Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story

by Julian Barnes

  One out of four on the vision thing; and tractors were hardly a difficult pick.

  Against such a background, it would be rash to try to predict the continuing afterlife of Orwell’s work. Many of his phrases and mental tropes have already sunk into the conscious and unconscious mind, and we carry them with us as we carry Freudian tropes, whether or not we have read Freud. Some of those English couch potatoes watch programmes called Big Brother and Room 101. And if we allow ourselves to hope for a future in which all of Orwell’s warnings have been successfully heeded, and in which Animal Farm has become as archaic a text as Rasselas, the world will have to work its way through a lot of dictators and repressive systems first. In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just a single novel about the country, but a trilogy: Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  Orwell shared with Dickens a hatred of tyranny, and in his essay on the Victorian novelist distinguished two types of revolutionary. On the one hand there are change-of-heart people, who believe that if you improve human nature, all the problems of society will fall away; and on the other social engineers, who believe that once you fix society – make it fairer, more democratic, less divided – then the problems of human nature will fall away. These two approaches ‘appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time’. Dickens was a change-of-heart man, Orwell a systems-and-structures man, not least because he thought human beings recidivist, and beyond mere self-help. ‘The central problem – how to prevent power from being abused – remains unresolved.’ And until then, it is safe to predict that Orwell will remain a living writer.

  * Airport novelists irritated by their lack of status (a spectacle as comic as literary novelists moaning about their sales) habitually invoke one of two comparisons to prove their own worth: Dickens, who would have applauded their broad appeal, and Orwell, who would have approved their ‘plain’ (i.e. banal) style.

  FORD’S THE GOOD SOLDIER

  THE BACK COVER of the 1950s Vintage edition of The Good Soldier always made poignant reading. ‘Fifteen distinguished critics’ had been assembled to puff Ford Madox Ford’s novel of 1915. They had all subscribed to a single statement: ‘Ford’s The Good Soldier is one of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our century.’ And then the names, including Leon Edel and Allen Tate, Graham Greene and John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos Williams and Jean Stafford.

  There was something both heroic and hopeless about this, as there was much that was heroic and hopeless about Ford himself. Fifteen critics ought to be better than five, but somehow the number overpleads. ‘One of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels’ sounds as if it can’t make up its mind – again, a very Fordian vacillation, but one that weakens rather than strengthens the claim: ah, so Joseph Henry Jackson thinks it’s in the top fifteen, but Willard Thorp only ranks it in the top twenty? As for ‘in our century’ – that seemed rather presumptuous with four more decades of it still to run.

  Yet the statement remains poignant because you can hear the literary virtue behind it: look, we know this guy is good, so will you please, please read him? Ford has never lacked supporters, but he has always lacked readers. In 1929 Hugh Walpole wrote that ‘there is no greater literary neglect of our time in England than the novels and poems of Ford’. To which Ford replied, ‘It is just that the public will not read me.’

  Trying to explain it further – to himself, as much as to his correspondent Gerald Bullett – he wrote from Toulon in 1933:

  Why should a London public like my works? My constatations of life have dubious international backgrounds; they contain nothing about British birds’ nests, wild-flowers or rock gardens; they are ‘machined’ with a Franco-American modernity that must be disagreeable indeed to the inhabitants of, say, Cheltenham. To them, on account of the ‘time-shift’ and projection instead of description, they must be quite incomprehensible and inexpressibly boring. Between the Middle West and the Eastern sea-board of the United States as well as round the Pantheon where those devices saw light they are already regarded as vieux jeu, accepted as classics which you must know of, and used for Manuals in University English Classes. So I go on writing in the hope that, a hundred and fifty years from today, what I turn out may be used as an alternative study in, say, Durham University. And at any rate, I have the comfortable feeling that none of our entrants for the Davis Cup will have been kept off the playing fields of Eton by a reprehensible engrossment in my novels.

