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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
Last Post, the fourth and final volume of Parade's End, is set on a single post-war summer's day. Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex with Tietjens' brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing perspectives, Ford explores the tensions between his characters in a changing world, haunted by the experience of war, facing an insecure future for themselves and for England. The Tietjens' ancestral home has been let to an American, its great tree felled; those like Tietjens who have served in the war find there is no place for them in a demoralised civilian society. The celebrations of Armistice Day have been replaced by the uncertainties of peacetime. 'How are we to live?' asks Valentine, as a death and an imminent birth bring Ford's great sequence to a close.Last Post includes:-- the first reliable text based on the hand-corrected typescript of first editions-- a major critical introduction by Paul Skinner, editor of Ford's novel No Enemy and of Ford Madox Ford: Literary Contacts (International Ford Madox Ford Studies 6)-- an account of the novel's composition and reception-- annotations explaining historical references and literary and topical allusions-- a full textual apparatus including transcriptions of significant deletions and revisions-- a bibliography of further reading
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FORD MADOX FORD
Parade’s End
VOLUME IV
Last Post
A Novel
Edited by Paul Skinner
For my sister, Penny Levy, too suddenly gone, May 2011
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Short Titles
Introduction
A Note on this Edition of Parade’s End
A Note on the Text of Last Post
LAST POST
Textual Notes
Appendix
Select Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Ford Madox Ford from Carcanet Press
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This has been a collaborative project from first to last, so my primary acknowledgements and thanks go to my fellow editors, Max Saunders, Joseph Wiesenfarth and Sara Haslam, who have read and commented on successive drafts, providing information, suggestions and encouragement. I feel privileged to have enjoyed their company (both in person and in correspondence) and remain profoundly impressed by their enthusiasm for the work, the high standards of their scholarship and the tolerance and good humour they have shown along the way.
It’s impossible not to single out Max Saunders for the extraordinary contribution he has made, tirelessly drafting and re-drafting statements of principle and editorial practice, while always demonstrating a Fordian mastery of both the smallest detail and the largest view of the entire project. Personally, I owe him a substantial debt of gratitude for innumerable suggestions, invaluable criticism and an unfailing readiness to answer distress calls.
I’d like to acknowledge with gratitude the staff at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, who have been helpful and prompt in their responses. Thanks are also due to Cornell University (again), to Michael Schmidt and the estate of Janice Biala for permission to quote from Ford’s and Biala’s letters.
Special thanks go to our editor at Carcanet, Judith Willson, and, of course, to Michael Schmidt, as both director of Carcanet and Ford’s executor, for supporting and facilitating this project.
For various instances of help, advice and information, I’d like to thank: Ashley Chantler for reading sample chapters and affording us the benefit of his editorial experience; Peter Clasen for generously offering the results of his research; and Brian Groth for racehorse tips.
Working on this edition has been inexhaustibly interesting and often exhilarating. Among those who have sometimes felt the effects of the resultant obsessive interest in horse-racing, agricultural implements or variants of fairy tales, I should acknowledge with thanks Nick Nile, Laney Nile, my daughters Jo and Kim, and Andrew Gilman.
My greatest acknowledgement remains to Naomi.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Dust-jacket of the Duckworth edition of Last Post (1928)
Leaf from the original typescript of Last Post (copyright © the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University)
Dust-jacket of the Boni edition of Last Post (1928)
Dust-jacket of the Literary Guild edition of Last Post (1928)
LIST OF SHORT TITLES
INTRODUCTION
A song new to us was heard, ‘What shall we be when we aren’t what we are?’ It foretold one of the many tragedies of Peace.
Mrs C.S. Peel recalling Armistice Night in How We Lived Then (1929)
The Great War ended at 11:00 a.m. on 11 November 1918. Many people felt both huge relief and uneasiness. ‘[T]hank the Lord that’s over […] we have to face the perils of Peace now’, Augustus John wrote to John Quinn, while D.H. Lawrence harangued David Garnett: ‘The crowd outside thinks that Germany is crushed forever. But the Germans will soon rise again. Europe is done for; England most of all…’1 In early December Aldous Huxley wrote to Ottoline Morrell: ‘It is certainly very curious the way almost everybody has become extremely depressed at the arrival of peace. One could regard the War as a nightmare and unreal; but with peace one must look at facts as though they were real – and they are extremely unpleasant.’2
Ford Madox Ford, then stationed at Redcar in Yorkshire, where he was lecturing to the troops, wrote to Stella Bowen on Armistice Day: ‘Just a note to say I love you more than ever. Peace has come, & for some reason I feel inexpressibly sad.’ Yet to free his beloved France from German occupation was ‘like a fairy tale’, he told her.3 In June 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, or when, as Ford put it, peace was declared, he wrote to Charles Masterman: ‘It’s like a fairy world.’4 How seriously should we treat such statements? Ford was not alone in making them, or statements very like them, and it’s hardly necessary to point to the extreme contrast between the trenches of Flanders and the streets of central London or the fields of Sussex to grasp that there was a widespread sense of unreality among many returnees. Nor were such feelings restricted to those who had been to the war: ‘Unreal city […] I had not thought death had undone so many.’5
Biography
Ford’s post-war life in West Sussex began at Red Ford, Hurston, Pulborough, in the spring of 1919, after his demobilisation. From the beginning of September 1920 he and his partner, the Australian painter Stella Bowen, lived at Coopers Cottage in Bedham, near Fittleworth. Their daughter, Esther Julia (Julie), was born three months later on 29 November. Ford and Bowen moved to France in late 1922; their relationship faltered under the impact of Ford’s affair with Jean Rhys and failed in the face of his extended visits to the United States from 1926 onwards, and his further romantic entanglements there.
Bowen is central to the story of Parade’s End, both personally and artistically. She provided indispensable practical and emotional support but also served as the primary model for the character of Valentine Wannop; other models were Stella’s close friend Margaret Postgate (who married the Socialist historian and economist G.D.H. Cole) and, in Ford’s own telling, the actress Dorothy Minto (Nightingale, 191).6
From the outset, Last Post draws heavily upon the material details of their life together in Sussex. Bedham, Stella wrote, was ‘on a great wooded hill […] There was an immense view.’7 Douglas Goldring, Ford’s friend and editorial assistant on the English Review a dozen years earlier, wrote admiringly that ‘the views from hereabouts are unrivalled in Sussex’,8 and Ford later remembered: ‘They said locally that it looked over twelve counties, and I daresay we really could see three from the west window’ (Nightingale 117). The context of that memory was one of isolation from the outer world (though Ford and Stella had numerous visitors), ‘being hidden in a green – a far too green – corner of England, on a hill-top that was almost inaccessible to motor traffic, under an immense screen of giant beeches’ (Nightingale 138).
