the good soldier (ford madox ford)

There was a scrawled note in the book, which I have had for many moons, from 1985. Which suggests it is forty years since I last read it. I have clung to the memory of the book, no matter how faint. But I had forgotten quite what a barnstormingly brilliant piece of writing it is.

Structurally you might say it’s all over the place. The narrator leaps from one moment in the past to another, seemingly at times willy-nilly. The story unfolds like a crumpled sheet. The affairs of Edward Ashburnham, around which the narrative is constructed, flicker and fade. Even the affair with the narrator’s wife, Florence. In the hands of another writer this would be the tragic spine of the story, but Ford has a shrewder take on human nature than most. He recognises that relationships, including marriage, are arrangements. Even love affairs, supposedly driven by the imperatives of the heart, are contingent on time, place and the individual’s tendency to want to fall in love. Edward is a wanton fool, but he is also driven by an excess of what the narrator calls sentimentality, but might also be called affection. In spite of his infidelities, he is a good man to many. Just not his wife. And, as the novel explains, there are reasons for that, which might include that his wife wasn’t ready when she became his wife. Timing is all. Affairs of the heart are accidents waiting to happen.

The exhumation of the affairs and relationships which make up the novel is surgical. Unlike Waugh in Brideshead, perhaps, any romanticism is excised, even if the narrator, and perhaps the reader, cannot help but construct from the figure of the Wykehamist, Edward Ashburnham, a vision of the ideal Englishman, right down to his clumsy naivety in love. He is the cursed romantic, whose absurdity is both admired and reviled by the Yankee narrator.  The differences between an English romanticism and an American pragmatism is laid bare. The novel offers a counterpoint to the typical generalisation of the English as a cold, passionless race. Under the starchy surface, blood rages. The weasel under the cocktail cabinet, as Pinter puts it.