The Good Soldier E-Book

Ford Madox Ford

• Herausgeber: Galley Beggar Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 424

Beschreibung

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard" - so begins The Good Soldier, the novel that Ford Madox Ford regarded as his best – and with good reason. It isn't perhaps as sad as the storyteller claims – but it is a lesson narration, the use of flashback, and literary impressionism. It's also, crucially, a gripping story, brilliantly told; a shocking and constantly surprising tale of marital strife, sexual intrigue, deep deception, fathomless mystery and tragic death. There is nothing else like it. It is a modernist classic and one of the finest novels of the twentieth century. This edition features a new introduction by Sam Jordison. It details Ford Madox Ford's turbulent, fascinating life and career, explores his place in posterity, recounts his many loves and frequent feuds, and explains why he too was such an unreliable narrator of his own life story. The introduction also includes a critical commentary on The Good Soldier itself. It explains its influence as a work of pioneering modernism, investigates the many narrative tricks, conceits and deceits employed by Ford and makes the case for why this book should be recognised as one of the greatest stories ever told.

Leseprobe

THE GOOD SOLDIER

‘I don’t know how many times in nearly forty years I have come back to this novel of Ford’s, every time to discover a new aspect to admire.’ —Graham Greene

‘The Good Soldier is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.’ —Jane Smiley

‘Of the various demands one can make of the novelist, that he show us the way in which a society works, that he show an understanding of the human heart, that he create characters whose reality we believe and for whose fate we care, that he describe things and people so that we feel their physical presence, that he illuminate our moral consciousness, that he make us laugh and cry, that he delight us by his craftsmanship, there is not one, it seems to me, that Ford does not completely satisfy.’ —W.H. Auden

THE GOOD SOLDIER

Ford Madox Ford

With a new introduction by Sam Jordison

The Good Soldier was first published in the UK by John Lane, 1915

Introduction, © 2024, Sam Jordison

This edition published 2024

by Galley Beggar Press Limited

Norwich, NR2 3LG

Typeset by Galley Beggar Press Ltd

All rights reserved

The right of Ford Madox Ford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act, 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition imposed on the subsequent purchaser

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-913111-67-0

INTRODUCTON

‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I’m now an old man and I’ll die without making a name like Hemingway.’

So said an aging Ford Madox Ford to the journalist George Seldes. ‘At this climax,’ Seldes tells us, ‘Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.’

That was in 1932. Ford died seven years later, on 26 June, 1939, in Deauville, France; a man whose time had been and gone, whose world was about to be smashed apart by war, whose books were falling out of print and whom almost everyone had forgotten. Picture him: despondent, in poverty, alone, watching his fame and his name – the very name he had chosen for himself – fading away into nothing.

A sad story. Or at least, a sad story if it’s told that way. But, if there’s one thing we learn from The Good Soldier, it’s that such narratives should always be doubted. That there are always other ways of looking at things. After all, here you are, reading these lines. Ford is still a going concern, remembered now as a pre-eminent modernist with a posthumous reputation burnished by writers and critics alike. In fact, Graham Greene got to work within a week of Ford’s death, writing in The Spectator about his ‘magnificent books’ and declaring, correctly, that ‘a posterity which would care for good writing’ would care for Ford.

It’s easy to imagine that one of Ford’s own characters, so often sceptical, so often doubtful, might have a sardonic remark to make about the author’s apparent misreading of his destiny. But, if we’re thinking in the Ford mode, we must also imagine him complicating the picture further; taking us back over the same ground again, making us question our first and second impressions, undermining our suppositions and presenting the case anew. For the truth – as Ford so often demonstrates in his fiction – changes, depending on the angle from which you approach it.

It’s not just Ford’s posthumous reputation that that George Seldes quote misrepresents. He was talking to Ford towards the end of what might just as easily have been described as an eventful and successful career.

So:

Ford was born on 17 December 1873, in Surrey. His father was a German emigre called Francis Hueffer. His mother was Catherine Madox Brown, a model and artist and the daughter of the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown (whose biography our Ford would eventually write). The couple gave their first son the name Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer.

