PARADE'S END
BARNIE’S BEGINNING
Some
Thoughts On Ford's Qwartet
1 : SURRENDER SWEET
A
couple of chapters in
: “I’d like to
read this book again.”
Later
:
“Even then, I could not know all its riches.”
Halfway
:
“This is tremendous, what extraordinary control.”
Often
:
“I cant wait to get back to reading it.”
Days
after finishing
: "How
pleasant to think about its thinking.”
And suddenly, the voice of my Meta-Self, watching my
Praising-Self:
“Those remarks are truly the zenith of every
writer’s hope. Well, those and one more, invoking the
comparator”
My
Praising-Self interrupted:
“I’ve already heard myself pronounce –
this is as good as War & Peace, which I can’t imagine
re-reading. It’s not a new Iliad : but,
then - that’s incomparable.
2 : RESISTANCE
A man chases a girl until she catches him.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see this caution until me
and the girl were fighting in our net. Is resistance a gift or an insult? One
can’t fake resistance. Well, of course you can, but why would you: for one
knows that once one is aware of resistance, there is no greater pleasure than
when that rejection, somehow, is changed into attraction, even
compulsion. It is as if one is suddenly filled with twice, or even three times,
the volume and density of pleasure that one would have had, had the courtship
been unresisted.
For a true or proper Reader, the pursuit of
books, and the acts of reading books, and the acts of talking & writing
about them, are never merely intellectual: she is always aware of the rising
swell of a deep undercurrent of psycho-sexual energy that sustains her identity.
Even those who wouldn’t know to call it that, and would be surprised to give
voice to this remark by an Oxbridge scholar : “I find libraries so
erotically charged”. They’d
certainly be among the few young men and women, in any generation anywhere,
who might say: “I had rather than forty shillings I had my
book of Songs and Sonnets here”
[Shakespeare
: Merry Wives of Windsor : £8K today]
A
young person comes into the priceless property of properness in the seven
millennial community of proper-readers when she accepts the judgment,
re-pronounced in every generation, that there are books she ought to
read. “I will read at least
some of what I ought to” is sufficient oath to be admitted to the
community. The vaunting. eternally-teen, taunt “I
won’t be told, and I will read only what I want” will
induce in any true-Reader absolute pity.
When I saw Parade’s End on the tv-listings,
I thought - I ought to read it first. So I taped the first episode, thinking I
would. A part of me hoped it would be a short book like his The Good Soldier,
which I’d read years ago. So when I saw the size of it - a quartet! – I felt
defeated : for I had felt too lowered this year to plan that much effort. I
allowed myself to watch the tv series now.
Very
quickly, I was ravished by the film : a sense of being overwhelmed by pleasure,
emotional longing & intellectual delight, but also
a shard of distress, an unbounded hate that puzzled me. I ought to
read it now . I watched the first four
episodes, and then re-watched them in reverse order. The pleasure and hate
deepened. In my ghostly solitude, my heart had leapt at the courtship of
Tietjens and Valentine : not only did it have the Biblical echo of Jacob waiting
for Rachel, for seven years, and the pagan echo of Penelope waiting for her war
hero for ten years, but it took me seven days reading to get to their union.
Watching again the beautifully filmed scene of the night-drive through the fog,
the resisted kiss in the mist, and the bitter tears by the wounded horse, I wept
with relief that I wasn’t too dead to be shaken by this longing denied.
But why did I hate Sylvia so much? Wasn’t that a symptom of some kind
of death?
Without
being limited to a type, Sylvia is the siren. But the actress wasn’t my type.
I remember being shocked that she looked a little like my friend’s daughter:
and I recalled a remark by Martin Amis – “My school-friend was blessed
with looking John Lennon. Girls would go out with him just for that pretence.”
Then I was glad for her, and wondered who else saw it. Tv-Sylvia revolted
me, she had a moral ugliness that was impassable. In a Seinfeld episode
of pretended identity, George is unable to resist a beautiful young woman who is
throwing herself at him. Only when Jerry reminds him of the truth “She’s
a Nazi” , does he reject her. Is that a good limit? Ford wrote before the
Nazi’s redefined evil.
