The Good Soldier (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Ford Madox Ford and Frank Kermode

The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

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• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
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All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.

Handsome, wealthy, and a veteran of service in India, Captain Edward Ashburnham appears to be the ideal “good soldier” and the embodiment of English upper-class virtues. But for his creator, Ford Madox Ford, he also represents the corruption at society’s core. Beneath Ashburnham’s charming, polished exterior lurks a soul well-versed in the arts of deception, hypocrisy, and betrayal. Throughout the nine years of his friendship with an equally privileged American, John Dowell, Ashburnham has been having an affair with Dowell’s wife, Florence. Unlike Dowell, Ashburnham’s own wife, Leonora, is well aware of it.

When The Good Soldier was first published in 1915, its pitiless portrait of an amoral society dedicated to its own pleasure and convinced of its own superiority outraged many readers. Stylistically daring, The Good Soldier is narrated, unreliably, by the naïve Dowell, through whom Ford provides a level of bitter irony. Dowell’s disjointed, stumbling storytelling not only subverts linear temporality to satisfying effect, it also reflects his struggle to accept a world without honor, order, or permanence. Called the best French novel in the English language, The Good Soldier is both tragic and darkly comic, and it established Ford as an important contributor to the development of literary modernism.

Frank Kermode has taught at Manchester, London, and Cambridge Universities as well as at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. Among his many books the most recent are Shakespeare’s Language, Pieces of My Mind, and The Age of Shakespeare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411432246

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.

Book preview

Table of Contents

FROM THE PAGES OF THE GOOD SOLDIER

Title Page

Copyright Page

FORD MADOX FORD

THE WORLD OF FORD MADOX FORD AND THE GOOD SOLDIER

Introduction

Dedication

PART ONE

—I—

-II-

—III—

—IV—

—V—

—VI—

PART TWO

—I—

—II—

PART THREE

—I—

—II—

—III—

—IV—

—V—

PART FOUR

—I—

—II—

—III—

—IV—

—V—

—VI—

ENDNOTES

INSPIRED BY FORD MADOX FORD

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

FOR FURTHER READING

FROM THE PAGES OF THE GOOD SOLDIER

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

(page 9)

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.

(page 10)

It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting—or, no, not acting—sitting here and there unanimously, isn’t that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple? So it may well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear Florence.

(page 12)

All good soldiers are sentimentalists—all good soldiers of that type. Their profession, for one thing, is full of the big words, courage, loyalty, honour, constancy. And I have given a wrong impression of Edward Ashburnham if I have made you think that literally never in the course of our nine years of intimacy did he discuss what he would have called ‘the graver things.’

(page 28)

She had had no conversation with Edward for many years—none that went beyond the mere arrangements for taking trains or engaging servants. But that afternoon she had to let him have it.

(page 57)

Good people, be they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten each other.

(page 60)

I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonora was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that she had to take up during her long Calvary of a life.

(page 61 )

‘You are all the consolation I have in the world. And isn’t it odd to think that if your wife hadn’t been my husband’s mistress, you would probably never have been here at all?’

(page 91)

It is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one’s small meannesses. It is really death to do so—that is why so many marriages turn out unhappily.

(page 101)

Leonora could not be aware that the man whom she loved passionately and whom, nevertheless, she was beginning to try to rule with a rod of iron—that this man was becoming more and more estranged from her.

(page 125)

She had the vague, passionate idea that, when Edward had exhausted a number of other types of women he must turn to her.... She imagined that, by now, she understood him better, that she understood better his vanities and that, by making him happier, she could arouse his love.

(page 149)

The human heart is a very mysterious thing.

(page 168)

‘You must stay here; you must belong to Edward. I will divorce him.’

(page 187)

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits.

(page 205)

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The Good Soldier was first published in 1915.

Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction,

Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions,

and For Further Reading.

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright © 2005 by Frank Kermode.

Note on Ford Madox Ford, The World of Ford Madox Ford and

The Good Soldier, Inspired by Ford Madox Ford, and Comments & Questions

Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Dedicatory letter to Stella Ford reprinted by permission

of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

Copyright © 1927 by Ford Madox Ford.

Copyright © renewed 1955 by Janice Brustlein.

