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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She said:
“Yes! The first Tietjens who came over with Dutch William, the swine, was pretty bad to the Papist owners …”
“He was a tough Dutchman,” Tietjens said, “but let us get on! There’s enough time, but not too much. … I’ve got this man to see.”
“Who is he?” Sylvia asked.
Tietjens was collecting his thoughts.
“My dear!” he said. “You’ll permit me to call you ‘my dear’? We’re old enemies enough and we’re talking about the future of our child.”
Sylvia said:
“You said ‘our’ child, not ‘the’ child …”
Tietjens said with a great deal of concern:
“You will forgive me for bringing it up. You might prefer to think he was Drake’s child. He can’t be. It would be outside the course of nature. … I’m as poor as I am because … forgive me … I’ve spent a great deal of money on tracing the movements of you and Drake before our marriage. And if it’s a relief to you to know …”
“It is,” Sylvia said. “I … I’ve always been too beastly shy to put the matter before a specialist, or even before mother. … And we women are so ignorant …”
Tietjens said:
“I know … I know you were too shy even to think about it yourself, hard.” He went into months and days; then he continued: “But it would have made no difference: a child born in wedlock is by law the father’s, and if a man who’s a gentleman suffers the begetting of his child he must, in decency, take the consequences: the woman and the child must come before the man, be he who he may. And worse-begotten children than ours have inherited statelier names. And I loved the little beggar with all my heart and with all my soul from the first minute I saw him. That may be the secret clue, or it may be sheer sentimentality. … So I fought your influence because it was Papist, while I was a whole man. But I’m not a whole man any more, and the evil eye that is on me might transfer itself to him.”
He stopped and said:
“For I must to the greenwood go. Alone a banished man. … But have him well protected against the evil eye …”
“Oh, Christopher,” she said, “it’s true I’ve not been a bad woman to the child. And I never will be. And I will keep Marchant with him till she dies. You’ll tell her not to interfere with his religious instruction, and she won’t …”
Tietjens said with a friendly weariness:
“That’s right … and you’ll have Father … Father … the priest that was with us for a fortnight before he was born to give him his teachings. He was the best man I ever met and one of the most intelligent. It’s been a great comfort to me to think of the boy as in his hands …”
Sylvia stood up, her eyes blazing out of a pallid face of stone:
“Father Consett,” she said, “was hung on the day they shot Casement. They dare not put it into the papers because he was a priest and all the witnesses Ulster witnesses. … And yet I may not say this is an accursed war.”
Tietjens shook his head with the slow heaviness of an aged man.
“You may for me …” he said. “You might ring the bell, will you? Don’t go away …”
He sat with the blue gloom of that enclosed space all over him, lumped heavily in his chair.
“Spelden on sacrilege,” he said, “may be right after all. You’d say so from the Tietjenses. There’s not been a Tietjens since the first Lord Justice cheated the Papist Loundeses out of Roby, but died of a broken neck or of a broken heart: for all the fifteen thousand acres of good farming land and iron land, and for all the heather on the top of it. … What’s the quotation: ‘Be ye something as something and something and ye shall not escape. …’ What is it?”
“Calumny!” Sylvia said. She spoke with intense bitterness. … “Chaste as ice and cold as … as you are …”
Tietjens said:
“Yes! Yes! … And mind you none of the Tietjens were ever soft. Not one! They had reason for their broken hearts. … Take my poor father …”
Sylvia said:
“Don’t!”
“Both my brothers were killed in Indian regiments on the same day and not a mile apart. And my sister in the same week: out at sea, not so far from them. … Unnoticeable people. But one can be fond of unnoticeable people …”
Hullo Central was at the door. Tietjens told her to ask Lord Port Scatho to step down. …
“You must, of course, know these details,” Tietjens said, “as the mother to my father’s heir. … My father got the three notifications on the same day. It was enough to break his heart. He only lived a month. I saw him …”
Sylvia screamed piercingly:
“Stop! stop! stop!” She clutched at the mantlepiece to hold herself up. “Your father died of a broken heart,” she said, “because your brother’s best friend, Ruggles, told him you were a squit who lived on women’s money and had got the daughter of his oldest friend with child …”
Tietjens said:
“Oh! Ah! Yes! … I suspected that. I know it, really. I suppose the poor dear knows better now. Or perhaps he doesn’t. … It doesn’t matter.”
IIIt has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotions puts the Englishman at a great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses. In the smaller matters of the general run of life he will be impeccable and not to be moved; but in sudden confrontations of anything but physical dangers he is apt—he is, indeed almost certain—to go to pieces very badly. This, at least, was the view of Christopher Tietjens, and he very much dreaded his interview with Lord Port Scatho—because he feared that he must be near breaking point.
In electing to be peculiarly English in habits and in as much of his temperament as he could control—for, though no man can choose the land of his birth or his ancestry, he can, if he have industry and determination, so watch
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