Dress Down Sunday: Last Post by Ford Madox Ford

book 4 of the Parade’s End tetralogy

published 1928

LOOKING AT WHAT GOES ON UNDER THE CLOTHES

[Valentine Wannop considers her current mode of life]

Marie Léonie was of opinion that she would lose Christopher if she did not deluge herself with a perfume called Houbigant and wear pink silk next the skin. Elle ne demandait pas mieux – but she could not borrow twenty pounds from Marie Léonie. Nor yet forty . . . Because, although Christopher might never notice the condition of her all-wools, he jolly well would be struck by the ocean of Houbigant and the surf of pink . . . She would give the world for them . . . But he would notice – and then she might lose his love. Because she had borrowed the forty pounds. On the other hand, she might lose it because of the all-wools. And heaven knew in what condition the other pair would be when they came back from Mrs Cramp’s newest laundry attentions . . . You could never teach Mrs Cramp that wool must not be put into boiling water! Oh God, she ought to lie between lavendered linen sheets with little Chrissie on soft, pink silk, air-cushionish bosoms! . . . 

observations: For more about this book, look at the many earlier entries – click on the Parade’s End label below. And earlier this week I wrote a piece in the Guardian about Sylvia Tietjens, first wife of the Christopher mentioned above - one of the great wicked women of literature.

Valentine is pregnant and worried, and she and her lover (Christopher) are very short of money. There is absolutely no need – there is masses of Tietjens family money, but he won’t take it for absurd reasons. Eventually she will have a go at him:

Well, she had been run down . . . At that stage of parturition, call it, a woman is run down and hysterical . . . It had seemed to her overwhelmingly the fact that a breeding woman ought to have pink fluffy things next her quivering skin and sprayings of, say, Houbigant all over her shoulders and hair. For the sake of the child’s health.

Christopher, the most brilliant man in England, is shown as absurd in this final book, rather a come-down for him, and Valentine (though still very much in love) is getting impatient with him: he’d better get hold of some money soon. It is sad to see him racing off on his bicycle trying to find things to sell.

Ford’s use of language is always interesting – he uses constatation, which means assertion, several times: it’s a real word, but almost never used. The word trepan is used several times in an odd (and real if obscure) sense – to mean trapped, as in Sylvia 'trepans' Christopher into marriage via a pregnancy. There are quite a few more obscure words such as stiver, stumer, storge, inexpressibles, colobium sindonis, air resort and kur-ort.

This is probably the last of the many blog entries I have done on this series of  books: it was an extraordinary experience to read it, and one I wouldn’t have missed. 

In an earlier entry I complained about the strange structure of the book, where Ford plonks you into a situation, then only slowly explains how it came about.  Colm Toibin, talking about his plan for his book Brooklyn, said he’d noticed that Jane Austen’s novels were very linear – no going back, just descriptions of what happened, one event after another. A few hours spent in Ford’s company and you are longing for that simplicity.

And yet, and yet – the books are true masterpieces, I found them unputdownable: I had no intention of reading them as quickly as I did, but I couldn’t distract myself from them…. A rare compliment.

The picture comes from the Library of Congress, where there is a rather startling collection of Glamour photos of the 1920s.