SOURCE: An introduction to Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford, Alfred A. Knopf, 1950, pp. v-xxii.

[Macauley is an American author and educator. In the following introduction to the first edition of Parade's End, he affirms that the tetralogy should be considered as a single work rather than as four separate novels published together for the first time.]

The year before he died Ford Madox Ford used to walk around the campus at Olivet College like a pensioned veteran of forgotten wars. We took him for a kind of vast, benevolent and harmless Uncle Toby, leaning on his stick in class or sitting in his dark little basement office and wheezing out his stories of Henry James as Toby might have spoken of Marlborough. His books seemed like medals achieved, perhaps, in the Crimea; and we read Auden, Kafka, Evelyn Waugh.

We were no different from the rest of the world. We knew vaguely that his Tietjens books were about the first World War and we suspected that they might be a good enough account of a soldier's disillusioning experiences—but we had read all that before. If any of us went far enough to look at the introductory letter to A Man Could Stand Up—, the third in the series, he would find Ford confirming it:

This is what the late war was like: this is how modern fighting of the organized, scientific type affects the mind. If, for reasons of gain, or, as is still more likely out of dislike for collective types other than your own, you choose to permit your rulers to embark on another war, this—or something very accentuated along similar lines—is what you will have to put up with! I hope, in fact, that this series of books, for what it is worth, may make war seem undesirable.

A little afterward some of us went to war ourselves and later, coming back, took Ford's novels down from the shelf to see if his easy prediction had come true. It seemed impossible that we could have been so wrong.

For some peculiar reason of his own he had hoaxed us; he was neither benevolent nor harmless and his books were by no means a simple warning as to what modern warfare is like. To read the Tietjens story for that would be like going through Henry James to improve one's manners or through Conrad to learn how to navigate a ship.

Nevertheless, this is the way the novels were taken when they were first published. They were thought to be books of "experiences" and they sold well. The reaction came when Ford's readers discovered that what he had actually given them was not another Under Fire or What Price Glory? but something complex and baffling. There was a love story with no passionate scenes; there were trenches but no battles; there was a tragedy without a denouement. Ford was quickly and easily forgotten.

We are a little older now and perhaps a little less superficial. We have been living a little longer with the great, enveloping tragedy Ford set out to describe. Perhaps in this edition we can take a second look at the Tietjens story and discover that it is less about the incident of a single war than about a whole era, more about our own world than his.

"The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage." So begins the Tietjens story. Everything is excellent, comfortable, predictable: the leather window straps are of virgin newness, the mirrors immaculate, as if they had reflected very little, the upholstery a luxuriant scarlet and yellow design, the air smelling faintly of varnish. The train runs as smoothly as (Tietjens thinks) British gilt-edged securities. Moreover, the two young men are of the class that administers the world. "If they saw a policeman misbehave, railway porters lack civility, an insufficiency of street lamps, defects in public services or in foreign countries, they saw to it either with nonchalant Balliol voices or with letters to the Times, asking with regretful indignation, 'Has the British This or That come to this?'" Under their care are manners, the arts, diplomacy, inter-imperial trade and the personal reputations of prominent men. They do not realize that their train has got on the wrong line.

Actually it is not running from London to Rye as they think, but from the past into the future, and ahead of them on their one-way journey is a chaotic country of ripped battlefields and disordered towns. Their fellow-passengers will grow hysterical and unpredictable, station masters will put up the wrong signals, troops will come aboard and get off again, the good furnishings of the train will get worn and broken, the schedule will go to pieces. And, experiencing all this, Christopher Tietjens will learn to expect that somewhere, beyond some bridge or tunnel, the tracks themselves will finally disappear into the dry sands of the wasteland.

But to begin where Ford did we must return to take a look at the unsuspecting passenger as he sits in his comfortable seat at the start of the journey. The beginning of the Tietjens story took form in Ford's mind just after the war. He had returned to France and was spending the summer in Harold Monro's villa on the deserted Riviera, a discharged officer, a cast-off writer immersed in a sense of disaster. As he walked in the garden of the Villa des Moulins, his ideas, cloudy at first but growing more precise, began to gather around the memory of an old friend, now dead.

