Dowell’s use of figurative language is also notable. In the first half of the book, he is drawn chiefly to nautical imagery, telling us, among other things, that he ‘had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows’; that he is ‘invisibly anchored’ to Philadelphia, and that Leonora hated Ashburnham ‘with an agony that was as bitter as the sea’. He portrays their foursome as a noble and seaworthy vessel: ‘We were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame.’ These descriptions seem almost deliberately uninspired, as if Dowell, true to Ford’s advice about narration, is lulling the reader into a false sense of his ability as a writer/narrator, not least because he goes on to show us that he can also use similes to good effect – for instance, when describing the Ashburnhams as being ‘like fire-ships afloat on a lagoon’; when noting Edward’s ability to enter a room and capture every woman’s gaze ‘as dextrously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls’, and when describing the Englishman’s desire for La Dolciquita arising ‘like fire in dry corn’.
In addition, Dowell’s metaphors occasionally take on such eyecatching boldness and obtrude with such a disconcerting extravagance that it is almost as if he is trying to make the reader laugh. Somewhat less than heart-rendingly, for example, Maisie Maidan’s trunk ingests her (save for –a small pair of feet in high-heeled shoes’) ‘like the jaws of a gigantic alligator’, and when Leonora recovers Maisie’s corpse she finds her ‘smiling, as if she had just scored a goal in a hockey match’. In a similar vein, when Florence creeps up on Ashburnham and Nancy ‘under the dark trees of the park’, Dowell conjectures that Nancy, in her cream muslin dress, must have resembled ‘a phosphorescent fish in a cupboard’. These comparisons are precisely wacky, memorably weird, as is Dowell’s description, towards the end of the novel, of Leonora and Nancy persecuting Ashburnham ‘like a couple of Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a stake’. There seems to be a calculated flippancy in play here, an irreverent ingenuity which pushes against the tragic swell of the story. Other examples might include Dowell’s description of himself going up and down the rope ladder to and from Florence’s bedroom ‘like a tranquil jumping jack’; Leonora glancing at Dowell ‘as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at [him]’, and Dowell’s use of this elaborately bizarre analogy to describe his role as Florence’s ‘sedulous, strained nurse’: ‘It was as if I had been given a thin-shelled pullet’s egg to carry on my palm from Equatorial Africa to Hoboken.’ Once the reader tunes in to Dowell’s apparent frivolity it can be very hard to tune out, and the more distinctly we catch his words, the more inviting it becomes to read his sideswipe at the Belgian State Railway and his other digressions and quips (‘And then she stepped over the sill, as if she were stepping on board a boat. I suppose she had burnt hers!’) as part of a pattern of cynical disengagement. This impression is only reinforced when Dowell says in response to the imagined question of the imaginary silent listener: ‘You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just nothing at all.’
Do we take these last words literally? Do they tell us that for Dowell, qua Florence’s husband, this saddest of stories is not really that sad ‘at all’? Or has the revelation of Florence’s adultery and Ashburnham’s affairs, their suicides and Nancy’s mental collapse, disturbed Dowell to such a degree that his distress intermittently finds voice in his outlandish turns of phrase? Like other aspects of his narrative, Dowell’s metaphors are unquestionably attention-seeking, and a key question for the reader is whether they betray a lack of nuance and control on Dowell’s part, as some critics have argued, or whether they provide evidence of his ironic detachment from his tale. All the reader can be certain of is that Ford has provided Dowell with a stock of flamboyant comparisons which bring him even more prominently to the centre of the stage, where the reader may observe him all the more closely, and where Dowell, now and again, loves to ham it up for all he’s worth:
You can’t kill a minuet de la cour. You may shut up the music-book, close the harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the white satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but surely the minuet – the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars. Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn’t there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?
This overblown and actorly passage suggests that Nancy was more than justified in laughing at ‘some old-fashionedness in [Dowell’s] phraseology’; his assertion that, in future, all smoking-rooms will be ‘peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths’ is a no less ornate but more succinct example of the same tendency.
Florence, Dowell maintains, wanted to appear ‘like the heroine of a French comedy’, but at times she must have felt as if she had landed a part in a good old British farce. Soon after Ashburnham first sets eyes on her, for example, he lets out ‘an appreciative gurgle’. Like the ‘sound that was very like a groan’ which Leonora vents on hearing that her husband has exempted Mumford from paying his rent, Ashburnham’s utterance may betoken the disruptive and ‘tempestuous forces’ which surge just below the starched surface of Edwardian decorum, but if the reader hears anything other than a strictly gruff note in his noise, it could well raise a smile. In a similar way, the image of Leonora and Maisie standing silently side by side in the hotel corridor with Leonora’s gold key caught up in Maisie’s hair and it having to be untangled by Florence, may strike the reader as more humorous than horrendous, and there are a number of other scenes in the novel which assume a comical aspect once we try to picture them. These include the dead of night, rope-ladder flitting of Florence and Dowell; Dowell standing by with his axe outside Florence’s bedroom door in Paris ‘in case she ever failed to answer my knock’; Leonora, towards the end, returning to her room ‘like a lame duck’ after a confrontation with Edward and ‘stumbl[ing] over the familiar tiger skins in the dark hall’; Leonora, just ten days after her husband’s suicide, looking out of the window and seeing rabbits on the lawn at Bramshaw, four-legged precursors of the rabbit-like Rodney Bayham who will soon take her husband’s place, and, most comic of all (if it strikes us that way), the mute and vacant Nancy suddenly blurting out ‘Shuttlecocks!’ with ‘her knife and fork… suspended in mid-air’.
