That is the plain English of it, and I suppose plain English is best.
(The ostensibly artless, candid tone of the narrator, John Dowell)
Forgive my writing of these monstrous things in this frivolous manner. If I did not I should break down and cry.
(Confession of his emotional devastation, p.60)
Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance; but they crowd on me. I will try to tell the story.
(Artlessly excusing the cleverly episodic narrative structure)
I know nothing – nothing in the world – of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone – horribly alone.
(His utter failure and alienation)
Ford Madox Ford (1873 to 1939) was a prolific author of the late-Victorian and Edwardian era, leaving some 70 volumes to his name. ‘The Good Soldier’ is generally acknowledged to be his best novel and was his personal favourite.
First the facts. The 228-page novel is told in the first person by an American man. Like lots else about the story, we only get his name well into the text, and even then only in fragments, first learning his surname is Dowell, and 20 pages later, and then only casually, in dialogue, that his first name is John. As he sits down to tell the story he is 45.
This tiny detail, the carefully delayed revelation of his name, can be taken as emblematic of the aim and technique of the entire thing, for ‘The Good Soldier’ is a deliberate, canny, teasing puzzle. Only slowly can the reader piece together the following facts:
- the narrator was married to an American woman named Florence, née Hurlbird
- a boat trip they took from Britain to France was so stormy and stressful that it affected his wife’s heart and doctors said another boat trip would kill her, so the couple were, in effect, marooned in Europe, circulating around the usual middle-class resorts and spa towns, for her health
- one evening, at the Hotel Excelsior in Nauheim, they met a charming English couple, Captain Edward ‘Teddy’ Ashburnham, home on leave from his regiment in India, and his wife Leonora Ashburnham, tall and horsey
The four got on very well and became a sort of item, a quartet, who met every year at the same resorts (for half the year the Ashburnhams stay at their estate Branshaw House near the village of Branshaw Teleragh in Hampshire). Over time they became inseparable and used to following the same routine at whichever resort town they were staying in. Breakfast together, followed by trips to tourist sights, or walks or rides. Luncheon followed by a rest. Dinner then cards or conversation.
The striking thing about them, Dowell reflects, is how on the surface their relationships were, how everything was polite and just so. They were ‘good’ people, not rich, just comfortably off (in fact surprisingly precise details are given of the income of Teddy’s large estate in England and of Florence and Dowell’s inheritances, page 179). Teddy is tall, handsome and amiably dim:
It struck him, he said, that brainy Johnnies generally were rather muffs when they got on to four legs.
He was so presentable and quite ready to lend you his cigar puncher – that sort of thing.
While Leonora is tall and white skinned and chilly. But then, precisely nine years and six weeks after they first met, in four tragic days, the tranquil facade of their lives was torn to shreds, terrible secrets were revealed and two of the quartet lost their lives. How? Why? What? These shocking events are what the dazed narrator sets out to make sense of and we accompany him on his shattered odyssey of understanding.
Puzzling
Which is why the narrator finds himself, disillusioned and appalled, confused and bereft, trying to make sense of what happened by writing the account we’re about to read.
A lot of the book’s tremendous appeal comes from the tone of voice created by this narrator, who comes over as sympathetic, well-intentioned, utterly devastated but continually obtuse, unperceiving, hopelessly puzzled. His nonplussed state extends to sharing with us that he doesn’t even know how to tell a story. His characteristic move is to ask a question about this or that aspect of the friendship and then wail ‘I don’t know, I don’t know’ which becomes a catchphrase.
Is all this digression or isn’t it digression? Again I don’t know…
For whose benefit did she do it? For that of the bath attendant? of the passers-by? I don’t know…
What could they have done better, or what could they have done that could have been worse? I don’t know…
It is this part of the story that makes me saddest of all. For I ask myself unceasingly, my mind going round and round in a weary, baffled space of pain—what should these people have done? What, in the name of God, should they have done?
Every few pages, in the middle of mentioning a topic, he candidly admits that he knows nothing about it and understands less. Female psychology, English society, English attitudes towards religion, Catholic doctrine, love and attraction, human nature, he barely understands any of them:
I do not know much about English legal procedure… (p.153)
I don’t know exactly what [her spiritual advisers] taught her.
