Some Do Not . . . (1924) is the first installment in British novelist Ford Madox Ford’s World War I tetralogy, Parade’s End. Parade’s End follows Christopher Tietjens of Groby, a Yorkshire landowner who has been pressed into service for the newly formed Imperial Department of Statistics. Ford figures Tietjens as the last man of the 18th century in Britain, on the verge of a shell-shocking reckoning with the 20th. And as another major character specifies, a “Cambridge Tory man”, something now belonging to a museum which in Victorian Britain had been replaced by the “Oxford Disraelian Conservative Imperialist”. Some Do Not . . . does begin around 1912, at the end of Britain’s “Imperial Century”, but Tietjens has not adapted himself; he is a gentleman who must become an officer, and a descendant of feudal lords who must become a bureaucrat, all under a suspicious Germanic name. His talent in statistics is largely owed to a brilliant memory, a capacity which makes him disagreeable, given to “knocking over all the skittles of the exactitudes of others”. Note that the inelegantly repeated “of” in that phrase contributes to the peevish effect of the “skittles” and “exactitudes”, as part of Ford’s larger design. That other major character is Tietjens’ love interest, and since she helps brings the best, or at least the truest, out of Tietjens and Ford, it will do to introduce her through a quick synopsis converging upon the passage which will be quoted and examined.
Tietjens’ wife Sylvia, an adventurous socialite (and Catholic besides) has left him for a Major Perowne, yet, bored again, she intends to return to her husband. The novel opens with Tietjens and his friend and colleague Vincent Macmaster on their way to Rye for a golfing weekend. Christopher learns in a letter of his wife’s intention to be reunited, but on the golf course he meets a startling young suffragette named Valentine Wannop. The next day Macmaster and Tietjens attend a breakfast at the Duchemin house; Mr. Duchemin is a sometimes lunatic, so Mrs. Duchemin and Macmaster are soon to become involved. Valentine is also there as an assistant to Mrs. Duchemin, and when she remembers Tietjens from the day before, she insists that he join her after for lunch at her mother’s house. We learn that Christopher’s father had helped Mrs. Wannop with money upon her widowhood. After lunch and another letter from Sylvia, Tietjens travels with Valentine by night and dog-cart to Rye.
This night scene, which contains the passage below, finds Tietjens dreading the meeting in Dover which is intended to resolve things with the wife; Sylvia’s haughty caprices are to be contrasted (although never directly) with Valentine’s practical enthusiasm, and with the comforts he can expect from the familiar countryside.
And he had sat, feeling he didn’t know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts - intent, like Miss Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures; a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a horse-deal in the market-town where he happened to know the horse-dealer. The horse-dealer, indeed, was known to every hunting man in England! A luxurious, long argument in the atmosphere of stable-hartshorn and slow wranglings couched in ostler’s epigrams. You couldn’t have a better day; the beer in the pub probably good, too. Or if not that, the claret. . . . The claret in south country inns was often quite good; there was no sale for it so it got well kept. . . .
On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his wife’s maid at Dover. . . .
He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like other men; free of his conventions, his strait waistcoatings. . . .
The two have repeatedly run into fog banks, and this passage is introduced as a memory of the fourth escape from fog through mist into moonlight, thanks to the road’s upward slope, when “they had emerged into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical sea. . . .” That elliptical tendency, as seen in the title of this first volume, is all over Parade’s End, both as a matter of punctuation and as a narrative device (see the beginning of Some Do Not. . .’s Part Two). The literal ellipses are most common within Ford’s free indirect discourse, as lapses in thought caused by pleasant evocations (the quite good claret), or by discomfiting anticipations (the meeting at Dover). The promise of claret slows Tietjens’ thoughts and leads him gently to his appreciation of the south country. His alarm at the meeting on Tuesday requires a new paragraph, and leads to a different kind of lull, one that must be broken by a new paragraph and a return to the previous line, now formulated more clearly as the “holiday from himself”. Here, though, the appositive/metaphor “his strait waistcoatings” has enough image and imagination to calm Tietjens again. . . . It is not until Valentine speaks that this relapse into reverie is interrupted.
The passage begins in the third person limited, and the disclaimer that Tietjens didn’t know why he felt like Guy Fawkes, an interpolation of “he didn’t know why” between “feeling” and “like”, has a colloquial effect. The “he didn’t know why” interruption is an adaption of Christopher’s observation that “I didn’t know why”. Tietjens’ voice is merged with the author’s in a simpler way in the stilted double negative “by no means disagreeable thoughts”, but the resolve shared with Valentine leads to the exclamation “till Tuesday morning!”, a bit of free indirect discourse proper, separated by the semicolon. Ford makes Tietjens’ relish for “figures” a sort of languor through the alliteration of “look”, “long”, and “luxurious”, with the two “g” sounds in the two adjectives matched to the one in “figures”. The word “figures” is repeated, and then “horse-deal” is tied fussily to “horse-dealer”. There is more relish in this repetition and in the repetition of “horse-dealer”, to whom the Monday is surely as much “devoted” as to the transaction itself. That note about the horse-dealer’s reputation is another outburst which in one clause makes the relationship less personal and introduces admiration for that tradesman. The “indeed”, though a formal word, is included as another colloquial pause in Christopher’s thought represented in Ford’s prose. The “l” and “g” sounds in “long” and “luxurious” give feeling to the complete forty-eight hours; they are repeated in description of the again consonant “argument”, though in the opposite order, perhaps simply to make the repetition more subtle. Ford matches them sonically to “argument”, to argument renamed as “slow wranglings”, and to the horse-dealer’s side of those wranglings, the “ostler’s epigrams”. To be literal and interpretive at the same time, one could say that Ford has smoothed the conventional thorniness of “figures” and “argument” into a “long” and “luxurious” quality. Tietjens may have strange tastes, but he enjoys them the same way anyone might enjoy a weekend both languid and productive. The second person of “You couldn’t have a better day” is ostensibly the universal “one” pronoun, but it is also Tietjens as the addressee of his own claim, and in a rare occasion for Ford, the reader, though addressed by character more than by author. Ford shows us in an informal sentence fragment following a semicolon that Tietjens anticipates beer at the pub, but this beer is soon substituted with the more squire-like claret, with Tietjens practical explanation as to its quality in the south, which thought trails into the future with another ellipses. . . .
One of the literary legacies of the First World War may have been an overdetermination of thematic content in the interwar novels that followed, at least as they are presented a century onward. Tietjens is no doubt a “History Man”, more victim than agent, and made too aware of it so that the reader can learn too. Ford puts him at the busy street corner of class hierarchy and Christian decline in Some Do Not…., before telling us in the sequel, No More Parades, how those distances tend to collapse and get confused in the trenches. In these preceding years, as Tietjens is still the confident country gentleman, his most vivid encounter with the modern is that with plucky suffragette Valentine, and it suggests to us who he is as a subject of the 20th century, but also as his own man. Out in the befogged country, with those epochal stakes obscured, that encounter feels not like history, but like his story taken in as part of His story: “He was looking hard at her. He didn’t know what had happened to him. She took a long look at him, cool, but with immense eyes. It was if for a moment destiny, which usually let him creep past somehow, had looked at him.”