Reading The Good Soldier is like being trapped in a room with one of the windiest, endlessly digressive bores you can imagine. And then the penny drops and you realize you are in the middle of a rather fun mystery.
Who is this odd narrator, John Dowell, and why is he so in the thrall of a strange English couple, the Ashburnhams? What is the deal with Dowell’s wife? And why did Ford Madox Ford give this novel the title The Good Soldier, given there is nothing in it relating to the Great War then raging across Europe?
Another mystery less difficult to explain is the hold this elliptical book has had over generations of readers, only gaining stature in later critical surveys. The Good Soldier is a probing, devastating, subtly but persistently comedic examination of duty, religion, and so much else that falls under the heading of what one is brought up to believe.
Dowell is quite forward about it in his narration:
And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness.
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| The Kurhaus in Bad Nauheim, Germany is one of the Dowells and Ashburnhams early meeting places. "[O]n every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously should choose..." Image from the Kurhaus terrace at https://badnauheim.tour-de-kultur.de/kurhaus-terrasse-und-jugendstiltheater/ |
Yes, it is. And at the top of the list is what we are to make of this narrator. The title character is Captain Edward Ashburnham, who has just returned from British India and is now stationed with a local regiment back in England. Dowell admires him just for the way he looks when walking through a room, clear-eyed and stiff-necked. In time Dowell and his wife Leonora became regular companions of the Ashburnhams. Even so, he reveals “we knew nothing at all about them.”
Dowell is constantly like this, telling us one thing and then backtracking to say something quite different. The Good Soldier is often described as one of the best examples of something called “the unreliable narrator.” As the book goes on, there are blatant examples of Dowell holding back facts, so that tracks.
But is he unreliable on purpose, or because he’s genuinely struggling to get his facts straight? For me, that’s another mystery.
Set in the Belle Époque of upper-class Europe when people gathered at spas to dine and dance their nights away, The Good Soldier suggests from the start a world where keeping up appearances has a price. “Permanence? Stability? I can’t believe it’s gone,” Dowell sighs. “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.”
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| The Belle Epoque, or "Beautiful Era," was a decades-long period in Europe renowned for high living, ended suddenly by the onslaught of World War I. Above, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's At The Moulin Rouge, captures something of the same fancified eeriness as does The Good Soldier. Image from https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/convergence-belle-epoque |
Dowell may call Edward Ashburnham “a good soldier,” but the more we learn, the more the title suggests Dowell himself. His wife Florence, he tells us, has what is called “a heart,” a malady of that organ requiring constant rest and seclusion. Sex is out, too, a situation that bothers Dowell hardly at all. He is content being a “male sick nurse.”
Ah, but when he eventually discovers some unpleasant things about both his wife and the couple they have been spending so much time with, it doesn’t shake him quite as much as you suspect it would. He’s rather at times like a robot, play-acting a humanity he doesn’t quite possess:
She excused herself on the score of an overmastering passion. Well, I always say that an overmastering passion is a good excuse for feelings. You cannot help them.
How self-denying can a person be?
The mystery of The Good Soldier may in the end be less the seamy underbelly of life exposed to Dowell over time, but rather his inert response to same. Some readers have flat-out called Dowell a sociopath and read hints in his vague narration of murder and poisoning. How can he be so blind about what is going on around him?
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| A man like Edward Ashburnham given to conducting many affairs, Ford Madox Ford (above) focuses his best-known novel on a victim of same. A writer of many books, Ford was frustrated by his lack of acclaim in that field. The Good Soldier has lifted him after death above many contemporaries. Image from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ford-madox-ford |
My take is more chilling. He just doesn’t have soul enough for figuring such things out, or reacting to their discovery with any true emotion. He’s an empty vessel, not malevolent at all, but incapable to do anyone any real good, least of all himself.
Writing on like this about what the book may mean misses a larger point worth making, which is how much fun it is to read.
Dowell as a narrator is someone who can’t seem to get out of his own way. The opening chapters often devolve into parades of digressions as he struggles to communicate basic facts about his life. “I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze.”
He is often at pains to communicate his propriety, to absurd degrees:
Fellows come in and tell the most extraordinary gross stories – so gross that they will positively give you a pain. And yet they’d be offended if you suggested that they weren’t the sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. And very likely they’d be quite properly offended – that is if you can trust anybody alone with anybody.
