''Parade's End'' is a

tetralogy A tetralogy (from Greek τετρα- ''tetra-'', "four" and -λογία ''-logia'', "discourse") is a compound work that is made up of four distinct works. The name comes from the Attic theater, in which a tetralogy was a group of three tragedies ...

of novels by the British novelist and poet

Ford Madox Ford Ford Madox Ford (né Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer ( ); 17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals ''The English Review'' and ''The Transatlantic Review (1924), The Transatlant ...

, first published from 1924 to 1928. The novels chronicle the life of a member of the English

gentry Gentry (from Old French , from ) are "well-born, genteel and well-bred people" of high social class, especially in the past. ''Gentry'', in its widest connotation, refers to people of good social position connected to Landed property, landed es ...

before, during and after World War I. The setting is mainly England and the Western Front of the

First World War World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

, in which Ford had served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life he vividly depicts. The individual novels are '' Some Do Not ...'' (1924), '' No More Parades'' (1925), '' A Man Could Stand Up —'' (1926) and ''

Last Post The "Last Post" is a British and Commonwealth bugle call used at military funerals, and at ceremonies commemorating those who have died in war. Versions The "Last Post" is either an A or a B♭ bugle call, primarily within British infan ...

'' (1928). The work is a complex tale written in a

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

style and does not concentrate on detailing the experience of war. Robie Macauley, in his introduction to the Borzoi edition of 1950, described it as "by no means a simple warning as to what modern warfare is like... utsomething complex and baffling o many contemporary readers There was a love story with no passionate scenes; there were trenches but no battles; there was a tragedy without a denouement." The novel is about the psychological result of the war on the participants and on society. In his introduction to the third novel, ''A Man Could Stand Up--'', Ford wrote, "This is what the late war was like: this is how modern fighting of the organized, scientific type affects the mind". In December 2010,

John N. Gray John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948) is an English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the L ...

hailed the work as "possibly the greatest 20th-century novel in English", and Mary Gordon labelled it as "quite simply, the best fictional treatment of war in the history of the novel".

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 ''

'' (''The Last Post'' in the USA) (1928); the books were combined into one volume as ''Parade's End'' in 1950. In 2012,

HBO Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television service, which is the flagship property of namesake parent-subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based a ...

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

and VRT produced a television adaptation, written by

Tom Stoppard Sir Tom Stoppard (; born , 3 July 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and politi ...

and starring

Benedict Cumberbatch Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch (born 19 July 1976) is an English actor. He has received List of awards and nominations received by Benedict Cumberbatch, various accolades, including a BAFTA TV Award, a Primetime Emmy Award and a Laurenc ...

and

Rebecca Hall Rebecca Maria Hall (born 3 May 1982) is an English actress and director. She made her first onscreen appearance at the age of 10 in the 1992 The Camomile Lawn (TV serial), television adaptation of ''The Camomile Lawn'', directed by her father, ...

Plot summary

The novels chronicle the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last

Tory A Tory () is an individual who supports a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalist conservatism which upholds the established social order as it has evolved through the history of Great Britain. The To ...

", a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy landowning family who serves in the British Army during the

. 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 Pacifism is the opposition to war or violence. The word ''pacifism'' was coined by the French peace campaigner Émile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in Glasgow in 1901. A related term is ''a ...

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 novel A war novel or military fiction is a novel about war. It is a novel in which the primary action takes place on a battlefield, or in a civilian setting (or home front), where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, suffering th ...

s, 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 World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. 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 Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a re ...

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 Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet and writer of fiction, plays and screenplays based in New York; she was known for her caustic wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. Parker ros ...

and Carl Clinton Van Doren to

Anthony Burgess John Anthony Burgess Wilson, (; 25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer. Although Burgess was primarily a comic writer, his Utopian and dystopian fiction, dy ...

and

Malcolm Bradbury Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury, (7 September 1932 – 27 November 2000) was an English author and academic. Life Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of a railwayman. His family moved to London in 1935, but returned to Sheffield in 1941 wit ...

(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 Ronald Charles Andrew Hines (20 June 1929 – 28 March 2017) was a British television actor. He had a lengthy career, but possibly his most prominent roles were as Henry Corner in three of the four series of '' Not in Front of the Children' ...

and

Judi Dench Dame Judith Olivia Dench (born 9 December 1934) is an English actress. Widely considered one of Britain's greatest actors, she is noted for her versatility, having appeared in films and television, as well as for her numerous roles on the stage ...

. * ''

Parade's End ''Parade's End'' is a tetralogy of novels by the British novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford, first published from 1924 to 1928. The novels chronicle the life of a member of the English gentry before, during and after World War I. The setting is ...

'' (2012), five-part BBC/HBO television serial) by Susanna White, script by

, starring

and

References

For further discussions of the novels comprising ''Parade's End'' see for example: *Auden, W. H., "Il faut payer", ''Mid-Century'', no. 22 (Feb. 1961), 3–10. *Bergonzi, Bernard, ''Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War'', third edition (Manchester: Carcanet: 1996). *Bradbury, Malcolm, "Introduction", ''Parade's End'' (London: Everyman's Library, 1992). *Brown, Dennis, "Remains of the Day: Tietjens the Englishman", in ''Ford Madox Ford's Modernity'', International Ford Madox Ford Studies, no. 2, ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA.: Rodopi, 2003), 161–74. *Calderaro, Michela A., ''A Silent New World: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End'' (Bologna. Editrice CLUEB ooperativa Libraria Universitaria, Editrice Bologna 1993). *Cassell, Richard A., ''Ford Madox Ford: A Study of His Novels'' (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962). *Colombino, Laura, ''Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing'' (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). *Gordon, Ambrose, Jr, ''The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford'' (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1964). *Gasiorek, Andrzej, "The Politics of Cultural Nostalgia: History and Tradition in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End", ''Literature & History'', 11:2 (third series) (Autumn 2002), 52–77 *Green, Robert, ''Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). *Haslam, Sara, ''Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel, and the Great War'' (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). *Hawkes, Rob, ''Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War'' (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). *Hein, David
"Goodbye to All That: On Ford Madox Ford's ''Parade's End''."
''The New Criterion'' 40, no. 3 (November 2021): 24–29. *Judd, Alan, ''Ford Madox Ford'' (London: Collins, 1990) *Meixner, John A., ''Ford Madox Ford's Novels: A Critical Study'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1962). *Moser, Thomas C., ''The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). *Saunders, Max, ''Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life'', 2 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), II. *Seiden, Melvin, "Persecution and Paranoia in Parade's End", ''Criticism'', 8:3 (Summer 1966), 246–62. *Skinner, Paul, "The Painful Processes of Reconstruction: History in "No Enemy" and "Last Post", in ''History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford's Writings'', ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth, International Ford Madox Ford *Studies, no. 3 (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York: 2004), 65–75. *Tate, Trudi, ''Modernism, History and the First World War'' (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). *Wiesenfarth, Joseph, ''Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel'' (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). *Wiley, Paul L., ''Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford'' (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1962). {{Authority control British novels adapted into films English novels Modernist novels Novel sequences Novels by Ford Madox Ford Novels set in Belgium Novels set in England Novels set in France Novels set during World War I

Background

Plot summary

Literary notes

Textual history

Adaptations

References

Further reading