Lines I Wished I’d Written: Sylvia Contemplates Revenge, from Parade’s End

I am nearing the end of my four or five year journey through Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy.  The fourth novel of the series is titled The Last Post.  Perhaps the overly deliberate pace I’ve been reading has caused to make me lose sight of the novel’s themes, but it’s still a wonderfully written work.  In technique and skill, this is one of the highest achievements of modernist literature.  But for now let me just highlight another wonderful passage.

Here we have Sylvia Tietjens again.  Her husband Christopher has finally left her because of her infidelity.  Christopher had come back from the war (WWI) and taken up with a young lady, Valentine Wannop, having fallen in love with before he went to the war, but in which he did not consummate the relationship.  He was honorable and had intended to stay with his wife before the war, but the war seemed to have changed everything. 

In order to grasp the context of this passage, you have to understand a few things.  Sylivia is Catholic, and despite her many sinful actions, she is a believer.  Christopher is High Anglican, and he too is a believer.  Christopher, unlike the other upper class British in the novel, is chivalrous to the point of being saintly.  Sylvia actually calls him a saint in this passage.  Father Consett is a priest who had known Sylvia for most of her life and had died sometime during the war. 

Sylvia in this passage is bitter that Christopher has left her, and she contemplates some sort of revenge.  Gunning is a yeoman farmer on their estate and he makes the suggestion to Sylvia that she could induce a miscarriage to Christopher and Valentine’s baby that Valentine is carrying.  It took some contemplation before Sylvia realized what exactly Gunning was suggesting.

We also see in this passage the modernist technique of narration that Ford uses.  It’s in third person narration but in free indirect discourse style.  That means the author speaks in a third person point of view but shifts in and out of a character’s mind using the character’s interior thoughts to move the narration.  It’s almost like a stream of conscious narration but controlled by the author’s third person view.  I marvel at how Ford executes it with such skill throughout the novel.  So much of what passes through Sylvia’s mind resonates with events her life that Ford has built a detailed mind filled with psychological depth.  Here Ford starts with Sylvia thinking about religion and morality and ends with her horror struck when she realizes what Gunning has actually suggested.

Anyhow the case had been a fiasco and for the first time in her life Sylvia had felt mortification; in addition she had felt a great deal of religious fear.  It had come into her mind in Court—and it came with additional vividness there above the house, that, years ago in her mother’s sitting-room in a place called Lobscheid, Father Consett had predicted that if Christopher fell in love with another woman, she, Sylvia, would perpetrate acts of vulgarity.  And there she had been, not only toying with the temporal courts in a matter of marriage, which is a sacrament, but led undoubtedly into a position that she had to acknowledge she was vulgar.  She had precipitately left the Court when Mr. Hatt had for the second time appealed for pity for her—but she had not been able to stop him.…Pity!  She appeal for pity!  She had regarded herself as—she had certainly desired to be regarded as—the sword of the Lord smiting the craven and the traitor to Beauty!  And was it to be supported that she was to be regarded as such a fool as to be decoyed into an empty house!  Or as to let herself be thrown downstairs!...But qui facit per alium is herself responsible and there she had been in a position as mortifying as would have been that of any city clerk’s wife.  The florid periods of Mr. Hatt had made her shiver all over and she had never spoken to him again.

And her position had been broadcast all over England—and now, here in the mouth of his gross henchman it had recurred.  At the most inconvenient moment.  For the thought suddenly recurred, sweeping over with immense force: God had changed sides at the cutting down of Groby Great Tree,

The first intimation she had had that God might change sides had occurred in that hateful court and had as it were, been prophesied by Father Consett.  That dark saint and martyr was in Heaven, having died for the Faith, and undoubtedly had the ear of God.  He had prophesied that she would toy with the temporal courts.  Immediately she had felt herself degraded, as if strength had gone out of her.

