Christopher Tietjens, with his brilliant mind, predicted long before the war that America would come out on top soon enough, and that that’s where the money would be. After he’s done soldiering, he goes into the antique furniture business, fixing up old pieces and selling them for a bundle to rich Americans. This is of course not terribly respectable, but it’s smart.

Who are these Americans on the cusp of taking over the world? Mark muses in his tent before the unexpected arrival of one such: “Nearly all he knew of Americans came from a book he had once read—about a woman like a hedge-sparrow, creeping furtive in hedgerows and getting into trouble with a priest….But no doubt there were other types.”

No doubt. The one who shows up is Mrs. de Bray Pape, a horribly vulgar (and wealthy) woman who is letting Groby, furnished. She believes she is “descended spiritually from the Maintenon,” lord knows why, but she certainly won’t shut up about it:

‘You are probably too haughtily aristocratic to speak to me, Sir Mark Tietjens. But I have in me the soul of the Maintenon; you are only the fleshly descendent of a line of chartered libertines. That is what Time and the New World have done to redress the balance of the old. It is we who are keeping up the status of the grands seigneurs of old in your so-called ancestral homes.’

She expects the children of Mark’s tenant farmers to bow to her as she passes in the street, as if she could rent his family name and history along with his house. It’s tragic what she does to Groby, but it turns out to be on some level their saving grace. Obsessed as she is with the Maintenon, Mrs. de Bray Pape has no sense of history—which mean she isn’t hobbled by it as Tietjens is. She can go into a place and throw out and tear down and rip up and clear out. Just as Christopher knew it would be the vulgar Americans without the burden of history on a cramped continent who would eventually come into England with their money and change just about everything. His eighteenth century—no, seventeenth century—no, sixteenth century Toryism can only be shaken up and shaken off with the help of this awful woman, who convinces Mark that the curse on their house has been lifted and brings him—impossibly as it seems—peace.

I could write about this book without saying anything for ages, and there are more beautiful passages than I could possibly quote in any kind of structured posts. Don’t worry, there will be re-reads someday. I would like to thank once more Mel U of The Reading Life for organizing an unstructured group read of Parade’s End, without which I would surely have waited years more to experience this amazing work.

It had been obvious to her for a long time that God would one day step in and intervene for the protection of Christopher. After all Christopher was a good man—a rather sickeningly good man. It is, in the end, she reluctantly admitted, the function of God and the invisible powers to see that a good man shall eventually be permitted to settle down to a stuffy domestic life…even to chaffering over old furniture.

Ah, Sylvia, how the mighty have fallen! By The Last Post Sylvia’s schemes are hanging on by a thread; she’s still obsessed with tormenting Christopher of course but knows she is pushing her luck by this time. Her stories about him are no longer as easy to believe, though she still hopes to convince the Earl of Fittleworth with her charms to push Tietjens and his brother out of the county: “Beauty and truth have a way of appearing to be akin; and it is true that no man knows what another man is doing when he is out of sight.”

She has after all successfully convinced many people that Tietjens’s older brother Mark is suffering not the effects of a stroke but of late-stage syphilis. But convincing other people is not really her game&dmash;she is obsessed with her husband and must know for her own satisfaction that he is miserable. She is determined to find even the tiniest detail to support her, and goes to the cottage he and Valentine now live in hoping to find her housekeeping poor and to bring back some nice nasty detail to scandalize the neighbors. But she’s mostly scandalizing herself, drifting out of her own social circle to try to get dirt on the Tietjens’s and making her desperation more and more apparent. Even her own son sees her as a sex-obsessed bitch when it comes to his father, though he does seem to be a mama’s boy all the same.