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The Good Soldier

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-268-0 ISBN-10: 1-59308-268-1

eISBN : 978-1-411-43224-6

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FORD MADOX FORD

Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer on December 17, 1873, in the county of Surrey, near London. His father, Dr. Francis Hueffer, was a music critic for the London Times; his maternal grandfather was the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. Through them young Ford met many leading literary and artistic figures of the time, including writers Algernon Charles Swinburne and Ivan Turgenev. After the sudden death of his father in 1889, Ford and his family moved to his grandfather’s home in London, where he briefly attended the University College School.

In 1891, when he was seventeen years old, Ford published his first work, a children’s fairy tale titled The Brown Owl, illustrated by his distinguished grandfather. Over the next decades he would experiment in many genres, writing novels, biographies, poetry, and criticism. He met Joseph Conrad, already a well-known novelist, in 1898; the two became close friends and collaborated on several works, including The Inheritors ( 19 01 ) and Romance (1903).

In 1908 Ford founded the English Review, an avant-garde literary journal that would publish works by such modernists as H. G. Wells, Henry James, and John Galsworthy. Financial problems forced him to give up editorship of the journal in 1910 .

Ford had a tumultuous romantic life. He began an affair with his sister-in-law, which caused the breakup of his marriage. He subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown in 1904. Later, he entered into liaisons with painter Stella Bowen and writers Violet Hunt and Jean Rhys; Rhys would later write of her relationship with Ford in her novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931).

In 1915 Ford published The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, a novel considered by many, including himself, to be his best work. Shortly after the book’s release, the forty-one-year-old author enlisted in the British Army; he went on to fight at the front lines in the battle of the Somme.

After the war, Ford changed his name to Ford Madox Ford, perhaps to mask his German heritage, and moved to France. Literary life in Paris in the 1920s was dominated by Gertrude Stein’s salon, and in that legendary circle Ford mingled with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway. He and Hemingway worked together on Ford’s new literary journal, the Transatlantic Review. During this period Ford also published a four-volume novel collectively titled Parade’s End (1924-1928) and his Collected Poems (1936). In 1937 he received an invitation to teach at Olivet College in Michigan. There, he wrote his ambitious work of literary history and criticism The March of Literature. Ford Madox Ford died in Deauville, France, on June 26, 1938.

THE WORLD OF FORD MADOX FORD AND THE GOOD SOLDIER

INTRODUCTION

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) once described himself thus: son of Francis Hueffer, musical editor of the Times [of London], grandson of Ford Madox Brown, painter. His early environment ensured a lifelong connection with writing and the other arts. As a boy he was under the influence of the group of artists—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and others, including his grandfather—who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and formed a kind of avant-garde in mid-nineteenth-century British art.

Ford published his first book at the age of seventeen. From an early age he was intimate with writers of his own generation. A magazine editor of rare talent, he was known to his contemporaries as Ford Hermann Hueffer; but he changed his name to Ford after World War I, at a time when a name suggesting a German origin was thought not to be to an English writer’s advantage. Under whatever name, he always remained, as he said, mad about writing, always a conscious modern artist.

Ford’s eighty or so books are on an extraordinary variety of subjects, and he did not fail to celebrate his illustrious family connections. His father, who had emigrated from Germany in 1869, had high authority in the musical world. At the age of twenty-three Ford published a biography of his famous grandfather, the painter; a few years later he published a book about the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Rossetti (1902). And he looked back, in various autobiographical writings, to the distinction of his family and the happiness of his unusual childhood.

Yet we no longer primarily associate Ford with Victorian painters and writers. He was very much a literary man of his own age, a modern writer. As a magazine editor he was the first to notice and encourage the talent of D. H. Lawrence. He was also an influential poet, much admired by the young and innovative American Ezra Pound. Among the many aspiring writers who sought his advice was the ambitious young American novelist Ernest Hemingway. Even in his later years, when he had to struggle to survive in America, he kept in touch with leading figures in the arts, and counted among his close American friends the poets Allen Tate and the young Robert Lowell. Later he moved to Paris, where, as editor of the Transatlantic Review, he published, among other adventurous writers, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and E. E. Cummings.

