Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International)

by Julian Barnes

  But no one in the novel gets sex, and sexual passion, right. Sex is almost always damaging and disastrous – to the extent that the businesslike relationship between Mark and Marie-Léonie seems almost normal, until you consider that in the thirteen years she has been his mistress she has never known ‘what his Office was nor where his chambers, nor even his surname’. Towards the very end of the novel there is a walk-on (or rather, ride-on) part for Christopher and Sylvia’s son. He is just a downy boy, if one beginning to feel the allure of an older woman; but he is old enough to have witnessed his mother at work on various men. And what is this ingenu’s early conclusion on the whole matter? ‘But wasn’t sex a terrible thing.’ Nor does the instinct just do for human beings. Christopher, on a balmy day in the Seine valley, the war for once distant, hears a skylark singing so far out of season that he concludes ‘the bird must be over-sexed’. Two novels later, his brother Mark, lying awake, hears nightingales producing not their normal, beautiful sound, but something much coarser, which seems to him to contain abuse of other males, and boastfulness to their own sitting hens. It is the sound, in his phrase, of ‘sex ferocity’.

  Greene wrote that ‘The Good Soldier and the Tietjens series seem to me almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English. They are our answer to Flaubert.’ In subject matter, certainly; but there is also a consanguinity in technique. One of Flaubert’s great developments (not inventions – no one really invents anything in the novel) was style indirect libre, that way of dipping into a character’s consciousness – for a paragraph, a sentence, a few words, sometimes for just a single word – showing things from his or her point of view, and then dipping out again. This is a direct ancestor of the stream-of-consciousness narrative so richly deployed by Ford. Much of Parade’s End takes place within the heads of its characters: in memory and anticipation, reflection, misunderstanding and self-justification. Few novelists have better understood and conveyed the overworkings of the hysterical brain, the underworkings of the damaged brain (after his first spell at the front, Tietjens returns with partial memory loss), the slippings and slidings of the mind at the end of its tether, with all its breakings-in and breakings-off.

  The name Freud occurs only once, on Sylvia’s lips: ‘I … pin my faith on Mrs Vanderdecken [a society role model]. And, of course, Freud.’ She doesn’t elucidate, though we might reasonably deduce that he provides her with some theoretical justification for what Tietjens calls ‘her high-handed divagations from fidelity’. But Freud is more widely present, if – since this is a very English novel – in a subtle, anglicised form: ‘In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other.’ The word ‘subconscious’ is never used; instead, Tietjens at one point has been ‘thinking with his undermind’. Later, Valentine had always known something ‘under her mind’; Tietjens refers to ‘something behind his mind’; while General Campion ‘was for the moment in high good humour on the surface, though his subordinate minds [sic] were puzzled and depressed’. Ford moves between these levels of the mind as he moves between fact and memory, certainty and impression. Tietjens compares the mind to a semi-obedient dog. Nor is it just mind, memory and fact that are slipping and sliding; it is the very language used to describe them. General Campion, one of the least hysterical of characters, is driven to wonder, ‘What the hell is language for? We go round and round.’

  The narrative also goes round and round, backtracking and criss-crossing. A fact, or an opinion, or a memory will be dropped in, and often not explained for a dozen or a hundred pages. Sometimes this may be a traditional cliffhanger: a character left in a state of emotional crisis while the novel ducks off for fifty or sixty pages at the Western Front. More often, the device becomes something much more individual and Fordian. An explosive piece of information, murderous lie or raging emotional conclusion might casually be let drop, whereupon the narrative will back off, as if shocked by anything stated with such certainty, then circle around, come close again, back off again and, finally, approach it directly. The narrative, in other words, is acting as the mind often works. This can confuse, but as V. S. Pritchett said of Ford, ‘Confusion was the mainspring of his art as a novelist. He confused to make clear.’ To say that a great novel needs reading with great attention is somewhere between a banality and an insult. But it applies particularly to Parade’s End. It will be a very rare reader who does not intermittently look up from the page to ask, ‘But did I know that? Have we been told that already or not?’ In what sense did Christopher ‘kill’ his father? Did we know that Mrs Macmaster was even pregnant, let alone that she had lost a child? Have we been told Tietjens is under arrest? That his stepmother died of grief when Sylvia left him? That Macmaster was dead? Has Mark really been struck dumb? And so on, confusingly and clarifyingly, to the very end.

