"No more parades" by Ford Madox Ford

The second book of the Parade's End Tetralogy. At the end of the last book, Some Do Not ... the hero, Christopher Tietjens, heir to a country estate, a complete know all, fiendishly intelligent and yet the cuckold of a wife he won't divorce even though he is platonically in love with Valentine Wannop because it wouldn't be proper, is sent to the British world war one army in France. This book takes place in two days while he is an officer who prepares troops for the front line (his medical classification will not permit him to go to the front).

In this book we explore the parallels between CT and Jesus Christ at the same time as having a detailed commentary on the chaos of organisation that is the military in a war and an examination of the public school system of morality.

In Part One, mostly told as a stream of consciousness from CT's point of view and thus allowing confusions to creep in to the narrative (for example CT initially thinks that Captain McKechne is called Captain Mackenzie), CT is performing miracles of multitasking, issuing orders, helping men to write their wills, calming half-mad senior officers and even writing a sonnet to order in three minutes. Then a messenger whom he refused leave (woman trouble, a theme which reflects CT's own and which is repeated for many of the other soldiers) is killed in an air raid in front of him. Although he realises that 09Morgan would have survived had he sent him home, CT washes the blood from his hands.

The stream of consciousness technique enables FMF to show the chaos and confusion around Tietjens and to impress upon us how overworked he is and how easy it is for him, even someone as brilliant as he is, to make a mistake. This also means that the reader is (probably) aware before Tietjens that the woman waiting at the gate is Tietjens’ own wife (whom he supposes to be in England, causing scandals). This revelation is voiced by the staff officer

Great lines in Part One:

• “Men you worried over there. Each man a man with a backbone, knees, breeches, braces, a rifle, a home, passions, fornications, drunks, pals, some scheme of the universe, corns, inherited diseases, a greengrocer’s business, a milk walk, a paper stall, brats, a slut of a wife.”
• “That place was meant for the quiet and orderly preparation of meat for the shambles.”
• “pack a million and a half of men into and round that small town was like baiting a trap for rats with a great chunk of rotten meat.”
• “These immense sacrifices, this ocean of mental sufferings, were all undergone to further the private vanities of men who amidst these hugenesses of landscapes and forces appeared pygmies!”
• “The red viscousness welled across the floor; you sometimes so see fresh water bubbling up in sand. It astonished Tietjens to see that a human body could be so lavish of blood.”
• “He hoped he would not get his hands all over blood, because blood is very sticky. It makes your fingers stick together impotently.”
• “Why did they shoot them at dawn? To rub it in that they were never going to see another sunrise. But they drugged the fellows so that they wouldn’t know the sun if they saw it: all roped in a chair . .. It was really the worse for the firing party.”
• “Captain Mackenzie in the light of a fantastically brilliant hurricane lamp appeared to be bathing dejectedly in a surf of coiling papers spread on the table before him.”
• “English people of good position consider that the basis of all marital unions or disunions is the maxim: No scenes.”
• “He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book.”
• “The lady, Mrs Tietjens, was certainly without mitigation a whore.”
• “On the Somme, in the summer, when stand-to had been at four in the morning, you would come out of your dug-out and survey, with a complete outfit of pessimistic thoughts, a dim, grey, repulsive landscape over a dull and much too thin parapet. There would be repellent posts, altogether too fragile entanglements of barbed wire, broken wheels, detritus, coils of mist over the positions of revolting Germans. Grey stillness; grey horrors, in front, and behind amongst the civilian populations! And clear, hard outlines to every thought . . . Then your batman brought you a cup of tea with a little—quite a little—rum in it. In three of four minutes the whole world changed beneath your eyes. The wire aprons became jolly efficient protections that your skill had devised and for which you might thank God; the broken wheels were convenient landmarks for raiding at night in No Man’s Land. You had to confess that, when you had re-erected that parapet, after it had last been jammed in, your company had made a pretty good job of it. And, even as far as the Germans were concerned, you were there to kill the swine; but you didn’t feel that the thought of them would make you sick beforehand . . . You were, in fact, a changed man. With a mind of a different specific gravity. You could not even tell that the roseate touches of dawn on the mists were not really the effects of rum .” A wonderful description of the effects of alcohol on how one views the world.
• “I remember the thoughts I thought and the thoughts I gave her credit for thinking. But perhaps she did not think them.” A clever way of underlining the unreliability of all narration.
• “Nothing but the infernal cruelty of their interview of the morning could have forced him to the pitch of sexual excitement that would make him make a proposal of illicit intercourse to a young lady to whom hitherto he had spoken not even one word of affection. ... And without doubt Sylvia had known what she was doing. The whole morning; at intervals, like a person directing the whiplash to a cruel spot of pain, reiteratedly, she had gone on and on. She had accused him of having Valentine Wannop for his mistress. She had accused him of having Valentine Wannop for his mistress. She had accused him of having Valentine Wannop for his mistress” The effective use of repetition.
• “That was the right of the Seigneur in a world of Other Ranks.”
• “All those millions were the play-things of ants busy in the miles of corridors beneath the domes and spires that rise up over the central heart of our comity.”
• “a line of ghosts that were tents, silent and austere in the moon’s very shadowy light”
• “getting cattle into condition for the slaughter-house ... But it’s better to go to heaven with your skin shining and master of your limbs than as a hulking lout.”

