Some Do Not…

Ford Madox Ford was nearly fifty when he began it, and had already written the novel most people know him by. Born Ford Hermann Hueffer in Surrey in 1873, he collaborated on novels with Joseph Conrad, founded The English Review in 1908, and published The Good Soldier in 1915. That same year, at forty-one, he took a commission in the Welch Regiment and went to France. At the Somme in July 1916 a shell explosion concussed him; by the Ford Madox Ford Society's account of his life he lost his memory for three weeks and forgot his own name for a few days. He stayed in France until he was invalided home in 1917, and changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919. All of that sits behind this book, and one scene of it is transposed almost directly.

He began it at Cap Ferrat in 1922, worked on it travelling north through France, and finished it in Paris. In January 1924 he launched the transatlantic review from Bill Bird's printing office on the quai d'Anjou: twelve monthly issues that printed James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys and the earliest Ernest Hemingway, who also worked for him as a subeditor and guest-edited the August number. The first instalment of this novel closed the magazine's first issue. Gerald Duckworth and Company, the London house that published the magazine, published the book itself in April 1924, and Thomas Seltzer brought it out in New York the same year.

Three more novels followed — No More Parades in 1925, A Man Could Stand Up— in 1926 and Last Post in 1928 — and the four together are called Parade's End. Later readers have made large claims for the sequence: Anthony Burgess called it the finest novel about the First World War, and William Carlos Williams the English prose masterpiece of its time. Whether it is four books or three is still argued: Graham Greene left Last Post out of the edition he oversaw in the early 1960s, citing a letter in which Ford said he had always meant the series to end with the third volume, though Ford went on in the same letter to say he was ready to be guided otherwise. In 2012 the novels were adapted as a five-part television serial written by Tom Stoppard, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Christopher Tietjens and Rebecca Hall as Sylvia, which is how a good many readers now arrive at the first volume.

Part One is a weekend in June, before the war. Christopher Tietjens, twenty-six, works for the newly created Imperial Department of Statistics; he is travelling down to Rye for golf with his friend Vincent Macmaster, a poor Scot from Leith who is correcting the proofs of his first book and building a career one drawing-room at a time. That morning Tietjens has had a letter from his wife, Sylvia, who left him four months earlier to go abroad with a man called Perowne and is now bored and wants to return. He will take her back and will not divorce her. On the golf course the next day two suffragettes run through the links after trying to speak to a Cabinet Minister, and when a crowd of men gives chase Tietjens throws his bag of clubs between the pursuing policeman's legs so the women can get away. One of them is Valentine Wannop, daughter of a dead professor and a novelist mother; she left school at seventeen and spent nine months as a maid at five shillings a week.

The centrepiece is a breakfast at a Sussex rectory. The wealthy clergyman who gives it, Mr Duchemin, is mad and has fits on Saturdays; he recites obscene Latin down the length of the table while Macmaster talks him quietly out of it, and his young wife falls in love with the man who handled it. Tietjens spends the afternoon at the Wannops' cottage, mends the harness of a horse that would have killed Valentine's mother, and then drives the two suffragettes twenty miles by night to a safe house. On the way back the dog-cart is lost in fog for hours, and at dawn, at the mouth of a neighbour's drive, a car comes out of the mist and hits the horse.

Part Two moves to London, three years or so into the war. Tietjens has been out to France as a liaison officer with the French artillery; something exploded near him in the dark and three weeks of his life are gone. He is doing dull duty in a hut among dust heaps, reading the Encyclopædia Britannica straight through to put his memory back, and helping Valentine's mother with her newspaper articles. Sylvia is living with him again and cannot make him quarrel. Meanwhile a version of him is circulating in clubs and drawing-rooms — that he keeps two households, that he has had a child by Valentine Wannop, that he is a French agent — and it has already cost him his bank, his club, a death in his family, and probably his place in the department. Most of the second half is a single afternoon in which he answers all of it, item by item, to people who mostly will not believe him.