SOURCE: "Parade's End," in Ford Madox Ford, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1977, pp. 94-123.

[Stang is an American writer and editor specializing in the study and criticism of the works of Ford Madox Ford. In the following excerpt, she provides an overview of Parade's End, focusing particularly on the symbolism of the main characters and their interactions with one another.]

Parade's End is, of course, a "war novel"—really an antiwar novel, Ford called it, for he intended to show "what war was like" without overstating its physical horrors. W. H. Auden called Parde's End a "four-volume study of Retribution and Expiation"; Graham Greene read it as a book about the power of a lie. These themes are present, but they are lesser themes. As Robie Macauley has pointed out, Ford's book is really "more about our own world than his"; Ford wrote prophetically about the world he saw and understood. Pade's End is about historical change; its theme, most inclusively stated, is the great and irreversible change in human consciousness that took place when the shift from the civilization of the nineteenth century to that of the modern world as we know it occurred under the stress of World War I.

The complicated story of Paade's End tells itself in a series of images. At the center is the triangle composed of Christopher Tietjens, the main character; his estranged wife, Sylvia, who pursues him and would destroy him, if she could, and prevent another woman from having him; and Valentine Wannop, the other woman, whom Christopher loves, finally acknowledges to himself that he loves, and lives with after the war.

The secondary yet overlapping story, which takes the form of a seesaw, is of the rise of Vincent Macmaster, son of a poor shipping clerk, and Christopher's corresponding "fall" in the great world of English government and society. The war, with Christopher at the front, is imaged by Ford in explosions, trenches, huts. And after the war, Christopher and Valentine retreat to the English countryside, in Last Post, to live their own lives and raise their child.

Parade's End consists of four novels, published as separate volumes (1924-1928) exactly a decade after the war (1914-1918): Some Do Not … (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up— (1926), and Last Post (1928). The books were not published in one volume until 1950 in the United States, nor were they known in England as Parde's End. The American title is merciful: even the best-intentioned readers have difficulty remembering and keeping in order the first three teasing, low-keyed, and unwieldy titles. Oddly, Ford was emphatic on two points: it is clear from his correspondence in 1930 (1) that he intended the novels as a trilogy rather than a tetralogy ("I strong wish to omit Last Post from the edition. I do not like the book and have never liked it.… ") and (2) that if the novels were to have one general title, it should not be The Tietjens Saga, though Ford had often referred to them as the Tietjens novels. ("I do not like the title Tietjens Saga—because in the first place 'Tietjens' is a difficult name for purchasers to pronounce and booksellers would almost inevitably persuade readers that they mean the Forsyte [sic] Saga with great damage to my sales.")

The title Parade's End was originally Ford's own suggestion in 1930 and picks up the note of the second volume, emphasizing its title. The words "no more parades" meant, of course, that given the kind of war being waged and the social changes taking place, there would be no more pomp, no more ceremony, no more public processions, no more posturing. Not that the idea of ceremony is contemptible, but by itself, with nothing behind it, it is the outward show of nothing. Having no meaning, it has no reason for being.

"At the beginning of the war," Tietjens said, "I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow.… What do you think he was doing … what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can't say we were not prepared in one matter at least.… Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease: the band would play 'Land of Hope and Glory,' and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades.… Don't you see how symbolical it was: the band playing 'Land of Hope and Glory,' and then the adjutant saying There will be no more parades? … For there won't. There won't, there damn well won't.… No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country … Nor for the world, I dare say … None … Gone … Napoo finny No … more … parades!"

Professor Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory has spoken of "the collision … between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress." World War I was a breaking point in European culture, and Ford was marking the break not only in public events but in language. By "no more parades" he meant, in addition to the more obvious sense of the phrase, no more hollow rhetoric, no more heroic abstractions like hope and glory and honor—an end of traditional moral language, those words that, compared to the concrete names of villages, indeed seemed obscene to Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms.

To Ford those words seemed extinct, and in Parade's End his achievement was to render the experience of the war in a language adequate to it and more accurate than the language inherited from another era. Of the great modernist writers—Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Lawrence—Ford was the only one to have been involved directly in the war, and he was alone in bringing to that experience the great technical innovations of twentieth century literature. Aside from its other merits, Parade's End is, for this reason, historically the most important English novel to come out of World War I.

Ford's reasons for disliking Last Post were never clear. He tells us that he had originally intended to deal with the period before the war and the war itself, not with the lives of his characters in the years following it. But it may be that his natural preference for the three-part form more than anything else made him regret the actual necessity for the fourth part as it came upon him. In his introductory letter to A Man Could Stand Up—, he referred to that volume as "penultimate": obviously, he could not, much as he wanted to, do without Last Post and keep to his original three-part idea. The aba song form was as inevitable and right for him in the design of his novels as it was in his life: how else account for the curious name he constructed for himself after the war?

