Ford Maddox Ford – ‘The Last Post’

Isn’t One Day I’m Going to Soar a great record? Unapologetically damaged: celebratory, bold as brass, but ready to bolt for the hole in the skirting board at the merest sign of the gentlest cat. There’s no way Kevin would have betrayed the Dexys name for a quick buck, but still, it’s glorious to have the proof. The telling moment, on record as in the live show, is the mid point of ‘I’m Always Going to Love You’, a blissful duet turning sour on a dime, for no reason but Kevin’s whim: ‘I think I’m going round the bend, now this must end’. Madeline can only exclaim, ‘What?!’ Parade’s End, too, is a story of love gone rancorous on a whim, and its concluding volume, The Last Post, sours the toxic pot of Christopher and Sylvia’s relations still further. Almost entirely left out of the recent TV series, it begins with Mark Tietjens, who has been paralysed by a seizure on armistice day, lying within a ramshackle construction with a roof but no walls, in the grounds of a house Christopher has taken in Sussex, as the base for his post war antique dealings. His long standing mistress and now wife, Marie-Léonie, tends to him, turning the pages of a newspaper held between two picture frames so that he can keep up with the racing news, and in the mean time she bottles cider and gets on with the other day-to-day duties of the smallholding. The day on which the book is set is some years after the armistice. Published in 1928, it finds Sylvia and Christopher’s son, Michael / Mark, at Oxford amongst a set of Marxist-Communists. Since he was born in 1912 or 1913, he would be 15 or 16 in 1928, and he must be at least that old – perhaps the book is set slightly in the future? In any case, it deals with the day of Mark’s death, and his thoughts and reflections make up a good deal of the text. Christopher is absent, off on a doomed mission to prevent the highly contentious Groby Great Tree from being chopped down (it is already down, and it brought down a chunk of the house – including Mark’s childhood bedroom – with it).

Mark’s mind is a stuffy, misogynistic place to be:

It is obvious that women must be allowed what means they can make use of to maintain – to arouse – their sex attraction for their men. That is what the bitches are for in the scale of things. They have to perpetuate the breed.

Make that misanthropic, too. Now, this is a very un-Dexys attitude, but what is similar is the insistence on sexual attraction as a powerful and uncontrollable force. Over the course of his musings, Mark adds to sex attraction ‘sex fever’, ‘sex-cruelty’, ‘sex-madness’, ‘sex-viciousness’ and ‘sex ferocity’ – it is quite clear that he sees it as a malignant force, to be guarded against, and this helps to explain his peculiar life choices. Born to be lord of the manor, in possession of a good fortune, he ran from the universally acknowledged truth that he must be in want of a wife, and hid in a cubby hole in London with a woman who for many years was more maid than significant other. From the TV series (which leaves out Marie-Léonie completely), S. presumed Mark must be gay. Maybe he is and won’t face it. Certainly some of his misogyny stems from seeing what Sylvia has done to Christopher – but then he is the elder brother, so by that stage he had already settled into his weirdly uncomplicated, uncommitted (but monogamous) regime.

It is not possible to understand Mark purely in terms of his own generation, though. He is bound by honour just as much as Christopher, though they understand the idea differently (Mark more in bureaucratic / legal terms – what can be proved against one). Thinking about their father, he reflects:

He had been a younger son who had never spoken to his father for forty years. Grand-father had never forgiven him for marrying Miss Selby of Biggen… not because it was marrying below him but because Grand-father had wanted their mother for his eldest son…

And then, of their father’s death, from an apparently accidental gunshot wound:

Did he commit suicide? If so then Valentine Wannop was his daughter.

Mark later rejects this idea, in order, perhaps, to die at peace, but it’s a shocking moment. It pulls his motives into focus: he has seen the damage that the choosing the wrong partner, or having affairs with the wives of friends can do to subsequent generations, and rather than risk doing the same himself… but it’s not even that, it’s not an altruistic choice, it’s that he resents – whilst accepting – the imposition of his own birth, and wants to minimise its effects.

He had always been tired of the tenantry and of Groby. He had been born tired of them.

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Some of the strange vocab of The Last Post: fauteuil, auriference, purfling, apophthegms, incult, jonnock, jigamaree, lustrum, chaffering, flinders, vicegerent, clittering, trituration, cicisbeo, pellitory, skep, stiver, tweeny (as in servant, not teenager), layette, slub, marmoreally, fald-stool.