Strength had undoubtedly gone out of her.  Never before in her life had her mind not sprung to an emergency.  It was all very well to say that she could not move physically either backwards or forwards for fear of causing a stampede amongst all the horses and that, therefore, her mental uncertainty might be excused.  But it was the finger of God—or of Father Consett, who as saint and martyr, was the agent of God…Or, perhaps, God, Himself, was here really taking a hand for the protection of His Christopher, who was undoubtedly an Anglican saint….The Almighty might well be dissatisfied with the relatively amiable Catholic saint’s conduct of the case in which the saint with the other persuasion was involved.  For surely Father Consett might be expected to have a soft spot for her whereas you could not expect the Almighty to be unfair even to Anglicans….At any rate, up over the landscape, the hills, the sky, she felt the shadow of Father Consett, the arms extended as if in a gigantic cruciform—and then above and behind that an…an August Will!

Gunning, his bloodshot eyes fixed on her, moved his lips vindictively.  She had, in face of those grossly manifestations across hills and sky, a moment of real panic.  Such as she had felt when they had been shelling near the hotel in France when she had sat amidst palms with Christopher under a glass roof….A mad desire to run—or as if your soul ran about inside you like a parcel of rats in a pit an unseen terrier.

What was she to do?  What the devil was she to do?...She felt an itch….She felt the very devil of a desire to confront at least Mark Tietjens…even if it should kill the fellow.  Surely God could not be unfair!  What was she given beauty—the dangerous remains of beauty!—for if not to impress it on the unimpressible!  She ought to be given the chance at least once more to try her irresistible ram against that immovable post…. She was aware….

Gunning was saying something to the effect that if she caused Mrs. Valentine to have a miscarriage or an idiot child ‘Is Lordship would flay all the flesh off ‘er bones with ‘is own ridin’ crop.’  ‘Is Lordship ‘ad fair done it to ‘im, Gunning ‘isself, when ‘e lef ‘is misses then eight and a ‘arf munce gone to live with old Mother Cressy!  The child was bore dead.

The words conveyed little to her….She was aware….She was aware….What was she aware of?  She was aware that God—or perhaps it was Father Consett that so arranged it, more diplomatically, the dear!—desired that she should apply to Rome for the dissolution of her marriage with Christopher and that she should be freed as early as possible, Father Consett suggesting to Him the less stringent course.

A fantastic object was descending at a fly-crawl the hill road that went almost vertically up to the farm amongst the breeches.  She did not care!

Gunning was saying that that wer why ‘Is Lordship giv ‘im the sack.  Took away the cottage an’ ten bob a week that ‘Is Lordship allowed to all as had been in his service thritty yeer.

She said: ‘What!  What’s that?’  Then it came back to her that Gunning had suggested that she might give Valentine a miscarriage….

Her breath made in her throat a little clittering sound like the trituration of barely ears; her gloved hands, reins and all, were over her eyes, smelling of morocco leather; as felt as if within her a shelf dropped away—as the platform drops away from beneath the feet of a convict they are hanging.  She said: ‘Could…’  Then her mind stopped, the clittering sound in her throat continuing.  Louder.  Louder. 

Descending the hill at the fly’s pace was the impossible.  A black basket-work pony phaeton, the pony—you always look at the horse first—four hands too big; as round as a barrel, as shining as a mahogany dining table, pacing for all the world like a haute école circus steed and in a panic bumping its behind into that black vehicle.  It eased her to see…But,…fantastically horrible, behind that grotesque coward of a horse, holding the reins, was a black thing, like a funeral charger; beside it a top hat, a white face, a buff waistecoat, black coat, a thin Jewish beard.  In front of that a bare, blond head, the hair rather long—on the front seat, back to the view.  Trust Edith Ethal to be accompanied by a boy-poet cicisbeo!  Training Mr. Ruggles for his future condition as consort!

She exclaimed to Gunning:

‘By God, if you do not let me pass I will cut your face in half…’

It was justified!  This in effect was too much—on the part of Gunning and god and Father Consett.  All of a heap they had given her perplexity, immobility and a dreadful thought that was gripping her vitals….Dreadful!  Dreadful!

She must get down to the cottage.  She must get down to the cottage.