One constant concern in Ford’s post-war work, not always obvious or rendered in obvious ways, is a profound sense of loss, of grief, of mourning. This was, of course, an inextricable feature of the cultural landscape of that time: among the major combatants, Jay Winter has commented, ‘it is not an exaggeration to suggest that every family was in mourning’.9 In addition to the numerous deaths inextricable from his war service, Ford had lost many close friends in recent years, including Arthur Marwood, W.H. Hudson and Joseph Conrad, while the death of the painter Juan Gris in May 1927 was closely followed by that of Ford’s mother, just three weeks later.10
All these and other deaths and vanishings lie behind his asking of Isabel Paterson in Last Post’s ‘Dedicatory Letter’ if she does not find that ‘in the case of certain dead people’ she ‘cannot feel that they are indeed gone from this world’. He goes on to say that, for him, ‘the world daily becomes more and more peopled with such revenants and less and less with those who still walk this earth’.11
Remembrance of the dead and their resurrection in the pages of his books is, then, a crucial and constant feature of Ford’s post-war writings. He was, as John Coyle remarks, ‘a compulsive ghost-seer’ (Nightingale viii). More immediately, perhaps, the setting of Last Post is itself a shadowing of Ford’s life in Sussex. Fifteen years before, he had written of literary impressionism’s rendering of ‘those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass’, when you see, in addition to the view through that glass, the reflection upon it of a face or person behind you.12 That is often true of Last Post, with its overlaid images of alternative lives and disparate histories, its crowding of voices and memories into the spaces left by Mark’s determined silence and Marie Léonie’s absorption in her work. The novel is haunted by the unspoken or, at least, the understated: the war, as it is lived with in this ‘after-war world’,13 and what is gone from the lives of not only the characters but their author also. It is this haunting that may bring before the reader a sharp and unsettling sense of the short, almost invisible step between ‘last post’ and ‘lost past’.
The Title
The novel’s title lends itself to multiple interpretations.14 The OED offers a bewildering array of meanings for ‘post’ (as it does for ‘last’): half a dozen headings as a verb and a dozen as a noun. Those merely of obvious relevance to Ford’s novel are plentiful enough: support, boundary marker, horse-racing, the act of recording an entry in a ledger, the point at which a soldier is stationed when on duty, and the Latin word for ‘after’ or ‘since’, as in ‘post-war’. Yet the most immediately striking fact about the occurrences of ‘post’ in the novel is that more than half are specifically focused on beds and shelters. These are noticeably grouped towards the beginning and the end of the book. They relate particularly to the bed in which Mark lies and the shelter that contains it; but also the bed in which the pregnant Valentine Wannop lies and in which she expects and hopes that her child will be born.
The ‘last post’ is the bugle call sounded at the end of the military day, signalling the order to retire for the night. It is also sounded at military funerals and at services of remembrance, and this context is undoubtedly far more familiar to civilian ears, certainly since 1919 and the establishing of annual ceremonies on Armistice Day. Ford wrote of this – but also, tellingly, of what follows:
At a British military funeral, after the Dead March in Saul, after the rattling of the cords from under the coffin, the rifle-firing and the long wail of the last post, suddenly the band and drums strike up “D’ye ken John Peel?” or the “Lincolnshire Poacher” – the unit’s quickstep. It is shocking until you see how good it is as a symbol. (Nightingale 19–20)
That ‘long wail’ is heard several times in Last Post, both in the novel’s present, in which a neighbour’s sons (one of whom has been a bugler) play or attempt to play it, and in the memories of Armistice Night – variously painful for Mark Tietjens, Valentine, Marie Léonie and even Sylvia Tietjens – that such playing prompts.
The Novel
Last Post is set during a few hours of a June day, in the years following the First World War. Christopher Tietjens now makes his living as a dealer in old furniture. He and Valentine Wannop share a cottage in West Sussex with Christopher’s older brother Mark and Mark’s wife, Marie Léonie.
Much of the novel is presented from Mark’s point of view as he lies, mute and immobile, in an outdoor shelter; other sections are presented from the viewpoints of Marie Léonie and Valentine. The narrative also dips in and out of the consciousnesses of Christopher’s estranged wife Sylvia, their son, Mark Junior, and several minor characters. These interior monologues traverse the past, speculate on the future, illuminate details of the present and offer alternative perspectives on some of the events that have occurred earlier in the sequence, particularly ‘that infernal day’ and ‘that dreadful night’ of the Armistice, around which their memories circle obsessively.
The tensions of the novel centre, domestically, on Valentine’s advanced pregnancy in the context of her, and Christopher’s, financial precariousness. Mark is wealthy but a feud between the brothers, brought about by Sylvia’s promotion of scurrilous rumours about her husband, which were initially believed by Mark and, consequently, by their father, has made it impossible for Christopher to accept, either by gift or by inheritance, money or property from his brother. The threats to the Tietjens ménage derive directly or indirectly from the continued malicious scheming of Sylvia Tietjens, who has tried to turn their neighbour and landlord against them, and manoeuvred an American tenant of Groby (the Tietjens ancestral home) into cutting down Groby Great Tree, ‘the symbol of Tietjens’ (I.iv).15 Christopher has flown to York in an attempt to avert this threat. The invasion of the Tietjens domain by the American tenant and the Tietjenses’ son, by Sylvia and by other figures from earlier in the tetralogy closes with Sylvia’s retreat and change of heart. The novel’s fine and poignant ending focuses on the death of Mark Tietjens.
The Literary Context
The literary decade in which Ford published the four Tietjens volumes was a famously rich one. Those years saw Lawrence’s Women in Love and Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1920, then TheWaste Land, Ulysses, the early Cantos, several major volumes by Yeats, The Great Gatsby, Mrs Dalloway, A Passage to India, The Sun Also Rises, To the Lighthouse and The Apes of God. Ford knew most of the writers of these works and had himself published Lawrence, Lewis, Pound, Yeats, Joyce and Hemingway.
