THE GOOD SOLDIER

THE GOOD SOLDIER

FORD MADDOX FORD was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in Surrey in 1873. He married Elsie Martindale in 1894. His first published works were fairy stories. In 1898 he met Joseph Conrad and they collaborated on several works including the novels The Inheritors and Romance. Ford published over eighty books in total, The Fifth Queen appearing in three parts during the period 1906–8. In 1915 he published The Good Soldier, which he regarded as his finest achievement. In the same year he enlisted in the army and served as an infantry officer. Parade’s End, the culmination of his experiences during the First World War, was published in four parts between 1924 and 1928. Ford moved to Paris in 1922 and two years later founded the Transatlantic Review, whose contributors included, among others, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. In his later years he divided his time between France and America. Ford also published several volumes of autobiography and reminiscence, including Return to Yesterday (1931) and It Was the Nightingale (1934). A final characteristically personal and ambitious volume of criticism, The March of Literature, appeared in 1939, the year he died.

Educated at Newcastle University and the University of Oxford, David Bradshaw is Hawthornden Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford. He has edited The Hidden Huxley (1994), Brave New World (1994) and Oxford World’s Classics editions of The White Peacock (1997), Women in Love (1998), Mrs Dalloway (2000) and The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction (2001) by Virginia Woolf. In addition he has edited Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall for Penguin Classics (2001), a volume on Modernism for Blackwell (2002) and has published articles on Bloomsbury, Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Huxley, Woolf, Yeats and various aspects of literature and politics in the 1930s. He is an Editor of the Review of English Studies and a Fellow of the English Association.

FORD MADOX FORD

The Good Soldier

Edited by DAVID BRADSHAW

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published by The Bodley Head 1915

Published in Penguin Books 1946

Introduction and editorial material copyright © David Bradshaw, 2002

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN:978-0-14-193719-9

Contents

Introduction

Selected Reading

Note on the Text

Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Notes

Introduction

This may or may not be ‘the saddest story’ you will ever hear, but it will certainly be one of the best. As a tale of the ‘broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic’ human condition it has few equals and it spellbinds from the beginning. Ford once said that he and his friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad (whom he first met in 1898) strove for progression d’effet in their novels, where ‘every word set on paper – every word set on paper – must carry the story forward, and, that as the story progressed, the story must be carried forward faster and faster and with more and more intensity’,¹ and The Good Soldier, with its tortuous retreat from the farthest reaches of the Empire and the cosmopolitan watering-places of Europe to a loose box in a Hampshire stable (by way of two suicides, one fatality and one mental collapse), achieves progression d’effet of rare degree. It is universally regarded as one of the masterworks of modernist literature, a novel which explores tensions between light and darkness (epistemological, moral and narrative), speech and silence, desire and restraint, order and chaos with an ever-tightening power. Sadness is one of its many attributes; humour, oddly enough, is another.

But, if there is one mood which dominates the novel, it is doubt: The Good Soldier, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), is orchestrated by an unreliable narrator, in this case John Dowell. One of the richest sources of pleasure for readers is in pitting themselves against Dowell, attempting to figure out the stories behind his story, trying to make sense of his peculiarities, obsessions, tonal shifts and evasions. It is not easy, since there is no aspect of the novel which is not either shaded by or shot through with uncertainty.

One thing, however, seems clear: Captain Edward Ashburnham was not just a good soldier, but a very fine soldier indeed. A holder of both the Distinguished Service Order and the ‘Royal Humane Society’s medal with a clasp’ for having twice jumped from a troopship to rescue ‘Tommies’, Ashburnham, even more impressively, has been twice recommended for the Victoria Cross, the highest honour conferrable on a member of the British armed forces for conspicuous bravery in battle, ‘and, although owing to some technicalities he had never received that… order, he had some special place about his sovereign at the coronation [of Edward VII in 1901]’. It is small wonder Ashburnham’s troop had ‘loved him beyond the love of men’. Of course, by the time the Dowells meet the Ashburnhams in August 1904, the good soldier has resigned his commission, but being ‘tall, handsome, [and] blond’, and with a moustache ‘as stiff as a toothbrush’, Ashburnham still looks the consummate cavalry officer, even though his demeanour, like so many other aspects of this enthralling and challenging book, is deceptive.