  Since nothing is simple with Ford, one of the unsimple things about Parade’s End is the status and quality of the fourth volume, Last Post. When putting together the Bodley Head edition of Ford (1962–3), Greene simply omitted it, thus reducing a quartet to a trilogy. He thought the book ‘was more than a mistake – it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade’s End’. He charged it with sentimentality, and with damagingly clearing up ‘valuable ambiguities’ by bringing them into ‘the idyllic sunshine of Christopher’s successful escape into the life of a Kentish small-holder’.

  Half a century on, it’s hard to see Last Post as having delayed ‘a full critical appreciation’ of Parade’s End. Cyril Connolly, in The Modern Movement (1965), followed Greene by referring to Ford’s ‘war trilogy’ (and patronisingly dismissed all of it), but most subsequent editors have chosen to view it as a quartet rather than a trilogy. And over those years, the reputations of both Ford and the novel itself have remained pretty much what they always have been. Ford enthusiasts are ever in the minority and ever undeterred. To be a Fordite is rather like being a member of one of those volunteer groups who help restore Britain’s canal system. You run into them, muddy and sweaty, spending their Sunday afternoons digging out some long-disused arm which once brought important goods to and from, say, Wendover. You are fairly sure that they are doing a good thing, but unless you jump down and get muddy yourself, the virtue of the task, indeed of the whole canal system, might well escape you.

  There is a clear structural argument in favour of Last Post: the first volume of the quartet is set before the war and the middle two during it; so a fourth, post-war volume makes sense. But it’s also true that if, when you got to the end of the third volume, A Man Could Stand Up, you were told that this was the last Ford ever had to say about Tietjens, you would not necessarily be shocked or disappointed. That novel ends in the chaos of Armistice Night 1918, with a proper melee of the drunk and the half-mad, of celebration and high anxiety, of possible new beginnings, and of Tietjens and Valentine at last together, dancing. Six pages before the end of the third volume, she has smiled at him for the first time. And the novel’s final line, from inside Valentine’s head, is a typical and brilliant Fordian aposiopesis: ‘She was setting out on …’

  It could end there. We could imagine to ourselves what she (and Tietjens) were setting out on – and it would, no doubt, be that life they separately and together dreamed of, a life of talking, talking, of continuing the conversation; also of an escape from the past, and war, and madness, and Sylvia. That is probably what we would write for the two of them. What Ford in fact wrote is different, and more complicated, and darker, and really not very much as Greene describes it – ‘the idyllic sunshine of Christopher’s successful escape into the life of a Kentish small-holder’. In fact, it’s West Sussex, not Kent, and Christopher is a furniture dealer rather than a smallholder; but let that pass. ‘Idyllic’, ‘successful’? Well, Christopher the saint is still being cheated by the world’s wicked, while he and Valentine (plus Christopher’s mute, paralysed brother Mark and his mistress, now wife, Marie-Léonie) get
by financially thanks to occasional windfalls and some effective French housekeeping. Valentine has patched clothes and collapsing underwear, and for all their shared ambition of frugality she finds it hard going. Anxieties are not reduced (Valentine, having secured Tietjens, is now constantly worried about losing him); a sense of madness is never far away; and hovering over their supposedly idyllic escape is the fish eagle Sylvia, thinking up further attacks on not just her estranged husband but also his pregnant girlfriend and paralysed brother.

