The first was published by Thomas Seltzer. Harvey found no reviews before 18 October , from which he deduced an October publication date. If the September date refers to the Boni first printing, then the Seltzer edition must have been published earlier than Harvey assumed: in September or before. US: as The Last Post. The A. Boni edition, printed from the same plates but with a variant title page, followed soon after. Harvey p. His dating of them leads him to assume that Ford made revisions for the UK edition.
However, the existence of earlier reviews makes publication appear fairly simultaneous, and necessitates study of the manuscript evidence to determine which text Ford revised. The Duckworth editions of all four novels were listed as reprinted in The novels were republished individually by Penguin in — when the aftermath of the Second World War perhaps made them seem newly relevant — each with the same Preface by R.
The important Dedicatory letters Ford wrote for the first editions of the last three novels were collected in the edition of his War Prose, ed. Max Saunders Manchester: Carcanet, The occasion was the reissue of his first masterpiece The Good Soldier — his "great auk's egg" — which he had published at the age of Even back then, he maintained, he had felt like an "extinct volcano", one who had had his time and was all too willing to hand over to the "clamorous young writers" of the rising generation.
But those new voices — Imagists, Vorticists, Cubists — had been blown away by the first world war, and somehow he was still around. And so, to his own surprise, "I have come out of my hole again" to write more books … Such weary, genteel valetudenarianism was typical of Ford, and probably didn't help his reputation. When he died, in , Graham Greene wrote that it felt like "the obscure death of a veteran — an impossibly Napoleonic veteran, say, whose immense memory spanned the period from Jena to Sedan".
However, it was and is always a mistake to go along with Ford's self-presentation. He appeared confused and was often confusing; he would say one thing and probably mean another, only to state its opposite as a counter-certainty not very long afterwards; he was fanciful, unreliable and exasperating. Some thought him simply a liar, though as Ezra Pound charitably pointed out to Hemingway, Ford "only lied when he was very tired".
So in , for all his self-dismissingness, he was three-quarters of the way through what would become his second masterpiece: the four-book Parade's End A novel which couldn't be further from the work of some superannuated old buffer: in human psychology and literary technique, it is as modern and modernist as they come.
And now that the years have shaken down, it is Ford who makes Greene look old-fashioned, rather than the other way round. The Good Soldier 's protagonist, Edward Ashburnham, was a version of the chivalric knight. Parade's End 's protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, is a version of the Anglican saint. Both are great auks making do in a world of modernity and muddle.
Tietjens — a North Yorkshireman whose ancestors came over with "Dutch William" — believes that the 17th century was "the only satisfactory age in England". He is "a Tory of an extinct type" who has "no politics that did not disappear in the 18th century".
He reads no poetry except Byron, thinks Gilbert White of Selborne "the last English writer who could write", and approves of only one novel written since the 18th century not that we can read it, since it is by a character in Parade's End. Both Ashburnham and Tietjens share a streak of romantic feudalism — nostalgia for a time of rights and duties and supposed orderliness.
But Ashburnham is better fitted for the modern world, being — beneath his chivalric coating — a devious libertine and not outstandingly bright. Tietjens, by contrast, declares: "I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. This may be an advantage in the Imperial Department of Statistics, where he number-crunches for England; but isn't such a good idea in the world he inhabits. There, intelligence is viewed as suspect and chastity weird; virtue as smugness, and saintliness a direct provocation.
It is a great audacity for a novelist to begin a long novel with a main character whom very few other characters like, let alone admire. Tietjens is socially awkward, and emotionally reticent to the point of muteness: when, in the book's opening action, his wife Sylvia, having left him four months previously, asks to be taken back, he "seemed to have no feelings about the matter".
He is "completely without emotions that he could realize", and "had not spoken more than twenty words about the event". Later, he is said to have a "terrifying expressionlessness".
Men sponge off him for both ideas and money; women on the whole find him rebarbative — "his looks and his silences alarmed them". In the course of the novel he is variously compared to a maddened horse, an ox, a swollen animal, a mad bullock, a lonely buffalo, a town bull, a raging stallion, a dying bulldog, a grey bear, a farmyard boar, a hog and finally a dejected bulldog.
He is also likened to a navvy, a sweep, a stiff Dutch doll, and an immense feather mattress. He is "lumpish, clumsy", with "immense hands". His wife constantly imagines him constructed from meal-sacks. Even Valentine Wannop, the spikey suffragette who is eventually to bring this Anglican saint a kind of salvation, initially finds him "as mad as he is odious", with hateful eyes "protruding at her like a lobster's"; she takes him for just another "fat golfing idiot".
Still, for all his apparent ineptness, there is one thing always to be said for Christopher Tietjens: he is very good with horses. Tietjens's notions of love and sex — which you would not expect to be conventional — are summed up at one point as follows: "You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks to her.
Tietjens's idea is a less engaging version of what Ford himself believed. As he put it, rather more sweetly, in propria persona : "You marry to continue the conversation. The sort of woman such an Anglican saint requires should be "passionate yet circumspect". The second adjective is richly inappropriate for Sylvia, who first seduced him, very uncircumspectly, in a railway carriage.
For Graham Greene, Sylvia Tietjens is "surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel". A wife who is bored, promiscuous and up-to-date, tied to a husband who is omniscient, chaste and antique: there's a marriage made in hell. Christopher is a mixture of chivalry and masochism if it hurts, I must be doing the right thing ; Sylvia a mixture of recklessness and sadism if it hurts him, I must be doing the right thing.
Christopher believes that a gentleman does not divorce his wife, however she behaves; though if she wants to divorce him, he accepts it. He also thinks of Sylvia as a "tremendous discipline" for the soul — rather as being in the French Foreign Legion would be for the body. Sylvia for her part cannot divorce Christopher because she is a Catholic. And so the couple are bound together on a wheel of fire. And the torments she devises for her husband are of exquisite accuracy.
When she was 13 we learn only towards the end of the fourth volume, Last Post Sylvia idly imagined cramming a kitten's paws into walnut shells; this shows great early skill of a Sadic nature. Throughout the novel, she deploys the subtle rumour, the lie direct and the vicious deed to visit on her husband a series of social, financial and psychological humiliations. Her final act of malignity is the cutting-down of the Great Tree of Groby at Tietjens's ancestral home — "as nasty a blow as the Tietjens had had in generations".
Once, she had watched a fish-eagle circling high above a scream of herring-gulls, causing havoc by its mere presence; she liked and remembered this as a self-image.
Still, for all her apparent viciousness, there is one thing always to be said for Sylvia Tietjens: she is very good with horses. Why, you may ask, does she persecute her husband?
Or, more particularly, why continue, year after year, when she has many admirers, from young bucks to old generals, fawning on her, seeking both her love and her body? Part of the answer lies in Christopher's very saintliness: the more he fails to respond and suffers without complaint, the more it goads her. He also infuriatingly attempts to see things from her point of view.
What could be more enraging to a soul like Sylvia's than to be understood and forgiven? And so, every time, she returns to the attack on her great meal-sack of a husband. Guarding or granting permission to a temple no decent butcher would give to his offal tray. He's my husband, it is not a sin. View all 5 comments.
Ever since reading Constellation of Genius by Kevin Jackson I was fascinated by the fact that Ford Madox Ford was, to lift the phrase from The L-Word , a major hub; I even considered rereading the book to draft a graph showing all of his intellectual connections. I knew what to expect of a modernist novel - I like the period - but the sheer number of such remarks coming from people who had the literacy and the stamina to go through it was intimidating.
Another thing the reviews and the introduction pointed out was that the last part of the novel is markedly weaker than the previous three it was deemed so by the critics, even left out in some editions , but my experience was different. Immense miles and miles of anguish in darkened minds.
That remained. Men might stand up on hill, but the mental torture could not be expelled. It's that they won't let us alone. Not one of us! If they'd let us alone we could fight. But never No one! It's not only the beastly papers of the battalion, though I'm no good with papers. Never was and never shall be But it's the people at home. One's own people.
