"Pink Flannel" by Ford Madox Ford (May 8, 1919 in Land and Water)

A Short Story set in WW I by the Author of The Good Soldier and Parade's End 

Yesterday I was very please to find included in an anthology of short stories I was kindly given by Dover Publishing a story by Ford Madox Ford (1873 to 1939).  "Pink Flannel" was originally published in Land and Water a literary and political journal focusing on World War One, May 8, 1919.  Land and Water was published weekly in England from 1914 to 1920.  It is a stream of consciousness story centering on an English soldier in the trenches in France thinking about his up coming 36 hour furlough.  (Ford volunteered for frontline duty in the war even though he was above the age of required service.)

The man is in a panic as he cannot find a letter he received from a married woman arranging their meeting during his short leave. He needs to find out if she wants to continue the affair.  He is afraid some malicious individual will show the woman's husband the letter.  As German gun fire and artillery rain over him he racks his brain to try to recall where he might have hidden the letter.  He can identify the weapon by the sound and knows which are most dangerous.  There are not a lot of hiding places in his base in the trenches.  He seemingly shrugs off the threat of death but is in a panic over the lost letter.  Ford does a marvelous job of displaying the stream of thoughts of the soldier.  

I read this in a forthcoming in 2015 anthology 100 Great Short Stories selected and introduced by James Daly, published by Dover Thrift Editions.  The selection of stories is first rate, with a combination of must includes and more creative selections.  The formatting, of course this may be fixed upon publication, is a total mess, with no clickable index.  Translator information is not given and date of first publication information, very important, is left out.  I had to Google Ford's story to find out when it was first published.  

In my brief research I could not find the story online.  

Mel u

Note added Feb 19-  I got in touch with Max Saunders, leading authority on FMF, he advised me that Ford wrote just over twenty short stories but more are still being discovered in little known his journals from the period. 

The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford

The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford (1907, 238 pages with an introduction by A. S. Byatt-part one of a trilogy about Queen Katherine Howard)

Ford Madox Ford (1873 to 1939-UK) has been important to my blog.   I first read and posted on him in December of 2009 when I read for the first time The Good Soldier.     I now see this book as among the very best novels of all time, a work of a very powerful artistic intelligence.    It is on most best novels of all time lists.    After reading this I hosted a read a long on Parade's End, his tetrology centering on WWI and its after years.     After reading Parade's End  I felt a bit stunned as one should be after experiencing a transcendent work of art for the first time.    I also read Ford's encyclopedic survey of the history of literature, The March of Literature and was thoroughly intimidated by it even if I did come away with many reading ideas.   I treat it now as a kind of reference book with the caveat that there are no authorities in taste (in the sense that there are authorities in science).    Both Parade's End and The Good Soldier are uncontroversially canon status works.   Of the two,  read The Good Soldier first and decide from there if you will read more.   I have done no research but my guess is that for every 20 people who have read The Good Soldier, one has read Parade's End.   Ford wrote a lot of books, about 80.    It seems only these two books and his trilogy about Katherine Howard,  The Fifth Queen really still are read by general readers like myself.

The Fifth Queen is part one of a trilogy of the same name centered on  Katherine Howard (1524 to 1542) who was the fifth woman to be married to King Henry (1491 to 1547 the VIII of Tudor England).   Henry became king in 1509 at age 18 and ruled until his death.    Historians see him as a great king that made England a strong and powerful country able to stand up to the bigger and wealthier countries of Europe.    Popular culture in the 21th century sees him as a huge man  with a turkey leg in one hand and an eighteen year old wench in the other one  screaming for an executioner to take off the head of his current wife.

When we first meet Katherine she comes from a Catholic family of minor nobility that has fallen on economic hard times.   Her cousin Thomas Culpepper was a friend and courtier of Henry.    (This is the plot line of The Fifth Queen, not history).    Through family connections she becomes the lady in waiting to Mary I, Henry's oldest daughter.   Courtiers and Ladies in waiting are sort of a cross between a friend and a servant.    The closest confidante and advisor of Mary is a spy for Thomas Cromwell.    Katherine (sometimes spelled with a "c") is surrounded by intrigue and self advancing sycophants who want to use her beauty to attract the eye of the king and thus gain influence which gives them the opportunity to increase their wealth and advance their own retainers.    In The Fifth Queen Katherine is portrayed as a very devout and well read young lady, far from how she is portrayed in a recent cable TV series on the Tudors!

The Fifth Queen is a work of very subtle narrative intelligence.   It deals largely with power struggles between rival factions at the court and Katherine's attempt to take charge of her own life.   The prose over a very high standard.

The Fifth Queen is  very different from a modern historical novel.   There is little attempt to recreate the world in which Katherine lived.  It is all about characterizations and the behind the scenes maneuvers at the court  The Fifth Queen is still read for the style and to study the narrative method of Ford, not as a historical novel that gives a slice of Tudor life.

One thing I admit I enjoyed in the introduction by A. S. Byatt, was her telling us that Ford consciously decided not to try to recreate the speech patterns of the era as he did not want to impose such a thing on his readers and he felt such attempts to recreate accurate speech in  an era very remote from the readers would distract from the artistic impact of a work as people end up trying to figure out what is being said and lose track of the story.   Thank you Mr Ford!

There are two more parts of The Fifth Queen still to go.   I will try to take a closer look at the style of Ford in my next two posts.   I hope to have this completed by the end of March.

For now, I would say read The Good Soldier first then decide if you want to read more Ford.   If you teach literature or are an aspiring writer then you should really read The Good Soldier soon.    If you are on a plan to read the canon and have not already done so, you really need to read also Parade's End eventually.   The Fifth Queen is not a canon status work on any lists I have seen.    I will generalize on it more when I read part two and three.

Mel u

"The March of Literature" by Ford Madox Ford

The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford (1938,  878 pages)

I have been reading The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford (1873 to 1939-UK) for about four months now.    Ford wrote some 80 books including The Good Soldier and the tetrology Parade's End.    The Good Soldier is the most read of his works.      Parade's End is a long demanding work but most of those who have read it, including me, come away from it in awe.    Ford, from a very cultured family, was incredibly well read and seems to have possessed amazing memory.       He read the classics and more in at least six languages.    He was not, except for a year or two, an academic but he spent 1937 and 1938 lecturing at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, USA.    He had made the acquaintanceship of the president of the university and he offered him a position.   