She said to Gunning:

‘You damn fool….You damn fool….I want to save…’

He moved up—interminably—sweating and hairy from the gate on which he had been leaning, so that he no longer barred her way.  She trotted smartly past him and cantered beautifully down the slope.  It came to her from the bloodshot glance that his eyes gave her that he would like to outrage her with ferocity.  She felt pleasure.

She came off her horse like a circus performer to the sound of ‘Mrs. Tietjens!  Mrs. Tietjens’, in several voices from above.  She let the chestnut go to hell. 

It seemed queer that it did not seem queer.  A shed of long-parings set upright, the gate banging behind her.  Apple branches spreading down; grass up to the middle of her grey breeches.  It was Tom Tiddler’s Grounds; it was near a place called Gemmenich on the Fourth of August 1914…But just quietude: quietude.

Mark regarded her boy’s outline with beady, inquisitive eyes.  She bent her switch into a half loop before her.  She heard herself say:

‘Where are all these fools?  I want to get them out of here!’

He continued to regard her, beadily, his head like mahogany against the pillows.  An apple bough caught in her hair.

She said:

‘Damn it all, I had Groby Great Tree torn down: not that tin Maintenon.  But, as God is my Saviour I would not tear another woman’s child in the womb!’

He said:

‘You poor bitch!  You poor bitch!  The riding has done it!’

She swore to herself afterwards that she had heard him say that, for at the time she had had too many emotions to regard his speaking as unusual.  She took indeed a prolonged turn in the woods before she felt equal to facing the others.  Tietjens had its woods onto which the garden gave directly.

Her main bitterness was that they had this peace.  She was cutting the painter, but they were going on in this peace; her world was waning.  It was the fact that her friend Bobbie’s husband, Sir Gabriel Blantyre—formerly Bosenhair—was cutting down expenses like a lunatic.  In her world there was the writing on the wall.  Here they could afford to call her a poor bitch—and be in the right of it, as like as not!  (p. 873-7)

What I think Ford wants you to see in this passage is Sylvia’s mind integrating her immediate action of riding a horse, her recent bitterness at her husband leaving her, with Gunning’s proposal of a future revenge, and with the morality established in her core as a child.  Perhaps this is not the most exciting passage in terms of events, but it’s one of great skill.  

Lines I Wished I’d Written: Tietjens Under Fire, from Parades End

This scene in A Man Could Stand Up, the third novel of the Parades End tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford is magnificently drawn out.  It’s World War I in the trenches and the hero, Christopher Tietjens, is trying to defend against a German offensive.  There is a young soldier, Aranjuez, who has sunk into the mud, and most of the scene deals with Tietjens pulling him out and carrying him to safety, all the while bullets and bombs hurling about him.  The language simplifies immensely to simulate the fragmenting thoughts of the soldiers under immense pressure.  Compare the staccato, simple sentences of this battle scene with lush, flowing language of an earlier part of the book, a scene describing Tietjens’ unfaithful wife, Sylvia, here.  This is a very complex, modernist book, and I’m not sure I completely follow everything, but the characters are really engaging and the writing is exquisite.  Ford Madox Ford is one of the best prose stylist in the English language.  Here’s this remarkable scene.

It was slow, slow, slow…like a slowed down movie.  The earth maneuvered for an infinite time.  He remained suspended in space.  As if he were suspended as he had wanted to be in front of that cockscomb in whitewash.  Coincidence!

The earth sucked slowly and composedly at his feet. 

It assimilated his calves, his thighs.  It imprisoned him above the waist.  His arms being free, he resembled a man in a life-buoy.  The earth moved him slowly.  It was solidish.

Below him, down a mound, the face of little Aranjuez, brown, with immense black eyes in bluish whites, looked at him.  Out of viscous mud.  A head on a charger!  He could see ‘the imploring lips form the words: ‘Save me, Captain!”  He said: ‘I’ve got to save myself first!’  He could not hear his own words.  The noise was incredible.

