Long, long ago, when at school, I was presented with a passage from a novel to assess. I was sixteen, maybe, in an English class. We must have been given many such passages from books and told to write a short essay on them. I can vaguely remember the text book, which had several such exercises, but from that time only one text has stayed with me:
I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches. When you looked at them carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick pink of his inner eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister expression—like a mosaic of blue porcelain set in pink china. And that chap, coming into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls. It was most amazing. You know the man on the stage who throws up sixteen balls at once and they all drop into pockets all over his person, on his shoulders, on his heels, on the inner side of his sleeves; and he stands perfectly still and does nothing. Well, it was like that. He had rather a rough, hoarse voice.
I knew neither the novel or the author, but with all of the arrogance of my mid-teen years, I laid into it. The writer did not know how to write. He was trying to be evocative but lacked the language. It read like somebody talking. Well, that’s what I see in it, I must have thought, so that’s what I shall say. How right I was, and how wrong.
The passage comes from Ford Madox Ford‘s 1915 novel The Good Soldier. It describes the titular character, Edward Ashburnham, and is written with the voice of the novel’s narrator, Edward Dowell. It is absolutely accurate in language, character, situation and time, in all its revealing banality. All this I knew soon enough, as I read The Good Soldier for the first time four years later and recognised immediately that here something extraordinary, both the model novel and the novel outside most other novels, swerving as a comment on the rest.
I have read The Good Soldier several times since then, and again recently. It tells of two couples, one British, one American, from the upper reaches of society. They befriend one another at the sanatorium in Nauheim, dedicated to sufferers of the heart. On the surface they are trouble-free, expert in presenting an entirely calm exterior to the world. Underneath, all is turmoil, as the pains of the heart from which two of them ostensibly suffer lie beyond any cure that Nauheim might offer.
The protagonists are Edward Ashburnham, an English captain, magistrate and landowner, and his Roman Catholic wife Leonora; a wealthy American John Dowell, and his well-born wife Florence. Its crisis is caused by an affair between Edward and Florence, but untruths, misdeeds and cruelties have led up to this and are engendered by it. To keep up appearances, the people involved must be destroyed. Two of the quartet commit suicide, one ancillary character dies of a heart attack, another goes insane. It is melodramatic, but one cannot complain that Dowell, the narrator, deceives us. No sooner has he painted a picture of the idyllic quartet at the start of the book than he tells us of its doom:
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 should choose; and we could rise and go, all four together, without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or, if it rained, in discreet shelters … Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn’t there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?
No, by God, it is false! It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison—a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.
The story is told in retrospect, but hardly chronologically. What Ford’s novel so brilliantly portrays are the operations of a mind – Dowell’s – that relates things as they are remembered, with one memory triggering the next, evasions and confusions mixed with moments of devastating frankness when the narrator can hide from reality no longer. Much has been written about The Good Soldier having an ‘unreliable narrator’, but this has always puzzled me. John Dowell seems to be a particularly reliable narrator. He is not an omniscient one, certainly, not least because other protagonists, his wife Florence in particular, devote so much effort to keeping him in the dark. But from the start he tells us that all is not as it seems. The dishonesty of appearances, the impossibility of knowing what is true, the ultimate meaninglessness of things – these are Dowell’s, and Ford’s, bleak themes. Dowell does not tell us everything, especially so about himself, but what he does tell we have to believe – even when it seems so unbelievable.
Ford Madox Ford (he was Ford Madox Hueffer at the time, only changing his surname in 1919) set out to write a novel that contained all that he knew about writing. As he admitted in a preface to a republication of the novel in an collected works, ‘I had never really tried to put into any novel of mine all that I knew about writing. I had written rather desultorily a number of books – a great number – but they had all been in the nature of pastiches, of pieces of rather precious writing, or of tours de force.” Those who have read more of Ford than I tend to concur that he produced a lot of potboilers, a flawed masterpiece in the later Parade’s End trilogy, and some florid but dazzling memoirs that are rather more unreliable than that presented as John Dowell’s. I would add among his great achievements the 1905 The Soul of London, a philosophical study of London, perhaps the best non-fiction book on the city that I know.
The novel is not autobiographical – though it has autobiographical elements – but there is in Edward Ashburnham, as in Christopher Tietjens, the hero of Parade’s End, the kind of troubled Englishman that Ford saw in the mirror (he favoured the word ‘Tory’). They aspire to the values of their time and class without knowing, or understanding, what those values mean any more. They put up a good show, and it is the cause of their doom. Dowell exclaims, in one of his particularly despairing passages:
Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people—like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?