The March of Literature is a very ambitious book.    It means to tell the story of the development literature world wide (including Asia) from the very first literary works up to the works written in the 1930s.   Ford also discusses the cultural contexts in which the works of literature arose.    It is not a "balanced" text book kind of a work.   No sane professor would attempt to teach a course based on it today.    Ford will spend twenty pages discussing the relative merits of 14th century German poets but not even mention Tolstoy.    The standard of the prose is high.     It is at times repetitive and does ramble a bit.    I was at times tempted to fast forward through sections of the book devoted to writers or eras that I have no familiarity with but I am glad I resisted the temptation.   I will probably never read any epics by medieval Scandinavian authors but at least now I know there are such a things.   Some of his literary value judgments may seem idiosyncratic (such as not regarding Tolstoy as worth mentioning, calling Stephen Crane  the first "real American" writer, and suggesting one cannot consider oneself an Anglo-Saxon unless you have read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).     His English bests writers are Trollope, Austin, Thackeray and with some end notes, Dickens.  In American, it is Henry James when all the rhetoric settles.    In France he sees, as do most, two works of Flaubert, Stendhal's The  Red and the Black and "one or two by Balzac" (he does not tell us which ones) as the best European literature of the 19th century.

Who should read this book?    My quick answer would be any one who wants to read an account of literature by a genius (who added to the great literature of the world himself) of the reading life.   To qualify it, if you are already interested in the subject of the book I think you will be amazed by the breadth and depth of Ford's knowledge.   His prose styling is impeccable.    Personally as I read it I was thinking it was a shame Ford was never able to read in the 20th century Japanese novel.   At one point he says America first began to really produce work of the highest literary merit when American writers began to read Flaubert and Stendhal.
I have come to the conclusion that the Japanese novel came into existence when a small number of young men attending elite schools began to read Flaubert and Stendhal (a very powerful influence on 20th century Japanese literature) and married the French forms to Japanese classical traditions.    Perhaps scholars (of which I am not) may dismiss this as off the wall.

The March of Literature is a serious book that those who want to know more about the history of literature and get tons of reading ideas  should read.   I read it slowly as it is a densely written book.   I will use it as a reference book from now on.    I am very glad I read it and I think, as only those who love quality literature will read it,  that any one who reads this book will be delighted they did.    There are just so many great reading suggestions in this book!    Ford is hard on academics in his book and at times seems patronizing to Americans but maybe that was just a humorous jibe   He suggests that much literary analysis is the work of people who perhaps once loved to read but now see it just as a job.

I admit I was very happy  when he mentioned Katherine Mansfield as one of the writers in whom he saw the seeds of a great new wave of literature.    He appears to have met neither Mansfield or Virginia Woolf.

I will be reading soon, I hope, his trilogy of historical novels on Katherine Howard, starting with The Fifth Queen.    

Mel u

"Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford

Mrs Ford-

Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford (1924-1928, 836 pages)

Violet Hunt-role model for Sylvia

Parade's End is Ford Madox Ford's (FMF)  WWI  tetralogy set in England and France in the period of around 1914 to 1918.    It was published as four parts but should be viewed (as FMF certainly did) as a unified work.   I have already 

posted on the four individual works, Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post.   Each of  the participants in the Read A Long, Dwight, Nicole, and Hannah have also done multiple posts on the work which have helped me understand the book a lot.   Dwight has an excellent resources page for those interested in more background information on FMF. 

About 40 while in the Army

Parade's End is a not just a great novel, it is a great work of art.    It is very carefully constructed, what seem like errors or lapses by the narrator (not everyone agrees with this) and characters are part of the structure of the work.   Parts of the work read like a play of the period, parts are brilliant explorations of the streams of consciousness of very diverse persons.   It is also, in its central character Christopher Tietjens, a superb portrait of a man deeply into the reading life.    It experiments with numerous writing styles.  While our lead character is in the trenches in France in WWI we can feel the extreme discordance in the consciousness of Tietjens reflected in the strident  prose of the work.    When some of the more vapid characters in the book converse over silly self-centered matters the prose seems like that of an Edwardian play.   Throughout the work there are 100s of marvelous epigrams and pronouncements on history, marriage, art, literature and the 18th century that alone made the book worth reading for me.   

As I was reading this I somehow had a flashback to a class on early modern art that I took many years ago.   One of the themes of Parade's End is the nature of knowledge, memory, and the construction of history.   In a way, Parade's End, like The Wave by Virginia Woolf which I am now reading, is almost doing in a novel what the Cubists tried to do in their movement (time frame 1907 to 1921.)   This quote from Wikipedia is very useful:

In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.

This is very much what FMF is doing in Parade's End.   I would alter the quotation to say social reality and maybe all reality comes from the point at which the most points of  view intersect.  (In this I see it as similar  to Woolf's The Waves  published in 1930.)  Part of the point of the massive number of cultural references is to suggest that culture increases our ability to depict internally a rich universe and from that internal projection we enrich the collective socially constructive aspects of reality.  

Parade's End is a super rich book with many themes.   It is a great portrait of a marriage which seems to make little sense until we think about it a bit then we realize there is much more to the marriage of Sylvia and Christopher than meets the eye.   It is a great story of a culture in massive transition.    It is not an encyclopedic narrative as I once thought it might be  and in fact in the heart of its meaning it seems to undercut the very notion of such a possibility.

I tremendously enjoyed Parade's End.    A lot can be learned just from unraveling  the references and allusions in the work.  (That is one of many ways the Internet has enriched our ability to read.   For example, I thought a literary reference made by Tietjens as from a Russian novel was really from Henry James and with the Internet I found I was correct in very short period of time.   In the pre-Internet days I would have just had an uneasy feeling about the passage.)

With a brief internet search you will see that FMF was a very controversial figure and was greatly disliked by many who knew him well.    Jean Rhys (with whom he had a romance) wrote a novel in which FMF is one of the central characters.   He is depicted as a predatory man who preys on women whom he sees as having as their place to serve his genius.   FMF did have about 30 relationships with women in the arts and literature (many of these women ended up hating him but, like Sylvia for Christopher, did not want to let another woman take their place).    FMF was incredibly well read.   I have on order his 800 plus page work The March of Literature and am very much looking forward to learning from FMF.  FMF helped many people like Joyce, Pound, Lawrence, Rhys, and Hemingway become  writers and is now probably less known or read than any of them.    I also think there may be a backlash of sorts against Ford now in some circles due to the perception that he had a predatory attitude toward women.

Parade's End is a not a work we can lollipop our way through (Ok, I like the Edwardian slang I learned from the book).        It sets a standard few books can match.   I really do not think there are ten books written in the 20 century more worth reading than Parade's End.

I think there are a few others now reading Parade's End and I am very much looking forward to their posts.