In The Last Post we spend some more solid time with Mark, and also with his wife, and they are really of the right sort: “He was the English Milor with le Spleen. She had read of him in the novels of Alexander Dumas, Paul de Kock, Eugene Sue and Ponson du Terrail. He represented the England that the Continent applauded—the only England that the Continent applauded. Silent, obstinate, inscrutable, insolent, but immensely wealthy and uncontrollably generous.” He has never spoken since hearing the terms of the Armistice, whether from a stroke or from his obstinacy. His mind is amazingly sharp though, and he has Sylvia’s number:

Obviously it taxed her mind to invent what she invented. You could not invent that sort of sex-cruelty stuff without having your mind a little affected. She could not, for instance, have invented the tale that he, Mark, was suffering for the sins of his youth without its taking it out of her. That is the ultimate retribution of Providence on those who invent gossip frequently.

Sylvia’s mind is affected, but she hasn’t lost it or anything like that. Rather she is haunted by the things she’s done and what she’s become. It’s not so much that society is turning on her, because it isn’t really, not yet anyway, but that she has seen herself and doesn’t like what she sees. One of her more recent shower-bath-string-pulling episodes was initiating divorce proceedings, only to drag Tietjens’s name through the papers.

Anyhow the case had been a fiasco and for the first time in her life Sylvia had felt mortification; in addition she had felt a great deal of religious fear. It had come into her mind in Court—and it came with additional vividness there above that house, that, years ago in her mother’s sitting-room in a place called Lobscheid, Father Consett had predicted that if Christopher fell in love with another woman, she, Sylvia, would perpetrate acts of vulgarity. And there she had been, not only toying with the temporal courts in a matter of marriage, which is a sacrament, but led undoubtedly into a position that she had to acknowledge was vulgar.

More mistakes, and for the same reasons as before—Sylvia is not as good at controlling things as she needs to be. It’s her own lawyer who turned the case into a fiasco, in a way she wouldn’t have wanted. But she can only set things in motion, unable to direct them with any exactitude once they’ve begun. And by the end of her scene at the cottage it’s clear she didn’t direct that last afternoon very well at all. She helped perpetrate what Christopher would consider the worst offense possible against him, but she’s absolutely defeated by the presence and uncontrollable actions of the people she’s brought to the cottage to hurt him and Valentine.

This whole volume is really one great scene like yesterday’s. Half a dozen swirling perspectives building to a surprisingly affecting (because how could it be more affecting than everything else, after so much?) close to the whole thing.

Writing about Robert Louis Stevenson the other day, Amateur Reader described the way he would build to scenes and compared it to Ford Madox Ford’s technique in Parade’s End. Parade’s End is full of this, but the scene that came to mind immediately was the first one of the third volume, A Man Could Stand Up–.

The novel begins with Valentine Wannop, back in England teaching physical education in a girls’ school, on Armistice Day. The school has her make the girls run around all morning to tire them out, so when news of the armistice comes through the blaring sirens there won’t be too much chaos. Just as the chaos starts, Valentine gets a phone call from Edith Ethel Macmaster, her former friend and the wife of Tietjens’s former protegé.

Valentine has no idea who she’s talking to, nor does she care—her thoughts are racing because everything in her world has suddenly changed. She thinks of what she’ll do now the war is over, how she’ll act, how everything is different and now that the war is over you can’t use profanity, how she’d been ordered to keep the girls in line, whether her brother is safe—everything but the phone call. When she finally realizes who she’s talking to her thoughts change, responding often indirectly to Edith Ethel and her offensiveness. After she hangs up, she sits and thinks, then goes to her headmistress, who’s also spoken to Edith Ethel, and makes quite a scene about her father, her family situation, her relationship to Tietjens, Edith Ethel’s untrustworthiness, and finally her plans to leave the school and be with her man.

The stream of consciousness Ford writes is just as it should be: all but impossible to understand for several pages, especially being as it is at the absolute beginning of the novel (there is enough separation between the volumes in Parade’s End that a reader of No More Parades would have no real idea of where the next book would be starting up), then slowly coming together until the passage makes complete sense and brings an understanding of the novel’s events and Valentine’s feelings that would have been all but impossible to achieve otherwise. Valentine’s highly fragmented mind is like a glass being un-shattered; the bits and pieces fit one by one until all the breakages have disappeared and the reader can look through it—not quite clearly, but close enough.