I did not know much about housekeeping expenses in England… (p.180)
I don’t attach any particular importance to these generalizations of mine. They may be right, they may be wrong; I am only an ageing American with very little knowledge of life. (p.219)
He makes a big deal of not understanding the ranks or social etiquette of the British Army, pretends never to have heard of Simla, the famous town built by the Raj in the foothills of the Himalayas where imperial administrators could retire from the heat of the plains (p.155).
I am no good at geography of the Indian Empire.
Above all he continually volunteers his sense that he is failing to explain the story properly, to get it down, to achieve his aim of making us really see his friends and understand their fates.
It is very difficult to give an all-round impression of a man. I wonder how far I have succeeded with Edward Ashburnham. I dare say I haven’t succeeded at all. (p.140)
Who in this world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any other heart – or of his own? (p.144)
Eventually he settles on the conceit of imagining that the person he’s writing for (‘O silent listener’) is sitting with him in a country cottage, on the other side of the hearth in front of a roaring fire, as he tells the story – but this image, though he recurs to it a couple of times, doesn’t last long or really help. What he’s trying to set down is too complex and confusing.
What’s so brilliant, enjoyable and wonderful about the book is that it really sounds like someone genuinely struggling to make sense of a great emotional disaster which has utterly wrecked his life and his faith in people and belief in a moral universe.
Because what slowly emerges, in fragments, first as hints, and then in devastating revelations, is that everything he thought true about his wife and this other couple of ‘good people’, for nine long years of friendship and stability, turns out to be howling lies.
It turns out that his cold, calculating wife never had a heart condition. She invented it in order to be pampered and looked after but, above all, to obviate all physical relations with her husband. And, in the name of calmness and security, insisted she slept in her own room with the door locked. For the 12 years of their marriage she treated him as no more than a ‘trained poodle’ (p.114). It is only in the shattering four days of revelations that the narrator learns that all the locked door business was the better to entertain a string of lovers, chief among whom, was his friend Edward Ashburnham.
For Ashburnham turns out to have been a world-class philanderer. Before Leonora met him he had nearly been prosecuted for kissing a servant girl at his house, a scandal the Hampshire establishment hushed up. But even after they were married, Edward had a series of affairs. But it wasn’t just that. He plunged the household into financial crisis after crisis.
In Monte Carlo he fell madly in love with ‘a cosmopolitan harpy who passed for the mistress of a Russian Grand Duke’, in fact a Spanish dancer named La Dolciquita, who demanded tens of thousands of pounds before she’d sleep with him. But like the imbecile he was, Ashburnham thought he’d make the money gambling in the casino but, of course, lost even more tens of thousands of pounds.
All this was in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, in the late 1890s, when a thousand pounds meant something. The income from his estate was in the tens of thousands, but still, this was reckless folly. Once Leonora realised what her husband was like and began investigating his affairs, she discovered he was also being blackmailed by people who knew about other affairs of his. At around the time the narrator and Florence met the Ashburnhams, he was having an affair with mousey little Maisie Maidan. This poor woman really did have a heart condition and had been persuaded by Leonora to leave her husband (also serving in India) to visit the spa towns of Europe. When she realised that she had essentially been pimped for Ashburnham’s sexual desires, she was distraught, and did, eventually die.
But Maisie Maidan was, for Ashburnham, just a stepping stone towards the great passion of his life, who was the narrator’s wife, Florence. In fragments, memories, random scenes and snatched dialogue, Dowell pieces together a portrait of a complex character, Florence Hurlbird, from a southern family, who needed a man with income to take her away from her stifling family, and settled on Dowell, a rootless aimless man with a comfortable fixed income.
Later in the third quarter of the book, he describes, in fits and fragments, the upbringing and characters of Leonora and Edward, she a sheltered convent girl, he a virginal jolly good chap, paired off by their parents and all-too-quickly realising they had nothing in common.
Ford’s storytelling technique is gold standard, it’s a masterclass of the craft. As his narrator sits day after day at a table in a house in Hampshire, trying to piece together the series of events, he builds up, by a mosaic or almost a cubist technique, portraits of the three other members of the quartet, seen from multiple angles, via numerous episodes, visited and reinterpreted again and again, over this nine-year period, and every angle, facet and fragment, takes us deeper, builds up a fascinating and fantastic multi-levelled, intricately complex narrative. And all underpinned by the age-old aesthetic principle, that the most naive and artless effects, are the result of the most cunning contrivance.
I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes. And, when one discusses an affair – a long, sad affair – one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real… (p.167)
4 August
As calculated as everything else in the narrative, Ford makes the date 4 August ring out through the book as a symbolic, talismanic date, a fateful date.