No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up—have a clear three-part structure, and Some Do Not…, while divided into two parts, illustrates the characteristic Fordian return to the opening theme. Some Do Not … opens—and the first paragraph has been justly celebrated as one of the great openings in the English novel—with two young men, Christopher Tietjens and Vincent Macmaster, riding in the pre-war railway carriage, the leather straps on the windows "of virgin newness," the upholstery "luxuriant" and "regulated" in "an intricate pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne," the smooth-running train smelling "hygienically" of varnish—every detail contributing to an image of design, order, opulence, and perfection of surface, all a metaphor for the civilization about to be changed irrevocably.

The end of the novel returns to this scene: Tietjens's mind counterpoises it with the party celebrating Macmaster's knighthood. The two men are once more together. The war has intervened, Macmaster has profited from it (his knighthood is conferred for statistical calculations Christopher had made), and Christopher is about to leave for the fighting in France again.

The title of Some Do Not…, like all the other titles of the tetralogy, recurs throughout the novel, turning up in different contexts, emerging in variations ("Gentlemen don't," "women didn't," "some girls have") and wandering into the other books, there acquiring unexpected, witty, and poignant resonances. "Some do not" is part of a line from Ford's poem "Mr. Bosphorus and the Muses" (1923). In the title of the novel Ford quotes himself:

The gods to each ascribe a differing lot:
Some rest on snowy bosoms! Some do not!

And Macmaster, who, at the opening of the novel misreads the times (he believes a war is impossible) and misreads Rossetti (yet will build his career on his monograph on Rossetti), misquotes the lines, changing them to

The gods to each ascribe a differing lot:
Some enter at the portal. Some do not!

A careerist of the most determined kind, Macmaster characteristically changes the verb and the image, so that the categories refer to success and failure rather than luck. The snowy bosoms are replaced by portals: Macmaster's sexuality, always circumspect, and his well-managed affair with Edith Ethel Duchemin, the wife of the Reverend Duchemin, form the second story of the book, parallel to Christopher's; and each of the stories comments on the other.

Ford could not see the issue of sexual morality apart from that of the war, nor could Christopher.

Macmaster said loftily:

"You're extraordinarily old-fashioned at times, Chrissie. You ought to know as well as I do that a war is impossible—at any rate with this country in it. Simply because…" He hesitated and then emboldened himself: "We—the circumspect—yes, the circumspect classes, will pilot the nation through the tight places."

And Christopher answers:

"War, my good fellow" …—the train was slowing down preparatorily to running into Ashford—"is inevitable, and with this country plumb centre in the middle of it. Simply because you fellows are such damn hypocrites. There's not a country in the world that trusts us. We're always, as it were, committing adultery—like your fellow [Dante Gabriel Rossetti]!—with the name of Heaven on our lips." He was jibing again at the subject of Macmaster's monograph.

In the figures of Macmaster and Edith Ethel—as well as Christopher's wife, Sylvia, Ford connects the two issues, the sexual conduct of men and women and the world at war. Edith Ethel, "passionately cultured," with the "elegance and portentousness of a funeral horse," and her lover, Macmaster, make a show of Pre-Raphaelite sensibility and English respectability, camouflaging their eroticism elaborately and affectedly with an aesthetic they exploit for their mutual profit—though the sexual antagonism Edith Ethel harbors but will not acknowledge is as immense as her essential vulgarity.

It is this mixture, and not the fact of fornication, that Christopher sees as filthy. Both at the beginning of the story and ten years later, at the end of Some Do Not…, he declares, with his characteristic preference for clarity in thought and conduct:

I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again no talking about it.…

And Christopher in fact suffers for monogamy and chastity; the Macmasters pretend to. It is their way of having what they want and not taking the consequences that seems unprincipled to Christopher. "Principles are like a skeleton map of a country—you know whether you're going east or north." Having no principles, only instincts for self-advancement, they become expert social climbers, appropriately representing a government that, in the same way, has deserted the idea of virtue. The Office of Statistics, to which Christopher will not go back, falsifies official figures; England's political strategy in respect to its allies is exploitative and treacherous; the men at Whitehall betray the men at the front and nullify all sacrifice. No more truth and honor: Ford saw a government run by sycophants and cowards feathering their nests in the middle of the war.

In the famous breakfast scene early in Some Do Not… the Reverend Duchemin's obscenities explode, appalling and testing the excellent manners of the guests, who almost succeed in appearing to ignore what is so unseemly. The scene is a brilliant image of violence erupting that anticipates the larger violence of the coming war and probes with great subtlety the relationship between sexuality, madness, and culture.

Professor Steven Marcus's conclusion to The Other Victorians connects the treatment of sexual life with the social criticism of the modern novel. His comment applies strikingly to Parade's End.