Dexys at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 18th September

[Another diary-review like this one, fact-checked a bit. It wouldn’t hurt to set the scene by mentioning the support act, a burlesque performer whose name I didn’t catch, and who turned out to embody the ‘later use of the term’ – i.e. striptease. It was all very professional and, as you’d expect with something Dexys-associated, her costume was beautifully cut and colour co-ordinated, being all in lemon-yellow. Over the ten minutes of a brass-band soundtrack she eventually got down to pants, tiara and nipple-covering sequinned discs. It was the one moment of the evening which recalled Kevin Rowland’s fabulous My Beauty album, in particular the cover and the ‘Concrete and Clay’ video, which doomed it, of course, commercially. A young female stripper didn’t come close to the taboos addressed there, but it was a tip of the hat, I thought. Nice tits, too, well swung.]

19th Sept. Fennel soup! And a latte, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery café in Edinburgh, the day after Dexys played the Queen’s Hall. Fennel, apple and... celeriac, I think, though it doesn’t taste like celery. Perhaps it doesn’t, generally. Dexys were great, very much the polished showmen of their Later... performance, drilled and immaculately dressed. Kevin wore a grey fedora all the way through, which was a problem at first because we were right above the stage on the balcony, so it was three songs before we got to see his face. For ‘She Got a Wiggle’ a screen was wheeled out, on to which Madeleine Hyland was projected, singing when appropriate (the ‘I’m mad about you’ refrain), otherwise smouldering. Kevin performed to the screen, letting us identify him positively for the first time. I presumed Hyland hadn’t come on tour with them, but the screen turned out to be a device for preserving the thunder of her appearance a few songs later, on ‘I’m Always Going to Love You’. That’s when the sparks really began to fly.

They played the whole of One Day I’m Going to Soar, and it was great, but the encores were greater. A slow, mellow, green-lit ‘Tell Me When My Light Turns Green’, sung in response to some stage patter, a policeman asking Kevin to explain himself for… burning, naturally. I’m sure Chris Roberts’ Don’t Stand Me Down article mentioned policemen and burning (hey, it did), must be an old routine. There was no ‘Geno’, though folks chanted for it; there was an extended ‘Come On, Eileen’, Kevin strutting up and down in front of the stage like a peacock, trying to climb a speaker stack and thinking better of it, returning to strutting. Clasping outstretched hands from the front row. And then, best of all, with a curtailed intro, just ‘I’ve been wondering, what’s she like?’… yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything better than Dexys playing ‘This Is What She’s Like’, straight from 1985 (except for the reception, so one hears). After singing ‘Well you know the kind of people that put creases in their old Levis?’, Kevin said, ‘people really used to do that’. It built quickly and got a huge round of applause as it dropped back for the harmonies and variations. A band-intro bit was built in and as it approached its final whirl Madeleine Hyland came out again, not to sing but to stand – to stand him down? – accusatory, hands on hips. Kevin didn’t sing to her this time, he was wrapped up in his mantra, ‘This is my soul’, over and over for many short minutes, and though that might be self-centred it radiated like nothing I’ve ever felt, and it was his soul, filling the room, transcendentally joyful.
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Chris S.’s photos of the gig.

The only good Tory is a lonely Tory

Have you been watching Parade’s End? After the first episode I found myself reading along, which is something I’ve never done before. TV adaptations are all very well, but you don’t want them to interfere with your conception of the book, do you? Previously I’ve found actors’ faces hard to shift when reading after watching, but this time, doing both at once, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Benedict Cumberbatch is terrific as Christopher Tietjens, self-contained and in permanent meltdown, but it is impossible to identify him with his character visually. Tietjens is a ‘fat golfing idiot with bulging eyes’, and his wife Sylvia says of him:

I call my husband the Ox. He’s repulsive: like a swollen animal.

For all his slow, deliberate movements, and his pained facial expressions, Cumberbatch isn’t exactly swollen, and certainly not fat. Ford Maddox Ford himself (above) seems a better physical fit.

Though I’ve a book-and-a-bit of this tetralogy yet to go, I wanted to get down my thoughts about Tietjens’ Tory values, because they’re not straightforward. He’s a member – the youngest son – of an old, wealthy, Yorkshire family. They have a grand home called Groby, to which Christopher is unexpectedly heir. Two of his elder brothers died in battle in India ‘on the same day and not a mile apart’, and the eldest, Mark, ‘the archetype of all sound men’, has ruled himself out of the running:

‘He,’ Tietjens said, ‘has got a French woman near Euston station. He’s lived with her for over fifteen years, of afternoons, when there were no race meetings. She’ll never let him marry and she’s past the child-bearing stage. So there’s no one else….’