4th of August: Florence born.
4 August 1899: Florence sets out with her uncle for the tour round the world in company with a young man called Jimmy.
4th of August 1900: the owner of a house party, Mr Bagshawe, sees Florence coming out of the room of a man named Jimmy who, it is assumed, she had sex with.
4th of August 1901: Florence marries John Dowell and sets sail for Europe in a great gale of wind.
4 August 1904: Maisie Maidan dies of shock at realising Leonora persuaded her to come to Europe, not for her health, but to become a mistress to her husband Edward.
4 August 1913: Florence realises Ashburnham has dropped her to seduce the orphan girl who the Ashburnhams have raised since she was a girl, and commits suicide by taking a phial of prussic acid (p.97). Therefore this is last day of the narrator’s absolute ignorance and perfect happiness (p.95).
The unreliable narrator
The narrator is a brilliant fictional creation. I found his permanent air of confusion very plausible and winning, the crucial basis of the narrative; it is his obtuseness about the true nature of his own wife and two best friends on which the whole thing depends.
His stupidity means that he is continually shocked and passes this shock onto the reader. It’s a startling revelation that he only found out his wife was having an affair with Ashburnham a) when Teddy and Florence are both dead and b) only when Leonora tells him, in passing, in the most casual offhand manner, because she thinks he already knows (p.101). But he didn’t and is staggered, as a result, he tells us, going into a kind of zombie catatonic state of shock for days.
And I thought nothing; absolutely nothing. I had no ideas; I had no strength. I felt no sorrow, no desire for action, no inclination to go upstairs and fall upon the body of my wife. (p.103)
In his stupidity he didn’t even realise that his wife killed herself; he thought she was having one of her heart spasms and took some medicine to calm it, but the medicine failed. It takes Leonora to explain there wasn’t any medicine in the phial but arsenic – Florence wanted to die (p.101).
And yet, as the narrative progresses, somehow Dowell’s candour becomes harder to believe. He starts out saying he loved his wife, he enjoyed the company of bluff Teddy and aloof but terribly polite Leonora and thought they all made a wonderful happy quartet of friends… But then, as revelation after revelation piles up you come to realise that no one could be that obtuse and stupid, that the evidence was all around him.
So the narrator is both a person – an appealingly candid character we’re meant to relate to (and I do) –but also a narrative device which comes to seem more and more contrived (which I also acknowledged, and at the same time).
He comes over as naive and innocent and frank and candid… But what lies and deceptions is the narrator himself concealing? I bet if you really studied it and read it two or three times, you’d begin to tease out the inconsistencies which imply much greater knowledge and awareness than he lets on… and that, too, is part of the exquisite enjoyment.
The philanderer’s philosophy
It’s a novel about two adults, a man and a woman, Edward and Florence, who can’t stop having adulterous affairs. As it happens Ford was quite the philanderer himself, leaving his wife for another woman and then having a series of affairs. So for two reasons it’s interesting to read his narrator’s thoughts on the subject.
I have come to be very much of a cynic in these matters; I mean that it is impossible to believe in the permanence of man’s or woman’s love. Or, at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the permanence of any early passion. As I see it, at least, with regard to man, a love affair, a love for any definite woman—is something in the nature of a widening of the experience. With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory…
And the fading of that early passion:
Whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times… (p.109)
And the narrator attributes to the noble Leonora, devout Catholic and convent educated, a similarly simple and primeval view of women’s role vis-a-vis men:
She saw life as a perpetual sex-battle between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to their wives, and wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the end. That was her sad and modest view of matrimony. Man, for her, was a sort of brute who must have his divagations, his moments of excess, his nights out, his, let us say, rutting seasons… The lot of women was patience and patience and again patience. (p.170)k
Vivid
I love books more than music or movies or TV because of what writing can do, which is convey the world in words, something I find intoxicating; and also for the never-ending number of ways simple words, arranged in beguiling rhythms, revealing unexpected notions, can surprise you and make you sit up.
Certain women’s lines guide your eyes to their necks, their eyelashes, their lips, their breasts. But Leonora’s seemed to conduct your gaze always to her wrist. And the wrist was at its best in a black or a dog-skin glove and there was always a gold circlet with a little chain supporting a very small golden key to a dispatch box. Perhaps it was that in which she locked up her heart and her feelings.