In the work of the great late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century avant-garde artists, and in particular among the novelists, the entire fabric of modern society came in for attack. The focus of their assault was the sexual life of the bourgeois or middle classes, as those classes and the style of life they conducted had come to be the prevailing social powers. The difficulties, agonies, contradictions, double-dealings, hypocrisies, inequities, guilts, and confusions of the sexual life of the middle classes were for these novelists not only bad in themselves; they were symbolic of general circumstances of injustice, unpleasantness, demoralization, and malaise which for these artists characterized the world they inhabited. They endorsed a freer sexual life as a good in itself; and they depicted the sexual anguish of modern persons and the sexual hypocrisies and contradictions of modern society not merely for the sake of exposure and sensationalism (although there was that too), but in order to outrage and awaken the society which had imposed upon itself such hideous conditions of servitude. Society being what it is, they were often punished for their efforts, but the work of awakening had been furthered, the work of bringing back into the central discourse of civilization that sexual life upon which it is built and through which it is perpetuated.

" … You must have a pattern to interpret things by. You can't really get your mind to work without. The blacksmith said: By Hammer and hand all art doth stand!" Toward the end of the fourth novel, Lost Post, Christopher's dying brother Mark applies the rules of art of life: coherence is necessary, he means, and it must be wrought; it will not come by itself. His words take us back across the four novels to the opening theme, the "intricate, minute" pattern of the upholstery in the railway car, a pattern that will be dissolved by the events of history.

"I think The Good Soldier is my best book technically unless you read the Tietjens books as one novel in which case the whole design appears," Ford had written in a letter. The care with which he—and the other great twentieth-century novelists, notably Conrad, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf—approached questions of pattern and technique, was, as it has been pointed out, a response to the disorder presented by the external world. "The most general common characteristic" of modernist writers was "the inverse relation between the rendered aesthetic order and the represented chaos":

The more disordered the world represented, the more ordered the rendering of the work.… The very techniques used to represent a world of dissolving appearances and discontinuous selves, of crumbling institutions and discredited authorities… are also the techniques that bind part to part and part to whole with an unprecedented adhesive force.

Ford's impressionism, the literary theory comprising the whole set of artistic assumptions that enabled him to write his novels, provided the "rules" for working into coherence the raw material the world presents. But rather than deal with the raw facts themselves—that is, the phenomena of the external world—he tried to get at the very nature of experience, to study the impact of the external world upon human consciousness. In other words, he was interested not in "realism" but in psychological reality.

And in rendering the experience of each of his characters—Tietjens, Sylvia, their son Mark, Valentine, Christopher's brother Mark, Mark's wife, Marie Léonie—Ford was as much interested in the individual way each mind experienced as in what it experienced. The characteristic sound of its thoughts, the psychological rhythms of perception and speech, the special syntax of each separate consciousness—through these the reader can grasp each character's unique psychological experience as well as the facts to which he responds. The reader is forced to stand, with each of the characters, "at different angles" to the perceived world and to experience twice every act of perception: once with the character, and once for himself, reassembling all that he has learned from the implications of the text. In getting the facts, the reader simultaneously experiences the whole range of the characters' responses to them.

In Parde's End, the point of view is not confined to any one character (as it is in The Good Soldier), though, as Ford tells us in It Was the Nightingale, there was to be a central observer whose attitudes affect the way in which we read the whole story. But Parade's End is not told by Tietjens, as The Good Soldier is by Dowell: rather, Tietjens's story is told through a far-ranging, "authorial," "omniscient" presence who puts together for us a complicated tissue of the consciousness of each of the many characters. The principal relationships are examined by every character, each aware of the other's awareness. The technique provides a set of reflecting mirrors.

Like the French impressionist painters, writers espousing literary impressionism were forced to make a set of quite revolutionary technical innovations. The most far-reaching and dramatic was the breaking up of chronological time or, as it has come to be known, the time shift. Behind the time shift is the principle of juxtaposition. Chronological time is broken up and rearranged so that we are presented with disparate moments, recalled either voluntarily or involuntarily—because two spots of time, two impressions taken together, like two spots of color, acquire more emotional vibrancy and meaning than they have separately. It is really the old and universal principle of contrast—the two stories in a Shakespearean play coloring one another—applied to the surface of time.

In Parde's End, Ford created an elaborate design out of the tension between the actual chronology of the many events that take place before, during, and after World War I, and the activity of the perceiving mind of each of the characters experiencing the events. Two kinds of time therefore make themselves felt throughout the story—chronological and experienced time, and their mingling produces what has been described as a kind of keyboard of all the tenses of memory. Ford himself develops the analogy with music: "The motives mingled fugally," he wrote in No More Paades. What we have is a fluid succession of present moments—or, to use another of Ford's metaphors, a surgical cutting and stitching.

She said:

"If we could wash out.

He said, and for the first moment felt grand, tender, protective:

"Yes, you can," he said. "You cut out from this afternoon, just before 4.58 it was when I said that to you and you consented.… I heard the Horse Guards clock.… To now.… Cut it out; and join time up.… It can be done.… You know they do it surgically; for some illness.…"

The actual prototype for Christopher, as we know from It Was the Nightingale, was Arthur Marwood, Ford's good friend who had been long dead when Ford began Parade's End. Marwood had "the widest and most serene intelligence of any human being I have yet met." Ford could, he claimed, "set" his mind by him. So haunted was Ford by the power of Marwood's intelligence and personality that he listed him among the "revenants": the ghosts of the past who had for him more reality than the men and women he saw every day. Tietjens was to be a recreation of Marwood, and Ford's intention was "to project how this world would have appeared to him today."

