The Good Soldier

By Ford Madox Ford and Sara Haslam

With an Introduction and Notes by Sara Haslam, Department of English, The Open University.

The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, an inspiration for many later, distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. Set before the First World War, it tells the tale of two wealthy and sophisticated couples, one English, one American, as they travel, socialise, and take the waters in the spa towns of Europe.

They are 'playing the game', in style. That game has begun to unravel, however, and with compelling attention to the comic, as well as the tragic, results the American narrator reveals his growing awareness of the sexual intrigues and emotional betrayals that lie behind its façade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848700765

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, and editor. Born in Wimbledon, Ford was the son of Pre-Raphaelite artist Catherine Madox Brown and music critic Francis Hueffer. In 1894, he eloped with his girlfriend Elsie Martindale and eventually settled in Winchelsea, where they lived near Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ford left his wife and two daughters in 1909 for writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he launched The English Review, an influential magazine that published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. As Ford Madox Hueffer, he established himself with such novels as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), cowritten with Joseph Conrad, and The Fifth Queen (1906-1907), a trilogy of historical novels. During the Great War, however, he began using the penname Ford Madox Ford to avoid anti-German sentiment. The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be Ford’s masterpiece, earned him a reputation as a leading novelist of his generation and continues to be named among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Recognized as a pioneering modernist for his poem “Antwerp” (1915) and his tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-1928), Ford was a friend of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Despite his reputation and influence as an artist and publisher who promoted the early work of some of the greatest English and American writers of his time, Ford has been largely overshadowed by his contemporaries, some of whom took to disparaging him as their own reputations took flight.

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The Good Soldier

A Tale of Passion

Ford Madox Ford

with an Introduction and Notes by

Sara Haslam

Beati Immaculati [1]

Psalm 119:1

The Good Soldier first published

by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2010

Published as an ePublication 2012

ISBN 978 1 84870 076 5

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General Introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free Introductions and to provide Notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser: Keith Carabine

Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury

Introduction

When reviews of The Good Soldier began appearing, soon after its publication in 1915, they focused on either the immorality, or the structure, of the tale. The ‘slow growth’ of events, the ‘little by little’ revelation of secrets all the way to the ‘nightmare quality’ of the final scenes, the ‘sex-morbid’ atmosphere and the end of ‘clean innocence’ exercised the critical faculties of those who read the book for the press. If it was judged harshly, as it was by some, it was on the same terms – because the story was ‘unpleasant’, or even ‘dangerous’. And the American novelist Theodore Dreiser wished Ford Madox Ford had asked him for advice, whereupon he would have suggested that he ‘begin at the beginning’, which to his mind was where Colonel Powys seeks to marry off his daughters, rather than with John Dowell’s opaque view of things. The Morning Post offered what might stand as a reasonable, objective summary of these critical opinions on 2 April 1915: ‘The Good Soldier is a challenge, in matter and method alike.’ [Footnote: details of the reviews quoted are as follows: Observer (UK), 28 March 1915; New York Times Book Review, 7 March 1915; Boston Transcript, 17 March 1915; Daily News and Leader (UK), 2 April 1915; Athenaeum (UK), 10 April 1915; New Republic (US), 12 June 1915; Morning Post (UK), 5 April 1915. All are found in Stannard’s Norton critical edition of the novel, pp. 219–34. Full references for this and subsequent citations are in the Bibliography that follows this Introduction.] Ford himself would have welcomed such a description. His ‘method’ – of narration – is self-consciously innovative, as we shall see. The ‘matter’ is likened by the narrator in the opening pages to the end of a civilisation. While this may be a claim too far, the story he tells is certainly an exposure of the rot at that civilisation’s heart – as well as in the hearts of those who maintain it – and Ford said he had heard it, or some of it anyway, ‘from Edward Ashburnham himself’. [Footnote: in the Dedicatory Letter to the novel] In The Spirit of the People (1907), the last of the three books about Englishness that Ford wrote in the early 1900s, he introduces us to the character he turned into Edward Ashburnham, and his wife, and his ward:

I stayed, too, at the house of a married couple one summer. Husband and wife were both extremely nice people – ‘good people’, as the English phrase is. There was also living in the house a young girl, the ward of the husband, and between him and her – in another of those singularly expressive phrases – an attachment had grown up. P— had not only never ‘spoken to’ his ward; his ward, I fancy, had spoken to Mrs P—. At any rate, the situation had grown impossible, and it was arranged that Miss W— should take a trip round the world in company with some friends who were making that excursion. It was all done with the nicest tranquillity. Miss W—’s luggage had been sent on in advance; P— was to drive her to the station himself in the dogcart. The only betrayal of any kind of suspicion that things were not of their ordinary train was that the night before parting P— had said to me, ‘I wish you’d drive to the station with us tomorrow morning.’ He was, in short, afraid of a ‘scene’.

Nevertheless, I think he need have feared nothing. We drove the seven miles in the clear weather, I sitting in the little, uncomfortable, hind seat of the dogcart. They talked in ordinary voices – of the places she would see [ . . . ].