As long ago as 1948, the critic Mark Schorer wrote an influential critique of The Good Soldier in which he hailed it as one of the ‘great works of comic irony’ and argued, among other things, that
perhaps the most astonishing achievement in this astonishing novel is the manner in which the author, while speaking through his simple, infatuated character, lets us know how to take his simplicity and his infatuation. This is comic genius. It shows, for example, in the characteristic figures, the rather simple-minded and, at the same time, grotesquely comic metaphors…21
Nowadays, few commentators would risk being so categorical about the design of the novel – especially since so much of its greatness is tied up with its elusiveness. The Good Soldier is both ‘grotesquely comic’ and, in places, almost unbearably tragic: few will complete it unmoved. In Dowell’s opinion, it is a story which has neither ‘elevation’ nor ‘nemesis’ nor ‘destiny’ nor ‘villain’, but for most contemporary readers it will have more than enough tragic substance. What will surprise some readers, however, is to find themselves smiling here and there.
To sum up, Sondra J. Stang wrote with as much insight as gusto when she claimed that Dowell, far from being ‘an ignorant fool’, as he would have us believe,
is a faux-naif of the most artful kind, a pretender to innocence, a master of obfuscation, a manipulator of every trick, the most unreliable of unreliable narrators. Ther
e are overstatements, understatements, denials, lies, evasions, contradictions, accusations, exaggerations, puns, apparent irrelevancies, logical fallacies, omitted links, digressions, sharp anticipations, delayed explanations, swings of mood, and explosions great and small. He embarrasses, bullies, confuses and tests the reader; he presumes on his credulity; he cloys, simpers, condescends; he writes of ‘monstrous things’ in a ‘frivolous manner’. He spirals up and down, toward and away from his point, buries it, conceals it, flattens and misleads with false emphasis; he lurches from self-denigration to self-promotion and back; he suddenly varies the intensities and the volume and pushes himself into the story. And he repeats.22
Stang overstates her case, but nothing she asserts is untrue and many readers will find her placement of Dowell at the helm of the novel far more persuasive than the kind of interpretation which marginalizes him as a cack-handed tugboat pilot and a nincompoop to boot.
In his ‘Dedicatory Letter’, Ford says that he began writing The Good Soldier on his fortieth birthday, 17 December 1913. He thought it would be his last novel and that it would easily surpass the nineteen he had published to date. As a general rule, it is unwise to make too much of correlations between a writer’s life and work, but in the case of this text it is practically irresistible. Ford’s life was in disarray by 1913. Having married Elsie Martindale, his childhood sweetheart, in 1894, he seems to have fallen in love with her sister, Mary Martindale, at some point around 1903. Following the discovery of their relationship, Ford suffered a nervous breakdown in 1904. Early in August that year he went abroad to recuperate at a number of spas in Germany (but not at Nauheim on this occasion) and elsewhere on the Continent, and by the following year, 1905, he had made a reasonable recovery, though the after-effects of his breakdown, in particular agoraphobia, were to stay with him for the rest of his life. In 1909 he left his wife for Violet Hunt, a fashionable writer, whom he ‘married’ in 1911, though he was not divorced from Elsie. But further instability, both emotional and professional, followed, and by the time he sat down to write The Good Soldier in 1913 a young woman named Brigit Patmore (with whom he had also fallen in love) was on the point of rejecting him and he had become estranged from two of his closest male companions: temporarily from Conrad, and permanently from a Tory squire named Arthur Marwood, with whom he had been intimate, almost continuously, since they had first met in 1905. In the ‘Dedicatory Letter’ Ford says that he put ‘all that I knew about writing’ into The Good Soldier, and it seems certain that he also poured into it a great deal of the passion, disappointment and pain he had accumulated in his life to date. Just how much of his real life Ford imported into his novel is a question which has always intrigued its admirers. Graham Greene, one of the most avid, once wrote:
the impression which will be left most strongly on the reader is the sense of Ford’s involvement. A novelist is not a vegetable absorbing nourishment mechanically from soil and air: material is not easily or painlessly gained, and one cannot help wondering what agonies of frustration and error lay behind [it].23
In an earlier work, The Spirit of the People (1907), Ford described how he had witnessed the actual event on which he based Ashburnham’s parting from Nancy in Part Four of The Good Soldier. One summer he stayed at the house of a married couple – ’good people’ – and a young woman, the husband’s ward, was also resident. An ‘attachment’ had grown up between the husband and the ward and it was decided to send the young woman round the world with some friends. When the day came for the ward to depart, Ford, like Dowell, was asked to ride to a nearby railway station in a dogcart with the husband and his ward. As the young woman boarded her train Ford noticed that ‘P–. never even shook her by the hand: touching the flap of his cloth cap sufficed for leave-taking… it was playing the game to the bitter end. It was, indeed, very much the bitter end, since Miss W–. died at Brindisi on the voyage out, and P–. spent the next three years at various places on the Continent where nerve cures are attempted.’24 (It is from Brindisi, of course, that Nancy sends Ashburnham the jolly-hockey-sticks telegram which prompts him to slit his throat with his ‘little neat penknife’.)
