Parade's End

Parade's End is a tetralogy (four related novels) by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. It is set mainly in England and on the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life vividly depicted in the novels.

History

The four novels were originally published under the titles: Some Do Not . . . (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up -- (1926), and Last Post (or The Last Post in the U.S.A.) (1928). They were combined into one volume as Parade's End, which has been ranked at number 57 on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list. It has been adapted for television by Sir Tom Stoppard for the BBC, and is due to be broadcast in 2011.

Plot

The novels chronicle the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy land-owning family who is serving in the British Army during World War I. Tietjens may or may not be the father of the child of his wife, Sylvia, a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him. Meanwhile, Tietjens' incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited suffragette, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. The two central novels follow Tietjens in the army in France and Belgium as he ruminates on how to be a better soldier and untangle his strange social life.

Literary notes

Almost uniquely among war novels, Tietjens' consciousness takes primacy over the war-events it filters. Ford constructs a protagonist for whom the war is but one layer of his life, and not always even the most prominent though he is in the middle of it. In a narrative beginning before the war and ending after the armistice, Ford's project is to situate an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral and psychological complexity.

Textual History

The four novels were reissued separately by Penguin just after the Second World War (in 1948). They were first combined into one volume under the collective title Parade's End (which had been suggested by Ford, though he didn't live to see an omnibus version) in the Knopf edition of 1950, which has been the basis of several subsequent reissues. Graham Greene controversially omitted Last Post from his Bodley Head edition of Ford's writing, calling it "an afterthought which he (Ford) had not intended to write and later regretted having written. Greene went on to state that "...the Last Post was more than a mistake--it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade's End." Certainly Last Post is very different from the other three novels. It is concerned with peace and reconstruction, and Christopher Tietjens is absent for most of the narrative, which is structured as a series of interior monologues by those closest to him. Yet it has had influential admirers, from Dorothy Parker and Carl Van Doren to Anthony Burgess and Malcolm Bradbury (who also included it in his 1992 Everyman edition). The first annotated and critical edition of the novels will be published by Carcanet Press in 2010-11.

Further Reading

For further discussions of the novels comprising Parade’s End see for example:

Auden, W. H., ‘Il Faut Payer’, Mid-Century, no. 22 (Feb. 1961), 3-10.

Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, third edition (Manchester: Carcanet: 1996).

Bradbury, Malcolm, ‘Introduction’, Parade's End (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992).

Brown, Dennis, ‘Remains of the Day: Tietjens the Englishman’, in Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, no. 2, ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA.: Rodopi, 2003), 161-74.

Calderaro, Michela A., A Silent New World: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (Bologna. Editrice CLUEB [Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria, Editrice Bologna], 1993).

Cassell, Richard A., Ford Madox Ford: A Study of his Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962).

Gordon, Ambrose, Jr, The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1964).

Gasiorek, Andrzej, ‘The Politics of Cultural Nostalgia: History and Tradition in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End’ Literature & History, 11:2 (third series) (Autumn 2002), 52-77

Green, Robert, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Haslam, Sara, Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel, and the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

Judd, Alan, Ford Madox Ford (London: Collins, 1990)

Meixner, John A., Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

Moser, Thomas C., The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Saunders, Max, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), II.

Seiden, Melvin, ‘Persecution and Paranoia in Parade’s End’, Criticism, 8:3 (Summer 1966), 246-62.

Skinner, Paul, ‘The Painful Processes of Reconstruction: History in No Enemy and Last Post’, in History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, no. 3 (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York: 2004), 65-75.

Tate, Trudi, Modernism, History and the First World War (Machester: Manchester University Press, 1998).

Wiesenfarth, Joseph, Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

Wiley, Paul L., Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1962).