I won’t say that I felt very emotional myself, for what of the spectacle I could see from my back seat was too interesting. But the parting at the station was too surprising, too really superhuman not to give one, as the saying is, the jumps. For P— never even shook her by the hand; touching the flap of his cap sufficed for leave-taking. Probably he was choking too badly to say even ‘Goodbye’ – and she did not seem to ask it. And, indeed, as the train drew out of the station P— turned suddenly on his heels, went through the booking office to pick up a parcel of fish that was needed for lunch, got into his trap and drove off. He had forgotten me – but he had kept his end up. [Footnote: Ford’s account of these events is given on pp. 312–15, and might be described as the ‘germ’ of one of the most significant relationships in the novel – that between Edward Ashburnham and Nancy.]

Ford tells us the end of this particular story about one family’s misery. Miss W— died at Brindisi on the voyage out, and Mr P— needed to spend three years on the Continent having ‘rest cures’. But he understood, even as he wrote up this version of it, what such a story might signify about the cost of repression – a fundamental aspect of the kind of Englishness he was exploring in the trilogy. He found it ‘almost appalling’, and was not done with it, returning a few years later to give it more detailed treatment, in fiction this time. The Good Soldier’s ‘matter’ is sexual and emotional repression then, and hypocrisy, and the cost of silence. (As those who have turned to the novel first will know, it is also about sexual incontinence and the absence of ‘tenderness’.) [Footnote: see p. 315 of The Spirit of the People; the novel suggests a relationship between these forms of behaviour, as well as (in what may seem odd at first) between repression and sexual incontinence.] It is an unpacking of those quintessentially English phrases that Ford puts in speech marks in the passage above. It was intended as a challenge.

1

Forget about Piers Plowman, forget about Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Morris, the English Bible, and remember only that you live in our terrific, untidy, indifferent empirical age, where not one single problem is solved and not one single Accepted Idea from the past has any more magic [ . . . ]. It is for us to get at the new truths or to give new life to such of the old as will appeal hominibus bonae voluntatis [to men of goodwill]. Only to do that we must do it in the clear pure language of our own day and with what is clear and new in our own individualities. [Footnote: Letters of Ford Madox Ford, p. 55]

This ‘terrific sermon’ (his own description) was delivered by letter in the year in which Ford Madox Ford began work on The Good Soldier. It provides an excellent starting point for considering Ford’s state of mind, and his working philosophy, before he began to write what is his best-known novel. The letter, dated 23 January 1913, was addressed in typical and invigorating style to a fellow writer. Lucy Masterman, wife of Ford’s friend, the liberal politician C. F. G. Masterman, had sent Ford some poems for comment, and Ford took the opportunity to respond in broad terms, asserting his views on the urgent task before each and every writer at that crucial time in his career. [Footnote: he did also offer an affectionate and detailed critique of her poems.] ‘New truths’ and ‘new life’ for – or perhaps ‘about’ might be more accurate – the new age were what he believed was called for, and he was soon to practise in his own fiction what he preached.

Ford states in the Dedicatory Letter to The Good Soldier (published first in the second American edition of the novel and included, as you will see, here) that he sat down to write the novel he calls his ‘best book’ on his fortieth birthday, 17 December 1913. [Footnote: the second American edition appeared in 1927, published by Albert & Charles Boni. The second UK edition came out a year later, and also included the Dedicatory Letter, to Stella Bowen.] It is possible that work did, in fact, begin earlier; that summer perhaps, as he and Violet Hunt, the flamboyant novelist with whom he was then living, moved between Hunt’s summer cottage at Selsey in West Sussex, and South Lodge, her house in London’s Campden Hill. [Footnote: Violet Hunt (1862–1942) was the author of several novels, and she collaborated with Ford on Zeppelin Nights: A London Entertainment (1915). She was a founder of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League.] Certainly Brigit Patmore, his first amanuensis for the novel, to whom he dictated its opening (so she and Ford heard the ‘saddest story’ aloud, like its narrator John Dowell imagines he does), was invited by Hunt to Sussex to stay in the summer months of 1913. It may be that it was only later, then, that it suited Ford to think about this novel as begun, symbolically, at the very start of his forty-first year. This would fit with the feeling he said he had that this would be his last book. [Footnote: in fact, he published over 30 more volumes (novels, poetry, criticism, memoirs) before his death in 1939, as well as numerous essays and reviews.] It would also fit with his own perception of his place in the world of letters. His rousing call to his comrades – as delivered to Lucy Masterman – aside, Ford actually discerned a clear break between the writers of his generation and those he termed ‘les jeunes’, with whom the future lay. He found a powerful way of expressing this in the same Dedicatory Letter when he described The Good Soldier as his ‘Great Auk’s egg’. The Great Auk had become extinct nearly a hundred years previously: the curious, latent example of the species that he felt he represented became more credible on reaching forty, perhaps (though, in what will emerge as a particular irony, The Good Soldier was, in fact, a technically bold and modern book).

