‘“I Don’t Read Novels... I Know What’s in’em”’: Impersonality, Impressionism and Responsibility in Parade’s End1

1The idea that English literature and culture were fundamentally altered by the First World War is, as Samuel Hynes has argued, the hegemonic ‘Myth of the War,’ taking root as cultural orthodoxy in the years after 1918.2 And for Paul Fussell, the gap between the romantic literary diction of before the war and the post-war sensibility disseminated by Joyce, Pound, Kafka, Proust et al provided one of the conditions for irony, which became the dominant mode of remembering war in the twentieth century. He claims that, in 1914, there had existed ‘what was, compared with ours, a static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable... It was not until eleven years after the war that Hemingway could declare in A Farewell to Arms that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates.”’3 As Ford Madox Ford’s biographer Max Saunders notes, even before the war Ford had used the category of ‘big words’ like ‘courage, loyalty, honour, constancy’ to characterise the value system of Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier, and after the war Ford, like Hemingway, proclaimed the irretrievable absurdity of this vocabulary.4 It was a literary tendency against which he had always inveighed; now his objections were crystal-lised by the experience of war. To cite one further modernist collision between the war and literary expression, T. S. Eliot, writing during the Second World War, dates his struggle with the inadequacy of language to the inter-war period, ‘the years of l’entre deux guerres,’ and uses military imagery to describe the inter-war experience of writing:

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.5

2Here ‘raid,’ ‘mess’ and ‘undisciplined squads’ embody the affinity between war and the ineffable. Such raids on the inarticulate might be considered the opposite of the ‘big’ or ‘abstract’ words that Hemingway now found used up and putrid. Post-war language needed to be temporal and concrete rather than timeless and universal.

3In Parade’s End Ford explores the war’s effect on language and literary representation through the experiences of Christopher Tietjens, the novel’s gentleman protagonist. Broadly speaking, Tietjens enters the war with an unshakeable faith in generalisations and an aspiration to complete impersonality in thought and speech. As a result of his experiences at the front, however, he is forced to abandon this faith and this aspiration, confronted by ungeneralisable realities that press him into the assumption of a first person voice. In this paper I sketch his transformation, and indicate how Tietjens’s trajectory is from an impersonal towards a Fordian-impressionist use of language. This literary problem is given an ethical turn, moreover, by the particular personal challenges which war posed as an object of literary representation. Writing about war brought writers face to face not only with the inadequacy of language to communicate trauma, but also with the horror of contingency, and the impossibility of justifying one’s own survival, one’s own narrative.

4Alyson Booth cites the army postcard, issued to British troops in the great war, as a means by which the realities of trench warfare were euphemised for the civilian population. The postcards were printed with a set of stock phrases which soldiers selectively effaced depending on their circumstances; thus the possible messages that could be conveyed were strictly limited, and the experiences of individual soldiers were reduced to a few generic narratives.6 Christopher Tietjens would have approved of such a practice, and, although he does not use the postcard himself, he does employ another military genre to construct an impersonal representation of his own emotional life. Whilst in command of a British transport depot in France, Tietjens writes a mock report, ‘for the use of garrison headquarters,’ detailing the break-up of his marriage and his passionate, unconsummated affair with Valentine Wannop. (349) With this pastiche he attempts a third person autobiography, the ‘deliberate, consecutive recollection’ which his intensely personal memory resists: ‘He became instinct with a sort of passion to let his thoughts wander into epithets and go about where they would.’ (347) Before the war, too, Tietjens draws on the impersonal discourses available during peace-time to efface himself from his speech: when his wife Sylvia proposes to return to him after a flagrant infidelity, he uses a telegram to reply, in much the same way that he later uses the military report. Sylvia provides an astute assessment of his psychology in doing so:

He sent it out of consideration: the lordly, full dress consideration that drives me distracted... And partly because he’s the soul of truth like a stiff Dutch doll. He wouldn’t write a letter because he couldn’t without beginning it ‘Dear Sylvia’ and ending it ‘Yours sincerely’ or ‘truly’ or ‘affectionately.’ He’s that sort of precise imbecile. He’s so formal he can’t do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can’t use half of them. (32)