Mel u

"The Last Post" by Ford Madox Ford

The Last Post by Ford Madox Ford  (1928, 159 pages)

The Last Post, named for a traditional British Army bugle call to commemorate a fall compatriot, is the final book in Ford Madox Ford tetralogy set in the WWII era in England and France.     The prose in the opening chapter of this book seems to have a quieter less dissonant feel to it than one finds in the parts of the book that deal directly with Tietjens's  WWI experiences.   It is as if the book is itself calming on winding down to mirror the effects of armistice.   

As The Last Post opens we get to know a lot better Mark Tietjens, brother of Christopher our central character, and his mistress.   His mistress is French and has a back ground in the theatrical arts.   A good bit of the opening parts of the Last Post passages through her consciousness and her concerns over her failure to get the unmarried Mark to make her his wife.   Perhaps this is meant as a not too funny play on the state of post war French-English relationships.   She is also reflects upon what seems to her the passing of an era of civilized values into one of anarchy:

They had only to read in the papers of the deeds of assassins, high way robbers, of the subversive and ignorant who everywhere seized the reigns of power.

One of the themes in Parade's End is the feeling among the characters that the world they know is coming to an end.   As I read the lines above (and many similar reflections in Parade's End on the post WWI world) I could not help but have come to mind these lines from W. B. Yeats (1919)


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.


I think the historical lesson, if we can use this word, the Ford is conveying is that what seems like an end is merely a transformation.   The terrible changes that some of the characters in The Last Post   speak and think on are in fact them inflating a set of changes that disadvantages them into a social apocalypse in which all values are swept away.   


It seems to me the narrator in The Last Post becomes somehow odder and manifests his social prejudices more openly than before.   It is as if the narration of the book (done in a seemingly but hardly in fact omniscient way) is having increasing difficulty with the social changes brought on by WWII.   We see this in the numerous unfavorable references to Americans, to the French and the disturbing way middle eastern Jews are characterized.   Here is the purpose in life of a minor character, Mrs de  Bray Pape:

The lady said it was precisely giving lessons in history to  the dissolute Aristocracy of the Old World that was her mission in life.

Here is very interesting few lines from the conscious of the General who is involved with Sylvia and was at times the commander of Christopher:

Christ was a sort of  an Englishman and  Englishmen did not as a rule refuse to do their jobs.   They had not used to, now they no doubt did...perhaps Christopher was a symptom of how the English were changing.

The Last Post has some very interesting things to say about the relationship of the sexes.    It seems Sylvia is making a crasser than ever effort to make her husband Christopher's life miserable with no real intention of leaving a man she seems to hate.   We also learn some to me surprising things about the treatment of the returning British soldier by society at large.    Overall, a lot can be learned from Parade's End on an amazing range of topics.    I know longer view it as an encyclopedic narration of sorts and I am starting to see it, as reflected in the narrative method (Tietjens hobby of finding errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica kind of-but maybe too obvious-clue to this) kind of statement to the effect that an era has begun which does not lend it self to encyclopedic narratives has begun.   There is a lot more I would like to say on The Last Post but I am still struggling with the work thematically and will do a final over all post on Parade's End very soon.   For sure it is a supreme work of art, if a maddening one at times.   I will try to go more into my over all impressions soon.  


I am very grateful for the very high quality of posting from the other participants in the read along.

Dwight of A Common Reader -Dwight also has a very good resources Page on FMF.   

Hannah of Hannah's Book Blog

Nicole of Bibliographing

Each has done multiple postings on the work and each has very insightful things to say.

I think a few others may soon post on it also and look forward to reading their thoughts.

I will do one more overall post.

"A Man Could Stand Up" by Ford Madox Ford

A Man Could Stand Up by Ford Madox Ford (1926, 174 pages)

A Man Could Stand Up is part three of Parade's End  Ford Madox Ford's (FMF) tetrology set in the World War I era (1914 to 1918) in England and in the trenches in France.   I have already done posts the first two works as well as a general post as to whether or not Parade's End should be treated as an encyclopedic narrative.    

Parade's End and A Man Could Stand Up are about a lot of things.    It is a love story of sorts, a war story (some say it is the best English language war story)and  a story of class in Edwardian England.    It is about partial knowledge (I think a more knowledgeable person than I on such matters could relate it to some of the  visual  art of the period), it is about the nature of history, the causes of war (some of the reflections that come from the very upper class central character  Christopher Tietjen's are quite radical), the effect of war on the close up combatants (FMF had first hand knowledge of Trench Warfare-he volunteered for combat even though he was above the draftable age).    There are a lot of very interesting references to literature and art of the 19th century and way beyond.   It is about how memory effects our perceptions.    I should note that as I read on in Parade's End I see the real difficulties in precisely knowing what the plot action of the novel is (and there is a lot going on, it is not a novel strictly of the wealthy having endless conversations about matters of interest only to those in their closed circles) as a reflective of the deeper themes of the work.   I hate to say this but if one see Parade's End as an easy read then you have missed the point of it fully.   

Dwight of A Common Reader has done a great job setting on the time frame and action in A Man Could Stand Up.   It opens on Armistice Day in London (November 11, 1918).   We enter the stream of consciousness of Valentine Wannop (unconsummated -we think?) romantic interest in the married Tietjens (Parade's End is also a great account of a marriage in perpetual crisis and of the state of the relationships between men and women among the Edwardian gentry) as she reflects on her life and life post World War I.   Another theme (yes there are this many and more) is the effect of the destruction of old values caused by the war.   Leaders lead the people into a near meaningless war over petty quarrels and dynastic squabbles that cost millions of people their lives.   To those who reflected on this it seems like a break in history or the opening up of the doors of chaos to a world without values.   (In this way Parade's End does remind me of some post WWII Japanese works).   Valentine has contact with the wife of an old friend of Tietjens which leads to some interesting interaction.    From here A Man Could Stand Up begins a flash back to Tietjens in the trenches.   The often charring quick flash writing style of this section almost evokes the feel of explosions in the trenches.   We can feel Christopher struggling to keep his sanity in the structure of the prose in this part of  the book.   The final section of A Man Could Stand Up sees Christopher back in England shortly after Armistice Day.   He and Valentine are trying to deal with and in fact find out what their feelings for each other are.   Each has a confused in part notion of what the other wants and thinks.   Tietjens mind has been effected by the war in ways we do not fully understand.   There was nothing in his upbring to prepare him for trench war even though in part one he did say it would be people like him that would win the forthcoming war.   Tietjens is a deeply cultured man (I can think of few if any books that do a better job showing the interior life of a very intelligent and deeply read man than Parade's End) and he is a bit of a class snob.   He looks out for his men while feeling it is not right for the "lower classes" to have political opinions.   He does not get along well with his superior as they are men inferior to him that in a proper world order would have no authority over him at all.

