I've been meaning for ages to read something by Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), because he kept coming up in the Paris expatriate literature I consumed quite a bit of at the beginning of the year. Ernest Hemingway was horrible about him. Sylvia Beach was much kinder, commenting: "He had been gassed in the war, but it had not affected his activities. He was a jolly creature, and popular with his fellow writers." Morrill Cody, channelling barman Jimmie Charters, also focuses on his bonhomie: "[He was] a great organizer of good times, first in his bal musette near the Place de la Contrescarpe and later in his own studio... Ford was making considerable money at that time and he spent much of it entertaining his Montparnasse friends with very large quantities of the finest wines and liqueurs."

Gertrude Stein, channelling Alice B. Toklas, writes: "I was next to Ford Madox Hueffer [as he was then] and I liked him very much and I liked his stories of Mistral and Tarascon and I liked his having been followed about in that land of the french royalist, on account of his resemblance to the Bourbon claimant. I had never seen the Bourbon claimant but Ford at that time undoubtedly might have been a Bourbon." It was in Ford's literary magazine, The Transatlantic Review, that extracts from Stein's The Making of Americans were first serialized (at Hemingway's instigation). And she recounts the way Ford interrupted Hemingway's explanation of why he wouldn't be able to review the book: "Just then a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and Ford Madox Ford said, young man it is I who wish to speak to Gertrude Stein. Ford then said to her, I wish to ask your permission to dedicate my new book to you. May I. Gertrude Stein and I were both awfully pleased and touched." She also recalls: "It was Ford who once said of Hemingway, he comes and sits at my feet and praises me. It makes me nervous." Very perspicacious...

But what pushed me to finally get round to reading some of his work was the realization that he spent quite a while in Toulon. Most of the Midi-resident expatriate authors of the 1920s and 1930s preferred to live in Bandol or Sanary, or in the area around Hyeres, heading for Toulon only for necessities like banks or health services. (The city had a rep for opium dens and brothels, and a bit of an edgy vibe... D.H. Lawrence wrote: "So we left for Toulon, gay Toulon, with its ships and sailors and shops, real sailors’ shops with boxes adorned with shells, ships made of shells, long knives from Corsica, on which was written: ‘Che la mia ferita sia mortale’ (May my stabbing be deadly!)... Yesterday we went to Toulon in the bus -- a port, all sailors and cats, and queer people -- not unattractive: and this afternoon we went out on the sea in a motor boat, the four of us -- a blue sea, bright sun, but a cold little tiny wind -- and I had no idea the mountains behind us [Mt Faron] were so deep in snow, a long low range of white."

Ford, on the other hand, actually lived in Toulon. According to Max Saunders, he fell in love with the city when he visited in 1925, and returned several times in subsequent years, eventually renting part of a villa from 1931 to 1936: "Toulon wasn't fashionable, like Cap Ferrat... But it had enough artists and writers to provide the kind of creative milieu Ford thrived in." In fact, Ford had already written about Toulon even before he went there. And there were a number of draw-cards. He would have been familiar with its military history, and the role it played in Anglo-French relations; he was a fan of the work of Captain Frederick Marryat, who had visited and written about Toulon; and Toulon was also a place that was important for Ford's friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad. By the 1930s, "Toulon really gets into the foreground of Ford's writing... As Ford argues in [the book called] Provence, Toulon's history separates it from the culture of the region... Perhaps that, ultimately, was the attraction of Toulon. Just as New York is not America, Toulon is not France; nor is it, quite, Provence. It is in them but not of them: exactly in the position Ford identified with his own point of view, at once inside and outside the systems he represents, whether nation, class, culture, or genre."

Some photos from that article:


The Villa Paul, by Stella Bowen, 1931


Based on Saunders's description, I think this is where the villa is located (926 Corniche du General de Gaulle)


Ford on the Terrace, Cap Brun, around 1931, by Janice Biala, Ford's partner of many years

Anyway, The Good Soldier, published in 1915, is a cracking good novel. In fact, Ford regarded it as his best work.

Our narrator is John Dowell. He's American, as is his wife, Florence. The book is about their marriage, and the tangle of relationships that form when they get to know a British couple, Edward and Leonora Ashburnham.

John is, from the get-go, a tricksy narrator. His first sentence reads: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard..." A curious thing to say, as it gives us no indication that this story intimately involves HIM. Very early on, he's telling us: "My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them." This is John all over. Apparently oblivious. Edward and Leonora, he says, seemed the "model couple". Of Edward he comments, with masterful ambiguity: "So well set up, with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity, such a warm goodheartedness!"

There's a terrible sense of foreboding from the outset, too: "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." We know, from the beginning, that two of the four are dead, and the narrator is "horribly alone". Hints permeate this opening section: You would have thought, says John, that Edward was "exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with". But that was "madness".