Part Two is described from the point of view of Sylvia (Mrs) Tietjens again starting from a third person and then zooming in to her stream of consciousness to the point where I got muddled about what she said to herself and what she said aloud.

Sylvia is sitting in a hotel lounge with Perowne, the man who brought her to France and the man with whom she ran away to France with years ago when she first left Tietjens. She realises that Perowne is no sort of man. Compared to Tietjens no man seems worth having: “almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. ... You knew the opening, you were already bored by the middle, and, especially, you knew the end”. But this is a problem, Because he infuriates her. He is so good. She is like the woman taken in adultery and she thinks: “And women taken in adultery . . . All of them . . . Like . . . You know Who . . . That is his model . . . ’ She said to herself: ‘Curse him! . . . I hope he likes it . . . You’d think the only thing he thinks about is the beastly duck he’s wolfing down.’ . . . And then aloud: ‘They used to say: “He saved others; himself he could not save . . .”

Later, having a meal with CT and a sergeant-major, she starts to compare Tietjens to Jesus more explicitly. Tietjens is omniscient, the soul of charity, refuses to condemn anyone, lives chastely (after his early marriage and even though he wants to sleep with Valentine), annoys the powers that be but helps everyone and is adored. However, when Sylvia compares her CT to JC the sergeant-major demurs: “‘Ma’am,’ he said, we couldn’t say exactly that of the captain . . . For I fancy it was said of our Redeemer . . . But we ‘ave said that if ever there was a poor bloke the captain could ‘elp, ‘elp ’im ‘e would . . . Yet the unit was always getting ‘ellish strafe from headquarters . . .” Yet somehow, ‘getting strafe from headquarters’ (annoying the established church?) makes CT seem even more Christ-like. And when When Sylvia, mainly from mischief, tells the General that her husband is a socialist, she makes explicit comparisons. “‘He desires,’ Sylvia said, and she had no idea when she said it, ‘to model himself upon our Lord . . . ’ The general leant back in the sofa. He said almost indulgently: ‘Who’s that . . . our Lord?‘ Sylvia said: ‘Upon our Lord Jesus Christ . . . ’ He sprang to his feet as if she had stabbed him with a hatpin. ‘Our . . . ’ he exclaimed. ‘Good God! . . . I always knew he had a screw loose . . . But . . . ’ He said briskly: ‘Give all his goods to the poor! . . . But He wasn’t a . . . Not a Socialist! What was it He said: Render unto Caesar . . . It wouldn’t be necessary to drum Him out of the Army’”

Sylvia hates him for being perfect and yet, as predicted by the Irish priest who was her confessor and is now in heaven, she is desperately and passionately in love with Tietjens (because he is inaccessible to her).