God help us, you'd think that when a poor devil was in the trenches they'd let him alone Damn it: I've had solicitors' letters about family quarrels when I was in hospital. Imagine that! Imagine it! I don't mean tradesmen's dunnings. But one's own people. I haven't even got a bad wife as McKechnie has and they say you have. The message, to me, seems to be against the simple interpretation that the British society changed as a result of WWI; the end of "Old England" was not due to the war.
Rather, the war gave people — chaotic, evil, selfish people - the chance to shatter whatever harmony was left in the world the novel is narrated from the PoVs of "Quality", mostly. The post WWI order is one of modernist chaos, uncertainty, and despair, in which the protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, strives to function with his new family. Christopher is a Job-like figure, whose socialite wife turns his life into a nightmare, probably in order to exert some kind of emotional power over him, and who is routinely betrayed by everyone, and let down by debtors.
Gentlemen, remarks Tietjens bitterly, dwell in a celestial sphere untainted by financial affairs: Gentlemen don't earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don't do anything.
They exist. Perfuming the air like Madonna lilies. Money comes into them as air through petals and foliage. Thus the world is made better and brighter. And, of course, thus political life can be kept clean!
So you can't make money. The unavoidable paternalism towards lower classes: It was to him a certain satisfaction that It was akin to the feeling that made him regard cruelty to an animal as a more loathsome crime than cruelty to a human being, other than a child. It is Christopher's and Valerie's sense of responsibility which makes the main love scene of the novel look like this: We never finished a sentence. Yet it was a passionate scene. So I touched the brim of my cap and said: So long!
Or she I don't remember. I remember the thoughts I thought and the thoughts I gave her credit for thinking. But perhaps she did not think them. There is no knowing. Characterisation is formidable. Making Christopher relatable is short of a miracle.
The only thing the two women have in common is their good physical shape — sport for Sylvia being a way of maintaining her stunning figure and spending more time around men, for Valerie — a part of her moral, hygienic, modern education.
She uses her sexuality to dominate, destroy, use men: she ran the whole gamut of 'turnings down. But they knew in their hearts that calamity came from the fact that she hadn't deigned to look into their eyes.
View all 11 comments. Feb 01, Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly rated it it was ok. Reading this consisting of four books: "Some Do Not It is not unreadable or incomprehensible. It's in English, originally in English can't blame any faulty translation , and the characters are even English.
But they talk differently. They act differently. Their motivations are hard to grasp. Like they're in a dream, their movements come in hazy sequences. The plot Reading this consisting of four books: "Some Do Not The plot is gettable but not unforgettable: Christopher Tientjens, maybe conceived by Ford Madox Ford while looking at the mirror, never described as handsome FMF was ugly but only big, strong, clumsy and gray, is married to the beautiful Sylvia, a flirt who ran away with another man, they have a son but it is not certain if Christopher is really the father, fed up with her paramour Sylvia writes Christopher a note saying she wants to go back to him and he accepts her, no questions asked, then there's Valentine described as having big feet somewhere she's in love with Christopher who agrees when he asks her to be his mistress but didn't even kiss her and instead just goes to the trenches to fight world war one, hoping at one point to die, he's rich but renounces wealth, intelligent but does stupid things, Sylvia, finding him too perfect, wants to destroy him, ah what the heck!
I found no thrill with the story. The characters did not come alive for me. I started to worry that maybe something is now wrong with my brain after reading too much and playing chess too much, so I checked some of the reviews and see several praising the novel without even reading all four books, like they tasted one dish in a food buffet and announced all the rest as outstanding really?
Then why not finish the rest? One said he started reading it one day, but never said he finished reading it another day. So if he's alive, in front of me, I may be yelling right now to him, asking him to answer the question if he had actually finished reading all four books and not if the novel is great as I am not asking him that question.
View all 9 comments. Nov 22, Kristin rated it it was amazing. Amazing insight into British society and the English mind around WW1. The time shifts are initially confusing, but when one lets yourself go I think the confusi Amazing insight into British society and the English mind around WW1. The time shifts are initially confusing, but when one lets yourself go I think the confusion the reader feels is intended, it mimics the confusion the characters feel , one discovers great comic moments the breakfast scene at the Duchemins in particular , a beautiful love story and a very sympathetic hero of the stiff upper lip variety, and one of the most despicable yet fascinating characters you're likely to encounter in literature.