The emphasis of the novel is on Christopher's observation and understanding of the world—and consequently on his suffering, the "human tribulations" that, as Ford noted in It Was the Nightingale, "are the only things worth writing about," and that came to him as the original material of the book; the character was to carry "a permanent shackle and ball on his leg … something of a moral order and something inscrutable." "He was to go through the public affairs of distracted Europe" with a "private cannonball." The two themes—public and private life—are clearly connected here in Ford's account of the genesis of Parade's End. The world war and the private battlefield are inseparable from one another, or, as Ford put it, the war was the "outward sign of inward and spiritual disarray": two related wars and their two resolutions, one central figure to bear the double pressure, and two women.

Remarkably unlucky and hard-pressed, in fact overtested by his misfortunes and the strain and anxiety of going through the war, Christopher bears his trials with such "strength of mind and composure" that Ford counted on his stoicism and his "power of cool observation in tremendous crises" to excite the reader's sympathy—as the heroes of other novelists might excite sympathy by their weakness. Christopher is a strong central character, but not a "hero." Ford deliberately avoided the term in his comments on the book: "I was in no mood for the heroic."

My character would be deprived of any glory.… He was to be too essentially critical to initiate any daring sorties. Indeed his activities were most markedly to be in the realm of criticism.

… When it seemed to be his duty he would criticise. That would get him, even at the Front, into many and elaborate messes.… So I should get my "intrigue" screwed up tighter and always tighter.

The critical spirit would replace the heroic—would indeed become the only form of heroism untainted by anachronism. Tietjens was to be a "sort of lonely buffalo.…An exact observer." The novel would show the chasm between the critical attitude (a phrase Ford liked and used as the title of a book of essays in 1911) and the way the world is really run. In Parade's End, knowledge and power move unalterably apart.

Perhaps the greatest critical problem the book offers is the character of Sylvia Tietjens. How are we to understand her and her relationship to Christopher? What, by inference, are we to make of Christopher, who married her? She has often been taken to be the embodiment of evil, an allegorical figure, and one of the great femmes fatales in literature. How can we square such an image with Ford's novelistic method, which rests upon the idea that the sympathetic imagination can enlarge the reader's capacity for identification with other people and understanding of them?

Ford's idea of the art of the novel derived largely from Flaubert's principle "ne pas conclure." Ford would often quote that phrase, intended for the practicing novelist, and it meant do not sum up a character; do not draw the reader's conclusions for him; allow him to see and understand for himself. Like Flaubert, Ford seldom gives us a complete physical description of a character. Instead, the character—even the way he looks—emerges from different contexts, always freshly to be perceived, and never totally grasped. In this respect Ford's men and women are like human beings outside the novel, at every meeting needing to be reinterpreted and never finally to be wholly understood. More than any character in Ford's novels—that is to say, more than any of the hundreds of characters he created, Sylvia is the most problematic and difficult to understand.

She had first presented herself to Ford's imagination as a pagan goddess. As he tells us in It Was the Nightingale, he once saw a woman in the railway station at Amiens:

She was in a golden sheath-gown and her golden hair was done in bandeaux, extraordinarily brilliant in the dimness. Like a goddess come in from the forest of Amiens!

I exclaimed:

"Sylvia!" So I didn't have to cast about for a name.

Sylvan, of the woods: the original shining figure became, before Ford was done with her, a character of tantalizing complexity. "Who is Silvia? What is she?" Shakespeare's song may have had as much to do with Ford's naming her as did the fresh and arrestingly pagan quality of the actual woman he once saw in Amiens.

Early in Some Do Not…, Sylvia is compared to the mythological Astarte, Phoenician goddess of love and fertility, and Lamia, in Greek stories the witch who sucked human blood. Though the mythic dimension is certainly implied, and at times implied very strongly, Sylvia is neither of these. What is significant is her many-facetedness, and it was present in Ford's original inspiration as a quality of light—coruscating, brilliant, flashing different images at different times, now a goddess, at other times a woman, never reducible to a single fixed aspect.

Virgin and courtesan, devil as well as "a picture of Our Lady by Fra Angelico," she is presented in paradoxes, with each quality calling up its opposite. Perverse, unpredictable, her character is "a matter of contrariety." "To be seductive and to be chaste" is the condition she aspires to. To do wickedness and not be wicked: it is a theological distinction she makes, and perhaps it is the ultimate paradox of her nature. Ford repeatedly uses the verb coil in connection with Sylvia to suggest a snake, yet the imagery of writhing is, as often as not, connected with her suffering. And she speaks of the "almost painful emotion of joyful hatred." "Coldly passionate," she goes to the front to torment and allure Christopher in the hope of a rapprochement. She loves him for his mind, she says, but she hates his ideas. "There was no end to the contradiction in men's characters"—or women's. That she loves him as she does is, of course, "the impossible complication." The character of Sylvia needs four books to unfold itself, and Ford is at great pains to present her point of view with scrupulous fairness.

