The Tory in a Time of Change: Social Aspects of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

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Toward the end of his life, Ford Madox Ford grew fond of describing himself as an old man mad about writing; but years earlier, in study of Henry James first published on New Year's Day, 1914, he had cast himself also in the role of a Tory mad about historic continuity.2 Ford believed always that the novelist's proudest function was to serve as the historian of his own time, and his own greatest challenge in this regard was supplied by the immense and complex historical discontinuities of the First World War. His response to the war is set down most immediately and personally in quasi-autobiographical memoirs with reassuring titles like No Enemy (1929) and It Was the Nightingale (1933). But the four volumes of the saga now known as Parade's End (Some Do Not ..., 1924; No More Parades, 1925; A Man Could Stand Up-, 1926; and The Last Post, 1928) stand as his most comprehensive and broadly social attempt to restore lost sense of continuity by salvaging what was demonstrably valid from the halcyon days before Armageddon. Ford's critics have always hailed Parade's End and The Good Soldier (1915) as his two greatest achievements; but critical studies of the Tietjens volumes have usually been written in the spirit-if not under the shadow-of The Good Soldier, emphasizing the psychological and technical aspects of the tetralogy while treating its larger social implications only in terms of suggestive allegory, parable, or fairy tale.3