Read along of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: First impressions and more considered views of part two: “No More Parades”

This is part two of four instalments that I intend to write while reading Parade’s End. Mel U at The Reading Life hosts this read along.

In this the second book of Ford Madox Ford’s Parades End the well appointed drawing rooms of the wealthy and the dewy grass fields of the English countryside give way to an altogether different landscape. No More Parades is the story of 48 hours in the wartime life of our hero (if hero he can be called), Christopher Tietjens. Having left him in London at the end of the last book, we now find him in France in a senior position away from the front line but nevertheless surrounded on all sides by the realities of war. He now inhabits a “dust covered world” and Ford’s language is awash with browns and greys and the suggestion that colour and jollity, such as it was has now disappeared from view.

This new theatre is in large part, a chance for Ford to explore old themes – the nature of the relationship between Tietjens and his wife Sylvia and struggles that Tietjens faces in being an English gentleman in a world increasingly at odds with such an identity. The illumination of Tietjens’ mind is skilfully accomplished through the description of his thoughts. Ford uses a stream of consciousness-like technique to lead us through the avenues of Tietjens thoughts. He emerges much as he emerged in Some Do Not…” but even more so: he is a man utterly hidebound by his own values yet powerless to enforce them meaningfully.

Sylvia on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish. She appears unexpectedly in France and causes a dreadful crisis for her husband during the course of No More Parades. Her visceral hatred for her husband and compulsion to punish and humiliate him know no bounds. Here in this the second book we get a better look at Sylvia and at the workings of her mind. She is in many respects an awful woman and her actions quite beyond comprehension. Having said that, there is something appealing about her as a character and the reason for this is that she lacks propriety in all things – she stands outside normal mores and sparkles in a landscape otherwise covered in dust and conformity. In a strange way she is like a living Rebecca de Winter, a woman whose glittering personality might be admirable if she did not turn it to such nasty ends.

Where Some Do Not felt like a play, this book feels more like a series of monologues. It is more psychological than the previous book and altogether more intense. Ford plays with the idea of the unreliable narrator – we see action narrated by Sylvia’s axe grinding imagination in the same way that we Tietjens’ methodical mind trying to process that which may entirely beyond method. Ford has surely chosen to illuminate this marriage in a war zone for a reason – and that reason is that no stage could sum up better, the conflict between husband and wife.

Mel U at The Reading Life hosts this read along and there is also an excellent post on the novel by Dwight at A Common Reader. I have included front covers past and present and a picture of Ford Madox Ford as illustrations.

Look out for my first impressions and more considered view of part three A Man Could Stand Up.... coming soon.

Read along of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: First impressions and more considered views of part one: “Some do not”

This is part one of four instalments that I intend to write while reading Parade’s End. Mel U at The Reading Life hosts this read along.

I must admit that when I unwrapped the parcel from Amazon France and beheld Ford Madox Ford’s door stopping, flood blocking, handbag busting, super-size “Parade’s End”, my first thought was “what have I committed to here?” I have now finished the first of the four parts of this book – Some Do Not – and although there were moments when this thought came back to me, for the most part, this has been a read of challenge and discovery that I would recommend. It has become a joy.

The subject of the novel is the upstanding aristocratic Tory gentleman Christopher Tietjens. He is a man of education culture and means whose home life is far from idyllic. In fact, his wife, who is a notorious beauty and something of a bed-hopper has, at the opening of the book, left him for another man. A great deal of effort is expended by Ford to show that Tietjens is a vast intellect and a brick of the old order, but I have to say that in the first few chapters of the book my view of him was that he was an absolutely fearful prig and a total snob. When the runaway wife Sylvia puts in an appearance early in the book and claims to hate her husband because he is a patronising bore, I must say that I could see where she was coming from. The novel opens in the years immediately before the First World War – a conflict which Tietjens predicts magisterially from a train carriage, to be the inevitable result of social mobility. All rather ridiculous... or so I thought. Now, I think that these impressions were partly motivated by shock at the size of the book and compounded by reading too quickly, because as I got deeper into the Tietjens world, my ideas changed – the characters became somehow more real and the plot more involving.