The Tietjens books have been described by Graham Greene as "almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English." In the story of Sylvia and Tietjens, the relation between the sexes is seen as a condition of warfare. Christopher's problem is "the whole problem of the relation of the sexes." Sylvia's "sex viciousness," her "sex ferocity," her "sex cruelty" are plain. But that repeated note cannot obscure the fact that the struggle between them is neither simple nor one-sided and that they are two antagonists of considerable subtlety, whose antagonism is made all the more subtle by the similarities between them. Their story is a study in obstinacies—two strong wills engaged in a war. On the one side Sylvia acts out of a strongly instinctual nature; on the other side Christopher distrusts his instincts and acts from a set of principles which, as he comes to recognize, can no longer serve. In order to use them, he is forced to reexamine them.

Curiously, the novel insists on how similar Christopher and Sylvia are. They are both hallucines (Pound's word for Ford), given to actual hallucination. They are both venerators of the ideal of chastity as a state of physical and moral purity. And their sensitivity to one another's psychological processes is expressed by Christopher's compulsion (his "obsession") to shield Sylvia against gossip and slander, and on her side, by her pity and revulsion at how far she has succeeded in destroying him. There are moments when they meet and fight with the "friendly weariness of old enemies." Even their child—the young Mark—speculates about the basis of their enmity.

Questions of … sex-attraction, in spite of all the efforts of scientists, remained fairly mysterious. The best way to look at it … the safest way, was that sex attraction occurred as a rule between temperamental and physical opposites because Nature desired to correct extremes. No one in fact could be more different than his father and mother—the one [Sylvia] so graceful, athletic and … oh, charming. And the other [Christopher] so … oh, let us say perfectly honourable but lawless. Because, of course, you can break certain laws and remain the soul of honour.

It is Sylvia who is generally regarded as lawless, but as she sees Christopher, it is he who is immoral. His principles are so baffling—for example, his systematic refusal to stand up for himself—that they make no sense, and they are so outmoded that she cannot even identify them. He "unsettles" society. As Christopher explains to General Campion:

… I've no politics that did not disappear in the eighteenth century.… I'm a Tory of such an extinct type that she might take me for anything. The last megatherium. She's absolutely to be excused.

Christopher understands her difficulties.

Their relationship began as a "courtship of spiders," with the female enticing the male. Having married Sylvia "on the hop when he was only a kid," as his brother Mark puts it, Christopher forgives her her "sin." (She believed herself to be pregnant after an affair with a man named Drake.) As Sylvia perceives her marriage to Christopher, she is perpetually the woman taken in adultery. Though she grants that Christopher is more Christian than any man she knows, she finds it unbearable that with her he should play the part of Christ. "But our Lord was never married. He never touched on topics of sex."

Christopher is, in his remarkable selflessness and detachment from the world, correctly regarded as a saint, and his wish for saintliness is one of the repeated themes of the book. But Sylvia's view is to be considered. Christopher cherishes forgiveness (and, as Mark realizes in Last Post, Christopher cherishes unforgiveness as well), but Sylvia wants neither his forgiveness nor his saintliness. "How could any woman live beside you … and be forever forgiven?" If he had denounced her or cursed her, he "might have done something to bring us together." But his aloofness and self-containment—she complains that he closes himself in "invisible bonds"—make him seem merely cold and feelingless, though he is neither.

Everything in his training as an Englishman and a Yorkshireman (a point Ford makes much of) has worked against the ready and spontaneous show of feeling. To make a display of one's deepest emotions is against the rules. His "calculatedly wooden" expression, his "terrifying expressionlessness," make him as much an enigma to Sylvia as she is to him. Intellectual, abstract, he has a monolithic quality she cannot deal with, except to attack it. She perceives him as a rock, a frozen marble statue. His extraordinary self-control, which puts him beyond her reach as he accepts the consequences of her wildest efforts to humiliate and slander him, is, as she understands it, a form of aggression against her, a way of refusing to acknowledge that she can touch him. It is a tacit statement that she is excluded from his life.

Christopher's brother Mark, who is Sylvia's most implacable enemy, understands this: that she is unable to attract her man is the mainspring of her behavior. It is a case of thwarted love become destructive. A woman unused to frustration or failure with men, she is "sappily in love" with him; that she is "forgiven" but not loved by him is the basic fact of their relationship. Jealous even of Christopher's battalion because he cares about his men so deeply, she says to one of them: "I'm glad the captain…did not leave you in the cold camp … For punishment, you know."