Parade's End is an incredibly well constructed and crafted novel.   Just the pleasure of the many epigrammatic observations of Tietjens on literature are enough to make the book worth reading!   We need to keep our wits fully about us as we read this work-the narrator may seem omniscient but he is not.   Even some of the literary observations of Tietjens are wrong (he attributes something from Henry James to  a Russian author-there may well be other errors I have missed also, of course).   Everything in Parade's End is deliberate.   It is not journalism turned into a novel.

I took a break between Part Two and Three of  Parade's End as I felt I needed some time to reflect on what I had read.   I will begin the final section, The Last Post soon.   I will do a post on it and then at least one over all post on Parade's End.   

All of those in the read along have posted multiple times on Parade's End.   I have profited greatly from their posts.    I also think there are a couple of others who may have read Parade's End also along with who have not yet posted on it.   I do find posting on the book intimidating

Here are links to the posts of the participants I am aware of in the read along

Dwight of A Common Reader -Dwight also has a very good resources Page on FMF.

Hannah of Hannah's Book Blog

Nicole of Bibliographing

"No More Parades" by Ford Madox Ford

No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford (1926, 212 pages-part II of Parade's End)

I am now a bit past the half way point in Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy set in   the WWI era in England, Parade's End.  No More Parades takes us a few years ahead in time.   We now see Christoper Tietjens in his role as a British Army officer serving in France.   His primary job is to prepare draftees for front line assignments.   He has normally about 2800 men under his command.   he tries to be a good compassionate commander but he also is a bit offended by having to deal directly with men whose class level is way below his.   Parade's End is very much a story of class distinctions.    Tietjens is under the command of a General to whom both he and his wife are very close personally.   There is a lot happening in this part of Parade's End.   A lot of the plot action and narrative line is carried through conversations.     Some time I had to read the conversations two or three times just to figure out who is speaking.   I know that pretty much that only those very interested in FMF or Parade's End will ever read  my blogs on the work so I will not try to convey too much of the plot action-the fun is in part in trying to figure it out.

I have some sort of random observations on the work so far.   Previously I had said that I thought Parade's End could be seen as a kind of Encyclopedic Narrative (in the meaning of the term coined by Prof. Mendelson).   I now no longer think this as it does lack some of the meta-qualities of such narratives, its scope is too narrow, Tietjens'  mathematical knowledge does not really provide us the outlines of the sciences of the times (as found in both Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick).   I think part of the deeper theme of Parade's End is that encyclopedic narratives are of necessity wrong  (remember the hobby of Tietjens in finding errors in the dominant encyclopedic of his time, The Britannica) and that truth is as much subjective as objective.   If you read Parade's End and come away seeing it as a straight forward work than you for sure understood you missed the point!   Perception is created by cultural and culture by perception deepened by reading and art.   History is a set of stories to make what happens seems morally right.    

The book is for sure very political and harshly judgmental in its treatment of the causes of war and the concern of leaders for the millions who will be killed.   (FMF went to war at age 41 and had what seems to be a nervous breakdown).    It is a very interesting study of the nature of marriages particularized through the marriage of Sylvia and Christopher Tietjens-they are at perpetually loggerheads and always on the brink of divorce but each one satisfies the needs of the other in some very deep and hard to quite fathom ways.   Parade's End finds Tietjens under arrest for striking a fellow officer who behaved in an improper way toward Sylvia.   I love the conversations in Parade's End, I know whenever Tietjens speaks there is a good chance it will be something  which I can learn from or marvel at at least.   Not all of his statements  in the conversations  about art and literature  are correct  and some are said mostly as the thought of the moment  and we need to catch his errors if we can.    This is one great way the internet has helped readers-any reference to something you have not heard of can be tracked down at once.   I am also starting to see the effects of the war on our characters.    

I will admit sometimes in reading this book I am reminded of The Monty Python Skit in which there was a contest for "Upper Class Twit of the Year" .   I do not say this as a reflection on the book but it did come to mind more than once.    

I will, I think, attempt a more grandiose summery of themes and methods and such in Parade's End when I have completed the work.   FMF famously said of Flaubert's A Sentimental Education that one should  not consider themselves well educated until they had read it 14 times.    Parade's End  does remind me a lot of A Sentimental Education.   Parade's End is a very edifying book as well as superb entertainment, what more can I ask from a novel?   

I strongly urge those interested in Parade's End or FMF to read the posts on the novel at  A Common Reader

There is really so much in this novel that I do find it hard to decide what to post on it.   I have noticed that FMF has a thing for magpies!    This is a very rich book.    I will not say that it is an easy read or that one could lollipop their way through its 830 pages with much profit.   I am willing to say it is a great work of art and all who seriously try to read it will be way over paid for their time.   It also really is a lot of fun.   Most would probably tell you to read his The Good Soldier first and I guess I would also.

"Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford -Tietjens in the Trenches

Tietjens in the Trenches -Observations on Parts I and II of No More Parades (Part II of Parade's End)

No More Parades finds our man Christopher Tietjens in the trenches in France in the opening months of  WWI (1914).   He is charge of preparing a large group of Canadian Draftees to go into battle.   He is living in the trenches.   The trenches in WWI were often quite elaborate and included officers quarters and such.   They were not simply places to stand up and fire from.   Tietjens's commanding General is his late father's best friend.   At first impression Tietjens seems like a man who would not do well in the trenches as he has had a totally pampered life and he is not at all physical fit.    Tietjens is in command of a group of Canadian draftees (colonials in his mind), 2994 men for two months time during which they will be readied for combat, trained and fitted out.   Tietjens is of several  minds on these draftees.   He is, we must acknowledge, offended to have to listen to the opinions of some of the soldiers (he feels the lower classes should not have political opinions).    He also meets a Canadian draftee who seems nearly as erudite as he is.   Tietjens has a kind of near break down shortly into his command due to his compassion for the men under him.   One of the draftees asked for a day off, Tietjens thinking he was doing the man a favor for another reason, denied the request and this ends up putting the draftee in the way of enemy fire and he is killed.  Tietjens  cannot get over blaming himself.   Tietjens is very patriotic and as British as they come but he is no fool.   Here is how he sees the origins of war:

Intense dejection, endless muddles, endless frolics, endless villainies.   All these men given into the hands of the most cynically care-free intriguers in long corridors who made plots that harrowed the hearts of the world.   All these men toys, all these agonies mere occasions for picturesque phrases to put into politicians' speeches without heart or even intelligence.   Hundreds of thousands of men tossed here and there in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of winter...by God, exactly as if they were nuts willfully picked up and thrown over the shoulder by magpies...But men.   Not just populations.  Men you worried over there.   Each man with a backbone, knees..a home, passions..schemes of the universe, a milk walk, a slut of a wife, a brat..The Men:  The Other ranks.  And the poor--little officers.