The stage is set, one would have thought, for Christopher to take up the reigns which are his by birth: to be the great landowner, or, in the war (the book starts in 1912, and has so far reached the armistice), to be comfortably part of the officers’ club. If he doesn’t want that, he could discreetly get himself a mistress and live beneath the radar, like Mark; or he could make a pyrrhic stand against his own privilege, like... Wittgenstein, say. He could give away all his money and live according to principles of egalitarianism. He could certainly divorce his unfaithful, contemptuous wife, who almost ruins his military career at one point by telling General Campion that he is a Socialist, in response to Campion’s musings:

he’s got a positive genius for getting into the most disgusting messes…. You’re too young to have heard of Dreyfus…. But I always say that Christopher is a regular Dreyfus….

Campion’s charge is that Tietjens is hapless. This is and isn’t true. It is true if he is being judged by the standards of an upper class which values property and solidarity above all else; but Christopher’s particular idealism is to believe that his class is not just about self-perpetuation, that it is there to set an example, and to provide money, leadership and moral guidance. In other words, although he should be an insider, he believes the stories his class tells about itself to outsiders, and so falls prey to subtle social forces which want to avoid the exposure of the prevailing doublethink.

Precisely because he does believe these stories, Christopher does not rebel. He acts in what he sees as an honourable manner – the only manner possible – when all around him people wince at his lack of ambiguity. He marries Sylvia because it is possible he has got her pregnant; but it is more likely that she has entrapped him, being already pregnant by another man. This inauspicious start, coupled with Tietjens’ (so far) chaste affection for Valentine Wannop, leads to an escalation of rumours which gets back to his father, including betrayal of his country for money to support Valentine and their (non-existent) child, ‘connivance’ in other affairs of Sylvia’s, and himself sharing his a friend’s mistress. His father cuts him at their club, then commits suicide back in Yorkshire. Christopher can’t forgive him, for the accusations or the suicide, and refuses his inheritance – and it is this last point which, ironically, is the most damaging. ‘Of course, refusing property is a sign of being one of these fellows’, says General Campion, confirmed for the moment in his opinion of Tietjens as a Socialist.

Elsewhere:

‘By God!’ Christopher exclaimed. ‘I loathe your whole beastly buttered-toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, hot-house aired beastliness of fornication….’

Christopher’s attitude is similar to Socialism in that it is against the same things; but it is not for the same things. It is nonsensical in that it relies on the integrity of the social hierarchy as much as on the integrity of individuals; and though Tietjens believes this once existed – in his beloved seventeenth* century – he knows that it hasn’t survived. So much of Parade’s End is about bureaucracy, from the statistics office in London, which he quits in frustration, to the trenches in France, where he finds official obfuscation undiminished. His personal integrity is never in doubt to the reader, but neither is it obvious to his companions; as he reflects, ‘I am damn good at not speaking’.

And indeed, with him, the instinct for privacy — as to his relationships, his passions, or even as to his most unimportant motives — was as strong as the instinct of life itself. He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book.

The golden age he harks back to, of ‘Herbert and Donne and Crashaw and Vaughan’, was simpler, slower, on a smaller scale, and its organising principles have failed to survive industrialisation. ‘Damn the Empire! It was England!’ thinks Tietjens – and you sympathise, but it’s not a position that goes anywhere. Opening up and speaking is the only possible response to his damning assessment of all society, which is, if he could only realise it, an argument in favour of breaking apart the structures he can’t bear to leave behind.

And Tietjens, who hated no man […] fell to wondering why it was that humanity that was next to always agreeable in its units was, as a mass, a phenomenon so hideous. You look at a dozen men, each of them not by any means detestable and not uninteresting, for each of them would have technical details of their affairs to impart; you formed them into a Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human society.

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By the way, I joined Twitter recently. You can find some of the more peculiar vocab used in Parade’s End here.

* That should be ‘eighteenth’, which is the century Tietjens keeps yearning for, when industrialisation and the empire hadn’t made hypocrites of his nation’s citizens. The poets he cites, though — Herbert, Donne, Crashaw and Vaughan — all lived in the seventeenth century.

