PENGUIN BOOKS
Parade’s End
Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in Merton, Surrey in 1873. He married Elsie Martindale in 1894. His first published works were fairy stories. In 1898 he met Joseph Conrad and they collaborated on several works, including the novels The Inheritors and Romance. He published over eighty books in total, The Fifth Queen appearing in three parts during the period 1907–8. In 1915 he published The Good Soldier, which he regarded as his finest achievement. In the same year he enlisted in the army and served as an infantry officer. Parade’s End, the culmination of his experiences during the First World War, was published in four parts between 1924 and 1928. He moved to Paris in 1922 and two years later founded the transatlantic review, whose contributors included, among others, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. In his later years he divided his time between France and America. Ford Madox Ford also published several volumes of autobiography and reminiscence, including Return to Yesterday (1931) and It was the Nightingale (1933), and a final characteristically personal and ambitious volume of criticism, The March of Literature. He died in Deauville in 1939.
Max Saunders is Professor of English at King’s College London, where he teaches modern English, European and American literature. He studied at the universities of Cambridge and Harvard, and was a Research Fellow and then College Lecturer at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is the author of the two-volume Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (Oxford University Press, 1996), the editor of Ford’s Selected Poems and War Prose (Carcanet, 1997 and 1999), and has published essays on Ford, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Freud, Pound, Ruskin and others.
FORD MADOX FORD
Parade’s End
With a New Introduction by Max Saunders
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Some Do Not… first published by Duckworth 1924
No More Parades first published by Duckworth 1925
A Man Could Stand Up — first published by Duckworth 1926
The Last Post first published by Duckworth 1928
This edition published in Penguin Books 1982
Reprinted with a new introduction in Penguin Classics 2002
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Introduction copyright © Max Saunders 2002
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-93307-8
Contents
Introduction
Some Do Not…
No More Parades
A Man Could Stand Up –
The Last Post
Introduction
The best novel produced by a British writer (and British has everything to do with culture, nothing to do with blood) is the tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford (previously named Ford Madox Hueffer) called Parade’s End. It is also the finest novel about the First World War. It is also the finest novel about the nature of British society. Ford is neglected. The finest editor of his time, he not only encouraged Joyce and Lawrence but actually wrote a good deal of Joseph Conrad’s fiction for him. If this judgment on the supremacy of Parade’s End be cavilled at, I am prepared to yield and to submit Ford’s The Good Soldier as the best novel ever produced in England.1
These provocations from Anthony Burgess say much about Ford, and the series of four novels that make up his postwar masterpiece Parade’s End. They tell us, first of all, that it is more than a great war novel, or a great novel of historical change: it is a great novel. Ford was a prodigiously versatile writer, moving agilely between most genres. But he saw himself as above all someone constantly searching for a ‘new form’ for fiction. Parade’s End engages with culture, with the nature of British society, with the war, certainly; and with many other issues that these things imply, and which are still pressingly relevant: feminism; masculinity; the relation between the sexes; class; politics; questions of nation and race; aggression and destructiveness; trauma; memory; the environment; technology; survival; creativity; art; representation; history. None the less, we should not forget that these things are Ford’s material, to be worked into a novel rather than a document or a discourse.
In the summer of 1915 Ford was forty-one, much older than the average volunteer. He could have stayed in
