The Good Soldier

by Ford Madox Ford

32. Daily News and Leader (2 April 1915), 6, rep. in Stannard, 222–4.

  33. Quoted in Saunders, i, v.

  Selected Reading

  WORKS BY FORD

  The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, eds. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (1994).

  Critical Essays, eds. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (2002).

  Critical Writings, ed. Frank MacShane (1964).

  The Fifth Queen (Trilogy, 1906–1908: The Fifth Queen (1906), Privy Seal (1907) and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908)). Available as a onevolume Penguin edition.

  The Ford Madox Ford Reader, ed. Sondra J. Stang (1986).

  The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (1995). This Norton Critical Edition is the standard scholarly text of the novel, containing very important textual (pp. 175–216) and extremely useful critical (pp. 219–398) appendices.

  Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (1965).

  Memories and Impressions, ed. Michael Killigrew (1971).

  Parade’s End (Tetralogy, 1924–1928: Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926) and Last Post (1928)). Available as a one-volume Penguin edition.

  Pound/Ford, The Story of a Literary Friendship: The Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and Their Writings about Each Other, ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (1983).

  War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (1999).

  CRITICISM

  Paul B. Armstrong, The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford (1987).

  Todd K. Bender, Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Charlotte Brontë (1997).

  Richard A. Cassell (ed.), Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford (1987). ——, Ford Madox Ford: A Study of his Novels (1961).

  Nicholas Delbanco, Group Portrait: Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and H. G. Wells (1982).

  Ambrose Gordon Jr., The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford (1964).

  Robert Green, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics (1981).

  Sara Haslam, Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War (2002).

  Samuel Hynes, Edwardian Occasions: Essays on English Writing in the Early Twentieth Century (1972). There are three fine essays on Ford and ‘The Epistemology of The Good Soldier’ (pp. 54–63), first published in the Sewanee Review, 69 (Spring 1961), 225–35, is the best of them.

  Carol Jacobs, ‘The (too) Good Soldier: “a real story” ‘, in Telling Time: Lévi-Strauss, Ford, Lessing, Benjamin, de Man, Wordsworth, Rilke (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 75–94.

  Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford (1990).

  Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf (1991).

  Richard Wald Lid, Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art (1964).

  David H. Lynn, The Hero’s Tale: Narrative in the Early Modern Novel (1989).

  Frank MacShane (ed.), Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage (1972; 1997). ——, The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford (1965).

  John A. Meixner, Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study (1962).

  Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (1972).

  Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (1980).

  Carol B. Ohmann, Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman (1964).

  C. Ruth Sabol and Todd K. Bender, A Concordance to Ford Madox Ford’s ‘The Good Soldier’ (1981).

  Max Saunders (ed.), Special Ford double issue of Agenda, 27, No. 4/28, No. 1 (Winter 1989–Spring 1990). See esp. the essays by Carol Jacobs on Ford’s fictional theories (67–76) and by Wilbur Sanders on Ford’s drama of narration (85–92).

  Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (1996). This standard critical biography of Ford contains the most exhaustive single essay on the novel.

  Grover Smith, Ford Madox Ford (1972).

  Ann Barr Snitow, Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty (1984).

  Sondra J. Stang (ed.), The Presence of Ford Madox Ford: A Memorial Volume of Essays, Poems, and Memoirs (1981).

  ——, Ford Madox Ford (1977).

  Joseph Wiesenfarth (ed.), Special Ford issue (‘Ford Madox Ford and the Arts’) of Contemporary Literature, 30, No. 2 (Summer 1989). See esp. the article by Sondra J. Stang and Maryann De Julio on Ford’s own translation into French of The Good Soldier, of which 37 manuscript pages have survived (263–79).

  Paul L. Wiley, Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford (1962).

  Note on the Text

  The extant manuscripts of The Good Soldier are held by Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare Books and Manuscript Collections. One manuscript comprises 376 pages of holograph and typescript, and a second, probably the printer’s copy, consists of 305 pages of typescript.

  Among other things, these manuscript sources reveal intriguing evidence of Ford’s remodelling of Edward Ashburnham. By discarding material which projected him as an unregenerate libertine (and the father of a number of illegitimate children), Ford accentuated the tragic sentimentalist in Ashburnham and made him less obviously the principal cause of the novel’s abundant suffering. For a full account of the various changes which Ford made, see The Good Soldier ed. Martin Stannard (New York and London: Norton, 1995), 179–216, and Charles G. Hoffmann, ‘Ford’s Manuscript Revisions of The Good Soldier’, English Literature in Transition, 9, No. 4 (1966), 145–52.

  The copy-text for this edition of The Good Soldier is the first English edition of the novel, published by John Lane on 17 March 1915 (which was also, almost certainly, the date of the first American edition). There is a reference to ‘Waterbury, Ill.[inois]’ in Part Four, Chapter 2 of the first edition, but no such place existed in 1915 (nor does it exist today). Ford obviously had in mind ‘Waterbury, Conn.[ecticut]’, and the text has been amended accordingly. Similarly, in Part One, Chapter 2, this edition changes the first edition’s ‘Frantz Hals’ and ‘Woovermans’ to ‘Frans Hals’ and ‘Wouwerman’ on the grounds that the 1915 spellings were clearly unintentional errors.