  Ford structures this grim continuation with characteristic boldness. The first half is mediated through the non-speaking Mark, who recapitulates and reorders and re-examines the past; then we are much with Sylvia as she plans fresh revenges and her own social advancement; also with Marie-Léonie as she bottles cider; then, a little towards the end, with Valentine. And so, through this final volume, there mounts the increasing question: where is Christopher Tietjens? He is often referred to, but his presence and point of view are conspicuously and risingly absent until the last two pages when he returns, worn out, from a failed attempt to save the Great Tree of Groby (no ‘success’ there). Where is this idyll with Valentine? It exists only in the siting of the house, with a view of four counties, in its neat horticulture, its woods and hedges. The surroundings may be idyllic, but any romance lies strictly in nature not humankind. Where is that talking, that continued conversation? Not in Last Post – nor is there any back-reference to its having already occurred. Sylvia may furiously envy the household for having found ‘peace’, but the reader witnesses little of this; it may all be in Sylvia’s fantasy.

  Consider the only scene which shows Tietjens and Valentine together, in those final two pages. He returns from Yorkshire carrying ‘a lump of wood’ (it is ‘aromatic’, so presumably a chunk of the Great Tree). Valentine’s greeting consists of a rebuke for his incompetence as an antiques dealer: he has foolishly left some prints in a jar which has now been taken away by someone else. ‘How could you? How could you? How are we going to feed and clothe a child if you do such things?’ She tells him to go off and get the prints back at once. Mark (now speaking again) points out to her that ‘the poor devil’s worn out’. But this appeal has no effect. Then: ‘Heavily, like a dejected bulldog, Christopher made for the gate. As he went up the green path beyond the hedge, Valentine began to sob. “How are we to live? How are we ever to live?” ’

  Is this an idyllic escape? There is more than a hint that Tietjens’s inept saintliness is bringing out the scold in Valentine. The fish-eagle silhouette of Sylvia may have finally fled the sky (though she has changed her mind so often before that who is to say her private armistice will last?); but Ford allows us to imagine that, just as the anxious will always find new anxieties to replace the old, so a tormented saint, freed from his persecutor, might yet bring upon himself a new tormentor in the unlikeliest of shapes. Anglican saints were always hunted to extinction, just like great auks.

  KIPLING’S FRANCE

  IN 1878, LOCKWOOD Kipling, principal of the Mayo College of Art in Lahore, took his twelve-year-old son to the Paris exhibition. Lockwood was involved with the Indian section of arts and manufactures; he gave the young Rudyard two francs a day for food, a free pass to the exhibition, and left him to his own devices. The boy, who all his life was to love seeing how things were put together, was enthralled by ‘all the wonders of all the worlds emerging from their packing cases’.

  One of his favourite sights was the head of Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, soon to be shipped to New York as a belated centennial gift to the American republic. For five centimes – or a free pass – you could climb an internal staircase and look out at the world through the vacant eyeballs. Rudyard frequently made the ascent, and on one occasion an elderly French wiseacre advised him, ‘Now, young Englisher, you can say that you have looked through the eyes of Liberty herself.’ Fifty-five years later, the elderly Kipling remembered this conveniently placed oracle, and chose to correct him: ‘He spoke less than the truth. It was through the eyes of France that I began to see.’

  Kipling and France? Kipling and India obviously. Kipling and England, Kipling and the Empire, Kipling and South Africa, Kipling and the United States, Kipling and the hated Germany (the true home, in Orwell’s analysis, to those often mislocated ‘lesser breeds without the law’). But Kipling and France? It’s not an obvious runner. France and the French feature little in his published work. Nor might you expect this demotic, pragmatic, self-educated celebrant of the British Empire to care much for the lofty and theoretical inhabitants of Britain’s closest imperial rival. Yet that first visit of 1878 began something which continued until Kipling’s death in 1936. As his daughter Elsie noted simply after her father’s death, ‘He was always happy in France.’

  Happy in, certainly; happy with, not always. In later life Kipling was inclined to make his relationship with the country seem like one of seamless felicity. But in the 1880s and 90s, when imperial rivalries were at their sharpest, Kipling was reliably anti-French; from India, he wrote journalistic defences of Britain in ‘what I then conceived to be parodies of Victor Hugo’s more extravagant prose’. The Boer War – in which the French were noticeably not on the British side – made things worse. Kipling wrote a mocking story, ‘The Bonds of Discipline’, in which the crew of a British cruiser outwit a stowaway French spy.

