Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier—A Tale of Passion, Edited with an Introduction by Max Saunders. Oxford: World’s Classics, 2012 [1915].
Around February of last year, we started a reading project of going through the works of Joseph Conrad, and got almost ten volumes in before taking a hiatus. Your host has meant to resume this Conradathon for some time now, but found it challenging to get back in the groove.
To ease ourselves back into Conrad's literary atmosphere, this letter will focus on the most famous novel by Conrad's occasional writing partner Ford Madox Ford (as seen in The Inheritors).
Ford had already published a great deal when this masterpiece came out in 1915, and he'd been established amongst the other leading lights of late-Romantic-early-Modernism, like Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence — and Conrad of course.
But it seems widely agreed that The Good Soldier (1915) is where Ford knocked it out of the park, blending together the satire and sexual intrigue that were given play separately in his previous books. This novel plunges the quintessential topic of late 19th century novels, namely adultery, into a cold and dark modern sensibility. It didn't dissappoint!
As we saw in the letter on Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, the Modernist mood of composition is osbsessed with beginnings: how to begin, where to begin? It’s the same deal with
I don't know how it is best to put this thing down — whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.
The narrator, John Dowell, is in possession of “the saddest story.” The narrative, at a certain level, is a drama of his struggle to tell it effectively, since he doesn't seem to know how.
I don't want to divulge any details of this messy affair taking place between two couples on vacation at a spa resort in Germany: Dowell and his wife Florence, and Edward Ashburnam and his wife Leonora. It is so imbricated within the writing (though at the same time, because of the way Dowell tells it, you basically know what's going to happen right away).
For the moment, Dowell, while setting down the saddest story, pictures for himself an analogy for the relationship between author and reader as a quiet communion. It's reminiscent of the Polish writer Bruno Schultz idea of reading as a seance.
So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars....
It's cozy but things feel more obscure, with a certain modern sensibility, than with literary fiction of the 19th century: the addressee is always silent, even though they're present.
You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavans, I do not know. It feels like nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that. They are dead; they have gone before their Judge who, I hope, will open to them the springs of His compassion....
So John Dowell is working through his own confused emotions, but there's also a hint that this is an American guy who may be out of his depth when it comes to these upperclass British weirdos.
It is very difficult to give an all-round impression of any man. I wonder how far I have succeeded with Edward Asbhurnam. I dare say I haven't succeeded at all. It is even very difficult to see how such things matter. Was it the important point about poor Edward that he was very well built, carried himself well, was moderate at the table and led a regular life — that he had, in fact, all the virtues that are usually accounted English? Or have I in the least succeeded in conveying that he was all those things and had all those virtues? He certain was them and had them up to the last months of his life. They were the things that one would set upon his tombstone. They will, indeed be set upon his tombstone by his widow.
I'm not a style-forward kind of reader (anymore), but I have to acknowledge how the style carries a narrative that could have been a boring sequence of backfilling. Ford is a great writer of course, but Dowell also has these fascinating tics and phrases that create an atmosphere of inclusivity — he just “doesn't know” a lot, and how can we really know why people do what they do?
He tries to persuade us about Ashburnam's regular schedule, in case writing about his philandering would make a lop-sided impression, and then interrupts himself mid-sentence to acknowledge that he can't really make us do anything. “I have been forced to write very much about his passions, but you have to consider — I should like to be able to make you consider — that he rose every morning at seven...”
And speaking of the “Limbo” of Dowell’s emotions, there is a good deal of religious business here. Leonora is a Catholic of Irish descent, and with all the talk of marriage, adultery, divorce, the very history of Britain gets implicated, since it was a divorce of a monarch that created the English Church. Divorce is “the basis upon which Protestantism rests.” Ford was Catholic too (like Burgess and Greene).
We are left to marinate in this uneasy atmosphere of inexplicable emotional pain from somewhat inexplicable behavior. These people are both obscure and just barely recognizable, though they exist in an all but vanished world of transatlantic society.
They say Modernist literature is haunted literature, and this piece will likely haunt you host for some time longer.