Will Tom Stoppard Side With Graham Greene on the Last Book of ‘Parade’s End’?

Paul Windle

Contributing to the One-Page Magazine is a fun and sometimes challenging exercise in compression and economy. For every 70 words I work into a column, there are often hundreds more I could have written on a subject. That’s never been more true than it is for Sunday’s edition, which focuses on the most exciting TV news in recent memory: Benedict Cumberbatch, best known as the lead in BBC’s “Sherlock,” stars in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s “Parade’s End.” The joint BBC and HBO production was directed by Susanna White and is positioned as the smart Edwardian-era alternative to “Downton Abbey,” a show Cumberbatch has ridiculed far and wide. Most notoriously, he denounced its cheap sentiment in an interview with Reader’s Digest and called the second season “atrocious,” preceded by an adverb that cannot be written here.

Both White, and the creator of “Downton Abbey,” Julian Fellowes, have sought to downplay the rivalry. The only similarity between the shows, White said, “is the period in which they are set and the fact that they are both about a load of toffs. ‘Downton’ is just a lovely thing to curl up in front of with a glass of wine but ours is the opposite. I like to think of ‘Parade’s End’ as ‘Downton Abbey’ meets ‘The Wire.'”

“Downton” has its pleasures and once had its subtleties — or at least its surprises. I like my friend Alexander Chee’s argument, in “Parvenucracy,” that “We are so preoccupied by Edwardians because we are neo-Edwardians; we are a people who apparently missed the vast economic chasms of those times so much we reproduced them, or at least, did not defend sufficiently against their return.” But season two’s soap opera tropes did get increasingly hard to choke down, at least for me.

And while both shows depict the travails of the upper crust and risk melodrama, only one has, at its core, the mammoth tetralogy from Ford. Ursula LeGuin has affectionately called “Parade’s End,” “that interminable four-decker” and “one of the great novels about war.” Although Ford is known (when he is known at all), almost exclusively for “The Good Soldier,” he once presided over early 20th century letters. When Chee and I corresponded about Ford’s relationship with Jean Rhys several years ago, Chee called Ford a juggernaut, “unlike any modern author since except perhaps Joyce Carol Oates, if she had a second job as Dave Eggers.” And Graham Greene once said that “there is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford.” Ford’s admirers have also included W.H. Auden, A.S. Byatt, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess and Dorothy Parker, who praised the depth and power of his writing and its “rackingly moving honesty.” He wrote a novel with Joseph Conrad. He founded and edited literary magazines. An entire book is devoted to his love affairs — his “regiment of women.”

Apart from seeing the story come alive on screen, I’m most interested to see which sections of the books Stoppard used and which he discarded. When Greene edited the Bodley Head selection of Ford’s writing, he omitted the final “Parade’s End” volume, “The Last Post,” calling it, with some basis in Ford’s own remarks, “more than a mistake — it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of ‘Parade’s End.'” Burgess denounced this decision as “the worst example I know of unjustified translation,” arguing that “whatever Ford said, the work is a tetralogy, and the thing is severely maimed with the loss of his final book. An author is not be trusted in his judgment of this sort of thing.”

Stoppard admits that the adaptation, which took 15 months to complete, was daunting. “I felt frightened of it. It isn’t an ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ novel. You have to trot to keep up. Often you don’t know where you are in the time schemes and you’re off balance about whether you’re sympathizing with a character or not.” But he’s pleased with the results. “As writing goes, it’s as engrossing a 15 months as I have ever had. If viewers have as good a time as I did, I’ll be delighted.”

The less delightful news is that while the show airs in Britain this evening, those in the United States will have to wait until 2013 to (legally) watch.