  Foreign words seem to have been italicized almost at random in the first edition: ‘Schreibzimmer’ (writing-room), for example, was set in italics, whereas ‘Reiseverkehrsbureau’ (travel agency) was not. In this edition, an effort has been made to introduce consistent practice in this area, and all French, German, Italian, and Latin words and phrases, apart from proper names, have been italicized except where the word or phrase appears without italics in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993).

  By far the most important change this edition makes is to follow Martin Stannard’s Norton Critical Edition in amending the first edition’s ‘Branshaw Teleragh’ to ‘Bramshaw Teleragh’ throughout the text. In his ‘Textual Appendices’, Stannard notes that ‘Bramshaw’ was Ford’s preferred spelling in the manuscript and that an error seems to have crept in between the typing up of the manuscript and the compositor’s setting of the novel from the ensuing typescript. ‘Although’, Stannard writes, ‘later consistently corrected in MS and TS to “Bramshaw Teleragh”, the compositor takes the typist’s first mistranscription as the standard and prints “Branshaw” throughout’ (p. 197). ‘One might argue that the corrupt forms [unlike this edition, Stannard also alters the name of one of Ashburnham’s tenants from “Mumford” to “Mudford”] received Ford’s tacit approval at proof stage,’ Stannard acknowledges elsewhere, ‘but it would have been wearisome (and costly) to go through the whole text altering the names… [and] there is a strong argument for removing textual corruption here as the product of external agency (the typist) and economic factors’ (p. 192).

  Stannard’s argument is persuasive enough in its own right, but its strength is only fortified when we also take into account something he does not mention: that is, that Bramshaw (unlike ‘Branshaw’) is a real place in Hampshire. Parts of The Good Soldier are set in a specific area of that co
unty, and Bramshaw is at the heart of the locality in question.

  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 19132 – I had never attempted to extend myself, to use a phrase of racehorse 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,3 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 tapageux and riotous Jeunes4 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.5 So I took a formal farewell of Literature in the columns of a magazine called the Thrush6 – 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.,7, 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,8 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.9 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 Rodker10 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 Lane11 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 I 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,12 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 hatbands 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

  NOTES

  1. Stella Ford the Australian painter Esther Gwendolyn ‘Stella’ Bowen (1893–1947) was never actually married to Ford. Their relationship lasted from 1919–28 and it was with Bowen that Ford had his third daughter, Esther Julia, born in November 1920. The ‘Dedicatory Letter’ was specially written for the second American edition of the novel (1927) and was subsequently reprinted in the second British edition (1928).

  2. 17th December 1913 was Ford’s fortieth birthday. He was born in Merton, Surrey, in 1873 and christened ‘Ford Hermann Hueffer’. He changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in
1919.

  3. the companionship of Conrad the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was one of Ford’s closest companions (especially between 1898 and 1909) and perhaps his chief literary inspiration. They collaborated on three novels, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924), and it is thought that Ford may have written part of Conrad’s Nostromo (1904).

  4. literary Cubists, Vorticists, Imagistes… Jeunes the Franco-Spanish Cubist movement began around 1907 (and petered out c.1914) with the multi- perspectival paintings and sculptures of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963), though who, precisely, Ford has in mind as ‘the literary Cubists’ of Britain is harder to determine. Vorticism was an iconoclastic art movement that flourished in London between 1912 and 1915. Influenced by both Cubism and Italian Futurism, its chief exponent was the writer, painter and polemicist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). A 10-page excerpt from the beginning of The Good Soldier appeared in the first number of Vortidsm’s aggressively opinionated mouthpiece, the pink-covered Blast, edited by Lewis. Imagisme (or Imagism) was an Anglo-American literary movement inspired by the critical ideas of T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) which began in 1912. The Imagistes were dedicated to the concise expression of pure visual images, and an influential anthology, Des Imagistes, appeared in 1914. The French words tapageur (-euse) and jeune mean ‘loud, showy or noisy’ and ‘young’ respectively, so Ford has in mind riotous youth.

  5. Eel… might as well die European and American freshwater eels swim to the Sargasso Sea to breed. The Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) was a flightless seabird which was hunted to extinction in 1844.

  6. a formal farewell… the Thrush Ford contributed an essay to the Thrush, an ephemeral poetry magazine that flourished between December 1909 and May 1910, but he actually announced his intention to abandon fiction in a magazine called Poetry and Drama soon after completing The Good Soldier: ‘Writing up to my own standards is such an intolerable labour and such a thankless job… that for my part I am determined to drop creative writing for good and all.’ (‘On Impressionism: Second Article’, Poetry and Drama, 2, No. 8 (December 1914), 323–34. Quote from p. 326.