Parade's End

Background

Ford stated that his purpose in creating this work was "the obviating of all future wars". The four novels were originally published under the titles: Some Do Not ... (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up — (1926) and Last Post (The Last Post in the USA) (1928); the books were combined into one volume as Parade's End in 1950. In 2012, HBO, BBC and VRT produced a television adaptation, written by Tom Stoppard and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall.

Plot summary

The novels chronicle the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory", a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy landowning family who serves in the British Army during the First World War. His wife Sylvia is a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him through her sexual promiscuity. Tietjens may or may not be the father of his wife's child. Meanwhile, his incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited pacifist and women's suffragist, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe.

The two central novels follow Tietjens in the army in France and Belgium, as well as Sylvia and Valentine in their separate paths over the course of the war.

Literary notes

Notably among war novels, Tietjens' consciousness takes primacy over the war-events it filters. Ford constructs a protagonist for whom the war is but one layer of his life, and not always even the most prominent even though he is in the middle of it. In a narrative beginning before the war and ending after the armistice, Ford's project is to situate an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral, and psychological complexity.

Robie Macauley wrote that "the Tietjens story...is less about the incident of a single war than about a whole era" and its destruction. "Ford took as the scheme for his allegory the life of one man, Christopher Tietjens, a member of an extinct species, which, as he says, 'died out sometime in the 18th century.' Representing in himself the order and stability of another age, he must experience the disruptive present."

The work is also striking in its investigation of the relationship among gender dynamics, war, and societal upheaval. Scholar David Ayers notes that "Parade's End is virtually alone of the male writing of the 1920s in affirming the ascendance of women and advocating a course of graceful withdrawal from dominance for men".

Textual history

Penguin reissued the four novels separately in 1948, just after the Second World War.

The novels were first combined into one volume under the collective title Parade's End (which had been suggested by Ford, although he did not live to see an omnibus version) in the Knopf edition of 1950, which has been the basis of several subsequent reissues.

Graham Greene controversially omitted Last Post from his 1963 Bodley Head edition of Ford's writing, calling it "an afterthought which he (Ford) had not intended to write and later regretted having written." Greene went on to state that "...the Last Post was more than a mistake—it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade's End." Certainly Last Post is very different from the other three novels; it is concerned with peace and reconstruction, and Christopher Tietjens is absent for most of the narrative, which is structured as a series of interior monologues by those closest to him. Yet it has had influential admirers, from Dorothy Parker and Carl Clinton Van Doren to Anthony Burgess and Malcolm Bradbury (who included it in his 1992 Everyman edition).

Carcanet Press published the first annotated and critical edition of the novels, edited by Max Saunders, Joseph Wiesenfarth, Sara Haslam, and Paul Skinner, in 2010–11.

Adaptations

• Theatre 625: Parade's End (1964), three-part BBC videotaped serial with Ronald Hines and Judi Dench.
• Parade's End (2012), five-part BBC/HBO television serial) by Susanna White, script by Tom Stoppard, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall.

References

References

1. Barnes, Julian. (24 August 2012). "A tribute to Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford". The Guardian.
2. Macauley, Robie. (1950). "Introduction". Alfred A. Knopf.
3. Macauley, Robie. (1950). "Introduction". Alfred A. Knopf.
4. Gray, John. "John Gray's New Year's Resolution". New Statesman.
5. Gordon, Mary. (March 2018). "Book Reviews: ''Parade's End'' by Ford Madox Ford". Style.
6. Meixner, John. (1962). "Ford Madox Ford's Novels". U of Minnesota Press.
7. [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Parades-End Parade's End. novels by Ford. Britannica]
8. "Parade's End". BBC.
9. Macauley, Robie. (1950). "Introduction". Alfred A. Knopf.
10. Ayers, David. (1999). "English Literature of the 1920s". Edinburgh University Press.
11. Ford, Ford Madox. (1950). "Parade's End". Knopf.
12. Ford, Ford Madox. (1963). "The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford". [[The Bodley Head]].
13. Ford, Ford Madox. (2010–2011). "Parade's End: Volume I". Carcanet Press.
14. (1964). "Theatre 625: Parades End". BBC Warner.
15. Alter, Alexandra. (21 February 2013). "TV's Novel Challenge: Literature on the Screen". [[The Wall Street Journal]].