Today his readers probably think of him first as one of the creators of the modern novel. The celebrity of The Good Soldier derives in great measure from its display of advanced novelistic technique. Ford wrote many novels, not all worthy of him, though a few are good enough to stand beside The Good Soldier. One example, The Fifth Queen (1906), the first novel of a historical trilogy centering on Catherine Howard, niece of the powerful and Catholic Duke of Norfolk, who was soon beheaded to make way for Henry VIII’s sixth and last queen, appealed to Ford’s own brand of Catholicism, which was also to be reflected in The Good Soldier. Better known, and usually given second place to The Good Soldier, is Parade’s End, Ford’s World War I tetralogy (if one admits the inferior fourth volume). It has sometimes, and not without reason, been called the best book about that war, in which Ford, though well past the age of enlistment, served as an infantry officer.

The Good Soldier, his own favorite, has established itself as having first claim on our attention. Ford was a great admirer of the French novelists Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, but his ability to write such a book as The Good Soldier was fostered chiefly by his association with two older anglophone novelists, the American Henry James and the Polish-born Joseph Conrad, each, in his own way, working at the frontiers of the art. James was the admired master; Conrad was rather more than that, a senior collaborator. Ford worked with Conrad on several projects, including The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). So close was their association that Ford even wrote a section of Conrad’s major novel Nostromo (1904). (His claim to have done so when Conrad was ill and under pressure from an editor was understandably ignored or derided, for he had a reputation for allowing his fantasies to color his versions of the truth; but documentary evidence has now established the validity of this particular claim.)

Nostromo is a complicated book, making much use of time shifts—that is, it departs in the course of its narrative from simple chronological order, aiming beyond the mere telling of a story toward the rendering of an affair, with truth to psychology taking precedence over simple tale-telling. Ford believed that the course of the novel should be an exhaustion of aspects.... [It] was to proceed to one culmination, to reveal, once and for all, in the last sentence, or the penultimate; in the last phrase, or the one before it—the psychological significance of the whole. This remark occurs in Ford’s autobiographical Return to Yesterday, now available in a modern edition (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1999, p. 159), and it is worth reading in its context. We shall see that The Good Soldier is a product of such theorizing; it aims to exhaust aspects in establishing significant relationships between parts of the novel by violating the normal time sequence. Related to this practice is the use of point of view, a technique that dispenses with the more familiar omniscient narrator and allows one character to relate events as he or she observes or participates in them. This character may not be an altogether reliable reporter—which adds to the complexities of impression and expression.

These techniques and terms have been much studied in recent years, and the criticism devoted to them has achieved a perhaps undesirable complexity of its own, but when they come to examine Ford’s novel, readers may at least find helpful the distinction, first suggested by Russian critics, between fabula (fable, story) and sujet (the manner in which the fable is presented). If you were to extract from Ford’s novel a chronological account of all that happened in it (this can be done and is quite a valuable exercise) you would have something resembling its fabula. Indeed, any account of a fabula has to be arrived at in that way, since the events it contains have no other existence outside the sujet. But in extracting the fable you of course destroy the book. The American realist novelist Theodore Dreiser, reviewing The Good Soldier, felt he should explain how much more satisfactory it would have been if Ford had begun at the beginning, gone on to the end, and then stopped. But that was not Ford’s intention at all. He was writing a very different kind of novel, with a unique shape that had to be achieved in defiance of chronology.

In his memoir of Conrad, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), Ford notes their agreement that life does not narrate, but makes impressions on our brains.... If we wished to produce ... an effect of life [we] must not narrate but render ... impressions. The business of a novel is to render a single affair in all its psychological complexity. Ford found Henry James’s methods to be exemplary in this respect. What was needed in novels that aspired to be works of art was a quality lacking from most ordinary, everyday novels; it was a matter of highly refined craftsmanship. By the time he came to write The Good Soldier Ford was an experienced craftsman, determined to establish by his practice his conviction that the novel must be a true work of art.

He was extremely proud of The Good Soldier. In his dedicatory letter to his partner, the painter Stella Bowen, prefixed to the U.S. edition of 1927 (and included in this edition), he calls it his best book. By the time he wrote it, he says, he had reached an age at which he felt it was time to put into a novel all that I knew about writing. Partly with the companionship of Conrad, he had, in the course of an active career, made exhaustive studies into how words should be handled and novels constructed. He began the novel, he says, on the day I was forty (December 17, 1913) and finished it before the war began on August 4, 1914, but this claim is probably a little inaccurate. The Good Soldier might well, he thought, be his last book. It would appear in a new epoch, in a literary world newly dominated by the passionate young, many of whom he knew and admired. Afterward he would stand aside and leave the field to the likes of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis.

