The Good Soldier

by Ford Madox Ford

  Dowell even suggests at one point that Leonora was ‘pimping for Edward’, and it is true that she plays a strangely proactive role in his infidelities. For instance, if Ashburnham had not been travelling in a third-class railway carriage to save money, he would not have come across the Kilsyte girl: as Dowell puts it, ‘It is part of the peculiar irony of things that Edward would certainly never have kissed that nursemaid if he had not been trying to please Leonora.’ And it is Leonora’s worldly priest who suggests that she should take her rather prudish husband to Monte Carlo in order that he may indulge in a ‘touch of irresponsibility’ (which he does, of course, with disastrous results). The same drive for economies which drives Ashburnham into the arms of the Kilsyte girl also takes him and his wife to India. By renting out Bramshaw Manor, Leonora straightens out the Ashburnham finances, but by moving to the subcontinent and going into retreat at Simla she abandons her husband to Mrs Basil. Lastly, it is Leonora’s idea to bring Maisie Maidan to Nauheim, and it is Leonora who suggests that she and Edward sit next to the Dowells at dinner. She does so to outface Florence (who has cottoned on to the true state of the Ashburnhams’ marriage when untangling Leonora’s wrist from Maisie Maidan’s hair earlier that day), but Leonora must have been aware that she was placing more temptation in her husband’s path. And even if she didn’t quite see it this way, Ashburnham’s ‘appreciative gurgle’ should have sounded like a tocsin in her ears rather than occasioning nothing more than ‘a slight hesitation’ on her part. The next time Ashburnham gurgles that evening Leonora shivers ‘as if a goose had walked over her grave’, a typically Dowellian trope that is both creepy and droll in equal measure.

  Yet Leonora feels utterly betrayed by her husband and has suffered at his hands for many years. In Dowell’s eyes Ashburnham is a ‘sentimentalist’, but in his wife’s he is lecherous. For Dowell, Ashburnham is a noble and duty-bound traditionalist, but as far as Leonora is concerned his fling with La Dolciquita shows that he is careless of his inheritance in that he almost loses his house and land as a result of it. To Dowell, Ashburnham is generous; to Leonora, he is profligate. With hardly any clothes of her own, she buys the expensive travelling cases for Ashburnham as a sign of her devotion to him, and it is the depth of her love for her husband which accounts for the depth of her bitterness when she finds out she has been deceived. A convent girl and a woman of unbending faith, Leonora first realizes her husband and Florence are intimate when Florence touches his wrist over the glass case covering one of the most important documents of the Protestant Reformation. It is this which makes the revelation of his faithlessness almost unendurable. And while Leonora is a woman of principle, it is Ashburnham’s rigidity, not hers, which leads to Nancy being sent back to her father, ‘a violent madman of a fellow’ who has previously smashed her mother to the floor, whose voice makes Nancy almost lose consciousness, and who once knocked her out for a full three days. According to Leonora, Ashburnham’s determination to return Nancy to her father is ‘the most atrocious thing’ he has done in his ‘atrocious life’ and it’s hard to disagree with her. That Nancy goes under mentally while crossing the same Red Sea from which Ashburnham has twice plucked ‘Tommies’ is one of the novel’s more piercing ironies.