  Ford sees the problem as purely internal, textual; yet there are many external – and overlapping – reasons for his past and continuing neglect. He presents no usefully crisp literary profile; he wrote far too much, and in too many genres; he fails to fit easily into university courses. He seems to fall down a hole between late Victorianism and modernism, between a childhood of being dandled by Liszt and seeing Swinburne gambol, and a subsequent career as the avuncular facilitator of Pound, Hemingway and Lawrence. He also presented himself as an elderly party fading out before this new generation, which was probably a bad tactical move. If ambitious novelists should all study The Good Soldier as an example of the possibilities of narrative (how dull that makes it sound), they would also do well to look at Ford’s life as a prime example of negative career management.

  He had the sort of large, soft, bonhomous presence which provoked attack, and also a suffering gentlemanliness which declined to reply (this naturally provoked renewed attack). He quarrelled endlessly with publishers, regarding them as tradesmen, and impertinent for wanting to read his manuscripts before buying them. Even those who admired Ford were often irritated by him. Rebecca West said that being embraced by Ford was ‘like being the toast under a poached egg’. Robert Lowell’s praise of the ‘master, mammoth mumbler’ is lapped with fondish mockery:

  … tell me why

  The bales of your left-over novels buy

  Less than a bandage for your gouty foot.

  Wheel-horse, O unforgetting elephant …

  Those who weren’t fond of Ford were more than irritated. Hemingway – whom Ford had made the mistake of promoting – denounced him to Stein and Toklas as ‘an absolute liar and crook always motivated by the finest synthetic English gentility’. Once, when he was near Philadelphia, Ford applied to see the Barnes collection. Admittedly (if characteristically), he made his approach through the wrong person; but tactical maladroitness alone can’t account for the ferocity of Dr Barnes’s telegram from Geneva: ‘Would rather burn my collection than let Ford Madox Ford see it’.

  He changed his name, from Hueffer to Ford; he changed his country of domicile more than once; he was sometimes more ambitious for literature than for himself. Even so, it is strange how completely he fails to blip on certain radar screens. Edmund Wilson scarcely mentions him in his journals and criticism: did he simply miss (or miss the point of) Parade’s End, despite sharing the war with Ford? Virginia Woolf and Orwell are silent. Waugh never mentions him in letters, journals or criticism: this seems even more peculiar than Wilson’s case. Like Ford, Waugh wrote a book about Rossetti; while his Second World War trilogy, Sword of Honour, seems manifestly related to Ford’s First World War quartet, in its setting of marital warfare against the wider landscape of the real thing, and its pitting of a vindictive, pursuing wife against an out-of-his-time gentlemanly husband.

  With Ford, even praise somehow turned itself to his disadvantage. In his preface to a 1927 reissue of The Good Soldier, he recounts the story of an admirer telling him it was ‘the finest novel in the English language’. To which Ford’s friend John Roker rejoined, ‘Ah, yes, it is. But you have left a word out. It is the finest French novel in the English language.’ In a tauter, less authentic form – ‘the best French novel in the language’ – this is often cited, famously in Lowell’s Life Studies. If readers can be put off by titles (I resisted The Catcher in the Rye for many years, imagining it to be a prairie baseball novel), so they can by hyping tags. What’s the point of wr
iting a French novel in English? you might roughly ask. That’s a pretty fey thing to do, isn’t it? And not exactly entering a competitive field either: what’s the second-best French novel in the language?

  France certainly provided The Good Soldier’s point of emulative origin: ‘I had in those days an ambition’, wrote Ford subsequently, ‘that was to do for the English novel what in Fort comme la mort, Maupassant had done for the French.’ What Maupassant did was this: into a novel which for much of its length appears to be a kind of tranced, Degasian treatment of the society woman in late-nineteenth-century Paris, delighting in the douces petites gourmandises of feminine existence among la fine fleur du high-life, he gradually introduces the theme of violently transgressive passion – that of a society painter for the daughter of his long-term mistress. The painter’s tragedy – if that’s what it is – springs from the flaying difference between the easy love of youth and the desperate (the more desperate because unwanted and unrequited) love of age. ‘It’s the fault of our hearts for not growing old,’ laments the hero-victim, whose emotionally incestuous love moves the final quarter of the novel to a pitch of terror and a heightened, operatic mode. The love that dares not speak its existence finally prefers death to acknowledgement.