5The twin precepts at work, as Sylvia identifies them, are absolute truthfulness and conventionality, which Tietjens uses as a proof against personal feeling. He exploits the telegram to efface himself from his message, and approximate an impersonal discourse. In a discussion with his friend and protégé Vincent Macmaster, Tietjens himself refers to this abdication of verbal responsibility. He indignantly denies that he has ‘a way of putting things’; that is, that he has a personal voice. (16) The implication is that he erases himself from his discourse as far as possible, attaining to a neutral and objective language.

6It is not surprising, then, that Tietjens is an admirer of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘I am really, sir, the English public schoolboy. That’s an eighteenth-century product,’ (490) he tells his commanding officer, and later mourns the absence of seventeenth-century pastoral decorum: ‘quiet fields, Anglican sainthood, accuracy of thought, heavy-leaved, timbered hedge-rows, slowly creeping plough-lands moving up the slopes.’ (566) An eighteenth-century authority for Tietjens’s linguistic practice is suggested by his preposterous dismissal of novels, quoted in the title of this paper. This remark echoes a quirk attributed by Boswell to Samuel Johnson, who apparently enjoyed ‘a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end.’7 And in his 1765 preface to Shakespeare’s plays, having praised the universality of the characters, Johnson speculates on just such an absolute justness of expression as Tietjens’s styleless candour. ‘If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance’8; without, in other words, ‘fiddling about after literary expression.’ The flexibility and freedom of a language conceals its proper logic, an order privileging one single style ‘so consonant and congenial’ that it is permanent. To these classical ideals, hierarchy and permanence, Tietjens would readily subscribe. Ford, like Johnson, advocated the vernacular in literature: ‘unless [a poet] speaks to us sincerely, without affectation, and in such language as he ordinarily uses, his poems will ring false’; but he was a pluralist when it came to stylistic propriety: modern poetry does and should offer ‘a vast number of small intimate shades of personalities.’9

7These statements appear in the essay ‘Modern Poetry,’ in which Ford posits the twin assertions that a poem must be an authentic expression of its author’s personality, and that modern literature should be the stage for an infinite variety of distinct sensibilities. Ford’s aesthetic, in short, embraced variety and idiosyncrasy; as Levenson observes, ‘the Impressionist, in Ford’s view, is entitled, even obliged, to be personal in the presentation of reality, since there must be no pretence of a neutral body of knowledge.’10 The field which Ford chose for waging his war on such ‘pretence’ was, time and time again, the field; that is, he often picked on objectivism and conventionality as it was practised in nature writing and the pastoral. One relatively benign example is to be found in his 1914 essay ‘On Impressionism,’ in which he contrasts the objectivist agricultural writer for The Times with his stylistic hero W. H. Hudson. Hudson’s prose does not, unlike the journalist’s, provide a recognisable simulacrum of its object, but rather ‘will give you nothing but the pleasure of coming in contact with his temperament.’11 It is, in fact, useless by Samuel Johnson’s standards. Johnson identifies the pastoral as the most immutable of genres, since nature is constant, and specifically admonishes the poet to represent only her universal aspects and not his own whimsical perceptions. ‘Poetry cannot dwell upon the minuter distinctions, by which one species differs from another, without departing from that simplicity of grandeur which fills the imagination; nor dissect the latent qualities of things, without losing its general power of gratifying every mind by recalling its conceptions.’12 Ford, on the other hand, enthusiastically endorsed individualism in description, deeming it unimportant that no-one knew precisely what Hudson meant.