  Dowell’s attitude to Leonora is coloured in various ways. He is antagonistic to her religion; he is something of a misogynist who thinks all women are ‘intolerably cruel to the beloved person’, and, above all, in setting herself against Ashburnham and corrupting Nancy, Leonora harms ‘the only two persons’ whom Dowell says he ‘ever really loved’. Indeed, when Dowell first sees Ashburnham, his enraptured tone is all the more noteworthy in that at no point does he direct the kind of language he uses then or at other times in the novel to his wife or to another woman: ‘I never came across such a perfect expression before and I never shall again.’ On one occasion he tells us he ‘cannot think of Edward without sighing’ and at another he admits: ‘I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself.’ ‘It would be merely glib to argue that Dowell’s protestation of concealed love for Ashburnham reveals a homosexual impulse’, Max Saunders has cautioned. ‘But it would be slightly deceitful to deny that the thought crosses the reader’s mind as Dowell makes his revelation.’26 All we can say with any certainty is that in a novel packed tight with images of incarceration – Jimmy confined to Europe by Florence’s uncle; the ‘imprisonment’ of Dowell and Florence on the same continent; Leonora’s ‘immense’ blue eyes ‘like a wall of blue that shut [Dowell] off from the rest of the world’ and her gold circlet in which ‘she locked up her heart and her feelings’; Leonora and her six sisters ‘interned’ in their convent and then immured ‘behind the high walls of the manor-house that was almost more cloistral than any convent could have been’; ‘the never-opened door between’ Leonora’s and Ashburnham’s rooms; the two couples like ‘a prison full of screaming hysterics’ – the most imprisoned thing of all could be Dowell’s love of Ashburnham. And if this is the case, then the fervour and frequency of his eulogies to Ashburnham’s ‘public side’ may be explained, along with his flippant interpolations and his tone of ironic disengagement: as a secretive and deeply conventional ‘gentleman’, Dowell would indeed have a great secret to hide. Significantly, Dowell describes himself as ‘a sort of convent’, and one of the last glimpses we have of him is sitting in Ashburnham’s gun-room in a state of solitary confinement: ‘All day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests.’ As Martin Stannard has shown, Dowell even writes his story using the kind of hunting and equestrian terms which an accomplished horseman like Ashburnham would have used all the time.27 By the last chapter of the novel there will be readers who feel authorized to construe Dowell’s purchase of Ashburnham’s place at Bramshaw Teleragh as the ultimate act of love in this ‘Tale of Passion’, but if the novel has taught us anything it has taught us to be wary of all ‘black and white’ readings of the text – or, indeed, of any ‘black and white’ image in the text, such as Dowell’s vision, ‘in black and white’, of God’s judgement on Leonora, Edward and Florence. To be dogmatic about Dowell’s sexuality would be to lose touch with the spirit of a novel which generates questions rather than answers (to whom, for instance, does the epigraph refer?). But by the very end of the book, when Dowell tells us, almost as an afterthought, that Ashburnham has killed himself, his casualness barely holds back his passion. If ‘Dowell’s offhand manner is his defence against breaking down with grief, as one critic has argued,28 then it is a glaringly vulnerable defence. The truth is that Ashburnham, the slightly priggish and very sentimental Tory Englishman, is everything Dowell, the slightly priggish and very sentimental conservative American of old English stock, desires to be.

  Rather than trying to pin labels on Dowell and searching for consistency in his words, it is probably best to accept his fundamental slipperiness. During the course of the novel, for instance, he tells us on a number of occasions that he loathes Leonora and yet he also says, more than once, that he loves her. Even as he sits alone in Bramshaw Manor he states that he would ‘very cheerfully lay down [his] life… in her service’. And it would be possible to assemble a whole dossier of statements in which Dowell’s feelings for Nancy, Florence and Edward, and Edward’s feelings for Florence, Nancy and Leonora, and Leonora’s attitude to Dowell, Florence, Edward and Nancy could all be shown to be equally contradictory. But to make too much of this would be to read against the grain of the novel, because, as Max Saunders has argued:

  Ambivalence becomes for [Dowell], as for Ford, a habit of sensibility: a mode of thinking about society, history, and morality. Above all, Dowell’s tone embodies, and elicits, ambivalence about the very story he is telling. Fascinated by telling stories which were at once plausible and improbable, both compelling and outrageous, in The Good Soldier Ford invented a character, Ashburnham, at once sympath
etic and outrageous, whose story is told by a narrator who is both convincing and ridiculous.29

  It is fitting that a tale which registers the end of so many Edwardian certainties should have first appeared in Blast, the incendiary mouthpiece of the English Vorticist movement. Entitled ‘The Saddest Story’, Ford’s ten-page excerpt from the beginning of the novel may have looked a little out of place in such an abrasively avant-garde publication, but as Robert Green has noted:

  the image of the ‘vortex’ printed in the same issue of Blast and representing ‘whirling concentrations of energy’ framed by the ‘stable and self-contained’ – the basic Vorticist tenet of’internal energy and external calm’ – is suggestive of the novel’s combination of phlegm and hysteria, the presence in The Good Soldier of anarchy, fission and incest within a rigid formal structure.30

