It’s nearly thirty years since a friend lent me Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and he’ll never get it back. I’ve read it five times since then – I like to revisit books. Of course what Heraclitus said of rivers is true of books as well. We can never step into the same book twice, and no book is more shifty and fluid, reflecting back who you are when you read it, than The Good Soldier.
When I first read it in 1994 its modernity bowled me over. I told my husband he simply must read it and so he did, but I wouldn’t know the impression it made on him till twenty years later when I found the yellow Post-It note that he’d stuck inside the back cover. I can’t remember the second reading except that, damn it all, I missed the Post-It note – which would have cast a useful ray of light on my incomprehensible life. I read the book for the third time in 2014 and by then I knew most of what that Post-It note had to tell me; the wonder was simply that it was there at all, proving the singular power of this book to heave up the past and stir emotion.
You might expect not to feel anything much, reading a melodrama of adultery, suicide and madness told by an improbably gullible, sexless Philadelphian Quaker. ‘This is the saddest story I ever heard,’ announces Dowell at the start – as if he hadn’t himself just lived through it. He is a ‘deceived husband’ who’s been half absent from his own life – not knowing what he has lived through till he hears it from others. Ford had wanted the title to be ‘The Saddest Story’ in March 1915, with the First World War underway, his publishers begged him to change it. His reply was facetious: ‘Why not call the book The Roaring Joke? Or call it anything you like, or perhaps it would be better to call it A Good Soldier – that might do.’
The Roari
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Subscribe now or Sign inIt’s nearly thirty years since a friend lent me Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and he’ll never get it back. I’ve read it five times since then – I like to revisit books. Of course what Heraclitus said of rivers is true of books as well. We can never step into the same book twice, and no book is more shifty and fluid, reflecting back who you are when you read it, than The Good Soldier.
When I first read it in 1994 its modernity bowled me over. I told my husband he simply must read it and so he did, but I wouldn’t know the impression it made on him till twenty years later when I found the yellow Post-It note that he’d stuck inside the back cover. I can’t remember the second reading except that, damn it all, I missed the Post-It note – which would have cast a useful ray of light on my incomprehensible life. I read the book for the third time in 2014 and by then I knew most of what that Post-It note had to tell me; the wonder was simply that it was there at all, proving the singular power of this book to heave up the past and stir emotion. You might expect not to feel anything much, reading a melodrama of adultery, suicide and madness told by an improbably gullible, sexless Philadelphian Quaker. ‘This is the saddest story I ever heard,’ announces Dowell at the start – as if he hadn’t himself just lived through it. He is a ‘deceived husband’ who’s been half absent from his own life – not knowing what he has lived through till he hears it from others. Ford had wanted the title to be ‘The Saddest Story’ in March 1915, with the First World War underway, his publishers begged him to change it. His reply was facetious: ‘Why not call the book The Roaring Joke? Or call it anything you like, or perhaps it would be better to call it A Good Soldier – that might do.’ The Roaring Joke sounds entirely flippant but maybe it isn’t, because there is a vein of bathos and farcical comedy that runs through the novel as well as a roaring wind that seems to blow all round its edges – the same wind that buffets Paolo and Francesca, the adulterous lovers in Dante’s Inferno. Ford, Eliot, Pound, Henry James, so many writers at that time were obsessed with Dante’s Divina Commedia and sure enough, Dowell pictures his old friends in the setting of eternal judgement, ‘upon an immense plain suspended in mid-air’; the ‘impeccably chaste’ Leonora Ashburnham ‘will burn clear . . . a Northern light and one of the archangels of God. And me . . . well perhaps they will find me an elevator to run . . .’ The Dowells and the Ashburnhams, two ‘perfect’ married couples of the leisured class, begin to unravel in Nauheim, a German spa, on 4 August 1913 – the exact anniversary of their first having formed, nine years before, a ‘little coterie à quatre’. Dowell describes a world that vanished ‘in four crashing days’. Racked with perplexities and inconsistencies, he pieces together a past that’s different from what he had thought it was. For thirteen years he has been not his wife’s husband but her nurse; his failure to pounce on her through ‘absence of mind’ at the critical moment had marked him as not quite a man. Since then she has convinced him of her potentially fatal heart condition – a lie that denies him all conjugal rights and facilitates the adulterous affairs she conducts right under his nose: ‘The profession of keeping heart patients alive . . . You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become.’ Dowell assumes that Leonora is an equally devoted nurse to her husband Captain Edward Ashburnham but his ‘heart’ too is a fraud. Edward is a sentimental philanderer and his wife Leonora, a neurotic Irish Catholic, is dedicated to controlling both her husband’s finances and his love affairs. Edward turns out to have been, for the last nine years, the lover of Dowell’s wife Florence. Dowell admits to having been so idle he’d got into the habit of counting his own footsteps between the bath-house, the Englischer Hof and the Excelsior dining-room as the ‘four-square coterie’ stepped the ‘minuet’, always ‘to the music of the Kur orchestra’. He mourns the loss of decorum and stability: ‘no indeed it can’t be gone. You can’t kill a minuet de la cour. You may shut up the music book, close the harpsichord . . . the mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall but surely the minuet – the minuet is dancing itself away to the furthest stars . . .’ This is a novel of its time: one minute elegy, the next revulsion at the rottenness that made some people view the Great War as a purgative hurricane: ‘No by God it is false! It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison – a prison full of screaming hysterics . . .’ Are these the contradictions of an ‘unreliable narrator’? They don’t strike me that way. Only through contradiction is truth to be found. Dowell proceeds, like memory itself, in strange lassoing motions that fill in gaps, correct false impressions, ramble along a path ‘through what may be a sort of maze’. And if this is a tale told by an idiot, he’s one who never ceases trying to work out what it all signifies. You can’t fail to be beguiled by his voice, with its sudden bursts of passion and its baffled questions. This is a novel that you hear – its cadences still sound in your head long after you’ve put it down, and in fact Ford carried it around in his head for about ten years before he dictated it, first to Brigit Patmore whom he wished to captivate, and later to the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle who fainted three times during the recitation. ‘And I shall go on talking,’ says Dowell, ‘in the low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead a great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.’ He insists that we, the readers, are silent listeners, ‘sympathetic souls’ by a hearth in a country cottage. What is it like, he ruminates, to be a deceived husband? ‘Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just 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.’ Any fool who’s ever been flattened by the thunderbolt of truth must feel a strong affinity with Dowell. He conjures up so well the explosion going off quietly in your head, the immediate surroundings suddenly etched into your skull even as the universe tilts and becomes alien.That was how I got the news – full in the face, like that. I didn’t say anything . . . It was as if I thought, at that moment, of a windy November evening, that, when I came to think it over afterwards, a dozen unexplained things would fit themselves into place . . . I was sitting back, rather stiffly, in a deep armchair. That is what I remember. It was twilight . . . The immense wind, coming from across the forest, roared overhead. But the view from the window was perfectly quiet and grey.The first and second times I read The Good Soldier I was still stepping, so to speak, the ‘minuet’. But by the third reading in 2014 the harpsichord was closed, my husband long since gone, the truth having followed in his wake. I finished the last page huddled in my car, perched on a single yellow line outside a window shop, waiting for some glass to be cut. This time, as never before, I was achingly the ‘sympathetic soul’; Dowell spoke to me as no one ever had, bringing back that sad old incessant monologue: the telling, retelling, backwards and forwards, figuring out ‘the pieces’ of a shattered past, like a ‘problem in algebra’. The Dowells of the world, long after the cataclysm, are doomed to this fatiguing mental exercise. I remembered driving along the Embankment in London one day when a burst of illumination suddenly fitted some ‘unexplained things into place’ and put me in such a fit of helpless laughter I had to pull over. Whatever else it was, it was also a ‘roaring joke’. By all the laws of boringness the Post-It note should have been some old shopping list. But curiosity quickened when I recognized my former husband’s handwriting. The quotes he’d copied from the novel were from those passages where Dowell speaks most tenderly of Edward Ashburnham, whom he still loves in spite of Edward’s adulterous liaison with Florence, Dowell’s own wife. My husband clearly saw himself in Edward; whose love ‘was a precious lamb’; who wanted nothing more than ‘long passages of deep affection kept up in long long talks’; and who belonged among ‘those splendid and tumultuous natures’. How could he not understand that he was Florence, the wife who wraps her husband up in lies? ‘I am NOT Leonora,’ I said crisply to the Post-It note, but of course for him the virtuous, unlikeable wronged wife of Edward would be my natural role in the drama, which in our vanity we’d both reduced from a coterie à quatre to a folie à deux. Underneath was a list of women’s names. No mistaking their significance. The catalogue of Edward’s infatuations had prompted this impressive roll call of past amours, horizontally divided into the ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ by a strange doodle resembling the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner that represented marriage. My husband left in the year ’99 for a foreign country. He said it was a coup de foudre. Really . . . the first? I asked. Yes. Till some time after he was gone, I believed that. And all the while his written confession had been sitting for five years in the bookshelf. ‘Fat Fordie’ had got it out of him. Ford had treacherous friends who called him undignified names behind his back even though there wasn’t anywhere a more generous and serviceable champion of other writers than he. He was also a chaotic, financially floundering polygamist along the lines of Edward Ashburnham, but, like Dowell, he poured forth unceasing words as he teased away at the significance of past impressions. In The Good Soldier he has Dowell say: ‘I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself.’ In 1915 Ford was thrilled by the newly published ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. In T. S. Eliot he had found a poet ‘very much after my own heart’. A friend remarked how ‘very very Huefferish’ Prufrock was (Ford’s original surname had been Hueffer). Dowell’s voice with its possibly ‘insidious intent’, with its ‘visions and revisions’, is the voice of a Prufrock: ‘Full of high sentence but a bit obtuse;/ At times indeed almost ridiculous . . .’ When Ford wrote The Good Soldier he divided himself between the two characters of Ashburnham and the Prufrockian Dowell. No wonder that Dowell, the cogitating cuckold, is the sinning Edward’s most compassionate advocate. Oh treacherous book! Twenty years apart – but in the eternal present that is a book – my husband and I, betrayer and betrayed, had found ourselves reflected in the dual entity that is Ford Madox Ford. Apart, yet together, we nestle in the palm of his hand. That was some kind of a stitch-up. I have left the Post-It note just where I found it, as a sort of monument to our unlooked-for posthumous reunion.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 80 © Noonie Minogue 2023
About the contributor
Noonie Minogue is a Londoner who writes, etches, teaches Latin and translates Greek songs. She will never now look less than attentively at any slip of paper left behind in a book.