Ford worked fast, however, and his routine was to write every day. [Footnote: a frustrated Joseph Conrad wrote in 1909 to their shared literary agent, J.B. Pinker, of Ford’s facility and speed: ‘I am not FMH who can dash off 4000 words in 2 hours or thereabouts’ (Collected Letters, Vol. IV, p. 276–8).] In addition, the novel as we know had been gestating for some time – ‘when I did begin on it,’ Ford noted in 1928, ‘I had almost every word of it in my head, and I dictated it very quickly’ [Footnote: from a publicity release accompanying the 1928 edition. See Stannard, p. 180.] – and could well have taken enough shape between 17 December 1913 and 20 June, 1914, when the first section appeared in Blast magazine, for the fortieth-birthday story to be factually, as well as symbolically, true. This appearance, however, did little to support his view of himself as an ‘Old Man’ of letters, surrounded by a new generation in literary London to whom the future of writing belonged. It was much more in keeping with his intention to stir things up with his novel: Blast was the mouthpiece of the English Vorticist movement. [Footnote: see Note 8 to the Dedicatory Letter for more on Wyndham Lewis, its editor.] Though the instalment ended with the promise ‘To be continued’, by the time the next issue was released Ford’s novel had been out for four months. The Good Soldier was published by John Lane in March 1915. [Footnote: the text of the novel that follows is, with the exception of some minor corrections, that of the first English edition, published by John Lane in 1915.] It carried the sub-title A Tale of Passion on its title page and its author was listed not as Ford Madox Ford but as Ford Madox Hueffer, as he used to be known. Both his own name, and the title of the book, were subject to change.

2

Ford’s father and mother, Francis Hueffer and Catherine Madox Brown, had married in September 1872. Their first child was born on 17 December 1873 and was christened Ford Hermann Hueffer. Francis Hueffer was German. He had come to England in 1869 as Franz Hüffer, anglicised his name slightly, and by 1879 was music critic of The Times – part of the artistic establishment, in other words, despite his outspoken support of the German composer Richard Wagner’s music. [Footnote: George Eliot, for example, was an early fan, but there were precious few others.] Ford embraced his German heritage, particularly in his teens, and his status as a quasi-outsider (who might therefore be expected to have a keen vision of ‘Englishness’) was made more interesting on his mother’s side; she had links to well-known but iconoclastic artists. Catherine was the daughter of Ford Madox Brown, and her firstborn developed a particularly close and formative relationship with the painter, mentor to, among others, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. [Footnote: Madox Brown’s tempestuous relationship with the Royal Academy had broken down completely by the late 1850s. D. G. Rossetti (1828–82) was a poet as well as a painter, and formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with Holman Hunt and John Millais. He was brother to Christina Rossetti – one of Ford’s favourite poets – and William, who married Ford’s aunt Lucy in 1874. Ford published a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1902.] The names Ford Madox Ford eventually took were in part a homage to the man who influenced profoundly his creative and emotional development from an early age (Ford’s father died when he was fifteen). Madox Brown illustrated Ford’s first publication, a fairy-tale called The Brown Owl, in 1891, and was the subject of his first biography in 1896. The Good Soldier’s author began writing as Ford Madox Hueffer in 1900, but formalised the change just after it was published in July 1915, finally becoming Ford Madox Ford by another deed poll in June 1919. By this stage he was also a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War.

The war was one crucial context, of course, for the decision about whether to change his (Germanic) surname, so in many ways it is surprising he left it so late. Less self-evident is the impact the war had on his choice of title for his novel of 1915, the year in which he also joined up. When the first instalment appeared in Blast it was under its original title, The Saddest Story, a key phrase which is flagged conscientiously by the narrator, Dowell, in his opening words. To many readers The Saddest Story seems an entirely just description of this account of suicide, madness and astonishing emotional dysfunction. This despite the fact that it is not always as easy to locate those feelings of sympathy for the protagonists (or ‘screaming hysterics’ as Dowell graphically describes them) as such a title might lead us to expect. Ford’s publisher disagreed with him about its appropriateness, however. John Lane pressed Ford to come up with an alternative, fearing for the sales of a novel with such a gloomy title in the first full year of the war, as well as, one can imagine, what the reviews might say in comparison with news from the Western Front. In the event, The Good Soldier proved problematic in this respect too. [Footnote: the New Witness review of June 1915, for example, cites its ‘misappropriation of such a title’, and then works itself up to calling it a ‘profanation’. The review was written by Thomas Seccombe (incidentally a friend of Ford’s), Professor of History at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, during the war (Stannard, pp. 229–30).]

3

Despite the title that Ford took back to Lane (and he insisted afterwards he’d suggested The Good Soldier with heavy irony, never expecting Lane to take him up on it), and despite the importance of the date of 4 August throughout the text, this is not a ‘war novel’ as such. If Ford did rework parts of the manuscript later in 1914 to make the date when Britain declared war on Germany central to the novel’s chronology (the alternative explanation, that this was sheer coincidence, is so unlikely that it makes the reworking case very strong), it is not as though he did so in the attempt to foreground the war itself. [Footnote: we will probably never know exactly when Ford finished the novel – whether it was before or after 4 August 1914. For discussion on this subject, see Saunders’ biography, Vol. 1, pp. 434–8, the Norton critical edition, and a further essay by Stannard, ‘The Good Soldier: Editorial Problems’, in Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, pp. 137–48.] The tragedies of this novel are not those of war, as we have already seen, but of peace. They are domestic tragedies of repression, duplicity, lethargy and despair. And for all the political and religious resonance they gain as they are played out against a historical backdrop of maritally incontinent Reformist kings and princes (Henry VIII supreme among them), it is clear that Ford intends to fix our vision on the local, and domestic: on the faces of those we may, in fact, dimly recognise still. [Footnote: as well as English King Henry VIII, whose divorce and remarriage helped to determine the course of the Protestant Reformation, there is the man Dowell calls ‘Ludwig the Courageous’, though he’s in fact referring to Philip the Magnanimous, who established in 1527 the world’s first Protestant university at Marburg – where Ford situates an important scene in the novel – and was given a dispensation by Martin Luther allowing him to marry a second wife bigamously.] For there are no real, fighting ‘soldiers’ here. There are only ‘good’ ones, who are not, perhaps, so good. [Footnote: the novel’s title is provocative in this respect; and Dowell’s (‘do well’) name is carefully chosen.] The secret vices and torments explode primarily, though not exclusively, in the faces of those who are culpable, and complicit, not the powerless and beleaguered Tommy or Fritz of war fiction. As Dowell muses with characteristic, pathological detachment:

And that miserable woman [Florence] must have got it in the face, good and strong. It must have been horrible for her. Horrible! Well, I suppose that she deserved all that she got.

