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This book is about Ford Madox Ford, a hero of the modernist literary revolution. Ford is a fascinating and fundamental figure of the time; not only because, as a friend and critic of Ezra Pound and Joseph Conrad, editor of the English Review and author of The Good Soldier, he shaped the development of literary modernism. But, as the grandson of Ford Madox Brown and son of a German music critic, he also manifested formative links with mainland European culture and the visual arts. In Ford there is the chance to explore continuity in artistic life at the turn of the last century, as well as the more commonly identified pattern of crisis in the time. The argument throughout the book is that modernism possesses more than one face. Setting Ford in his cultural and historical context, the opening chapter debates the concept of fragmentation in modernism; later chapters discuss the notion of the personal narrative, and war writing. Ford's literary technique is studied comparatively and plot summaries of his major books (The Good Soldier and Parade's End) are provided, as is a brief biography.
This chapter examines Ford Madox's depictions of silences and sensibilities in Parade's End and look at how his characters respond to the noise of society and the noise of war. It explores the changes to the experience of silence that were brought about by the Armistice and crafted over ensuing years. Tietjens and McKechnie argue in the hut during the bombardment, yelling 'sharp, injurious, inaudible words' in an attempt to drown out the engulfing noise. The sudden absence of noise leaves a vacuum which silence floods to fill. The noise of war was constant. It was never all quiet on the Western Front; not in incident and certainly not in terms of artillery, aerial or small-arms fire. But the Two Minutes' Silence on Armistice Day was not based on such measured principles. Its strength is also its weakness.
D. H. Lawrence's essay ‘Why the Novel Matters’ focuses on issues of communication and plurality as displayed by the effective novel. The relationship between Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford was sometimes close, and at times was difficult. It began when Ford first published Lawrence in the English Review and ‘introduced him to literary London’. What is communicated in Ford's novels, and how? This chapter examines the resultant dramatic thrust of the contemporary Fifth Queen trilogy, the eye for colour, for detail, for patterns. The psycho-political geography of Ford's writing is thus confirmed in its period of relative certainty, especially when compared with the suicides of Edward and Florence in The Good Soldier and the suicide of Christopher Tietjens's father in Parade's End. These later novels are distinguishable from the Fifth Queen trilogy primarily due to their more complex interweaving of levels. As another manifestation of modernist fragmentation, one fomented by psychoanalysis and sexology, the four main characters are read partly as four parts of the same psyche, individually and oppositionally gaining (at times violent) expression.
Ford Madox Ford admired Ivan Turgenev, so it is not surprising that one comes across ideas borrowed, perhaps, from him in the later writer's work. In this case, though, there is a development at work; a development precipitated by World War I. Turgenev's self-confessed nihilist Bazarov expresses amazement at the tenacity of human belief in words – words that, in his example, can diminish and deaden a feeling of catastrophe. Were he to find himself instead in the volumes of Parade's End (or one of a number of other war novels), Bazarov's amazement would be tempered. Ford, post-war, has lost belief in words. He is often unsatisfied with the capacity of language to express the totality of thought or experience; speech constantly ‘gives out’, to be replaced by his most characteristic grammatical tool: ellipsis. Two quotations provide a framework for an exploration into how and why sight functions in the fragmentation of war. The first is from John Keegan's book, The Face of Battle; the second from Frederic Manning's novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune.
, this was an inspection by a senior UVF officer, while in others the parade ended with a short religious service or reaffirmation of political resolutions against Home Rule). In terms of wider propaganda, only one brief article has considered this important issue of the public face of the UVF in detail.25 Unionists seem to have been confused about how to portray the UVF, if at all, in their propaganda. One famous anti-Home Rule postcard, issued c. 1913, shows a women, carrying a rifle, saying ‘Deserted, well I can stand alone!’ A curious piece, when one considers that
Brussels. On 13 August Heeze tried to read a letter from Orange in a meeting of the city council, calling for unity in order to expel the Spaniards. However, it was still too soon for the city to openly support Orange’s cause.65 That moment arrived on 30 August when the magistrates of Brussels granted permission to Heeze’s troops to enter the city of Brussels for its defence. The troops of Heeze paraded every day with their lieutenant colonel, Jacques de Glymes. On 4 September, the parade ended with what most scholars have called le coup d’état: the troops broke into the
perverse parody of The Bridge on the River Kwai ’s stiff-upper-lip stoicism, whistling the tune of ‘Black Leather Rock’ à la ‘Colonel Bogey’. However, the parade ends not in a celebration of imperial guts and glory but the brutal mugging of Simon, who is left battered and bleeding as the gang march triumphantly away. Although the scene bears an uncanny resemblance to the choreographed gang violence in
of sectarian disturbance was never far away. In 1822, for example, the Order’s annual 12 July parade ended with Irish Catholics besieging the marchers within their hall. ‘Police and even military intervention was required and 127 Orangemen were taken into safekeeping, returning home ignominiously “with their sashes in their pockets”’ (ibid.). Such Protestant–Catholic conflicts in Scotland may be partly understood as a product of the demographic and economic make-up of a second wave of members joining the Order. These were not Scottish soldiers returning from