A justly famous novel can slumber on one's shelves for an astonishingly long time without arousing the slightest interest. Indeed, it can arouse all the less interest for being so famous. There is a wonderfully accurate passage I encountered recently in Florence King, in which she describes a self-defeating trap in which precocious literary youngsters tend to ensnare themselves. Intent upon proving themselves possessed of knowledge undreamt-of by their surroundings -- whatever those may be -- young people desperate to develop a reputation for book learning will avoid all the novels anyone has ever heard of, heading straight for the lesser known works in the canons of the great, or the best-known in the oeuvre of the minor. They "skip Jane Eyre and read The Professor," as King puts it.
And in the very effort to evade knowledge possessed by everyone else, they deprive themselves of the knowledge that would have impressed upon others the idea that they were book-smart. The poison chalice of ignorance, which they were so desperate should pass from them, ends up being the very one from which they drink.
My aversion to reading The Good Soldier, despite its presence on my shelves for the last ten years, had something of this origin. The book has lain there so long, in fact, that it surprised me when I noticed it again earlier this week. I barely remember where I got it, even. I think it was from some free book give-away at the Regenstein Library in college, in which my principle was to grab a copy of every text that I had remotely heard of, since anyway it was free, and moreover I had (and have) some notion that I was eventually destined to read everything, it was only a matter of when, so a book of any kind -- even a justly famous and therefore dull one -- could never be a bad thing to possess.
The other factor weighing in the balance against reading it -- apart from the just fame -- came from my initial disappointment over the discrepancy between its name and its contents. When my mom first recommended the book to me when I was a teenager, I think I hoped for an instant that it might be some sort of scathing commentary on war. I wanted everything to be a scathing commentary on something or other, in those days -- and not much more than that -- and I hoped that the "good soldier" of the title was in fact not good at all, and that was the point -- that he was a dupe of diabolical forces -- something like a "good German" -- or else perhaps that he was a genuinely good man in a bad job, or else a terrible solider, not much good at all, and that would be the joke.
If the book had been The Good Soldier Svejk, in short, we might have been in business. But no, we were one word short. And when my mom told me it actually wasn't about war or soldiers, but was "really more of a love story," this for me -- at that age -- was the kiss of death. If I planned to read the book ever, at that point, it was only in some impossibly distant future. Like when I was twenty-eight, or something.
Since that time, I have experienced little of love, but even less of war, and as a result the former subject has become much more interesting to me than it was to my fifteen-year-old self. And so, as if the book now went off like a mine one had long thought defused. It suddenly presented itself to me -- for whatever reason -- as something I must read.
The subtitle of Ford's short masterpiece is A Tale of Passion, which is considerably more revealing than what comes before the colon; and it turns out -- if the novel's epistolary dedication is to be trusted -- that the discrepant over-title itself began life as a joke. Ford's original plan was to name his novel The Saddest Story -- a phrase he uses to describe it several places in the text -- but, trying to market the book in a world suddenly at war, his publishers had advised against it. As a satirical dig at them for this editorial hand-wringing, he suggested the title "The Good Soldier," and it stuck. But that phrase too appears in our text, rendering this account only slightly suspect.
I know roughly as little about Ford now as I did prior to reading the book. I knew he was of a generation and milieu of British life that straddled the divide of the 19th and 20th centuries, with one foot planted by reason of ancestry and birth among the Pre-Raphaelites and the other extended all the way into the Lost Generation (he knew Hemingway, etc. etc.) That's about it. What one does learn about his character from the book -- if he identifies at all with his protagonist -- is not inspiring. There are flickers and flashes from our narrator of gross and cruel prejudices, violence against servants, reflexive anti-Catholicism, that sort of thing.
Moreover, the chief characters in the Good Soldier are all of that unbearable and unbelievable variety of unproductive rich that inhabit many a novel of the fin-de-siecle (I am a "leisured American," announces our protagonist rather humorously, "which is as much as to say [...] un-American.") It is astonishing to contemplate -- no matter how often such novels confirm it -- that a newly-modern economy could produce such a surplus as to sustain so many people in a condition of abject and splendid idleness. (Then I contemplate the fact that my own profession is sustained entirely through voluntary donations, and I fall silent, lest I break the magic spell.) "I did nothing," says our protagonist, referring to his profession. "Why does one do things?" I should have liked to refer him to -- or, more accurately, to have referred to him in -- my earlier post on this subject.