  This juxtaposition of ‘internal energy and external calm’ is particularly evident in the text’s representations of the British Empire. The leisurely pursuits of a cavalry officer’s life in India, for instance, such as an afternoon’s polo or cricket, and the annual decampment of the raj to Simla, are offset by snipers on ‘the Northwest Frontier’, just as the Boers fight a guerilla war against the British in South Africa and in Ireland Leonora’s father’s tenants take ‘pot-shots at him from behind a hedge’. While the ‘Vorticist’ theme is most obviously embodied in the two couples and their seemingly ultra-steady quartet, as well as the apparently ‘quiet and ordered’ life of Bramshaw Manor in Part Four of the novel, its ‘calm pococurantism’ masking all manner of passionate intensity, it is typified, as well, in the post-hockey match ‘saturnalia’ which disrupts the normally calm rituals of Nancy’s convent school. It assumes a polite guise in the polo game involving Ashburnham and Count Baron von Lelöffel (where Anglo-German imperial rivalry quickens the sporting encounter) and it takes a potentially more volcanic form when Florence’s disdain of Irish Catholics is met by Leonora’s silent fury.

  One way or another the old order is under attack from modernity on many fronts in the novel, whether it be in the form of the Kilsyte girl and her courtroom victory over a county squire or Ashburnham’s ‘Nonconformist adversaries’ who seize on the case for political gain. The period leading up to the publication of The Good Soldier was one of serious political, industrial, social and cultural unrest in Britain – the suffragettes, for example, had been in full cry – and the novel’s predominantly wistful mood reflects Dowell’s nostalgia for the era of early-Edwardian high style which this period of disruption brought to an abrupt end. Dowell’s sympathies clearly lie with the old order, but the old order, we see, is doomed, just as Nancy’s ‘stable and self-contained’ view of marriage is sent into a spin by the ‘whirling concentration of energy’ which is released when she reads about the Brand divorce case.

  With the exception of his Fifth Queen trilogy (The Fifth Queen, 1906; Privy Seal, 1907; and The Fifth Queen Crowned, 1908), Ford had not had much success as a novelist prior to the publication of The Good Soldier. He would go on to receive some acclaim for his post-War tetralogy, Parade’s End (Some Do Not, 1924; No More Parades, 1925; A Man Could Stand Up, 1926; and Last Post, 1928), but it is The Good Soldier on which his reputation mainly rests. In 1915, however, while its artistry impressed some of the more astute reviewers, its subject matter dismayed many more. ‘The portrayal of marital infidelity is dangerous enough even when delicately handled’, the Boston Transcript intoned, ‘and for the written page to linger upon the indecencies of intrigue – details to be expected from the reeking tongue of an alley-gossip – there is no excuse whatever. For all the author’s clever manipulation of words, he has given his story nothing to compensate for its artistic feebleness or to clear its distorted, sex-morbid atmosphere.’31

  Ford, on the other hand, needed no convincing that The Good Soldier was his ‘best book’ (‘Dedicatory Letter’). Immediately before starting work on it he had completed his study of Henry James (1914), and with the publication of his novel Ford showed that he had absorbed the lessons of both James and Conrad and could produce a work of fiction as technically fine and as psychologically complex as, say, What Maisie Knew (1897) or Heart of Darkness. In addition to Graham Greene, writers as diverse as Conrad, Ezra Pound, May Sinclair and H. G. Wells all expressed their admiration of The Good Soldier’s technique and its capacity to hold the reader’s attention. ‘For the subject is,’ Rebecca West wrote in 1915, ‘one realizes when one has come to the end of this saddest story, much vaster than one had imagined that any story about well-bred people, who live in sunny houses, with deer in the park, and play polo, and go to Nauheim for the cure, could possibly contain.’32 West also said, much later, that The Good Soldier ‘set the pattern for perhaps half the novels which have been written since’.33 Here she exaggerated, but quite understandably. For how can anyone not read on, stalk-eyed with curiosity, after an opening paragraph as engrossing yet ambiguous, as outspoken yet muted, as clear yet contradictory as the first paragraph of The Good Soldier?

