The book of my life: “The Good Soldier” by Ford Madox Ford

I came across Ford Madox Fords The Good Soldier: A story full of passion when I was a teenager, in a box of my late grandmother’s books. It was a paperback copy of Ford’s 1915 novel, published in the US in the 1950s; perhaps my grandmother, who was American, had bought it on a trip home after the war. On the stiff cover is an ink drawing of a man and a woman in a smeared embrace, their faces obscured by the other’s; another man faces them, standing stock still, his face a pale swirl.

When I read the book, I was captivated but also baffled. Later, I remembered only the mysterious, confused atmosphere, which was passionate, muddled and hazy. When I reread the novel several years later, I understood a little better what had drawn me to it, not least that both my confusion and my fascination mirrored that of the narrator.

Our narrator, an American named John Dowell, tells how he and his wife Florence became friends with an English couple during their annual visits to a German spa. As Dowell learned much later, Florence began a long affair with the Englishman, a former soldier named Edward Ashburnham. The consequences were terrible.

“This is the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” Dowell begins, as if the story and the sadness belong to someone else. “You ask what it feels like to be a cheated husband,” he says. “For heaven’s sake, I don’t know. It feels like nothing.” Yet Dowell’s narrative shudders with his own feelings. It is driven by his will to understand and twisted by his fear of it. He rambles and digresses, circles and evades, only to have the flitting surfaces suddenly pierced by an all-too-vivid image, an odd joke, a stark statement. “I know nothing—nothing in the world—about people’s hearts,” Dowell says, his despair still somehow averted by rhetoric. “All I know is that I am alone—terribly alone.”

Ford originally called his novel The saddest story but his publisher, arguing that such gloom would not be well received by the public in 1915, demanded a different title. With a mischievous, even sarcastic undertone, Ford suggested: The Good Soldier. He later regretted the change of title, and rightly so. The crude irony of the new name is a travesty of the subtle and devastating irony of the story it contains.