Arthur Marwood had been enough of a paradox in himself to suggest greater ones. He was the son of a good Yorkshire country family, a mathematician of brilliance in the government office of statistics and Ford's associate in publishing The English Review. His mind was "acute and scornful" Ford says. "He possessed the clear Eighteenth-century English mind which has disappeared from the earth, leaving the earth very much the poorer." However, "he was, beneath the surface, extraordinarily passionate—with the abiding passion for the sort of truth that makes for intellectual accuracy..." In spite of his brilliance, Marwood had no career.

It was tuberculosis, actually, that forced him into a retired and inactive life, yet Ford, going beyond that, saw a tragedy of disinheritance. His kind of intelligence and what it represented passed through the metamorphosis of the author's imagination and became Christopher Tietjens. "I seemed," Ford says, "to see him stand in some high place in France during the period of hostilities taking in not only what was visible but all the causes and all the motive powers of infinitely distant places. And I seemed to hear his infinitely scornful comment on those places. It was as if he lived again."

So Marwood furnished the outline and the intellect, but there had to be more to Tietjens than that alone. Through the course of the four books the development of his personality is one of the most elaborate and singular accomplishments of modern writing.

His character is synonymous with the character of an ordered, bounded, and harmonious past. Socially, this means the England of gentry and farms before the middle classes built it into an empire. Morally, it means a code of honor and self-respect in contrast to business honesty and puritan habits. It means that Tietjens is humane in his relationships, feudal in his outlook, Christian in his beliefs, a classicist by education, a Tory in politics. He is, in fact, "the last English Tory." Mirrored in this "clear Eighteenth-century mind," the world is an equable and logical mechanism in which God, Man, and Nature have a balanced relationship. It is not specifically an English view; it has belonged to every Western nation.

In one place in No More Parades Tietjens concocts a kind of fable for himself. He sees:

The Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English landowner, a benevolently awful duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak; Christ an almost too-benevolent land-steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter's lodge, apt to be got around by the more detrimental tenants; the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game; the atmosphere of the estate, that of Winchester cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been played.

Tietjens means it as a semi-humorous comment on himself, but beyond that it is serious. Heaven is a Platonic reflection of earth, a place of feudal order and harmony and there are laws of science, morality, or theology to cover every event.

But Tietjens is out of his time in a world where the laws have lost their reality, the system has collapsed and the synthesis of knowledge and belief has lost its validity; under his feet he feels the great landslip. England (his specific example) once had a defined and integrated culture, but during the Nineteenth century it had become a kind of pseudo-civilization marked for export. Like cheap trading-goods, imitations, her morals, manners, and religion were shipped to every part of the world. It was a process of weakening, dilution, and overextension in more than a physical sense. Earning great paper profits, she had actually been spending her capital.

Ford saw the war as simply a dramatic heightening of the inevitable processes of ruin. England's victory was only an irony, a catalytic occurrence and she emerged from it into a social and intellectual chaos. The telling thing, Ford thought, was not that the world had changed physically to any great extent, but that the lines of communication had broken down. There was no longer a recognized continuity between past or present or present and future. The traditional modes of relationship among people had disappeared and there were no new ones to take the place.

We are likely to judge history as the blind men took the elephant; it is too big for us and too misleading in its various parts. The historian may offer a splendid, documented, analytical narrative; and yet we feel the lack of a plot. The novelist of history offers us a kind of mystery-play in which the great mass of ideas and events are concentrated into a sharp and comprehensible drama. Shakespeare's historical cycle and War and Peace are such mystery-plays. Though I do not wish to suggest a qualitative comparison—those two works are almost the grandest of their kind—Ford's Tietjens novel at least belongs in the same category. But with a difference. Ford was trying to define dramatically a thing that was only a direction or indication in his own time and his story includes the future. Looking at England today we can see more plainly what he meant. Tolstoy left the future out or, rather, he saw it as a twin-brother to the past and the cycle of his novel goes through the sequence of revolt and disorder back to order again. Chekhov, seeing differently, implied the future and we know now that the ring of the axe on the cherry tree outside the Ranevskys' windows was a more prophetic sound than the laughter in the Behuzovs' drawing-room at the end of War and Peace.