Years
ago, my friends knew that I would not take a lodger who liked soaps or
rap-music, even in their own room in my house. To understand the
depth of this preference, one asked: “If an incredibly attractive woman was
interested in taking the room, and she liked soaps & rap, what would you do?
It really didn’t feel hard to say “I still wouldn’t let her in!”
I
bought the book partly to seek understanding about and relief from my now
geriatric intolerance. More hopefully, I wondered how the sublime moon-ride
would be written by Ford himself.
Predictably,
a proper-essay doesn’t follow : just more asides, partly setting off from
Aristotle’s elements : but I intend more than critical square-bashing.
3 : JAGGED TIME & SPACE
The
tv film was transmitted, and I began reading the novel, almost exactly one
century after the events of the story begin, Summer 1912. Perhaps because
television adaptations are required to spoon-feed the restless viewer, including
clear flashbacks, it was only when I
began reading the novel that I realized how much Ford wanted the reader to trust
him as he leapt back and forth across the time-line. A series of actions are
described, implying a certain (logical) outcome. But then he jumps over the
implied but unstated outcome to a later development and starts complicating
that. The earlier unstated outcome is gradually or suddenly introduced, but
often without the expected narrative weight. Such devices heighten the tension,
for there is always the possibility that the logical outcome will be displaced
by a (ridiculous) surprise.
Another
beautifully tensioned scene is where Christopher & Valentine’s attempted
reunion is repeatedly interrupted. I was reminded of those great Dostoevskian
set-pieces where there is a room, tiny like Raskolnikov’s hovel (Crime
& Punishment) or huge as in Stavrogina’s drawing-room (The Devils),
into which one new person after another keeps arriving disrupting all
possibility of understanding the gathering chaos. Being before the telephone
era, his characters had actually to be there in the same physical space, even if
in an a upper-room or behind a screen. In Ford’s novel, but not in the film,
Valentine’s mother is present in Tietjens house – with its doorstep and its
several floors filling with visitors - as
a voice held in the phone. In a magnificent piece of symbolism, she is almost
telling herself that she must cut the umbilical cord.
It
is only when the quartets ends that the oscillations stop. Until then, not only
is the story told from various perspectives, but crucial details are omitted in
earlier tellings. We realise later that our readerly satisfaction at the reunion
was premature: for we are returned to the Tietjen’s house to meet new horrors.
I
know nothing of Ford’s biography, but if Ford modeled Christopher on his own
brilliant mind, then he almost certainly knew what Einstein & Picasso had
done to relative perspective and multi-dimensionality : and was perhaps aiming
for a writerly correlate.
4 : NOT FREYTAG’S TRIANGLE
4a : CHRISTOPHER : WHO COULDN’T QUITE
DESUBLIMATE
Christopher
Tietjens is given by several of his group the ascriptions, “the most
brilliant man in
Initially,
money, even his salary, for his intellectual labours, has no necessity or
meaning. Money, cash or cheque, is
of course either frozen-labour, or frozen-time, or both. In time-established,
land-based hierarchies, money cannot buy immediate elevation. Macmaster might
get a knighthood, by plagiarizing Tietjens’s idea, but only his
great-grandchildren will, if he also gets land, be admitted to
aristocracy. Social codes are not as fixed as natural laws : like magnetic-poles
repel, but aristocrats can refuse to lend to their own. Certain terms are
inscribed with monetary-exchange - labour, tenant, lodger – and imply
the correlate owner. If Tietjens gifts rather than lends money to his
co-tenant Macmaster, does that he mean he owns him or unconsciously wants to? If
his brother Mark says he could only sublet to a tenant who is not
equally-English, what obligation is he afraid of? Two catastrophic plot-lines
are initiated by the material mystery of these questions. In a rare moment of
expressed impatience rather than hauteur, Tietjens says “Ah, the lodger”
to Ruggles. This wound is enough to turn the latter into Othello’s bitterly
envious ensign Iago. Lady Macmaster’s growing contempt for her upstart husband
becomes a suspicion of his friend’s gift, and she furthers Ruggles’s
calumnies. Sibling rivalry persuades Mark of their truth. To call to duel &
kill your love-rival is one thing : but to bounce his cheque for a few hours is
pathetic. And yet this paper-cut is the final insult Tietjens’s father feels
leaves him no family reply except suicide.