Good people. That’s the phrase that occurs in the novel again and again. Or, more particularly, ‘quite good people’ a construction that leapt out at me on reading the book again. It features early on:
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”.
You have to have been brought up on the edges of a polite English society, so able at weaving together values and language, to appreciate the extraordinary, if not toxic, richness of that phrase. In particular, the word ‘quite’. What does it mean? ‘Quite’ is one of those English words that can mean what it seems to say, and the opposite. The dictionary says that the adverb means ‘completely, wholly, entirely’ but also ‘somewhat, fairly’. Depending on how you say it, or hear it, it qualifies itself. And of course, say it in the right way, and it means both. English people of a certain class (or Americans, like Dowell, with a particular heritage) can use it like a knife. It can be employed to praise, to express uncertainty, to defend one’s view of the world, or to cut.
As a phrase, ‘quite good people’ has a fine rhythmic quality. There is a certainty there, an assurance echoed in the three beats, da da da-da. Ford was a poet, as well as being a novelist, essayist, memoirist and editor, and he displays a singular use of that combines the plain with the lyrical, such as my teenage self failed to see in that passage describing Edward Ashburnham, with its blues and pinks, its actions and their consequences. It lacks the sound that those observing the Ashburnhams and the Dowells would have uttered on seeing them, but you only have to practice saying the phrase in your head, with a subtly different emphasis each time, to feel its strange power. It is toxic.
‘Quite good people’ occurs twice in The Good Soldier. The first time is when we are being introduced to the quartet. The second is near the end, when we have been led through the cataclysm.
It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people will do in order to keep up their appearance of calm pococurantism.
The sentence describes the novel. It is almost designed to be difficult to read, or indeed to be able to say. From the Edwardian slang, to the flat irony of ‘quite good people’, to the accurate but tongue-tripping final word (which means nonchalance, to save you from looking it up, as I had to), it can read as representing the sheer clumsiness of keeping up appearances, of espousing values that have no value. Correct English can be anything but correct.
It is well known that Ford did not want the book to be called The Good Soldier. He had picked The Saddest Story, a phrase used in the opening sentence (“This is the saddest story I have ever heard”). The publisher rejected it, because in the middle of a war the word ‘sad’ was not going to help sales. I agree with the publisher’s decision, though for different reasons. It is not a sad story. ‘Sad’ is the one thing it is not. It is only ‘sad’ in the way you might think Othello is sad.
Ford proposed The Good Soldier as a replacement, doubtless evoking common use of the phrase as a means of praising someone as having the right values. It is a fine way to describe Edward Ashburnham, or indeed Ford Madox Hueffer, who joined the Army in the same year the book was published, 1915; and the subtitle, ‘A Tale of Passion’, is a good one. But The Good Soldier is not about the one man. Each of the central quartet occupies just as much of the action and reasoning. Leonora Ashburnham’s desperate struggles to manage a man with a perfect horror of being managed is as central to the design as her husband; likewise Florence Dowell, the unfaithful wife whose husband knows her not at all; and John Dowell, who tells us everything except about himself – it is a quartet who play Ford’s minuet (in 1928 Jean Rhys would write a novel entitled Quartet, based on her affair with Ford Madox Ford).
Instead I would have called it Good People. Or Quite Good People. That gets the view, the society, the hopes, the bitterness, the irony. Whatever it is, or might have been called, The Good Soldier is one of the finest novels in English. When Ford wrote that by writing it he wanted to show all that he knew about writing, he meant all writers, not just himself (he was a brilliant editor of literary journals, after all). Here is how the novel can be, if we are honest in our work. The tragedy is that, once you have written it, you will never write so well again. Now that is the saddest story.
Links
- There was a particularly good 1981 TV film of The Good Soldier, made by Granada. It succeeded in visualising what might seem to be the unfilmable, with a disordered narrative mixing flashbacks with flashforwards, and no skimping on the bleak ending. It is on YouTube. It starred Jeremy Brett (Edward Ashburnham), Vickery Turner (Florence Dowell), Robin Ellis (John Dowell), Susan Fleetwood (Leonora Ashburnham), Elizabeth Garvie (Nancy Rufford), Pauline Moran (Maisie Maidan) and John Ratzenberger, one year away from Cheers fame, as Jimmy. It was directed by Kevin Billington and scripted by Julian Mitchell. Ellis writes illuminatingly on the production, and with many illustrations, on his personal site, https://robin-ellis.net/2015/05/25/the-making-of-the-film-the-good-soldier. The image of the first edition at the head of this post comes from there.