Therefore, Ford took as the scheme for his allegory the life of one man, Christopher Tietjens, a member of an extinct species, which, as he says, "died out sometime in the Eighteenth century." Representing in himself the order and stability of another age, he must experience the disruptive present.

I have been trying to give a bare idea of the abstract concepts which govern the development of the Tietjens novel, "the game," Ford says, "as distinct from the players of the game." One of Flaubert's important insistences was that the writer deal directly and exclusively with the explicit, leaving value judgments to implication. For a novelist whose abstract meaning is readily available this is not hard. The younger Flaubert, for instance, demonstrates just the right evidence to make the case of Madame Bovary clear. But it is a relatively simple case. The older Flaubert, dealing with the greater and more complicated issues of L 'Education sentimentale, produces a story whose surface is difficult, contrasting, and perplexed. Ford went along the same path; the lucidity and perfect form of The Good Soldier was followed ten years later by the slippery indirections of the Tietjens story. (The comparison is even more exact if we remember that Ford's early enthusiasm was for Madame Bovary but that in later life, he said, he read L 'Education sentimentale fourteen times.)

There is perhaps one central question arising from the events and circumstances of the Tietjens story that seems almost unexplainable in terms of the plot alone. It is one of the chief ambiguities that must exasperate and rebuff the unwary reader and yet it seems to lie in wait for him in almost every phase of the entire story. A workable answer to it should supply a great deal.

Why is Christopher Tietjens so endlessly persecuted? Nearly everyone else in the novel, consciously or unconsciously, tries to discredit, injure, attack, or betray him. He seems to be the object of a kind of compulsive hatred, yet in himself he is honorable, amiable, apparently a danger to nobody. In various ways this enmity appears in his friends, his acquaintances, fellow-officers, superiors, but most particularly and significantly in his wife. It is the last, his relationship with Sylvia, that offers the decisive clue to the seemingly purposeless affliction that he finds on every side.

At the beginning of Some Do Not… the domestic situation of the two is outlined. Sylvia has had a child whose paternity is doubtful and more recently she has run away to the Continent with another man. Then she has changed her mind and asked Tietjens to have her back again, a proposal to which he assents by cable. Sylvia, in Germany, is shown in a scene with a Socratic Irish priest, Father Consett, who draws from her the admission that what she hates most about her husband and what she can't live with is his essential and imperturbable goodness. In the meantime Tietjens has met a young woman named Valentine Wannop at Rye and taken a long ride in the fog with her. The first part is chiefly an establishment of character and the lines are drawn between Sylvia, an arrogant, reckless, and morally chaotic woman and Christopher, the wise and enduring man.

The antagonism gets dramatic exposition in the second part of Some Do Not… through a long scene which is built up by one of Ford's favorite devices, the progression d'effet. It is a psychological melodrama which gradually produces an intolerable pressure.

Tietjens, in the interval between the two parts, has been in the early battles of the war. A portion of his mind has been numbed by amnesia and he is wondering if this may be the first terrible sign. At the same time Sylvia is attacking his mental security in her own way. "I'll torment him," she has promised herself and she proceeds by accusation, sarcasm, lies, and open hatred. She has slandered him to his friends, whispered that he is keeping a mistress, that he has had a child by another woman; she has involved him in financial trouble. She is trying by all desperate means to reduce him to her own state of emotional anarchy—one sign of anger or weakness is all that she needs. "If," Sylvia went on with her denunciation, "you had once in your life said to me: 'You whore, you bitch … May you rot in hell …' you might have done something to bring us together."

But Tietjens grows stronger under the assault. Bit by bit his memory is returning and with it the emotional and intellectual equilibrium that belongs to him. He treats her violence with his odd courtesy, dispassion, and forgiveness.