Tietjens
principal pleasure before the war, and his last defence on the battlefield, is
mentation : the correction of errors, literary or scientific, published or
conversational, and the pursuit of correct mathematical solutions especially
those predicting or prosecuting war, and prose fitting immediate experience. The
poetry contest he initiates, and the skylark dispute, both on the battlefield,
are the moral zenith of this strategy. His secondary bliss is for non-human
nature – flowers, birds, horses, the ‘timeless’ landscape. “each
knew the names of birds and grasses… all technical terms the best people must
know” [p.105] As with
If
the efflorescence of sexual desire is always accompanied by a sense of
prohibition, the cause is either universal psychopathology, an unresolved
Oedipus complex, or local theology. Perhaps Freud was too new for Ford to use
deeply : for he focused on religious wars, an old curse on his family, and a
strange bastard concept – Anglican Saint. But this, like all other
pre-war identities, 18C or 20C, are exposed as fragile and untenable by the
monstrous vanity & venality of those aristocrats & climbers running the
war. These bitter experiences release Tietjens to a different conception of
money & labour, knowledge & sexuality.
4b: SYLVIA : WHO COULDN’T QUITE
SUBLIMATE
What
is a woman worth – her body and the work she might do?
There is no power on earth like that of a mother’s over an infinitely,
dependant child, boy or girl. But only boys grow up to know that they, like all
men, will have all the other kinds of possible powers, including over the
parameters of female sexuality and motherhood. Most girls grow up being told
that there is only baby-work and house-work ahead. That these tasks also assume
the precondition that a woman knows she is (somehow) the solution to all the
puzzles of male sexuality is less often told. But it is not hard for her to
fathom that men see female capital as comprised of silent physical beauty (as
they define it) and a non-threatening quick-wittedness at learning and
performing house-tasks, the angel of the house : and that what they are
most ambivalent about is a woman’s consciousness of, let alone command of, her
own sexual allure, the harlot of the hearth.
If a woman can’t have babies, or if she has servants & nannies, to
do house-work and baby-work, what is she to do?
Portia,
the heroine of The Merchant of Venice, might home-study law, disguise
herself as a man and rescue her fiancé from ruin: but then she must put away
manly things. Helen, the heroine of All’s Well That Ends Well,
might home-study medicine, cure the King, but still get rejected as a
bride by a man barely a social (not academic) degree higher, because the King
hasn’t yet elevated her. Shakespeare didn't dare risk doing anything but
having her trick him into sex & 'win' him back.
Whatever
economic or social worth there is in good women, there is little narrative worth
in them. There is a roll-call of Victorian female characters, who are described
as very or most beautiful in their social sphere, but who lose what little
interestingness they had a moment after marriage: both to their husband and to
the reader : Jane Bennett in Pride & Prejudice, Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch,
Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair, Gwendoline
Harleth in Daniel Deronda, Cynthia Kikpatrick in Wives & Daughters.
Their sexuality is disavowed. Admittedly, Elizabeth Bennett has a better range
of conversation style, but she will not learn & do as Molly Gibson, or
aspire heroically like Dorothea Brooke. And again their bedroom-self is denied.
Thackeray
shows Becky Sharp as commanding a vibrant sexuality and linguistic &
economic finesse. Though she, like Portia & Helen, still won’t be allowed
a profession in which to exercise her skills, one senses that her marriage to
Rawdon has enough mutual pleasure. I feel that Thackeray need not have added
child cruelty to her faults of opportunism, little different from men’s. She
is indifferent to but rarely vicious to their son: though these faults are bad
enough.
