Dowell certainly makes it difficult for the reader to follow his tale, not only by failing to tell it chronologically, but also by digressing from it and loading it with a welter of geographical, topographical, cultural and personal asides. For instance, if his ‘anecdote’ in Part One, Chapter 2 about old Mr Hurlbird dispensing Californian oranges about the globe is briefly diverting in both senses of the word, to follow on from the tense ‘Protest’ scene with information about his ‘appetites’ (helpings of caviare at a typical table d’hôte are insufficient, he complains), his ‘impatiences’ (he cites the Belgian State Railway’s scandalous treatment of French trains), and other miscellaneous issues, seems nothing less than a goad to the reader, a deliberate holding back of the story. A little earlier, Dowell has shared with us his fondness for catching the 2.40 train from Nauheim to Marburg and the sights one can see on the journey, and earlier still he has told us the story of Peire Vidal. ‘Is all this digression or isn’t it digression?’ he muses in Part One, Chapter 2, and it is a question which hovers around in the reader’s mind, not least in Part Three, Chapter 4, when Dowell goes on at some length about his brief and uneventful business career in Philadelphia. ‘Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance,’ Dowell acknowledges in Part Four, Chapter 2, ‘but they crowd on me. I will try to tell the story.’
If the narrator draws attention to his unfitness for his task throughout the novel, he also spotlights himself in more intriguing ways. Most obviously, though Dowell carries the ‘title deeds of [his] farm’ around in his pocket and expresses pride in his Quaker roots, ‘his account of his background’, in the words of the American critic Grover Smith, ‘does not hold up well: he calls his country the “United States of North America”… [and] boasts that he came of a family originally English, the first Dowell having “left Farnham in Surrey in company with [the Quaker leader] William Perm” (there are no Perm associations at Farnham…)’. Most curious of all, according to Smith, is Dowell’s assertion that he ‘learned “Pennsylvania Duitsch” (sic) in childhood. In general, American probabilities are so foreign to him that… we might suspect him to be bogus.’ Smith emphasizes that Ford (who was born in 1873 to an English mother and a German father and christened ‘Ford Hermann Hueffer’):
could not have been guilty of this howler, for he of all people would have known that Pennsylvania Deutsch is not Holland Dutch. Dowell is marked as ignorant and pretentious – and, in some sense which, even so, is not quite the literal one, as an imposter. He has touched up and tinted his own photograph.9
The bath attendants at Nauheim have an unfailing ‘air of authority’, but the narrator, emphatically, does not.
As with every aspect of this text, however, things are not quite so black and white as they seem. It is probable, for instance, that rather than drawing attention to his ignorance, pretentiousness and bogusness, Dowell’s use of ‘Duitsch’ is an orthographic detail intended by Ford to accentuate his genuineness. Duitsch is a variant of Deutsch in Plattdeutsch, the Low German dialect spoken by immigrants from rural north Germany, otherwise known as ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’: the Amish and other Pennsylvanian communities still speak it today. It is quite conceivable that Dowell would have picked up the spelling with the ‘Pennsylvania Duitsch’ he absorbed from his German immigrant school friends, or, more likely, the Dowell family’s German immigrant servants. It is not a ‘howler’ at all.