Ford later cited the example of Proust as an influence on the conception of Parade’s End (though he had not at that stage read Proust’s work: Nightingale 179–80); and he was certainly familiar with the novels of Woolf and Joyce, as he was with the poems of Pound, Yeats and Eliot. It was surely the case that such examples and such literary company as he enjoyed in both Paris and New York encouraged his confidence in the immense project he was embarked upon, strengthening his belief that he was producing some of the best and most significant work of his life. Ford had enjoyed some critical successes (and one or two commercial ones) but it was with Some Do Not … and its successors that he was reviewed and discussed with the same seriousness and with the same recognition of literary significance as were the other major Modernists.
The constituent volumes of Parade’s End are usually – and, I think, quite rightly – viewed as closely, even inextricably, connected parts, though Last Post, as I discuss later, is sometimes not so regarded.16 Their initial publications were, though, interspersed with half a dozen other titles, including A Mirror to France in 1926 and two books of essays, New York is Not America and New York Essays, both published in 1927.
That international flavour is certainly significant. Perhaps, though, the books by Ford most closely related to Last Post – apart from the earlier volumes of Parade’s End – fall outside this period and the real context is not purely chronological. No Enemy shares many similarities of setting and post-war mood, as well as numerous echoes of both image and phrasing, while The Heart of the Country, though twenty years earlier – and, obviously, pre-war – foreshadows several elements of Last Post.17 There are echoes in the novel of two volumes of poetry, A House (1921) and Mister Bosphorus and the Muses (1923), and the later It Was the Nightingale has been described as ‘a companion volume to Parade’s End, reiterating the concerns of the tetralogy with renewed urgency’ (Nightingale xiv). In fact, though the war was a huge and trans-formative event in Ford’s life, as in countless others’, many of his preoccupations, manifested in his writing, long pre-dated it and continued to engage him later. The war did not invalidate them: rather, it added urgency, depth and a stronger sense of the fragility of our lives and their surrounding darkness.
‘Like a Fairy World’
Ford’s writing to Masterman that ‘Peace’ was ‘like a fairy world’ surely hints at the grounds on which a few critics of Last Post have described the novel as ‘retreating from history’ and existing in its own time – though other readers and commentators have regarded this element altogether more positively. ‘It is into the overgrown but still unblocked tunnels to dialect and faery England that the dying Mark Tietjens glimpses’, Hugh Kenner wrote, ‘it is from them that he extracts his legacy for the living.’18
Ford’s publishing history begins with fairy tales and many of his later books draw on elements of this tradition: the possibilities of transformation, the frequent instability of ‘reality’, the subtle tug of archetypes, the pressure of conflicting narratives.19 And fairy tale, like an undercurrent barely disturbing the surface of the water, is one example of the means by which Ford achieves that characteristic effect of glimpses, of sounds not quite heard, of objects vanishing or shifting in the moment of their detection.
Consider Valentine Wannop, under the several stresses of anxiety over her unborn child, her home under siege, having just emerged from the upstairs room in which she had unintentionally locked herself, needing to reach the doctor who attends to Mark Tietjens. She gazes down ‘her long room’ as she holds the telephone to her ear, looking ‘into the distant future’ when things will spread out ‘like a plain seen from a hill’. In the meantime, they have ‘to keep all on going’. All these are tiny echoes of details from earlier in the sequence or, like Meary Walker, the Bonnington agricultural worker about whom he wrote on several occasions, of recurring figures in Ford’s work. Valentine asks the doctor to come quickly: ‘Sister Anne! Sister Anne! For God’s sake, Sister Anne! If she could get a bromide into her it would pass like a dream. / It was passing like a dream’ (II.iii).
‘Sister Anne’ points us to Charles Perrault’s story, ‘Bluebeard’, in which the wife’s sister looks out from the top of the tower for their two brothers, who are riding towards them while Bluebeard calls his wife to meet her death at his hands.20 Within Parade’s End that in turn points back to the late pages of A Man Could Stand Up –, in which Valentine waits in the empty house while the ‘madman’, Tietjens, is coming up the stairs. ‘He was carrying a sack. […] A sack was a terrible thing for a mad man to carry. […] It was a heavy sack. Bluebeard would have had in it the corpse of his first wife’ (III.i). It is, of course, a sack of coal. Even carried by a madman, a sack may be benign. It is not always so. In an earlier passage, marked by high anxiety and hallucination preceding an expected enemy attack, Tietjens sees a pile of wet sacks and notes their appalling resemblance to ‘prostrate men’. A few pages later:
Noise increased. The orchestra was bringing in all the brass, all the strings, all the wood-wind, all the percussion instruments. The performers threw about biscuit tins filled with horseshoes; they emptied sacks of coal on cracked gongs, they threw down forty-storey iron houses. It was comic to the extent that an operatic orchestra’s crescendo is comic. Crescendo! … Crescendo! CRRRRRESC … The Hero must be coming! He didn’t! (A Man Could Stand Up – II.i)
In Some Do Not …, when Valentine learns from Mark Tietjens that her mother will be provided for under the terms of Mr Tietjens’ will, she reflects that it is ‘as if a novel had been snatched out of her hand so that she would never know the end’. Ford adds: ‘Of the fairytale she knew the end’ – that is, tailors and goose-girls. ‘But she would never know whether they, in the end, got together all the blue Dutch tiles they wanted to line their bathroom’ (II.v). We need both novels and fairy tales (which are, Ford wrote, ‘a prime necessity of the world’),21 though the question of degrees of separation lingers. In A Man Could Stand Up – that ‘small company’ of the Rag-Time Army that Tietjens currently commands, ‘men of all sorts of sizes, of all sorts of disparities and grotesquenesses of physique’, including two music-hall comedians, is called to attention and ‘positively, a dwarf concealed under a pudding basin shuffled a foot-length and a half forward’. It is ‘like a blurred fairy-tale’, Tietjens reflects (II.ii). So, of course, in many respects, is the entire experience of war. Blurred, senseless, incomprehensible, transforming fields into mud, houses into rubble and men into scraps, by turns deafening, terrifying and stupefyingly tedious. The fairy tale, in such conditions, can look unsettlingly like The Real Thing.
In No Enemy, when the poet (and Fordian persona) Gringoire relates the ‘psychological anecdote which gives the note of this book’, it concerns an envisioned landscape, or rather, ‘not quite a landscape’ but ‘a nook’ – ‘with a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm’. ‘A castle in Spain, in fact, only that it was in a southern country – the English country.’