Horrible it was to see herself thoroughly exposed, and Florence kills herself soon afterwards. Yet the shock-waves as they permeate out from the shattered existences of these very particular ‘well-bred people, who live in sunny houses, with deer in the park, and play polo, and go to Nauheim for the cure ’ on the face of it diminish rapidly in force. [Footnote: this description is taken from Rebecca West’s review in the Daily News and Leader.] Maisie Maidan is dead because Leonora settled on her as a lover for Ashburnham. Nancy loses her mind because she has been sharing Bramshaw Teleragh with the Ashburnhams, also becoming the unwitting focus of their selective appetites. Their suffering may be terrible, but it is, it would seem, also localised (in geographical and class terms), a far cry from the reach of the war as represented in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), say, when Lady Bexborough opens a village bazaar with the telegram telling her that her favourite son is killed in her hand, or from its ubiquitous and monstrous presence in Wells’s Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916). ‘I am the Fact,’ says War, absolute and personified in this novel published the year after The Good Soldier, ‘there can be nothing else and nothing more in human life until you have reckoned with me.’ [Footnote: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 4; Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through, p. 182.]

This is all true. Ford, after all, had not yet seen the conflict up close. [Footnote: later, though, he showed what he could do with war as his main subject: in No Enemy (1929), say, or in his volume of reminiscence, It Was the Nightingale (1934), or, most of all, in the four Tietjens novels of the 1920s, Parade’s End (1924–8).] But the Dowells encounter the Ashburnhams on 4 August, albeit amid the exclusive and ‘cold expensive elegance’ of the Hotel Excelsior. Ford also wants Dowell’s ‘absolute ignorance’ and his ‘perfect happiness’ to come to an end on 4 August, the same day as Florence’s suicide. Though the war may not feature, Ford is letting us know that there is more than one way for a ‘civilisation’ to end; and if his focus may at first seem narrow (a social class that owned land and had serious money to lose), his ‘matter’ in this novel is intended to speak to us all. Critics have compared the force of the drama, however contained we may at first find it to be, with Sophocles’ plays, and Shakespeare’s, as well as with the neuroses of Vienna’s upper-middle class as dissected in Freud’s case studies. The mention of Freud is instructive, because although Ford was indeed writing about Englishness, and social class, he was using sex to do so. He called the novel, in a letter to John Lane, a ‘serious analysis of the polygamous desires that underlie all men’ – and, he might have continued, the emotional costs of both expressing and repressing those desires. [Footnote: the letter is dated 17th December 1914 (Ford’s birthday again) and appears in The Ford Madox Ford Reader, p. 477.] (He is silent in his letter, for good reason, about incest, although his novel is not.) [Footnote: this is one reason for the comparisons with Sophocles, author of the Oedipus tragedies. For a discussion of incest in the novel, based around the quasi-incestuous nature of this guardian/ward relation, see Saunders, Vol. 1, pp. 420–7.] Ford’s description is oddly specific in one way, considering (for example) Florence’s consummate ability to express herself sexually. But more importantly, in case we should think it is a novel only about ancient families with relics of Charles I to sell when they are being blackmailed, it makes absolutely clear his intent to explore in The Good Soldier fundamental aspects of life that affect ‘all men’, and can undo, or even destroy them too. Telegrams also help Ford in his task. Here, though, they signify the reach, and the strength, of desire, and Nancy’s from Brindisi precipitates Ashburnham’s suicide as the novel comes to a close.