If you're not sure that you can commit to the full book, read Some Do Not This is a self-contained book in it's own right--if you finish it wanting to know what happens to the characters, then by all means read on. But it's in my mind easily the strongest of the four books--most comic and best use of modernist techniques, namely the time shift which Ford coined.
Jul 14, Mark Hinton rated it it was amazing. Knowing just enough about everything to get myself into trouble, I chose to take Victorian Literature.
Romantic poetry did not sound like something a Montana kid grown up on Hemingway would want to read. Only much later, years and states away, would I discover how wrong I was…. The Victorian sensibility that pervades Arnold and Browning — the interest in the ordinary and common day, the moral purposefulness, the unmooring clash with science, the search for the Victorian ideal — seemed cloyingly myopic and dark.
I admired much but was never able to get my sea legs. By then, I knew a little about Ford: his relationship with Conrad, his literary influence, his reputation for untruth though hardly a vice in a writer , his bad relationship with Hemingway. I knew of, but had not read, The Good Soldier, his most celebrated and read work.
I put the book on a shelf and carried it for a few moves. Through years of reading the once neglected Romantics, through expanding my familiarity with Irish poetry beyond Yeats.
Paul I picked up the big book and began to read. Parades End has been called the last Victorian novel. And I suppose it is. So much that is Victorian is in this book, and yet… there is something of the lost generation in here also.
It is in my mind a transitional novel, the last hurrah of the Victorian and a first tentative peek at the modern. His is the anti-Hemingway style. His sentences and paragraphs go on for pages… and yet, I found myself enthralled in the same way that James enthralls me. So exotic does their language usage seem that I feel I am reading another tongue altogether. A language at once more ornate and expressive and beautiful than I could even dare to imagine — the term baroque comes to mind although unlike baroque music, James and Ford are always satisfying.
His wife is unfaithful to him, he is betrayed by friends and colleagues, and the modern, post-war world is changing everything he once thought he knew. Why Ford has fallen so out of favor, and this novel in particular has been all but forgotten, is one of those peculiarities of taste and time.
View 1 comment. Not an easy novel to read not by any means. This is the story of Christopher Tietjens a man quite out of step with the times and with those closest to him. An interesting character in his own right although quite overshadowed by his manipulative and spoilt wife Sylvia. Found that the novel did lag in places however the descriptions of life in the trenches and the physical and psychological impact of the Great War to be compulsive reading.
The characters were constrained and at times understated Not an easy novel to read not by any means. The characters were constrained and at times understated but that did add to their power on the page. One of those novels that you find yourself thinking about after the last page is turned.
View all 6 comments. I found this book to be a fantastic slog. It had been so difficult for me to read, in fact, that I found myself trying to skim, and resisting, just barely. I suppose part of the problem must have been the unmatched expectations I've had for this humongous doorstopper.
I've heard of it as 'an epic tale of WWI'. But in reality, it was more involved with two people trying to outdo each other in the amount of suffering they could cause.
I found the endless digging in the machinations and idiotic move I found this book to be a fantastic slog. I found the endless digging in the machinations and idiotic moves. I didn't particularly want to read a book about marital machinations and moves, I wanted to read a book about WWI.
Too, there is in me still the sense that I could never envision the main characters, Tietjens and his wife, Sylvia, as in any way real. They do what they do from reasons which, to me, are inexplicable and incomprehensible, and I don't think that's just because they're turn-of-the-century Brits. Sylvia cheats on her husband and tries to ruin his life and hers with it, since for some reason she would not divorce him, though her Catholicism is less than nominal because she "hates his immoral opinions".
Since I never really encountered an opinion of Tietjens - not to mention a deed - that was immorally appalling, I had a hard time seeing Sylvia do what she was doing for any reason other than the author's strings, pulling at her. The prose is abstruse and difficult to read. I found it almost prohibiting at times. It's full of elliptical sentences and unexplained utterances, and one loses the thread of what people are actually saying, and why, astonishingly quickly.
