SOURCE: "Parade's End," in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, Random House, 1954, pp. 315-23.

[Williams was one of America's most renowned poets of the twentieth century. Rejecting as overly academic the Modernist poetic style established by T S. Eliot, he sought a more natural poetic expression, endeavoring to replicate the idiomatic cadences of American speech. In the following essay, which was first published in 1951, he focuses on the significance of Sylvia in the transition of Christopher Tietjens throughout the novel, and suggests that Tietjens is not "the last Tory," but rather the first of a new, more enlightened generation of Englishmen.]

Every time we approach a period of transition someone cries out: This is the last! the last of Christianity, of the publishing business, freedom for the author, the individual! Thus we have been assured that in this novel, Parade's End, we have a portrait of the last Tory. But what in God's name would Ford Madox Ford be doing writing the tale of the last Tory? He'd far rather have tied it into black knots.

In a perfectly appointed railway carriage, two young men of the British public official class, close friends, are talking quietly together. Back of their minds stands Great Groby House, the Tietjens' family seat, in Yorkshire, the north of England—its people, neighbors, and those associated with them just prior to the beginning of the First World War. It was a noteworthy transition period. It would be idle of me, an American, to try to recreate so highly flavored an atmosphere as that represented in this railway carriage. One of the speakers is Christopher Tietjens, younger son to Groby's ancestral proprietor; he is a blond hulk of a man, a sharp contrast to his companion, MacMasters, dark-haired and with a black pointed beard, a smallish Scotsman for whom the Tietjens family has provided a little money to get him through Cambridge and establish him in town.

Sylvia, young Christopher's beautiful wife, has four months previously gone off to the Continent with a lover. She has sickened of him and wants to be taken back. The two men on the train, thoroughly well bred and completely British, are discussing the circumstance and its profitable outcome—Christopher, defending his wife, has consented to let her do as she pleases. There begins now to unravel (you might almost say it is Christopher's ungainly bulk itself that is unraveling) as intimate, full, and complex a tale as you will find under the official veneer of our day.

Four books, Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post, have been for the first time offered in one volume as Ford had wished it. The title, Paade's End, is his own choosing. Together they constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time. But Ford's writings have never been popular, as popular, let's say, as the writings of Proust have been popular. Yet they are written in a style that must be the envy of every thinking man. The pleasure in them is infinite.

When I first read the books I began, by chance, with No More Pardes; as the story ran the First World War was in full swing, the dirt, the deafening clatter, the killing. So it was a little hard for me to retreat to Some Do Not, which deals with the social approaches to that holocaust. At once, in the first scenes of this first book the conviction is overwhelming that we are dealing with a major talent. We are plunged into the high ritual of a breakfast in the Duchemin drawing room—all the fine manners of an established culture. There's very little in English to surpass that, leading as it does to the appearance of the mad cleric himself, who for the most part lies secretly closeted in his own home. Beside this we have the relationship of the man's tortured wife with Tietjens' friend MacMasters; the first full look at Valentine Wannop and of Tietjens himself before he appears in khaki—the whole rotten elegance of the business; Sylvia, at her best, and the old lady's "You are so beautiful, my dear, you must be good." Then it shifts to Christopher and the girl, Valentine, in the fog, linking the land, disappointment, the yearning for fulfillment and—the ten-foot-deep fog itself covering everything but the stars of a brilliant sky overhead; we see Christopher in the carriage holding the reins, Valentine leaping down to find a road sign and disappearing from his view. Only the horse's head, as he tosses it, reappears to Christopher from time to time as the man sits there alone. Following that is the restraint and hatred in the scene between husband and wife, Christopher and Sylvia. He at table in uniform, she standing behind him, bored. Casually she flings the contents of her plate at the back of his neck, glad she hadn't actually hit him—but the oil from the dressing dribbled down on his insignia. He didn't even turn. It is their farewell as he is about to leave for the front.

This is the first of the four books. The war intervenes. No More Parades. The war ends. Tietjens is invalided home, his mind half gone. Valentine lives for him and he recovers. Mark, the present heir to Groby, the Correct Man, represents the family and England as a family. Living with his French mistress he suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and lies, during all of The Last Post, in a sort of summerhouse, where with his last breath, and as he holds the pregnant Valentine by the hand, the saga comes to an end.

Sylvia, through all the books, in her determination to destroy her husband, does everything a woman can, short of shooting him, to accomplish her wish. From start to finish she does not falter.