But if Dowell is not quite the ‘marked’ American some critics have made him out to be, his handling of detail on this side of the Atlantic is at times just as iffy. At one point, for example, Dowell says the castle at Marburg is ‘not a square castle like Windsor’, which would be helpful were it not for the fact that Windsor Castle is nothing like a square and never has been. More strikingly, ‘Bramshaw Teleragh’, the nearest settlement to Bramshaw Manor, the Ashburnham family home, sounds almost more Irish than Hampshirish, half real place, half trumped-up location, while Leonora’s maiden name, Powys, is a most singular and unaccountable Irish surname in that it is a well-known and longstanding Welsh place-name.10 The surname Maidan arouses similar misgivings in that maidan is an Urdu word meaning ‘an open space in or near a town; a parade-ground’.11 It is the kind of word an officer’s wife like Maisie Maidan would have heard and even used in India on a daily basis. And while it may sound like a name ‘of country parsonage origin’, it would normally be spelt ‘Maiden’ or ‘Madin’: ‘Maidan’ is unrecorded as an English surname.12 Like a number of Dowell’s American references, therefore, ‘Bramshaw Teleragh’, ‘Powys’, ‘Maidan’ and the Windsor Castle remark all seem designed to arouse the reader’s suspicions – though it is also true, conversely, that ‘Dowell’ is a surname which in the late nineteenth century had a specific association with Philadelphia and nowhere else in the United States.13 If Ford goes to the trouble of giving his narrator such an authentic Philadelphian surname, why does he also make him come across as an ‘imposter’ in some ways? And why do at least three of the novel’s other proper nouns sound questionable? A ‘dowel’ (while the dictionary is to hand) is ‘a headless wooden pin’ used to hold together the components of a structure, but because of his dubious nomenclature and a host of other problems, Dowell’s narrative does not hold together very tightly at all. Of course, whether this is because Dowell is constitutionally ‘headless’ and ‘wooden’, or because Ford was occasionally slapdash, is harder to say. But some of the elements of Dowell’s story are so inexplicably baffling or strange, the likelihood is that they were planted on him by the author in order to further encourage the reader to study everything Dowell says with the utmost care and circumspection, and to make us think even harder about what he might be keeping back. Dowell calls his trust of his wife ‘madness’, but there is plenty to suggest that it would be just as crazy for the reader wholly to trust him.
Dowell’s dubiousness is matched by his secretiveness. ‘I have a taste for good cookery and a watering tooth at the mere sound of the names of certain comestibles,’ he tells the reader. ‘If Florence had discovered this secret of mine I should have found her knowledge of it so unbearable that I never could have supported all the other privations of the regime that she extracted from me. I am bound to say that Florence never discovered this secret.’ And it is this same zest for concealment, presumably, which accounts for his reluctance to spell out the word ‘Marburg’ – there appears to be no other reason why he should refer to it as ‘M– ’ throughout his tale – providing further evidence that a man who frequently laments his inability to communicate may well actually relish non-communication.
Furthermore, although Dowell does his best to portray himself as a thin-blooded and undemonstrative man, we glimpse other sides of his character that are more disturbing. For example, the supposedly timid and genteel narrator tells us that when his old black valet dropped Florence’s ‘grip’ he attacked him: ‘I saw red, I saw purple. I flew at Julius… I filled up one of his eyes; I threatened to strangle him.’ Dowell has already admitted that he ‘hate[d Florence] with the hatred of the adder’ and that she lived in fear of him: ‘For that was really the mainspring of her fantastic actions. She was afraid that I should murder her.’ It is almost certainly this terror, Dowell is ‘convinced’, rather than the sight of Ashburnham kissing Nancy, which induces Florence to swallow prussic acid immediately after seeing her husband in conversation with Bagshawe, the man who once caught her leaving Jimmy’s bedroom in the early hours of the morning they (and old Mr Hurlbird) were guests at Bagshawe’s house in Herefordshire. It is, after all, in the event of this kind of exposure that she always has the prussic acid to hand. Dowell may wish to present himself as passionless, may even think of himself as passionless, but he is clearly a man with a great capacity for passion of one kind or another, a man more than capable of ‘the maddest kind of rage’.
