PENGUIN BOOKS
Parade’s End
Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in Merton, Surrey in 1873. He married Elsie Martindale in 1894. His first published works were fairy stories. In 1898 he met Joseph Conrad and they collaborated on several works, including the novels The Inheritors and Romance. He published over eighty books in total, The Fifth Queen appearing in three parts during the period 1907–8. In 1915 he published The Good Soldier, which he regarded as his finest achievement. In the same year he enlisted in the army and served as an infantry officer. Parade’s End, the culmination of his experiences during the First World War, was published in four parts between 1924 and 1928. He moved to Paris in 1922 and two years later founded the transatlantic review, whose contributors included, among others, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. In his later years he divided his time between France and America. Ford Madox Ford also published several volumes of autobiography and reminiscence, including Return to Yesterday (1931) and It was the Nightingale (1933), and a final characteristically personal and ambitious volume of criticism, The March of Literature. He died in Deauville in 1939.
Max Saunders is Professor of English at King’s College London, where he teaches modern English, European and American literature. He studied at the universities of Cambridge and Harvard, and was a Research Fellow and then College Lecturer at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is the author of the two-volume Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (Oxford University Press, 1996), the editor of Ford’s Selected Poems and War Prose (Carcanet, 1997 and 1999), and has published essays on Ford, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Freud, Pound, Ruskin and others.
FORD MADOX FORD
Parade’s End
With a New Introduction by Max Saunders
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
Some Do Not… first published by Duckworth 1924
No More Parades first published by Duckworth 1925
A Man Could Stand Up — first published by Duckworth 1926
The Last Post first published by Duckworth 1928
This edition published in Penguin Books 1982
Reprinted with a new introduction in Penguin Classics 2002
7
Introduction copyright © Max Saunders 2002
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-93307-8
Contents
Introduction
Some Do Not…
No More Parades
A Man Could Stand Up –
The Last Post
Introduction
The best novel produced by a British writer (and British has everything to do with culture, nothing to do with blood) is the tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford (previously named Ford Madox Hueffer) called Parade’s End. It is also the finest novel about the First World War. It is also the finest novel about the nature of British society. Ford is neglected. The finest editor of his time, he not only encouraged Joyce and Lawrence but actually wrote a good deal of Joseph Conrad’s fiction for him. If this judgment on the supremacy of Parade’s End be cavilled at, I am prepared to yield and to submit Ford’s The Good Soldier as the best novel ever produced in England.1
These provocations from Anthony Burgess say much about Ford, and the series of four novels that make up his postwar masterpiece Parade’s End. They tell us, first of all, that it is more than a great war novel, or a great novel of historical change: it is a great novel. Ford was a prodigiously versatile writer, moving agilely between most genres. But he saw himself as above all someone constantly searching for a ‘new form’ for fiction. Parade’s End engages with culture, with the nature of British society, with the war, certainly; and with many other issues that these things imply, and which are still pressingly relevant: feminism; masculinity; the relation between the sexes; class; politics; questions of nation and race; aggression and destructiveness; trauma; memory; the environment; technology; survival; creativity; art; representation; history. None the less, we should not forget that these things are Ford’s material, to be worked into a novel rather than a document or a discourse.
In the summer of 1915 Ford was forty-one, much older than the average volunteer. He could have stayed in England, and continued to write propaganda for the government. But he enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment, and remained in the army until January 1919. His military experience was very varied. Although at the Front for only two months, he witnessed what he described at the time as ‘the two greatest strafes of history’, the Battle of the Somme, and the Ypres Salient.2 He was frequently under bombardment, and suffered from concussion, shell-shock, and lung damage. He was attached to the First Line Transport, which kept him moving between the Front and the support lines. He was also in base camps, a casualty clearing station, army hospitals, even a bombed train. For a time he was responsible for a group of prisoners of war. From the spring of 1917 he was judged too unwell to serve in France, and was given light duty commanding a company of the 23rd King’s Liverpool Regiment, stationed in North Wales. Then he was posted to a training command at Redcar, on the Yorkshire coast, where he spent the rest of the war. In 1918 he was promoted to captain, and attached to the Staff, going ‘all over the N[orth]. of England inspecting training & lecturing’.3
The war redefined the rest of his life and work; and his experience of it was transformed into Parade’s End. This is not to say it is an autobiographical roman-à-clef. Many of Tietjens’ experiences were Ford’s – especially his shell-shock, and skirmishes with military authorities – but some were not. Tietjens is also partly based on Ford’s mathematician friend, the Yorkshireman Arthur Marwood, though Marwood was too unwell for the army.