Note on the reference to "Slut of a wife"-Sylvia Tietjens,  his own wife is never far from the action or his mind.   In fact Sylvia even shows up at the trenches.  (It was not unusual for officers wives (for those with some money) to show up in France at the front.   Sylvia begins to try to stage manage Christopher's military career via her family connections to his commanding general.   She feels he should have a more important job.  We learn more about the complicated dynamics of the marriage of the Tietjens and get more insight into the characters of our parties.  

As I read   the  parts of No More Parades dealing with trench war fare and Tietjens thoughts on the origins of war I could not help but think of General Pudding, a minor but thematically important character in Gravity's Rainbow, and his memories of trench warfare in France in WWI.   I know devotees of Gravity's Rainbow and Parade's End may each find this remark very odd,  but I see a lot of commonality in the two books.   I might post on this upon completion of Parade's End if I still believe it after I have finished the book.

There are a number of interesting references to the 18th century in this section.   Tietjens also makes another one of his wonderful literary epigrams in declaring that there  no English literature of value written subsequent to the 17th century.   Here is how his wife Sylvia described the head of her pet dog (which for her amusement and stress relief she just beaten for no reason with a rhinoceros whip after remarking that the white dog she was whipping remind her of her husband):

A great head, room for a whole British encyclopedia of misinformation.

There are a lot of good conversations between Christopher, his wife, her priest, the  general, Christopher's brother Michael and the men under Christopher.    We may be seeing the awaking of Tietjens to the many absurdities that unpin the Empire.   (the use of the bold characters above is my idea!)

There is a really a lot in Parade's End.   Great conversations, wicked epigrams that can take their place among the best in literature.   Many wonderful cultural references, some of them brilliant some more than passing strange.    The sentences are crafted beautifully and there are themes enough for 100s of posts.  

In a prior post I pondered the question as to whether or not Parade's End should be seen as an encyclopedic narrative summing up the culture and knowledge of England in the 1910s.  Maybe it is a kind of anti-encyclopedic work suggesting the building of encyclopedias is a fools errand.   I think this is  part of the reason for the great number of cultural references in Parade's End.   


As I said when I began my Reading Notes on Parade's End the very nature of the work means that our early perceptions could be all wrong and I accept that as central to the experience of the work.  

Parade's End Reading Notes and links to posts by others in the read along.

"Some Do Not"-Part One of "Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford

Some Do Not by Ford Madox Ford (Part One of the Parade's End, 1924, 288 pages

Some Do Not is the opening novel in Ford Madox Ford's four part work set in the 1910s, Parade's End.   I am treating the entire tetralogy as it were artistically one work.    The four parts of the work were published in rapid succession (FMF must have been a very fast writer given his huge output)   and the limited research I have done (as well as the introduction to my edition on the work by Max Saunders, leading authority on FMF) indicated the four works were meant to be taken as a whole.   Given the nature of the work,  I have to accept that what I think I understand about Some Do Not (I completed it yesterday and have not yet begun part II) may be quite undercut by what  I will read later on.    I think that this is in fact reflective of the themes of the work that deal with the nature of knowledge, culture, literature, and relationships that our understanding of the novel is always on shaky ground.   

Some Do Not centers on the lives of the landed gentry in England in the period right before WWI begins.   We first meet two of the central characters on a train.   FMF is very careful to describe an upper class train compartment so it matches the class of our characters.   The lead character of Some Do Not (and I think the work as a whole) is Christopher Tietjens.   He comes from a wealthy family (how wealthy is up for debate as book one closes), he is quite brilliant.   He works as a statistician for the British government.   He is so well read and cultured that as a hobby he is doing a report on errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica .   Physically he is quite large and out of shape.   He is married to Sylvia Tietjens.     I have quoted previously her description.    She is the very epitome of an upper class beauty.   She seems to require a lot of stimulation and is easily bored indicating perhaps a lack of internal resources.   She does not admire Tietjens as much as I do.   Maybe she knows something or maybe Tietjens is a bit of a bluff.   She sees him as terrible "know it all" and openly mocks him with her adultery which may have produced a child born in wedlock but whose father is not her husband.     We also meet a seemingly good friend of Tietjens', MacMaster.    In the relationships of the characters there do not seem to be too many relationships of equality as befitting this very class conscious work.   

In writing about the work I am tempted to simply do a lot of quotes and say the whole 800 pages is full of one marvelous turn of phrase or epigram of wonder after another.   Tietjens does like to make "pronouncements" on all sorts of topics.   Some of what he says is for sure wrong.   He attributes to an unspecified Russian writer a quote from a short story by Henry James.   There are constant cultural references in the work.   I had to think that maybe some of them are wrong also but the Henry James error is the one I could catch where as the references to Rossetti are not something I can judge.   

Here are what I think are some of the themes of  Parade's End as shown in Some Do Not:   marriage, class structure, the nature of art and literature (Tietjens has some very interesting off the wall things to say about literature), the construction of history (history does not just happen it is a novel), the use of conversation to create bonds and to keep yourself isolated.    As the work proceeds we will, I think, see much of the world of the gentry depicted in Some Do Not destroyed by events beyond their control.    We will also see these same people win a war and we may learn in part why.   Events are not always, for me at least, easy to follow in the narrative and that is for sure on purpose I think.   ( I was I confess confused a bit by the bank overdraft that comes into play toward the end of Some Do Not).    I am very much looking forward to seeing how The Great War will affect the people in Some Do Not.   How will the marriage of the Tietjens hold up?   Will we learn a lot about life in France during the war.   There are period drama type plot threads between the characters.   Not only are the perceptions of the characters not fully reliable, I think the narration of the story is itself subject to differing understandings.   

Dwight of A Common Reader has done  a wonderful job in sorting out the action and themes of Some Do Not-

Parade's End is a pure delight just for the turns of phrases and the conversations alone.   The references to art and literature are wonderful.   I am taking the trouble to track down the references I do not fully follow (imagine how hard this was to do in pre-internet days!) and am finding it very edifying.   

 Junichiro Tanizaki and Ryunosuke Akutagawa have have some close thematic and narrative similarities to those shown by FMF.    I might go more into this latter as I read an additional work by Akutagawa to explain   the very similar way both writers use artifacts to create class divides.   

I will start part two, No More Parades today.  I am very excited to see what will happen next.   I will probably do a couple of  reading note posts on it as I proceed through the work then attempt a closing post on it.   