But World War I intervened. Ford finished the writing and went off to fight. He claimed to have translated the novel into French in the midst of a battle. The close attention this feat required enabled him to see, with some astonishment, how complicated the book was, with its tangle of references and cross-references. A friend, the writer John Rodker, described it as the finest French novel in the English language, and this judgment did not displease Ford; but he also records the gloomy reaction of another officer who had been, he said, unwise enough to read it when on the point of marrying. Ford called the French translation Quelque chose au coeur (something to do with the heart)—an excellent choice for a novel about people’s heart conditions. But Ford’s translation was never completed, and the title was not used.

The title Ford had wanted was The Saddest Story, but his publisher thought it would depress the sales of a book to be published in 1915, in the darkest days of the war (p. 5), when morale was low but soldiers were admired. Ford accepted the change with some understandable reluctance. (The novel is still called The Saddest Story in the advertisements included in the first edition.) The substitute title, in full, is The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, and the title page bears as an epigraph the Latin words Beati Immaculati, which is from the first verse of the longest of the Psalms: Blessed are the undefiled (Psalms 119 :1, King James Version). (The reader may find it interesting to speculate about to whom these words are meant to refer: perhaps to Maisie Maidan and Nancy Rufford, both figures of youthful female innocence, though contact with the main characters may be thought to have defiled them.) So the novel, started before and finished soon after the war was declared, has made its way in the world in spite of having to surrender its true title to the cause of bolstering civilian morale in wartime.

Ford liked to appear precise about dates, and, as we shall see, The Good Soldier professes to be so; but the dates given in the narrative are in fact very confused. So are the facts of its writing and publication. It is likely that Ford began the novel in the summer or fall of 1913—using houseguests, themselves writers, as amanuenses—and worked on it possibly for a whole year. He sent some forty pages of manuscript, the opening pages of the book, to Wyndham Lewis as a contribution to Lewis’s new avant-garde periodical BLAST, and this extract appeared in the first issue of the journal, which is dated June 20, 1914 (though the issue may not have been published for some time after that date). There was a plan to serialize the whole book in BLAST, but this had to be given up because the second number of Lewis’s journal—the only successor to the first—was greatly delayed, and in fact did not come out until after the first edition of the whole novel had appeared, in March 1915.

The main reason for concerning oneself with these calendar details is this: The date August 4 is given great significance in the novel, and the question arises whether Ford picked it by accident or was choosing that date, on which the Great War began, as being particularly doom-laden—in which case he must presumably have written in the August 4 references after August 4, 1914. If the references existed earlier we are left to consider a really remarkable coincidence. Ford did attach a solemn importance to that date—it marked, for him as for many, the end of a civilization. It may not have seemed to him to matter greatly that in the novel the crowding of important events onto the date August 4 is implausible; indeed, it can be shown, in terms of the story itself, to be impossible. But all this goes to show how important the date was to Ford.

Common sense, and some scraps of external evidence, suggest that the book was indeed partly written or reworked after August 4, 1914, and that Ford, who had perhaps used the date once by accident, now forced it into the very center of the novel. (The most up-to-date study of this complicated problem is Martin Stannard’s essay The Good Soldier: Editorial Problems in Hampson, Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity, pp. 137-148; see For Further Reading.)

As we have seen, the problem is not merely bibliographical; the date August 4 affects the entire conduct of Ford’s story. He was avowedly a man who cared more for impressions than facts—indeed, he liked to call himself an impressionist—and the scope and integrity of his narrative mattered more to him than complete factual accuracy in its telling. He was more interested in what he called the affair than in mere story; the narrative must be shaped, constructed, with some larger purpose in mind than the simple and plausible setting forth, one after the other, of the events that constitute it. This might well involve damage to verisimilitude, and that is what happens when August 4 is obsessively repeated as the date of crucial events. A further enemy of easy plausibility is the use of an unreliable narrator, particularly as Dowell, without being a complete fool, seems to have rather extensive limitations as an observer of the action, so that learning about it from him is a chancy business; his occasional fits of sensitivity or perceptiveness add to rather than reduce