Twentieth Century Sleeper:
REXROTH, KENNETH
WRITERS and WRITING Twentieth Century Sleeper Parade's End. By Ford Madox Ford. Knopf. 836 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Kenneth Rexroth Author, "Bird in the Bush," "In Defense of the Earth," "The...
...She isn't a bit nice and far from thrilling, but she is infinitely pitiable...
...It is singularly like Burnt Njal rewritten by the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses...
...When I first read the Tietjens series in those same years, I felt just the same way...
...The Literary Guild imprimatur is hardly "dismay...
...In 1950 they stayed away in droves...
...Newspaper reviews ranged from awestruck to fulsome...
...After the last war any number of think tanks started talking about Tietjens in publishers' offices...
...I became very excited and prepared an introduction...
...Tietjens is far from being the last Tory...
...Let's hope someday Knopf-Random will break the one volume back into its constituent parts and issue them in the paperback Vintage series or the Modern Library...
...Glenway Westcott is quoted on the blurb of this edition: "It somewhat dismayed the reading public of its day...
...The book was a bomb...
...This might well be the description of a great tract but not a great novel...
...However, the point is far from labored—obviously, if a ranking critic could compare the book to The Forsythe Saga, even unfavorably...
...The last cobwebby novels of James, the webs of indirection of Conrad, were in the recent past...
...Reviewed by Kenneth Rexroth Author, "Bird in the Bush," "In Defense of the Earth," "The Signature of All Things" This is the major sleeper of 20th century literature in English, maybe in any language...
...His own autobiographical anecdotes outrank Frank Harris' and are much more entertaining and far more wise...
...What is wrong is that the public has become the many-headed monster that haunts the novel...
...They knew...
...If that isn't Lincoln's Doctor's Dog, I don't know what is...
...We all have another chance...
...It is just not good language for a dust jacket...
...Barrabas...
...And alas, it is still there in the new edition...
...There is nothing enjoyable about the wickedness of war in Ford Madox Ford's mind—it is just wicked...
...They were about to issue the tetralogy in one volume, with an introduction by a leading critic...
...with a terrifying din...
...And believe me, that kind of wickedness is very old-fashioned...
...Paul Goodman has recently pointed out, as others have before him, that almost all "anti-war" novels and movies are pro-war...
...Tolstoy said, tirelessly and tiresomely, that war was wicked, but in fact he seemed to enjoy it almost as much as Dostoyevsky enjoyed his murderers and supermen...
...It did not...
...The book is big and fairly dear...
...It certainly seemed modern...
...he only seems Christlike because all the others cry out continuously, "Barrabas...
...People who spit at sight and storm out of cocktail parties in all kinds of dudgeon meet in peace in praise of Tietjens...
...There is the same deadly impetus, the inertia of doom, that drives through the greatest of the sagas...
...I do hope all my colleagues get behind and push...
...There is the same tireless weaving and reweaving of the tiniest threads of evil, the loom of corruption, that sickens the heart in Choderlos de Laclos...
...Partly, it was the serious public relations fumble...
...The same novelists who have grown rich on the anti-war bit have made bull fights popular with touring housewives from the exurbias of the Middle West...
...Justine, Venus in Furs or Deer Park touch only my risibilities...
...Robie Maculey asks why he is so Christlike, so put upon and crucified...
...At least one book, the concluding The Last Post, became a book club selection...
...But not too modern...
...I felt like a man about to be executed," says Sacher-Masoch's hero in Venus in Furs, as he waits for his Wanda to show up with her brand new dog whip...
...Certainly it is a better book than any of Conrad's...
...No book has ever revealed more starkly the senselessness of the disasters of war, and shown up with greater X-ray vision, under the torn flesh of war, the hidden vindictive world of peace-behind-thelines...
...not just awful, but silly...
...This is no rash statement...
...Ford is Erasmus, touring the Thirty Years War with Anne Boleyn—and there is no Mother Courage to save the day for sentiment...
...It does a book no good to compare it even favorably to The Forsythe Saga or talk about "the gradual, then swift, disappearance of the nineteenth century conception and presentation of the governing class in fiction" That would scare anybody off...
...My own edition is a Literary Guild publication...
...I tell all this just to show how the casual mechanisms of publishing can make all the difference...