Reading Notes on Parade's End

Parade's End -is it an Encyclopedic Narrative?-a question for readers

 Is Parade's End an Encyclopedic Narrative? -a question for readers-

Conspiracy of Commodities: Postmodern Encyclopedic Narrative and Crowdedness Alan Clinton

[1] In 1976, Edward Mendelson used the novel Gravity's Rainbow in order to introduce a genre that had "never previously been identified"(161), the "encyclopedic narrative." A cynical reading of his essay (published in a volume on Thomas Pynchon entitled Mindful Pleasures)  would view the new genre as Mendelson's excuse to glorify his favorite novelist, for his definition of "encyclopedic authors" is extremely exclusive: Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Melville, Joyce, and of course, Pynchon. Yet, Mendelson does provide a set of criteria for encyclopedic narratives which extends beyond their exceptional authors: 1) they all include an extensive account of at least one technology or science; 2) they are an encyclodedia of literary styles; 3) they all provide a history of language (are metalinguistic); 4) they all propose a theory of social organization.  From  

In a very famous and still highly regarded early essay on Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Professor Edward Mendelson (Columbia University) coined the term "Encyclopedic Narrative" as given an informative name to what he said were seven master literary works of western civilization.   (listed in the quote above)-All these works sort of sum up a culture at its apex.    I know this concept is very useful in unraveling the mysteries of Gravity's Rainbow.   One of the incidental characteristics of an encyclopedic narrative is simply that it is a long book.   I began to wonder if maybe Mendleson had overlooked a very obvious encyclopedic narrative.   Most of the narratives are also about a culture in decline or at its apex.    Parade's End does use a variety of literary styles (not as wide a variety as Gravity's Rainbow maybe but as wide a variety as would be credible in the structure of the work).   It also makes reference to ancient literature and makes wide use of slang of an era just like Moby Dick uses whaling slang.    The extensive literary references can maybe be seen as part of a metalinguistic theory.   The lead character is both a man of extensive literary culture (some of which he has wrong-this is no accident of course) and a skilled statistician and versed in higher mathematics.   Parade's End does show us Tietjens explaining these functions in his various conversations.   There are a lot of obscure references in Parade's End just like in Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick.   Also do not forget one of the hobbies of our lead character is correcting the Encyclopedia Britannica.   There are extensive comments about the structure and nature of society in Parade's End also.   Parade's End is for sure a book about social structure and class construction through artifacts and literature.  

My question to readers of Parade's End is then should the work be treated as an encyclopedic narrative of  England in the 1910s?    Parade's End seems to be many things.   One of its  deeper themes seems to me to be the nature of culture and deeper still the nature of knowledge.     

Parade's End is also fun.   The conversations are marvelous and the relationships of the characters are really interesting.  Even the 3rd party style narrator is really a character in the story.   I will say it is not a work that you should lollipop your way through.    As you can see I am quite baldheaded over it and do run to the magpie on its marvels.  (ok no more slang from the 1910s!)

Reading Notes for Parade's End

Parade's End Read Along some notes and observations on chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7

Parade's End read along notes inspired by chapters four through seven of Some Do Not (part one of the tetralogy)


Cultural Creation in Parade's End

Normally when I read a novel and I do not feel I fully understand the cultural references or some of the words used I simply go past it hoping I will figure it out latter and not wanting to stop my reading to look things up I do not worry too much about what I do not understand.   In reading the first 140 pages of Some Do Not, the first novel in the tetralogy that makes up Parade's End,  I think you cannot really do that as I think one of the very basic themes of the work is the construction of culture and identity through things understood the right way.   Parade's End is in part about effects of knowledge and the lack of it and the faking of it.    In the opening chapters you cannot, I think, but help be impressed and intimidated a bit by the depth and width of the apparent culture of our central character Christopher Tietjens.   After all, he corrects  the Encyclopedia Britannica for fun.    Another way culture is created, and I think this is also a theme of Parade's End, is through slang.   Slang also defines class structures, it includes and excludes.

"Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford-Chapter Two and Three in Which we meet Sylvia Tietjens

     Parade's End Read Along-Chapter 2 and 3-do we like or hate Sylvia Tietjens, wife of Christopher Tietjens

2nd entry in my Parade's End reading notes

In writing reading notes on a work like Parade's End before you have completed the novel you run the risk of not fully understanding events, characters and themes that are fully illuminated only with the further unfolding of the story.   If one had done posts as you read The Good Soldier you would see your first perceptions of things were not quite right.   You learn as you go on that things are far from simple.   Ford Madox Ford (FMF) is as subtle  and one must say as slippery a literary artist as anyone.    In doing reading notes on one of his works without first finishing it I think I will for sure end up learning from my mistakes.   

In Chapter One we met Christopher Tietjens.   He comes from a very well off family and works a statistician for the government.    He is a man of great culture and wide knowledge as evidenced by his hobby of correcting errors in The Encyclopedia Britannica (in the time of the opening of the book-early 1910s-in England-I think the Encyclopedia Britannica was the ultimate authority.   It was also quite expensive so the possession of it is another of the many many class indicators in Parade's End).    Tietjens is traveling on a train with his good friend Macmaster (from Scotland )    The friendship of Tietjens and Macmaster is not a relationship of equals and Macmaster defers to Tietjens as a superior man.   We do not yet know how important Macmaster will be in the story and if his deference to Tietjens is justified but it is there for sure as we start our story.

In Chapter Two we meet Sylvia Tietjens, the wife of Tietjens.   It is from her we learn that his  first name is Christopher and  his nickname is "Chrissie".    There are no accidents I can already see in the work of FMF.   Why "Christopher"?    Is it as obvious as an equation of Tietjens to Jesus or Columbus?   In the 21th century, "Chrissie" is a nickname appropriate for a woman, not a man.    I do not know if the same was true in 1912 so I cannot tell if this is to indicate the wife is mocking him for a lack of masculinity.   We learn first about Sylvia through the conversations of Mrs Satterwaite  (I loved the description of her) and a priest concerning her.  They are talking about Sylvia's attitude toward her husband:

"There are times when a woman hates a man-as Sylvia hates her husband..I tell you I have walked behind a man's back and nearly screamed because of my desire to put my nails into the veins of  his neck.  It was a fascination.   And it is worse with Sylvia.   It's a natural antipathy."

I left chapter one being in awe of the brilliance and cultural depth of Tietjens but wait, his wife seems to see him as a near idiot and an insufferable know it all and bore.   She seems to say she stays married to him only so she can torture him.   She has had numerous affairs, it seems, and seemingly  Tietjens does not have any clue he is not the father of his wife's child.   Here is a  description of Sylvia (we do not yet know how much we can rely on the narrator even though it is told in the 3rd person):

Immensely tall, slight, and slow in her movements, Sylvia Tietjens wore her reddish very fair hair in great bandeaux down over her ears.   Her oval, regular face had an expression of virginal lack of interest such as used to be worn by fashionable Paris courtesans a decade before that time.   