It was a name to contend with – and the younger Ford got going early. He published his first book, a fairy story called The Brown Owl, in 1891, at the annoyingly young age of 17. His first novel – The Shifting of the Fire – came in 1892, when he was 19. He also embarked on one of the other great projects of his life – keeping company with some of the most important writers of his age. In 1894, at 21-years-old, he set up house on the south coast near Winchelsea (after eloping with a schoolfriend, Elsie Martindale). There he became the neighbour – and soon the friend – of H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. He even began a collaboration with the latter. Ford and Conrad decided that if they combined their considerable talents, they were bound to produce a hit. In 1901 they published a science fiction novel called The Inheritors. It wasn’t as good as the sum of its illustrious parts. Nor was it particularly bad. But it didn’t sell. So next, they tried for a potboiler about smugglers and pirates called Romance. That too was neither good nor bad and, when it emerged in 1903, it was also a commercial failure.

This failure of Romance, coupled, so many scholars speculate (although nothing is certain) with a torrid affair with his sister-in-law, Mary Martindale, drove Ford to nervous exhaustion. In 1904, he went to Germany for a nerve cure (an experience that provided some of the emotional and physical landscape for The Good Soldier) and when he came back, his fortunes picked up. He wrote a study of the capital, The Soul of London, which sold well and was well reviewed (it ‘boomed in the newspapers’ said Ford). He followed up in quick succession with The Fifth Queen (1906), Privy Seal (1907) and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908), a successful trilogy of historical romances about Katharine Howard, wife of Henry VIII.

He also found the time to be, as Graham Greene put it, ‘the best literary editor England has ever had’. In 1908, the 30-something Ford established and began to edit The English Review, a journal championing (and deeply influencing) modernism and encouraging new forms of poetry (which Ford insisted should be ‘as good as prose’). The English Review debuted D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Norman Douglas. Ford also published W.B. Yeats, Henry James, May Sinclair, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad. In fact, the last five writers in that list appeared together in one single edition of the magazine. Ford’s own writing more than held its own in that remarkable crowd. Ezra Pound also reckoned him the ‘finest critic’ in English.

Yet just as Ford’s literary reputation was reaching new heights, his private life began to fall apart. By 1909, he had begun a relationship with the novelist Violet Hunt, but Elsie Martindale (who later became a Catholic) refused him a divorce. The dispute continued for several years, and in 1912 Elsie even brought a libel case when Violet was named in the press as ‘Mrs Ford Madox Hueffer’ – a title which Elsie still claimed for herself.

And here I have to pause. The details of Ford’s extraordinarily complicated love life would take up several volumes of their own. In fact, they already have. Jean Rhys featured her disastrous 1920s affair with him in her 1928 novel Quartet. Rhys’s husband Jean Lenglet also wrote about Ford and Rhys in a Dutch novel called In de Strik, Barred in 1932. During this period, Ford was also in a relationship with Stella Bowen, who wrote in her autobiography Drawn From Life that Ford had ‘a genius for creating confusion and a nervous horror of dealing with the results’. Ford himself also wrote about the mess of his love life in When the Wicked Man in 1931. And that’s just a sampling, from a few years when he was deep into his career as an amorous adventurist.

Back in 1912, meanwhile, Ford’s reputation was taking a battering. But that didn’t put him off further amorous adventures. By 1913, he was dictating The Good Soldier to Brigit Patmore, a writer, hostess and lover of numerous poets, poetesses and authors. Ford was very keen to be among them. Violet Hunt jealously noted in her diary the ‘flattery’ Ford paid to her rival. She suggested that Patmore’s husband must have known she had been ‘up to’ something. In May 1914 she also wrote: ‘Brigit came & went. Is this the day they sat & cried all day silently & I left them alone?’

It’s easy to see parallels between this particular ménage à quatre and the marital difficulties Ford describes so strikingly in The Good Soldier. It’s also easy (and fun!) to imagine the infatuated writer hoping his novel might impress Brigit as she typed it out. Certainly, it impressed him. At least, it did in 1927, when he wrote in an introduction to a new edition of the book:

No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity, if taking down one of his ten-year-old books he exclaims: ‘Great heavens, did I write as well as that then?’ for the implication always is that one does not any longer write so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.

Ford, as he so often was, is being a little deceptive here. He actually continued to write productively until his death. The only gaps came in the years eaten up by World War I. They were hard years. By then in his 40s, Ford should have been counted as too old to serve, but managed to join the army in 1915. He was injured by a shell in the Somme, exposed to gas at Ypres and eventually invalided home, suffering mentally, physically, emotionally.

In 1919 he changed his name from the Germanic Ford Hueffer to the more English, but still idiosyncratic, Ford Madox Ford and by 1923 he was back at the forefront of the avant-garde, working on The Transatlantic Review in Paris where he published his lover Jean Rhys, along with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. In 1927, the year the 54-year-old Ford was claiming to worry about being an ‘extinct volcano’, he was actually in the middle of publishing another great masterpiece, Parade’s End, the mighty four-volume work that appeared between 1924 and 1928. Malcolm Bradbury has declared it ‘the finest English novel’ about the Great War and Julian Barnes has called it ‘masterly’.

Parade’s End brought Ford new fame in America, and a few good years, before the Depression hit. After that, Ford’s sales began to decline and he sometimes struggled to find a publisher. Yet, even if he was reduced, at the end, to Bohemian poverty, he was still a going concern. The March of Literature, the last book published in his lifetime, came out in 1938, just months before he died. It was an ambitious overview of writing and writers from Babylon until modern times. ‘It is the book of an old man mad about writing,’ he says in his introduction. He then gallops through the millennia in 900 energetic pages, his ideas and opinions variously brilliant, perceptive, frustrating, and eccentric (he really hated Henry Fielding). He kept his light still blazing right until the strident final sentences where he imagines the ‘great’ work of art of the future that will come ‘because all the peoples of the earth demand nothing else, if only that they may have a little rest from their fears and the leisure to sit down and read. And what the master shall command the slave of the hand shall contrive’.

It seems his faith in the written word remained undimmed, in spite of what he may have said to George Seldes. And it wasn’t such a bad career, all in all.

_____

Except. Pause again. This is Ford Madox Ford. There were complications. There were also very good reasons to fear for Ford’s posterity.

Graham Greene may have praised him in that Spectator obituary, but he also had to go on the defensive, lambasting the conservatism of English critics who were already claiming Ford’s books were ‘dated’ and a literary world which had ‘carefully eliminated him’. Worse was to come thanks to one of those men Ford told Seldes he had helped: Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway had already made a veiled reference to Ford in The Sun Also Rises. There, he appears, thinly disguised, as Braddocks, a ridiculous ‘literary’ man who puts on dances in a disreputable café. But it was Papa’s 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast that really did for Ford. Here, Ford huffs and puffs onto the page as a ‘well-clothed, up-ended hogshead’, and Hemingway comments that he neither wanted to look at nor smell him. In A Moveable Feast, Ford is a physically repugnant heavy-breather and, worse still, a compulsive liar. Hemingway recounts that Ezra Pound told him to go easy on Ford, since he only lies ‘when he is tired’. But, of course, that meant pretty much all the time.

If Hemingway’s had become the last word, Ford would have been remembered more for his lying than for his own carefully crafted fiction – been better known for his nasal blockages than any spirit he breathed into his characters. He might have become a footnote to Papa – a writer talented enough to eclipse him – but also cruel enough to make fun of physical problems directly attributable to a gas attack and horrible suffering.

Yet time has actually been kinder than Hemingway. Now Ford is widely regarded as, to quote Colm Tóibín, a ‘genius’. Anthony Burgess called him the ‘greatest British novelist of the 20th century’. A.S. Byatt put him second only to Proust among her favourite writers of all time. (Admittedly, also alongside Balzac, Dickens, Eliot, Thomas Mann and James, Iris Murdoch, Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky – but still, not a bad list.)

When it comes to The Good Soldier itself, the critic Frank Kermode calls it ‘wonderful’. Robert McCrum calls it ‘extraordinary’. And Julian Barnes has described it as ‘literary impressionism of Jamesian subtlety, yet with a crisper delivery; it is also the most perfectly deployed example of the unreliable narrator.’

In other words, The Good Soldier is as good as they get: a fierce, daring and deeply unsettling novel. A book that remains fresh and vital, unusual and original more than a century since it was written.

But don’t take my word for it. In fact, if you’re a first time reader, it might be sensible to leave off this introduction at this point and go and find out for yourself. One of the wonderful things about The Good Soldier is just how much it can take you by surprise on first reading – and I’d hate to spoil that feeling. So go now – and please come back here when you’re done.

_____

How was it?