...I still do...
...There is not much blood, guts and mud, but what there is is awful...
...Parade's End is one of those books...
...I still do...
...Nothing could be done about it...
...When Ford used to say that he taught Conrad how to write, nobody believed him...
...The negotiations fell through...
...It is not for nothing that I have compared Parade's End with six of the greatest and most mature novels of all literature...
...It is a little like all of them rolled together, although of course it is not as great as some of them...
...Cultivated people who had known in their own flesh the moral disaster of the First World War read of Tietjens and his troubles with quite adequate comprehension...
...But it is not as big as Gone With the Wind or War and Peace and it is as interesting reading as either...
...I have never met a critic of the slightest importance who had read the book and did not think it was a very great one...
...During the next 20 years the Penguin editions sold quietly and apparently well: They were always in print...
...In fact, it is a masterpiece of style and novelistic construction...
...Poor Tietjens...
...As the years go by, I read less and less fiction...
...Ulysses had just come out in Paris...
...Blood and mud and terror and rape and all-pervading anxiety—this is what is attractive about war to those who are withering of tedium vitae and "human selfalienation...
...Parade's End goes a long way toward substantiating that outrageous claim...
...I'll grant him "somewhat...
...Ten years have gone by and here comes the book again...
...Partly, this was the fault of production...
...Not High Politics and Merchants of Death and all that stuff that agitates the liberals, but just petty human evil...
...Those who knew Ford know that he was given to outrageous confabulation...
...What is wrong with the public...
...There's a Wanda in Parade's End, one of the first full-dress portrayals of the adulterous, guilt-crazy, unrelievedly hostile wife—the Modern Woman, the daughter of Ibsen's Nora or Hedda, whose divorce scandals enliven the daily press at midcentury in every newspaper, everyday, in all the civilized world...
...The boys on the GI Bill in 1950 didn't seem to understand...
...The public thought the book was about a fictional Winnie Havana-Havana...
...A callow publicity man can effectively bury the greatest novel of World War I, one of the most devastating "war novels" ever written, one of the very small number of great novels in English of this century and—last— and far, far more rare, one of the few novels ever written by an adult about adults...
...What's wrong with the public now...
...New Directions tried to get them for their New Classics series...
...He is humanist man, 2,000 or more years old, beset by the first major explosion of mass civilization, inchoate and irresponsible, ridden with frustration and vindictiveness...
...A respectable number of the most respectable literary critics in Britain and America agree with me...
...However, the lead-off on the blurb—in red ink—is by Graham Greene, and it says, "the Tietjens series seem to me the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English...
...As time went on and the advance publicity trickled in, I began to get a chill...
...I was there...
...Thirty-five years ago they bought the books...
...Issued in four volumes from 1924-28, Ford Madox Ford's "Tietjens Series," as the books were always called then, was a moderate success both financially and critically...
...Alas, novels are written for women and men under 30, by women and the incorrigibly immature...
...that troubled, gently sardonic man, was being billed as "the last Tory...
...Few people go to brothels seeking domesticity...
...Most of them were written long ago and far away: The Tale of Genji, The Satyricon, Don Quixote, The Dream of the Red Chamber, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Burnt Njal...
...He isn't, really...
...There is simply nothing self-conscious, or boyish or stagy about it, and those adjectives apply only too well to even those novels signed by both Conrad and Ford...
...It has, of course, always been like that, but we are self-conscious today...
...In a sense she is the heroine of the book, as the wretched Lear is the hero of the play...
...One day in 1949 I received a letter from Knopf...
...Out of all fiction there is possibly a five-foot shelf of books which you can reread in later life with thorough approval and that necessary identification that T. S. Eliot called suspension of disbelief...
...Returning to the works of the great dead is a disillusioning experience...
...After all, it was a direct quote, his very own words for himself...
...The war is even nastier...
...When I finished Les Liaisons long ago in my early youth I felt like I'd been put through a meat grinder...
...Robie Macauley's longish introduction is lucid, but somehow it is nevertheless confusing, and it is certainly disappointing to those of us who have championed the story all these years...
...It did no good to try to tell people that this was the wriest of all his sardonic comments on his own career...
...With almost no exceptions, current production induces a mild, queasy funk...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 27