‘I ask to be believed in what I am now saying.’ Gringoire uttered the words slowly. ‘It is just the truth. If I wanted to tell fairy tales, I’d do better than this. Fairy tales to be all about the Earth shaking, and the wire, and the crumps, and the beef-tins … You know. And that would be true too. Anyway this is…. ’ (33–4)
In Last Post’s teasing ‘Dedicatory Letter’ to his ‘fairy godmother’, Isabel Paterson, Ford reverts to the matter. He touches again on his attempt ‘to project how this world would have appeared’ to his friend Arthur Marwood ‘to-day’. He recalls the many years during which he tended to ask himself what Marwood would have said and how he would have acted in certain situations.
And I do so still. I have only to say to my mind, as the child on the knees of an adult says to its senior: “Tell us a fairy tale!” – I have only to say: “Tell us what he would here have done!” and at once he is there.
Little wonder, perhaps, that Valentine Wannop reflects ‘The age of fairy-tales was not, of course, past’ (Last Post II.iii).22 Little wonder, too, that something more is needed.
All this may simply enforce and emphasise the fact that, in practice, Ford’s writing draws on many genres within a single work, which can unsettle some critics just as it enthuses many of Ford’s readers. Is Parade’s End historical novel, comedy, pantomime, fairy tale, romance or satire? Is it realistic or fantastic, concerned with ‘public’ or ‘private’ events? The temptation is simply to say ‘yes, all of these’, though risking some readers’ inference that this means, necessarily, something unresolved, ungainly or untidy.
It does not.
Boundaries
If Parade’s End is a novel, or novel-sequence, of both war and peace – or, at least, ‘not-war’ – where does the boundary lie? Some Do Not … often gives the impression of being pre-war – but half of it is not. A Man Could Stand Up – technically covers the postwar but it is, quite literally, Armistice Day; and the first and third sections bracket a much longer second section – exactly 60 per cent of the book – that deals most vividly with the war, specifically Ludendorff’s great offensive of Spring 1918. The true post-war is limited to Last Post. And, though all four books were produced several years after the Armistice, Last Post is written, I believe, very much in the spirit of the immediate post-war: of that sense of fairy tale and of unreality, of wish-fulfilment, the rush of relief after the years of strain, but still a world turned upsidedown, riddled with hazard and uncertainty. The trick of it was that Ford in 1927 was casting his mind back to the years in Sussex with Stella Bowen: their cottage then was the setting for ‘Tietjens’s’ now. The tension, the tremendous effort of doing this, was heightened by the fact that his relationship with Bowen, so crucial to the conception, planning and production of Parade’s End, was fracturing, now, as he wrote it.
The book is Ford’s last, regretful, love letter to Stella Bowen, through which he is saying his farewells, and not only to her. He is in America, or rather in a ship off the coast of Canada taking him away from her – again – when he writes to say that his last ‘English’ novel is finished; she, the Australian, met and loved and lived with in England, then in France, to whom he dedicates not this last novel arising from their long intimacy (and, in a sense, the one rooted most deeply in their lives together) but a new edition of his pre-war masterpiece, The Good Soldier, written and published before he met her. That novel is about a divided Ford, about his portrait of the artist, the actor and the watcher. The actor cuts his throat and the watcher writes it down. Within a few months of its publication, Ford the actor was a soldier in uniform and the watcher could not write. And one version of how he came to be able to write again – or a parable of that – he set down at the beginning of their lives together, in a story called ‘English Country’, which was not published until a decade later, as No Enemy, after his life with Stella had ended.23
This is why, even within the fictional world of the novel, there are currents running towards the outside, the ‘actual’ world, sometimes of the early twenties soon after the war when there is a discernible rawness and fragility; but also a stronger current, I believe, running towards the writer’s present, the transatlantic movement itself bridging (but deceptively, over the surface of the sea) two worlds, Europe and America, an author whose work was, increasingly, bridging those same two worlds, and whose life – or one version of it – was ending: his mother recently dead, the news of other deaths seeming to confront him at every turn, an essay just published in which he mourned for his lost fellow writers and said that it was like dying himself.24 Lost, last.
Arts and Crafts
‘Writing’ is, in fact, a curious absence in Last Post – curious, in part, because it’s so prevalent in the other volumes. Some Do Not … opens with Macmaster correcting the proofs of his first book, though finding nothing to correct. Thereafter, as well as the many allusions to Fordian favourites (including Gilbert White, Christina Rossetti, Turgenev, Ezra Pound, James and Conrad), there are scores of instances of different arts and media: paintings and drawings, telegrams and telephone calls, military reports, the composition of music-hall sketches and sessions of bout-rimés. The many letters include those that Tietjens thinks of writing to Valentine and the one that he seems (to Levin) to be writing to her in his sleep, as well as those written by or about Sylvia. In Last Post, by contrast, the most significant letter appears to be that written by Mrs de Bray Pape to Mark Tietjens about her proposed cutting down of Groby Great Tree.
The foregrounding of the arts seems then to recede in Last Post – yet this is not in fact the case. Ford had always taken a broader view of ‘the arts’ than some of his contemporaries, and here the cider-making, furniture-restoring, planting, keeping of chickens and general maintenance, the multifarious tasks performed by Gunning, are treated with seriousness and respect. That is to say that the arts are less alluded to or described than enacted. Norman Leer commented of Last Post that Christopher Tietjens is ‘still the central character, but he remains in the background, like an accomplished fact’.25 I would suggest that this context is what has been accomplished; that Tietjens, through his ordeal at the hands of Sylvia, obtuse or malevolent civilians, incompetent or vengeful military superiors and the rest, has earned the right to the imperfections, fallibilities and makeshifts of everyday life; that he can now practise the arts of the ordinary processes of living, as did the Ford of the early 1920s and the 1930s.
There are two main elements to this: Valentine’s use of the phrase ‘keep all on going’ is Ford’s hommage to Meary Walker, who could turn her hand to many things and whom Ford revisited several times. In retrospect, she gained in symbolic strength, not only because of her honesty and sheer determination but also because Ford saw her as exemplifying a vanishing and, in part, regretted world (England 181).