Did it wrong foot you? That’s certainly how it got me, first time around. I remember trusting Dowell implicitly, early on, believing him when he told me how happy he was in the early days of his marriage, believing also that he was a poor innocent chump wronged by his scheming wife and a sex-mad Captain of Hussars. I believed him a victim of lies, passions and absurdities. If you take Dowell’s story at face value, he’s had it rough. If you believe him, that sad story goes something like this:

Our unfortunate hero, Dowell, poor Dowell, unwary of the wiles of women, was tricked into marrying the heartless and pitiless Florence. Florence didn’t desire him. She didn’t even like him. In fact, the marriage was a sham. She had entered into it as a way to help her to get to Europe and to launch herself on English society. And all the while she was carrying on an affair with a blackmailing cad called Jimmy. To further this scheme, she had persuaded Dowell that she had a heart condition – and so must under no circumstances be excited. Which is why, for most of their married life, she kept her bedroom door locked to him, and as Dowell explains:

I was provided with an axe – an axe! – great gods, with which to break down her door in case she ever failed to answer my knock, after I knocked really loud several times. It was pretty well thought out, you see.

In spite of these unusual arrangements, Dowell tell us that thought himself ‘happy’. He carried on tending to Florence, assiduously avoiding not just anything that might excite but also anything that might even interest her (judging by his reports of their conversations). He maintained her in idle luxury in the spa town of Nauheim. He claimed to think he was even happier, and luckier, when the charming Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora wondered into their lives. Little did he know that behind that locked door, Edward was carrying out an affair with Florence! Even when his wife committed suicide, he didn’t at first realise that there had been anything wrong. He claims, in fact, to have been unaware of the fact that she had killed herself. He tells us he thought her death was caused by her heart problem. He tells us he only began to understand how he had been deceived, afterwards, back in England, when Leonora explained everything to him. What betrayal she laid out! And yet, in spite of it all, he still remained on friendly terms with Edward. … And when Edward in turn killed himself, Dowell went on to play a thoroughly honourable part in trying to pick up the pieces and look after a poor girl called Nancy Rufford, another victim of Edward’s who had lost her mind because of her misplaced love for him…

Possibly, that’s how you saw things too? It’s a plausible plot summary. I think I believed it for a good part of my first read (for this is a novel you must read more than once). I know that others believe it too. Writing in The Guardian in 2006, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer Jane Smiley said:

Ford’s greatest gamble is in the naïveté of the narrator (Dowell), supposedly an idle but well-meaning wealthy man from an old Philadelphia family who readily accepts a sexless marriage with a woman (Florence) whose emotional life is a secret and a deception.

But was it really a gamble? Did Ford really expect us to think that Dowell is such an innocent? Did he expect us to trust this man when he tells us of this of his first meeting with Edward Ashburnham:

I could see his lips form a word of three syllables – remember I had nothing in the world to do but to notice these niceties – and immediately I knew that he must be Edward Ashburnham, Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of Branshaw House, Branshaw Teleragh. I knew it because every evening just before dinner, whilst I waited in the hall, I used, by the courtesy of Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor, to inspect the little police reports that each guest was expected to sign upon taking a room.

Perhaps inspecting guest lists was normal practice before World War I? I couldn’t say. But I do know that the way it is presented here makes it seem discomforting. Something about the way he brings in Schontz, and the diminishing of the reports in that ‘little’. Something unsettling in the image of him rifling through to check on the particulars of people he hasn’t even yet met...

Should you choose, you can find plenty of reinforcement for this idea that Dowell may be a creep – a vicious sneaking creep. It’s even possible to feel more sorry for Florence than for him. Think of his limp failure to properly embrace her even as they are eloping. Think of the way he bores her and insists she too talks of boring things. And what did you make of the perpetual coldness with which he describes her? How clear he makes it that he himself thinks little of her charms? What did you make of his ugly, cringing misogyny. Who do you think might enjoy being married to Dowell?

Let’s go further. Because isn’t there also a disturbing hint of violence in Dowell’s make-up? One of the first things Florence sees her husband do is to ‘fill up’ one of the eyes of his servant and threaten to strangle the unfortunate man. And while we’re dwelling on disturbing possibilities, is there a chance Dowell may even be complicit in his wife’s suicide? Initially, when he describes seeing her running through the street – on what has turned out to be her flight to her death – he tells us that he has no idea what was going to happen and that: ‘I could not move; I could not stir a finger.’ But later on he returns to the scene again and tells us something rather different:

I thought suddenly that she wasn’t real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates. It is even possible that, if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her room and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But I just couldn’t do it...

Like so much else in the book, that passage and the discrepancy can be read in quite a few ways. There isn’t solid evidence – but the important thing is that the possibility – the notion – of Dowell’s culpability is there. So too is the possibility that he also does nothing to help Edward in his final moments.

