The Good Soldier

It is all a darkness

Famously and absurdly, Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel The Good Soldier (subtitle: A Tale of Passion) opens with the line: This is the saddest story I have ever heard. The line could function as a “what not to do” for novelists writing their openers. It reads as simplistic, almost juvenile, and telling a reader outright that the story they’re about to read is sad primes them to disagree. Therefore, the reader must take the opening line as either ironic or a provocation, and trust that they’re in good hands. Nowadays, the knowledge that Ford was a sophisticated literary man whose circle included many of the great writers of his day, and that The Good Soldier is regarded as a masterpiece, serves as a basis for that trust. But a reader coming in cold (and with this book, it’s best to go in cold) will just have to hope that the author knows what he’s doing.

A hint: it contains very little goodness, and very little soldiering.

In the book’s opening pages we meet our foursome: a rich American couple, John and Florence, and a rich English couple, Edward and Leonora. They’ve been friends for nearly a decade, meeting each year at a spa town in Germany where Florence and Edward are treated for mysterious “heart troubles.” John is the narrator, writing the story of how their friendship came apart. He paints his wife Florence as sensitive and fragile, someone whom he takes enormous pains to shield from excitement lest her heart troubles kill her. The English couple he describes as brilliant and respectable, with Leonora beautiful and upright, and Edward handsome and honorable (if a bit sentimental and weak-willed). The two couples, both rich enough that they have very little to do, have passed nine years without incident, spending their time in a choreographed sequence of dinners, dancing, excursions, and health treatments.

In the opening pages we learn that Florence, the narrator’s wife, has died. A short while later we learn that Edward and Florence were carrying on an affair for the entire nine years of their friendship. And then in another short while we learn that not just Florence, but Edward and another person referred to only as “the girl” are all dead. The narrator introduces these facts casually, as though the reader already knows them. We learn that the “sad story” John is telling is the story of Edward and Leonora. This story has been told to him in turn by each of them from their own points of view, and the book is his effort to set it down. So we learn, in pieces, the story of Edward’s death, and Florence’s. And the death of “the girl.” Oh, and Maisie Maiden, who was traveling with them, also dead. He nearly forgot about her.

I’ve been in the habit for the past year of reading with a pen in hand, for underlining and writing in the margins. The margins of my copy of The Good Soldier are full of spots where I wrote only “!!!” and sometimes “???” and sometimes “wtf”. As the narrator jumps back and forth in time, dropping revelations that won’t be explained until fifty or a hundred pages later, revising his characterizations and leaving glaring inconsistencies unexplained, the effect is disorienting but also dazzling. From a tone of placid gentility, it transforms into High Gothic. The book reads almost like a mystery novel, dropping clues that require everything to be refigured, changing villains to victims and back again in a way precise enough and audacious enough that it feels like being led through a garden maze where agonized wailing can be heard on the other side of the hedge.

The narrator takes pains to explain that all of them are “good people.” And by “good people” he seems to mean those who both belong to one’s socioeconomic class, and whose behavior is correspondingly predictable:

You meet a man or a woman and, from tiny and intimate sounds, from the slightest of movements, you know at once whether you are concerned with good people or with those who won’t do. You know, that is to say, whether they will go rigidly through with the whole programme from the underdone beef to the Anglicanism.

Throughout the novel, when characters deviate from what might be expected of “good people”, others try to explain it by referring to some categorical difference: they did it because they’re Catholic, or Protestant, or English, or “sentimental.” The narrator’s failure to find the right explanation for the behavior of the people in his life, why “good people” should torment themselves and each other, is the novel’s final unresolved mystery.

The Good Soldier is a perfect case study for that much-discussed literary device, the unreliable narrator. John presents things at the beginning in a way that turns out to be far from his true understanding. Who does he love, who does he hate, who does he desire? He makes claims about his feelings, but the claims shift over the course of the book, and so we can never quite be sure. His facts shift as well. And since he is telling much the story secondhand — recounting what’s been told to him by Edward and Leonora — we need to call into question their accounts as well. John seems to take at face value claims that are highly suspect. And, though he tries strenuously to depict himself as an innocent observer of the whole mess, embroiled in it through no fault of his own, we must doubt that he’s as naive as he seems.

I’ve written in this newsletter before about the desire authors sometimes express to write a book that’s “like life” — that doesn’t follow the tidy narrative structures of traditional fiction, but allows for the lassitude and messiness (or meaninglessness) of life as we experience it. In the early pages of The Good Soldier, the narrator expresses a similar wish. He wants to tell the story not “as a story,” but in the way someone might tell it to a friend:

I don’t know how to get this thing down — whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me.

Later, he makes excuses for the reader’s confusion:

I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way … when one discusses an affair — a long, sad affair — one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.

In theory, this gives him license to be sloppy — to mention things as they occur to him, to embellish or diminish facts to make himself more sympathetic, to digress, to express uncertainty. But in all the arts, “natural” effects are the most difficult of all — the slightest clumsiness will spoil the illusion of artlessness, and so everything must be carefully arranged. For me, The Good Soldier is not natural, is nothing at all like being told a story by a friend. This is another way in which the narrator deceives us: in all his affected innocence, the voice of the author is clearly speaking through him.

There are times when Ford wants to write John as unsophisticated, lacking in insight. In the second chapter he relates the story of La Louve and Piere Vidal (a story which he classifies as “culture”), and he tells it clumsily, just like a friend who is bad at telling stories, and ends it with “But I suppose La Louve was the more ferocious of the two. Anyhow, that is all that came of it. Isn’t that a story?”

But then he also pulls out paragraphs like this:

I call this the Saddest Story rather than “The Ashburnham Tragedy” [CC’s note: here’s the author again] just because it is so sad, just because there was no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end. There is about this story none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. 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 on a lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, 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.

It all plays out like clockwork. It’s hard to imagine how Ford pulled it off — a novel that’s not quite a mystery, not quite a melodrama, flirting with absurdities both comic and horrible, a “tale of passion” that’s entirely unromantic. The Good Soldier is in a genre of its own — and, unlike its narrator, it isn’t trying to be anything other than its glorious self.