The other element is the central positioning of Marie Léonie. That she has her absurdities is an essential point about her; that she possesses indispensable qualities is no less essential. The ideas of frugality and the avoidance of waste were ones that Ford long associated with the French, specifically, French women of a certain type and age.26 In the 1930s the Fordian persona of small producer, eco-warrior and prophet would dominate such books as Great Trade Route and Provence. But it was one of the foremost ideas he had brought away from the war, partly perhaps in reaction to what was now widely perceived as the wastefulness and over-consumption of the Edwardian upper and middle classes. No Enemy’s Gringoire noted of the war that ‘it did teach us what a hell – what a hell! – of a lot we can do without’ (52).27 Then, too, it was artistically admirable. Ford would write of Izaak Walton’s as an example of that kind of prose that is fresh ‘because its author sought for the simplest words and the most frugally exact adjectives and similes, having the exact eye and the passion above all to make you see’.28
History and Fiction; or, Some Racehorses
Several commentators have attempted to clarify Parade’s End’s chronology, sometimes listing inconsistencies and apparent contradictions of the sort almost inevitable in a long work written over several volumes and several years.29 These and other analyses include the likely date at which Last Post is set. There is no obvious consensus here: some readers have assumed that the action of the novel takes place very soon after the war, with 1919 or 1920 the most popular suggestions; others have opted for the mid- or late-1920s or, more simply and broadly, ‘post-war’.
Initially, the immediate post-war period seems entirely plausible. But what exactly does ‘plausible’ mean in this context? Ford’s book, despite the continued presence and symbolic importance of Marie Léonie, is strongly rooted in England, in considerations of the state of England. Yet most of his time after 1922 was spent in France and, increasingly, in the United States.30 He may well have seen English newspapers, of course, and if he were the kind of writer who required historical ‘accuracy’ and wanted to anchor the action of his novel to particular years, there were numerous candidates for such signposts. Clearly, such precise historical alignment was not his concern.
There are very few unambiguous chronological clues in Last Post. We know, for instance, that General Campion is now MP for the West Cleveland Division. But the ‘coupon election’ in December 1918 (candidates approved by the coalition between Conservatives and Lloyd George’s Liberals received a coupon) was followed by three more elections in successive years, from 1922 to 1924. Ford may have deliberately obscured the date he had in mind, not desiring to limit readers’ interpretations, but it seems now equally likely that he had no specific date in mind.
There are, however, two details in the novel that allow of only one time period (plus a couple that point towards it); and at least one other detail that contradicts it. We know that the novel covers part of a day in June and we have a number of references to horse races. The crucial one is not filtered through a character’s consciousness but is presented in the context of the newspaper that both Mark and Marie Léonie are reading: the King’s filly has won the Berkshire Foal Plate at Newbury and the Seaton Delaval Handicap at Newcastle has been won by ‘the horse of a friend’ (I.i).
At the beginning of the second chapter in both the English and American first editions, the reference to ‘Seattle’ having won a race was initially puzzling. Mr E. Gwilt’s six-year-old, Seattle, ran twice at Newbury, an also-ran in the Moderate Handicap Hurdle on the 1st of the month while coming in last of seven runners on the 30th! But that month was December 1921, not June.
Ford’s mother died on 3 June 1927. Ford was in London by the 7th and Max Saunders writes that he stayed about a week (Dual Life II 316 and 613, n.2). The funeral took place on 15 June and a letter to Ezra Pound from Paris is dated the same day,31 so Ford must have travelled back immediately after the ceremony if that date is correct. Was there another brief visit to London that month, perhaps in connection with the reading of his mother’s will?
On leaf 42 of the typescript of Last Post, the word ‘Thursday’ is typed across the top left-hand corner. On Friday 24 June 1927 The Times carried the previous day’s results from the Newbury summer meeting and from Newcastle. The Seaton Delaval Handicap was won by Carsebreck, owned by a Mr W.W. Hope.32 The Berkshire Foal Plate was won by Scuttle, a filly owned by His Majesty George V.
The conversation at the beginning of I.ii follows on from that of the opening chapter. It is the King’s filly, ‘Scuttle’, that is referred to and Ford’s typescript error had been carried over to both UK and US editions, probably occurring at the outset because reading those ‘endless, serried columns’ in The Times did allow the strong possibility of misreading one or two letters in a name – especially for a novelist who did not, as a rule, follow horse-racing.33
One other specific detail occurs in the course of young Mark Tietjens’ comparison of his ‘divinely beautiful’ mother’s athleticism with that of both Atalanta and Betty Nuthall. The same issue of The Times (Friday 24 June) carried a report of Miss Betty Nuthall’s defeat of the American Anna Mallory in the Third Round at Wimbledon the previous day, by two sets to one. The paper included a photograph of the two players, taken just before the match. Nuthall is described as ‘youthful’, and no wonder: born on 23 May 1911, she was barely sixteen on her Wimbledon début. Young Mark Tietjens’ admiring reference would, then, make no ‘historical’ sense at all before 1927.
In Some Do Not … it emerges that Mark ‘came up to town’ at the age of twenty-five (II.iii). Knowing the difference in age between Mark and Christopher, and that Christopher was twenty-six in 1912, we can place that ‘coming up to town’ in 1897. In Last Post Mark reflects on the government department that he had entered, in the first British edition, ‘thirty-five years before’. This points to a present of 1932, an obvious anachronism – but the reference in the US edition was ‘corrected’ to ‘thirty years ago’, which takes us back to 1927.34 Perhaps one more detail does: in the ‘Dedicatory Letter’, Ford refers to Tietjens, tongue in cheek no doubt, ‘at this moment’: ‘I here provide you with a slice of one of Christopher’s later days so that you may know how more or less he at present stands.’
In that opening chapter, though, the racing reports already quoted evoke in Mark the reflection that:
He had meant to go to the Newcastle meeting this year and give Newbury a by. The last year he had gone racing he had done rather well at Newbury, so he had then thought he would try Newcastle for a change, and, whilst he was there, take a look at Groby and see what that bitch Sylvia was doing with Groby. Well, that was done with. They would presumably bury him at Groby.
That ‘was done with’ because Mark is immobilised. The difficulties here are that, firstly, he is immobilised as a result of a stroke or a resolution on Armistice Night, that is to say, in November 1918.35 ‘He had meant to go to the Newcastle meeting this year’ implies that, when the decision was made, he didn’t know he would be immobilised, which means prior to November 1918. The decision to go to Newcastle could have been taken any time prior to 1918 but it would have centred on the next available racing year. In that context, ‘this year’ strongly implies 1919 and is thus wholly incompatible with other ‘historical’ data.