"There is only one man from whom a woman could take 'Neither I condemn thee' and not hate him more than she hates the fiend!" Sylvia says, and finally gives her last furious thrust: Tietjens' father, she says, was driven to commit suicide by hearing the report that Christopher had got the daughter of his oldest friend with child.

Tietjens answers. "Oh! Ah! Yes! I suspected that. I knew it really. I suppose the poor dear knows better now. Or perhaps he doesn't… It doesn't matter." Instead of the expected explosion there has been a deflation and Sylvia has lost again.

Later on in No More Parades Tietjens's relationship with Sylvia is developed in another crucial scene. It is in France during wartime and Tietjens, now in command of a base camp, is suffering from enormous nervous stresses. Sylvia has managed to get there by unofficial means and they meet at a hotel during an engagement party. She is unable to explain to herself exactly why she has come; she confronts herself with the apparently insoluble paradox that Christopher, whom she detests so much, is actually the only man in the world she can love. But once there, she gives herself up to the luxury of torturing and trying to ruin him. Though she cannot quite see what it means, her memory furnishes her with an exquisite sadistic example of her motives in the anecdote of a white purebred bulldog (looking something like Tietjens) that she had once whipped raw and left out in the weather to freeze.

Sylvia has no difficulty raising all kinds of troubles, official, domestic, and personal, around Tietjens's head. She seems to arouse the hidden or latent antagonism of everyone else towards him. ("Christopher … A Socialist!" gasps General Campion when Sylvia tells him an absurd lie. "By God, I will have him drummed out of the service … ") It ends in a strange muddle in her hotel room and as a result Tietjens is transferred to the front lines.

The portrayal of Sylvia is as remarkable as that of Christopher. The unusual thing that Ford manages to transmit is not only Sylvia's insecurity and self-doubt, but her real terror at the idea of her husband. The intolerable fact to her is that he is sane.

And some of this terror at Tietjens is shared by everyone around. They are fragmentary people, uncertain, confused, without values. They sense that Tietjens belongs to a moral frame of reference that both makes the world intelligible and wards off its shocks. To their jumbled and neurotic lives he stands as a reproach, and they must destroy him if possible.

The two middle books of the novel, No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up— might be described as concurrent with the war rather than about it. The scene is France during the hostilities and Ford manages to show a great deal of Tietjens's life, first as an administrative officer in charge of organizing drafts of replacements and later as commander of a front-line unit. It is often vivid, always well-observed and convincing; yet the mere fact of the war has a curiously secondary importance.

Fiction about war has always been, essentially, a kind of adventure fiction. With the older novelists it was an adventure of sides or armies seen from a high hill. How will the English (or the Scotch or the French) win this battle? was the question we were supposed to hang on. Victor Hugo's Waterloo is the most elaborate example. Then came Stendhal, the innovator, and wrote the adventure story of a single man lost in the tremendous confusion. How will Fabrizio escape? he asks. It seemed to be a much more interesting question.

Tolstoy and Crane followed his line and so did nearly all of Ford's contemporaries who wrote about the first World War. To it they added their own generation's contempt for illusion and made the point that such an adventure must turn out badly. War was a savage, hideous thing and had to be shown as such. Nevertheless, it was a kind of entity in itself, an unexplained adventure that had little to do with the normal course of the world.

Ford saw the war as a concentrated specimen of the whole history of his time, a bloody dumb-show imitating the bigger drama. If there is any adventure in Ford's war it is a cerebral adventure and if there is any danger it is psychological danger. Tietjens's question: "Am I going mad?" becomes a universal one and while protagonists of other war novels see villages wrecked, Tietjens sees a civilization going to ruin.