 We are still left a bit to ourselves to figure out from this description what Sylvia looked like.   We know she had red hair for sure.   "Immensely tall"?   well a six foot five woman is immensely tall.   We can guess she was not that tall so we really do not know what this means-does it just mean two or three inches taller than average?  then why call her immense.   I confess I had to look up the meaning of "bandeaux"  and this image appears to be it.   (My knowledge of expressions for fashion accessories of the 1910 is not great.)    I guess we are to assume that either the narrator was familiar enough with fashionable courtesans of ten years prior to the start of the story that he would at once compare Sylvia's expression to theirs or that is the in fact logical way to describe her..   Of course this begs the question as to whether this is an accurate picture of French courtesans or the projection on Sylvia of the sort of images the narrator can relate to.

Here is Sylvia's description of her husband:

I call my husband the Ox.   He is repulsive, like a swollen animal.

Sylvia's mother loves Christopher, she calls him one of her "best boys"  while Sylvia tells us her husband cannot bear her.   We know already our perceptions of these people and relationships are on shifting sand.

One of the pleasure of this work is the many epigram like remarks and sentences that I already have found in abundance in the first 3 chapters.   Here is one from Sylvia  "To know everything about a person is to be bored...bored....bored".   We know already Sylvia is talking for effect, in part.

The chapters two and three have interesting conversations about the nature of marriage, about religion, and relationships and sexual morality.   I was about ready to decide ok Sylvia is a bad person married to a wonderful man until we meet "The General"  in Chapter III who seems not a fool and he goes on an on about how wonderful Sylvia is.


I see Parade's End as totally worth reading for the many marvelous turns of phrase in the book alone and there is so much more in it.   I am really looking forward to going on in this book.    I may write a good number of these reading notes type of posts and then as I finish each section of the tetralogy  I will probably do a sort of summing post or two and then on finishing the work  I will probably do two or three over all posts on the work as a whole.     Because I do not know what is coming next some of  what I say will be in error as i go along but the errors are part of my reading experience.     I may end up doing 20 or more posts as I go along.  (I keep telling myself to make shorter posts on the books I read!)    To those  the read along I will link your posts in here and comment on them if I am able.    


To readers of my blog, I read normally several things at one time and will be posting next on a great super fun  Japanese novel.   I will say the Junichiro Tanizaki is the Japanese novelist that FMF seems most like to me, so far.   

There is a very telling post on Bibliographing that echos my remarks about the wonderful phrases that about so far in Parade's End.

"Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford-some of the great things in Chapter One

The Read Along of Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford (a work in four parts-1924 to 1928-836 pages in the Penguin Books edition) is set to begin April 1.   Several people will be joining in so it should be very interesting-There are no rigid schedules the only request is you link your posts to here and that hopefully we can all comment on each others posts.    I invite any and all to join in.

A  Common Reader has just done a great post concerning on line resources on Ford Madox Ford and Parade's End

I want to just talk a bit about some of the wonders of Chapter 1.  (I will refer to chapters in making references as there are different editions.)   One of the great things I can already see in Parade's End are the marvelous observations about literature, history and current events by the central characters.   I enjoy a novel when the lead characters make me think.   A great novel can, through these remarks, reshape our own perceptions.   Here is a very interesting remark by the lead character of Parade's End, Tietjens:

"I don't read novels."  Tietjens answered.  "I know what is in em.   There has been nothing worth reading written in England since the eighteenth century expect by a woman...but it is natural for you enamel splashers to want to see them selves in bright and variegated literature.  Why shouldn't they?   It a healthy human desire and now that printing and paper are cheap they get it satisfied.

Maybe we do not agree with his remark about English novels but this for sure made me think.   Not just think about if this remark was correct but more about the mind set that would produce it.   Why dismiss all the canon status English male novelists of the 19th century (in an era when political correctness meant something far different than it does now).?

Parade's End  begins shortly before WWI (1914 to 1918)  on a train in England.   The conversations wanders to a consideration on the question as to why a great war is certain to happen.   Here is Tietjens explanation as to why war is sure to occur:

Yes war is inevitable.   Firstly, there is you fellows who cannot be trusted.  Then there is the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and white enamel.   Millions of them all over the world.  Not merely here.   And there aren't enough bathrooms and white enamel in the world to go around

 These few lines go a long way to explain the turmoil of the 20th century.   Here in Asia it can be seen stating the cause of the rise of communism in China with millions of deaths and the reign of Pot Pal in Cambodia,  leaving Europe aside.

This is my first reading of Parade's End and I have read only the first chapter so far but I think I can say we will be treated to 100s of such observations.   Maybe you think they are crazy (at least we now know what an enamel splasher is) but they will make us think and smile as well.  

As Tietjens and his companion Manchester begin to descend from the train here is what they see:

On the platform a number of women in lovely sable cloaks, with purple or red jewel cases, with diaphanous silky scarves flying from motor hoods, were drifting toward the branch train bound for Rye, under the shepherding of erect, burdened footmen.

Ford Madox Ford (FMF from now on) knows how to paint a scene and evoke and era in a few lines.   There  are other things in Chapter one of Parade's End .   There are quotations from wonderful poems spoke by Manchester, passing references to things that allude to events in English history, narrative remarks about  Italian painters such as Botticelli and Rosetti,  and numerous  references to English places.   Chapter One is really nearly an introduction to the gentry in England if one works through the allusions.   The characters are "snobbish" and they do evaluate people based on their clothes, the circumstances of their birth etc.   But remember before we judge them,  some of the lead characters are headed into the abyss of the trenches of WWI.   Tietjens, who we will get to know very well, I think, knows he is a snob and is rather proud of what that means:

All the same, when the war comes it will be those little snobs who will save England, because they've the courage to know what they want and to say so.

I think I will do another post on place name references and cultural asides in Chapter One.   I think FMF in Parade's End has produced a kind of encyclopedic narrative and I want to ponder  a bit how this works using the references we see already in great profusion in Chapter One.  

I found Chapter One a great pleasure to read.   It made be think.   I marveled at the glorious prose.   I dreamed I was riding on a train.   I imagined a day where people were as educated as Tietjen and Manchester obviously are.    I do see the book as possibly itself seeming somehow "snobbish"  and overbearing in its presumption of cultural depth on the part of the reader to some readers.   I actually think I will quite enjoy this aspect of the book and I expect to learn a great deal from it.   I am going to read this book slower than I normally do and will go into greater depth than I ever have before in talking of other books.  To a large extent I am doing this as the writing of the posts will help clarify for me my understanding of the book.    I will also, I think, talk some about the themes of the book but I may focus on the workings of the narrative a bit.   To participants in the read along,  please let me know when you have done a post and I will link it.  

