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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“We shall probably be out all night then,” Tietjens said. “Do you mind? The horse may be tired. …”
She said:
“Oh, the poor horse! … I meant us to be out all night. … But the poor horse. … What a brute I was not to think of it.”
“We’re thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter from a place whose name I couldn’t read; six and three-quarters from somewhere called something like Uddlemere. …” Tietjens said. “This is the road to Uddlemere.”
“Oh, that was Grandfather’s Wantways all right,” she declared. “I know it well. It’s called ‘Grandfather’s’ because an old gentleman used to sit there called Gran’fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden market was abolished in 1845—the effect of the repeal of the Corn Laws, you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that.”
Tietjens said patiently: He could sympathise with her mood; she had now a heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would.
“Would you mind,” he said then, “telling me …”
“If,” she interrupted, “that was really Gran’fer’s Wantways: midland English. ‘Vent’ equals four crossroads: high French carrefour. … Or, perhaps, that isn’t the right word. But it’s the way your mind works. …”
“You have, of course, often walked from your uncle’s to Gran’fer’s Wantways,” Tietjens said, “with your cousins, taking brandy to the invalid in the old tollgate house. That’s how you know the story of Grandfer. You said you had never driven it; but you have walked it. That’s the way your mind works, isn’t it?”
She said: “Oh!”
“Then,” Tietjens went on, “would you mind telling me—for the sake of the poor horse—whether Uddlemere is or isn’t on our road home. I take it you don’t know just this stretch of road, but you know whether it is the right road.”
“The touch of pathos,” the girl said, “is a wrong note. It’s you who’re in mental trouble about the road. The horse isn’t. …”
Tietjens let the cart go on another fifty yards; then he said:
“It is the right road. The Uddlemere turning was the right one. You wouldn’t let the horse go another five steps if it wasn’t. You’re as soppy about horses as … as I am.”
“There’s at least that bond of sympathy between us,” she said drily. “Gran’fer’s Wantways is six and three-quarter miles from Udimore; Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters; twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from ‘O’er the mere.’ Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to put church with relic of St. Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: ‘O’er the mere.’ Obviously absurd! … Putrid! ‘O’er the’ by Grimm’s law impossible as ‘Udi’; ‘mere’ not a middle Low German word at all. …”
“Why,” Tietjens said, “are you giving me all this information?”
“Because,” the girl said, “it’s the way your mind works. … It picks up useless facts as silver after you’ve polished it picks up sulphur vapor; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent patterns and makes Toryism out of them. … I’ve never met a Cambridge Tory man before. I thought they were all in museums and you work them up again out of bones. That’s what father used to say; he was an Oxford Disraelian Conservative Imperialist. …”
“I know of course,” Tietjens said.
“Of course you know,” the girl said. “You know everything. … And you’ve worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life. You want to be a Nenglish country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you’ll never stir a finger except to say I told you so.”
She touched him suddenly on the arm:
“Don’t mind me!” she said. “It’s reaction. I’m so happy. I’m so happy.”
He said:
“That’s all right! That’s all right!” But for a minute or two it wasn’t really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities—even merely with the velvet. He added: “Your mother works you very hard.”
She exclaimed:
“How you understand. You’re amazing: for a man who tries to be a sea-anemone!” She said: “Yes, this is the first holiday I’ve had for four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her day’s work for slips of the pen. … And on the top of it the raid and the anxiety. … Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother had gone to prison. … Oh, I’d have gone mad. … Weekdays and Sundays. …” She stopped: “I’m apologising, really,” she went on. “Of course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You, a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and all. … It did make you a rather awful figure, you know … and the relief to find you’re … oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay. … I’d dreaded this drive. … I’d have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn’t been in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And, if I hadn’t let off steam I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart. … I could still …”
“You couldn’t,” Tietjens said. “You couldn’t see the cart.”
They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its romantic unusualness. They couldn’t see the gleam of the lamps; they could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to a
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