This leisured American and his leisured American wife meet and befriend two equally leisured Britishers -- Edward and Leonora Ashburnham. Edward is an incurable spendthrift with the charm possessed by all the great doofy honorable landed Tories of English literature. Much like the Debarry household of George Eliot's Felix Holt, Edward sees it as a point of pride -- a duty suited to his position -- to put himself at expense to remit his tenants' rental payments during hard times, or to secure legal counsel for a young girl in the village who is charged with infanticide. As George Eliot writes of Maximus Debarry, he "only snarled in a subdued way when he looked over the accounts, willing to endure some personal inconvenience in order to keep up the institutions of the country, to maintain his hereditary establishment, and do his duty in that station of life--the station of the long-tailed saurian--to which it had pleased Providence to call him." Precisely such words could be applied to Edward Ashburnham, as Ford has drawn him. (A more contemporary instance of the type in English literature might be Guy Clinch, of Martin Amis's London Fields.)
This honorably charitable attitude on Edward's part -- feudal rather than egalitarian in its motives, but sympathetic nonetheless -- is despised by his Catholic wife Leonora, who -- in an interesting reversal of roles -- plays the part of the hard-nosed Protestant worldly-ascetic, intent in the belief that an estate should accumulate over time, rather than gradually dissipate through what Hazlitt once jokingly called "the idle claims of humanity." Ford attributes this stance in part to Leonora's descent from the land-owning classes of Ireland, that "garrison in a plundered country" (why she would then be Catholic eludes me, and suggests I don't really understand the complexities of Irish history). He also, however, intriguingly suggests that the Catholics in England are a kind of Protestant, and have the character of Dissenters, for "in England [they] are even technically Nonconformists."
These different attitudes to money soon prompt Leonora into a tight-fisted management of Edward's increasingly bankrupt affairs, while he seeks refuge in the company of other women who will understand and share his "ideals." The eventuates into infidelities, included an affair with the wife of our narrator/main character, and -- after her death -- to a tormented, chaste obsession on Edward's part with the girl whom the narrator intends for his second marriage.
One of the most interesting and oft-remarked aspects of the novel is the way all this is told. The narrator -- who self-consciously remarks upon his own digressive style late in the book -- alludes openly to every key element in this narrative within the very opening sections of the book, and they are all mentioned several times over again in a cyclical manner before he has finally told us the entirety of the tale. "[W]hen one discusses an affair -- a long, sad affair --," he observes, "one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places[.]"
This is plausible enough, but one needn't be fooled by the off-hand manner -- in reality, Ford's technique works as an extraordinarily powerful device for building and holding suspense. One knows the whole picture in outline from the very start, and desperately waits to see exactly how each piece will be filled in. In this way, what appears at first to be a dull story about idle and silly people and their foolish entanglements becomes -- as it unfolds -- breathlessly engaging, tragic, and horrible.
Our narrator is -- by most people's definitions -- the wronged party in this tragedy -- or one thereof. It is his wife whom Edward sleeps with, his intended whom Edward not-quite-seduces. Yet it is part of the strange genius of this novel and its eery sense of the oddness of human nature that he manages nevertheless to seem the mere observer of the whole travesty.
First though, let us count the ways in which he would have every right to be injured. His wife, Florence, dreams up an elaborate neurotic fiction about a weak heart, in order to warn her husband off the possibility of sex with her, while she proceeds to conduct liaisons with other men -- eventually including Edward. (Our narrator reasonably and calmly suggests that he could have excused his wife's feelings in these matters, as well as any "straight action" on her part -- such as if she had run off with Edward or any of the other men -- but that this extraordinary deception was a bit much.) Our narrator is then deceived by Leonora as to the status of Florence and Edward's relationship -- basically in order to spare his feelings, though this is generally not enough in life to make one forgive one's deceiver.
Yet, for all this, our narrator is singularly lacking in resentment and a feeling of betrayal. In one scene early in the novel, he conjures an image of three figures in a dream, alone on a desolate plain, two of them locked in a romantic embrace with one another, and the third standing off a pace and watching them. It is a vision seemingly out of Edvard Munch's "Jealousy," and it was plainly the basis for the pencil drawing by Stephen Greene that serves as the cover of the 1951 Vintage paperback edition of the novel -- the one I picked up at the free book give-away. Yet, while Greene portrays the third, watching figure as male -- possibly our narrator -- the narrator himself imagines that the third figure is Florence.
Perhaps this is just a projection on his part, but the narrator's seeming lack of jealousy of Edward and Florence's affair also emerges plausibly and organically from the story. For one thing, the narrator is not resentful because he genuinely does not know what else the other characters could have done. One of the great themes of the novel is precisely that Edward and Leonora are both "good people" -- yet they manage to inflict astonishing damage on the people around them. Edward -- as ultimately philandering as he is -- sets about each of his love affairs through a kind of self-deception. Each time, he is truly convinced that his motives are pure, that he is seeking a kind of higher understanding and love and nothing more. Likewise Leonora means well, in misleading our protagonist. "[H]ere, then," writes Ford, "were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, agony of the mind, and death."