Christopher Tietjens, for whom I had taken such a dislike, is slowly and beautifully revealed to be a man of deep intelligence. He is a questioning and humane soul who is unquestionably, also a snob. Through the layers of the narrative he comes to be seen as a victim and a proper subject of pity. His victimhood is based on the fact that almost everyone inexplicably appears to hate him – his wife, his brother, the social climbing characters of his daily life. He is a proper subject of pity because although there is a temptation to see Tietjens as being an “old fashioned” character in a “modern” world – in fact his displacement is far greater than that. His brand of “old fashioned” is one that never existed, was always a myth, was always an aspiration rather than reality. He floats around the narrative of the novel – almost totally out of time. His only true friends are an aging novelist and her young, spirited suffragette daughter, the lovely Valentine Wannop. Tietjen’s desperate love for Valentine grows and grows until he can barely contain it, but at the end of part one I am left wondering whether he will ever be able to reconcile his worldview with his love for a woman who is not his wife.

Some do not is a political book and it is a book about a society. Tietjens represents an idealised view of Edwardian England – of the unmuddied, clear-headed, righteous, humble, Englishman. Those around him, and in particular his wife Sylvia represent the onslaught of the modern world – a place where people may advance above their station, where the old hierarchies and certainties are a nothing, a reckless party, a meaningless charade. The themes of the novel – duty versus inclination, morality, love, society versus the self – they are all introduced and discussed directly by the characters. The narrative has the feel of a play as much of the story is acted out in epic scenes where characters come and go and plot and personalities are revealed bit by bit. There is something wonderfully Socratic about the way Ford tells us the story. He jumps about in time, he discusses everything, he makes his reader question first impressions. The surprising thing about Some Do Not is that nothing turns out to be quite as you expect it to be – so much so that I am quite sure that there will be more changes of heart as I go along.

Mel U at The Reading Life hosts this read along and there is also an excellent post on the novel by Dwight at A Common Reader. I have included the penguin front covers past and present and a picture of Ford Madox Ford as illustrations.

Look out for my first impressions and more considered view of part two No More Parades.... coming soon.

A brilliant way to treat entangled lives: "A Crisis of Brilliance" by David Boyd Haycock

I am standing in our kitchen wondering why I chose David Boyd Haycock’s A Crisis of Brilliance as the first book I read at our new home in France. Only tiny traces of the massive snowfall that greeted our arrival remain in the garden and half remembered schoolgirl French is slowly coming back to me. I do still feel like a bit of a newbie – a student on an exchange trip rather than a permanent resident. So maybe that is the reason behind choosing such a quintessentially English book for my first read.

A Crisis of Brilliance is that rare and excellent thing: a collective biography. It traces the lives of five British artists of the early twentieth century – Stanley Spencer, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler and Richard Nevinson. These artists all entered the Slade School of Art by wildly divergent routes at approximately the same time. They met, fought, loved and formed there and they are rightly associated with one another. When Britain went to war in 1914 they would be shattered apart – never to be reunited – never to recapture the glory days of their youth. For each of them the war would mean something different – alienation; disintegration; fear; grief; development; fame. For all of them their best work would emerge from the horror of conflict. The images that they produced, of landscapes torn asunder and men treated like machines have become standard ways of looking at the Great War – but at the time they were groundbreaking.

There are too few collective biographies in the world. Thinking about people in groups makes so much sense – we all live love and work in groups and the traditional format of the cradle to grave individual biography is often limiting. The subjects of Haycock’s book were drawn inexorably together and so Haycock has treated them together. They were all brilliant subversives who rejected the ordinary and the respectable. Individually and collectively, they lived for their art. In some cases they are already well known. Anyone who has seen “Carrington” will know the tragedy of Dora Carrington’s end as well as the unlikely subject of her most abiding love. Visitors to Cookham will know of the gentle, gauche Stanley Spencer whose paintings have come to represent so much of English identity. The brilliance of Haycock’s book is that he shows the staggering level of entanglement between these people.
This tale is a whirlwind of passion, repression, love, intelligence and alienation. Although it is non-fiction, Haycock’s prose reads effortlessly and often has the power of a novel – it moves from one scene to another, taking in a vast array of colourful characters. In many respects the beguiling, enchanting, often dishonest Dora Carrington, or “Carrington” as she preferred to be known stands at its centre. Crop haired, charming, confused, deceitful, she attracts almost everyone but struggles to respond to their affections. Mark Gertler, the Jewish émigré artist is the brooding, difficult heathcliffe – tormented by his visceral love for Carrington. Paul Nash stands aloof: courteous, urbane and thoughtful. Stanley Spencer, that genius of the English countryside is locked into a world where the verge of Jordan meets the Thames valley. Richard Nevinson is the angry, difficult young man who pushes away those whom he loves the most. Although we have all heard about them before, because Haycock has been brave with his format and approach, they come alive afresh on the page.