Thinking hard about the reliability of Dowell’s narrative makes the reader chary of all acts of disclosure in the novel. Ashburnham’s goodness as a soldier, for example,
looks distinctly less clear-cut when we bear in mind that the principal source of Dowell’s information is the awe-struck Nancy. ‘[C]hant[ing] Edward’s praises to [Dowell]’, Nancy glorifies her guardian to such a degree that he becomes, as Dowell sees it, a superhuman combination of Lohengrin, El Cid and the Chevalier Bayard, three heroes of legendary status. Nancy’s transfiguration of Ashburnham from an exemplary soldier into an unexampled warrior is all the more noticeable because our only knowledge of his military service which does not appear to originate with her is the fact that he received the DSO and was promoted to the rank of brevet-major ‘during the shuffling of troops’ that happened as a result of the South African, or second Boer, War (1899–1902). To hold the Distinguished Service Order (awarded to officers for exceptional service) and be twice recommended for the Victoria Cross and yet remain at the rank of captain seems meagre reward for Ashburnham’s outstanding gallantry and a soldiering career which must have lasted around fifteen years. When Dowell asks Ashburnham about his DSO, he dismisses the question with either an embarrassed or a cynical disclaimer. Has Ashburnham embroidered the truth in order to entertain himself at the expense of Nancy or to impress Dowell? Or has Nancy, or Dowell, made most of it up, inventing a heroic record of service in tribute to the hero they worship? It is impossible to say, of course, but the more closely we examine the matter, the less certain we can be that Ashburnham was a good soldier – and that is without taking into consideration his affairs with Mrs Basil and Mrs Maidan, the wives of ‘injured brother officer[s]’. And what applies to Ashburnham’s soldiering is applicable to the novel as a whole: the more intensively it is scrutinized, the more densely uncertainties proliferate. For this reason, it is crucial that the reader stays alert and open-minded at all times. If we too readily accept Dowell’s characterization of Florence as a flirtatious ‘Anglo-maniac’ hell-bent on charming her way into the Hampshire rural gentry, for example, it will come as quite a shock to learn that she is ‘of a line that had actually owned Bramshaw Teleragh for two centuries before the Ashburnhams came there’.
Nor would it be wise to dismiss Dowell as a booby too hastily. There are other ways of approaching his narrative which suggest he may be more ringmaster than clown. First and foremost, Dowell’s narrative method, for all its apparent flaws, is closely modelled on Ford’s own theory of story-telling. ‘I have, I am aware,’ Dowell admits at the beginning of Part Four,
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. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes. And, when one discusses an affair – a long, sad affair – one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that 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 and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.
By the time Ford wrote The Good Soldier, he had come to exactly the same conclusion about the anti-realistic effect of a strictly chronological narrative structure. Indeed, in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, Ford recalls how he and Conrad had decided that the whole problem of the British novel
was that it went straight forward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintance with your fellows you never do go straight forward. You meet an English gentleman at your golf club. He is beefy, full of health, the moral of the boy from an English Public School of the finest type. You discover, gradually, that he is hopelessly neurasthenic, dishonest in matters of small change, but unexpectedly self-sacrificing, a dreadful liar but a most painfully careful student of lepidoptera and, finally, from the public prints, a bigamist who was once, under another name, hammered on the Stock Exchange… To get such a man in fiction you could not begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically to the end. You must first get him in with a strong impression, and then work backwards and forwards over his past.14
Which is exactly what Dowell does with Ashburnham, of course.
Vincent J. Cheng has usefully reconstructed ‘a clear chronology (or as clear as possible) of the events of the story’ and in doing so he, like other critics, has drawn attention to a number of inconsistencies in The Good Soldier – for example, an apparent confusion about the date of the first meeting of the Ashburnhams and Dowells at Nauheim, and the fact that Dowell appears to finish writing a novel published in 1915 at the beginning of 1916!15 – but while these ‘problems’ may point to Ford’s imperfect workmanship, it is just as likely that they are integral to his representation of the lack of ‘straight forward[ness]’ in human experience and his belief that a discontinuous and inconsistent narrative structure is more true to life than one which is flawlessly chronological. In Part Three Dowell mentions that he is well aware of the distinction between ‘a cheap novelist’ and ‘a very good novelist’ and tells us that ‘it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things dearly’. Riddled with darkness and doubt though The Good Soldier may be, and notwithstanding Dowell’s protestations of incompetence, the fact is that it, and he, successfully get across the messiness, ‘unhappiness’, bewilderment and isolation of what Dowell calls ‘this sweltering hell of ours’. The truth is that Dowell is both tiresomely ineffectual and subtly effective as a narrator, often simultaneously, and the more the novel is re-read, the more his craftsmanship and his achievement may be appreciated. For ‘an ageing American with very little knowledge of life’, a man who freely confesses that he ‘doesn’t know much about human beings’, Dowell, especially in the second half of the book, writes almost with tragic insight.