A man stood over him.  He appeared immensely tall because Tietjens’ face was on a level with his belt.  But he was a small Cockney Tommy really.  Name of Cockshott.  He pulled at Tietjens’ two arms.  Tietjens tried to kick with his feet.  Then he realized it was better not to kick with his feet.  He was pulled out.  Satisfactorily.  There had been two men at it.  A second, a corporal had come.  They were all three of them grinning.  He slid down with the sliding earth towards Aranjuez.  He smiled at the pallid face.  He slipped a lot.  He felt a frightful burning on his neck, below and behind the ear.  His hand came down from feeling the place.  The finger-tips had no end of mud and a little pinkishness on them.  A pimple had perhaps burst.  He had at least two men not killed.  He signed agitatedly to the Tommies.  He made gestures of digging.  They were to get shovels.

He stood over Aranjuez, on the edge of liquid mud.  Perhaps he would sink in.  He did not sink in.  Not above his boot tops.  He felt his feet to be enormous and sustaining.  He knew what had happened.  Aranjuez was sunk in the issuing hole of the spring that made the bog.  It was like on Exmoor.  He bent down over the ineffable, small face.  He bent down lower and his hands entered the slime.  He had to get on his hands and knees.

Fury entered his mind.  He had been sniped at.  Before he had had that pain he had heard, he realized, an intimate drone under the hellish tumult.  There was reason for furious haste.  Or, no….They were low.  In a wide hole.  There was no reason for furious haste.  Especially on your hands and knees.

His hands were under the slime, and his forearms.  He battled his hands down greasy cloth; under greasy cloth.  Slimy, not greasy!  He pushed outwards.  The boy’s hands and arms appeared.  It was going to be easier.  His face was not quite close to the boy’s, but it was impossible to hear what he said.  Possibly he was unconscious.  Tietjens said: ‘Thank God for my enormous physical strength!’  It was the first time that he had ever had to be thankful for great physical strength.  He lifted the boy’s arms over his own shoulders so that his hands might clasp themselves behind his neck.  They were slimy and disagreeable.  He was short in the wind.  He heaved back.  The boy came up a little.  He was certainly fainting.  He gave no assistance.  The slime was filthy.  It was a condemnation of a civilisation that he, Teitjens, possessed of enormous strength, should never have needed to use it before.  He looked like a collection of mealsacks; but at least he could tear a pack of cards in half.  If only his lungs weren’t…

Cockshott, the Tommy, and the corporal were beside him, grinning.  With the two shovels that ought not to have stood against the parapet of their trench.  He was intensely irritated.  He had tried to indicate with his signs that it was Lance-Corporal Duckett that they were to dig out.  It was probably no longer Lance-Corporal Duckett.  It was probably by now ‘it’.  The body!  He had probably lost a man after all!

Cockshott and the corporal pulled Aranjuez out of the slime.  He came out reluctantly, like a lugworm out of sand.  He could not stand.  His legs gave way.  He drooped like a flower done in slime.  His lips moved, but you could not hear him.  Tietjens took him from the two men who supported him between the arms and laid him a little way up the mound.  He shouted in the ear of the Corporal:

‘Duckett!  Go and dig out Duckett!  At the double.’

He knelt and felt the boy’s back.  His spine might have been damaged.  The boy did not wince.  His spine might be damaged all the same.  He could not be left there.  Bearers could be sent with a stretcher if one was to be found.  But the might be sniped coming.  Probably, he, Tietjens, could carry that boy, if his lungs held out.  If not, he could drag him.  He felt tender, like a mother, and enormous.  It might be better to leave the boy there.  There was no knowing.  He said: ‘Are you wounded?’  The guns had mostly stopped.  Tietjens could not see any blood flowing.  The boy whispered: ‘No, sir!’  He was, then, probably just faint.  Shell shock very likely.  There was no knowing what the shell shock was or what it did to you.  Or the mere vapour of the projectile. 

He could not stop there.