  Ford applies these tropes and torments to a very English set of characters (even the Americans are such Anglophiles that their Americanness barely registers) from a similar leisured class. But The Good Soldier is much less of a social novel than Fort comme la mort. The progressive disintegration of Edward Ashburnham, good soldier and seemingly model Englishman, takes place in festering privacy: initially among a tight Racinian quartet of expatriates at the German spa of Nauheim; ultimately with Ashburnham’s ward Nancy Rufford. His relationship with her is plainly – as in the Maupassant – emotionally incestuous, and may well be more than this: Ford’s biographer Max Saunders has made a persuasive case for Nancy being Ashburnham’s daughter. In terms of emotional heat The Good Soldier is even Frencher than Fort comme la mort. Maupassant turns up the burners only towards the end of his novel. Ford raises the stakes in both madness and terror (and body count); but his greatest audacity is to start at the highest emotional pitch, and then keep raising it.

  Cyril Connolly in The Modern Movement praised The Good Soldier with rather idle words about its ‘energy and intelligence’. Looked at now, the novel barges its way into the modernist club for very different reasons: its immaculate use of a ditheringly unreliable narrator, its sophisticated disguise of true narrative behind a false facade of apparent narrative, its self-reflectingness, its deep duality about human motive, intention and experience, and its sheer boldness as a project. Greene wrote in 1962: ‘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.’

  Take the novel’s famous opening sentence, one of high plangency and enormous claim: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’ The first part of the sentence takes our attention and rightly so. It cannot logically be until the second reading (and it may not be until the third or fourth) that we note the falsity of the final word. Because it’s not a story Dowell, the narrator, has ‘heard’. It’s one in which he has participated, has been right up to the neck, heart and guts in; he’s the one telling it, we’re the ones hearing it. He says ‘heard’ instead of ‘told’ because he’s affecting distance from his ‘tale of passion’, declining to admit complicity. And if the second verb of the first sentence of the book is unreliable – if it gives a creak under the foot as we put our weight on it – then we must be prepared to treat every line as warily; we must prowl soft-footed through the text, alive for every board’s moan and plaint.

  This is a novel about the human heart. It says so on the first page. Yet the word is set differently in its first two appearances, once plainly, once between quotes. When is a heart not a heart? When it’s a medical condition, a ‘heart’. Ford plays for a while with this separation of meaning. We might expect that having a ‘heart’ means that affairs of the heart are offlimits. But this is a false facade: it seems that the two characters who are at Nauheim for medical purposes – Florence Dowell and Edward Ashburnham himself – are the very two who are indulging their unquote-marked hearts; whereas the two healthy onlookers, Dowell and Leonora Ashburnham, are the two with a different sort of heart trouble – hearts which are cold or killed. However, this paradox turns out to be a second false facade: Florence’s ‘heart’ is a fake, a got-up condition to keep her husband out of her bedroom; while later on we learn (or seem to learn – there is a lot of seeming to learn in this novel) that Ashburnham doesn’t have a ‘heart’ either: the Ashburnhams are in Nauheim because of Maisie Maidan, whom they have brought to the spa from India for treatment. She – Maisie – is (or seems to be) the only character in the novel who has a heart in both the amatory and medical senses of the word. Not surprisingly, she is soon to die.

