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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“Now I’m a bloody murderer!” Tietjens said. “Not gory! Green stained with vital fluid of innocent plant … And by God! Not a woman in the country who won’t let you rape her after an hour’s acquaintance!” He slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!
“By God,” he said, “Church! State! Army! H.M. Ministry: H.M. Opposition: H.M. City Man. … All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God we’ve got a navy! … But perhaps that’s rotten too! Who knows! Britannia needs no bulwarks … Then thank God for the upright young man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here on earth … as she should be! As she should be! In the early decades of the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome! Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs: bashing in policemen’s helmets. … No! It’s I do that: my part, I think, miss! … Carrying heavy banners in twenty mile processions through streets of Sodom. All splendid! I bet she’s virtuous. But you don’t have to bet. It isn’t done on certainties. You can tell it in the eye. Nice eyes! Attractive back. Virginal cockiness. … Yes, better occupation for mothers of empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till you’re as hysterical as a female cat on heat. … You could see it in her: that woman: you can see it in most of ’em! Thank God then for the Tory, upright young married man and the suffragette kid … Backbone of England! …”
He killed another flower.
“But by God! we’re both under a cloud! Both! … That kid and I! And General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, M.P. (suspended), to spread the tale. … And forty toothless fogies in the club to spread it: and no end visiting books yawning to have your names cut out of them, my boy! … My dear boy: I so regret: your father’s oldest friend. … By Jove, the pistachio nut of that galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections! Thought I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich. … But no! Gloomy reflections: I’m hysterical: like that large-eyed whore! For same reason! Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters over the turnips consumed by the sedentary. England the land of pills … Das Pillen-Land, the Germans call us. Very properly … And, damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life … and forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day long! … Why, hang it, I’m as badly off as she. Sylvia’s as bad as Duchemin! … I’d never have thought that … No wonder meat’s turned to uric acid … prime cause of neurasthenia. … What a beastly muddle! Poor Macmaster! He’s finished. Poor devil: he’d better have ogled this kid. He could have sung: ‘Highland Mary’ a better tune than ‘This is the end of every man’s desire’ … You can cut it on his tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a paulo-post pre-Raphaelite prostitute. …”
He stopped suddenly in his walk. It had occurred to him that he ought not to be walking with this girl!
“But damn it all,” he said to himself, “she makes a good screen for Sylvia … who cares! She must chance it. She’s probably struck off all their beastly visiting lists already … as a suffragette!”
Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile: left foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt had to cross. She stood waiting, her back still to him. … Her nimble footwork, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic. To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch: the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate that in the sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside thistle-tops. No; damn it! it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier does, the eyes of a chaffinch. … Infinitely pathetic!
Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: “Pink! pink!”
The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird:
“Damn your eyes! Have them put out, then!” The beastly bird that made the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like any other skylark or tomtit. Damn all birds, field naturalists, botanists! In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: “Damn your eyes! Have your chastity impugned then? What do you speak to strange men in public for! You know you can’t do it in this country. If it were a descent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each other’s throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot … well, you could! You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to every man you met. … ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore …’ To every man you met as long as he wasn’t an Englishman of good birth: that would deflower you!” He was scrambling clumsily over the stile. “Well! be deflowered then: lose your infantile reputation. You’ve spoken to strange pitch: you’re defiled … with the benefit of Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids of England. … They’d all tell you you can’t talk to a strange man, in the sunlight, on the links without becoming a screen for some Sylvia or other. … Then be a screen for Sylvia: get struck off the visiting books! The deeper you’re implicated, the more bloody villain I am! I’d like the whole lot to see us here: that would settle it. …”
Nevertheless, when at the roadside he stood level with Miss Wannop who did
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