  This passage of geopolitical froideur ended with the Entente Cordiale in 1904. After this there were no grounds for scowling at France. There was also now a means by which the novelist could renew his passion and deepen his knowledge of the country: the motor car. Like Edith Wharton, Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, Kipling was entranced by the new century’s first great invention. In the autumn of 1899 he had hired an appropriately named Embryo; the following summer he bought a steam-driven American Locomobile; next came a Lanchester, personally delivered to the famous author by Mr Lanchester himself.

  In March 1910 Kipling was staying at Vernet-les-Bains, the Pyrenean spa where his wife Carrie annually took the sulphur baths. Claude Johnson, joint manager of Rolls & Co, and also first secretary of the Royal Automobile Club, cannily made Kipling an offer he could scarcely refuse: ‘I am sending my car back to Paris empty. If you would care to take her over, she is at your disposition.’ Since the car had ‘all the power of the Horses of the Sun’ and came with a chauffeur who had been a Royal Marine and knew the world ‘largely and particularly’, Kipling was delighted. The Silver Phantom took them from Banyuls-sur-Mer, ‘where we gathered narcissi in a field and wisteria was in bloom’, via Perpignan, Narbonne, Montpellier, Nîmes, Arles, Avignon, Tournon, St-Étienne, Moulins, Nevers and Montargis to Fontainebleau and Paris. It was on this trip that Kipling first became fascinated with the dead city of Les Baux – ‘a vast stone Golgotha, inconceivably mad and grotesque and pathetic’; he discovered the roads of France – ‘straight, wide, level, perfect’, a judgement later needing qualification; and he was hooked on the Rolls-Royce. The following year he bought his own and never subsequently changed marque. (At Bateman’s, his house in Sussex, you can inspect his last, shimmeringly dark blue Roller.) He also began the habit of annual motor tours of France, which continued – with the interruption of the Great War – until the late 1920s.

  In 2000, the publishing director of Macmillan was clearing out his desk after forty years with the firm. The desk had previously belonged to Thomas Mark, Kipling’s editor. In its furthest recesses were six small leather-bound notebooks. These turned out to be the motor-tour diaries Kipling kept from 1911 to 1926 – the only diaries of his to have survived apart from an extract from an Indian journal of 1884. They have yet to be published; but the transcripts – running to nearly a hundred pages – vividly convey the mentality and the obsessiveness of this writer-as-traveller.

  For some of those early literary motorists, like Edith Wharton, the car was largely a means to an end: the end being distant people and far-flung cultural monuments. She savoured the exhilaration of motor travel but i
gnored its specifics and technicalities; the car was a clever mechanical servant, and if it got uppity, her husband Teddy and the chauffeur were there to deal with it. Kipling, who was whizzing around France at the same time, found the means as absorbing as the end.

  Like other well-heeled tourists, he naturally visited the key sites – Carcassonne, Chartres, the church at Brou, the Bayeux Tapestry, Albi Cathedral, Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. He loved clambering around things, whether Chartres Cathedral to examine the back of a stained-glass window, or a Dordogne cave to see ‘Cro-Magnon piccys of bison, horse, wolf and rhino’. But Kipling was the most democratic of English geniuses, equally at ease with generals and peasants, as interested by inner tubes as by high art. He travels as the great man in his Rolls-Royce, as the speech-writer of George V and friend of Clemenceau (who visited Bateman’s more than once); but he also travels as Pooterish motor-nerd. He loved totting up the distances covered; he noted each puncture suffered by his Rolls – ‘a terror on tyres’ – and tried every possible brand of tyre, even to Russian Provodniks. ‘New Goodyear tyre,’ he notes, ‘car pulled like silk.’ ‘English springs aren’t strong enough for French roads – that’s a fact.’ ‘T had adjusted carburettor and she pulled like a dragon.’ ‘The succeeding days were devoted to the care of the Duchess and … not only was her spring renewed but all her transmission noise was eliminated by Parsons.’ ‘A most annoying day as far as tyres went but this scenery and climate beyond words’ – this from one rarely beyond words.