He took the boy under his arm as you might do a roll of blankets.  If he took him on his shoulders he might get high enough to get sniped.  He did not go very fast, his legs were so heavy.  He bundled down several steps in the direction of the spring in which the boy had been.  There was more water.  The spring was filling up that hallow.  He could not have left the boy there.  You could only imagine that his body had corked up the springhole before.  This had been like being at home where they had springs like that.  On the moors, digging out badgers.  Digging earth drains, rather.  Badgers have dry lairs.  On the moors above Groby.  April sunlight.  Lots of sunlight and skylarks.

He was mounting the mound.  For some feet there was no other way.  They had been in the shaft made by the projectile.  He inclined to the left.  To the right would take them quicker to the trench, but he wanted to get the mound between them and the sniper.  His breathing was tremendous.  There was more light falling on them.

Exactly…Snap!  Snap!  Snap!...Clear sounds from a quarter of a mile away…Bullets whined overhead.  Long sounds, going away.  Not snipers.  The men of a battalion.  A chance!  Snap!  Snap!  Snap!  Bullets whined overhead.  Men of a battalion get excited when shooting at anything running.  They fire high.  Trigger pressure.  He was now a fat, running object.  Did they fire with a sense of hatred or fun!  Hatred probably.  Huns have not much sense of fun.

His breathing was unbearable.  Both his legs were like painful bolsters.  He would be on the relatively level in two steps if he made them…Well, make them!...He was on the level.  He had been climbing, up clods.  He had to take an immense breath.  The ground under his left foot gave way.  He had been holding Aranjuez in front of his own body as much as he could, under his right arm.  As his left foot sank in, the boy’s body came right on top of him.  Naturally this stiffish earth in huge clods had fissures in it.  Apertures.  It was not like regular digging. 

The boy kicked, screamed, tore himself lose….Well, if he wanted to go!  The scream was like a horse’s in a stable on fire.  Bullets had gone overhead.  The boy rushed off, his hands to his face.  He disappeared round the mound.  It was a conical mound.  He, Tietjens, could now crawl on his belly.  It was satisfactory.

He crawled.  Shuffling himself along with his hips and elbows.  There was probably a text-book way of crawling.  He did not know it.  The clods of earth appeared friendly.  For bottom soil thrown to the top they did not feel or smell so very sour.  Still, it would take a long time to get them into cultivation or under grass.  Probably, agriculturally speaking, that country would be in pretty poor condition for a long time….

He felt pleased with his body.  It had no exercise to speak of for two months—as second-in-command.  He could not have expected to be in even the condition he was in.  But the mind had probably had a good deal to do with that!  He had, no doubt, been in a devil of a funk.  It was only reasonable.  It was disagreeable to think of those Hun devils hunting down the unfortunate.  A disagreeable business.  Still, we did the same….That boy must have been in a devil of a funk.  Suddenly.  He had held his hands in front of his face.  Afraid to see.  Well, you couldn’t blame him.  They ought not to send out school-girls.  He was like a girl.  Still, he ought to have stayed to see that he, Tietjens, was not pipped.  He might have thought he was hit from the way his left leg had gone down.  He would have to be strafed.  Gently.

Lines I Wish I’d Written: Sylvia Tietjens from Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford

I finished the first novel, Some Do Not…, of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy, Parade’s End.  What a great work.  It’s high modernism, which usually means it’s complex, much of the action within the subconscious, and unconventional.  It’s as if one combined Henry James, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence.  I’ll have a post where I’ll provide some thoughts, but for now I wanted to just share this finely written passage.  The central character of the novel is Christopher Tietjens, and his wife Sylvia is one of the most distinct characters in all of literature: unfaithful, cruel, stunningly beautiful, aristocratic, and utterly self-confident.  Here is a mostly expository description of her character. 