So Ford’s use of August 4th – especially if it was intentional but even if it was, as is just possible, a coincidence – encourages readers to be aware of the novel’s wider resonances, though the war itself may still be a matter for the future. As it is first deployed in 1904, as the date upon which the two couples meet each other, it certainly refocuses attention on the world before the war, reminding us of the need to read that pre-war decade with closer attention to detail, as the ‘game’, as Leonora terms it, began to unravel with such devastating consequences for them all. With quintessential Dowell-esque understatement he muses at one point that the period of the Land League and the Land Acts was one of ‘troublesome times in Ireland’. [Footnote: the Land League was founded in 1879, by Michael Davitt, to secure reforms in the land-holding system in agrarian Ireland. Charles Parnell became the League’s president, and its campaigns were linked with the demand for Home Rule in Ireland (the re-establishment of an Irish parliament with responsibility for internal affairs, a cause to which Ford was sympathetic). Davitt and Parnell were both imprisoned by the British government after the League was declared illegal. Between 1883 and 1903 the Land Acts were passed to address some of the worst features of the landlord system in Ireland.] Analysing what Dowell, typically, does not understand, Colm Toibin observes that Leonora, ‘the most significant Irish presence in an English novel since Trollope’, animates in The Good Soldier what was experienced as ‘the dark and dangerous and confusing shadow of Ireland’ in England at that time. [Footnote: Colm Toibin, ‘Outsiders in England and the Art of Being Found Out’, in Gasiorek and Moore (eds), pp. 71, 77] War with Germany was not expected in 1913; it wasn’t even a certainty in Asquith’s cabinet in July 1914. But civil war in Ireland was a very real possibility, while British industry was crippled by strikes and the Tories, exercised by the decline in power that landed wealth afforded, tried to sabotage the Liberal legislative programme. [Footnote: the Liberal landslide in the election of 1906 was one of the seismic shocks of the period. Lloyd-George, as Chancellor, tried to introduce a ‘people’s budget’ in 1909. It was rejected by the House of Lords, and one result of the constitutional crisis that followed was the Parliament Act of 1911. This ended that power of veto, and represented a huge blow to the power and influence of the landed aristocracy in the United Kingdom.] Though one can’t see either Florence or Leonora as New Women, or as suffragists, the disturbing quality of Florence’s sexual duplicity, taking lovers behind her bedroom door as Nurse Dowell willingly surrenders his conjugal rights, has more than a whiff of the contemporary, reactionary fear of bike-riding single females about it. And then there was Freud, a literary as well as scientific figure in the years leading up to Ford’s novel, suggesting that no one (but especially not Dowell) was master in his own psychological house. [Footnote: Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900), for example, first appeared in English in 1913. See also the Introduction to Freud’s Literary Culture.] Pre-war political, social and cultural contexts provided many, then,

Reviews for The Good Soldier

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A classic novel dealing with the dissection of three marriages. But the narrator himself is revealed as unreliable, so where is the reader left by the tales? In addition Ford writes this novel in a series of flashbacks, which aids the general air of revelation, and dissonance. It is good to read, though finally not so much entertaining as engrossing.

[tanyaread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Published in 1915. It details the interactions of (basically) two couples. I found it often "how on earth could anyone behave in this way" but it was engrossing and gave a picture of life in a time that I have not read about very much before. I can see how the author came to the end provided (a surprise one given the preceding text) but I am pretty sure the way I felt about it and the way he felt about it (given the title) are quite different. I thought it was well worth reading.

[benuathanasia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Forgettable. Absolutely and woefully forgettable.

[oskar_matzerath-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Let the author and you trust each other, each to his job. Don't worry if at the start you ask, "Who is speaking here?" By the end, after all hope is gone and your heart is broken, you'll know.

[technodiabla · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book starts out painfully slow and the old-school English sentence structure is really tedious until you get into the rhythm. Turns out the style suits the story perfectly. Better yet, the story does grow on you slowly but surely. I can't say it's a page turner or that I "couldn't wait to read more," but it makes its point very well and will probably stick with me for a while. It's odd that there's no real protagonist, no villain, just "good people" laid bare and fully exposed.

[jmcdbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Rated: A-Ford masterfully weaves a sordid narrative tale of intrigue of passion in the empty lives of the rich. This book was one that kept calling me back to fill in more of the blanks in the sad story. Great handling of the various points of view from the leading characters.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very deep well written novel. A book that sentences have to be read a couple of times to get the full meaning.

[wendyrey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Two rich couples travel together in Europe, they have secret affairs, practice marital deception on a grand scale and two end up dead in strange circumstanes.Clever witty and fun.

[madepercy-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading classic literature is always full of surprises. I did not know that Ford Madox Ford was considered an impressionist. He seems to have moved beyond the more formal yet (then) modern prose of Henry James to capture the nature of English manners while obviously displaying Edwardian characteristics. Yet his prose was exactly like a conversation - I found the so-called illogical flow of the plot to be exactly like listening to someone tell their story as one would over a cup of tea or coffee. This novel is not too taxing and is definitely worth reflecting upon.

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An impressionistic work of English life right before the outbreak of WWI. Told in a series of flash-backs, it skips around and is nonchronological. Somewhat difficult to read, but worthwhile. You get different views of the "good" soldier and two Americans, each of whom are married. It has twists. What you believe of a character may turn out not to be true.

[thatotter-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Dreadful. A long, boring non-story with muddled, plodding writing.

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

December's bookclub selection - a story about two couples and the disaster that arises when one one of the men has an affair with the other man's wife. What made this book such a great read was that it was told by the cuckholded husband as a flashback - the perfect unreliable narrator. His moods and emotions change over the course of the story and my emotions followed. It was an interesting book to discuss - different people felt that different characters were at fault and everyone was pretty flawed. I read this at the same time as listening to Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. Both books are set in that same time period - turn of the century. Interesting to see how society's rules (divorce was scandalous - affairs were ok) dictacted people's lives.

[kromestomes · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Somewhat dated ... some "old-fashioned" racism that may be actually used to show a negative for a character ... some of that double-reverse English understatement-type stuff ...

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ford Madox Ford originally intended to call this beautiful but tragic novella "The Saddest Story", based upon the opening sentence, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard"> His publisher objected, suggesting that such a title would have a disastrous impact upon sales. Ford was not convinced, responding angrily that the publisher should do whatever he thought fit, adding that one might as well just call it "The Good Soldier". "The Saddest Story" might have spelt disaster on the booksellers' shelves but it would certainly have satisfied those who lean towards the "It does what it says on the tin" approach to titles. It is an immensely sad story - the tale of two self-destructive couple touring Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.However, it is also a beautifully written story, to such an extent that one suffers all the pain of the narrator as he recounts his tragic story.Ford was a master of literary criticism and brought all his stylistic knowledge to bear here giving a series of different literary devices (flashback, impressionism, florid conjecture). It is a short book but infinitely rewarding .. yet also heartbreaking.

