Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (11 page)

There, intelligence is viewed as suspect and chastity weird; virtue as smugness, and saintliness a direct provocation. It is a great audacity for a novelist to begin a long novel with a main character whom very few other characters like, let alone admire. Tietjens is socially awkward, and emotionally reticent to the point of muteness: when, in the book’s opening action, his
wife Sylvia, having left him four months previously, asks to be taken back, he ‘seemed to have no feelings about the matter’. He is ‘completely without emotions that he could realise’, and ‘had not spoken more than twenty words about the event’. Later, he is said to have a ‘terrifying expressionlessness’. Men sponge off him for both ideas and money; women on the whole find him rebarbative – ‘his looks and his silences alarmed them’. In the course of the novel he is variously compared to a maddened horse, an ox, a swollen animal, a mad bullock, a lonely buffalo, a town bull, a raging stallion, a dying bulldog, a grey bear, a farmyard boar, a hog, and finally a dejected bulldog. He is also likened to a navvy, a sweep, a stiff Dutch doll and an immense feather mattress. He is ‘lumpish, clumsy’, with ‘immense hands’. His wife constantly imagines him constructed from meal-sacks. Even Valentine Wannop, the spiky suffragette who is eventually to bring this Anglican saint a kind of salvation, initially finds him ‘as mad as he is odious’, with hateful eyes ‘protruding at her like a lobster’s’; she takes him for just another ‘fat golfing idiot’. Still, for all his apparent ineptness, there is one thing always to be said for Christopher Tietjens: he is very good with horses.

Tietjens’s notions of love and sex – which you would not expect to be conventional – are summed up at one point as follows: ‘You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks to her.’ Which is the exact opposite of one conventional male view, in which ‘chatting up’ with luck leads to sex, and afterwards you wonder what to talk about. (Tietjens’s idea is a less engaging version of what Ford himself believed. As he put it, rather more sweetly,
in propria persona
: ‘You marry to continue the conversation.’) In Tietjens’s mind, it is ‘intimate conversation’ which leads to ‘the final communion of your souls … that in effect was love’. The sort of woman such an Anglican saint requires should be ‘passionate yet circumspect’. The second adjective is richly inappropriate for Sylvia, who first seduced him, very uncircumspectly, in a railway carriage.

For Graham Greene, Sylvia Tietjens is ‘surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel’. A wife who is bored, promiscuous and up-to-date, tied to a husband who is omniscient, chaste and antique: there’s a marriage made in hell. Christopher is a mixture of chivalry and masochism (if it hurts, I must be doing the right thing); Sylvia a mixture of recklessness and sadism (if it hurts him, I must be doing the right thing). Christopher believes that a gentleman does not divorce his wife, however she behaves; though if she wants to divorce him, he accepts it. He also thinks of Sylvia as a ‘tremendous discipline’ for the soul – rather as being in the French Foreign Legion would be for the body. Sylvia for her part cannot divorce Christopher because she is a Catholic. And so the couple are bound together on a wheel of fire. And the torments she devises for her husband are of exquisite accuracy. When she was thirteen (we learn only towards the end of the fourth volume,
Last Post
) Sylvia idly imagined cramming a kitten’s paws into walnut shells; this shows great early skill of a sadic nature. Throughout the novel, she deploys the subtle rumour, the lie direct, and the vicious deed to visit on her husband a series of social, financial and psychological humiliations. Her final act of malignity is the cutting-down of the Great Tree of Groby at Tietjens’s ancestral home – ‘as nasty a blow as the Tietjens had had in generations’. Once, she had watched a fish eagle circling high above a scream of herring gulls, causing havoc by its mere presence; she liked and remembered this as a self-image. Still, for all her apparent viciousness, there is one thing always to be said for Sylvia Tietjens: she is very good with horses.

Why, you may ask, does she persecute her husband? Or, more particularly, why continue, year after year, when she has many admirers, from young bucks to old generals, fawning on her, seeking both her love and her body? Part of the answer lies in Christopher’s very saintliness: the more he fails to respond and suffers without complaint, the more it goads her.
He also infuriatingly attempts to see things from her point of view. What could be more enraging to a soul like Sylvia’s than to be understood and forgiven? And so, every time, she returns to the attack on her great meal-sack of a husband. She loathes him – for his gentlemanliness and solemnity, his passiveness, his ‘pompous self-sufficiency’, his ‘brilliance’ and the ‘immorality’ of the views which that brilliant mind emits. When her confessor, Father Consett, suggests that ‘
Tout savoir, c’est tout pardonner
’ she replies that ‘to know everything about a person is to be bored … bored … bored!’ Sylvia is bored by marriage, but even more bored by promiscuity. ‘All men are repulsive,’ she assures her mother. And, ‘man-mad’ though she appears, Sylvia treats her lovers with disdain: they are not even worth properly tormenting. ‘Taking up with a man’, she reflects, ‘was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with a man before you said: “But I’ve read all this before.” ’

