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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“Our father’s idea,” Mark said by the fountain, “was that no settled sum could keep you straight. His idea was that if you were a bloody pimp living on women … You don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind your putting it straightforwardly,” Christopher said. He considered the base of the fountain that was half full of leaves. This civilisation had contrived a state of things in which leaves rotted by August. Well, it was doomed!
“If you were a pimp living on women,” Mark repeated, “it was no good making a will. You might need uncounted thousands to keep you straight. You were to have ’em. You were to be as debauched as you wanted, but on clean money. I was to see how much in all probability that would be and arrange the other legacies to scale. … Father had crowds of pensioners. …”
“How much did father cut up for?” Christopher asked.
Mark said:
“God knows. … You saw we proved the estate at a million and a quarter as far as ascertained. But it might be twice that. Or five times! … With steel prices what they have been for the last three years it’s impossible to say what the Middlesbrough district property won’t produce. … The death duties even can’t catch it up. And there are all the ways of getting round them.”
Christopher inspected his brother with curiosity. This brown-complexioned fellow with bulging eyes, shabby on the whole, tightly buttoned into a rather old pepper-and-salt suit, with a badly rolled umbrella, old race-glasses and his bowler hat the only neat thing about him, was indeed, a prince. With a rigid outline! All real princes must look like that. He said:
“Well! You won’t be a penny the poorer by me.”
Mark was beginning to believe this. He said:
“You won’t forgive father?”
Christopher said:
“I won’t forgive father for not making a will. I won’t forgive him for calling in Ruggles. I saw him and you in the writing-room the night before he died. He never spoke to me. He could have. It was clumsy stupidity. That’s unforgiveable.”
“The fellow shot himself,” Mark said. “You usually forgive a fellow who shoots himself.”
“I don’t,” Christopher said. “Besides he’s probably in heaven and don’t need my forgiveness. Ten to one he’s in heaven. He was a good man.”
“One of the best,” Mark said. “It was I that called in Ruggles though.”
“I don’t forgive you either,” Christopher said.
“But you must,” Mark said—and it was a tremendous concession to sentimentality—“take enough to make you comfortable.”
“By God!” Christopher exclaimed. “I loathe your whole beastly buttered toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, hothouse aired beastliness of fornication. …” He was carried away, as he seldom let himself be, by the idea of his amours with Valentine Wannop which should take place on the empty boards of a cottage, without draperies, fat meats, gummy aphrodisiacs. … “You won’t,” he repeated, “be a penny the poorer by me.”
Mark said:
“Well, you needn’t get shirty about it. If you won’t you won’t. We’d better move on. You’ve only just time. We’ll say that settles it. … Are you, or aren’t you, overdrawn at your bank. I’ll make that up, whatever you damn well do to stop it.”
“I’m not overdrawn,” Christopher said. “I’m over thirty pounds in credit, and I’ve an immense overdraft guaranteed by Sylvia. It was a mistake of the bank’s.”
Mark hesitated for a moment. It was to him almost unbelievable that a bank could make a mistake. One of the great banks. The props of England.
They were walking down towards the embankment. With his precious umbrella Mark aimed a violent blow at the railings above the tennis lawns, where whitish figures, bedrabbled by the dim atmosphere, moved like marionettes practising crucifixions.
“By God!” he said, “this is the last of England. … There’s only my department where they never make mistakes. I tell you, if there were any mistakes made there there would be some backs broken!” He added: “But don’t you think that I’m going to give up comfort, I’m not. My Charlotte makes better buttered toast than they can at the club. And she’s got a tap of French rum that’s saved my life over and over again after a beastly wet day’s racing. And she does it all on the five hundred I give her and keeps herself clean and tidy on top of it. Nothing like a Frenchwoman for managing. … By God, I’d marry the doxy if she wasn’t a Papist. It would please her and it wouldn’t hurt me. But I couldn’t stomach marrying a Papist. They’re not to be trusted.”
“You’ll have to stomach a Papist coming into Groby,” Christopher said. “My son’s to be brought up as a Papist.”
Mark stopped and dug his umbrella into the ground.
“Eh, but that’s a bitter one,” he said. “Whatever made ye do that? … I suppose the mother made you do it. She tricked you into it before you married her.” He added: “I’d not like to sleep with that wife of yours. She’s too athletic. It’d be like sleeping with a bundle of faggots. I suppose though you’re a pair of turtle doves. … Eh, but I’d not have thought ye would have been so weak.”
“I only decided this morning,” Christopher said, “when my cheque was returned from the bank. You won’t have read Spelden on Sacrilege, about Groby.”
“I can’t say I have,” Mark answered.
“It’s no good trying to explain that side of it then,” Christopher said, “there isn’t time. But you’re wrong in thinking Sylvia made it a condition of our marriage. Nothing would have made me consent then. It has made her a happy woman that I have. The poor thing thought our house was under a curse for want of a Papist heir.”
“What made ye consent now?” Mark asked.
“I’ve told you,” Christopher said, “it was getting my cheque returned to the club; that on the top of the rest of it. A fellow who can’t do better than that had
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