Ford always felt somewhat embarrassed in trying to explain his own work; the great artistic immodesty of James's prefaces was something he could not understand. Consequently, his prefatory remarks to these books might have been written by a mild, slightly deprecating friend who had little idea of their subject. In a typical understatement to be found in the dedicatory letter to No More Parades he says that the book is about Worry:

That immense army was … depressed by the idea that those who controlled it overseas would—I will not use the word "betray" since that implies volition—but "let us down." We were oppressed, ordered, counter-ordered, commanded, countermanded, harassed, strafed, denounced—and, above all, dreadfully worried. The never-ending sense of worry, in fact, far surpassed any of the "exigencies of troops actually in contact with the enemy forces," and that applied not merely to the bases, but to the whole field of military operations. Unceasing worry!

This statement hints at something, but by no means expresses it. The more valuable idea that Ford's war is seen as something like a violent intensification of all the troubles of a foundering society comes out a little more clearly in his remarks concerning his "war books" in the autobiographical volume, It Was the Nightingale:

A man at this point is subject to exactly the same disasters and perplexities as his temperament prepares him for in time of peace. If he is the sort of man to have put up with the treachery of others, his interest at home will suffer from treasons; if he is the man to incur burdens of debts, debts will unaccountably mass themselves; if he is a man destined to be betrayed by women, his women will betray him exaggeratedly and without shame. For all these vicissitudes will be enlarged by the strident note that in time of war gets into both speeches and events … And he is indeed then homo duplex: a poor fellow whose body is tied in one place but whose mind and personality brood over another distant locality.

In No More Parades the "disasters and perplexities" that haunt Tietjens have actually taken possession of those around him. Lt. McKechnie is the lunatic remnant of a brave officer, a classical scholar. His troubles with his wife are a wildly exaggerated version of Tietjens's relations with Sylvia and he has got to the point where he hears a kind of shelling within his brain. "The memory seemed to burst inside him like one of those enormous tin-pot crashes." For Tietjens he is like a horrible premonition.

There is the Welsh private, O Nine Morgan. His wife has gone off with a prize-fighter and when he applied for leave to go home Tietjens refused it in order to save him from being killed by the fighter. Morgan is a dispatch-runner; he is hit by a shell-burst in the street just outside the door of Tietjens's office and he falls inside to die in Tietjens's arms. "So he was better dead," Tietjens thinks. "Or perhaps not."

"Is death better than discovering that your wife is a whore and being done in by her cully? Gwell angau na gwillth, their own regimental badge bore the words. 'Death is better than dishonor.'… No, not death, angau means pain. Anguish! Anguish is better than dishonor. The devil it is!… He was born to be a blooming casualty. Either by shellfire or by the fist of the prize-fighter."

O Nine Morgan, the semi-anonymous man, is an example or a parable. He is truly homo duplex, born to be a casualty wherever he might go—either from fists at home or splinters of iron abroad, both of which, in the final view, are aspects of the same thing.

The war experiences, in a way, represent Tietjens's dark night. No More Pardes piles injustice on injustice, but one of the things that helps Tietjens remain firm is the increasing realization that he is experiencing no simple personal nemesis but the total breakup.

"We were fitted neither for victory nor defeat," he thinks; "we could be true neither to friend nor foe. Not even to ourselves." He sees the clearest irony in his story of a visit to the War Office in 1914 where he had seen an official preparing the one ceremony of the war for which (Tietjens thinks) England was prepared—the disbanding of troops. It would close with the band's playing Land of Hope and Glory. The adjutant would then say, "There will be no more parades." And, Tietjens adds, "Don't you see how symbolical it was? … For there won't. There damn well won't. No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Not for the country … Not for the world, I daresay."

A Man Could Stand Up— begins with a telephone message to Valentine Wannop in England, informing her that Tietjens has come home but that he seems to have lost his mind. With this ominous suggestion about him, the novel takes a step backward in time to show the history of one day in the trenches. The major part of it takes place in Tietjens's mind, an interior monologue that mingles a thousand fragments of the past with a thousand details of the present. Tietjens is second-in-command of a thinned-out battalion awaiting a German attack. As he goes about the routine business of the day Tietjens makes an effort of memory and imagination to hold off the gathering insanity he feels all about him. He must quiet the frenzied McKechnie and deal with his colonel who, losing control, has taken to drink. He tries to keep up the morale of his men.