There is plenty more we might ask. For instance, Dowell seems to know plenty about her uncle’s questionable heart problems – so did it really not occur to him that Florence’s issues might be equally spurious? And why do women always seem to shy away from him? Why does Leonora get rid of him so fast? Does Nancy show any desire for him? Hasn’t she effectively become his prisoner at the end? Why in the very first sentence of the book does Dowell claim that this is ‘the saddest story I have ever heard’ – when he didn’t hear it at all, he lived it?

All of these questions might have innocent answers.

Likewise, it might just be coincidence that everything goes Dowell’s way by the end of the book. That Florence so conveniently kills herself just five days after inheriting a fortune from her uncle, that his love rival kills himself, that he gets control of Nancy, the woman he seems to love. I mean, it would be absurd to suggest he’s a murderer, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

Well, probably.

But the joy of this novel is just how many possibilities it presents. All bets are off. This is a book open to all kinds of interpretation. Here, you can have your cake and eat it. Dowell can be both an innocent victim and an absolute monster. And whichever way you look at him, he is fascinating.

He is also supremely discomforting. What do we make of his clear hatred of women? His angry loathing of Catholics? Are those character tropes, cleverly inserted by Ford to make Dowell less sympathetic? Or are they Ford himself, writing as he was going through a painful relationship breakdown with a Catholic-curious wife? Do we say that, well, Ford could also write about fine women, like the suffragette Valentine Wannop in Parade’s End? Do we say, well, he might have had a point about the Pope?

Personally, I’d caution taking anything at face value, or judging anything based on the biography and supposed opinions of this most slippery and elusive author. This is a novel where even the title is an enigma – and of course, the author’s explanation for it only adds to the confusion:

This book was originally called by me The Saddest Story, but since it did not appear until the darkest days of the war were upon us, Mr Lane [the publisher] importuned me with letters and telegrams – I was by that time engaged in other pursuits! – to change the title, which he said would at that date render the book unsaleable. One day when I was on parade, I received a final wire of appeal from Mr Lane, and the telegraph being reply-paid I seized the reply form and wrote in hasty irony: ‘Dear Lane, Why Not The Good Soldier’ ... To my horror six months later the book appeared under that title.

So said Ford in that 1927 introduction. But is The Good Soldier really such a poor title? And is it really one he would spurn? Even if it was just a marketing wheeze, it must also have occurred to Ford as a title that both reflects on the subject of the novel and changes it.

For, why focus on this good soldier?

It initially feels strange that the title makes us focus in on Edward Ashburnham, Captain 14th Hussars, of Branshaw House, Branshaw Teleragh. In its first half (on first read) it seems the book isn’t about him so much as the breakdown of the marriage between the cuckolded narrator John Dowell and his apparently heartless wife, Florence.

True, Ashburnham turns out to be the man with whom Florence is sleeping, but he doesn’t take up much space on the earlier pages of the book. We certainly don’t hear that much from him beyond the odd appreciative gurgle at a well-turned ankle and a few elusive comments. Comments that we are even told are elusive:

There he was, saying at the back of his mind: ‘It might just be done.’ It was like a chap in the middle of the eruption of a volcano, saying that he might just manage to bolt into the tumult and set fire to a haystack. Madness? Predestination? Who the devil knows?

Otherwise, Florence, and Edward’s wife Leonora have most of the dialogue until late on in the book. And it’s our narrator who does most of the rest of the chatting, the thinking and the dwelling. It’s only as the book develops that it becomes clear that Edward may well be important, may well be a tragic figure. In fact, I only really began to understand the depth of Edward’s tragedy in my second and third readings of the book. First time around, I was more prone to see Dowell as the principal victim. Yet even then, I also had doubts. There was that title nagging at me, telling me to look at the soldier. Look at Edward.

As well as directing attention to Edward, the title also suggests how we might regard him. He is a ‘good’ soldier.

What does that mean? Well, I wish you luck if you want to get a firm grasp on Edward’s morality.

And even if you take the title as a strictly military description, Edward’s ability is questionable. He seems effective. Dowell tells us that Edward is popular with his men, brave in battle, dedicated to his calling. He tells us that he has a Distinguished Service Order and ‘the Royal Humane Society’s medal with a clasp’ and has twice risked his life at sea to rescue men fallen from ships. He tells us that Edward has also been twice recommended for the Victoria Cross. Yet even here there is plenty of room for doubt. Why, we have to ask, did Edward the recommendation but not get the decorations due to him? Why hasn’t he been promoted more? And if he is so dedicated to soldiering, why did he leave his regiment? Just to follow another man’s wife to Europe?