8One iteration of Ford’s serial anti-pastoralism is found in Parade’s End, where it is the unreconstructed pre-war Tietjens who receives Ford’s criticism. In an extended and vitriolic satire, Ford has Tietjens and his future lover Valentine Wannop walk over the fields of Kent mentally naming the plants and animals they see. For example, ‘Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, greenfinch, yellowammer,’ as well as the apposite quotation from Shakespeare. The narrator is exasperated by the empty adherence to tradition this entails; he cannot resist making sarcastic incursions into the narrative, and brands the recited clichés ‘anodynes for thought.’ (104-5)13 English nature fetishism is again criticised for its stagnant conventionality in Ford’s memoir It Was the Nightingale, where he complains that demonstrable knowledge of ‘the names of all the wearisome tits and trying finches’ or ‘the local, West Riding name of the dandelion’ is required of him as a sort of password for Englishness. And as a password, this vocabulary is standard; everyone ‘pants out’ the same quotations, recites the same names. (Ford 1933, 130) Such conformity ‘saves him [the Englishman] the trouble of thinking, and that is why his conversation is usually rounded off with a catchword from the Holy Scriptures or a misquotation from Shakespeare.’ (Ford 1911, 190) This formalisation of identity is at the heart of The Good Soldier, where John Dowell refers to it as ‘the modern English habit of taking everyone for granted.’14 In Dowell’s upper class world, individuality is subsumed beneath ritualised behaviour (or so he believes), and in the same way the English rambler performs a ritual of quotation and naming that leaves no room for ‘the trouble of thinking,’ or the recording of original perceptions. This stylised practice would surely answer Johnson’s requirement for abstracting the universal from the particular, ‘gratifying every mind by recalling its conceptions,’ although perhaps not his insistence on rigorous observation.

9Although Tietjens at first participates heartily in the naming of the countryside, a normal and normative appreciation of nature which Samuel Johnson implicitly endorses, he soon finds it necessary to forego the complacency of naming in the face of particular details. On his second pastoral journey with Valentine Wannop, with whom he is now in love, he observes that:

Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver: if you looked at it with the eye of the artist... With the exact eye! It was smirched with bars of purple, of red, of orange, delicate reflections; dark blue shadows from the upper sky where it formed drifts like snow... The exact eye: exact observation; it was a man’s work. The only work for a man. Why then, were artists soft, effeminate, not men at all; whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the schoolteacher, was a manly man? (127)

10Here Ford dramatises Tietjens’s coming to an impressionist awareness of phenomena. The key words are ‘no longer.’ Ford does not reject the first adjective, but works over the top of it like a palimpsest. Is it because the mist changes colour or because Tietjens begins to look at it in a new way that ‘silver’ is ‘no longer’ apposite? Is it the instability of modern life, the ‘impressions so fragile, so temporary, so evanescent,’ (Ford 1911, 186) that embarrass general names and abstract concepts, or is it the temporal nature of perception itself, in which a fact is composed of a series of impressions, like the ‘steel ring’ that does not cease to be one even when it is identified as a revolver?15 Both possibilities inform Ford’s aesthetic.

11Tietjens’s use of impersonal discourses to describe his emotional life, his Johnsonian claim to speak without an individual style, and his participation in the English ritual of naming and quotation, all tend towards the abdication of first person speech. In certain ideal situations, this becomes literally possible. For example, he ‘considered that his relationship with his father was an almost perfect one. They were like two men in the club—the only club; thinking so alike that there was no need to talk.’ (7) Tietjens consciously practises this discipline of taciturnity, contrasting the ‘English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotions’ to the volubility of ‘chatter[ing]’ Frenchmen, ‘shout[ing]’ Prussians, ‘emotional’ Italians and the Americans who are ‘epigrammatically imbecile over inessentials.’ Parade’s End, however, charts the disintegration of the ‘English habit.’ ‘The great advantage would seem to have lain with English society; at any rate before the later months of the year 1914.’ (178-9) Tietjens is the site of this decay.