The typescript reading, ‘Last year’, makes it unmistakeably 1918, since he has been ill since that November and the latest he could have gone racing is that year. The US revision, ‘During the last year when he had gone racing’ merely elaborates the change in the UK edition (‘The last year he had gone racing’) but cannot remove the obstacle to rooting it in 1918–19.
And yet this ‘incompatibility’, in its peculiar way, is wholly in accord with my sense that Ford was precisely not focused on one time or, rather, was looking through the glass at 1927 and seeing, in addition to the view through that glass, the reflection upon it of – what behind him? Coopers Cottage, an orchard running up to the road at the top of the hill, the wood, the rough field. Stella, Julie. For Ford, in fact, the last of England.
The earlier volumes of Parade’s End were more obviously concerned with ‘such events as get on to the pages of history’ (No More Parades, ‘Dedicatory Letter’). Ford subsequently stressed the trouble he had taken to get details right, to check his memory, to affirm his Whitmanian power of witness (‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there’), while also emphasising the fact that he was writing a novel (though, unusually for him, one with a purpose: that of obviating all future wars) and seeking to disentangle, in the minds of his readers, the opinions of his characters from those of their author.
What does occur, in all four volumes, I think, is the phenomenon of the historical ‘fact’ that is not quite there, that is almost ‘right’, that may be slightly misremembered, that may confuse or blur two or more details. These instances generally occur under the umbrella of characterisation, that is to say, within the thoughts or expressions of a fictional character. They raise, in any case, the old question of whether there can be factual ‘mistakes’ in a work of fiction, in which characters inhabit an invented world, or at least one that, though very similar to the ‘real’ world, is not identical with it.36
One example of this tendency, representative in its curious collusion of ‘fact’ and ‘not quite fact’, is precisely the matter of racehorses. A few pages into Last Post, Ford writes of Mark Tietjens, referring to the elder brother’s great interest in horse-racing already alluded to in both Some Do Not … and No More Parades: ‘He knew the sire and dam of every horse from Eclipse to Perlmutter.’ Eclipse was, of course, one of the most famous racehorses of all time, ancestor of 95 per cent of contemporary thoroughbreds and unbeaten in eighteen starts. But what of Perlmutter?
Montague Glass’s highly successful stories about two Jewish business partners, ‘Potash and Perlmutter’, pre-date the First World War.37 His play of the same title was first produced in Britain at the Queen’s Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, on 14 April 1914. Further plays, then films, followed well into the 1920s. That ‘Potash and Perlmutter’ were fairly constant cultural references for at least a decade is confirmed by the fact that they were also the nicknames given to Charles John Green, cook, and Perce Blackborow, his assistant, on Shackleton’s last Antarctic expedition.38
In 1922, the same year in which Ford moved to France, two Dutch sisters arrived in Paris. They became artists’ models for Marie Laurencin and the photographer Berenice Abbott, among others. Tylia Perlmutter, born in 1904, died young. Bronja, two years her senior, became engaged to Raymond Radiguet, who died in 1923, and married the filmmaker René Clair two years later. Kay Boyle writes about them, in her revision of Robert McAlmon’s memoir, as does Djuna Barnes.39
‘Perlmutter’, then, was part of a great many people’s mental furniture for a decade or two, not only in London and New York but in Paris as well for those, like Ford, who moved in ‘artistic’ circles. Was this a slip of the pen while intending to write, say, Persimmon? That was a famous horse: first Royal winner of the Derby (in 1896) for 108 years (the Prince of Wales’ horse won both Derby and St Leger that year), later retired to stud at Sandringham. Persimmon died in 1908, nearly twenty years before Ford was writing Last Post – in Paris, then Avignon, then aboard ship en route to New York via Montreal. ‘What was that damned horse’s name?’ Yet it could not have been mere forgetfulness, since Ford does mention Persimmon in Last Post (I.iv, I.vii). It seems impossible to say how much of this is misremembered in haste, how much, if any, is Fordian mischief – perhaps at the expense of Mark Tietjens of Groby.
Continuities and Contrasts
Last Post has sometimes been viewed as differing in kind from the tetralogy’s three earlier volumes, perhaps because of the brevity of the time covered, shrinking here to part of a single afternoon, perhaps because of the shift in point of view from, primarily, Christopher Tietjens to a far more fluid and interior perspective, particularly that of Mark Tietjens, but also those of Marie Léonie and Valentine Wannop.
This apprehension of differences has sometimes tended to disguise the novel’s continuities with those other volumes, a tendency strengthened by critics disposed to accept at face value Ford’s complimentary address to Isabel Paterson, suggesting that it was at her insistence that Last Post was written.
It seems a very English novel or, rather, one reflecting a very particular vision of England. And as far as that vision is of Bedham, aligned with Ford’s early post-war removal from the centre of things, Last Post is, in that sense, a novel of the periphery.
The metropolitan and the rural run curiously and characteristically through Ford’s life and writerly preoccupations. Though strongly associated with London, with Paris and with New York, much of his time (and a good deal of his work) was devoted to Kent, to Sussex and to Provence, to fields and hedgerows, gardens and terraces. Ford was well aware of this doubleness, noting that the first thing he did on arrival in a city was to plant some seeds in a window-box.40 Similarly, while he introduces ‘peace’ into ‘war’, assaulting his soldiers with domestic crises and anxieties, the reverse is also true. The assault on ‘Tietjens’s’ curiously resembles a military campaign, and several phrases suggestive of more warlike contexts have bled into this outwardly peaceful setting in the course of the novel: ‘mopping up’, ‘the air of a small army’, ‘surrendering his body’, ‘desultorily approaching cavalry’.41 Reconnaissance is followed by the artillery barrage of Mrs de Bray Pape and son Mark, and that in turn by the heavy armour of Sylvia Tietjens, while Christopher’s wartime nightmare of hearing voices beneath his bed – ‘Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze!’ – still recurs (II.iii).
As might be expected, there are innumerable echoes and allusions between the four volumes of Parade’s End, and some of these are reflected in the notes. A few such echoes – or series of echoes – prompt and propose larger thematic or structural ones. Several commentators, for instance, have noted the comparison that is invited by the army hut in which No More Parades opens with Ford’s 1921 poem ‘A House’, a comparison explicitly suggested by the description of the space as ‘shaped like the house a child draws’. The poem begins: ‘I am the House! / I resemble / The drawing of a child / That draws “just a house.”’42 But beyond this, all four novels can be seen as opening in comparable spaces, amid striking variations of greater or lesser threat.