There is something anarchic about Sylvia; her jealousy and destructive passion resist containment. It is not evil as an absolute that she represents, even at her worst, so much as chaos, irrationality, impulse gone berserk. She is an unhappy, even masochistic woman who must have weak things to torture. She sees Christopher "with a mixture of pity and hatred" as a "tired, silent beast" whom she takes pleasure in lashing, as she once thrashed a white bulldog. On the other hand, "Tietjens' words cut her as if she had been lashed with a dog-whip." Ford is suggesting a mysterious identification here.

All the plumb lines are so entangled, as Ford liked to say about human relations and motives, that human behavior seems incapable of simplicity. Though the marriage is improbable from the start, and Sylvia's adultery makes it even more so, Christopher refuses, out of his sense of honor as a gentleman, to divorce her—a refusal that keeps them connected, and at the same time, alienated. The perversities of her nature make it impossible for her to leave him alone, and the game she plays is to torment him, to provoke him into intimacy. Tietjens understands this side of her and calls it "pulling the strings of the shower-bath." Her game is impulsive rather than systematic. She wants to see where and how and whether Christopher is exposed, and she stops only when he seems to have nothing more to lose, having lost money, property, position, and reputation. Her sense of decency makes an attack on Valentine and her baby unthinkable. Besides, by the time of Last Post, it seems to her that "God has changed sides."

Christopher's strength inheres in the fundamental principle of his being, his certainty about his own autonomy, his own outlines. Sylvia's sense of herself is a good deal weaker. She wants to possess him, but possession, as she comes to see, is meaningless without self-possession. And rather than fight back, Christopher merely waits for her ("anguish is better than dishonour" is his battalion's motto) to expend herself, as she finally does.

Christopher's metaphor of the shower bath is, in its understatement, intended to deflate Sylvia's effectiveness. But not even his clearness of mind and temperamental affinity with eighteenth-century rationalism can dissipate the sense of evil that hovers around Sylvia. We first see her in Lobscheid, the "last place in Europe" to be Christianized. There, Father Consett, her "saintly" confessor, hears "the claws of evil things scratching on the shutters" and tries to attribute Sylvia's "evil thoughts" to the "evil place" they are in. But the suggestion remains, no matter how much we understand Sylvia's psychology, that Christopher is under her spell and that she herself may be under a spell. The possibility of magic in Sylvia's capacity for destructiveness inheres in the book, emerging often enough to demand interpretation.

Magic has been defined by the late Hannah Arendt tin Rahel Varnhagen, 1974] as an "intensification of the world to such a pitch of extraordinariness that reality would necessarily fail to come up to its expectations." Sylvia lives in such an intensified world, but not consistently. Standing away from it long enough to try to understand it, she asks:

How was it possible that the most honourable man she knew should be so overwhelmed by foul and baseless rumours? It made you suspect that honour had, in itself, a quality of the evil eye.…

No matter how farfetched her charge or inaccurate her aim, her success in hurting Christopher is uncanny and not to be wholly explained in terms of cause and effect. "I have always been superstitious myself and so remain—impenitently," Ford wrote in 1932. "The most rationalist of human beings does not pass his life without saying: 'I am in luck today!'" In No Enemy he had spoken of the "type of feeling" that men engaged in agriculture often have and that makes them "so often passionately disagreeable and apparently unreasonable"—the sense of "wrestling with a personal devil," of an "intelligent, malignant… being with a will for evil directed against you in person." "I think that, whilst it lasts," he wrote, "it is the worst feeling in the world."

Ford's belief in a kind of animism—really more significant than his nominal Catholicism for an understanding of his novels—that is, his sense of a universe full of unknown and living forces creating "an atmosphere of loaded dice"—is surely at work in his conception of the Catholic Sylvia. Insofar as she suggests Astarte or Lamia, Sylvia is, in spite of her Catholicism, a creature from the world of romance. Throughout his long career, the pendulum of Ford's imagination swung back and forth between two kinds of fictional reality—the subjective and the objective: which is to say that he wrote two kinds of fiction—those he called romances and those he referred to as novels, and he was usually careful to designate by a subtitle which was which. Roughly half of his works of fiction bear the subtitle A Romance (Romance, which he wrote with Conrad, surely needed no subtitle) or some equivalent like An Extravagant Story or A Just Possible Story or A Sheer Comedy. And the historical novels are often, though not consistently, designated as romances. What Parde's End represents is a merging of the two genres—the combination of psychological reality and fantasy in the same framework, a conjunction that offers an interesting critical problem.

Tietjens has, as in a fairy tale, incurred the malignity of a dangerous woman. In putting himself beyond her influence, he moves from the world of romance, where cause and effect are incommensurate, to a small corner of the real world. In Ford's early fairy tales and romances, metamorphoses occur and miracles heal and bring back to life. The natural law of cause and effect is suspended, and we are in the realm of magic and divine intervention, in "that sacred and beautiful thing Romance," Ford called it. In Parade's End, Tietjens must face the tangled consequences of every small action—his own or Sylvia's—and live them down, as Ford put it when he discussed the genesis of the novel in It Was the Nightingule. If Tietjens is to have a new life, he must make it for himself. Ford is clear about keeping Tietjens in this imperfect world: the resolution of the book is coincident with Christopher's growing sense of reality. And Paade's End, unlike The Good Soldier, is about learning how to live rather than how to die.