 

Sylvia Tietjens rose from her end of the lunch-table and swayed along it, carrying her plate.  She still wore her hair in bandeaux and her skirts as long as she possibly could; she didn’t, she said, with her height, intend to be taken for a girl guide.  She hadn’t, in complexion, in figure or in the languor of her gestures, aged by a minute.  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.  That was because she felt that her hold on men increased to the measure of her coldness.  Someone, she knew, had once said of a dangerous woman, that when she entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash.  It was Sylvia’s pleasure to think that, before she went out of the room, all the women in it realised with mortification—that they needn’t!  For if coolly and distinctly she had said on entering: ‘Nothing doing!’ as barmaids will to the enterprising, she couldn’t more plainly conveyed to the other women that she had no use for their treasured rubbish. 

Once, on the edge of a cliff in Yorkshire, where the moors come above the sea, during one of the tiresome shoots that are there the fashion, a man had bidden her observe the demeanor of the herring gulls below.  They were dashing from rock to rock on the cliff face, screaming, with none of the dignity of gulls.  Some of them even let fall the herrings that they had caught and she saw the pieces of silver dropping into the blue motion.  The man told her to look up; high, circling and continuing for a long time to circle; illuminated by the sunlight below, like a pale flame against the sky was a bird.  The man told her that that was some sort of fish-eagle or hawk.  Its normal habit was to chase the gulls which, in their terror, would drop their booty of herrings, whereupon the eagle would catch the fish before it struck the water.  At the moment the eagle was not on duty, but the gulls were just as terrified as if it had been.   

Sylvia stayed for a long time watching the convolutions of the eagle.  It pleased her to see that, though nothing threatened the gulls, they yet screamed and dropped their herrings…The whole affair reminded her of herself in her relationship to the ordinary women of the barnyard….Not that there was the breath of scandal against herself; that she very well knew, and it was her preoccupation just as turning down nice men—the ‘really nice men’ of commerce—was her hobby. 

She practiced every kind of ‘turning down’ on these creatures: the really nice ones, with the Kitchener moustaches, the seal’s brown eyes, the honest, thrilling voices, the clipped words, the straight backs and the admirable records—as long as you didn’t enquire too closely.  Once, in the early days of the Great Struggle, a young man—she had smiled at him in mistake for someone more trustable—had followed in a taxi, hard on the motor and flushed with wine, glory and the firm conviction that all women in that lurid carnival had become common property, had burst into her door from the public stairs…She had overtopped by the forehead and before a few minutes were up she seemed to him to have become ten foot high with a gift of words that scorched his backbone and the voice of a frozen marble statue: a chaud-froid effect.  He had come in like a stallion, red-eyed, and all his legs off the ground: he went down the stairs like a half-drowned rat, with dim eyes and really looking wet, for some reason or other. 

Yet she hadn’t really told him more than the way one should behave to the wives of one’s brother officers then actually in the line, a point of view that, with her intimates, she daily agreed was pure bosh.  But it must have seemed to him like the voice of his mother—when his mother had been much younger, of course—speaking from paradise, and his conscience had contrived the rest of his general wetness.  This, however, had been melodrama and war stuff at that: it hadn’t, therefore, interested her.  She preferred to inflict deeper and more quiet pains.

 

What a way to connect her with a hawk.  That is her subconscious identity brought to the fore.

Notable Quotes: No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford

I’ve been reading Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, a tetralogy (a sequence of four books)set during and after the first world war.  It’s as good as any novel in the high modernist period, which means it is difficult, but transcending.  Perhaps it’s me, but I love the literature from between the world wars.  That’s what I specialized in college.  Let  me also say that Ford may be the best prose writer in English of his era.  And when you consider that’s including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway that is saying a lot.  A heck of a lot. 

I’m going to quote this wonderful gem from the second novel of the tetralogy, No More Parades.  It has nothing to do with writing, as a lot of my notable quotes do though Ford had lots to say on writing, but more on how dejected I’ve been the last two days over some current events.  I’m not going to get into it.  Politicians should be barred from making any military decisions.  Or get better politicians. 

Ford, by the way, volenteered and served in the first world war at the age of forty-one.  The picture I provide below is Ford in uniform, a picture I've never seen before.  He looks rather exhausted and beaten. 

 

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.

        -Ford Madox Ford