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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“There’s that veiled woman!” she said, “going into eleven. … It’s two o’clock, of course. …”
She looked at her husband’s back hard, the clumsy khaki back that was getting round-shouldered now. Hard! She wasn’t going to miss a motion or a stiffening.
“I’ve found out who it is!” she said, “and who she goes to. I got it out of the porter.” She waited. Then she added:
“It’s the woman you travelled down from Bishop’s Auckland with. On the day war was declared.”
Tietjens turned solidly round in his chair. She knew he would do that out of stiff politeness, so it meant nothing.
His face was whitish in the pale light, but it was always whitish since he had come back from France and passed his day in a tin hut among dust heaps. He said:
“So you saw me!” But that, too, was mere politeness.
She said:
“Of course the whole crowd of us from Claudine’s saw you! It was old Campion who said she was a Mrs. … I’ve forgotten the name.”
Tietjens said:
“I imagined he would know her. I saw him looking in from the corridor!”
She said:
“Is she your mistress, or only Macmaster’s, or the mistress of both of you? It would be like you to have a mistress in common. … She’s got a mad husband, hasn’t she? A clergyman.”
Tietjens said:
“She hasn’t!”
Sylvia checked suddenly in her next questions, and Tietjens, who in these discussions never manoeuvred for position, said:
“She has been Mrs. Macmaster over six months.”
Sylvia said:
“She married him then the day after her husband’s death.”
She drew a long breath and added:
“I don’t care. … She has been coming here every Friday for three years. … I tell you I shall expose her unless that little beast pays you tomorrow the money he owes you. … God knows you need it!” She said then hurriedly, for she didn’t know how Tietjens might take that proposition:
“Mrs. Wannop rang up this morning to know who was … oh! … the evil genius of the Congress of Vienna. Who, by the by, is Mrs. Wannop’s secretary? She wants to see you this afternoon. About war babies!”
Tietjens said:
“Mrs. Wannop hasn’t got a secretary. It’s her daughter who does her ringing-up.”
“The girl,” Sylvia said, “you were so potty about at that horrible afternoon Macmaster gave. Has she had a war baby by you? They all say she’s your mistress.”
Tietjens said:
“No, Miss Wannop isn’t my mistress. Her mother has had a commission to write an article about war babies. I told her yesterday there weren’t any war babies to speak of, and she’s upset because she won’t be able to make a sensational article. She wants to try and make me change my mind.”
Sylvia said:
“It was Miss Wannop at that beastly affair of your friends? And I suppose the woman who received was Mrs. What’s-er-name; your other mistress. An unpleasant show. I don’t think much of your taste. The one where all the horrible geniuses in London were? There was a man like a rabbit talked to me about how to write poetry.”
“That’s no good as an identification of the party,” Tietjens said. “Macmaster gives a party every Friday, not Saturday. He has for years. Mrs. Macmaster goes there every Friday. To act as hostess. She has for years. Miss Wannop goes there every Friday after she has done work for her mother. To support Mrs. Macmaster. …”
“She has for years!” Sylvia mocked him. “And you go there every Friday! to croodle over Miss Wannop. Oh, Christopher!”—she adopted a mock pathetic voice—“I never did have much opinion of your taste … but not that! Don’t let it be that. Put her back. She’s too young for you. …”
“All the geniuses in London,” Tietjens continued equably, “go to Macmaster’s every Friday. He has been trusted with the job of giving away Royal Literary Bounty money: that’s why they go. They go: that’s why he was given his C.B.”
“I should not have thought they counted,” Sylvia said.
“Of course they count,” Tietjens said. “They write for the Press. They can get anybody anything … except themselves!”
“Like you!” Sylvia said; “exactly like you! They’re a lot of bribed squits.”
“Oh, no,” Tietjens said. “It isn’t done obviously or discreditably. Don’t believe that Macmaster distributes forty-pounders yearly of bounty on condition that he gets advancement. He hasn’t, himself, the least idea of how it works, except by his atmosphere.”
“I never knew a beastlier atmosphere,” Sylvia said. “It reeked of rabbit’s food.”
“You’re quite mistaken,” Tietjens said; “that is the Russian leather of the backs of the specially bound presentation copies in the large bookcase.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sylvia said. “What are presentation copies? I should have thought you’d had enough of the beastly Russian smells Kiev stunk of.”
Tietjens considered for a moment.
“No! I don’t remember it,” he said. “Kiev? … Oh, it’s where we were …”
“You put half your mother’s money,” Sylvia said, “into the Government of Kiev 12½ percent. City Tramways. …”
At that Tietjens certainly winced, a type of wincing that Sylvia hadn’t wanted.
“You’re not fit to go out tomorrow,” she said. “I shall wire to old Campion.”
“Mrs. Duchemin,” Tietjens said woodenly. “Mrs. Macmaster that is, also used to burn a little incense in the room before the parties. … Those Chinese stinks … what do they call them? Well, it doesn’t matter”; he added that resignedly. Then he went on: “Don’t you make any mistake. Mrs. Macmaster is a very superior woman. Enormously efficient! Tremendously respected. I shouldn’t advise even you to come up against her, now she’s in the saddle.”
Mrs. Tietjens said:
“That sort of woman!”
Tietjens said:
“I don’t say you ever will come up against her. Your spheres differ. But, if you do, don’t. … I say it because you seem to have got your knife into her.”
“I don’t like that sort of thing going on under my windows,” Sylvia said.
Tietjens said:
“What sort of thing? … I was trying to tell you a little about Mrs. Macmaster … she’s like the woman who was the mistress of the man who burned the other fellow’s horrid book. … I can’t remember the
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