As Ford wrote in another context [When Blood Is Their Argument, 1915] the purpose of philosophy was "to teach a man how to bear himself during, and what to expect from, life. All else is stamp-collecting."

Christopher can make a new life ("a man could stand up") because of Valentine.

But, positively, she and Sylvia were the only two human beings he had met for years whom he could respect: the one for sheer efficiency in killing; the other for having the constructive desire and knowing how to set about it. Kill or cure! The two functions of man. If you wanted something killed you'd go to Sylvia Tietjens in the sure faith that she would kill it; emotion: hope: ideal: kill it quick and sure. If you wanted something kept alive you'd go to Valentine: she'd find something to do for it.… The two types of mind: remorseless enemy: sure screen: dagger … sheath!

He can respect both women for their opposite perfections. Sylvia kills; Valentine cures. And he asks: "Perhaps the future of the world then was to women?"

Valentine is a militant suffragette. When we first see her, she is on a golf course where she has been demonstrating for the vote. She is exercising one of the suffragette movement's characteristic tactics—to invade the traditionally male preserve. Ford himself had helped the suffragettes by writing for Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women's Social and Political Union, a pamphlet entitled This Monstrous Regiment of Women (1913), published by the Women's Freedom League, and he had a strong sense of the women's movement as the beginning of a new consciousness.

Valentine, whose name suggests love, health, and strength, is a fitting heroine for a novel that is as turned toward the future as The Good Soldier was turned toward the past. "She would have to be a militant if my book ever came to anything," Ford wrote later. But Valentine is also the daughter of Professor Wannop, the classical scholar, and from him she has received a sound classical education. Her intellectual roots are in the past, and she longs to read Euripides by the Mediterranean. Christopher admires not only her Latin, which is superior to his, but the fact that her head "is screwed on right." Having worked as a "slavey" to support herself and her mother, Mrs. Wannop, the aging and neglected novelist whose work Christopher so much admires, Valentine has a larger firsthand experience of the English class system than Christopher, and a grasp of reality he admires.

I daresay you're a heroine all right. Not because you persevere in actions the consequences of which you fear. But I daresay you can touch pitch and not be defiled.

Although Valentine is as unlike Sylvia as to be her mythical opposite (healer vs. destroyer), Ford has not created a simple antithesis. Instead, he deals with a "civilized ambiguity": in many ways they are similar—and unlike Christopher. For example, neither woman can bear the thought of war: both are pacifists, and though Christopher does not share their views, he understands them.

Not three hours ago my wife used to me almost the exact words you have just used. Almost the exact words. She talked of her inability to sleep at night for thinking of immense spaces full of pain that was worse at night.… And she, too, said that she could not respect me.…

Both are blonde, both are athletes (unlike the slow and heavy Tietjens). Sylvia is strikingly tall and calls Valentine, who is small, a miniature of herself. Both women are presented along with their mothers, so that we see them as daughters. Both express the same irritation with Christopher in the same language. Valentine feels "something devouring" and "overwhelming" in him that "pushed you and your own problems out of the road." She notes his "calculatedly wooden expression and his omniscience" and his "blasted complacent perfections." Like Sylvia, she feels he has insulted her by not making love to her. When they first meet, Valentine says: "I pity your wife … The English country male! … The feudal system all complete.…"

Tietjens winced. The young woman had come a little too near the knuckle of his wife's frequent denunciations of himself.

Ironically, although Sylvia was conceived as a pagan, it is Valentine whose outlook is more authentically pagan. She is free of the burden of sin and the sense of dualism (body and soul leading separate lives) that Sylvia's Catholic upbringing has given her. In Valentine, body and mind work together. She can be as critical as Sylvia of Christopher's faults. But free of Sylvia's conflicts and morbid engrossment in her own capacity to sin, she has no wish to destroy. Harmony, discipline, "bread-and-butter sense": with these qualities she offers Christopher a "little, tranquil, golden spot" in an unstrung world.

In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams had asked: "What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth?" As if in answer, Christopher says:

… It is not a good thing to belong to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries in the twentieth. Or really, because it is not good to have taken one's public-school's ethical system seriously. I am really, sir, the English public schoolboy. That's an eighteenth-century product.… Other men get over their schooling. I never have. I remained adolescent. These things are obsessions with me.

Christopher suffers from the defects of his qualities, and the scrupulousness with which he has adopted this code of behavior makes him slow to know his own feelings, which are often in conflict with his principles. Sitting on his mind as if it were a horse, "a coffin-headed, leather-jawed charger," he is at the same time aware of and aloof from the claims and needs of his "under mind," with all its repressed impulses. "He occupied himself with his mind. What was it going to do?" He is a man "in need of a vacation from himself," as he realizes. Under the double stress of the war and Sylvia's harassment, his mind becomes more and more detached until he sees his own dissociation as a danger signal, a portent of the madness he fears.