Most important of all, he must keep his own balance. One night Tietjens had awakened to hear a voice coming from a mine almost beneath his feet, "Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze," it said. "Bring a candle to the captain." Was it real? he wonders. Or is his mind becoming a tangle of fantasy like all the others'?

But Tietjens has an amulet to carry him through. It is the recurring thought of George Herbert on a hill above Bemerton parsonage composing the line, "Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky …" It is a vision of serenity and sanity. It serves to remind Tietjens that he belongs to a consistent system of belief, that there is or has been once a regular, logical, beautiful order to nature of which he is part. As long as that idea remains, as long as he can distinguish the song of the larks from the noise of the barrage, he will be safe.

The battlefield of A Man Could Stand Up—, thus, is more mental than physical and only one actual shell falls on it. It comes as a climax to the scene, burying Tietjens, a lance-corporal, and a lieutenant under a pile of earth. Tietjens crawls out, uncovers the others and carries the lieutenant away under fire. Immediately he is ordered to report to General Campion who, spic and span, is visiting the trenches on a tour of inspection. He is enraged that Tietjens has not reported before, that his uniform is dirty and that he has a hand in one pocket. The general relieves him of his command and with this unexpected little irony the war is over for Tietjens.

The third part of the book begins where the first left off, bringing Tietjens and Valentine together in his empty house in London. He is not mad, but just saved from madness. At last they are ready to admit they love each other, but as the horns and bells of Armistice Night sound, the crazy spectres from the trenches drift in one by one. Now that the ordeal is over, they seem simply harmless scarecrows and Tietjens and Valentine give them something to drink to celebrate the war's end.

Before looking at the final book of the Tietjens story, I should mention the matter of style. It is quite possible that Ford knew as many of the trade-secrets of writing as did any author of his time and a real discussion of his technique would be more extensive than an introduction allows. A few important methods and intentions, however, can be noted.

The language of the Tietjens story is one of simplicity and understatement. It is neither commonplace nor rhetorical and it manages to reveal exciting events without any surface theatricality of its own.

The chief strategems of narrative or dramatic style are somewhat more difficult to describe; they are the progression d'effet, the time-shift and the interior monologue. I have noted a good example of the first in the breakfast scene between Tietjens and Sylvia in Some Do Not .… in which all the nerves are slowly drawn to the snapping point.

In the Tietjens novel the time-shift and interior monologue are employed simultaneously. Ford often translates the scene of his story into the mind of one character or another and then uses all the tenses of memory as if they formed a keyboard. A scene from the far past is juxtaposed significantly with a present incident; the happening of a year ago has some bearing on yesterday. The "stream-of-consciousness" techniques (Woolf, Joyce, Proust, Richardson) bear both similarities and differences, though Ford at this time had not read the work of his contemporary experimenters.

In all, Ford cannot be called a great stylistic innovator. Rather he tried to use the best techniques of others with great care and imagination. He himself called his style "impressionistic." If a term is needed, that word seems both sufficiently general and sufficiently descriptive.

The Last Post is the strangely inconclusive conclusion of the Tietjens story. In form it is the most oblique of any of the books, the most extreme example of what might be called Ford's "tangential relevance." Christopher Tietjens is present physically for only one moment at the end of the book and yet he is the most central being in it. The system of the book might be thought of as a temporarily eclipsed sun with a number of visible satellite consciousnesses surrounding and defining its position. There are nine relative and interconnected interior monologues representing several people in the general vicinity of the cottage to which Christopher and Valentine and Mark and his long-time French mistress (now his wife) have gone after the war.

Each one of these monologues is a digressive collection of commentary, gloss, footnote, addenda, and paraphrase of the whole Tietjens story. The mind of Marie (Mark's wife) is described as being like a cupboard, "stuffed, packed with the most incongruous materials, tools, vessels and debris. Once you opened the door you never knew what would tumble out or be followed by what." Nearly all of the incongruous material that tumbles out of each mind, however, is pertinent somehow to the life of Tietjens.