And this brings us back to Edward’s mortality. He’s a philanderer. Can he really disrupt all those lives and still be called ‘good’? Is Edward really a ‘sentimentalist’ who, as Dowell sometimes suggests, acts mainly out of love and compassion? Is it really Edward’s fault that women fall for him? Can he help it that he is so dashing, and so handsome? Is it his fault that he has such a fine moustache?

What about the more serious accusations? What about the fact that Edward attempts to rape a vulnerable woman in a railway carriage? Dowell sets this out as the result of confusion and a desire to ‘comfort’ someone who was already upset. But are we to believe that? And what of Edward’s inconstancy to his wife? Does Leonora really drive him (‘pimp’ him, as Dowell puts it) out of her bed and into the arms of other women? Is it impossible to be faithful to someone who is so ‘wicked and mean’? Dowell gives us the impression that he is spinning out a strong pro-Edward line, but many of the things he tells us make the soldier look terrible.

Other facts that Dowell provides appear more straightforward – assuming we believe him. Edward does at least seem to have some virtues. He is kind to the tenants on his country estate. He carries out acts of charity. He is a lenient magistrate. In the end, he takes a course that protects rather than compromises his ward Nancy.

We can also, if we are feeling especially lenient, believe Dowell when he tells us how much he likes Edward. When he suggests that perhaps that he loves him. When he informs us that he can’t help sighing over him.

We can. But we don’t have to. There is always room for doubt, for twisting meaning. Sometimes the perspective on Edward can make a full 180-degree turn in the space of a single sentence. There’s a beauty at the end of this passage:

I had forgotten his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches. When you looked at them carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid.

Dowell can’t help showing us more than he appears to want to tell us. Even if, as usual, there are different ways to read this extra message. What does it show us? Contempt? His own doubt? That Dowell thinks being honest and straightforward is a form of stupidity? Or is it bitterness? His genuine opinion? His doubt? He also tells us that those ‘honest’ eyes have a ‘curious, sinister expression’. That’s a strange kind of honesty, just as Edward is a strange kind of ‘good’. So it is that even the most ‘straightforward’ words can start to seem worryingly uncertain in The Good Soldier.

The word ‘good’, of course, is a prime example when it comes to this kind of complexity. Generally, we expect ‘good’ to be a measure of moral simplicity. Dogs are ‘good’ – noble creatures that they are. We are also taught from a very young age that we ought to be – or at least try to be – ‘good’. When we want to suggest someone has a simplistic worldview, we say that they have split the world into goodies and baddies, black and white. It is a word that doesn’t normally come in shades of grey. And yet, trying to define it as it applies to The Good Soldier is like trying to catch fairy dust in a net. Or, if you believe in Edward’s moral turpitude, bog water in a colander.

Plenty more of the language in the book is similarly shifting and doubtful. Whenever Dowell describes a character as ‘poor’ (as in ‘poor Edward’, that ‘poor devil’), it is near-impossible to gauge whether he is being sympathetic or sarcastic, or, indeed, whether the ‘poor’ person has had any ill fortune at all. If someone in The Good Soldier is ‘nice’, you know to watch out for their sting. If they are ‘chaste’ ... well. ‘Straightforward’ words become bristling, complex weapons.

This disruption of familiar words breeds uncertainty. Meaning has slipped its moorings. When you don’t know where you are with words like ‘good’ and ‘poor’ and ‘nice’, you realise that you are floating without a rudder, without a compass. The charts don’t correspond to the world around you.

And if we don’t know what Dowell means when he calls Edward a ‘poor devil’, what are we to make of him when he says something more complex and ambivalent:

I call this the Saddest Story, rather than ‘The Ashburnham Tragedy’, just because it is so sad, just because there is no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end. There is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people – for I am convinced that Edward and Leonora had noble natures – here then were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fire ships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, agony of the mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all darkness.

Double darkness with extra fog. It’s difficult enough trying to work out what he means by The Good Soldier. Where would we be if he had called it The Saddest Story?