His decision to live with Valentine is a way of freeing himself and healing himself so that he can adapt to a new set of conditions. "Today's today," he tells himself. "The world was changing and there was no particular reason why he should not change with it." His brother Mark refuses to change; his muteness is a refusal to speak in a world he has come to loathe and despair of, and he wills his own death. In his book on Henry James, Ford had spoken of "the journey towards an entire despair or towards a possible happiness." It is toward the possible happiness that Paade's End moves.

… He would no longer stand unbearable things.… And what he wanted he was prepared to take.… What he had been before, God alone knew. A Younger Son? A Perpetual Second-in-Command? Who knew? But to-day the world changed. 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!

Christopher has inherited, through the deaths of his older brothers, the vast ("between forty and sixty rooms") Yorkshire estate of Groby that his family had acquired at the time of William of Orange. He renounces Groby because his disaffection with his own class makes it impossible for him honestly to accept its privileges, not the least of them being the immense income the estate yields. But more importantly, by giving it up, Christopher divests himself of the whole unwieldy feudal structure he has inherited. In exchange, he can, for the first time, recognize the legitimacy of personal happiness; "noblesse oblige" comes to include the obligation to oneself.

Christopher has learned that his sanity and his life depend on knowing what to preserve from the past and what to discard. He would like to keep "the old goodnesses"—without their old trappings and parade. And he reinterprets—by the spirit rather than the letter—the laws that have kept him second-in-command of his own life. Salvaging himself from the wreckage, he trims and consolidates his world, selling what is left of his beautiful old furniture, withdrawing from public life to a private life of "infinite conversations," a life of frugality, self-sufficiency, and comparative serenity. He will live his own life, rather than a predetermined model of it—and it will have order and meaning.

"In contentment live obscurely the inner life," Ford wrote later in Provence. In Last Post, we see Christopher mislaying some precious old prints and Valentine ashamed of the condition of her underthings and Sylvia and her entourage invading the landscape: Ford cannot offer an ideal solution for Christopher and Valentine, and that is the point. He makes it clear in his dedicatory letter to Last Post: "And so he will go jogging along with ups and downs and plenty of worries and some satisfactions, the Tory Englishman, running his head perhaps against fewer walls, perhaps against more.…" His descendants will carry on the country "without swank."

Christopher has to rethink his connection with the life he has been born to, and for that way of life Ford created one of the memorable symbols in modern literature, that of Groby Great Tree. The tallest cedar in Yorkshire, the fantastic tree was planted to commemorate the birth of Christopher's great-grandfather who "had died in a whoreshop." The tree was said never to forgive the Tietjens family for transplanting it from Sardinia, and it was connected with the family's bad luck, darkening the windows of the house and tearing chunks out of its foundations.

… Groby Great Tree overshadowed the house. You could not look out of the schoolroom windows at all for its great, ragged trunk and all the children's wing was darkened by its branches. Black … funeral plumes. The Hapsburgs were said to hate their palaces—that was no doubt why so many of them … had come muckers. At any rate they had chucked the royalty business.

Though the tree "did not like the house," Mark knows how much Christopher loved the tree. He would "pull the house down if he thought it incommoded the tree.… The thought that the tree was under the guardianship of unsympathetic people would be enough to drive Christopher almost dotty."

The spell is broken through Sylvia's agency, as a final act of revenge on Christopher for the peace he and Valentine share. Sylvia allows the tenant who was renting the ancestral house "furnished" to have the tree cut down—"to suit the sanitary ideas of the day." It is cut down before Christopher can intervene. The act cannot be undone, and Sylvia, recognizing this, assigns the part to an American. But the curse is removed, as she realizes: "God was lifting the ban." And ironically, Sylvia is the agent by whom the curse of the past is removed.

The ancestors against whom she sins had taken Groby from its rightful owners when the first Tietjens had come over from Holland with William III. The tree, with its great roots and yet its baleful influence, is an ambiguous symbol of the past. In any case, the tree will not darken the house for the generations to come.

Just before Mark dies, Valentine asks him "How are we to live? How are we ever to live?" Her question too is ambiguous, and at last breaking his silence, he answers indirectly, in the old Yorkshire dialect.

He whispered:

"'Twas the mid o' the night and the barnies grat And the mither beneath the mauld heard that."

… "An old song. My nurse sang it.… Never thou let thy barnie weep for thy sharp tongue to thy goodman… A good man!… Groby Great Tree is down.…"

Thinking of the future—Valentine's unborn child—Mark reverts to the oldest words he knows. They express the wisdom of the past, the wisdom of the folk. Having heard them as a child from his nurse, Mark uses them to express the continuity of the generations. To Valentine's question "How are we to live?" he answers—in harmony with Christopher, for the sake of the child. The message is for the future, and since he and Marie Léonie have no children, it is clear to Valentine why she should not tell Lady Tietjens of his last words.

She would have liked to have his last words.…
But she did not need them as much as I.