To readers of my blog,   I will, I hope be posting on a number of interesting books at the same time I am posting on Parade's End.   I hope others will join in and I can see just in chapter one the great conversations alone will make the book a wonder to read.   I will only post on Chapter One until the read along officially begins on April 1, 2010.

"Parade's End" and the Ford Madox Ford Page 99 Test

While reading  Amateur Reader's blog, Wuthering Expectations yesterday I came upon a post on the so called page 99 test  devised by Ford Madox Ford.  (Link above).    The basic idea is you open a book to the 99th page.   You then read the first purely discursive paragraph and the quality of prose there can be taken as representative of the quality of the prose of the work as a whole.  This was sort of meant as a pre-read test for a novel new to you.  Ford Madox Ford  (1873 to 1939) had a great influence on the literature of England in the period from 1915 or so up to his death.     Wikipedia sums it up well:

In 1908, he founded The English Review, in which he published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats, and gave debuts to Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. In 1924, he founded The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, France, he made friends with James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford is the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). Known in his role as critic for the statement "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." In a later sojourn in the United States, he was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student). Despite his deep Victorian roots, Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended bitterly

(By coincidence (?) I am now nearly done with The Broken Tower:  The Life of Hart Crane by Paul Mariani, a brilliant wonderful literary biography I will post on soon.    It turns out that while in Paris Hart  stayed for a while in the  apartment of Ford through the courtesy of their mutual friend, Alan Tate.) 

I am attempting to host a read along on Parade's End, a tetralogy set in dealing with WWI and the immediate after years starting on April 1, 2010.   I am very happy that some have shown an interest in joining in.   There will be no rigid rules, deadlines, schedules etc just like minded people reading the same book around the same time and reading and hopefully talking about each others posts.


I decided to apply the "page 99" test to  Parade's End, using the Penguin Press Edition of the work.


The 99th page test of the first section, Some Do Not (I started the count not with the page numbers but with the page count) found this:

She pushes her daughter out of her seat, and moving around besides the young man, she overwhelmed him with vociferous love.  As Tietjens had turned to speak to Mrs Duchemin she had recognized his aquiline profile as exactly that of her father at her own wedding breakfast.  To the table that knew it by heart--though Tietjens himself didn't--she recited the story of how his father had saved her life and was her mascot.   And she offered the son-for to the father she had never been allowed to make any return-her house, her purse, her time, her all.  

There is a way of life depicted in this short paragraph.    We have to be active in reading it.   What does it mean to have it declared that your father was the mascot of Mrs Duchemin?    It is overwhelming in its understatement and portrays action in a wonderful way.   We imagine the shock of all when Mrs Duchemin jumps up!    It evokes a world where ties matter, where people talked in complete sentences, where history mattered and where a woman could quite plausibly look at a man and have the thought go through her mind that his profile was "aquiline".   In the second to the last line most writers would say "To the father", where Ford's use of "For to" does make the reader see this had become in the mind of Mrs Duchemin and those in her immediate circle a kind of personal epic tale.   "For to the father"  is from an epic or at the very least a fairy tale brought to life in the retelling over and over.   In a way, the paragraph is about a dying empire in the form of a legacy that will never be passed on.

In reading The Good Soldier I learned that you must keep your wits fully about you in reading Ford.   The seeming meaning of a line on page 22 may be quite undercut by a revelation 100 pages further in.    There are layers of irony and feints to delight and prose as refined as it comes to   savor while  on a verandah contemplating what drink you wish to be brought to you while trying to forget about the war to end all wars.

In my own mind I have a test for greatness in a literary work.    (I have several but this is one I developed while reading the work of the great early 20th century Japanese novelists Natsume Soseki)-I call it the "Soseki test":

The pleasure we gain from a Noh play springs not from any skill at presenting the raw human feeling of the everyday world but from clothing feeling as it is in layer upon layer of art, and in a kind of slowed serenity of deportment not found in the real world.

(I have read a number of the great Japanese novelists in the last six months.  The Good Soldier reminds me of the work of Junichiro Tanizaki in that the smallest line may seemingly  destroy our understanding of all we have read and if we are not careful we will miss the point.     In my opinion, one of the uses of literary art is to teach us to see that there is no quite fixed social reality, it is all interwoven tales.     I will be, among other things, applying The Soseki test to Parade's End.   

I invite all interested parties to read along with us starting April 1.   Read at your own pace.   All I really ask is that one place at least a comment on my blog when you post or have some thoughts on the work so we can all join in.   This is my first time attempting such a project.   I hope, of course, lots of  readers will join in or at least read the posts.  (I promise not to write a long commentary on every paragraph!)


Mel u

Reading of Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End" to begin April 1-

Not two long ago I read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford for the first time.     I see The Good Soldier as among the very best novels ever written.    Ford had a huge literary output  (some 80 books) and helped numerous other now  canon status writers of the first half of the 20 century (including Joyce, Conrad, Hemingway and Pound).    I began to look for other works by Ford.    Everything lead to his four part work Parade's End.  Anthony Burgess has called  the work the best novel in the English Language.   (The work is artistically a whole.   It was published in four parts for business reasons.)    When pressed on this he said ok maybe it is second best behind The Good Soldier.   We know this is probably meant to be taken as hyperbolic but  it is without rival as a novel of WWI and the Imperial British Sensibility at the zenith of the empire.   The book is considered to be in part a great work of genius, though a flawed one.   I wanted to find out for myself.   I am inviting others to read  Parade's End starting around April 1, 2010.   There will be no time schedule or anything like that.   I do not see it as a read along just kind of people reading and posting on the book in around the same time frame.   I accept in the end no one may read along on this and that is ok.   I have my full time to devote to reading if I wish and I know others do not so my schedule cannot be followed by most.   I also know that many will not find the work to their taste.       I read the first chapter this morning and I really liked it but I could see others as seeing it as too mannered and elitist.    My hopes are very high for this book.   I plan to do at least one maybe two or three posts on each section.  If anyone does a post on the book I will link it here and if they like I would be happy to guest post it here.

I invite any and all to join in and go at their own pace and wishes.   Penguin Press has a nice edition of the work with a brilliant introduction by Max Saunders (foremost authority on Ford).   I hope to begin reading this about April 1, 2010.

Please let me know if you are interested in joining in

rereadinglives@gmail.com

Mel u