Parade's End

Ford Madox Ford · Gerald Hammond

Jun 2012 · Carcanet

About this ebook

Parade's End is the title Ford Madox Ford gave to his greatest work, the four Tietjens novels which -- in Graham Greene's words -- tell the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned by the clever devices of a jealous and lying wife. He wanted to see the book printed in one volume: Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925) and A Man Could Stand Up (1926), with his afterthought, The Last Post (1928). Christopher Tietjens is the last of a breed, the Tory gentleman, which the Great War, a savage marriage to Sylvia, and the qualities inherent in his nature, define and unravel. Here the War's attritions offered no escape from domestic witchcraft. Opposite Tietjens is Macmaster, a Scot, different in class and culture, at once friend and foil. Here Ford's art and his human vision achieve their greatest complexity and subtlety. Gerald Hammond is Professor of English at the University of Manchester, author of The Making of the English Bible, Fleeting Things and other critical volumes and editor of the Selected Poems of John Skelton and of Richard Lovelace in the FyfieldBooks series. This volume is part of The Millennium Ford project which aims to bring all the major writings of this great writer back into circulation.

About the author

Born Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer in England in 1873, Ford Madox Ford came from a family of artists and writers that included his grandfather, the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, and his uncles Gabriel Dante Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti. Ford's early works were published under the name Ford Madox Hueffer, but in 1919 he legally changed his name to Ford Madox Ford due to legal complications that arose when he left his wife, Elsie Martindale, and their two daughters. He also used the pen names Daniel Chaucer and Fenil Haig. Ford's early works include The Brown Owl, a fairy tale, children's stories, romances, and The Fifth Queen, a historical trilogy about Katherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII. He also collaborated with Joseph Conrad, whom he first met in 1898, on three novels: The Nature of Crime, The Inheritors, and Romance. Ford is best known for his novels The Good Soldier, which he considered both his first serious effort at a novel and his best work, and Parade's End, a tetralogy set during World War I. Both of these books explore a theme that appears often in Ford's writing, that of a good man whose old-fashioned, gentlemanly code is in conflict with modern industrial society. Ford also published several volumes of autobiography and reminiscences, including Return to Yesterday and It Was the Nightengale, as well as numerous works of biography, history, poetry, essays, travel writing, and criticism of literature and art. Although Ford and Martindale never divorced, Ford had significant, long-term relationships with three other women, all of whom took his name; he had another daughter by one of them. He died in Deauville, France, in 1939. Gerald Hammond was born in 1926. He was an architect for thirty years before retiring in 1982. He has written over thirty mystery novels and is the creator of John Cunningham, dog breeder in Scotland, and Keith Calder, gunsmith. He also writes under the pseudonyms Arthur Douglas and Dalby Holden.