Each one of these minds floats in the atmosphere of time, crossing and recrossing the orbits of the others, yet there must be a binding device to connect each one with the here-and-now of the book and to remind the reader of real people in a real place. Ford introduces a certain amount of present incident into the story to effect this (a woman entering the garden, Marie making cider) and each present incident is viewed from a different perspective by several different characters. The whole book is like an immense juggling act of time and point of view.

In the fantastic trench-world, Tietjens had wished for peace: "to stand up on a hill." The post-war world seems to be an image of his hope—placid and rural. But when the minds are opened we realize that nothing has actually changed and that the chaos, disorder and combat are still there. It is a non-sequitur world just as the memories of its inhabitants are non-sequitur.

Christopher's elder brother Mark becomes the Tietjens symbol. He has been paralyzed by a stroke (the Tietjenses can no longer be an effective force actually, physically), but his mind is as active and perceptive as ever (the intellectual dominance remains). He lies on a cot under a thatch roof, staring out at a landscape. He knows that he will soon die. His consciousness is thus purified of all physical dross and from him we can expect some definition, a statement removed into the realm of the absolute and final by death itself.

To the other six mental discussions of the Tietjens story, which are ambiguous, unreliable, partial views, Mark's three sequences of thought stand as a kind of framework. He appears at the beginning, middle, and end. (The actual succession follows this order: Mark; Marie-Leonie, his wife; Cramp, a farmer; an American woman, a stranger; Mark again; Marie; Sylvia Tietjens; Valentine Wannop; finally, Mark.)

In Mark's thoughts the various puzzles of the Tietjens history are solved at last. He knows now that his father's "suicide" was really an accident, that Christopher's son is truly Christopher's son. Now that the ancient tree of Groby is to be cut down and the family estate passed into the hands of a Catholic, he knows that the traditional curse will be off the Tietjens—in effect, the dire but honorable curse of simply being what they are. Last night he had heard a rushing sound and had been "sensible of the presence of the Almighty walking upon the firmament." He is ready for death and sure of heaven.

He hears the people in the garden as voices from the past. "Damn it all could they all be ghosts drifting before the wind?" Christopher stands in front of his eyes for a moment with a chunk of the fallen Groby great tree in his hands and then Mark is dead; and the time of the Tietjenses is dead with him.

Mark's final statement is beyond emotion; the "curse" has always implied a future and it is now lifted. He presents both a summation of the Tietjens's case and a reconciliation with its destruction. Both their strength and their failure lie in the fact that they have been true to something in a world where no one is true to anything. They are an anachronism and, as an anachronism, must disappear. It is inevitable that one theory of Truth, one systematic idea of how man may lead a "good" life, will be swallowed up in a world of Untruth, but that is according to history's law—not its equity.

In his crotchety book on the English novel, Ford found much to complain of. He could see in its history no progressive intellectual maturation, no regular development of a tradition and no continuing attempt to uphold the artist's responsibility of "rendering" the life he saw. There were, however, a few writers here and there who understood that responsibility and lived up to it.

The difference between the general library of English novels and these few isolated achievements is partly a matter of method and partly of artistic integrity. Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, Thackeray—and most of the others we are inclined to call the major English novelists—failed, Ford thought, in the peculiar duty of an artist to his work. It resulted in, "mere relating of a more or less arbitrary tale so turned as to insure a complacent view of life." "Complacent" is the important word. It recalls, as a near-perfect example, the ending of Tom Jones when Tom, outcast and disinherited because of his honesty and courage, is welcomed back again simply because Fielding has performed the magician's trick of discovering his gentle birth. This complacency, this annihilating compromise with banality Ford thought to be a result of the English writer's continual urge to be considered "respectable" in a country where the artist had no honor and no social place.

The working toward ultimate conformity produced another commitment, which was one of method and viewpoint. The novelist presupposes a whole social scheme; within that circumference he arranges the smaller scheme of his plot and within the plot he assigns his characters various appropriate roles. When Fielding or Thackeray suddenly surprise us by showing their faces over the tops of their puppet theatres, we realize exactly what the novelist should keep us from realizing: that these are not self-directing people involved in a situation that seems to generate its own drama, but contrivances of cloth and wood assigned to their roles of good or evil.