Interestingly,
there is a little cited Victorian novel that gives due weight to female sexual
desire and female public intellectuality, Kingsley’s Hypatia : asking
in high rhetorical style: That Pallas herself should be conquered every
day by Venus Pandemos!
We’ve
seen that aristocratic men, like Tietjens, can choose, for diversion and not
from economic necessity, to master a profession or State task. But gorgeous
women of that strata still had fuck-all to do : well, apart from fucking or
teasing all, there was also protecting their rank from uppity clever girls. Both
religion and State cosseted them from the smallest effort : they could bring
their maids to penitential retreats and they could buy pre-made war-effort
woollens.
Ford’s Sylvia is that rare beast in a pre-contemporary novel, a sexualized female, but (for whatever literary or didactic reason) she is too beastly, almost mono-dimensional : in the sense of being demented rather than poorly drawn. Her only social and existential capital is sexual allure, in her couture and in her relentlessly sexualized conversation and gesture. But, apart from sexual teasing, she is shown as experiencing very little actual sexual joy : her disappointments feeding a boundless capacity for malice. The tv-actress plays her superbly, and it was only when I read the book that I felt justified in hating her. Not only for the Ioagoan project to destroy her own husband’s flickering capacity for happiness, but she had sunk to the inhuman nadir, which appears there but not in the film : she contemplates corrupting her own child. She is a perfect illustration of the maxim tantum religio potuit suadere malorum : a morally flawed person made worse by their flirting only with the drama of religious belief.
(After
finishing this essay, I read a judgement on her by another adulterous
Catholic, "surely the most possessed evil character in the modern
novel". Graham
Greene)
She,
too sets a time-test, but unlike Tietjens’s suggestion of a poetry-fight as a
mutual psychic bandage from war-trauma, “never think on the subject of a
shock at a moment of a shock” [p.315],
hers is private, despite invoking her former priest, and yet another,
almost masturbatory, fantasy about a perfect man for her brittle ego. She
neither has the wifely dignity of Helen nor of Andromache nor of even Maintenon
in a time of war.
Speaking
of human sexuality as a subject for writers, Ibsen infamously said : “Zola
goes to the sewer to wallow in it, I go to cleanse it”. All one needs
to add to this typically sanctimonious bragging is that Ibsen was a gong-loving
social-climber, whereas Zola defended Dreyfus. I cheered when I recently heard
the great French actress Juliette Binoche say she’d preferred the daring
pursuit of sexual truths of admittedly bonkers Strindberg to the safely
controversial Ibsen.
Despite
the Censor’s prohibition of explicit reference, medical or vernacular, to
human sex parts, positions and stimulations, Ford was able more than many to
communicate a sense of their profound affective correlates : why it
drives men and women almost mad with puzzlement & dismay, and
occasionally takes them to a deeper & higher
union. Nowadays the writer or film-maker can say & show everything: but
interestingly it is a tv programme which is Fordian in its restraint which has
more thought about sexuality : Law & Order : Special Victims Unit. An
episode that I saw, as I was working through Ford, offered a fictional detail
that was clearly intended to have documentary force : that the Forensic
Departments of several major
Unsurprisingly,
I connected this example to Ford’s satire about army supplies. If war is
fighting fire with fire, then the fire-extinguisher is a necessary tool.
Tietjens is commanded to obtain them, but his efforts are stymied by it would
seem innocently contradictory regulations. But there is no more innocence here
than in US City Hall : High Command needs but scorns its Dominion troops.
4c : VALENTINE : WHO LEARNED TO DO
BOTH
General
readers, as well as feminists, might baulk at the frequency of mostly male
narratives, where a sexually confident woman is shown as doomed socially, and
perhaps even to murder – as In Looking For Mr Goodbar. Psychoanalysts
describe an existential doom separable from social scandal. If Freud was right,
and of course he was, that human well-being was defined by attaining a balance
of love and work, that is mutual, genitally expressed love, and spontaneously
creative effort as well as life-supporting labour, then an idle, rich beauty was
already done for.
