Answers to the unanswerable
THEA LENARDUZZI
PARADE’S END
BBC2, until September 21 and on iPlayer
Ford Madox Ford was a founder of influential literary magazines: the English Review, in 1908, and the Transatlantic Review, in 1924. As well as spells editing these, he was a poet, a writer for the War Propaganda Bureau, and a celebrated author of novels, including The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade’s End, a series of volumes --Some Do Not. . . ; No More Parades; A Man Could Stand Up --; The Last Post -- published between 1924 and 1928. Anthony Burgess described it as “the best novel produced by a British writer. ... It is also the finest novel about the First World War. It is also the finest novel about the nature of British society”. And yet Ford is thought to be overlooked. This £12 million television adaptation of Parade’s End, co-produced by the BBC and the American network HBO, may change that.
Ford’s essay “On Impressionism” (1913) sets out the writer’s aim to convey “those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass”, while else¬where he describes how mirrors are “as will-less, really, as any rolled surface of quicksilver, as true -- and no doubt as misleading”. Mirrors are everywhere in Parade’s End –-“immense”, “large, quiet mirrors”-- and it is through them that this adaptation, presented in hour-long episodes, scripted by Tom Stoppard and directed by Susanna White, arrives. The credits in the title sequence appear across three panes of a Vorticist lightbox, unfolding in the first episode to reveal a dazzling boudoir, in 1908, in which Sylvia Tietjens, played by Rebecca Hall, is seduced by a married man, Gerald Drake. She is one facet of a love prism that includes her husband Christopher (Benedict Cumberbatch) and a young suffragette, Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens). Ford did not introduce Sylvia until the second chapter of Some Do Not... , so the assumption must be that beau¬tiful Sylvia will produce a stronger first impression than “lumpy” government statisti¬cians in tweeds. Instead, the Stoppard version plunges us into the thick of the action: we do not yet know that Sylvia was simultaneously being courted by Drake and Christopher, who married her to save her reputation, or that she remains unfaithful to him. Christopher is “that precise sort of imbecile”, characterized by a “lordly, dull, full dressed consideration that drives [Sylvia] distracted” – “dull” is Stoppard’s addition and explains, perhaps, why he waits until Episode Three to give Christopher the opening scene, by which point there have already been frissons with Valentine, numerous arguments with Sylvia, and the death of Christopher’s mother.
The acting is accomplished, although Sylvia comes across not so much as “the most possessed evil character in the modern novel”, as Graham Greene had it, and more a victim of society. There are moments of tenderness, notably when she soothes Christopher’s shell-shocked mind, and his exculpation of her because “you were let down at the beginning by a brute, so you have the right to let down a man”. Cumberbatch convinces as “the last Tory”, with a demeanour as wooden as the Groby tree of his ancestral home. And yet, as he chews and gurns, his baritone slurring, one wonders: is this the characteristic “indefiniteness” of English conversation --created on the page by Ford’s ellipses-- which recalls “the sound put forth by a slug eating lettuce”?
Stoppard’s account is more linear than the original. Much of what happens in the first volume of Parade’s End does not occur in Episode One, particularly in relation to Christopher and Valentine, prolonging the suspense. Indeed, Episode One ends with her leaving him after a forty-mile cart ride, during which they “did not...”, rather than with him departing for the First World War, having asked her to be his mistress. These rearrangements are, mostly, accommodated by Stoppard’s repetition of phrases across the series, such as “there will be no more parades”, which occurs in three contexts for Christopher --marital, martial and psychological-- and by White’s use of imagery to foreshadow developments. The scene in which Christopher and Valentine recite lines from Romeo and Juliet -- “It was the lark, the herald of the morn, no nightingale” -- is framed by the silhouette of a bird in a hawthorn, suggesting the aesthetics of the war poems --spe¬cifically, perhaps, Isaac Rosenberg’s “Returning, we heard the larks”. The final scene of Episode One has Christopher sobbing into the neck of an injured horse as the camera rises above the fields; the threat is implicit for, as he reflects in No More Parades, “What chance had quiet fields . . . heavy-leaved timbered hedgerows” against modern warfare?
The adaptation signals its departure from Ford’s chronology by spreading Tietjens’s tale across five episodes, rather than treating as distinct each of the four books --or three for Greene, who left The Last Post out of his Bodley Head edition of 1963. But The Last Post was well received in 1928, L. P. Hartley considering it “the greatest tour de force”, though Dorothy Parker warned that it pre¬sented “great hardships for the reader”. Greene’s objection, since discredited, was not to its complexities but rather to what he saw as Christopher and Valentine’s retreat into an idyll, bringing closure to the lives that the previous books had blasted apart. It presents numerous challenges: The Last Post is a sequence of interior monologues, the longest belonging to Christopher’s brother Mark, rendered mute by the war, as he attempts to answer the “unanswerable” (Mark’s role, played by Rupert Everett, has so far been a supporting one); Sylvia and Christopher, meanwhile, take secondary and tertiary parts, respectively, with Christopher featuring only in the last pages. It is considered the most English of the novels, partly because it is set exclusively in Sussex, and because of the distinctive nature of British post-war experience –“Peace has come, & for some reason I feel inexpressibly sad”, Ford wrote to his partner, Stella Bowen. Yet it was included in American editions long before British ones. One critic remarked in 1965 on the “sad irony that while American admirers of Ford can read the complete novel, the citizens of his native land must be content with a cropped version of the Tietjens story”.
In Anglo-American productions, there remains the point of cultural difference --and cultural capital, considering the success in America of the British series Downton Abbey, set in the same period as Parade’s End. Ford’s characters, and readers, rather than being comforted by nostalgia, are thrust into his hall of mirrors. Whether the BBC’s Parade’s End will successfully convey this tension between pain and relief hinges on its treatment of the final novel.
TLS September 14, 2012