The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford: Review
Book: The Good Soldier. Date of Publication: March 17, 1915. Pages: 229. Genre: Romance.
The central figures of The Good Soldier are Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, members of the English gentry and “good people” to all they meet. The Dowells, a wealthy American couple, meet the Ashburnhams at Nauheim, a spa town where heart patients go to rest and recuperate. Florence Dowell’s condition is carefully looked after by her husband John who is directed to keep her mind occupied with light-hearted topics. They became fast friends and continued on that way for nearly a decade. John passes the nine years in the happy oblivion of a man perfectly accustomed to ease and leisure.
…the world is full of places to which I want to return — towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples. Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole world for me is the spots of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren’t so I should have something to catch hold of now.
[Pg. 20]
It is revealed in quick succession upon Florence’s death that:
- Edward and Florence had been carrying on an affair.
- Leonora was aware of the affair and deliberately concealed it to keep up appearances.
- Florence didn’t actually have a heart condition. She’d just used it as a cover to avoid intimacy with her husband.
- This was not Florence’s first infidelity as she’d been involved with an American artist before.
John learns that he has been the unaware and unwilling participant in a thoroughly didactic demonstration of how one comes to despise the person they lay down next to each night. For Edward and Leonora have created one of the happiest looking unhappy marriages that has ever been committed to writing. He is the picture of noblesse oblige: sentimental, generous, and endearingly block-headed:
…one evening he asked me seriously in the smoking-room if I thought that having too much in one’s head would really interfere with one’s quickness in polo. It struck him, he said, that brainy Johnnies generally were rather muffs when they got on to four legs. I reassured him as best I could. I told him he wasn’t likely to take in enough to upset his balance.
[Pg. 42]
And she is the perfect wife: devout, intelligent, and practical without losing an innate sense of elegance. Around company they have nothing but praise for each other. In private they have not spoken in earnest for years. She was married from a family of seven daughters on a precarious Irish estate that could no longer afford their upkeep. In such haste that there was no promise extracted that her children would be brought up Catholic, estranging her irrevocably from her husband. He, lacking the emotional support he needs, embarks on a series of ruinous affairs. She takes control of his property in order to repay the debts he has racked up. He finds this unbearably emasculating which further increases his pursuit of extramarital companionship.
Here were two noble people — for I am convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble natures — here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat in a lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches, agony of the mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness.
[Pg. 151]
The novel shines in this balance of absurdity and despair. But after Dowell’s revelation the novel begins to lose steam and wallow in the spectacle of every character dying or settling down unhappily with nothing new to add. I struggled mightily to understand my feelings about this book. To grasp the terrible turnaround in my regard for it. At first I thought The Good Soldier was a gem. By the end I thought it was the worst kind of derivative overwrought melodrama. I have never met a novel that has mirrored its subject so closely.
The Good Soldier has been called the greatest French novel in English. At his sharpest, Ford is as quippy as Balzac. Some highlights:
- “You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my proper place. I know it, thank you.” [Pg. 70]
- “That was how I got the news — full in the face like that. I didn’t say anything and I don’t suppose I felt anything, unless maybe it was with that mysterious and unconscious self that underlies most people. Perhaps one day when I am unconscious or walking in my sleep I may go and spit upon poor Edward’s grave.” [Pg. 100]
- “Leonora has told me that that was the most deadly time of her existence. It seemed like a long, silent duel with invisible weapons.” [Pg. 116]
- “You cannot be absolutely dumb when you live with a person unless you are an inhabitant of the North of England or the State of Maine.” [Pg. 155]