Lines I loved in Part Two

• “an immense castle that hung over crags, above a western sea, much as a bird-cage hangs from a window of a high tenement building”
• “Do you know the only time the King must salute a private soldier and the private takes no notice? . . . When ‘e’s dead . . . ’”
• “These horrors, these infinities of pain, this atrocious condition of the world had been brought about in order that men should indulge themselves in orgies of promiscuity . . . That in the end was at the bottom of male honour, of male virtue, observance of treaties, upholding of the flag . . . An immense warlock’s carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties

Part Three

The morning after. Tietjens is under arrest back at camp. The reason (as with all FMF narratives) slowly emerges from a muddle of statements. Last night he was in his wife’s room when Perowne came in wearing his dressing gown; he mistook him for room service and violently ejected him; Perowne made loud moan and woke General O’Hara who came to see what the fuss was about and was also pushed out of the room. Tietjens is thus under arrest for striking a superior officer.

Parallels with Jesus recur, for example when Tietjens says: “And then: ‘Oh, yes! I forgive . . . It’s painful . . . You probably don’t know what you are doing.”

The final chapter is a dialogue between Tietjens and General Campion (his godfather; wow, another parallel) in which the General acts rather like Pontius Pilate, desperately trying to find a way to help CT but in the end only coming up with the idea of sending him to a front-line regiment, despite his medical exemption, where he will probably be killed during the next German push. The General is, in effect, condemning CT to suffering and death and, kind man that he is, is desperately trying to get CT to help him find a way out of this. But CT refuses to take an easy option.

Lines I loved in Part Three:

• “The beastliness of human nature is always pretty normal. We lie and betray and are wanting in imagination and deceive ourselves, always, at about the same rate. In peace and in war!”
• “enormous bodies of men . . . Seven to ten million . . . All moving towards places towards which they desperately don’t want to go. Desperately! Every one of them is desperately afraid. But they go on.”
• “What the hell is language for? We go round and round.”
• “all men will go to hell over three things: alcohol, money . . . and sex. This fellow apparently hadn’t. Better for him if he had!”

A stunning book about war and a clever allegory about Jesus. July 2018

The tetralogy continues with A Man Could Stand Up, and Last Post

Ford Madox Ford also wrote the utterly brilliant The Good Soldier

"Some Do Not ..." by Ford Madox Ford

This is the first book of the Parade's End tetralogy. It is written by the author of The Good Soldier and it contains some of the same themes: the Catholic wife married to the Protestant husband, adultery, and the motivation of keeping up appearances.

Some Do Not ... was published in 1924, after Ulysses (1922) but before Mrs Dalloway (1925). As with these other novels, it foregrounds thought. Each chapter starts with a situation, and then rambles backwards and forwards. In this way the narrative technique resembles that of The Good Soldier (although it is less extreme, confining the rambling to within each chapter rather than allowing it to spread across the whole book as in TGS). In addition some of the chapters are told from within the head of one of the characters. Thus, Part One Chapter Six is a stream of consciousness in which Tietjens walks through the countryside following Valentine and thinks (and falls in love with her).

The protagonist if Christopher Tietjens, younger son of the owner of Groby, a stately home in Yorkshire, who is the ultimate in know-all geeks and the last of the stiff-upper-lipped old-style noblesse-oblige upper-class. The story opens in a railway carriage where CT and Vincent Macmaster (a Scott of very humble beginnings who has been supported through his education by CT's father and who is the soul of ambition) are discussing whether CT should forgive his wife who is asking to be taken back after running off to Europe with another man (leaving CT with a child whom he doubts is really his; in a brilliant pathetic fallacy we are told that CT is “interested in the domestic affairs of the cuckoo”). We progress through an attack on a golfing party by Suffragettes, a breakfast party with a clergyman suffering from some sort of religious Tourettes (at which VM falls in love with the clergyman's wife), to CT falling into unconsummated love with one of the Suffragette girls, Valentine Wannop (a wonderfully liberated woman who, to make ends meet after the death of her Professor father and to keep her brother at Eton works as a maid and later as a gym mistress). Part Two opens three years later during World War One. CT has been injured and is slowly recovering the use of his memory. Although everyone around him has been committing adulteries and he and VW are the only sexual innocents the rumours suggest he has made her pregnant; society (and particularly the guiltiest) is beginning to turn its back on him. CT is recalled to the front. Given that he may very well be killed, and given that he has already lost his reputation, should Christopher consummate his love for Valentine?