_____

At this point, I realise I’ve spent a good deal of this introduction discussing morality, emotion and character. I’ve barely touched on the novel as a classic of modernism – which it most certainly is. It is a complicated and artful construction. It has a narrative that weaves in and out of different time frames in sophisticated ways. It has a narrator who is very aware of the manner in which he tells his story as well as its ins and outs. A narrator, what’s more, who is, as we’ve learned, as unreliable as they come. It plays with form and meaning in ways that would become hallmarks of high literature in those early years of the twentieth century. It also takes us deep – uncomfortably deep – into the mind of Dowell. We get a sense of the deep caverns behind his eyes, the way he thinks and what he likes to think about. Almost a decade before Virginia Woolf wrote Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown and the urgent significance of trying to ‘catch the phantom’ of character, Ford was there, already revealing it in all its infinite variety.

It’s a clever book, in short. But novels don’t just survive on technical brilliance and dazzling trickery. They also have to be worth reading. The things that have most struck me every time I’ve read The Good Soldier (and in flat contradiction to all those who claim that modernism is somehow arid, elitist and clever-clever) are its deepness of feeling: the pain of this sad story. Ford is also able to lay bare matters of the heart. He knows the old-fashioned virtues of a good story, well-told.

Yes, the emotion in the novel largely centres around bitterness and anger. It’s also true that the hearts the novel investigates are dark and corrupt and that the story ends in near universal disaster – but you could easily say the same thing about Hamlet. The Good Soldier is full of gripping, primal material. The formal experiments work to serve the broader story. They allow Dowell to agonise over events as he recalls them, and to revise his opinions in the time it takes to tell the story. If he is unreliable, it is because so too is the human heart.

Or at least, that’s the way Ford Madox Ford sets us thinking. No doubt he’ll be doing the same for generations and generations to come. He isn’t beaten yet.

Sam Jordison

DEDICATORY LETTER

TO:

STELLA FORD1

My Dear Stella,

I have always regarded this as my best book--at any rate as the best book of mine of a pre-war period; and between its writing and the appearance of my next novel nearly ten years must have elapsed, so that whatever I may have since written may be regarded as the work of a different man--as the work of your man. For it is certain that without the incentive to live that you offered me I should scarcely have survived the war-period and it is more certain still that without your spurring me again to write I should never have written again. And it happens that, by a queer chance, The Good Soldier is almost alone amongst my books in being dedicated to no one: Fate must have elected to let it wait the ten years that it waited--for this dedication.

What I am now I owe to you: what I was when I wrote The Good Soldier I owed to the concatenation of circumstances of a rather purposeless and wayward life. Until I sat down to write this book--on the 17th December 1913--I had never attempted to extend myself, to use a phrase of race-horse training. Partly because I had always entertained very fixedly the idea that--whatever may be the case with other writers--I at least should not be able to write a novel by which I should care to stand before reaching the age of forty; partly because I very definitely did not want to come into competition with other writers whose claim or whose need for recognition and what recognitions bring were greater than my own. I had never really tried to put into any novel of mine all that I knew about writing. I had written rather desultorily a number of books--a great number--but they had all been in the nature of pastiches, of pieces of rather precious writing, or of tours de force. But I have always been mad about writing--about the way writing should be done and partly alone, partly with the companionship of Conrad, I had even at that date made exhaustive studies into how words should be handled and novels constructed.

So, on the day I was forty I sat down to show what I could do--and The Good Soldier resulted. I fully intended it to be my last book. I used to think--and I do not know that I do not think the same now--that one book was enough for any man to write, and, at the date when The Good Soldier was finished, London at least and possibly the world appeared to be passing under the dominion of writers newer and much more vivid. Those were the passionate days of the literary Cubists, Vorticists, Imagistes and the rest of the tapageur and riotous Jeunes of that young decade. So I regarded myself as the Eel which, having reached the deep sea, brings forth its young and dies--or as the Great Auk I considered that, having reached my allotted, I had laid my one egg and might as well die. So I took a formal farewell of Literature in the columns of a magazine called the Thrush--which also, poor little auk that it was, died of the effort. Then I prepared to stand aside in favour of our good friends--yours and mine--Ezra, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, H.D., and the rest of the clamorous young writers who were then knocking at the door.

But greater clamours beset London and the world which till then had seemed to lie at the proud feet of those conquerors; Cubism, Vorticism, Imagism and the rest never had their fair chance amid the voices of the cannon, and so I have come out of my hole again and beside your strong, delicate and beautiful works have taken heart to lay some work of my own.