This is where an analysis should begin; for some, who have written critically of Parade's End, find Sylvia's extreme hatred of her husband, her inexorable, even doctrinaire hatred, unreal. I think they are wrong. All love between these two or the possibility for it was spent before the story began when Christopher lay with his wife-to-be, unknowing, in another railway carriage, immediately after her seduction by another man. It made an impossible situation. From that moment all that was left for them was love's autopsy, an autopsy and an awakening—an awakening to a new form of love, the first liberation from his accepted Toryism. Sylvia was done. Valentine up! A new love had already begun to shimmer above the fog before his intelligence, a new love with which the past was perhaps identical, or had been identical, but in other terms. Sylvia suffers also, while a leisurely torment drives her to desperation. It is the very slowness of her torment, reflected in the minutiae, the passionate dedication, the last agonized twist of Ford's style, that makes the story move.

In his very perception and love for the well-observed detail lies Ford's narrative strength, the down-upon-it affection for the thing itself in which he is identical with Tietjens, his prototype. In spite of all changes, in that, at least, the Tory carries over: concern for the care of the fields, the horses, whatever it may be; the landed proprietor must be able to advise his subordinates who depend on him, he is responsible for them also. That at least was Tietjens, that too was Ford.

When you take those qualities of a man over into the new conditions, that Tietjens paradoxically loved, the whole picture must be altered—and a confusion, a tragic confusion, results, needing to be righted; it is an imperative that becomes a moral duty as well as a duty to letters.

Ford, like Tietjens, paid attention to these things. I'll not forget when he came to visit me in Rutherford, a town lying in the narrow sun-baked strip of good soil, land which the Dutch farmers cultivated so well in the old days, between the low Watchung Range and the swampy land of the Hackensack Meadows. It is one of the best tilled, you might almost say currycombed, bits of the Garden State, as New Jersey is still called. Old Ford, for he was old by that time, was interested. He asked me to take him out to see the truck farms. We spent the afternoon at it, a blistering July day when the sprinkler system was turned on in many of the fields, straight back into the country, about three or four miles, to the farm of Derrick Johnson, who personally showed us around. I was more interested in the sandpipers running through the tilled rows—birds which I hadn't seen up to then other than running on the wet sand of beaches as the water washed up and retreated, uncovering minute food. But on the farm they were nestling, here their eggs were laid and hatched in the heat between the beet rows on the bare ground. But Ford, who was looking around, questioned the farmer closely about the cultivation of the lettuce, carrots, dandelion, leeks, peppers, tomatoes and radishes which he was raising. It was all part of his understanding of the particular—and of what should properly occupy and compel a man's mind. He might have been Tietjens.

So far I have spoken in the main of Christopher and Sylvia, their relationship, their positions and their marriage. But there are other characters as important in the argument as they. Mark, Christopher's elder brother, the one man whom Sylvia has never been able to impress, should be put down as the first of these—as Ford, I think, recognizes, when he makes him the key figure of the entire last book, The Last Post. Mark, the perfectly cultured gentleman. Professor Wannop, old friend of the family, a studious recluse who has brought up his daughter, Valentine, in his own simple and profound ways, is gone. And there is, of course, Valentine herself, though she appears, generally speaking, little. She fills, however, a dominant place. A Man Could Stand Up is her book. General Campion, official England, is another to be named. He will carry off the girl, old as he is, at the close. At every turn he appears, often as Sylvia's instrument to thwart Christopher, triumphant officialdom.

But greater than he, Tietjens, are the men in the trenches, his special responsibilities, over whom he pains, a bumbling mother, exhausting himself to the point of mental and physical collapse.

Few could be in the position which Ford himself occupied in English society to know these people. His British are British in a way the American, Henry James, never grasped. They fairly smell of it. The true test is his affection for them, top to bottom, a moral, not a literary attribute, his love of them, his wanting to be their Moses, to lead them out of captivity to their rigid aristocratic ideals—to the ideals of a new aristocracy. Ford, like Tietjens, was married to them, and like Sylvia they were determined to destroy him for it. Even when he could help them, as Tietjens helped MacMaster, Ford got kicked for it and was thrown out of the paradise of their dying ideas—as much by D. H. Lawrence on one side, the coal miner's son, as by the others. He helped Lawrence but Lawrence soon backed out. And still no one grasps the significance of Tietjens' unending mildness, torn between the two forces—no one, really, but Valentine and Mark in the last words.

Sylvia's bitter and unrelenting hatred for Tietjens, her husband, is the dun mountain under the sunrise, the earth itself of the old diabolism. We sense, again and again, more than is stated, two opposing forces. Not who but what is Sylvia? (I wonder if Ford with his love of the Elizabethan lyric didn't have that in mind when he named her.)

At the start her husband has, just too late for him, found out her secret; and feeling a responsibility, almost a pity for her, has assumed a superior moral position which she cannot surmount or remove. She had been rudely seduced, and on the immediate rebound, you might almost say with the same gesture, married Tietjens in self-defense. She cannot even assure her husband that the child is his own. She cannot be humble without denying all her class prerogatives. Christopher's mere existence is an insult to her. But to have him pity her is hellish torment. She is forced by everything that is holy to make him a cuckold, again and again. For England itself in her has been attacked. But Valentine can pick up her young heels, as she did at the golf course, and leap a ditch, a thing impossible for Sylvia unless she change her clothes, retrain her muscles and unbend.