12He finds at the front that his equipage of quotations is incompatible with actual phenomena. ‘Someone once wrote: A myriad larks in unison sang o’er her, soaring out of sight! That was imbecile really. Larks cannot sing in unison. They make a heartless noise like that produced by the rubbing of two corks one on the other...’ (630) As before the war when he meticulously observes the many aspects of a mist that are not silver, so he finds fault with the empirical inaccuracies of a sentimental image. The transition here is typical of Ford, exchanging an unrigorous literary trope for one of almost tedious specificity; it recalls John Dowell’s fatuous description of Edward Ashburnhams’s eyes as blue like ‘a certain type of box of matches.’ (Ford 1915, 26) Not only the form, but also the content of this revision is significant in light of the war, however. For perhaps the greatest challenge to Tietjens’s preferment of generalisation over particularity, and also to Ford’s art, is the unthinkable plurality of separate lives caught up in the conflict.

13The tension between general and particular ideas of war is acutely apparent in the strategic conception formulated by staff officers, civil servants and politicians. Alyson Booth has analysed the discourse of the staff and shown how extremely it relied on abstract representation and, specifically, maps. ‘Because generals were physically so removed from the battlefield, their discourse relied on imaginative principles that may be traced back to maps: the line, the synecdoche, and a singular point of view.’ Such representations allowed generals to conceive of vast numbers of troops collectively, as tactical and strategic units; that is, to substitute conceptual unity for actual fragmentation. Booth argues that modernist literary techniques, on the other hand, were a resource well-suited to the depiction of trench warfare: ‘Shifts across a series of multiple perspectives—a truism of modernism—thus verbalise the fractured and disillusioning experience of war.’ (Booth 12, 101) The problem, I would argue, for Ford and Tietjens alike, is that of assimilating the abstract thought of a huge army with the concrete perception of its multifarious particles. Excluded from the complacent system of names and quotations, which unify disparate phenomena under conventional signs, Tietjens is faced by the cacophony, the ‘heartless noise,’ produced by the Other Ranks.

14Ford’s portrayal of the men in Parade’s End is a chaotic collage of individual lives, each marked by its own lurid peculiarity. As Tietjens observes philosophically, ‘You had to have that sort of oddity to make up the world.’ Tietjens’ first experience of active service is as a transport officer administering the movement of troops from behind the line to the front. This job plunges him into the carnivalesque affairs of his soldiers, confronting him with the irreducible variety of their lives, and causes a kind of vertigo as he attempts to reconcile the collective-historical and the particular-human perspectives on the war. His mind oscillates between ‘his draft: two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four men he had had command of for over a couple of months... winding away over a great stretch of country’ and ‘men. Not just populations. Men you worried over there. Each man a man with a backbone, knees, breeches, braces, a rifle, a home, passions, fornications, drunks, pals, some scheme of the universe, corns, inherited diseases, a green-grocer’s business, a milk walk, a paper stall, brats, a slut of a wife.’ (296, 297) The problem confronting him is not only a block to generalisation, as he switches from the collective to the particular view, but the inability to keep these visions separate. Tietjens seems haunted by a double vision where the men are both a conglomerate and a series of intensely particular beings, a duality he is unable to separate. This is most apparent in his sense of ‘The advanced wave of the brown tide of men [which] was already at his feet. The extraordinary complications of even the simplest lives... like dust, like a cloud of dust that would approach and overwhelm a landscape; every one with preposterous troubles and anxieties, even if they did not overwhelm you personally with them... Brown dust...’ (318) Here, his anxiety emanates from the infinite regression of particular beings, the inability to separate individuals from their iterability.

15Max Saunders argues that Ford struggled to reconcile the holistic and the local in the war; in other words, the perspectives of staff and infantry. He cites the key essay ‘A Day of Battle,’ written in 1916, in which Ford finds himself unable to comprehend the spectacle of the vast British army perceived en masse: ‘As for explanation I hadn’t any: as for significant or valuable pronouncement of a psychological kind I could not make any—nor any generalisation.’16 In his fictional account of war, however, Ford is able to have Tietjens look out on a panoramic prospect of the western front and see the ‘immense blind will’ of history or destiny as a redemptive force, driving towards ‘the one decent action that humanity has to its credit in the whole of recorded history.’ Synthesising opposing forces in the impersonal movement of history, Tietjens can transcend the vertiginous friction between collective and particular, resolving unruly beings into providential agents. What he finds consoling is that both sides, German and English, are being true to the integrity of their national characters. Crucially, however, his synthesis is not complete: he cannot help recalling at the end of his justification the view from the ground, the intractably personal stratum of existence: ‘But the other lives of all those men are dirty, potty and discreditable little affairs... Like yours... like mine.’ It is these unwieldy details, the dirty, the potty and the discreditable, that so unhinge Tietjens and also challenge Ford’s powers of literary representation.

