Parades*

The Story hinges upon war regarded as an agapemone, a lust fest. To focus this notion there is Sylvia Tietjens. To contrast war with quiescent civilization there is Christopher Tietjens of Groby, her husband. Both are extreme types, impossible in life unless recent English divorce cases were toned down in the newspapers.

She had had men before he married her. Even their boy's paternity was unknown to him. He had married her, not only for her transcendent, slender beauty, but because she asked him to. She had turned to him because his mental poise made other men seem as children.

She soon deliberately took another lover, the grossest, most insulting she could find, to torture Christopher. The selection of this man seemed to her a positive inspiration. Christopher's emotional control, bordering on stolidity, was the antithesis of her neurotic nature, which was of a lasciviousness so intense as to be quite "pure." A Catholic, she could not divorce him. An old school Tory, he would not divorce her. He set his jaw, closed his mansion, saw his father commit suicide, his mother die of grief, when he was bruited a maquereau, (wife-seller). His code, so ancient that society could not recognize it, commanded silence. He took the blame, pretending to have liaisons of his own. When, furious at her failure to make him wince, she asked to return to his house, he admitted her without altering his expression. Thus her malice and his stoicism continued until they combined to drive her into a convent. The War took him.

That is the prehistory of the story's chaotic opening at his base camp in Rouen. He is seen as a tireless, compassionate company commander, faithfully inspecting his men's feet and toothbrushes, writing their complicated little wills, guarding them from and for their women. Through labyrinths of official tape, thickets of superior and subordinate officers' personalities, swamps of physical obstacles, weather, food, transportation, equipment, his mind and nerves are shown maintaining their stability, and threading at the same time the dark jungles of his own inward life. Over all is the shadow of the major obscenity in the trenches. ... A casualty with half a face, air-bombed, bubbles red in his lap. . . . The half-face obsesses him. . . . "But the thing is to be able to stick to the integrity of your character," he says. . . .

Sylvia appears in the camp to torture him afresh. Her incredible malice brings about a bedroom scene where he strikes a drunken general in pajamas. For the troops' morale he must be removed, but still he will not clear his name, will not "blab." "There used to be," he tells his own superior, an old friend, "in families of position, a certain ... on the part of the man ... a certain . . . call it parade!"

"Then there had better be no more parades," blurts the old soldier. But there are more parades, of that kind. Tietjens' integrity sees him through and furthers a movement (for the "single command") that is to turn the War's tide. Tietjens comes out of a moral Gehenna victorious.

The Significance. As an intellectual feat, the book has few peers. As human literature it contains too much stark psychology to be immortal, though consummate art has converted a mountain of material into a story taut as a humming wire, though the spiritual current conducted has terrific voltage

The Critics. New York Times: "The first mature, unbiased statement of a clear and comprehensive vision of the World War. There is enough vitality for a dozen interrelated novels."

Herald-Tribune: "The finest novel of the year."

Louis Bromfield: "As great as anything produced in English during the past 25 years."

Mary M. Colum: "The indiscriminate calling of such writers great or immortal must be stopped. . . . Let me state that No More Parades is an excellent book and worth every intelligent man's or woman's reading once."

The Author. Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford, caricatured above, edits The Trans-Atlantic Review (Paris). He is 53. In 1917 he fought for Britain as a second lieutenant. Grandson of Painter Ford Madox Brown, "Fordie" was raised "to be a genius" by his philosopherfather, Dr. Franz Hueffer (long music critic of the London Times), by his grandfather and Aunt Lucy (sister-in-law of Poet Rosetti). Exposed from childhood to Fabianism, anarchism, aestheticism, etc., etc., he affects Toryism to annoy his relatives but looks "red" to the bourgeoisie. A Catholic, he sustains his family's reputation for heterodoxy by believing the Pope fallible, divorce moral. His friend, Edward Garnett, once came where Ford, in William Morris garb, drank country mead from a bullock's horn. Garnett had a basket of manuscript and Ford assisted in selecting for publication Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance and Some Do Not are his most recent books. At 16 he successfully published Brown Owl, illustrated by his illustrious grandparent.

*No MORE PARADES. Ford Madox Ford. A. & C. Boni. ($2.50).