Some Do Not: A Classic that Scares You

I re-read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The classic tetralogy Parade’s End scares me because frankly I have to work hard to keep track of the interweaving of the novel’s past (before and during WWI) and present (just after WWI) and the thoughts of the characters as they act and respond to change. The modernist treatment of Wes Civ being blown up is magisterial and majesty is not easy on the first reading.

Some Do Not – Ford Madox Ford

This is the first book in the Parade’s End tetralogy in which poet W.H. Auden says the author “makes it quite clear that World War I was a retribution visited upon Western Europe for the sins and omissions of its ruling class, for which not only they, but also the innocent conscripted millions on both sides must suffer.”

The sins and omissions are many and various. The protagonist Christopher Tietjens uses his prodigious memory and math ability to serve government bureaucracy with honor and responsibility. But because Tietjens thinks fudging figures is dishonorable, the Department of Statistics heaps honors on its more biddable members like Tietjens’ friend Vincent Macmaster. A banker wants to steal Tietjens’ difficult wife Sylvia so he abuses his power at the bank to bring Tietjens’ name into disrepute and break up his marriage. A general is so conceited about his ability to drive that he scoffs at hiring a driver and thus becomes a menace to himself and others on the road.

People of wealth and power put on a façade of grace, character and respectability but they act in irresponsible, dishonest and vindictive ways. Violent and savage too. Upset that their golf game has been disrupted by demonstrating Suffragettes, businessmen from the city chase a woman, shouting insanely, “'Strip the bitch naked!...Ugh...Strip the bitch stark naked!”

In their social lives, members of the ruling classes never act any better than they should. Sylvia has used a pregnancy to trick Tietjens into marriage. Though her mother likes Tietjens and feels deceit is a low trick, she covers for her daughter’s lies and chicanery. Sylvia - vain, idle, overdressed besides bored, angry, and sad - runs away with another man, returns without remorse, and tortures Tietjens with her tetchy moods and cruel words. She also throws food at him. 

Edith Ethel Duchemin, her lofty mind on the high art of the Pre-Raphaelites, hates Tietjens because her husband Macmaster owes him thousands of pounds which she sees no reason to pay back. Highly moral on the work but not right, the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti is summed up by Tietjens:

I tell you it revolts me to think of that obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown and the underclothes he’s slept in, standing beside a five shilling model with crimped hair, or some Mrs. W. Three Stars, gazing into a mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about passion.

Gurgling with high moral purpose and malice, society is willing to believe lies told about Tietjens, who is an English gentleman, a Tory type that went extinct in the 18th century, a make of man reduced to obsolescence by socio-economic brutes. 

The only bright spot in Tietjens’ life is Valentine Wannop, a Suffragette of intelligence and deep feelings. In a scene rendered with commitment to Conrad’s ideal of making us readers see, Ford has them fall in love as they drive a horse drawn carriage at night in the fog. They get lost and are out all night, which as any listener of Wake Up Little Susie will know, becomes the basis of talk. Ever practical, Valentine realizes becoming the mistress of Tietjens is not happening – they are not the kind of people to have affairs -  but she thinks incessantly about him. Valentine and her mother are merely different, which causes of mob of war-frenzied yokels to drive them from a village cottage to a shabby apartment in London.

During the Battle of the Somme in 1916 Ford was shell-shocked. His personal experience must have informed Tietjens’ description of memory loss and the sensation of “numbness” of his brain. Sylvia urges Tietjens to talk about it, not because she believes in the healing power of talking it out, but to torment him. He says, “The point about it is that I don’t know what happened and I don’t remember what I did. There are three weeks of my life that are dead… What I remember is waking up in C.S.S. and not being able to remember my own name.”

Ford’s modernist prose and technique are difficult even on re-reading. He uses paradox, time shifts, and, quoting the writer himself, “the intricate tangle of references and cross-references.” His fiction rewards attentive readers who re-read and approach serious fiction with respect. Other writers like Siegfried Sasson seemed to mourn that The First World War exploded traditional social and cultural truths of Europe but Ford’s thesis is that the war was the inevitable outcome of social tensions, abuse of power, madness, cruelty, greed, anger and anxiety. Ford truly was what he thought a serious novelist should be, a historian of his time.