16Alyson Booth cites a parallel instance from Parade’s End where Tietjens relativises opposing perspectives and thereby comprehends the inevitability of each. In conversation with Valentine Wannop, Tietjens sympathises with her pacifism whilst maintaining his own adversarial position because ‘they’re two different patterns that we see.’ As a parable about narrative technique, this conclusion symbolises the subjectivism and perspectival shifts Booth calls ‘a truism of modernism.’ Referred in its turn to the subjectivity of its source, however, it becomes an instance of precisely the self-abnegation and phoney objectivity that Ford critiques in Tietjens. It is certainly a part of Ford’s aesthetic to employ multiple points of view, but still more essential is his resistance to the disinterested objectivity that Tietjens claims. The undialectisable ‘dirty, potty and discreditable’ remainder of the men confronts Tietjens with his own equivalent contingency. The artistic problem is not only one of splintering a normative realist narrative into subjective points of view, but of justifying the selection of these points of view without conferring an importance upon them that can no longer be objectively authorised.

17The problem Ford wrestles with is one of justification: how is a voice or a narrative to be justified without claiming objective authority? In the trajectory of Tietjens this literary and existential problem is worked out through the logic of class hierarchy, as Tietjens is deprived of his assured identity in the highly formal English social system. Under the mental strain of being at the front and of obsessively analysing emotional events from his past, Tietjens finds himself doing what would never have been necessary in the pre-war world: ‘“What in the world was he doing? Now? With all this introspection? Why, if he, Christopher Tietjens of Groby, had the need to justify himself, what did it stand for to be Christopher Tietjens of Groby? That was the unthinkable thought.”’ It is as if, before the war, Tietjens is able to identify his public identity with his interiority. In the course of the war, however, he falls out of step with the objective account of his existence, and finds himself in the ‘unthinkable’ position of existing without adequate justification.

18Tietjens’s solution, as Gene M. Moore has argued, is to take responsibility anyway.17 ‘He had to take... Responsibility. And to realise that he was a fit person to take responsibility.’ (585) This responsibility is, as Moore points out, distinct from the feudal duty to rule by virtue of one’s degree, being rather a choice made without constraint or justification. Being obliged in the war to negotiate and sympathise with a range of beings who differ from him not hierarchically but anarchically, who differ merely but are neither more nor less important, neither less nor more contingent, forces on Tietjens a certain humility, and obliges him to descend from his position of silent authority and to take responsibility, as an actor and as a speaker. This reading of Tietjens’s story suggests another sense for Michael Levenson’s epigram of impressionism: ‘subjectivity in which the subject has disappeared.’ (Levenson 119) Ford’s aesthetic, having reached this extreme of passive subjectivism, confronted naked the question of responsibility. How is the impressionist to justify his narrative if it is nothing but the expression of his personality? And in the representation of the war, this literary problem acquired a crushing ethical weight: how could one narrative of the war be justified whilst so many thousands went untold? How could one overcome the writer’s block experienced by Robert Graves, who could not write about the war because he ‘was ashamed at having distorted my material with a plot’? A plot is shameful because arrogant; it asserts the centrality of the subject and silences the legion of other ‘preposterous troubles and anxieties.’ Ford’s solution in Parade’s End is to deploy the war as a corrective to Tietjens’s complacent objectivism, and to have him, like Ford himself, claim responsibility without claiming privilege.