And this too, in a way, is her husband’s fault. Their relationship is not just about the infliction and the bearing of pain. Key to an understanding of Sylvia are those rare moments when Ford, a profound psychologist, allows us to consider that Sylvia is more than just a vengeful spirit possessed by evil. However infuriating Tietjens might be, however ‘immoral’ his views, he is the only truly mature man she has been with, the only one whose conversation can hold her: ‘As beside him, other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up.’ So he has spoiled her for all other men, and must be punished for it. The more so because he is the only one who can still move her. In the middle of France, in the middle of war, when a venomous old French duchess seems about to derail a wedding, Tietjens, applying intelligence, practicality and his ‘atrocious’ old-fashioned French, talks the woman down. Sylvia has been watching, and: ‘It almost broke Sylvia’s heart to see how exactly Christopher did the right thing.’ Two and a half
novels later, when Tietjens is living with Valentine Wannop and Sylvia has almost reached the bottom of her bag of torments, she imagines confronting her husband’s mistress: ‘But he might come in, mooning in, and suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy – oh, adorable – face of stone.’ That ‘oh, adorable’ says it all. As far as Sylvia can love, she loves Tietjens; and her rage at him is a function of sexual passion. She still desires him, still wants to ‘torment and allure’ him; but one of the Anglican saint’s conditions for her return to the marriage is that he will not sleep with her – a torment in riposte.

As all this suggests, the emotional level of the novel is high, and often close to hysteria. There is scarcely a character in the book – except, perhaps, Marie-Léonie, the Frenchly practical mistress of Christopher’s brother Mark – who is not described at one time or another as being mad, or on the verge of madness. Only one – Captain McKechnie – seems positively certifiable, but for most, ‘normality’ means a kind of nerve-strained semi-madness. We might expect, for instance, that Valentine Wannop, the emotional counterweight to Sylvia, the virgin to her adulteress, who shares much with Tietjens – they are both Latinists with ‘bread-and-butter brains’, both ‘without much of the romantic’ to them, both lovers of frugality – that she at least would have a healthy mind in her undoubtedly healthy body. But even she finds her nerves constantly on edge and her mind slipping: her head ‘seems to contain two balls of strings being separately unwound’. At one point, she barks an order to her own panicky thoughts: ‘Steady the Buffs!’ The mind at work is like a regiment under fire, and about to relocate; but where is it going, and who is leading it, and will it survive?

The middle two volumes of the novel are spent at the Western Front. Other, more conventional novelists might have set the madness of war against the calm and balm of love and sex;
Ford knows more and sees deeper. War and sexual passion are not opposites: they are in the same business, two parts of the same pincer attack on the sanity of the individual. It is not at first obvious the extent to which
Parade’s End
is saturated with sex – with memories of it, hopes for it and rumours about it. (The novel is masterly on the workings of gossip, and the way it gets poisonously out of hand. By the fourth volume, the rumours about the Tietjens brothers have grown to the point where the pair of them are viewed as ‘notorious libertines’ and Mark said to be dying of syphilis. The objective reader can count the number of women the brothers appear to have slept with in their entire lives: three between the two of them.) The central emotional and sexual vortex is that involving Sylvia, Christopher and Valentine. But the lives of lesser characters, even those who are specks at the periphery of the reader’s vision, are also endlessly disrupted and twisted by sex. There is O Nine Morgan, who applies for home leave because his wife is having an affair with a prizefighter; Tietjens, having heard that the boxer will kill Morgan if he turns up in Wales, refuses the request. So, instead of being beaten to death, O Nine is blown to bits in the trenches: sex gets him either way. Elsewhere, sergeants’ wives take up with Belgians; a cook ruins his career by going AWOL because of his ‘sister’; an RSM wants a commission because the ‘bad boys’ who ‘monkey’ with his wild daughter back home will be more careful if she’s an officer’s daughter; while Captain McKechnie keeps getting home leave to divorce, and then not divorcing (‘That’s modernism,’ growls General Campion). Sylvia’s brusque view of the military is that ‘You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women.’ She regards the war as an
agapemone
(a place where free love is practised), and as ‘an immense warlock’s carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties’.