Not buying books

Having barely started on my haul of books from a holiday in April (so far just the Moomin one and a third of Essays of Elia), I was determined not to add too much to the ever-accumulating pile last week in Edinburgh. But I couldn’t resist Gogol’s Collected Tales, picked up from the surprisingly fiction-friendly Word Power, whose radical political foyer merges gracefully into the good stuff as you turn the corner. The table displays inter-weave the strands, making for a thought provoking browse. The chief draw of the Gogol volume was the story ‘The Nose’, in which a man wakes one day to discover he has no nose, merely a smooth blank space where it once was. This is significant – just to me, perhaps – because of a doll belonging to my niece, with thick woollen hair and a simple sewn-on face consisting of a smiling mouth and two dots-for-eyes. She calls her ‘No Nose’.

There was plenty of wool on display at Dovecot Studios, a tapestry studio / exhibition space. They currently have an exhibition celebrating their centenary, which is stunning. I was expecting something pretty craft-based, but it’s more like a fine art show, in wool rather than paint. Many of the pieces are actually derived from paintings by big name artists, and it was uncanny how often this resulted in an improvement. Usually John Bellany, Elizabeth Blackadder and David Hockney leave me cold, but the pieces based on their paintings were more vivid and texturally interesting than any originals I’ve seen. Texture is the key, of course, and S. provided illuminating commentary on how this is achieved, by mixing wool and linen, for instance, giving a fuzzy / clean contrast to the respective sections. She made the gallery attendants a bit nervous, I think, getting right up close to the incredibly valuable exhibits, but she was right, you have to.

We spent ages debating the composition of Victoria Crowe’s Two Views (below). What is that pale strip to the left of the window? A recess? Is it a window, or another painting? If it’s a painting, then how does it manage to billow the curtain? If it’s a window, why can’t you see the runners, or the ledge, or the lower edge of the open section?* Where does the sunlight illuminating the wallpaper come from? The real point, though, is that the wallpaper is beautiful. You only get an inkling from the photo.

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* The book says it’s a window, which it obviously is, I suppose. But I like the ambiguity, nonetheless.

Exposition

A couple of unconnected recommendations lately led me to make a start on Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, but I don’t know that it will become much more than a start. I liked the first chapter, in which the exuberant Aubrey irritates the restrained Maturin by bopping along to a string quartet, but as soon as they get anywhere near a boat, the text just explodes with obsolete sailing terms, and I got bored looking them all up. Here Stephen Maturin, high in the rigging of Jack Aubrey’s ship, and suspicious of his guide Mowett, tries to forestall any malicious intent:

        ‘Tell me,’ said Stephen, to keep the young man talking at any cost, ‘tell me, what is the purpose of this platform, and why is the mast doubled at this point? And what is this hammer for?’
        ‘The top, sir? Why, apart from the rigging and getting things up, it comes in handy for the small-arms men in a close action: they can fire down on the enemy’s deck and toss stink-pots and grenadoes. And then these futtock-plates at the rim here hold the dead-eyes for the topmast-shrouds – the top gives a wide base so that the shrouds have a purchase: the top is a little over ten foot wide. It is the same thing up above. There are the cross-trees, and they spread the topgallant-shrouds. You see them, sir? Up there, where the look-out is perched, beyond the topsail yard.’
        ‘You could not explain this maze of ropes and wood and canvas without using sea-terms, I suppose. No, it would not be possible.’

Possibly this kind of thing recedes as the reader becomes more familiar with the terminology, but it struck me as a clumsy (if self-aware) way to dramatise a technical explanation.

More to my taste is Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune, the first book in her Fortunes of War series. In this scene the Western journalists of Bucharest are gathered together for a stern briefing by the authorities about the benign nature of the previous day’s assassination of the Romanian prime minister. Yakimov is a charming scrounger, masquerading as a journalist chiefly for the food and drink:

Inchcape sat askew, his legs crossed at the knee, an arm over his chairback and his cheek pressed back by his fingertips. He looked sourly at Yakimov, who took the chair beside him, and said: ‘Something fishy about all this.’
        Yakimov, seeing nothing wrong but fearing to betray again his inexperience in the cunning world of journalism, murmured, ‘Quite, dear boy, quite!’ His tone lacked conviction and caused Inchcape to wave an irritable hand at the buffet.
        ‘Roped off!’ he said. ‘Why? Never saw such a thing before at a public function. These people are nothing if not hospitable. And what are all these damned insolent flunkeys doing here? Are they on guard? Or what?’ In an excess of indignation, he jerked round his head and stared at the back rows.

All at once, the scene opens up, through the mechanism of character.