But there is a deeper reason than that—and a still more paradoxical—in that Tietjens forced her to do good; that as his wife she serves best when she most hates him. The more she lies the better she serves. This is truly comic. And here a further complexity enters. Let me put it this way: If there is one thing I cannot accede to in a commonality of aspiration, it is the loss of the personal and the magnificent… the mind that cannot contain itself short of that which makes for great shows. Not wealth alone but a wealth that enriches the imagination. Such a woman is Sylvia, representing the contemporary emblazonments of medieval and princely retinue. How can we take over our Kultur, a trait of aristocracy, without a Sylvia, in short as Tietjens desired her? What is our drabness beside the magnificence of a Sistine Chapel, a gold salt cellar by Cellini, a Taj, a great wall of China, a Chartres? The mind is the thing not the cut stone but the stone itself. The words of a Lear. The sentences of Some Do Not themselves that are not likely for this to be banished from our thoughts.

Ford gave the woman, Sylvia, life; let her exercise her full range of feeling, vicious as it might be, her full armament of woman. Let her be what she is. Would Tietjens divorce her? When there is reason yes, but so long as she is truthfully what she is and is fulfilling what she is manifestly made to be, he has nothing but respect for her. Ford uses her to make a meaning. She will not wobble or fail. It is not his business. This is a way of looking at the word.

Ford's philosophy in these novels is all of a piece, character and writing. The word keeps the same form as the characters' deeds or the writer's concept of them. Sylvia is the dead past in all its affecting glamor. Tietjens is in love the while with a woman of a different order, of no landed distinction, really a displaced person seeking replacement. Valentine Wannop is the reattachment of the word to the object—it is obligatory that the protagonist (Tietjens) should fall in love with her, she is Persephone, the rebirth, the reassertion—from which we today are at a nadir, the lowest ebb.

Sylvia is the lie, bold-faced, the big crude lie, the denial… that is now having its moment. The opponent not of le mot juste against which the French have today been rebelling, but something of much broader implications; so it must be added that if our position in the world, the democratic position, is difficult, and we must acknowledge that it is difficult, the Russian position, the negative position, the lying position, that is, the Communist position is still more difficult. All that is implied in Ford's writing.

To use the enormous weapon of the written word, to speak accurately that is (in contradiction to the big crude lie) is what Ford is building here. For Ford's novels are written with a convinced idea of respect for the meaning of the words—and what a magnificent use they are put to in his hands! whereas the other position is not conceivable except as disrespect for the word's meaning. He speaks of this specifically in No More Pardes—that no British officer can read and understand a simple statement unless it be stereotype … disrespect for the word and that, succinctly put, spells disaster.

Parenthetically, we shall have to go through some disastrous passages, make no mistake about that, but sooner or later we shall start uphill to our salvation. There is no other way. For in the end we must stand upon one thing and that only, respect for the word, and that is the one thing our enemies do not have. Therefore rejoice, says Ford, we have won our position and will hold it. But not yet—except in microcosm (a mere novel you might say). For we are sadly at a loss except in the reaches of our best minds to which Ford's mind is a prototype.

At the end Tietjens sees everything upon which his past has been built tossed aside. His brother has died, the inheritance is vanished, scattered, in one sense wasted. He sees all this with perfect equanimity—Great Groby Tree is down, the old curse achieved through his first wife's beneficent malevolence, a malevolence which he perfectly excuses. He is stripped to the rock of belief. But he is not really humiliated since he has kept his moral integrity through it all. In fact it is that which has brought him to destruction. All that by his upbringing and conviction he has believed is the best of England, save for Valentine, is done. But those who think that that is the end of him miss the whole point of the story, they forget the Phoenix symbol, the destruction by fire to immediate rebirth. Mark dead, Christopher, his younger brother, has got Valentine with child.

This is not the "last Tory" but the first in the new enlightenment of the Englishman—at his best, or the most typical Englishman. The sort of English that fought for and won Magna Carta, having undergone successive mutations through the ages, has reappeared in another form. And this we may say, I think, is the story of these changes, this decline and the beginning of the next phase. Thus it is not the facile legend, "the last Tory," can describe that of which Ford is speaking, except in a secondary sense, but the tragic emergence of the first Tory of the new dispensation—as Christopher Tietjens and not without international implications. Transition was the biggest word of the quarter-century with which the story deals, though its roots, like those of Groby Great Tree, lie in a soil untouched by the modern era. Parade's End then is for me a tremendous and favorable study of the transition of England's most worthy type, in Ford's view and affections, to the new man and what happens to him. The sheer writing can take care of itself.