Perhaps ultimately this boils down to saying “the scene worked for me,” and there’s not much to do but tell you to read it, but you’d have to read all of it, and you should certainly do that anyway. But I also find it somewhat tragic. This kind of technique certainly turns people off, and I won’t say it’s not difficult to some extent. The rewards are so great, but I know people who would love this novel if they could get past the formal difficulty and who wouldn’t ever attempt it, who would be completely turned off. I want to evangelize this book far and wide but honestly, how many people are going to be sold on 900 pages of some seriously dense Modernism?

Back to the point, those great rewards and AR’s “true realism.” When I began Parade’s End, and I did read part of the introduction to my Everyman’s Library edition, I thought about the commonplace that the Great War changed everything. I was discussing what that “really” meant with the consumption partner, and how I had certainly read of this fact and knew of it and knew many things about the actual changes, the before versus the after, but that that didn’t give me much sense of why it struck people that way at the time, or what it actually struck them like. The usual questions of how a cultural narrative is constructed, I suppose. But now I feel like I know, rather than just knowing about. Again, what am I saying other than “this worked for me”? Probably nothing, but damnit it worked and it worked amazingly well. The awareness of the war and England before and after that Ford imparted in Parade’s End has crept into everything I’ve been reading since I started it—into my whole life, to some extent—and I don’t expect that to stop.

Thus far I have neglected Sylvia Tietjens, certainly the juiciest character in Parade’s End, in favor of her boring meal-sack of a husband. But as strange as it sounds, I believe Sylvia is not unlike the War Office.

I mentioned yesterday that the British bureaucracy had a knowledge problem: they cannot know all the information they need to know to make the decisions necessary to central planning on this scale. Sylvia has the same problem, but applied to her machinations against Christopher.

Motivations aside, Sylvia’s mission in life is to hurt her husband. She directs all her energies outward, towards other people, attempting to manipulate them into doing what she wants—anything from having affairs with her to hurting her husband’s career—to accomplish this goal. And in Some Do Not, she appears spectacularly successful. No More Parades reveals how much trouble Sylvia actually has at her sinister game.

For example, when we get her version of running off with Perowne years before, it turns out it was anything but an enjoyable fling with the side benefit of hurting Christopher. Sylvia actually shows how awful she is at planning anything. She can’t predict that Perowne will turn out to be a terrible bore, she fails to foresee that he might attempt to keep her or do violence to her, she hadn’t realized that if she wasn’t very particular scandal might land at her own doorstep, and she did not anticipate Christopher’s reaction to any of it. Just about all of her cunning plans turn out not to be very cunning, and it’s usually because Sylvia has no ability to predict the thoughts, feelings, and reactions of the other players.

Christopher sometimes struggles to counter her moves, especially when his thoughts are impaired. He faces the knowledge problem too, but his job is easier. Where all Sylvia’s energy is directed outward, trying to elicit some kind of action from others, Christopher’s efforts point inward. He absorbs, using himself as a cushion for any shock that would hurt his wife, his family, Miss Wannop, Macmaster, or anyone else he respects. He never attempts to stir a situation himself, to set in motion something that will evoke particular reactions from other, independent players. He works on the fly, just like with his army orders, countering the moves of Sylvia and her friends one by one, by being personally upstanding and by not depending on missing information about the minds of his acquaintances.

His desire to protect the hearth is much more easily accomplished than hers to orchestrate a complicated campaign against him. But Christopher is also more adept in general. He is often able to understand the motives of others, while Sylvia can only grasp such things after the fact, with the benefit of hindsight. She didn’t even know her own husband spoke fluent, if bizarre, French—but as soon as she finds out her does, she’s able to put the pieces together in reverse and understand why it all makes sense. But as she can never manage that ahead of time, her schemes seem doomed to fail.

