Last Post: A Classic that Scares You

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

Modernist novels are hard, what with time shifts, dissembling narrators, stream of consciousness, and themes forlorn and bleak. But I felt I had better re-read the Parade’s End tetralogy in order to understand more deeply Ford’s points of view and way of writing. Plus, this summer I was possessed by the same humid urge that drove me in 2015 to read all six Chronicles of Barsetshire one after the other.

Last Post – Ford Madox Ford

Motionless and mute, Mark Tietjens lies on a covered couch in front of Groby Hall, the Yorkshire manor of his time-honored English family. The blow hit him when, on the day of the armistice, he learned that the Allies were refraining from invading Germany to defeat the enemy and occupy his lands. Like William Tecumseh Sherman’s stomping on the South to wreck their morale forever, Mark figures, “It was the worst disservice you could do your foes not to let them know that remorseless consequences follow determined actions.”

But Mark does not find peace and tranquility - his much younger brother Christopher's wife Sylvia wants to rent the family home to a rich and vulgar American (who thinks she is the reincarnation of Louis XVI aristocrat) for the simple reason that Sylvia wants to annoy him and humiliate the family. For years, she has fought a fierce war against her husband, now impoverished and seeking peace the arms of a lover.

Reading Last Post, I missed Christopher Tietjens, but I did like Marie Léonie, Mark's girlfriend, a former toe dancer from France. She takes care of him with loving affection and never speaks English.She has the odd prejudice that the Britons lost only “a few hundreds” in the First World War.  In fact, it was a million dead and two million wounded. How little people know what other people go through.

We also receive more insight into Sylvia. Her malice toward Christopher has driven her off her dot. The previous novel A Man Could Stand Up ended with a wonderful scene of celebration on Armistice Day, but it is revealed in this one that during that scene inventive Sylvia managed to come between Christopher and his girlfriend Valentine once again. I mustn’t reveal how, and can only hint that the stratagem was pure Sylvia. After four novels with her, we readers are prone to have a grudging regard for the degree to which, in Father Consett’s words in the first volume, she wants to make the world “echo with her wrongs.” We feel sad that her spite has made her unstable and strange.

Comparisons with Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway and many others pervade the literary criticism of Ford's work. He has his own style. This one is sober and melancholy, serious and ironic. The end of the First World War brought an end to many illusions and complacencies, especially among artists, readers and other rebellious types. With his poetically rich vision, Ford represents middle period modernism (1920s and 1930s) in England which, with its atmospheric precision and at the same time soft-focus, makes us see, as in Impressionist pictures. 

Last Post has divided critics and readers since it was published in 1928. Taking a cue from misgivings about the novel in Ford’s own letters, Graham Greene omitted it from an edition of Parade's End, making it a trilogy. But I think this novel is worth reading. Last Post is a novel of elegy, like a lot of British novels in the 1920s and 1930s. Women in Love and Mrs. Dalloway don’t mention the war but, like Last Post, they are about the effects of the First World War and about remembering and working through loss and upheaval.