The English, in their stubbornly melancholy way, have a knack for living and re-living traditions of their oft-contemplated and fictionalized past, brooding about ends of eras and mild-mannered gentlemen finding themselves disoriented as the world disintegrates and falls away before they are ready to face what rises up to replace it.
Ford Madox Ford was a master of that stubborn melancholy, penning several novels meditating upon themes of honor, "families of position," the expanding reach of women and the onslaught of modernity, years before Waugh's better-known work Brideshead Revisited even began to take form.
Waugh's male figures -- paralyzed with Hamletian doubt and anxiety over what will come of the aristocracy, their behaviors, and their way of life -- find their prototypes in Ford's leading gentlemen, Edward Ashburnham of The Good Soldier and Christopher Tietjens of the Parade's End tetralogy.
For Waugh, what constitutes a Gentleman has a lot to do with aesthetics, affiliations, and affectation: wearing the right color jacket, speaking in the right accent, belonging to the right Oxford college, collecting the right watercolors, and reading the right poetry. In the world of Ford's tragic, inwardly-turned, and reflective protagonists, the concept of a Gentleman is purer, and strikes at the core of what is perhaps a profounder anxiety: the Gentleman fights to behave with restraint and reticence -- simply because it is the thing to do, nothing more. No trappings, no fanfare. Ford's nostalgic dream is that of a world in which decorum is instinctively and elegantly observed, a world in which there is no need for physical ornaments of honor and class because those virtues were the stuff of one's very bones.
It is a world that was dead long before Ashburnham begins his affair with Florence, and long before Tietjens joins his story's eponymous end of the "parade"...that is, if that world ever existed at all. Clinging to a code of "mercilessly" forgiving and restrained husbandly behavior that those around him (especially his wife) consider outmoded, Tietjens is constantly reminded that he belongs to en extinct breed. A passionate, romantic "sentimentalist," the "good soldier" Ashburnham patterns himself after novels and poems and yearns for the kind of great love affair only found in old books.
But the crux of the problem of nostalgia -- so powerful and crippling that the 17th century Swiss considered it a medical condition* -- is that its referent is necessarily imaginary, and that those who seek to perform according to nostalgic expectations are necessarily divorced from their referents. Ashburnham is revealed to have been a cheat and a liar all along, fickly pursuing romance after romance and driving his wife to bitterness. And Tietjens, caught in a tug of war between his desire to have an affair with suffragette Valentine and his belief in stoic and decorous restraint, does not naturally possess the hallmarks of Ford's idealized, nostalgic gentleman. He twists, he struggles, and eventually he caves. He is not, in fact, the last of a dying order. The order was extinguished before his time.
There is something near-pathological about the maddening emotional gymnastics that Ford's and Waugh's men inflict upon themselves. The only tangible and actionable hope, then, lies in the women, who in both Parade's End and Brideshead Revisited are remarkable, bright, complex, and defy rigid categorization as heroines or villains. Valentine becomes a married man's mistress, but there is no immorality attached to her decision. She merely follows her heart to a man who is her emotional and intellectual match. Sylvia, Mrs. Tietjens, rattles the bars of her gilded cage and verbally jabs the men around her at any chance she gets, but she possesses genuine admiration for her husband and yearns for real involvement with him -- not the tepid dismissiveness he gives her.
The women in these nostalgic English works also live in the future and act upon it: Valentine, a suffragette, seeks to advance the position of women in England, and Sylvia, keenly aware of the delicate workings of human motivation, pushes and prods the people around her to set her will in action. Where the men stand paralyzed, denying time and struggling with their performances of nostalgic identities, the women run forward and exercise their agentic power. Perhaps Waugh's aristocratic Julia Flyte -- who is passionate, conflicted, and rejects the backwards-gazing Charles Ryder to inherit and repurpose an estate alone -- is a WWII response to Ford's women. (She is even, like Sylvia Tietjens, an isolated Catholic processing her relationship to her faith.)
Visually stunning and masterfully paced, the 2012 BBC adaptation of Parade's End also brings a striking literalization of identity performance to the screen. The miniseries's characters navigate a kaleidoscope of mirrors not only in the title sequence (reflective golden triangles arranging and rearranging themselves under dancing light) and in key moments punctuating its five episodes. Sylvia contemplates her reflection in a compact mirror that is damaged when Tietjens fails to emote to her liking, and she tosses it out a window for a reaction. Afterwards she continues to use it, despite the cracks running down its center. Valentine -- with a third-person gaze -- imagines watching herself admire her own naked reflection as she awaits a late-night rendezvous with Tietjens. Even Tietjens himself is reflected back at himself: after sustaining an injury in war, he dreams of his own face fragmented in a mess of mirrors, and wakes to ask a nurse, "What is my name?"
The images are fraught with layers of meaning, chief upon which is the assessment and construction of the self via image. What do these figures see in their mirrors? Do the images match their concepts of themselves? What ideal form, if any, do they strive to pattern themselves after? To perform? Why does the maintenance of identity seem to require repeated, third-person observation and assessment? Is the image in the mirror the Self, a reflection of it, a distortion of it, or something else entirely? Is it a Platonic form? When Tietjens fancies himself a traditional, upstanding gentleman of the lost English aristocracy, to what image does he refer? Mirrors are the device through which the production's designers figure the negotiation of and conceptualization of identity. And, like the object of a nostalgic desire or performance, the image in a mirror is virtual and not quite true to reality -- impossible to grasp.
I have spent nearly three years now attempting to knead the meaning out of all this grand, melancholy English nostalgia, beginning with projects on Yeats and Waugh, and like the kaleidoscopic images of Parade's End, like water through fingers and like time slipping away, any meaning that begins to form immediately moves and changes and gets away from me. But that is the great beauty of that nostalgia: it gives and gives and never takes shape, refusing to cohere, co-authoring stories that do the same -- stories with a particular brand of sublime surface tension that ripples on the verge of rupture, never breaking.