As Ford mentions in his ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’, he had wanted to call the novel The Saddest Story, and had only offered an alternative as a joke when his publisher insisted that his preferred title would render the book ‘unsaleable’ following the outbreak of the First World War. Ford ‘never ceased to regret’ yielding to this importunity, and, as he anticipated, the title was something critics latched on to when the novel first appeared on 17 March 1915. The Observer’s reviewer, for example, saw it as indicative of ‘a desire to catch that public that does not want to hear of any other kind of excellence but military excellence’,² although readers who did buy it for this reason would have been surprised, if not disappointed, to find Prussia treated sympathetically (apart from one passing slight) and the War unmentioned (though there are two oblique references to its build-up: in Part Four, Ashburnham attends a meeting of an imaginary ‘National Reserve Committee’ and a little further on he expresses his eagerness to get ‘the numbers of the Hampshire territorials up to the proper standard’). But it was the title’s moral thrust, with its apparent stress on Ashburnham’s goodness as a man rather than on the calibre of his soldiering, which provoked most of the critical flak. One reviewer thought it unthinkable that ‘an officer and a gentleman… should have behaved as in close on three hundred pages of brilliant writing Mr Hueffer tells us he did behave’,³ while another maintained, with full-chested pomposity, that ‘good soldiers soon escape the fumes and do not descend so readily to the inferno of caddishness’.⁴

Nevertheless, while Ashburnham’s conduct as a husband leaves much to be desired, ‘along at least the lines of his public functions’ his goodness seems incontrovertible. Though his soldierly prowess is a thing of the past by 1904, he remains an altruistic ‘county magnate’ with a highly developed sense of noblesse oblige until the day he dies, granting ‘his tenants very high rebates’, allowing a hard-pressed man named Mumford to pay no rent at all, giving ‘an oldish horse to a young fellow called Selmes… [whose] father had been ruined by a fraudulent solicitor’, and, just before his death, spending two hundred pounds on the defence of ‘the daughter of one of his tenants, who had been accused of murdering her baby’. Time and time again, from the beginning of the novel to the end, Ashburnham’s unwavering goodness and decency are amplified by Dowell:

He was, according to [his wife] Leonora, always remitting his tenants’ rents and giving the tenants to understand that the reduction would be permanent; he was always redeeming drunkards who came before his magisterial bench; he was always trying to put prostitutes into respectable places – and he was a perfect maniac about children.

Dowell goes on to tell us he has no idea ‘how many ill-used people [Ashburnham] did not pick up and provide with careers – Leonora has told me, but I daresay she exaggerated and the figure seems so preposterous that I will not put it down. All these things, and the continuance of them seemed to him to be his duty – along with impossible subscriptions to hospitals and Boy Scouts and to provide prizes at cattle shows and anti-vivisection societies’. Ashburnham is even responsible for ‘a thousand little acts of kindliness, of thoughtfulness for his inferiors… on the Continent’, coming to the assistance, for example, of Hessian paupers and the Hotel Excelsior’s deserted head waiter. In fact, apart from his all-too-public lapse with the Kilsyte girl, ‘the public side of his record’ is spotless, as Dowell is ever ready to attest. He describes Ashburnham as ‘the cleanest-looking sort of chap; an excellent magistrate, a first-rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire’ and he is so unequivocal about the virtues of ‘Teddy Ashburnham’, and lists his merits and accomplishments so regularly, that his adulation of his friend is possibly the only consistent element of his story. Indeed, his reverence of the man who cuckolds him is hardly less ardent than that of Nancy Rufford, Ashburnham’s infatuated ward. ‘Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he was – the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character?’ Dowell asks anxiously at one point. ‘It is impossible of me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright and honourable,’ he confesses at another.