As a commentary on the pitfalls of Victorian sentimentality and hypocrisy (Edward is forever being described by our protagonist as an incurable sentimentalist) the novel is immensely powerful. Yet in its treatment of this subject, it reveals what seems to me a fundamental truth about life in general-- one we didn't manage to banish entirely with the cultural demolition of the Victorians. That is, the truth that harm is very often done more by people mistaking their own motives, than by those actuated by self-conscious malice. As I have argued before, self-awareness should be placed very high on the list of essential human virtues.
The other reason for our narrator's ultimate lack of anger and resentment is the fact that it is really not Florence he loves at all, at last-- but the couple, Edward and Leonora. It is them he is staring at on the "immense plain" of his dream, if he is staring at anyone, if he is there -- them he longs to be a part of, rather than wishing to insert himself between Florence and Edward.
Does that perhaps make sense to you as within the plausible bounds of human contrariness? Maybe not. Most people in their adult lives these days are too busy to conceive these kinds of tortured friendships and these kinds of invidious passions. We lack the leisure and energy for them. One time in our lives when we quite possibly and probably did, however, is in college, and if we relate to this novel at a personal level, it may be there that our memories repair in doing so. College is, after all, a kind of bizarre and unrepeatable hiatus in the context of modern life, but one that seems to have resembled what the whole of life was like to wealthy and idle Edwardians (in as much as it is full of a the constant round of being surrounded by the same people day in and day out, of exclusivity, of the content need for a constant supply of new things to talk about). This is further proof of my long-standing theory that people don't really mature with age; they are just placed into different circumstances.
We may recall from our younger days, in short, similar strange friendships to the ones Ford describes. Times when we fell in love with whole groups of people, whole couples, whole dynamics, whole concepts of our role within some larger social organism. If Ford's protagonist misses anything from his past, it is certainly not the company of Florence -- but rather the life that the four of them led together as friends. It was a life built on illusion and lies, but our protagonist is not wholly convinced that it was unreal, for all that. "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 sure to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?" he asks.
This is another area in which Ford is commenting upon a phenomenon that was particularly manifest in a given English social and historical milieu -- but which is a feature universally, in however attenuated a form, of all human nature.
The Good Soldier is in large part a novel about the peculiarities of English reserve, to be sure, and Ford adopts the voice of an American (which he was not) the better to ethnographically chronicle this perversity of his own national character. It is a novel at heart about how it is possible to spend years with English people and never know the least bit about who they actually are.
One of the most fascinating and odd things about the story our protagonist ultimately wishes to tell us, after all, is that he was aware of none of it at all while it was happening. Perhaps this is truly the final reason for his lack of anger and resentment. He takes us all through Florence and Edward's affair, through Edward's passionate obsession with the girl the protagonist wishes to marry, through his and Leonora's desperate fights over money, social mores, and marital vows -- and yet he didn't know any of it was happening until after Florence and Edward were both dead.
To him, all these things transpired behind a veil of perfect decorum. Not a ripple came to trouble the pure, glassy surface. "This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people," he remarks at the very beginning of the book. And -- later on -- "I think the modern [...] English habit -- of taking everyone for granted is responsible for this. [... W]ith all the taking for granted, you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued."
This -- like the commentary on sentimentality -- might seem to be a message fitted to a particular era. It suits our stereotypes about the Victorians and their stiff upper lip. Yet, just as in the former case, I don't think anyone is exempt from the truth of the indictment for being neither Victorian nor British.
Most of the romantic passions any of us conceive in adult life are founded in some way on deceptions. Probably not so deliberate as the ones that ensnare our protagonist -- more deceptions we commit against ourselves. Either way, though, I don't think anyone can look back on an obsessive period of love from their past and feel that their thoughts and conceptions at that time still seem to them a rational assessment of the state of affairs. There are few loves that don't, in retrospect, seem like a kind of madness. And we too will be unsure in looking back, like Ford's protagonist, whether that means we "really" had a goodly apple on our hands or not.
Which is why The Good Soldier retains to this day its intense interest and power as a novel, as well as its deserved reputation. If it had been about war after all, I probably wouldn't today be able to judge whether it had anything truthful to say at all. Given that it is "really more of a love story," however, it is possible to see all too clearly that it is wrung directly from experience.
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