
Impatiently
awaiting the BBC2 Parade’s End miniseries,
I read the four novels. It was my fourth try in two years. As Dorothy Parker
wrote
Ford’s style has here
become so tortuous that he writes almost as if he were parodying himself. There
are grave hardships for the reader in the long interior monologues which make
up much of the book. It is a novel to be read with a furrow in the brow. You
must constantly turn back pages, to ascertain from inside which character’s
head the author is writing.
However
it is not merely complication for its own sake. Behind it all there is an
intense anger. Ford is outraged at the blindness and selfishness that shoved the world
into war. Especially in the first book, he presents an Edwardian world that has already shattered to pieces. The war
didn’t blow it up; it had already blown itself apart. It was too insane.
As
a consequence, he will have nothing to do with any kind of explanation,
rationalization or alibi. He refuses to stand above his characters and tell us what
their actions mean. Instead, he circulates among them and records
what he can. We overhear their conversations. We are given access to their
unspoken thoughts. The motives, the point, the meaning is never clear. The form
isn’t tidy because the subject matter is the opposite of tidiness:
Intense dejection, endless
muddles, endless follies, endless villainies. All these men given into the
hands of the most cynically care-free intriguers in long corridors who made
plots that harrowed the hearts of the world. All these men toys, all these
agonies mere occasions for picturesque phrases to be put into politicians’
speeches without heart or even intelligence. Hundreds of thousands of men
tossed here and there in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of midwinter …
by God, exactly as if they were nuts willfully picked up and thrown over the
shoulder by magpies … But men.
But
it’s not all high modernist seriousness. For instance, there’s Christopher’s wife, Sylvia. What can I say about Sylvia? She's the most animated and amusing character in
the books. She stirs up trouble for fun and gets away with it. Her goal in life is to make everyone around her miserable.
You couldn’t discover in
the skin of her face any deadness; in her eyes the shade more of fatigue than
she intended to express, but she had purposely increased her air of scornful
insolence.
Some
of her breathtakingly appalling actions, comments and thoughts have the
excessively studied air of a character in a novel by de Sade (and the big
sister of Handful of Dust’s Brenda
Last), but her appearances invariably generate an uptick of fun. She’s the
catalyst that makes everything happen.
The rapidity with which her ardour for her lovers cools is the epic’s best running gag:
But, quite suddenly, on
seeing some well-known English faces in the casino it had come over her to
think that, however much she imagined Christopher to be humiliated by her going
off with an oaf like Perowne, that humiliation must be as nothing compared with
that which she might be expected to feel at having found no one better than an
oaf like Perowne to go off with.
This
is a girl who relishes her wounds:
She remembered, years ago,
trying to shock her mother’s spiritual adviser, Father Consett, whom they had
lately murdered in Ireland, along with Casement. … The poor saint had not in
the least been shocked. He had gone her one better. For when she had said something
like that her idea of a divvy life—they used in those days to say divvy—would be to go off with a different man every week-end, he had told
her that after a short time she would be bored already by the time the poor
dear fellow was buying the railway tickets. … And, by heavens, he had been right.
Rebecca
Hall is a lucky actress; let’s see what she does with the part.
[Image: Postcard of the destruction of Reims, 1917]