'Stick to the Integrity of Your Character'

On the endpaper at the back of Helen Pinkerton’s copy of Parade’s End (Everyman’s Library, 1992), faintly written in pencil, are the only words she wrote in the book: “p. 489 T. on the war.” T. is Christopher Tietjens, the hero of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy (1924-28). That page is in the cycle’s second novel, No More Parades. Capt. Tietjens is now at the Western front in France and is speaking with Col. Stanley Levin, who has just complained of “This beastly war!” Tietjens’ reply is marked by Helen’s customary way of noting a passage, with brackets at the beginning and end:

“’The beastliness of human nature is always pretty normal. We lie and betray and are wanting in imagination and deceive ourselves, always, at about the same rate. In peace and war! But, somewhere in that view there are enormous bodies of men. . . . If you got a still more extended range of view over this whole front you’d have still more enormous bodies of men. Seven to ten million. . . . All moving towards places towards which they desperately don’t want to go. Desperately! Everyone of them is desperately afraid. But they go on. An immense blind will force them in the effort to consummate the one decent action that humanity has to its credit in the whole record of history; the one we are engaged in. The effort is the one certain creditable fact in all their lives. . . . But the other lives of all those men are dirty, potty and discreditable little affairs. . . . Like yours. . . . Like mine. . . .’”

Here is Levin’s reply, not marked by Helen: “‘Just heavens! What a pessimist you are.’” Tietjens answers: “‘Can’t you see that that is optimism?’” In civilian life, Tietjens works as a government statistician. He is a gentleman. Ford describes him as “the last Tory,” representative of a species that “died out sometime in the 18th century.” His wife is narcissistic, vindictive and adulterous, one of literature’s memorable female monsters. Tietjens tells Levin that when the weather improves, the Germans will advance and “‘we’re probably done.’” Levin replies that the English “‘can’t possibly hold them.” Helen marks Tietjens’ next set-piece of a speech:

“‘But success or failure,’ Tietjens said, ‘have nothing to do with the credit of a story. And a consideration of the virtues of humanity does not omit the other side. If we lose, they win. If success is necessary to your idea of virtue – virtus – they then provide the success instead of ourselves. But the thing is to be able to stick to the integrity of your character, whatever earthquake sets the house tumbling over your head. . . . That, thank God, we’re doing. . . .”  

No declaration could be less modern, less pragmatic. On the Western front, Germans advancing, wife cheating, Tietjens makes the case for “stick[ing] to the integrity of your character.”

Helen had an abiding interest in war and military history, focused especially on the American Civil War. She published Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850’s (1987) and Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (2009). She was a member of Civil War Roundtables in the Bay Area and visited most of the major battlefields. We shared an admiration for Grant’s Personal Memoirs and I remember how pleased she was when I recommended Omar Bradley’s A Soldier’s Story (1951). My favorites among her poems are the four narrative verse letters she wrote about the American Civil War, collectively titled “Crossing the Pedregal.” Find them in Taken in Faith: Poems (2002) or A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems 1945-2016 (2016). The author of Moby-Dick speaks in “Melville’s Letter to William Clark Russell,” one of these dramatic monologues:

“Boys in the wild wind fell

Like autumn leaves in a New England gale,

Or lay in swathes, blue as a Cape Cod pond,

Their fresh young flesh scythed down with ripened wheat

Or plucked unripe in orchards, berry patches,

Their bodies, under dying horses’ hooves,

Crushed like the late June clover their feet crushed

Hastening to Gettysburg.”

[All ellipses in quoted passages from Parade’s End are Ford’s.]