As Dowell recognizes on two occasions, there is a ‘curious coincidence of dates’ in his story, and this, too, may have a biographical explanation which has now been lost:
[Florence] had been born on the 4th of August [1874]; she had started to go round the world on the 4th of August [1899]; she had become a low fellow’s mistress on the 4th August [1900]. On the same day of the year [ie, 4 August 1901] she had married me; on… 4th [August 1913] she had lost Edward’s love, and Bagshawe had appeared like a sinister omen – like a grin on the face of Fate.
The afternoon excursion to Marburg also occurs on 4 August (1904) and precisely ten years later, on 4 August 1914, the ‘sinister omen[s]’ which had long portended the First World War were suddenly reified in the German invasion of Belgium. However, it seems there is no connection between the date of Germany’s ominous move westwards and Ford’s choice of date: he had fixed on 4 August many months before it achieved lasting notoriety in August 1914.25 It is possible that Ford brought 4 August to even greater prominence in his novel after the outbreak of war, but he had already deployed it as a motif before hostilities commenced.
The list of casualties in this novel is worthy of a ‘melodrama’ (as are many of its scenes, such as Florence creeping up on Ashburnham and Nancy in the park; her sensational re-entry into the hotel lounge, and the sardonic ‘happy ending with wedding bells and all’), but who bears most blame for its cumulative suffering and sadness? Who is the real ‘villain of the piece’? At one point Dowell calls Florence a ‘whore’, and elsewhere he refers to her as ‘a cold sensualist’, a ‘Tartar’, ‘a contaminating influence’ and ‘a common flirt’, but is she the root cause of the tragedy? Florence is undoubtedly coquettish and unprincipled, but Dowell surely brings about his own misfortune through his mulish resolve to marry her. ‘I just drifted in and wanted Florence’, he states in Part One, Chapter 2. ‘I determined with all the obstinacy of a possibly weak nature, if not to make her mine, at least to marry her’, is how he puts it at the beginning of Part Two, and almost immediately afterwards, in another of his remarkably offhand similes, Dowell says that in his bunkered pursuit of Florence he was ‘like a chicken that is determined to get across the road in front of an automobile’. The Misses Hurlbird try to talk him out of his plan, hinting that their niece is not quite the unsullied young maiden they would wish her to be, but Dowell concludes his interview with them by declaring: ‘I don’t care. If Florence has robbed a bank I am going to marry her and take her to Europe.’ Even after a further interview, this time with Florence’s Uncle John, Dowell still goes ahead and marries her, in the face of all reason and seemliness, at about four o’clock in the morning. ‘I suppose it was my own fault, what followed’, he ruminates. No less capricious is his conduct immediately before the ceremony. Florence receives him at the top of the ladder with ‘an embrace of warmth’:
Well, it was the first time I had ever been embraced by a woman – and it was the last when a woman’s embrace has had in it any warmth for me… I fancy that, if I had shown any warmth then, she would have acted the proper wife to me, or would have put me back again. But, because I acted like a Philadelphia gentleman, she made me, I suppose, go through with the part of a male nurse.
If Dowell’s idolization of Ashburnham is one salient feature of this novel, his vilification of Leonora is hardly less evident. Dowell says Ashburnham found her ‘cold and unsympathetic’ and tells us, near the end of Part Three, Chapter 3, that Ashburnham ‘seemed to regard [Leonora] as being not only physically and mentally cold, but even as being actually wicked and mean’. ‘She had no conversation with Edward for many years – none that went beyond the mere arrangements for taking trains or engaging servants’, we read in Part One, Chapter 5, and on one occasion, when Ashburnham says to Leonora: ‘By jove, you’re the finest woman in the world. I wis
h we could be better friends’, his wife just turns her back on him. At one point Leonora is glimpsed ‘watching [Ashburnham] as a fierce cat watches an unconscious pigeon in a roadway’ and at another she is observed ‘watching Edward more intently and with more straining of ears than that which a cat bestows on a bird overhead’. By Part Four, Chapter 2, Leonora has become ‘a cold fiend’ who tells Nancy all about Ashburnham’s extra-marital affairs and urges her to have a physical relationship with her husband, while two chapters further on, Dowell asserts, ‘Leonora with her hunger, with her cruelty, had driven Edward to madness’. When Nancy is brought back to Bramshaw from Ceylon, Leonora does not even make the effort to drive over from her new home to see her.