  NOTES

  1. Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), 210.

  2. Observer (28 March 1915), 5, rep. in Martin Stannard (ed.), Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (New York and London: Norton, 1995), 221–2. Cited hereafter as ‘Stannard’.

  3. Outlook (17 April 1915), 507–8, rep. in Stannard, 226–7. The Good Soldier first appeared under the name ‘Ford Madox Hueffer’. The author changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919.

  4. Thomas Seccombe, ‘The Good Soldier’, New Witness (3 June 1915), 113–14, rep. in Stannard, 229–30. For further information about the controversy caused by the title see Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life 2 vols (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), i, 418–19. Cited hereafter as ‘Saunders’.

  5. Athenaeum (10 April 1915), 334, rep. in Stannard, 225.

  6. The phrase comes from a review in the Independent [USA], 81 (22 March 1915). 432, rep. in Stannard, 221.

  7. Sondra J. Stang, Ford Madox Ford (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), 74.

  8. J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 40.

  9. Grover Smith, Ford Madox Ford, Columbia Essays on Modem Writers, No. 63 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 28–9.

  10. Bramshaw, situated on the edge of the New Forest about six miles west of Fordingbridge in Hampshire, appears in the Domesday Book (1086) as ‘Brammesage’, and means (appropriately, given the entanglements which come to light there) ‘Bramble Wood’ (Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 60). ‘Teleragh’ is not listed in A. H. Smith’s English Place-Name Elements, Part II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), but there is a ‘Telleraught’ (or ‘Talleraght’) in County Wexford in Ireland. ‘Powys’ is not recorded in Edward MacLysaght’s The Surnames of Ireland, 6th ed. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1985).

  11. New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993).

  12. Charles Wareing Bardsley, A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames with Special American Instances (London: Oxford University Press, 1901), 506.

  13. Bardsley, A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames, 250.

  14. Ford, Joseph Conrad, 129-30.

  15. Vincent J. Cheng, ‘A Chronology of The Good Soldier’, English Language Notes, 24 (September 1986). See also Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 162–3.

  16. Ford Madox Hueffer, ‘On Impressionism’, Poetry and Drama, 2, Nos. 6 and 8 (June and December 1914), 167–75, 323–34. Quote from p. 333.

  17. Ford Madox Hueffer, ‘Dedication to Christina and Katharine’, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), xv.

  18. Ford, Joseph Conrad, 6.

  19. Smith, Ford Madox Ford, 30.

  20. Carol Jacobs, ‘The (too) Good
Soldier: “a real story” ’, Glyph, 3 (1978), 32–51, rep. in Telling Time: Lévi-Strauss, Ford, Lessing, Benjamin, de Man, Wordsworth, Rilke (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 75–94. Quote from pp. 84–5.

  21. Mark Schorer, ‘The Good Novelist in The Good Soldier,’ Princeton University Library Chronicle, 9 (April 1948), 128–33. Quotes from pp. 128 and 132, rep. in Stannard, 305–10.

  22. Stang, Ford Madox Ford, 72–3.

  23. Graham Greene, ‘Introduction’, The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, 5 vols (London, Sydney, Toronto: The Bodley Head, 1962), i, 12.

  24. Ford Madox Hueffer, The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind (London: Alston Rivers, 1907), 148–50.

  25. Martin Stannard has much of interest to say on the ‘much-debated date of completion’ of the novel and more specifically on Ford’s use of 4 August as a motif. See Stannard, 182–3.

  26. Saunders, i, 406.

  27. See, for example, the footnotes to Stannard, 71, 81,105,159.

  28. Saunders, i, 438.

  29. Saunders, i, 455.

  30. Robert Green, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 91. By ‘incest’, of course, Green alludes to Ashburnham’s relationship with Nancy, an angle on the novel developed at length by Saunders, i, 420–27.

  31. Boston Transcript [USA] (17 March 1915), 24, rep. in Stannard, 220–21.