For
some, not all, landed aristocrats, there was another aristocracy, based on
merit, that their capacity for intellectual pleasures wouldn’t let them deny
viz ranks of scholarship. One would not scorn a Professor, one would take a Vice
Chancellor’s Latin Prize Man as an equal. It had been so for men-only for six
centuries of Oxbridge. So, George Eliot could only show her heroine Dorothea
aching for the opportunity of purposed learning, whereas Ford was able to show
the first two generations given that chance, if not yet the vote. He honourably
describes the erotic charge of study, known from Plato onwards : that thrilling
current ever-remembered by Valentine’s father’s female students, and of
course more complexly embedded in her.
But
he also shows in minute detail that except for the tiniest minority of landed
aristocrats, even the highest knowledge must be sold for bread & shelter.
The widow of the famed feminist pedagogue Professor Wannop must beg and bustle
for writing commissions : and his daughter work as a slavey and then as gym
teacher : when in a different time she too might have been an Hypatia or written
Italian dictionaries like Barbara Reynolds or done neuro-research like Susan
Greenfield.
The
deepest joy the tv film gave me was the scene of Christopher and Valentine’s
night-drive. I thought it was one of the most astonishing scenes of unconscious
wooing. At first it seems ridiculously anachronistic, in the 20C to involve
horses and wooden wheels : as if one was riding with Elizabeth or Tess. That it
involves a certain amount of mutual provoking might also cast it as cliché.
What is so lovely is how the mutual recognition of intellectual beauty, Latin as
the language of love, and even more
so of moral beauty, her daring as a suffragette and his willingness to break the
law to help her friend flee, transfigures their visible physical bodies, which
would be diminished in any objective comparisons, Sylvie and Mark are better
looking, into the perfectly desired shape. In her innocent rapture she can even
say to him “You are not so dreadfully ugly, really”. [p.131]
As Sylvia is doomed to learn in bitterness, moral beauty does not wither.
Again, the passage in the book is even better : for it has the complete
love-fight over Latin grammar. It must be the most intellectual wooing scene in
English literature. Stoppard didn’t dare put all that in, in case the viewer got
bored. Shakespeare’s only bilingual love-scene in Henry V is frivolous
and implausible by comparison, albeit good theatre. It is remarkable that Ford
didn’t dumb down. I wondered if there was a CD of it read aloud.
Ascetics
are an affront to the weak-willed: what are they feeding on that they don’t
need to eat like us?! Even their
relatives & friends, and especially Sylvia, could not see that for
Christopher & Valentine those few fractured meetings, could sustain them for
seven years & despite opposing attitudes to the war and social scandal : so,
they conjectured more ordinary lusts & obligations and, in vicious envy, set
forth fatal slanders.
There
is a remarkable dialogue Valentine has with herself, where she wonders whether
the attainment of peak physical fitness, though feeling satisfying
& clean, isn’t somehow dangerous, inimical to thinking. She
doesn’t name it so, but this is an ancient fight between Hellenic and Jewish
world views. Five years later, in the real world, The Football Association,
terrified at the popularity of female football, persuaded tame doctors to lie
about female anatomy, so that they could force insurance companies to withdraw
cover and thus make their matches illegal. Ninety years after that, this summer,
after GB’s women footballers performed better than the men in the Olympics,
the FA &
It
is very moving that Christopher accepts Valentine bringing him from his solitary
compensatory 18C fantasies into a shared present reality. They will both do
manual and intellectual work for money, and continue their conversation, and
there will be their new baby, a real one.
