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The Good Soldier
The Good Soldier was published in 1915, a year after the start of the First World War, though it is set just before its outbreak. Ford originally intended to call his novel The Saddest Story; however, the proposed title was thought inappropriate so The Good Soldier – sarcastically suggested – became its replacement.
The story, which spans a number of years, is narrated by John Dowell, who forms half of one of the two couples around whom the plot centres. It depicts the unhappy events that lead to the unravelling of the two couples’ relationships, deaths of three characters and the descent into madness of a fourth. As the first-person narrator, Dowell has a monopoly on the information he imparts to the reader, and as such we are never quite sure whether he unwittingly allows the unfortunate events of the novel to happen, or whether he is deliberately engineering these outcomes. The rambling, non-chronological narrative and inconsistencies in the plot also serve to make the reader suspicious, leaving us unsure as to whether Dowell is sincere or duplicitous. Another interpretation could be that these inconsistencies are intended to give the impression of realism: human memory is highly subjective and prone to inconsistencies when recounting events. At any rate, Dowell’s unreliability as a narrator means that the reader is kept at arm’s length, afforded only an impression of the events and characters in the novel rather than the full picture, and is consequently unsure of the ‘truth’ of the story. This is a clever technique to draw the reader in, as ultimately it falls to us to form our own conclusions about how events played out, Dowell’s motives, and the real part he played in the story he is recounting. In the end, we are left with the impression of Dowell’s apathy – he no longer cares about the pain and suffering wreaked on his life and recounts events from a dispassionate stance, jaded and disappointed by both himself and others.
The Good Soldier touches on the human condition of its setting. The Edwardian era was one of transition, and the idea of an imposed structure on society – the qualified education, the nine-to-five working day, the singular career, the retirement age – were symptoms of industrialisation and, some might suggest, repressed the free spirit. Ford could be suggesting in The Good Soldier that this unnatural environment compelled many people to react in a primal way: when humans feel that certain elements of their lives are beyond their control they naturally look to those elements that they can control – in this case, personal relationships. One of the themes of the novel is the pursuit of sexual gratification at the expense of a stable relationship, which leads to jealousies, resentments, upsets – even suicide. Ford taps into a symptom of modern society: the relative democratic freedom which allowed this rebellion against society’s newly imposed structures manifested itself in a rise in less permanent, more transient relationships. This freedom came at the expense of marriage, which demanded emotional investment and represented stability. Ford paints a picture of flawed human nature, and the struggle to reconcile these social and personal conflicts. It is also possible that Ford’s personal situation informed his writing – his own marriage sadly disintegrated and he suffered a psychological breakdown some ten years prior to the novel’s publication.
Often cited as an exponent of literary impressionism, The Good Soldier has become established as a seminal and pioneering work that defied genre norms and advocated a more experimental approach, ultimately playing a significant role in shaping the course of twentieth-century literature.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy—or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.
I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a “heart”, and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer.
Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence’s broken years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctor’s orders. They said that even the short Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing.
When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave from an India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three; Mrs Ashburnham—Leonora—was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and poor Florence thirty. Thus today Florence would have been thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am forty-five and Leonora forty. You will perceive, therefore, that our friendship has been a young-middle-aged affair, since we were all of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams being more particularly what in England it is the custom to call “quite good people”.
They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the Ashburnham who accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as you must also expect with this class of English people, you would never have noticed it. Mrs Ashburnham was a Powys; Florence was a Hurlbird of Stamford, Connecticut, where, as you know, they are more old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of Cranford, England, could have been. I myself am a Dowell of Philadelphia, Pa., where, it is historically true, there are more old English families than you would find in any six English counties taken together. I carry about with me, indeed—as if it were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe—the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets. These title deeds are of wampum, the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham in Surrey in company with William Penn. Florence’s people, as is so often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, where the Ashburnhams’ place is. From there, at this moment, I am actually writing.
You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.
Some one has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event. Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together at one of the little tables in front of the club house, let us say, at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go, we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame. Where better could one take refuge? Where better?
Permanence? Stability? I can’t believe it’s gone. I can’t believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon my word, yes, our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously