The Good Soldier

Ford liked to say he began it on his fortieth birthday — December 17, 1913 — to show, after a decade of literary midwifery for other people, 'what I could do.' He called it The Saddest Story: two leisured couples, English and American, circling for years through spas and good manners while everything underneath rots, the whole told by Dowell, the American husband who understood none of it at the time and is not much better informed now. The opening chapters ran in Blast, the Vorticists' hot-pink magazine, in June 1914 — six weeks before the war.

By publication in March 1915 no one would buy a book called The Saddest Story; his publisher begged for another title, and Ford, in uniform and bitterly joking, offered The Good Soldier. The irony has confused browsers ever since: there is no battlefield in it — the violence is entirely domestic, and administered in drawing rooms.

The publisher John Rodker's verdict became the book's permanent tagline: the finest French novel in the English language — meaning its Flaubertian control, the time-shifted telling Ford called impressionism. It was also a rehearsal: a decade later, from Paris, Ford would publish the young Hemingway in the transatlantic review, and the unreliable narration he perfected here became one of the modern novel's standard instruments. It remains the book that proves the quietest story can be the saddest.

For nine years two couples meet each August at the German spa town of Nauheim: John Dowell, a rich, passive American, with his wife Florence, whose delicate heart forbids — she says — both travel home and marital intimacy; and Captain Edward Ashburnham, the model English soldier-landlord, with his capable Catholic wife Leonora. Dowell narrates the whole novel from the far side of catastrophe, circling in time, correcting himself, assembling what he has learned in the order he learned it — which is to say, years too late.

What he learned is that the symmetry was a stage set. Florence's heart condition was an invention that regulated her marriage; Edward, a hopeless sentimentalist, moved through a career of expensive passions — a kissed servant girl in a railway carriage, a brother officer's wife, a ruinous grande dame — each managed and financed, with gritted teeth, by Leonora; and for the last nine years Florence and Edward were lovers under Dowell's unseeing eye. The novel's fixed point is a date, August 4 — birthday, wedding day, and every turn of the tragedy — ticking through the story like a bomb.