She gave me, suddenly, yet deliberately, one long stare. Her eyes too were blue and dark and the eyelids were so arched that they gave you the whole round of the irises. And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.
A feminist digression
Though women, as I see them, have little or no feeling of responsibility towards a county or a country or a career – although they may be entirely lacking in any kind of communal solidarity – they have an immense and automatically working instinct that attaches them to the interest of womanhood. It is, of course, possible for any woman to cut out and to carry off any other woman’s husband or lover. But I rather think that a woman will only do this if she has reason to believe that the other woman has given her husband a bad time. I am certain that if she thinks the man has been a brute to his wife she will, with her instinctive feeling for suffering femininity, ‘put him back’, as the saying is… (p.219)
Is this at all true? Do women have a feeling for ‘the interest of womanhood’ which men don’t have for ‘the interest of manhood’? In my anecdotal experience, many women do have a fellow feeling for other women, in other countries, in other situations, which I and most of the men I know just don’t have for men in other countries, or even this country, or even in the same pub.
A note on the timeline
Because of the year of publication, 1915, and the title, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a novel about the First World War, but it very much isn’t. It was completed before the war began and its earliest portions are set two decades earlier. Ashburnham and Leonora are married in the early 1890s (1892) because it takes a few years for their marriage to fall apart, for Leonora to take control of his estate, rent it out and take him back to his regiment in India, and for some years to pass in India before the outbreak of the Boer War in October 1899.
Edward and Leonora
The last quarter of the book shifts its focus onto Edward and Leonora as the narrator retells the story of their unhappy marriage, from both perspectives, explaining the process of slow alienation which led Leonora to conspire with the family solicitor to finally seize control of Edward’s land, assets and income, and give him a paltry allowance. How she was so disgusted by his affair with La Dolciquita as to become physically frigid towards him, a lofty hauteur which only increased as Edward had affairs with the wife of a colonel in his regiment, and then poor Maisie Maidan.
Her tragedy was that, all the time, she thought that if she only waited long enough, Edward would burn out his pashes for other women, would be so impressed by her efficient running of the estate and building back up of his fortunes, that he would, eventually, come back to her.
And then she realised he was having an affair with Florence, the narrator’s wife, and her entire world crashes in ruins. It comes to a head in a scene he described early in the novel, when all four of them went on an innocent expedition to the castle in Germany where Martin Luther took refuge from the Inquisition, after he’d published his theses. The narrator senses a powerful atmosphere of agony and fraughtness and suddenly, inexplicably, Leonora shrieks and goes running out of the room, across the huge halls and out into the courtyard. When Dowell catches up with her she babbles something about how she is a Catholic and so this is where the Reformation started, the damning of so many millions of people including her poor husband – and at the time this makes a sort of rather mad sense to the narrator. Only much later does he learn that what triggered her panic attack was when she saw Florence lightly put her hand on Edward’s wrist and Edward turned to her with that look in his eyes… and then Leonora knew they were having an affair, and the ten or so long years of putting up with Edward’s behaviour and keeping the finances on a tight leash and depriving herself of life’s little luxuries in the name of financial prudence… all came crashing down in flames around her ear.
It’s like that, this book, full of fantastically charged scenes which the narrator doesn’t understand, which only much, much later is he able to puzzle out and understand and we, the readers, share in this restless work of poring over the fragments and making sense of his devastated life. Extraordinary things happened and were said and he interpreted them one way. And then, years later, he discovered that everything he had seen and heard and said himself, was wrong, hopelessly wrong. And isn’t life all too often like that?
It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me. (p.213)
There are more characters, and levels of complexity which I haven’t mentioned, namely the role played by the niece Nancy Rufford, her appalling family upbringing, her hero worshipping of Edward, and the grim and melodramatic fates of both Edward and Nancy, all described in ever-increasing agony and horror in the last 50 pages… Read it and find out. It’s a quite brilliant book, a masterpiece.
And, at the same time, Leonora was lashing, like a cold fiend, into the unfortunate Edward. Or, perhaps, he was not so unfortunate; because he had done what he knew to be the right thing, he may be deemed happy. (p.191)
I don’t know. I know nothing. I am very tired.
I don’t know. I leave it to you… (p.220)
Mini me
Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness. But I guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into the category of the passionate, of the headstrong, and the too-truthful. For I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am just as much of a sentimentalist as he was. (p.227)
Credit
The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford was published by Bodley Head in 1915. References are to the 1972 Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition.
Books & Boots 