How
does a writer most subtly introduce himself to the Reader as the writer of these
particular words? A confident display of a variety of sentence-weights,
character-apt & task-apt vocabularies, and accurately transcribed regional
vernaculars, are surely assumed in proper-literature, as distinguishable from
trash or the middle-brow. They are all here. But, as Stothard recently wrote one
of the primary task of proper novels and criticism is to teach readers to read
anew, make more effort with this book and others referred to. Some of Ford’s
characters are almost forbiddingly well-read, their reading & reflection
upon it, being part of their thinking-pulse eg the casual reference to Dante
being a swine and the dazzling conjunction of Goethe & Rosa Luxemborg. Even,
the almost stock-character of the bluff-general can say : “I have spent
a great deal of time in reading”. To which comes the even more
startling reply : “I know sir. You made me read Clarendon’s ‘History
of the Great Rebellion’ when I was twelve.”
But
he is most present in the Latin (& German) discourses, the recall of
Anglican poets, the poetry-fight, sonnet versus epic, and
the need to find the just word for each of the moment-by-moment horrors
of trench life. A writer being all his/her characters, the reader knows Ford is saying
to
him/her – I could
do the English pentameters and the Latin hexameters : and also challenging
him/her.
In
a hotel in
Peter
Cook’s aspiring miner laments “I never had the Latin for the judging.
I didn't have sufficient to get through the rigorous judging exam” . I
don’t know what percent of Ford’s first readers had sufficient Latin to
judge his literary use of it : but I do know that most of them in recent
decades, like me, have been as lamed as the poor miner. As I said above
I found its use in the love-drive ravishing, rather than an affront to
the common reader, like moi.
Here’s
a different piece of social engineering. In 1964 my state primary class went up
to
There
is one word which the bitter Ruggles uses to describe Tietjens to his father,
and which proves to be the death-word: “What
the French called maquereau. I can’t think of the English word” [p.490].
Ford has told us that the Grobyans lived a while in
6 : PARADE & FAMILY
At
a certain point, reading the final part, I felt I was being offered the same
paragraph about the Groby Tree as a moment earlier : and I felt bored and
annoyed. But only for a moment, and I thought of the similar boredom when TS
Eliot’s narrator in The Wasteland keeps generating conditionals about
rock and water. I knew it was my task to understand the meaning of the
repetition. Another Eliotian gem, from Journey of the Magi gives us an
overall perspective on the book.
There was a Birth, certainly,
We
had evidence and no doubt.
What
is remarkable about Ford’s quartet, set during the greatest intellectual
flowering after Pericles’s
Among
the very few lacunae in this magnificently, comprehensive novel is the
unmentionable tree,
Parades
are also opportunities to parade medals. There is a true story told by the
exceptional Baker Street London Centre code-breaker Leo Marks, that as World War
Two ended, his CO asked him to choose a medal. He replied he would take
no honour greater than any given to the girls on his team. Yes, he got nothing.
I was reminded of this by Ford’s scene about gongs. By the Army’s own
established criterion-referencing for acts of bravery, (though that formal-term
is not used), Tietjens is said to deserve a medal : but his CO invoked
norm-referencing, explaining that (but not why) they wanted to limit the medals
: which, having a use-value as well as moral-value, might help a non-aristocrat
more in the land fit for heroes.
(I
ask the reader to think about the GCSE English (not Latin) fiasco this summer :
and the absence from almost all reporting of it of the central concepts of norm
& criterion referencing that I use above.)
7 : CODA
Equal
in originality to the wooing scene, is the deathbed scene that closes the epic.
There is a brilliant frustration of reader expectation : after his prominence in
the first three parts, we expect, and soon long, to see enter into the room
again, “the dear, meal sack elephant” Tietjens
[p.674]. But Ford denies us: offering instead the silent statue of his brother,
Mark. And after the repeated valorisations of aristocracy and learning, in
both ancient and modern tongues, by all the principal characters, Ford chooses
for his closing words, the stricken man’s stroke breaking with his dying
breath, that must soothe his sister-in-law, and the reader, a song and a line of
folk wisdom recalled from his untutored nurse:
“
Never thou let thy barnie weep for thy sharp tongue to thy goodman… A good
man.”
So
Tietjens doesn’t get to parade. But this Reader salutes Ford’s presence in
the first ranks of Modern Classics.