Some Do Not … by Ford Madox Ford (story read aloud txt) 📕
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Some Do Not … opens at the cusp of World War I. Christopher Tietjens, a government statistician, and his friend Vincent Macmaster, an aspiring literary critic, are visiting the English countryside. Tietjens, preoccupied with his disastrous marriage, meets Valentine Wannop, a suffragette, during a round of golf. As their love story develops, the novel explores the horrors of the war without the narrative ever entering the battlefield.
The characters are complex and nuanced. Tietjens is an old-fashioned man even by the standards of his day; he’s concerned with honor and doing the right thing, but he lives in a society that only pays those values lip service. Yet he himself isn’t free of a thread of hypocrisy: he won’t leave his deeply unhappy marriage because that would be the wrong way to act, but the reader is left wondering if he tolerates his situation simply because he married up in class. He wants to do to the noble and right thing, but does that mean going to war?
The men and women around him each have their individual motivations, and they are often conniving and unlikable in their aspirations even as the propaganda of England at war paints the country as a moral and heroic one. The delicate interplay of each character’s subtleties paints a rich portrait of 1920s English society, as the romantic ideals of right and wrong clash with notions of ambition and practicality.
The prose is unapologetically modernist: unannounced time shifts combine with a stream-of-consciousness style that can often be dense. Yet Ford’s portrayal of shell shock, the politics of women in the 1920s, and the moral greyness of wartime is groundbreaking. The book, and its complete tetralogy—called Parade’s End—has garnered praise from critics and authors alike, with Anthony Burgess calling it “the finest novel about the First World War” and William Carlos Williams stating that the novels “constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time.”
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- Author: Ford Madox Ford
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Sandbach said:
“Of course you would, old chap. They’re our brothers. You’d see the beastly, lying Government damned first.”
“I was going to say that I should accept,” the General said, “I shouldn’t resign my commission.”
Sandbach said:
“Good God!”
Tietjens said:
“Well, I didn’t.”
“General! You! After all Claudine and I have said …”
Tietjens interrupted:
“Excuse me, Sandbach. I’m receiving this reprimand for the moment. I wasn’t, then, rude to Ingleby. If I’d expressed contempt for what he said or for himself, that would have been rude. I didn’t. He wasn’t in the least offended. He looked like a cockatoo, but he wasn’t offended. And I let him over-persuade me. He was right, really. He pointed out that, if I didn’t do the job, those swine would put on one of our little competition wallah head clerks and get all the schedules faked, as well as starting off with false premises!”
“That’s the view I take,” the General said, “if I don’t take the Ulster job the Government will put on a fellow who’ll burn all the farmhouses and rape all the women in the three counties. They’ve got him up their sleeve. He only asks for the Connaught Rangers to go through the north with. And you know what that means. All the same …” He looked at Tietjens: “One should not be rude to one’s superiors.”
“I tell you I wasn’t rude,” Tietjens exclaimed. “Damn your nice, paternal old eyes. Get that into your mind!”
The General shook his head:
“You brilliant fellows!” he said. “The country, or the army, or anything, could not be run by you. It takes stupid fools like me and Sandbach, along with sound, moderate heads like our friend here.” He indicated Macmaster and, rising, went on: “Come along. You’re playing me, Macmaster. They say you’re hot stuff. Chrissie’s no good. He can take Sandbach on.”
He walked off with Macmaster towards the dressing-room.
Sandbach, wriggling awkwardly out of his chair, shouted:
“Save the country. … Damn it …” He stood on his feet. “I and Campion. … Look at what the country’s come to. … What with swine like these two in our club houses! And policemen to go round the links with Ministers to protect them from the wild women. … By God! I’d like to have the flaying of the skin off some of their backs. I would. By God I would.”
He added:
“That fellow Waterslops is a bit of a sportsman. I haven’t been able to tell you about our bet, you’ve been making such a noise. … Is your friend really plus one at North Berwick? What are you like?”
“Macmaster is a good plus two anywhere when he’s in practice.”
Sandbach said:
“Good Lord. … A stout fellow …”
“As for me,” Tietjens said, “I loathe the beastly game.”
“So do I,” Sandbach answered. “We’ll just lollop along behind them.”
IVThey came out into the bright open where all the distances under the tall sky showed with distinct prismatic outlines. They made a little group of seven—for Tietjens would not have a caddy—waiting on the flat, first teeing ground. Macmaster walked up to Tietjens and said under his voice:
“You’ve really sent that wire? …”
Tietjens said:
“It’ll be in Germany by now!”
Mr. Sandbach hobbled from one to the other explaining the terms of his wager with Mr. Waterhouse. Mr. Waterhouse had backed one of the young men playing with him to drive into and hit twice in the eighteen holes the two city men who would be playing ahead of them. As the Minister had taken rather short odds Mr. Sandbach considered him a good sport.
A long way down the first hole Mr. Waterhouse and his two companions were approaching the first green. They had high sandhills to the right and, to their left, a road that was fringed with rushes and a narrow dyke. Ahead of the Cabinet Minister the two city men and their two caddies stood on the edge of the dyke or poked downwards into the rushes. Two girls appeared and disappeared on the tops of the sandhills. The policeman was strolling along the road, level with Mr. Waterhouse. The General said:
“I think we could go now.”
Sandbach said:
“Waterslops will get a hit at them from the next tee. They’re in the dyke.”
The General drove a straight, goodish ball. Just as Macmaster was in his swing Sandbach shouted:
“By God! He nearly did it. See that fellow jump!”
Macmaster looked round over his shoulder and hissed with vexation between his teeth:
“Don’t you know that you don’t shout while a man is driving? Or haven’t you played golf?” He hurried fussily after his ball.
Sandbach said to Tietjens:
“Golly! That chap’s got a temper!”
Tietjens said:
“Only over this game. You deserved what you got.”
Sandbach said:
“I did. … But I didn’t spoil his shot. He’s outdriven the General twenty yards.”
Tietjens said:
“It would have been sixty but for you.”
They loitered about on the tee waiting for the others to get their distance. Sandbach said:
“By Jove, your friend is on with his second. … You wouldn’t believe it of such a little beggar!” He added: “He’s not much class, is he?”
Tietjens looked down his nose.
“Oh, about our class!” he said. “He wouldn’t take a bet about driving into the couple ahead.”
Sandbach hated Tietjens for being a Tietjens of Groby: Tietjens was enraged by the existence of Sandbach, who was the son of an ennobled mayor of Middlebrough, seven miles or so from Groby. The feuds between the Cleveland landowners and the Cleveland plutocrats are very bitter. Sandbach said:
“Ah, I suppose he gets you out of scrapes with girls and the Treasury, and you take him about in return. It’s a practical combination.”
“Like Pottle Mills and Stanton,” Tietjens said. The financial operations connected with the amalgamating of these two steelworks had earned Sandbach’s father a good deal of odium in the Cleveland district. … Sandbach said:
“Look here, Tietjens …” But he changed his mind and said:
“We’d better go now.” He drove off with an awkward action but not without skill. He certainly outplayed Tietjens.
Playing very slowly, for
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