  So the novel’s language shows its strategy. It plays with the reader as it reveals and conceals truth. And part of Ford’s great achievement is to find the perfect voice for paradoxical narrative. In Dowell he gives us a bluff, know-nothing narrator, who forgets to tell us his Christian name until the book is nearly over, and seems in his bumbling way to have wrecked his own story by giving away its outcome on page two. Ford uses an armchair bore to tell a story of great subtlety; also one of deep emotional cruelty and pain. He deploys the natural tropes and forgettings of a bad narrator to enrich the narrative, delay our understanding, and finally to deliver us the whole (or whole-ish) picture: in other words, he makes good narrative out of bad.

  Ford also plays relentlessly on the reader’s desire to trust the narrator. We want – or want to want – to believe what we are told, and dummy-like we fall into every pit dug for us. Even when we know we can’t trust Dowell, we carry on doing so, to our cost. This trustingness before narrative recidivism has its counterpart within the novel, in Leonora’s trustingness before Ashburnham’s sexual recidivism. Of course, it is our own ‘fault’ as readers: the hazard warnings are plain enough. ‘My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it is possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.’ ‘Was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman … thinks at the bottom of her heart?’ ‘Is all this digression or isn’t it digression?’ Such items from the opening pages are more than indicators of Dowell’s candid indecisiveness. They establish the switchback rhythm of the whole book; they set up the pulse, the paradox and the dualism of the story.

  Listening to Dowell is like coming upon a hysteric who insists that everything is normal and he himself is fine, thank you very much. He goes backwards, forwards, sideways, switching times and tenses. He even comes up with an ‘impossible tense’, beginning a sentence like this: ‘Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together …’ – as if such a coming-upon were still possible. Yet he has already explained that two of the central quartet are dead, and as if suddenly realising that himself, he readjusts, and the sentence resolves itself in a ‘possible tense’, the past conditional: ‘… you would have said that as human affairs go, we were an extraordinarily safe castle’. Time and again a seemingly ordinary sentence will have contradicted itself by its end; there are sentences beginning ‘And’ which appear to supply continuation from the previous sentence, but in fact give a denial to it; there are false abuttings and leaky grammatical joints.

  So the prose’s dividedness points us directly to the towering either/ors of the story: Ashburnham as good soldier or plundering shit; Leonora as marital martyr or vengeful destroyer; the narrator as honest misprisioner or complicit evader, timid domestic dormouse or repressed homoerotic swooner over Edward Ashburnham; and so on. There is the wider dividedness between social face and inner urging; between emotional expectation and emotional reality; between Protestant and Catholic (this last aspect seems rather underworked: it’s as if the Catholic element
is mainly introduced to produce women of exceptional innocence and marital adhesiveness – and thus up the ante when they face the complexities and wiles of sex). Beyond this, the dividedness of the personality between the conscious and the unconscious mind. And beyond all this, the realisation that the answer to either/or may not be one or the other – is Ashburnham a deep sentimentalist, as Dowell constantly, indeed infuriatingly, insists, or a ruthless sexual predator? – but both. At the end of the novel, Nancy Rufford briefly emerges from deep madness to utter the word ‘shuttlecocks’, which we understand as a brief lucid memory of how she has been treated by the Ashburnhams. It is also the way the reader has been treated, soaring high between opposing bashes.

  Ford’s masterpiece is a novel which constantly asks how to tell a story, which pretends to fail at narrative while richly succeeding. It also openly doubts what we easily think of as character. ‘For who in this world can give anyone a character,’ Dowell asks at one point of Ashburnham (typically, there is a creak of the floorboard here as well: ‘give someone a character’ can mean ‘describe’, but also ‘give the social thumbs-up to’). Dowell’s answer to his own question is: ‘I don’t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case – and until one can do that a “character” is of no use to anyone.’ Ford later refined this line in his novel The New Humpty-Dumpty, where it comes from the Duke of Kintyre’s mouth: ‘ “Any man,” he said slowly, “is any sort of man, some time or another, you know.’ ” Ford’s approach is to get at character – and, more widely, truth – not just indirectly or contradictingly, but often by way of ignorance.