Yet the more fulsomely Dowell praises Ashburnham and affirms that he possessed ‘all the virtues that are usually accounted English’ and that he believed ‘constancy was the finest of the virtues’, the more the reader feels inclined to respond to his words with puzzlement, if not amazement. As the novel unfolds, we become increasingly conscious of the discrepancy between Ashburnham’s almost saintly ‘public character’ and the shabbiness of his private life. It is true that Dowell regards himself as a poor judge of his fellow men, but this deficiency alone cannot fully explain the slippage between the paragon whom the narrator exalts and the libertine whose affairs he chronicles. Dowell represents Ashburnham as a ‘sentimentalist’ and an incurable romantic, but from a less sentimental viewpoint he is an incurable philanderer, ‘a rake impregnated with lachrymose sensibility’, as the Athenaeum’s critic put it in 1915.⁵ In his roles as feudal squire, county magistrate and cavalry officer, Ashburnham personifies loyalty and integrity; in his extra-marital relationships with La Dolciquita, Mrs Basil, Mrs Maidan and Mrs Dowell, he more obviously embodies the absence of those virtues.

Ashburnham is most certainly a bit of a mystery, but Dowell is English literature’s most fascinating enigma. Paradoxically, the more gushingly he idolizes the errant ex-soldier and the more contradictory his appraisals of the other main characters turn out to be, the more urgently we feel the need to fathom not them but him. Whether Leonora is at heart a frigid and malevolent harpy or whether her humanity has dwindled with her marriage will be for the reader to decide; and whether the wayward Florence Dowell, admittedly a bit of a ‘riddle’, is really a scheming temptress or simply an opportunist who exploits Dowell’s perverse determination to marry her in order to resume her affair with the Europe-bound Jimmy, is similarly open to question. But coming to terms with Dowell himself is far more exacting. ‘I don’t know that analysis of my own psychology matters at all to this story,’ he remarks at the beginning of Part Three, but he could not be more mistaken. Ultimately, depending on how Dowell’s relationships with Florence, Leonora, Nancy and Ashburnham are configured; on how the reader interprets the various relationships amongst these last four and, above all, on whether the reader sees Dowell as ‘an American millionaire of exaggerated density’⁶ or a more switched-on and manipulative story-teller, seemingly intent on hiding rather than revealing the truth, ‘analysis of [his]… psychology’ is probably the only reliable angle from which the novel may be approached. So much so, that some critics have recommended that we subject Dowell not only to the closest scrutiny, but that we ‘assume an unrelievedly critical attitude toward everything he tells us and keep our eye on him at every moment, or the story gets away from us’.⁷ To focus on Dowell is not to lose sight of other aspects of the text but to accept that without him there would be no other aspects of the text.

It is rich, in a novel powered forward by perfidy, passion and lies, that four of the five main characters – Ashburnham, Leonora, Florence and Nancy – have blue eyes: traditionally, blue has symbolized truth, loyalty, constancy, chastity, piety and fidelity.⁸ And while it is appropriate that the righteous Leonora has always looked at her best ‘in a blue tailor-made’, it is thumpingly ironic that the only dress of Florence’s that Dowell can remember is ‘a very simple one of blue figured silk’. The narrator, we should remember, favours ties of a ‘special shade of blue’, but whether his preferred colour is apt or not is more difficult to say, not least because his ironizing self-consciousness makes it almost impossible, at times, to decide where, if anywhere, his honesty and sincerity lie. We never discover the colour of Dowell’s eyes, and the only thing we do know about his appearance is that he is on the short side. We sit opposite him, as he imagines, but we can’t see him. Like T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock (who also made his debut before the reading public in 1915), Dowell is ‘Natty, precise, well-brushed’, conscious of his lack of stature, and faceless.

Nor is it any easier to hold his story with confidence, and more than one critic, confronted with the task of trying to make sense of the text’s many complexities and confusions, has laid the blame squarely at the feet of Dowell the dodo. The Good Soldier, the argument goes, narrated by a ‘leisured American’ of the belle époque, is a slow-paced tale, punctuated with longeurs, recapitulations, inconsistencies, errors and corrections, and that, for the most part, is because the narrator is slow. He must be formidably dense and dull-witted, readers have argued, because how else is it possible to be the odd man out in a close foursome for nine years? How could he know the other three with ‘extreme intimacy’, be an integral part of’an acquaintanceship… as close as a good glove’s with your hand’, and yet not realize that two of the quartet (one his wife) are having an affair? ‘Don’t you see?’ Leonora roars at him during the fateful excursion to Marburg, ‘Don’t you see what’s going on?’, to which Dowell responds feebly, ‘No! What’s the matter? Whatever’s the matter?’ And if Dowell is as stupid as he appears to be, then his projection of Ashburnham as a wellnigh godly hero requires no further investigation. When he is not lamenting his ignorance, he’s regretting his gullibility – ‘But think of the fool that I was’ – and in conceding that Florence ‘had the seeing eye’, Dowell tells us (with redundant candour) that he has not. He only learns of Florence’s relationship with Ashburnham through a chance remark of Leonora’s soon after her husband’s funeral. Dowell also discovers that rather than dying of a strained heart, Florence committed suicide. ‘It had never entered my head. You may think that I had been singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may consider me even to have been an imbecile. But consider my position.’ It is absolutely crucial that the reader does exactly that from the splendidly catchy outset of this novel to its unbelievably nonchalant end.