The novel I should say novels, I read all four does have its good moments. For instance, the scene in which Sylvia discovers that her husband was not, in fact, shamming his memory loss, is almost touching.
She is repentant. Why she then proceeds to go on and continue to cause trouble for him, though, I am not sure. It's yet another enigmatic move, on the part of an utterly enigmatic author, in a completely enigmatic setting. I guess this book was just too much of a riddle wrapped in an enigma for me.
I barely finished it, though I am glad I at least did finish. Jun 11, Sarah rated it it was amazing. When it was time to finish the last section of this brilliant book, I bought myself a bottle of sparkling cava to celebrate and cried like a baby. I took a few more weeks to decide whether or not to read "Last Post". I did, and I see what the rest of the internet means. Christopher Tietjens is absent from the majority of the book. You get far more narration When it was time to finish the last section of this brilliant book, I bought myself a bottle of sparkling cava to celebrate and cried like a baby.
You get far more narration from Mark Tietjens who I want to be so so angry at, but It's so difficult to advise whether to read Last Post or not. The end of A Man Could Stand Up is like gloriously and gleefully throwing your frozen heart off the most dramatic cliff-top you can be bothered to imagine because perhaps, perhaps - a man can finally stand up!
I can't really say reading it was anything like reading the first three novels. It added lots about Mark's attitudes towards the war ending. On the other hand - after two weeks, just knowing it was there Do I think it needed to be there? But can you ignore it? Not really??
Argh, eh! Oct 01, Helena Fairfax rated it it was amazing. This is one of the best books I've ever read. The author evokes the emotions of his characters with unique brilliance, using a stream of conscious style of writing to describe inner dialogue, so that we feel exactly what each character feels, especially at moments of great stress.
Not only this, but the characters themselves are infinitely well-drawn and their actions believable, totally sympathetic and consistent throughou This is one of the best books I've ever read. Not only this, but the characters themselves are infinitely well-drawn and their actions believable, totally sympathetic and consistent throughout. The descriptions of what it was like to serve in the First World War are also vivid and again I think unique in that they describe not just the horror but also the constant organisational effort involved in moving troops about, and sometimes just the sheer boredom of it all.
Finally, the descriptions of the English countryside - a vanishing landscape in the early 20th century - are just perfect. The scene where Christopher Tietjens the hero and Valentine Wannop fall in love whilst riding a horse and cart all night through thick fog was so real for me I wished I could actually be in it. I wish I could write like Ford Madox Ford. That's all I can say. View all 3 comments. Quite the most singular book I've ever read.
So many times I had absolutely no clue as to what was going on and yet I stuck with it for over pages. Now I see where Graham Greene came from. A masterpiece; an infuriating masterpiece.
Sep 09, Ka rated it really liked it Shelves: wwi , historical-fiction , classics. I can't decide whether to give this book 2 stars or 4. Ultimately it does succeed as a powerful story of the effects of the Great War on English society. Instead of the sweeping narrative of the typical war novel, FMF takes his story completely inside the characters' heads, looking at society and war in the microcosm, an approach that must be respected.
And yet. I did not enjoy reading it. The third book does finally portray a good bit of the misery and danger of the trenches and the front lines I can't decide whether to give this book 2 stars or 4. The third book does finally portray a good bit of the misery and danger of the trenches and the front lines. The first two books are really more about a love triangle in England during the time of the first war. At all times, the story is narrated through the inner thoughts, relevant or irrelevant, of the 3 main characters.
Often these are overwrought; it is exhausting to read so many sentences ending in exclamation points. It's like a soap opera, in that you can skip forward 30 pages and be confident you'll still be in the same scene.
The reader is left to tease out the few narrative points amidst the torrent of banality. I did not read the fourth book, choosing to side with Conrad and others who called it 'a disaster' and who state that FMF never intended it to be published.
A further disadvantage of the extreme interior view FMF gives, of the war and the times, is that context is never developed or revealed. I am not sure whether, for example, I would have perceived the portrayal of the disintegration of classes, had I not already known that WWI was the catalyst for this.
I can't imagine what a reader without prior knowledge of the era and the war specifically would make of it.
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