But no one in the novel gets sex, and sexual passion, right. Sex is almost always damaging and disastrous – to the extent that the businesslike relationship between Mark and
Marie-Léonie seems almost normal, until you consider that in the thirteen years she has been his mistress she has never known ‘what his Office was nor where his chambers, nor even his surname’. Towards the very end of the novel there is a walk-on (or rather, ride-on) part for Christopher and Sylvia’s son. He is just a downy boy, if one beginning to feel the allure of an older woman; but he is old enough to have witnessed his mother at work on various men. And what is this ingenu’s early conclusion on the whole matter? ‘But wasn’t sex a terrible thing.’ Nor does the instinct just do for human beings. Christopher, on a balmy day in the Seine valley, the war for once distant, hears a skylark singing so far out of season that he concludes ‘the bird must be over-sexed’. Two novels later, his brother Mark, lying awake, hears nightingales producing not their normal, beautiful sound, but something much coarser, which seems to him to contain abuse of other males, and boastfulness to their own sitting hens. It is the sound, in his phrase, of ‘sex ferocity’.

Greene wrote that ‘
The Good Soldier
and the Tietjens series seem to me almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English. They are our answer to Flaubert.’ In subject matter, certainly; but there is also a consanguinity in technique. One of Flaubert’s great developments (not inventions – no one really invents anything in the novel) was
style indirect libre
, that way of dipping into a character’s consciousness – for a paragraph, a sentence, a few words, sometimes for just a single word – showing things from his or her point of view, and then dipping out again. This is a direct ancestor of the stream-of-consciousness narrative so richly deployed by Ford. Much of
Parade’s End
takes place within the heads of its characters: in memory and anticipation, reflection, misunderstanding and self-justification. Few novelists have better understood and conveyed the overworkings of the hysterical brain, the underworkings of the damaged brain (after his first spell at the front, Tietjens returns with partial memory
loss), the slippings and slidings of the mind at the end of its tether, with all its breakings-in and breakings-off.

The name Freud occurs only once, on Sylvia’s lips: ‘I … pin my faith on Mrs Vanderdecken [a society role model]. And, of course, Freud.’ She doesn’t elucidate, though we might reasonably deduce that he provides her with some theoretical justification for what Tietjens calls ‘her high-handed divagations from fidelity’. But Freud is more widely present, if – since this is a very English novel – in a subtle, anglicised form: ‘In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other.’ The word ‘subconscious’ is never used; instead, Tietjens at one point has been ‘thinking with his undermind’. Later, Valentine had always known something ‘under her mind’; Tietjens refers to ‘something behind his mind’; while General Campion ‘was for the moment in high good humour on the surface, though his subordinate minds [
sic
] were puzzled and depressed’. Ford moves between these levels of the mind as he moves between fact and memory, certainty and impression. Tietjens compares the mind to a semi-obedient dog. Nor is it just mind, memory and fact that are slipping and sliding; it is the very language used to describe them. General Campion, one of the least hysterical of characters, is driven to wonder, ‘What the
hell
is language for? We go round and round.’

The narrative also goes round and round, backtracking and criss-crossing. A fact, or an opinion, or a memory will be dropped in, and often not explained for a dozen or a hundred pages. Sometimes this may be a traditional cliffhanger: a character left in a state of emotional crisis while the novel ducks off for fifty or sixty pages at the Western Front. More often, the device becomes something much more individual and Fordian. An explosive piece of information, murderous lie or raging emotional conclusion might casually be let drop, whereupon the narrative will back off, as if shocked by anything stated with such certainty, then circle around, come close again,
back off again and, finally, approach it directly. The narrative, in other words, is acting as the mind often works. This can confuse, but as V. S. Pritchett said of Ford, ‘Confusion was the mainspring of his art as a novelist. He confused to make clear.’ To say that a great novel needs reading with great attention is somewhere between a banality and an insult. But it applies particularly to
Parade’s End
. It will be a very rare reader who does not intermittently look up from the page to ask, ‘But did I know that? Have we been told that already or not?’ In what sense did Christopher ‘kill’ his father? Did we know that Mrs Macmaster was even pregnant, let alone that she had lost a child? Have we been told Tietjens is under arrest? That his stepmother died of grief when Sylvia left him? That Macmaster was dead? Has Mark really been struck dumb? And so on, confusingly and clarifyingly, to the very end.