Some Do Not … opens in a railway carriage, with many assurances of stability and power; yet the coming war, with its permanent destruction of such perfect assurance and confidence, is subtly inserted into this picture. The absolute terms applied to the pristine carriage cannot help but carry with them implications of imminent change, even subversion: ‘perfectly appointed’, ‘virgin newness’, ‘immaculate’ and, more playfully, ‘the train ran as smoothly […] as British gilt-edged securities’. A muted threat is present in the German-designed upholstery pattern, and the ‘bulging’ of that upholstery is unsettling in the way that ‘bend’, ‘swell’ and ‘o’erbrimm’d’ are in Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’.
That pristine railway carriage can be set against No More Parades’ army hut, but may also be set beside the ‘whiteenamelled, wickerworked, be-mirrored lounge’ of the Rouen hotel in which Sylvia and Perowne sit (II.i), discussing sexual morality and adultery, as did Tietjens and Macmaster on that earlier occasion. Against the carriage mirrors that had ‘reflected very little’, we can place the hotel mirror in which Sylvia sees Tietjens enter the lounge. The novel ends with General Campion’s inspection of the cook-houses with, again, several subtle reminders of Parade’s End’s very first scene (‘spotless […] mirrors that were the tops of camp-cookers’).
The carriage in that first scene is surrounded by threatening forces, still distant but on an unimaginably vast scale. That same threat encloses the army hut but there is also a more immediate, direct danger, dramatised in its effects by the blood-soaked demise of O Nine Morgan. Around the hotel in Rouen hangs an air of insanity: in the midst of war, Sylvia Tietjens’ inexhaustible appetite for the persecution of her husband has brought her, with the connivance of General Campion, into that ‘theatre’, where she functions for many onlookers, presumably, as an emblem of ‘peace’.
At the beginning of A Man Could Stand Up – Valentine Wannop’s immediate danger is a personal one: the re-emergence of the malicious and self-serving Edith Macmaster, formerly Duchemin. Valentine has been called to the telephone which, ‘for some ingeniously torturing reason, was in a corner of the great schoolroom without any protection’. But the ‘threat’ beyond that is the peace that has broken out that day, its new dangers as yet undefined. At the end of the novel, in a symbolically stripped room, with the camp-bed ‘against the wall’, Valentine and Tietjens, dancing together within the – now – protective circle of khaki, celebrate their ‘setting out’.
In Last Post the hut has no walls but is nevertheless safe within the ambience of an eccentric and unorthodox but still highly significant community, though the shelter is open to something more than mere weather.43 Mark is accessible to invading Americans, to the Marxian Communist youth of Cambridge – and to his hated sister-in-law. He also – willingly – shares his space with a multitude of creatures, birds and dormice and tiny rabbits, and is sharply aware of others: night birds, foxes, stoats. He despises himself a little ‘for attending to these minutiae’ when it is ‘really’ those ‘big movements’ that have always interested him. But behind those musings stands an author who has mastered the art of the double view, of detail and map, of a finger’s touch on a bare wrist or a man walking under elm trees as well as that westward shift of political and economic power that largely defined the twentieth century.
Mark’s reflections on small mammals and big movements are set in the context of his recollection of ‘a great night’. The multiplicity of creatures around him is a part of this but so is his sense of great spaces and the transcendence of ordinary time, the night as a fragment of eternity: ‘The great night was itself eternity and the Infinite … The spirit of God walking on the firmament.’ The earlier volumes also have their great nights or, at least, their periods of stretched or fractured or recalibrated time. In Some Do Not … it is Christopher’s extraordinary night-ride with Valentine, through the dense mist, with time the object of intense speculation and calculation: ‘He had not known this young woman twenty-four hours: not to speak to […] Then break all conventions: with the young woman: with himself above all. For forty-eight hours.’ No More Parades has its bizarre and farcical night in the Rouen hotel. What has occurred there, the actual sequence of events, the conflicting witnesses, the piecing together of muffled, partial and reluctant stories, all unfolds in slow motion: but the consequences for Tietjens are rapid and inexorable. In A Man Could Stand Up – the fantastic closing scene on Armistice Night is preceded by an even more extraordinary scene: the explosion in the trenches. Though this takes place in daylight, ‘There was so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age! The earth moved.’ Again, time is stretched, curiously cinematic (‘like a slowed-down movie’), the earth settles again, over dead and wounded men and those in mortal danger of suffocation. And Mark’s own vigils, in those long, largely silent nights, fittingly in this post-war world, with their poignant sense of the vastness of the universe and the nearness of God, look back, perhaps, to the beginning of The Young Lovell, where the young knight rises from his knees, having kept his vigil from midnight until six in the morning.
For all his fabulous wealth and power, the Master of Groby is seen in Last Post only as master of a thatched shelter, a miniature Groby, overhung by apple boughs as Groby itself is overshadowed by its Great Tree. Ian Baucom has written of how the ruined country house can not only represent but actually define a dominant model of Englishness.44 Groby is not a ruined country house but, in the pages of the first three volumes of Parade’s End, it is certainly incomplete, removed and distanced. It is part of a title, ‘Tietjens of Groby’, a sign, a symbol that has no solidity. Nor has it, of course, in Last Post but it is noticeable that, though the shortest in extent, this last volume of Parade’s End mentions Groby nearly twice as often as do the first three volumes together. By the end of it, Groby is, indeed, if not ruined, then certainly damaged, both materially – ‘Half Groby wall is down. Your bedroom’s wrecked’ – and symbolically, with the Great Tree gone and ‘the curse’ (perhaps) lifted.
We see, in the course of Parade’s End, many interiors but it is only ‘Tietjens’s’ that is described in any extended way: its exterior and its context, its situation, its trees and outbuildings, as well as some details of its interior. The earlier drawing-rooms, army huts, hotel foyers and bedrooms have been the settings for ‘incidents’ and for the symbolic representations of power, class and money. The house in Last Post has a more extensive function: paradoxically, though the novel has sometimes been seen more in romantic or symbolic terms than the earlier volumes, its range of uses accords more with the tenets of realism; it must serve as the context in which these lives are set, not in any temporary sense, but fully, daily, over years. Here people work, think, love, conceive.
