Birthday Review: The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford

a brief review by Rich Horton

The English novelist Ford Madox Ford was born with the rather enormous string of names Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer on December 17, 1873, so this is the 147th anniversary of his birth. I assume all the extra names were a family tradition of some sort, and apparently he was always called Ford. Early novels were published under the name H. Ford Hueffer, later Ford M. Hueffer or Ford Madox Hueffer. After World War I he changed his name to Ford Madox Ford because Hueffer sounded too German. His first novel was published in 1892. He published three novels written with Joseph Conrad. His most famous works by far are The Good Soldier and the Parade's End series of four books. He is also remembered for an historical trilogy about Catherine Howard (the Fifth Queen trilogy) and for an SF book (of sorts), Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, about a man who goes back to Medieval times. He died in 1939.

I wrote this piece about The Good Soldier a couple of decades ago upon reading it. It's brief, really not very substantial, but the novel has only grown in my memory, so I figured I'd go ahead and repost it. The only other novel of his I've read is Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (in both versions, the original from 1911 and the 1935 revision), and I do plan to write about that book as well.

I had waited to read the book partly because I thought it would be a heavy-going tragedy.  I took the famous first sentence ("This is the saddest story I have ever heard.") literally.  (Indeed, Ford's original title for the book was The Saddest Story, but as I understand it his publisher felt that The Good Soldier would be a better title for a book published in wartime (it appeared in 1915.))

It turns out, of course, that, while The Good Soldier can hardly be called a happy book, it is a comedy.  A dark, rather bitter, rather sarcastic, comedy, and hardly funny ha-ha, but a comedy nonetheless.  It gives one pause to think how much of the major English and Irish fiction of the 20th century is comedy.  Ulysses.  All of Flann O'Brien.  A Dance to the Music of Time.  Kingsley Amis (and of course Martin Amis.)  Muriel Spark.  Evelyn Waugh.  Henry Green.  Even Orwell, sometimes.  Penelope Fitzgerald. I suppose perhaps I am picking and choosing examples to support my point.  And I'm not so sure this applies to American novels.  But I do think a point can be made that the major mode of the English novel in the 20th Century is comic.

Anyway, The Good Soldier tells the story of two rich couples in the years leading up to World War I, an American couple, John Dowell (the narrator) and his wife Florence, and a British couple, Edward Ashburnham ("The Good Soldier") and his wife Leonora.  Both spend the years 1902-1914 or so on the Continent, because allegedly Edward and Florence have "hearts": that is, they are of questionable health and need to stay at various Continental spas, and need not to travel by sea.  The joke, of course, is that their heart problems actually have to do with their sexual appetites.  Both Edward and Florence are serial adulterers, and inevitably strike up a relationship, of which Leonora is aware but John Dowell, in many ways a foolish and pathetic figure, is unaware.  The two couples seem fast friends, and live utterly empty and pointless lives.

The novel is extremely well and complexly constructed, as Dowell tells and retells their history, from the point of view of each of the characters, and going back and forth in time.  We realize from the beginning that as Dowell tells his story Edward and Florence are dead, and he slowly gets around to telling about the precipitating events, involving "the girl", as she is called, Nancy Rufford, a quasi-niece of the Ashburnhams, which result in the destruction of the carefully maintained arrangements the four have lived in.  It's indeed a striking and remarkable book, and a very well done portrayal of a pointless way of life, and four quite unpleasant characters.  The humor is mostly sarcastic and understated, though there are a few horrifying set-pieces. The impact by the end is quite profound. I consider it one of the great novels of the 20th Century.