The tetralogy thus needs to be set alongside other major works of European Modernism as much as other war novels, or other English texts. Modernism, after all, was essentially international; and Ford was himself something of a one-man international republic, living in France and New York while writing Parade’s End, founding and editing the transatlantic review to publish Joyce, Stein, Rhys and Hemingway. And in his memoirs of those tumultous days, he explains how it was the death of Proust that made him realize how he needed to write about the war.10 The case for seeing Parade’s End as a major European modernist fiction brings us back to the War and the question of history and time, due to the masterly way Ford combines war-book and time-book. Its broad social and historical concern with the war stops it collapsing into self-consciousness, solipsism and aestheticism. Conversely, Ford’s concern for time stops it being simply another war book. It is concerned with the history before and after the war too: the descent into madness, and the attempt to regenerate afterwards. And, as these terms already suggest, it is concerned not just with generalized categories of history and society, but individual experiences: memory, terror, amnesia, breakdown, recovery. Like Ford’s other war prose, it renders not just the experiences at the time, but the after-effects of war on the mind.
Like most of the other works discussed here, and many more – Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo, Gertrude Stein’s ‘Composition as Explanation’, Heidegger’s Being and Time – Parade’s End shares a widespread postwar perplexity about memory and time. ‘Well, then, what is time?’ asks Mann’s protagonist Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain.11 ‘When you thought of Time in those days your mind wavered […]’, thinks Valentine (p. 517). To Wyndham Lewis, who was writing his polemic Time and Western Man while Ford was publishing the Tietjens novels, modernists seemed tiresomely obsessed with what he called ‘The Time-doctrine’: something he blamed on the philosophy of Bergson and William James, or Einstein’s ideas about ‘space-time’.12 For the war’s survivors, though, it was not only the new philosophy and physics that had destabilized matter and time. Characteristically obtuse even at his most acute, Lewis doesn’t grasp that it was the war that provided the main context challenging the realities of time, memory, history and sensation. Whereas Ford does in Parade’s End, composing it with that crucial relation between war, time, and consciousness at its heart. In his memoirs of his postwar life, It was the Nightingale, Ford writes hauntingly of how civilization had been defamiliarized after the experience of the abyss:
No one could have come through that shattering experience and still view life and mankind with any normal vision. In those days you saw objects that the earlier mind labelled as houses. They had been used to seem cubic and solid permanences. But we had seen Ploegsteert where it had been revealed that men’s dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. Man and even Beast… all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields […] Nay, it had been revealed to you that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos.13
This is more discursive than what Parade’s End does with perceptions. (Perhaps it’s more like the ruminative digressive mode of Proust and Mann?) But it gives a good idea of the effect Ford sought in the tetralogy.
Parade’s End was successful in its time, making Ford more money that any of his other works. It was also ahead of its time, though, anticipating a shift in the way we tend to think about war. In the 1960s and 1970s, the era of student revolution, Vietnam and the demise of the deference society, the ‘myth’ of the First World War was an Oedipal one, of young men persecuted by their father-figures, whether by malice or stupidity: ‘lions led by donkeys’ (as presented in Oh What a Lovely War, say). The madness of authority. Poets like Owen and Sassoon were valued above all for the anger of their social truth-telling. For our more psycho-therapeutic times, it is trauma that most interests us: shell-shock. Sassoon and Owen with W. H. R. Rivers at Craig-lockart Mental Hospital. The authority of madness. It is hard to see how Pat Barker could have written Regeneration and the rest of her Ghost Road trilogy without Ford’s example here.
It was for his inventive re-mapping of the psychological that Ford admired Joyce. He wrote a pioneering appreciation of Ulysses, before the better-known defences by Pound and Eliot, which demonstrates his critical insight when encountering the really new:
‘Ulysses’ contains the undiscovered mind of man; it is human consciousness analyzed as it has never before been analyzed. Certain books change the world. This, success or failure, ‘Ulysses’ does: for no novelist with serious aims can henceforth set out upon a task of writing before he has at least formed his own private estimate as to the rightness or wrongness of the methods of the author of ‘Ulysses.’ If it does not make an epoch – and it well may! – it will at least mark the ending of a period.14
Less than a month after reading the book, Ford knew that his next fictional task would inevitably be influenced by Ulysses. And of course ‘the ending of a period’, or period’s end, is very much the core of Parade’s End.
Ford experiments with the Joycean stream of consciousness, especially in the final novel, The Last Post. Joyce’s example mattered in another way too. It showed Ford that he could give freer play to qualities that had always permeated his writing: the subliminal, the hallucinatory, pastiche and parody. Readers approaching Parade’s End as realism or impressionism are sometimes disturbed by its excesses. Three aspects in particular have been criticized: the analogy between the world war and the sex-war; the caricatured presentation of English society; and the stylistic shifts from one volume to the next. But all three indicate that rather than not quite succeeding at documentary realism, Ford was instead attempting something closer to Joyce’s achievement: a work that would register the mentality of his time through an ‘impressionism’ that allowed for the play of the parodic. It should be read as more like Georg Grosz’s expressionist visions of humanity distorted by war, perhaps, than as a finicky Pre-Raphaelite detailing of surfaces. In his novels as well as his anecdotes, Ford was a master of exaggeration – a trait to which Burgess pays homage in his claims that are truer than they sound.
He is certainly not alone in his admiration for Parade’s End. W. H. Auden wrote: ‘There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.’15 Graham Greene called the Tietjens books ‘almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English’.16 William Carlos Williams judged the four books ‘the English prose masterpiece of their time’.17 Samuel Hynes has described the sequence as ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’.18 These judgements are provocative too, in their own way. Whereas Malcolm Bradbury’s double claim best expresses how Parade’s End has been increasingly seen over the last few decades: as ‘the most important and complex British novel to deal with the overwhelming subject of the Great War’; and as ‘central Modernist novel of the 1920s, in which it is exemplary’.19