A further theme, established on the first page of the tetralogy, that persists through many changes and in many guises to the last may be mentioned here: ostensibly ‘foreignness’ – but reaching beyond this and perhaps better called difference. The book begins with Tietjens, an Englishman, and Macmaster, a Scotsman, though this overt distinction is deceptive, a feint. There is a related difference, that Tietjens is ‘Tietjens of Groby’ while Macmaster is a son of the manse, yet while having his mother provide a little money for Macmaster to get through university would have left ‘a sense of class obligation’ had Macmaster been ‘an English young man of the lower orders’, with Macmaster being a Scot, ‘it just didn’t’. There are plenty of other apparent tensions between the English Tietjens (his absurdly un-English name so boldly foregrounded that its foreignness becomes quite invisible) and ‘un-English’ others, such as Levin, Aranjuez, and, at greatest length, Marie Léonie. Yet it is Tietjens and Valentine who are most obviously set apart: and this is not simply because they care – because their moral sense is not steered by expediency or pragmatism – but because they notice. Tietjens is ‘an exact observer’; he notices not only the details of things, places, horses, people but also the direction in which history is tending (‘Christopher was always right. Sometimes a little previous. But always right.’) And Valentine Wannop, ‘New Woman’ and suffragette, while securely rooted in her own time, is also, as a classicist, well equipped for access to others.
The first novel begins with two men in an enclosed space, threatened but as yet in an abstract way, hinted at through the carriage’s furnishings, friends and colleagues yet still foreign to one another in terms of class, connections, their sense of entitlement and expectations.
The second novel begins with men, most obviously four men in two pairs (the third pair, the sergeant-majors, play a lesser role), in an enclosed and threatened space, the two men on the ground clearly foreign to the two others by nationality, class and rank – and height; the two officers foreign to one another; the first cannot get the other’s name right; the second has misunderstood the relationship of the first to General Campion.
The third novel begins with two women connected by a telephone and threatened by the peace that is now breaking out. One woman does not immediately realise that she knows the second: they are, in many ways, foreign to one another. One is a disembodied voice – in reality each would be so to the other but, in the novel, it is Valentine who is solid, athletic, bursting with health and vitality, listening to the disembodied and broken utterances of Lady Macmaster who is, indeed, insubstantial. Near the end of Last Post, Valentine observes that Edith Ethel is ‘not much changed’.
The fourth novel begins with two men, one in an enclosed space but in a different sense; if threatened, also in a different sense. They differ in class but – differently. One speaks in dialect that the other understands; he himself does not speak. All power and authority is seemingly concentrated in him: yet he is powerless to move or speak.
Last Post is, in fact, largely dominated by two men: Mark and Christopher Tietjens, doubles, with that telepathic connection that Ford identified as existing between his brother Oliver and himself: ‘when one of us broke the silence it was to say exactly what the other had been about to bring out’ (Nightingale 255).45 Mark serves, in fact, as a Fordian distancing device, enabling the confrontation with, and exploration of, intimate material, a role filled by ‘the Compiler’ in No Enemy. Nevertheless, unlike the Compiler, Mark is not there for that purpose: he is introduced for good reasons and earns his indispensability in the novel as in his government department. The similarities between the two brothers are rendered almost in order to accentuate their differences.46
Indeed, on a larger scale, consider these endings: No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up – both end on a note of madness, the first threatening, the second more benign. On either side of these two, Some Do Not … contains the superb derangement that is the Duchemin breakfast but ends with Christopher, apparently alone,47 in silence, reflecting on recent events, while Last Post contains the smaller-scale irruption of assorted characters into Tietjens’s and ends with Mark’s emergence from silence and sustained reflection on past events: speaking to, and touching, the pregnant Valentine, before returning into silence, finally and completely.
Endings and Un-endings
Just as Parade’s End is concerned with both the end of the old order and the emergence of a new, so Last Post is concerned with both birth and death. That birth, not yet accomplished, is of the child that Valentine carries, but the novel also engages with the idea of rebirth: the confirmed resurrection of Christopher Tietjens, pulled out of the mud – and then saving others – in A Man Could Stand Up –; and the possible rebirth or reinvention of ‘England’, perhaps even that of Ford himself. He had lost and recovered his memory; moved to France; presided over the birth and death of a literary review; and was now engaged in another, though partial, move to the United States. A double fording. ‘Ford’ is related, through its Germanic origin, to ‘fare’. Ford Madox Ford (né Hueffer, of Germanic origin) might have savoured that.
War, as so many have attested, is hell: and it was very obviously so on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. There had been nothing comparable on earth, at least. But there had been Homer, Dante, Virgil; epics, myths and legends. And hell was increasingly preoccupying novelists, painters, autobiographers – and poets.
What was originally the second half of Ezra Pound’s ‘Third Canto’ became by 1925 the opening of his ‘long poem including history’. Based on Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, it recounts his hero’s journey to the underworld to consult the shade of the soothsayer Tiresias: the sacrifice there of a sheep furnishes that ‘blood for the ghosts’ that became not only a familiar metaphor for Pound’s extraordinary translations but, in large part, his poetic practice.48 Ford and Pound exchanged letters about ‘Canto VIII’ (later Canto II) in 1922, the year of Ford’s move to France (Pound/Ford 64–7). He was, of course, familiar with the classical uses, in Virgil as well as Homer, of the underworld descent, but Pound’s (eventual) Canto I, together with the ‘Hades’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, would have kept the story vividly – and modernly – before his eyes.49
Ford is, then, hardly unusual in his references to Hell: but they are remarkably many. Hell is there in the first chapter of Some Do Not …, Dantescan and literary; theological in its second chapter, in Sylvia’s conversation with her mother and Father Consett; grimly unavoidable, as Tietjens in the Wannops’ cottage reflects that he is going back to Sylvia, ‘and of course to Hell!’ In No More Parades’ first chapter Tietjens has a vision of McKechnie against a background of hellfire, and when Dante’s underworld reappears, it is in the context of Tietjens making a pact with destiny, willingly ‘to pass thirty months in the frozen circle of hell, for the chance of thirty seconds’ talking to Valentine Wannop. It is also in the wry comment of the French soldier on the ‘moving slime’ that is German deserters disconsolately passing: ‘On dirait l’Inferno de Dante!’ As A Man Could Stand Up –