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| A first edition of The Good Soldier, with its original title, "The Saddest Story," written above. Ford, who was still using his original last name Hueffer at the time, was persuaded to change the name because of sensitivities about the war then raging. Did Ford put forward "The Good Soldier" sarcastically, or because it is a better title? Another mystery. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier |
Even the name is a pun. A dowel is a pin used to hold something firmly in place; a kind of stick, which was also English parlance during this time for someone so upright as to be a bore. Dowell can also be read as “do well,” which ties into his stifling propriety, too.
The cruel side of this humor is evidenced in how the other characters treat him. From all available textual evidence, Dowell is an emotional doormat for everyone else in the book. Edward Ashburnham cheats on his wife relentlessly, though Dowell says it is only because he’s a sentimentalist about women. Leonora is of such refinement Dowell literally brags about being like the carpet beneath her feet.
This puppyish, pathetic devotion is broken up occasionally by occasional venting as he looks back.
“After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings,” he mopes. “But one doesn’t.”
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| A scene from a 1981 British ITV adaptation of The Good Soldier features Jeremy Brett as Edward Ashburnham and Robin Ellis as his devoted companion John Dowell, no doubt completely in the dark about what his friend is up to. Image from https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=2048791589197563&set=pcb.582891708184557 |
There are also vivid word pictures that Ford sets before the reader, including one in which a character keels over in the middle of packing her belongings, falls into an open portmanteau, and leaves her feet dangling out as if they were in “the jaws of a gigantic alligator.”
Then there is Florence’s heart condition, and Dowell’s need to be always on hand. The metaphor he offers at one point is wondrous:
She became for me a rare and fragile object, something burdensome, but very frail. Why it was as if I had been given a thin-shelled pullet’s egg to carry on my palm from Equatorial Africa to Hoboken.
He notes Florence and her family are from Stamford, Connecticut, as if that alone accounts for their oddities. His logic is often circular this way.
Throughout the novel, there is a sense the reader is eavesdropping on a fellow talking to himself, only occasionally aware his words are being overheard. His rambling early in the book goes on for so long and gets so tangled that I began suspecting a parody of Henry James or Marcel Proust, whose digressions were famously frequent:
Is all this digression or isn’t it digression? Again I don’t know. You, the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don’t tell me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life it was I led with Florence, and what Florence was like. Well, she was bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the floors of castles and over seas and over and over and over the salons of modistes and over the plages of the Riviera like a gay tremulous beam, reflected from water upon a ceiling. And my function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.
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| While an English novel with mostly European settings, a fair deal of The Good Soldier is set in the United States. It is there Dowell, originally of Philadelphia, courts Florence and meets her family, the Hurlburds. Florence's terms for marriage, he explains, included no sex: "Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without blinking." Image from https://www.folkwear.com/blogs/news/the-history-of-how-the-gilded-age-se-the-stage-for-change?srsltid=AfmBOoo6Gef2-Bux_OpJliNwfakJQUjCdcuWrWKQFBB2q46VMypYyywj |
Dowell offers up random anecdotes, all somehow connecting to the central story without his seeming to notice. Once that story comes into sharper focus, which takes a quarter of the book’s length, the story settles into a vivid sort of high-society melodrama. Throughout Dowell never loses his bystander status.
Is this maybe what gives The Good Soldier such punch? Certainly the reader can’t but identify with a character only barely more involved in the plot than he or she is. There is a sense of things falling apart fully out of one’s control, which a reader can feel at least as well as Dowell.
Leonora and Edward do want him around, but only for the occasional confidence and, eventually, to take a young woman off their hands whom Leonora at one time wanted to make Edward’s new mistress. Dowell suggests this, anyway; it is possible he only imagined it.
The atmosphere of louche decadence throughout the book is intoxicating, as is Ford’s mastery of prose. It’s a quiet sort of power, but very effective: “There was an extreme stillness with the remote and intermittent sound of the wind. There was the grey light in that brown, small room. And there appeared to be nothing else in the world.”
The
Good Soldier
is of a specific time, place, and social strata, upper-class Western Europe
before World War I, yet the mood and feelings it captures remain familiar.
Humanity always seems to teeter somewhere between oblivion and bliss; perhaps
that gives this such staying power.
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