It should not amaze anyone that a man who appears to be so switched off from reality should be such an apparently inept narrator. ‘It is so difficult to keep all these people going’, Dowell complains near the end of the book, but. he has not helped himself by narrating his tale in a disjointed and misleading fashion. For instance, we are led to believe that Ashburnham’s pigskin travelling cases, all stamped ‘EFA’, epitomize his fastidious, old-world, slightly foppish, perfect-country-gentleman persona, but we subsequently discover that ‘they were Leonora’s manifestations’, given to him by the character whom we have otherwise been urged to identify only with the relentless enforcement of ‘economies’. Likewise, in Part Three, Chapter 4, Dowell tells us that Ashburnham’s ‘love-affairs, until the very end, were sandwiched in at odd moments or took place during the social evenings, the dances and dinners. But I guess I have made it hard for you, O silent listener, to get that impression.’ He also remarks with some pride in this same section that ‘I have generally found that my first impressions were correct enough,’ but this, pointedly, is only true ‘as far as waiters and chambermaids were concerned’. When faced with making sense of his own close circle or the world at large, Dowell is a good deal less reliable and has to apologize more than once for having conveyed the wrong impression. ‘I see that I have unintentionally misled you when I said that Florence was never out of my sight,’ he observes, for example, in Part Two, Chapter 1. ‘Yet that was the impression that I really had until just now. When I come to think of it, she was out of my sight most of the time.’ Similarly, any reader who does ‘gather’ from Dowell’s ‘statement’ on the first page of the novel that the reason for his wife’s death was her ‘heart’ will absorb the wrong impression along with an ironic take on the truth. In Part One, Chapter 4, the narrator brings to mind an American city where ‘the blocks are all square and the streets all numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth’, but the layout of his own story is altogether more obstructive. In fact, it is more like a labyrinth: with every page we turn, another dark passage lies before us. Some readers will regard Dowell’s narrative technique as perfectly suited to his gradual reconstruction of an imbroglio from which he was excluded; others will consider his mode of story-telling obfuscatory and entangling.

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.

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. There 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 wish 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.

Dowell even suggests at one point that Leonora was ‘pimping for Edward’, and it is true that she plays a strangely proactive role in his infidelities. For instance, if Ashburnham had not been travelling in a third-class railway carriage to save money, he would not have come across the Kilsyte girl: as Dowell puts it, ‘It is part of the peculiar irony of things that Edward would certainly never have kissed that nursemaid if he had not been trying to please Leonora.’ And it is Leonora’s worldly priest who suggests that she should take her rather prudish husband to Monte Carlo in order that he may indulge in a ‘touch of irresponsibility’ (which he does, of course, with disastrous results). The same drive for economies which drives Ashburnham into the arms of the Kilsyte girl also takes him and his wife to India. By renting out Bramshaw Manor, Leonora straightens out the Ashburnham finances, but by moving to the subcontinent and going into retreat at Simla she abandons her husband to Mrs Basil. Lastly, it is Leonora’s idea to bring Maisie Maidan to Nauheim, and it is Leonora who suggests that she and Edward sit next to the Dowells at dinner. She does so to outface Florence (who has cottoned on to the true state of the Ashburnhams’ marriage when untangling Leonora’s wrist from Maisie Maidan’s hair earlier that day), but Leonora must have been aware that she was placing more temptation in her husband’s path. And even if she didn’t quite see it this way, Ashburnham’s ‘appreciative gurgle’ should have sounded like a tocsin in her ears rather than occasioning nothing more than ‘a slight hesitation’ on her part. The next time Ashburnham gurgles that evening Leonora shivers ‘as if a goose had walked over her grave’, a typically Dowellian trope that is both creepy and droll in equal measure.