[robertg69_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very Edwardian Eng Lit

[abirdman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Difficult, wordy, old-fashioned language and moral quandries, but ultimately a very satisfying book. Highly recommended.

[iambookish-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm so conflicted on what I really think of this book. It was a struggle to get through and at times I wanted to throw it against the wall, but in the end I powered through and felt satisfied with its conclusion. This to me balances out to "average"!

[dorritt_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ford Madox Ford begins the tale with the words “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” which is a little nervy, I think – kind of like Babe Ruth stepping up to the plate and calling his shot. As if that weren’t enough, FMF “doubles down” in the preface to the version I read, explaining that when offered a chance to make revisions to the text, he decided not to change a word, as he realized the story was perfect the way it was. But d*** if the man doesn’t hit the ball exactly where he pointed. The art of this novel isn’t in the story, which is almost tauntingly simple: an upstanding, well-meaning British officer with a romantic nature that makes him a little bit too susceptible to falling in love ends up inadvertently ruining the lives of his wife (a Catholic who feels unable to divorce him), a good friend (whose wife he succumbs to), and at least two sweetly innocent but emotionally fragile ladies. The art of the novel is a little bit in the characterizations, which are authentic and intricate in a way I associate with Graham Greene, the highest compliment I am capable of giving. With few exceptions, no one in this terribly sad tale is actually evil: indeed, you could make the case that most of them demonstrate the capacity for extreme nobility – Edward, the tale’s tragic swain, is a generous and compassionate landowner; Leonora, his wife, willingly sacrifices her own happiness to secure his; Dowell, the tale’s narrator, similarly sacrifices his needs to accommodate the requirements of his wife’s (supposedly) ill health; Nancy, Edward’s final, fatal femme fatale, is sweet and patient and good. Each, however, additionally possesses a flaw – one tragic, inevitable, Aristotelean little flaw – that ends up perverting their nobility into something corrupt and awful and … yes … terribly sad. As summarized by Dowell (our first person narrator), part-ways through the tale: “I call this the Saddest Story, rather than “The Ashburnham Tragedy,” just because … there is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people … drifting down life … causing miseries, hart-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.” Mostly, however, the art of this novel is in FMF’s masterly and novel storytelling. The tale is effectively inverted - told from end to beginning - by a narrator who assumes the reader is already familiar with the ending. In this way, FMF crafts a tale that, instead of building towards tragedy, starts with the tragedy already established and then unfolds the details in a way so maddeningly careless that the effect can only have been achieved through the most deliberate and careful writing imaginable. Instead of waiting and watching for tragedy to unfurl – as happens in most novels – tragedy meets us on the first page and accompanies us all the way through our subsequent journey. Which isn’t to suggest this is a miserable or unpleasant read: on the contrary, I would argue that FMF’s wonderfully ingenious storytelling is what makes this “saddest story ever told” not only bearable, but hauntingly human. No short review could ever hope to capture all the worthy intricacies of this work. The title alone deserves its own paragraph: FMF’s introduction raises more questions than it answers about whether “The Good Soldier” is a literal reference to Edward, or meant in a figurative sense as a reference to all folks in this tale of act the role of “good soldier,” selflessly (or selfishly?) sacrificing themselves for the perceived good of others. Another paragraph might be devoted to FMF’s perception of Catholicism, which takes a beating in this tale. Another might be devoted to an analysis of the actual reliability of FMF’s supposed “reliable narrator”; yet another to debating whether, in this novel, FMF has indeed “laid [his] one egg and might as well die.” All of which would make this the ideal novel for a Lit 301 college course, without in any way undermining its merits as captivating and accessible tale, quickly read but not quickly forgotten.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

