can well be in her time, a sort of latter-day Sue Bridehead in her epicene appearance and her militant feminism, only much more attractive than Hardy's exasperating heroine and much more clearly enjoying the author's moral assent. Christopher and Valentine meet for the first time on a golf course, the scene, scrupulously kept as to appearances, of a highly ritualized and mainly masculine and upper-class game (the early Auden was to use "The golf-house quick one" as shorthand for a whole way of life); Valentine's behaviour there is intrusive, maverick, rocking the boat of complacent privilege, and she is abetted by Christopher.

If there is something voulu in Valentine's defiance of convention, however, Christopher's unconventionality sometimes has the air of innocence, a total absence of calculation of effects. This does not prevent the conventional world from thinking the worst of him, and one of the most powerful elements in the whole work is the appalling sense of society's readiness to believe evil of a good man who has proved unwilling to respect its conventions far enough to play the hypocrite.

The word "convention" makes a significant multiple appearance in the important scene which ends Part One of Some Do Not:

"Are you all right?" The cart might have knocked her down. He had, however, broken the convention. Her voice came from a great distance.…

His last thought came back to him. He had broken their convention: he had exhibited concern: like any other man.… He said to himself:

"By God! Why not take a holiday: why not break all conventions?"

They erected themselves intangibly and irrefragably. He had not known this young woman twenty-four hours: not to speak to: and already the convention existed between them that he must play stiff and cold, she warm and clinging.…

A convention of the most imbecile type … Then break all conventions: with the young woman: with himself above all. For forty-eight hours.…

Note the delicate mirroring of Tietjens' shifting responses through slight linguistic variations: "the convention," "their convention," "all conventions." The escapade—escape from convention—ends in detection by the General "In full tog," feathered and bemedalled. The grotesquely elaborate uniform ("something like a scarlet and white cockatoo") epitomizes convention at its most strikingly visual; like any uniform, it announces the submission of the individual to the group and reproves Tietjens' impulsive behaviour. Indeed, the whole episode seems stage-managed by providence to instruct him in the perils of defying convention. Yet he is not, or not yet, an instinctively unconventional man: he accepts the unwritten rules of his class, later accepting the inevitability of his ruin when his cheques are dishonoured (the banker's term is felicitous), even though the fault is not his: not inner motive but public event is decisive in accomplishing his dishonour. In this context, membership of his club becomes not just a matter of convenience but a badge of his own sense of his social acceptability: he resigns, withdraws the resignation, and then in an assertion of his own dignity resigns again the next day. To an outsider (the American narrator of The Good Soldier, for instance) such actions might seem to constitute an absurd charade; to Tietjens they are a profound moral drama.

Before the end of Some Do Not, Mark Tietjens, Christopher's brother, is presented in terms which make plain his role: if Christopher vacillates between conformity and rebellion at this stage, Mark is a paragon of conformity for whom outward forms, however apparently trivial, are everything:

Mark was considering that one of the folds of his umbrella was disarranged. He seriously debated with himself whether he should unfold it at once and refold it—which was a great deal of trouble to take!—or whether he should leave it till he got to his club, where he would tell the porter to have it done at once. That would mean that he would have to walk for a mile and a quarter through London with a disarranged umbrella, which was disagreeable.

As we shall see, Mark's role becomes a major one in The Last Post and the representative quality of the two brothers then becomes fully explicit. But The Last Post is set in the postwar period, its predecessor having ended with the Armistice; and the two inside novels of the tetralogy are novels of the war that went far towards shattering for ever the social order depicted in Some Do Not. No More Pardes echoes in its title that of the whole tetralogy, Parade's End, and Ford surely intended the word to evoke not only (more obviously) the secondary, military sense of parade but the primary meaning (from parare, to adorn) of "show, display, ostentation," which both as noun and as verb has a close semantic relationship to his use of "convention." The sweep of the tetralogy—its action brief in years, profound in irrevocable change to a whole civilization—records the death-throes of that world in which "parade," whether manifested in dress, in social behaviour, or in public morality, had been erected into a principle of existence by a tiny but enormously powerful minority. (Not that the extinction was complete, of course, as any observer of the contemporary British scene can confirm: forty years after Ford's death the Eton and Harrow match, mentioned in Some Do Not, is still an annual ritual; certain shops in Piccadilly are devoted to furnishing the expensive and improbable impedimenta of an Edwardian lifestyle; and London clubs like the one Mark Tietjens belonged to still exist in order to persuade their members that the nineteenth century has not ended. But the exception in these cases proves the rule.)

The Last Post, variously viewed as an integral part of the work and a superfluous afterthought, is of considerable interest in relation to the persisting theme of conformity and its decline as the century advances. Mark Tietjens has been shown as an almost parodically conventional creature, dressed like a foreigner's or cartoonist's stereotype of the English gentleman, even his vices regularized into unvarying and unquestioned habits: he visits his French mistress twice a week (with an equally regular interruption for his annual holiday), and for twenty years she has cooked him the same dinner. In The Last Post bowler and umbrella are abandoned, and he no longer sits down to his prescribed dinner of two mutton chops and two floury potatoes, for he has become an invalid who refuses to speak: the abandonment of the rituals which have hitherto composed his life represents his symbolic protest against the dishonour of public life in the period in which he now finds himself living. Before the war he had consciously incorporated ritual into his life: Mark's response to the loss of this ritual (manifested, for example, in the brotherhood of the trenches) is to abdicate from life in as thoroughgoing a way as is possible, short of suicide. By a more abrupt and dramatic route, a more patently symbolic gesture, he has reached a conclusion not unlike his brother's.

Groby, the ancestral home in the north of England, dominates The Last Post not as a dramatic setting but as a constant point of reference. Its existence is coextensive with that of the Tietjens family and of Groby Great Tree, which has overshadowed the house and darkened the schoolroom and the children's wing. The fate of tree and house in this final novel gives us, by a kind of shorthand, a version of the fate of the family. The American tenant-usurper, Mrs. de Bray Pape, essays to preserve the rituals of the past: she has a sentimental-snobbish fondness for powdered footmen and forelock-tugging peasants, but of course these rituals are empty and meaningless. The tree is uprooted, as a contribution to progress and modern improvement, and brings down with it part of the building, including the rooms associated with Christopher's childhood. The symbolism is, to modern tastes, a little crude, and in any case superfluous, for the end of the Tietjens tradition has already been rendered, more subtly, through the postwar fates of Christopher and Mark.

Like Forster's Howards End, The Last Post has an epilogue which asserts renewal and continuity after destruction. The child of Christopher and Valentine embarks on a life freed from the heavy hand of tradition and its limitations on personal freedom (of the self and of others). Convention and artifice have been dissolved—a point neatly made in a final image. Some Do Not has opened in a railway compartment in an atmosphere of newly varnished wood, and for Ford, as for Dickens in Little Dorrit, the varnish may well carry a metaphorical meaning. At the end of The Last Post Christopher holds in his hand a piece of wood from Groby Great Tree, as plain and unvarnished as Ford's symbolism, one is tempted to say. He has travelled from the first-class carriage to a rural retreat in which he will pursue a William Morrissy simple life (again, the path traced resembles that of Forster's remarkable prewar novel). It is a way of life in which convention and ritual will have no place.