Uncle Toby on Kanchenjunga

PARADE'S END (836 pp.]--Ford Madox Ford--Knopf ($5).

In the making of a literary reputation, as in most other enterprises, it pays to advertise. Many writers (e.g., Bernard Shaw, William Saroyan) do much of the advertising themselves: each time their talents burst into flower they let off such chesty bugle notes of self-satisfaction that only the coldest, boldest critic dares to play deaf. But there are other good writers who bloom in silence, leaving it to the critics to sniff them out, though it may take years to place them in their proper niches.

The late Ford Madox Ford was just such a neglected writer. He was the son of the London Times's erudite German music critic, Dr. Francis Hueffer (the son changed his surname to Ford after World War I), as well as a grandson of Victorian Painter Ford Madox Brown and a cousin of the Rossetti family. A precocious schoolboy, he began writing while still in his teens, but almost from the beginning he showed that the only noise he was likely to make would be in praise of others.

By the time he was 25, Ford was helping struggling Polish Immigrant Joseph Conrad to proper use of the English language. He wrote with him a novel named Romance--and thereafter paid the penalty of being introduced to strangers as "the man who collaborated with Conrad." As editor of the English Review, Ford was the first to print poems and stories by the young D. H. Lawrence--and in return for the favor was roundly abused by that ungrateful genius. Later, Expatriates Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passes made their early marks in Ford's transatlantic review.

Ford kept up the steady flow of his own writing--novels, criticism and reminiscence. But after a brief period in the '20s, when some of his novels became bestsellers in the U.S., he sank more & more into the twilight of Parisian cocktail parties and U.S. college lecture platforms ("an old man mad about writing," he once described himself). As a lecturer at Michigan's Olivet College in the '30s, he reminded one student of Tristram Shandy's garrulous Uncle Toby--a "vast, benevolent and harmless Uncle Toby, leaning on his stick . . . and wheezing out his stories of Henry James as Toby might have spoken of Marlborough. His books seemed [to us] like medals achieved, perhaps, in the Crimea; and we read Auden, Kafka, Evelyn Waugh."

Heir of the Ages. This week, eleven years after Ford's death, many U.S. readers will be getting their first chance at four of his long-forgotten, time-tarnished medals, the novel series Some Do Not. . ., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up--, The Last Post, all wrapped up in a single omnibus entitled Parade's End. Readers will also have a chance of being in on the making of a popular literary reputation, for Ford's publisher has spared no pains to provide his forgotten man with a general's escort of trumpeters: "the great English novelist of his time" (Allen Tate); "no novelist of this century more likely to live" (Graham Greene); "a veritable Kanchenjunga* among the current molehills" (Herschel Brickell).

In Parade's End Ford tried, like Tolstoy in War and Peace, to bite off and somehow chew a massive chunk of social history. It was Ford's belief that the industrial revolution had broken the back of the traditional England and that World War I had given the coup de grace. In the struggles and frustrations of one Christopher Tietjens (a name almost as un-English as Hueffer), Ford tried to express the gradual destruction of a way of life for which (as Ford Student Robie Macauley puts it) "the world is an equable and logical mechanism in which God, Man, and Nature have a balanced relationship."

Like Ford himself, Hero Tietjens is a huge, oxlike, blue-eyed creature with the brain of a poet and scholar. Unlike Ford, he is the descendant of generations of landed English gentry, and so thorough a natural aristocrat that he is almost incapable of hearing, let alone noticing, the personal criticisms of others. Whether reading Latin, running his hand over a horse or juggling with abstruse mathematical formulae, Christopher Tietjens is omniscient and, when the story begins just before World War I, apparently omnipotent to boot.

Who Is Sylvia? The downfall of this demigod is the inexorable theme of Parade's End. Christopher, despite his incomparable powers (or perhaps because of them), is a man saturated with humility, pity and chivalrous principles. With a world that is half gone to the dogs he will make not the smallest compromise; so the furious world sets out to hunt him down.

Leader of the yelping pack is Christopher's own wife, Sylvia, a beautiful, well-bred trollop who is driven sadistically insane by her husband's absolute incorruptibility. Wherever Christopher shows up--in government offices, in country retreats, even in the mud of France--he finds Sylvia there, turning men's minds against him. As a woman, Sylvia is probably the worst bitch in 20th Century fiction, and scarcely credible. But as a symbol of merciless revolution against old, established order she is the core of Ford's social tragedy.

"It would not be right," muses Christopher, at a time when he is almost bowed to the ground by slander and persecution, "that a man exactly and scrupulously performing his duty to his sovereign, his native land and those it holds dear, should not be protected by a special Providence. And he is!" Aided by this inextinguishable faith, Christopher survives his enemies, but only after a siege of torments as destructive as Christian's in Pilgrim's Progress.

To Ford, Christopher Tietjens, incorruptible paragon, represented "the last English Tory." The implied compliment is one that even the most ardent Tory, in real life, would consider too good to be true. But Parade's End, like many a fine work of fiction, is not intended to be literally true to life. It is first & foremost an artist's dream, always larger than life, more drenched with passion and drama. Often tortuously long, always intensely complicated by the mingling of thought and action, it is likely to be too much of a Kanchenjunga for most readers to struggle up. But those who make the grade will find--after a respite in which to get their breath back--that Uncle Toby Ford has laid out a remarkable view from the summit.

* Third highest (28,146 ft.) mountain in the world. Like its lofty neighbor, Mt. Everest, Kanchenjunga has never been climbed to the summit.

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