”This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”So begins the 1915 novel by Ford Maddox Ford, a book that even he, ten years after its publication, was surprised by the combined intricacies of voice and non-linear construction that make this narrative confusing and just a bit odd. But dang, it seems to have left me considering a reread in the not too distant future.The story itself is fairly straightforward: two wealthy couples, one English (Edward and Leonora Ashburnham), one American (John and Florence Dowell), spend many seemingly happy years together after meeting in a German spa town. At some point, it is revealed that Edward and Florence have carried on a long affair which Lenora knows about but Dowell does not. This affair appears to be the vehicle for a bleak string of deaths, suicides, and one woman’s spiral into mental illness.To say that Dowell is an unreliable narrator would be true but it is not the whole story. He has been duped so he doesn’t really know the whole story but as he pieces it together it goes through several revisions as he tells the story from several different points of view through time, shifting back and forth through many years. This was all very daring and cutting edge in 1915 but also very jumbled and had me scratching my head wondering where the clarity would come from. The clarity does come eventually, and then you think the narrative is finished but wait, Ford throws in the explanation for one last suicide. Dowell’s narration has always been a matter of controversy and for good reason. It’s random, chaotic, sprawling and for the most part, he is looking for sympathy. He actually admires Edward, who carried on with Dowell’s wife for years, right under his nose. ”I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham---and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from a distance.” (Page 257)Huh. That is brilliant. The fact that a reader can be taken in by such a narrator, well, you just have to give a lot of credit to the author. But wait---does he just think I’m incredibly stupid? Whatever the answer is, I am going to have to read this book again in the not too distant future. And that must mean Ford’s a genius.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of those books that everyone seems to describe as an under-appreciated classic. Obviously it isn't -- you can hardly open a book on 20th century literature without seeing its praises sung -- but for whatever reason, I hadn't read it before.It's not quite what I was expecting. It comes as a Penguin Modern Classic with cover art by John Singer Sargent, it's written by an American and set mostly in a German spa-town in the years before World War I, the characters are upper middle-class British and New Englanders -- everything is telling you to expect Henry James. And of course there are Jamesian elements: there is a hint of the old "naïve America meets sophisticated Europe" idea, and there is a huge amount of analysis and very little action. However, this is very definitely not James. The language is light and the syntax flows readily at room temperature; ideas are communicated explicitly and directly; there is even the occasional joke.Fundamentally, this seems to be a book about the process of narrative itself. There are only four main characters: the narrator, his wife Florence, Edward Ashburnham (the "Good Soldier"), and Edward's wife Leonora. The sequence of events described is quite short and straightforward, and the narrator goes through them over and over again, each time getting a different, further insight into what happened and how the events relate to the characters and motivations of the people involved. It is made clear to us that it is the process of telling the story that allows him to do this. In other words, the events are defined and redefined by the process of reporting them. Interestingly, this was ten years before Schrödinger and Heisenberg established that the act of measuring a physical system inevitably changes the system. Probably too fanciful to describe this as quantum-literature!Another thing we are made to realise as the successive layers of meaning are pealed away is that there is no externally-verifiable "right answer". We only have the unreliable evidence of the narrator, and he himself has no way to go back and establish that one or other version of events is somehow privileged. The narrator's conclusion that Edward was a good and lovable man and Leonora a selfish and manipulative woman is plausible, but he presents it as his own subjective view. This is clearly a book that has had a big influence on western literature. For instance, I was reminded very strongly of the narrative technique used by Günter Grass in his memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, which I read a few months ago. Grass uses exactly this idea, of the influence that fictional narrative has on the events it describes, and of the impossibility of getting back to a single, true, version of events.

[diefledermaus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(Spoilers) I’d read this book before, but reading it again (for a class) reminded me what a well written tragedy it was. Especially good because we read it alongside Goethe's Elective Affinities – there were many parallels between the two. It’s a story of betrayed and lost love – plenty of those – but even the basic plot is complex. To make things more complicated, the book is narrated by the least aware participant in the two love quartets. He moves from generalities to specific memories, spanning different times, with changing opinions, realizing things and judging. Few novels are more subjective. The story follows John Dowell, the nearly nameless narrator, who marries Florence and takes her to Europe. There they meet the Ashburnhams and Edward starts an affair with Florence. His long suffering wife, Leonora – who put up with his multiple mistresses but still loves him – keeps quiet. There was also an Edward in Elective Affinities – another man who is rather narcissistic and falls in love with a younger woman who’s like a daughter to him and his long suffering, practical wife. Nancy is the stand in for Ottilie – everyone falls in love with both of them, both bring about their own slow destruction when they choose to never be with either Edward. Leonora is the rational wife who attempts to smooth things over but eventually fails, as was Charlotte. She doesn’t really have a Captain – possibly the very ordinary Rodney Bayham, who she marries at the end.

[schmerguls · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Thisis a vry carefully constructed book, with more subltilty of character deliniation than I've seen in a long time

[sandydog1_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Chronic, angst, chronic cardiopulmonary disease, chronic longings, chronic nastiness. Give me Dostoyevsky any day. . Crazy (poor) people are much more interesting than eccentric (rich) people.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An impressionistic masterpiece? A tragedy or a comedy? This novel, published in 1915, from the pen of Ford Madox Ford is unique enough to have been described by its critics as all of the preceding and more. Subtitled "A Tale of Passion", it is unique both in my experience and within the author's total work. The story is narrated by an American, John Dowell, who invites the reader to sit down with him beside the fire of his study to listen to the "saddest story" he has ever known. The story, set during the decade preceding the Great War, while sad for some of the participants is truly sad only in the ironic sense of the word. The characters are not particularly likable or sympathetic. Considering that, it is counter intuitive, but the reader is spurred on to read the novel by the precision and the beauty of the prose and the intrigue within the story. The narrative unfolds in a mosaic-like way with a traversal of the narrator's memory back and forth over the nine year period that is covered. When complete, the tale is ended perfectly much as it begins. The result is a beautiful small novel that ranks high in this reader's experience.