The Good Soldier, however, remains my great auk's egg for me as being something of a race that will have no successors and as it was written so long ago I may not seem over-vain if I consider it for a moment or two. No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: "Great Heavens, did I write as well as that then?" for the implication always is that one does not any longer write so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.

Be that as it may, I was lately forced into the rather close examination of this book, for I had to translate it into French, that forcing me to give it much closer attention than would be the case in any reading however minute. And I will permit myself to say that I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references. Nor is that to be wondered at for, though I wrote it with comparative rapidity, I had it hatching within myself for fully another decade. That was because the story is a true story and because I had it from Edward Ashburnham himself and I could not write it till all the others were dead. So I carried it about with me all those years, thinking about it from time to time.

I had in those days an ambition: that was to do for the English novel what in Fort comme la Mort, Maupassant had done for the French. One day I had my reward, for I happened to be in a company where a fervent young admirer exclaimed: "By Jove, The Good Soldier is the finest novel in the English language!" whereupon my friend Mr John Rodker who has always had a properly tempered admiration for my work remarked in his clear, slow drawl: "Ah yes. It is, but you have left out a word. It is the finest French novel in the English language!"

With that--which is my tribute to my masters and betters of France--I will leave the book to the reader. But I should like to say a word about the title. This book was originally called by me The Saddest Story, but since it did not appear till the darkest days of the war were upon us, Mr Lane importuned me with letters and telegrams--I was by that time engaged in other pursuits! --to change the title which he said would at that date render the book unsaleable. One day, when I was on parade, I received a final wire of appeal from Mr Lane, and the telegraph being reply-paid I seized the reply-form and wrote in hasty irony: "Dear Lane, Why not The Good Soldier?" . . . To my horror six months later the book appeared under that title.

I have never ceased to regret it but, since the War, I have received so much evidence that the book has been read under that name that! hesitate to make a change for fear of causing confusion. Had the chance occurred during the War I should not have hesitated to make the change, for I had only two evidences that anyone had ever heard of it. On one occasion I met the adjutant of my regiment just come off leave and looking extremely sick. I said: "Great Heavens, man, what is the matter with you?" He replied: "Well, the day before yesterday I got engaged to be married and today I have been reading The Good Soldier."

On the other occasion I was on parade again, being examined in drill, on the Guards' Square at Chelsea. And, since I was petrified with nervousness, having to do it before a half-dozen elderly gentlemen with red hatbands, I got my men about as hopelessly boxed as it is possible to do with the gentlemen privates of H.M. Coldstream Guards. Whilst I stood stiffly at attention one of the elderly red hat-bands walked close behind by back and said distinctly in my ear, "Did you say, The Good Soldier?" So no doubt Mr Lane was avenged. At any rate I have learned that irony may be a two-edged sword.

You, my dear Stella, will have heard me tell these stories a great many times. But the seas now divide us and I put them in this, your letter, which you will read before you see me in the hope that they may give you some pleasure with the illusion that you are hearing familiar--and very devoted--tones. And so I subscribe myself in all truth and in the hope that you will accept at once the particular dedication of this book and the general dedication of the edition.

Your

F.M.F.

New York,

January 9, 1927

____________________________

1 Stella Ford was, in fact, Stella Bowen. She was not married to Ford Madox Ford.

PART I

I

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy – or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a ‘heart’, and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer.

Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence’s broken years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctor’s orders. They said that even the short Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing.

When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave from an India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three; Mrs Ashburnham – Leonora – was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and poor Florence thirty. Thus today Florence would have been thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am forty-five and Leonora forty. You will perceive, therefore, that our friendship has been a young-middle-aged affair, since we were all of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams being more particularly what in England it is the custom to call ‘quite good people’.

They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the Ashburnham who accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as you must also expect with this class of English people, you would never have noticed it. Mrs Ashburnham was a Powys; Florence was a Hurlbird of Stamford, Connecticut, where, as you know, they are more old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of Cranford, England, could have been. I myself am a Dowell of Philadelphia, Pa., where, it is historically true, there are more old English families than you would find in any six English counties taken together. I carry about with me, indeed – as if it were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe – the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets. These title deeds are of wampum, the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham in Surrey in company with William Penn. Florence’s people, as is so often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, where the Ashburnhams’ place is. From there, at this moment, I am actually writing.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

Some one has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event. Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together at one of the little tables in front of the club house, let us say, at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go, we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame. Where better could one take refuge? Where better?