While bureaucracy plays an obviously important role in Some Do Not, where Christopher Tietjens is employed as a government statistician in regular conflict with his pencil-pushing superiors, in No More Parades the problems of bureaucracy become both more critical, because of the life-and-death situation of the war, and also more immediate, because now Tietjens is truly distanced from the upper echelons in London. Rather than being able to predict potential problems with bureaucrats’ policies, he is a direct witness and often a victim of those policies.

The specific problems are familiar. Tietjens must apply to several quartermasters for his battalion’s supplies, each pointing a finger at someone else. Communication is difficult even at the base, and orders are continually sent down, countermanded, reinstated, revised, and countermanded again. There is a surprising amount of paperwork considering a few miles down the road millions are dying, but Tietjens recognizes its propriety, at least to some degree:

Every man had nine sets of papers and tags that had to be signed by an officer. It was quite proper that the poor devils should be properly documented. But how was it to be done? He had two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four men to send off that night and nine times two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four is twenty-six thousand nine hundred and forty-six. They would not or could not let him have a disc-punching machine of his own, but how was the Depot armourer to be expected to punch five thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight extra identity discs in addition to his regular job?

Of course, Tietjens can do anything in addition to his regular job. He can barely hold his head up at times but he gets his men out on time, personally makes sure they are outfitted, and even manages to keep track of their financial situations and help them write their wills before they are sent up the line. But his achievements are continually crushed by the faceless mass:

The whole organization of his confounded battalion fell to pieces. …It was just the way of the army, all the time. You got a platoon, or a battalion, or, for the matter of that, a dug-out or a tent, by herculean labours into good fettle. It ran all right for a day or two, then it all fell to pieces, the personnel scattered to the four winds by what appeared merely wanton orders, coming from the most unexpected headquarters, or the premises were smashed up by a chance shell that might just as well have fallen somewhere else….The finger of Fate!

Orders from headquarters are “wanton,” but Tietjens’s orders make perfect sense. He is intimately familiar with his men and their needs and can make snap decisions to head off problems before they have time to develop. It’s that kind of brain that can keep things in order—and according to General Campion there must just be one brain, one command, for it to work:

What won combats, campaigns, and, in the end, wars, was the brain which timed the arrival of forces at given points—and that must be one brain which could command their presence at these points, not a half-dozen authorities requesting each other to perform operations which might or might not fall in with the ideas or the prejudices of any one or other of the half-dozen….

While the frustrations of separate French and English commands can’t be denied, Campion’s single brain can’t do the job either. The knowledge problem cannot be overcome, and the incentives of that bureaucratic brain are all off. Right then, for example, London bureaucrats are purposely causing greater loss of life for their own political ends. You have to get down to the orderly-rooms before the incentives are aligned closely enough to make possible a truly impressive amount of decentralized planning and execution. All the soldiers are “really dependent on the acting orderly-room lance-corporals for their temporal and spiritual salvation,” that is, to match up all the supplies with their corresponding demands:

Yet, in the end, all this tangle was satisfactorily unravelled; the drafts moved off, unknotting themselves like snakes, coiling out of inextricable bunches, sliding vertebrately over the mud to dip into their bowls—the rabbis found Jews dying to whom to administer; the vets, spavined mules; the V.A.D.s, men without jaws and shoulders in C.C.S.s; the camp-cookers, frozen beef; the chiropodists, ingrowing toenails; the dentists, decayed molars; the naval howitzers, camouflaged emplacements in picturesquely wooded dingles….Somehow they got there—even to the pots of strawberry jam by the ten dozen!

For if the acting lance-corporal, whose life hung by a hair, made a slip of the pen over a dozen pots of jam, back he went, Returned to duty…back to the frozen rifle, the ground-sheet on the liquid mud….