A wonderful novel exposing the double standards behind society. As the book points out, those who don't go to the front to fight resent those who do and therefore do their best to blacken their names. Those who are guilty hate those who are innocent.

There are some great moments in which the socio-historical situation is laid bare. It is difficult to say whether the comments reveal the attitudes of the author, or of the character, and to what extent the author is writing these things in order to criticise them.

• “I am offered the job—of course it’s an order really—of suppressing the Ulster Volunteers . . . I’d rather cut my throat than do it . . . ’ Sandbach said: ‘Of course you would, old chap. They’re our brothers.”
• “And policemen to go round the links with Ministers to protect them from the wild women .”
• “The wangle known as shell-shock was cynically laughed at and quite approved of. Quite decent and, as far as she knew, quite brave menfolk of her women would openly boast that, when they had had enough of it over there, they would wangle a little leave or get a little leave extended by simulating this purely nominal disease, and in the general carnival of lying, lechery, drink, and howling that this affair was, to pretend to a little shell-shock had seemed to her to be almost virtuous.”
• “charity begins surely with the char!”

There are many other brilliant lines:

• “As Tietjens saw the world, you didn’t ‘talk.’ Perhaps you didn’t even think about how you felt.”
• “Disasters come to men through drink, bankruptcy, and women.”
• “His life had necessarily been starved of women and, arrived at a stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution, be considered as a legitimate feature of his life, he had to fear a rashness of choice due to that very starvation.”
• “If you swat flies enough some of them stick to the wall.”
• “What finally separated the classes was that the upper could lift its feet from the ground whilst common people couldn’t.”
• “dagger . . . sheath!”: This is a wonderful metaphor (full of sexual innuendo) in which the narrator compares his wife with the woman he loves:
• “Heroines are all very well; admirable, they may even be saints; but if they let themselves get careworn in face and go shabby . . . Well, they must wait for the gold that shall be amply stored for them in heaven.”
• “No woman should wear clouded amber, for which the proper function was the provision of cigarette holders for bounders.”
• “The devil of course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of mental oppressions .”
• “Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver: if you looked at it with the eye of the artist . . . With the exact eye! It was smirched with bars of purple; of red; or orange; delicate reflections: dark blue shadows from the upper sky where it formed drifts like snow . . . The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man’s work. The only work for a man. Why then were artists soft: effeminate: not men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the schoolteacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an old woman!”
• “But why was he born to be a sort of lonely buffalo: outside the herd?”
• “when she entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash.”
• “He had come in like a stallion, red-eyed, and all his legs off the ground: he went down the stairs like a half-drowned rat, with dim eyes and really looking wet,”
• “she was sure her butler would get to heaven, simply because the Recording Angel, being an angel—and, as such, delicately minded—wouldn’t have the face to put down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan’s offences .”
• “they hate the French for being frugal and strong in logic and well-educated and remorselessly practical.”
• “Perhaps the complete study of one woman gave you a map of all the rest!”
• “The poorer helots of great cities hearten their lives by dreaming of material beauties, elegance and suave wealth,”
• “The staff officers who came to the Tietjens were not of the first vintages; still they had the labels and passed as such.”
• “proficiency of the body calls for chastity, sobriety, cleanliness and the various qualities that group themselves under the heading of abnegation.”

The book explores social mobility. Tietjens, though an old Tory with the most privileged background, is utterly at home with all classes. Valentine was forced by her father's death to leave her privileged world and become a maid but this experience has not in the least coarsened her. Her bother, in contrast, who went to Eton at the expense of his skivvying sister, embraces communism and becomes a conscientious objector during the war, which involves working on a mine sweeper after a spell in prison, and is depicted as a drunk, coarsened by his rather privileged upbringing just as Valentine has been purified and refined by her descent into the working class.

Mrs Duchemin, the long-suffering wife of the manic preacher, who has an affair with Macmaster, and whose return for the protection and discretion of Tietjens is to shun him and blacken his name.She and Macmaster are from the poorest classes and successful social climbers; their Friday salons are a perfect example of evolving pecking orders.

Modernist writing at its best. June 2018

The tetralogy continues with No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and Last Post.