Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End (#1925Club)

"And Christopher was as obstinate as a hog. For that Mark did not blame him. It was a Tietjens job to be obstinate as a hog." [800]

The protagonist of Parade's End is Christopher Tietjens and indeed he's pretty obstinate. That's Mark, his older brother, musing above, and maybe it takes one to know one, both as a Tietjens and as an obstinate hog... 

Parade's End is a series of four novels that takes place from 1912 until some point after the end of World War I. Christopher Tietjens comes from a wealthy family from the North of England--he's one of the Tietjens of Groby--and in 1912 he's a highly valued analyst in a department of statistics. But he's married Sylvia Tietjens (neé Satterthwaite) and she's a bad 'un.

She'd set her cap at him because she thought she might be pregnant by Colonel Drake and needed a father; she's beautiful; Tietjens falls; he's never quite sure the son she bears is his. (Nor is anyone else: Sylvia herself, various other Tietjens, the reader.) At the beginning of the first novel Some Do Not Sylvia is on the continent, and has just left a subsequent lover Perowne, and intends to ask Tietjens to take her back, which he does.

In the meantime, though, Tietjens, in a meet-cute episode, has discovered Valentine Wannop, a suffragette. He's golfing; she's disrupting the golf course as a protest, and Tietjens rescues her from arrest. He ends up driving her home in the middle of the night and they start to fall in love. Nothing happens at that time.

And nothing happens for quite a while. Tietjens gets himself into the army; we next see Tietjens in 1917 and he's back in England; a shell had exploded near him in France and he'd woken up in hospital not even knowing his name. He meets Valentine again in London, but nevertheless he's determined to get back to France.

"The gods to each describe a different lot:

Some enter at the portal. Some do not!" [24]

This couplet is first quoted in the context of the landed Tietjens' relation to his poor Scottish friend MacMaster. But just before Tietjens' return to France, which both he and Valentine assume is a death sentence, he asks her to sleep with him, and she thinks, that while she's not that sort of girl, "Some do!"

 

But, in fact, they do not. 

 

The second novel No More Parades is set in France. Tietjens is a very capable officer in Transport. New levies appear and need to be moved to the front; there's a grimly comic bit about trying to move Canadian troops into position to go over the top, presumably largely to be killed. Tietjens' position isn't on the very front, but it's dangerous enough; his messenger Morgan dies in his arms, killed by a German shell. 

 

At the same time Sylvia (and aspirants to Sylvia's favours) are out to drag down Tietjens. It's widely believed that Valentine is Tietjens' mistress, and Sylvia contributes to the rumours which get back to, and are believed, by Tietjens' commanding officer General Campion, his older brother Mark, even by his father, so much so that his father commits suicide. (Or does he?) One of those aspirants, working for a bank, delays deposits to his account and hastens check processing so Tietjens' checks bounce, a court-martialable offence at the time.

 

What makes Sylvia so miserable to her husband? She perceives that Tietjens has fallen out of love with her, though he's too honourable to ask for a divorce, or even to sleep with the girl he loves (at least for a long while), and she's still half in love with him. She also just craves excitement:

"And then there is the boredom. I know it; one is bored...bored...bored!" [41]

A sentiment she repeats several times.  She gets to the battle lines in France, where she's not supposed to be and gets Tietjens to spend the night with her in a hotel, but leaves the door open so Perowne can come in.

"If what's distressing you is having to tell me that you believe Major Perowne came with my wife's permission I know it's true. It's also true my wife expected me to be there. She wanted some fun; not adultery." [498]

Not my idea of fun, but that's who Sylvia is. Tietjens not unreasonably attacks this intruder, but it's Tietjens who gets in trouble for it.

Tietjens, on the other hand, is often irritating in a priggish way:

"His private ambition had always been for saintliness...a saint of the Anglican variety..." [200] 

Tietjens' reputation is so compromised by the end of the second novel that Campion can do nothing but promote him into a position that actually is the front lines.

The third novel A Man Could Stand Up-- starts with Valentine on Armistice Day 1918. Noisy celebrations are starting; Valentine, who's teaching at a girls' school, can't control her students, when she learns (along with a lot of misinformation) that Tietjens has survived the war and is in London. She goes to see him, but does he want to see her? 

In fact he does, and once again they think about sleeping together, but rescuing Valentine's drunk brother gets in the way. 

The novel then moves back in time to early 1918 on the Western front; the British army is close to collapse and nobody quite recognizes that the German army is equally close to collapse. (The Russians have collapsed, which just might give a second wind to the Germans.) 

Tietjens on the front is more concerned with his personal issues: what to do about his family? His son (if the son is his)? Valentine? His brother Mark and his father were too ready to believe the slanders about Tietjens and he can't forgive them (see the quote at the top) and Tietjens who would inherit the family estate because Mark has no children decides to refuse it and make his own way.

The fourth novel The Last Post resolves most of the issues but I won't tell you how they're resolved... When Graham Greene caused the series to be reprinted as one volume in 1963, he said The Last Post was a 'disaster' and simply left it out. That's a little strong, but I did think it was the weakest.

The novel is often quite funny, despite the darkness of its themes, both political and personal. It's also stylistically interesting, with a lot of it in stream of consciousness, an early, though hardly the first, example of the technique. There was a BBC adaptation with Benedict Cumberbatch as Tietjens, which I haven't seen but now want to. Cumberbatch could do a good Tietjens, I think, both pompous and appealing; after all he was Sherlock Holmes.

It's the 1925 Club! 

Actually only the second novel No More Parades is from 1925; the whole was issued from 1924-1928. Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting!

 

 

Napoo finny! or How our phones really are making us stupid

I've been reading Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and enjoying it. The second volume No More Parades in the tetralogy came out in 1925 so it's suitable for next week's group reading project. The four volumes are set from just before World War I through to shortly after it ends.

The protagonist Christopher Tietjens says, "Napoo finny," and then later Valentine Wannop also uses the phrase. What the heck? Napoo finny?

Turns out 'Napoo finny' is World War I British soldier slang; it's a comic mispronunciation of the French phrase "[Il] n'y [en] a plus; fini," roughly "No more of that; finished." Valentine says it of her chastity, though in point of fact she remains chaste. It's the same sort of instinct that led British soldiers to turn the Belgian battlefield town of Ypres into Wipers.

Where do you go when you want to know something like that? These days it's Internet search, of course; Google in my first attempt. I was on a train and had my phone with, so I searched with that. Google's AI response, which took up the whole of the phone screen was this:

 

 

I could tell this was nuts. 'Finny' is a child's term for excrement? In what world? Clearly the AI was still on the poo part. I scrolled down and got a better answer from a blog post. But the AI overview was so bad it was almost funny. Why not just giggle at a good poo joke? But they keep saying this is the AI that's about to take over the world.

 

But what was even stranger was that when I just now checked this out on my desktop computer, the Google AI overview was much more sensible:

 

 

Now the AI understood that 'finny' came from 'fini', and the strange bit about 'napoo' also meaning 'to kill' had disappeared. Had Google AI learned something in the couple of days between? They say AI is learning all the time.

 

Alas, no, because my phone still produced the same result above. The Google AI result on the phone is different--and wronger--than the one on my computer. What is Google trying to do to us? And only if we depend on our phones?

 

In general I feel like Internet search, whether Google, or what I more often use, DuckDuckGo (Bing) has just gotten worse in the past five years or so. The AI has not been a help. Does anybody else feel this?

 

Well, somebody else does. Eventually my library will deliver the new Cory Doctorow--Enshittification--and maybe then I'll know why...