And so it goes on. We have a mixture of time periods; the sudden introduction of characters, without explanation or context (they dangle there, until they're eventually picked up again in the narrative); a mesh of details that are both intriguing and concerning (why is John looking at the "little police reports" that each guest is supposed to sign...?).

Then there's his fascination with Ashburnham, who knows all sorts of man-of-the-world stuff, and advises Dowell accordingly, but remains an intriguing cipher:

"And, if I ever penetrated into his private room it would be to see him standing, with his coat and waistcoat off and the immensely long line of his perfectly elegant trousers from waist to boot heel. And he would have a slightly reflective air and he would be just opening one kind of case and just closing another.

"Good God, what did they all see in him? for I swear there was all there was of him, inside and out; though they said he was a good soldier. Yet, Leonora adored him with a passion that was like an agony, and hated him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea. How could he arouse anything like a sentiment, in anybody?...

"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."

What a curious set of contradictions... What is John not seeing? Or what is he choosing not to tell us?

By the end of the book, John has failed to notice many things: That his wife's supposed heart complaint is fictional, that she is having an affair with Edward, and that her death was suicide. You feel sorry for him on one level (it does seem as though he was well and truly done over in his marriage). But you can't help wondering... Can anyone really be so blind? Or is this the classic case of a refusal to see?


Ford at the Villa Paul, 1930s

The snippets of information about Ashburnham's relations with a string of women become ever more tantalizing: The servant girl in the train; the mistress of a Russian grand duke, who costs him so much money that Leonora has to take over the couple's finances; the woman with the "quite nasty husband"; Maisie Maidan; "the girl"...

And Leonora also becomes more intriguing. She is clearly a kind of enabler for her husband. Looking back, John says: "I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonora was pimping for Edward." And indeed, Leonora had been instrumental in bringing Maisie to Europe -- another woman that Ashburnham is showing interest in. Here's someone else who unquestioningly accepts things until darker motives become obvious. Finding Leonora has paid her passage, Maisie is horrified ("I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress"); she decides to run away, and dies in her attempt to do up her trunk (because she genuinely does have a heart complaint).

Part I, then, ends with Maisie's death -- 4 August 1904. Part II will end with Florence's.

Just before that "deceived husband" bit, John comments: "What chance had I against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in league to conceal their hands from me? What earthly chance? They were three to one -- and they made me happy. Oh God, they made me so happy that I doubt if even paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me the like." But who, you increasingly wonder, is the real gambler here?

It's not that there's any Big Reveal, and Dowell is finally outed as the devil incarnate. But you constantly wonder about him...

And you wonder how much of the weirdness between the characters is a reflection of the weirdness of Dowell's mind. His attitude to Florence, for example: "You cannot, you see, have acted as nurse to a person for twelve years without wishing to go on nursing them, even though you hate them with the hatred of the adder." And his take on Florence's attitude to Leonora, as the former blunders in trying to "fix" her friend's marriage: "Leonora would treat her like the whore she was. Once she said to Florence in the early morning: 'You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my proper place. I know it, thank you.'"

John makes it hard for us to have sympathy for Florence. But he does acknowledge that she is afraid of him... She has seen him violent. So she doesn't know how he would react if he found out about her pre-marital relationship (with a man she is rather ashamed of). It's the combination of seeing someone who DOES know about that history in conversation with John, and suspecting that Edward has also moved on to pastures new, that pushes her to the suicide John insists he thought was a heart attack.

When she spots the man he's talking to, he sees her look stricken, and head upstairs, but it's not until "a long time afterwards" that he goes up to Florence's room." Later, he adds that his conversation with the man who knows some of Florence's secrets made her seem less real to him: "It is even possible that, if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her room and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But I just couldn't do it..."

And very soon after her death, he's talking about marrying "the girl".

You feel there's room for another book here, with Florence's side of the story...


Toulon, 2024

We have by now learned about all Edward's peccadilloes. But Leonora still hopes to salvage something. She thinks that once Edward has "exhausted a number of other types of women", he'll return to her. But it's not to be: "Florence knocked all that on the head." And that sentence is the end of Part III. The previous two Parts have ended with deaths. But this, too, is a kind of death. The death of hope.

Meanwhile, who is this "girl"? She's Nancy, Leonora's ward, used to seeing Edward in the role of a guardian. And yes, he falls in love with her... He tries to do the right thing, but it's another twisted relational skein: Edward is attempting renunciation; Nancy is for a long time oblivious; and Leonora is back in manipulative mode again.

Things come to a head after Florence's death, while John is in the United States (receiving a handy legacy via Florence's family).