Yet Leonora feels utterly betrayed by her husband and has suffered at his hands for many years. In Dowell’s eyes Ashburnham is a ‘sentimentalist’, but in his wife’s he is lecherous. For Dowell, Ashburnham is a noble and duty-bound traditionalist, but as far as Leonora is concerned his fling with La Dolciquita shows that he is careless of his inheritance in that he almost loses his house and land as a result of it. To Dowell, Ashburnham is generous; to Leonora, he is profligate. With hardly any clothes of her own, she buys the expensive travelling cases for Ashburnham as a sign of her devotion to him, and it is the depth of her love for her husband which accounts for the depth of her bitterness when she finds out she has been deceived. A convent girl and a woman of unbending faith, Leonora first realizes her husband and Florence are intimate when Florence touches his wrist over the glass case covering one of the most important documents of the Protestant Reformation. It is this which makes the revelation of his faithlessness almost unendurable. And while Leonora is a woman of principle, it is Ashburnham’s rigidity, not hers, which leads to Nancy being sent back to her father, ‘a violent madman of a fellow’ who has previously smashed her mother to the floor, whose voice makes Nancy almost lose consciousness, and who once knocked her out for a full three days. According to Leonora, Ashburnham’s determination to return Nancy to her father is ‘the most atrocious thing’ he has done in his ‘atrocious life’ and it’s hard to disagree with her. That Nancy goes under mentally while crossing the same Red Sea from which Ashburnham has twice plucked ‘Tommies’ is one of the novel’s more piercing ironies.

Dowell’s attitude to Leonora is coloured in various ways. He is antagonistic to her religion; he is something of a misogynist who thinks all women are ‘intolerably cruel to the beloved person’, and, above all, in setting herself against Ashburnham and corrupting Nancy, Leonora harms ‘the only two persons’ whom Dowell says he ‘ever really loved’. Indeed, when Dowell first sees Ashburnham, his enraptured tone is all the more noteworthy in that at no point does he direct the kind of language he uses then or at other times in the novel to his wife or to another woman: ‘I never came across such a perfect expression before and I never shall again.’ On one occasion he tells us he ‘cannot think of Edward without sighing’ and at another he admits: ‘I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself.’ ‘It would be merely glib to argue that Dowell’s protestation of concealed love for Ashburnham reveals a homosexual impulse’, Max Saunders has cautioned. ‘But it would be slightly deceitful to deny that the thought crosses the reader’s mind as Dowell makes his revelation.’²⁶ All we can say with any certainty is that in a novel packed tight with images of incarceration – Jimmy confined to Europe by Florence’s uncle; the ‘imprisonment’ of Dowell and Florence on the same continent; Leonora’s ‘immense’ blue eyes ‘like a wall of blue that shut [Dowell] off from the rest of the world’ and her gold circlet in which ‘she locked up her heart and her feelings’; Leonora and her six sisters ‘interned’ in their convent and then immured ‘behind the high walls of the manor-house that was almost more cloistral than any convent could have been’; ‘the never-opened door between’ Leonora’s and Ashburnham’s rooms; the two couples like ‘a prison full of screaming hysterics’ – the most imprisoned thing of all could be Dowell’s love of Ashburnham. And if this is the case, then the fervour and frequency of his eulogies to Ashburnham’s ‘public side’ may be explained, along with his flippant interpolations and his tone of ironic disengagement: as a secretive and deeply conventional ‘gentleman’, Dowell would indeed have a great secret to hide. Significantly, Dowell describes himself as ‘a sort of convent’, and one of the last glimpses we have of him is sitting in Ashburnham’s gun-room in a state of solitary confinement: ‘All day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests.’ As Martin Stannard has shown, Dowell even writes his story using the kind of hunting and equestrian terms which an accomplished horseman like Ashburnham would have used all the time.²⁷ By the las

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1783