[craso_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In 20th Century British literature it always stuns me how the characters react so stoicly when it seems more natural to act emotionally. No one is willing to talk about their feelings. This always leads to tragedy. That is why Ford Madox Ford almost named this book "The Saddest Story." Yet it isn't a tale that will make you weep. Infact, I don't feel sorry for any of the characters, because everything that happened they brought upon themselves.The novel is narrated by John Dowell the husaband of Florence. They are a rich American couple who live in Europe and go to a spa every year because Florence has a "heart." There they meet Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, a rich British couple who come to the spa for Edward's "heart." Edward is the "good soldier" who seems honnest and respectable. They start a friendship because Dowell is bored with being Florence's nursemaid and Leonora wants to use Florence to get Edward's mind of a young woman who is the real reason he is at the spa. Florence and Edward, again the only people in this novel that the narrator describes as having a "heart" start an affair and then everything goes down hill from there, or maybe that wasn't the beginning. Florence and Edward are characterized as having heart conditions when really they are two passionate people who married for convience. Their spouses, especially Leonora, are rather cold and unfeeling. Florence isn't the kindest person in the world to poor Dowell, but he is a dim-wit. At the beginning of the novel he describes the tale he is about to tell as the saddest story he has ever heard. What does he mean "heard"? He was living with these people when all the events occurred. This is where we come back to the stoic British. These two couples are portrayed as "good people" and good people never show emotion in public. They put masks on and pretend that they lead happy lives, because they are rich and hob-nob in high society.Dowell is not a reliable narrator. He tells the story in the first person, but he is relating the saga as it was told to him. He wants to state the tale as if he were sitting with the reader next a roaring fire on a cold night. The narrative starts out jumbled and gets clearer as it becomes clearer in Dowell's mind. He comes to realizations and adds his own thoughts as the story progresses.I recommend this novel because of the intriguing way it is written. The use of an unreliable narrator makes it well worth reading. It is also an excellent example of late 19th Century and early 20th Century literature with it's portrayal of members of high society caring more about how they are percieved by others than about how they treat others. It reminded me very much of Edith Warton and Henry James.

[booktruffler · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Good Soldier has one of the most famous opening sentences, and the rest of the book lives up to it."This is the saddest story I have ever heard." A tale of passion, miscommunication, good intentions, desperation. Two couples' lives become inextricably entwined in the late 1890s. The writing is restrained, narrated as it is by the deceived husband. He has an utterly believable voice as he drifts back and forth in time, trying to make sense of what has happened. Highly recommended if you're a fan of British literature.

[pauntley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a tale of infidelity, frustration and disappointment with a famous opening sentence: 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard'. There are many ways to read The Good Soldier. I read it for the first time cold, with very little idea about what I was in for. There are annotated editions with a plot synopsis, cast of characters and summaries of recurring themes or motifs but my electronic version was bare of any explanatory Introduction or annotation. Reading it this way was an exploratory process for the narrator, whose first and second names are only revealed incidentally, well into the novel, is unreliable, ignorant much of the time about what's going on and strangely artless. The chronology is fractured. On first reading the novel resembles a random patchwork quilt or William Burroughs cut up. My Kindle copy of the first version I read is heavily annotated with baffled or occasionally derisory comments. It would have been quite possible, of course, to begin with one of the annotated versions and commence reading with knowledge of what to expect. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't. The Good Soldier is a book to be read several or more times and something significant in my appreciation of the book would have been lost if I had been better prepared for that first encounter. The narrator may be strangely artless in the way he frames his narrative, but Ford Madox Ford is very far from artless. The Good Soldier is ranked by some critics among the most important 20th century novels, in company with Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, &c. It is certainly possible to disagree with that ranking. One difference is immediately apparent: the prose of The Good Soldier - the surface of the novel - is generally undistinguished. This is a tale told by a blandly imperceptive man whose mind mostly moves in cliches. He is, of course, Ford's creature and the art of the novel lies in the author's deployment of his unreliable narrator, with all his inadequacies of perception and expressiveness, over the shifting terrain of his 'saddest story'.

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I waffled a bit between 3.5 and 4 stars for this classic. While there were things about it that didn't appeal to me (some Catholic bashing for example), it made an impression on me & made me think. Two different but equally dysfunctional marriages are laid bare throughout the course of the book. It is written in an unusual style that I am not sure that I liked but worked well here -- the narrator writes as if the reader knew some fact or event that had not been revealed yet and then later explains it. For example, in the beginning of Part II, he is relating his own history talking about how he and Florence became married. He remarks "she might have bolted with the fellow, before or after she married me." What fellow? who is this person never before even alluded to? The reader begins to have suspicions of who it is and then several pages later it is revealed.As the story progresses, it becomes more and more clear that this is a highly unreliable narrator. And his shifting perspective may be not so much of a shift as a revealing of underlying views formerly hidden (from the reader and perhaps from the narrator's own conscious mind).

[flourishing_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've heard this book touted as a 'perfect' novel, and I have to say, I think that's true. It's taut, gripping, and endlessly fascinating - despite the fact that it relies on sexist underpinnings, it still seems to ring true. I loathe every character in it, and yet I feel enormous sympathy for them, because - aren't we all loathsome?In any case, heartily recommended.

[feelinglistless · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Writing in the literary appropriation of impressionism pioneered by his erstwhile friend Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford’s modernist narrative is an enemy of structure and coherence as it mimics his American narrator Dowell’s memory of his obsessive psycho-sexual relationships with his suicidal wife Florence, British stick Edward and his wife Leonora, chronology rolling in on itself over and again. When, at beginning of its fourth part, Dowell apologises for having told the story “in a very rambling way” because “it may be difficult for anyone to find their way through what may be a sort of maze”, well, reader, I sighed. Yet this is still engrossing thanks to its thick atmosphere steeped in turn of the last century continental privilege, and some beautifully rendered characterisation, especially Leonora, a passive aggressive viper who can ruin a man by simply giving him some of her attention. And knows it. And does.