Leonora "wanted to go on torturing Edward with the girl's presence... [She] said: 'If you want me to divorce you, I will. You can marry her then. She's in love with you.'" Meanwhile, she tells Nancy: "Edward's dying -- because of you. He's dying... You must stay here... to save Edward. He's dying for love of you." And Nancy says: "I know it... And I am dying for love of him." But she insists she is going to Glasgow to "rescue" her "fallen" mother. Edward, meanwhile, insists she is going back to India to live with her violent father. Leonora is obsessed: "She repeated that the girl must belong to her husband... The girl must become an adulteress; she had wronged Edward by being so beautiful, so gracious, so good. It was sinful to be so good."

Whoa... And it's at this point that they cable to invite John to stay... Ah yes, John, just the person you need in a relationship crisis. John, the person who never notices anything. John, the person who never acts until it's too late.

John says he wants to marry Nancy (he's been thinking about "the girl" for a while, remember). But Leonora doesn't want her ending up nearby. So Nancy duly leaves for India, having been thoroughly briefed on Edward's romantic history by Leonora.

John says, laconically: "Edward called me to come and have a chat with him, and I couldn't stop him cutting his throat." Nancy, hearing of this suicide while on her way to India, has a breakdown, and totally loses her reason. John brings her back to England. And he would marry her if she were judged sane enough. But she isn't. "So here I am," he says, "very much where I started thirteen years ago. I am the attendant, not the husband, of a beautiful girl, who pays no attention to me."

Leonora, meanwhile, has married a man called Rodney Bayham. "Not one of us has got what he really wanted," says John, who mourns the extinction of two noble spirits while the prosaic Leonora lives and thrives: "To her were sacrificed the only two persons that I have ever really loved... For I can't conceal from myself that I loved Edward Ashburnham -- and that I love him because he was just myself." If this is surprising, then it becomes even more so when we learn more about the circumstances of the suicide.

John is there when Edward receives a cable from Brindisi: "Having rattling good time. Nancy." Edward shows him the telegram. Takes out his penknife. Asks John to take the telegram to Leonora: "I guess he could see in my eyes that I didn't intend to hinder him. Why should I hinder him?" Yes, John is good at not preventing suicides... "When he saw that I did not intend to interfere with him his eyes became soft and almost affectionate. He remarked: 'So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know.'... I trotted off with the telegram to Leonora. She was quite pleased with it."

And that's how the book ends...



It's chilling on several levels, The Good Soldier. How close love and hatred often lie. How little we know of others and ourselves. How untrustworthy are any of our attempts at narration.

John remains impenetrable. As Sam Jordison notes, "The most impressive thing for me is that all bets are off. This is a book open to interpretation... Dowell can be both an innocent victim and a monster. And he is fascinating, whichever way you look at him."

This blogger also has a nice exposition of this ambiguity: "John isn’t the neutral observer and narrator he claims to be; he was a participant in everything he describes and sometimes the only witness, which increasingly makes The Good Soldier a murky read. John emphasises surface tranquility, proper behaviour and good form; everything around him though seems to be passion, confusion, fear, and of course love (the emotion he seems to most struggle with). On another reading, John is in modern terms a sociopath and as the book progresses that becomes more persuasive. Lives are ruined here, people die, and John’s bafflement could be genuine but could also be a mix of front and underlying lack of interest in the tragedies of other people."

As Robert McCrum says, "The Good Soldier... stands at the entrance to 20th-century fiction as a dark, spellbinding puzzle, a novel of perennially enthralling and mysterious depths whose influence lingers like gun-smoke after a shooting." It's true. Its creepy and psychological characteristics linger with you.

To close, a quick note on the title, which is rather odd. Edward is described as a good soldier, but we wonder about that, as we wonder about plenty of other things.

Sam Jordison quotes Ford himself: "This book was originally called by me The Saddest Story, but since it did not appear until the darkest days of the war were upon us, Mr Lane [the publisher] importuned me with letters and telegrams -- I was by that time engaged in other pursuits! -- to change the title, which he said would at that date render the book unsaleable. One day when I was on parade, I received a final wire of appeal from Mr Lane, and the telegraph being reply-paid, I seized the reply form and wrote in hasty irony: ‘Dear Lane, Why Not The Good Soldier’... To my horror six months later the book appeared under that title."

But Jordison also thinks the title is a good one: "It is a title that both reflects on the subject of the novel and changes it. Why focus on this good soldier? And how good is he?" And, of course, "in directing the spotlight onto Edward, the title helps John Dowell remain in the shadows".

How sad that someone who could create something so thought-provoking and brilliant should die "in poverty, forgotten and despondent. The writer George Seldes claims the ageing Ford told him: 'I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I’m now an old man and I’ll die without making a name like Hemingway.'"

If only he could have looked further down the decades.


Ford