We’ve just launched Last Post: A Literary Journal from the Ford Madox Ford Society. So soon after the centenary of the Armistice, a paper signed in a railway carriage in Compiègne forest, we’ve been thinking about Ford in that context (among others).
“At the beginning of the war,” Tietjens said, “I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow… What do you think he was doing … what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can’t say we were not prepared in one matter at least. . . . Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease: the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades. . . . Don’t you see how symbolical it was: the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying There will be no more parades? … For there won’t. There won’t, there damn well won’t. . . . No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country … Nor for the world, I dare say … None … Gone … Na poo, finny! No . . . more . . . parades!”[1]
In the midst of war, Christopher Tietjens looks back to a moment at the beginning of the war which looked forward to the end of the war. But that dizzying simultaneous backward and forward shift had occurred before the war in, fittingly, a book about moving through time. In Ford’s Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, published in 1911, the publisher William Sorrell is involved in a railway accident, from which he wakes, or seems to wake, in medieval England. ‘Supposing that his railway accident had really made him see something queer? Supposing that all these people were really just ghosts? He did not believe in ghosts. But, on the other hand, he was modern enough to know that in these days anything might happen, and suddenly he found himself saying to himself, that though he could not for the life of him say what he believed, he would not equally for the life of him say that he disbelieved any single thing.’ A little later, ‘he felt vaguely that if the ghosts from the past could come into the present, why in the world should not ghosts of the future be able to go back into the past?’[2] Is he himself a sort of ghost, he wonders?
Parade’s End is, unsurprisingly, a haunted book, as was much of the literature that emerged from the conflict. ‘Ghosts were numerous in France at that time’, Robert Graves remembered, looking back to 1915. ‘Fall in, ghosts’, Edmund Blunden titled his essay on ‘a Battalion Reunion’.[3] Ford’s novel is haunted, in part, by the Armistice itself, peace after war, the first and third parts of A Man Could Stand Up— explicitly so, the reunion between Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens taking place on Armistice Day, while all the main characters in Last Post recur obsessively to memories of Armistice Day or, for the most part, Armistice Night.
‘Do you not find’, Ford wrote to Isabel Paterson, in Last Post’s dedicatory letter, ‘that, however it may be with the mass of humanity, in the case of certain dead people you cannot feel that they are indeed gone from this world? You can only know it, you can only believe it. That is, at any rate, the case with me—and in my case the world daily becomes more and more peopled with such revenants and less and less with those who still walk this earth.’[4]
In Return to Yesterday, published three years later, Ford wrote that the three people in whose deaths he had never been able to believe were Conrad, Arthur Marwood and Jane Wells, wife of H. G. In an essay published in 1927, he stated that he had just ‘suddenly realised’ that Conrad, Henry James and Stephen Crane were all dead. He began writing Last Post a month after the death of another friend, the painter Juan Gris, and around the time his mother died.[5] Less than six months later, his old friend Charles Masterman, the Liberal politician and author, died at the age of fifty-four. All these deaths, following that of W. H. Hudson in 1922 and Joseph Conrad in 1924, individual as they are, also form part of a vast, cumulative wave of human loss, in and around that vast waste of life strewn across four years, thousands of miles and millions of casualties. Ford the writer and Ford the soldier had known his fair share of them: ‘I remember when I went to have lunch with the officers of our 2nd Battalion—all dead, the officers I had lunch with!—in Albert’.[6]
The first issue of Last Post ranges pretty widely, dwelling, as it happens, on neither war nor death: the stories contained in Ford’s own library (now in the Berg Collection, New York), Ford as reader, as literary ghost, as commentator on Anglo-German relations, as writer of detective stories, as subject of research, as point of reference in today’s America, plus a few reviews. Members of the Ford Madox Ford Society will receive two issues a year.
http://www.fordmadoxfordsociety.org/
References
[1] Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades (1925; edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2011), 27; see also the reconstruction of the previous volume’s original ending, the autograph fragment in Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not. . . (1924; edited by Max Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2010), 412.
[2] Ford Madox Ford, Ladies Whose Bright Eyes: A Romance (London: Constable, 1911), 82-83, 100.
[3] Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (1929 edition; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 157; Edmund Blunden, Fall In, Ghosts: Selected War Prose, edited with an introduction by Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2014), 77-93.
[4] Ford Madox Ford, Last Post (1928; edited by Paul Skinner, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2011), 5.
[5] Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 371; Ford Madox Ford, New York Essays (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1927), 24-25. Max Saunders remarks on the indication that ‘this most elegiac of his books was an oblique elegy for his mother’: Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, two volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), II, 316.
[6] Ford Madox Ford, No Enemy (1929; edited by Paul Skinner Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002), 134.
Reconstructionary Tales 