The idea of a narrator addressing a ‘silent listener’ is also found in Ford’s criticism. In writing of this figure in a two-part essay called ‘On Impressionism’ (1914), Ford discussed the literary artist’s absolute need to ‘capture’ and ‘hold’ his ‘silent listener’s’ attention:
You will do this by methods of surprise, of fatigue, by passages of sweetness in your language, by passages suggesting the sudden and brutal shock of suicide. You will give him passages of dullness, so that your bright effects may seem more bright; you will alternate, you will dwell for a long time upon an intimate point; you will seek to exasperate so that you may the better enchant. You will, in short, employ all the devices of the prostitute. If you are too proud for this you may be the better gentleman or the better lady, but you will be the worse artist.16
The ‘silent listener’ of The Good Soldier, though facing Dowell across a cosy cottage fire, is never permitted a cosy grasp of things, but Ford’s credo suggests that our discomfort may well be intentional and that we must listen all the harder to what Dowell says in order to locate his meaning. As he remarks to the reader apropos of Edward and Leonora’s quarrel about sending Nancy back to her father: ‘I can’t make out which of them was right. I leave it to you.’
Above all, Ford himself was an unreliable narrator, never averse to downplaying the truth in order to heighten an effect. ‘This book… is full of inaccuracies as to facts’, he wrote of Ancient Lights (1911), a volume of reminiscences dedicated to his daughters, ‘but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute’,17 while in his preface to Joseph Conrad Ford declared:
Where the writer’s memory has proved to be at fault over a detail afterwards out of curiosity looked up, the writer has allowed the fault to remain on the page; but as to the truth of the impression as a whole, the writer believes that no man would care – or dare – to impugn it.18
If we are prepared to read Dowell as a Fordian impressionist, rather than an unreliable narrator, the dependability of his narrative becomes less of a critical issue. The only problem then, as one critic puts it, is that ‘Dowell is not merely
an untrustworthy narrator but an untrustworthy impressionist’.19
But even if there were no parallels between Ford’s narrative theory and Dowell’s narrative practice, there is plenty to suggest that the American narrator knows exactly what he is doing, and that in writing his story he wants to show us he has more of a ‘good’ novelist in him than a ‘cheap’ one. For example, Carol Jacobs has examined the layered complexity of the incident on the journey from Nauheim to Marburg when Dowell looks out of the train window and sees ‘a brown cow hitch its horns under the stomach of a black and white animal and the black and white one [is] thrown right into the middle of a narrow stream’. Jacobs addresses the way in which this ‘apparently irrelevant interlude’ actually ‘operates as an inexorably precise, almost mechanical, if ultimately problematic, allegory’ of what is about to happen to the party: the ‘black and white’ relationship between the two couples will be upended when Leonora discovers that she has been displaced by Florence, and at about this time, back at the Hotel Excelsior, ‘Maisie Maidan is thrown into the middle of a portmanteau, with her feet in the air, like the black and white cow’.20 Nor should such narrative flair surprise us, for Dowell is a well-read narrator who likes to show off his learning: telling us that Nancy saw Ashburnham as a compound of Lohengrin, El Cid and the Chevalier Bayard is a case in point. Just as Florence is keen to display how much she has read up on the cultural sites that the quartet visit, so Dowell, no less conspicuously, embroiders his tale with allusions to, among other texts, the Bible, John Dryden’s All for Love (1678), Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) and Heart of Darkness, and borrows quotations from the poetry of Robert Herrick (1591–1674) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909). And he is familiar (though ‘an old-fashioned Philadelphia Quaker’) with the Latin of the Roman Catholic Church.