According to Ford's view, the other kind of novel—in distinction it might be called the "intensive" novel—was produced intermittently during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by, first, Richardson, later Austen and Trollope, finally Conrad and James. (His own name belongs next.) In France it became a tradition; in England it remained a series of singular performances.

This kind of novelist pursues an intense inquiry into the behavior of a certain group of characters both as unique beings and as part of an interweaving, interacting system of relationship. Finally he reasons, or suggests that we reason, from the particular to the general. All society, he declares, is simply a sum total of how human beings behave towards each other and if he is fortunate enough or gifted enough to select for his study circumstances of relationship that have a widespread application, he will have achieved, into his contemporary world, the most penetrating act of inquiry possible. In this kind of novel we surprise the individual situation in the very act of turning into the general circumstance.

We can imagine Mansfield Park as the geographical center of an early nineteenth-century culture and its concerns—love, money, manners, personal virtue—being pivotal to that culture. Visibly, things changed so little during the next seven decades that these could still remain preoccupations for that great pedant of the sensibilities, Henry James.

But geological shifts had been taking place in the culture and those values, by the end of the nineteenth century, no longer represented the same importance. Conrad had to deal with an expanding world and Ford an exploding one. In the Tietjens novel Ford had not only to consider a greater multiplicity of values (all of them changing, becoming ambiguous) but the greater question of value itself. If the quiet but intricate life of Mansfield Park is the proper symbol of one period, the wartime life of the Tietjens book is a symbol of our own destructive, inchoate time.

In this way Ford expanded the dimensions of the "intensive" novel to fulfill a more complicated assignment, yet he retained the central principle of precise moral-emotional-psychological investigation. The general argument or "meaning" of his book is not, of course, unique. In different ways and under different disguises it is one of the common motives of most important twentieth-century writers; Mann, Joyce, Gide, Eliot, Proust have all shared it and projected it in their various ways.

Each one of these writers has produced his response—Ford has not. It may be that the Tietjens novel demands a greater effort of self-recognition from the world, but if this effort can be made we shall not only have added a major novel to our literature but shall have performed a major act of understanding about ourselves and our era.

I have been referring to the Tietjens story as one novel divided into four different books and I think it can be comprehended in no other way. There is a misleading note in Ford's dedicatory letter to The Last Post which seems to indicate that he added this book as a kind of sequel to show "how things turned out." Addressing it to Isabel Paterson, he says:

For, but for you, this book would only nebularly have existed—in space, in my brain, where you will so it be not on paper or between boards. But, that is to say, for your stern, contemptuous and almost virulent insistence on knowing "what became of Tietjens" I never should have conducted this chronicle to the stage it has now reached.

Most likely, this should be taken more as a compliment to a literary friend than as exact truth. Without The Last Post, the novel would have been sadly truncated and though it could never "turn out" as an ordinary novel must turn out, the recapitulation and final statement of The Last Post is indispensable. In his book on Conrad, Ford explains that it was necessary for him to have a whole design in mind (contrary to Conrad's procedure) before he could begin.

The entire novel was written over a period of five years, Some Do Not … appearing in 1924, No More Parades in 1925, A Man Could Stand Up—in 1926, and The Last Post in 1928. It was begun at St. Jean Cap Ferrat, continued during Ford's wanderings from there to Paris, from Paris to Guermantes, to Toulon, Paris again, Avignon, and was finally finished in New York on November 2nd, 1927.

Previous to this edition it has not been published in its proper form, as a unit. Parade's End, the present title, was Ford's own choice as a designation for the whole.

It seems the most appropriate of any. With an immense sense of tragedy, Ford saw the long and splendid procession of the Western nations coming to an end and Tietjens is the ghostly voice of the adjutant at the final disbanding. He says, "There will be no more Hope, no more Glory. Not for the nation. Not for the world, I daresay. There will be no more parades."