Massive troop movements worth, quite literally, millions of lives, are determined less carefully than the distribution of condiments, because screwing up only one of those will get you killed. The folks back in London are hopelessly unaccountable, and as a man in the field who has seen death in one of history’s most gruesome wars, Tietjens is more disgusted with them than ever.

But he still believes in the enterprise. His speech to Levin is a golden Tietjens moment:

‘It’s an encouraging spectacle, really. 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! But, somewhere in that view there are enormous bodies of men….If you got a still more extended range of view over this whole front you’d have still more 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. An immense blind will forces them in the effort to consummate the one decent action that humanity has to its credit in the whole of recorded history; the one we are engaged in. That effort is the one certain creditable fact in all their lives….But the other lives of all those men are dirty, potty and discreditable little affairs….Like yours…Like mine….’

Levin is horrified by what he sees as unimaginable pessimism, but Tietjens insists this is optimism. And it is—after all, Tietjens thinks civilization is good, that what you might call free British civilization is humanity’s great positive achievement, win or lose. And the fact that they are doing this, pushing on, is a sign that that civilization is real and these men are committing themselves to something greater than their own small lives.

I don’t think it’s terribly clear whether Tietjens, or Ford, believes “the right men” at the top could have done something better. Tietjens’s stance in favor of a unified allied command suggests that he does; the fact that he left London at all and ignores Sylvia’s accusation that the whole thing is his responsibility suggests he doesn’t. Tomorrow I’ll explore how I think this is all related to their relationship and individual personalities. And in any case, Tietjens is a welcome antidote to Dostoevsky:

And indeed, with him, the instinct for privacy—as to his relationships, his passions, or even as to his most unimportant motives—was as strong as the instinct of life itself. He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book.

Christopher Tietjens, the Yorkshire youngest son who takes center stage in Some Do Not, the first volume of the Parade’s End tetralogy, is a man outside his own time. His Toryism is out of step with the politics of the day and his sense of honor out of step with its mores.

For Tietjens, the glory of England is in “a man and a maid walk[ing] through Kentish grass fields:”

the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous; he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. …

Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed….

He is so impossibly upright that he takes back his unfaithful wife, because it is wrong for a man to divorce a woman. He insists on taking scandal upon himself to deflect it from virtuous (and less so) women. He refuses, not to fake statistics for the government, but to massage the data and ignore his conscience, even though he could be knighted for it. He loans money to his friend Macmaster and won’t take repayment from Macmaster’s mistress when she’s in control of her lunatic husband’s estate.

And as scandal and dirt pile up on Tietjens, practically disgraced by the middle of the war and suspected even of being a French spy, he knows it all and doesn’t care. His friends get wind of the rumors about him and feel afraid to tell him, they are so awful, but Tietjens already knows. Just before his return to France, where he rather hopes to be killed, his older brother Mark confronts him about his assumed debauchery. On Tietjens’s rebuff, Mark explains the problem:

‘Because,’ Mark said with emphasis, ‘you treat these south country swine with the contempt that they deserve. They’re incapable of understanding the motives of a gentleman. If you live among the dogs they’ll think you’ve the motives of a dog. What other motives can they give you?’ He added: ‘I thought you’d been buried so long under their muck that you were as mucky as they!’

The dogs give Tietjens their own motives, misreading his actions and intentions. They superimpose themselves on his situation; imagining themselves in his place, they can only believe he is base. “It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you,” the narrator tells us, and Tietjens gets plenty of trouble. Struck from visiting lists, pushed out of the lives of former friends, ridiculed by people certainly beneath him, Tietjens has been materially affected by all these false impressions and misreadings.

The content goes well with the form of Parade’s End. Ford is tricky; his narrator is tricky. Every scene and fact must be triangulated as the narrative shifts through time and pivots from one character’s point of view to another, seamlessly, creating an impressionistic picture of events and personalities. Ford’s technique is masterful, each word exactly chosen, but that doesn’t mean you can trust any of it. Don’t read your motives into anything, or you risk grave misunderstanding and horrible consequences—but what other motives can you give?