Ambiguities, contradictions and double entendres:
The prose is full of wonderful ambiguities and double entendres.
There is the leit-motif of 'heart': Florence and Edward (and Uncle John) all have 'weak hearts'; actually the only character who does indeed have heart disease is Maisie Maidan. Meanwhile John says that he and Leonora are "both of the same profession ... of keeping heart patients alive.” (1.5); they are the enablers who allow Florence and Edward to have an affair. Later, John asks: “Who in this world knows anything of any other heart—or of his own?” (3.4)
There are contradictions. Sometimes, the narrator corrects himself. For example, in part two chapter one he tells us that he “unintentionally misled you when I said that Florence was never out of my sight. ... When I come to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time.” At other times, the reader must find the contradiction for themselves. For example, "poor, dear Florence" (1.1) becomes "I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness." (1.6) He describes Nancy as epitomised by contradictions: “She was exceedingly grotesque and at times extraordinarily beautiful. ... at times she seemed as old as the hills, at times not much more than sixteen. At one moment she would be talking of the lives of the saints and at the next she would be tumbling all over the lawn with the St Bernard puppy. She could ride to hounds like a Maenad and she could sit for hours perfectly still ... She was, in short, a miracle of patience who could be almost miraculously impatient.” (3.2)
There are ironies: “they said he was a good soldier. ... all good soldiers are sentimentalists - all good soldiers of that type. Their profession, for one thing, is full of the big words, courage, loyalty, honesty, constancy.” (1.3) This is vicious irony: Edward might have been courageous but he was scarcely loyal to his wife, nor even to Maisie or Florence, and he was anything but constant. Honest is problematic too.
There are double entendres: "At that time the Captain was quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence. She used to do it about three or four times a week under the approving eyes of Leonora and myself. It wasn't, you understand, systematic. It came in bursts." (1.4)
The unreliability of the narrator is emphasised by his tendency to use superlatives The first sentence is: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” Five pages on, he says “That struck me as the most amazing thing I had ever heard.” In Chapter 1.5 he says “Those words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in my life.” This tendency to exaggerate and over-dramatise could be interpreted as shallowness ... or as mendacity.
The characters:
Given a chronically unreliable narrator, it is difficult to have any certainty about the characters. We only know what John tells us, and what we infer from the gaps in his narrative.
Florence Dowell, nee Hurlbird, is the only coherent character. She's a villain. She's an American who was taken by her Uncle John on a world tour which had to be terminated when she was discovered coming out of the bedroom of Uncle John's companion, Jimmy. She marries John as a way to get him to take her back to Europe and Jimmy. From the very first night of the wedding she feigns sickness and he is told by her and her complaisant doctors that she has a weak heart and sex might kill her; as a result she sleeps alone behind a locked bedroom door and their marriage is never consummated. John's bitter retrospective consolation is that she can't achieve her goal of living the the family estate in England because he won't let her weak heart brave the turbulence of the English channel. But she has an affair with Jimmy and, after she tires of him, she starts sleeping with Edward. Then, one dreadful night, she discovers that Edward intends to transfer his affections to Nancy and also she realises that John knows about her affair with Jimmy. That night she is found dead of prussic acid poisoning.
What we know of Florence comes mainly from her actions, not her words. Much of what her husband knows comes to him (so he says) from later discussions with Edward (in a confession made shortly before his death) and Leonora (in a conversation after Edward's funeral). Florence is deceptive and controlling. She is willing to feign a heart condition to get her way, and to commit suicide if she doesn't. She values her ancestors, her goal being to live in the ancestral home in England, but hates her immediate family. She is both powerful and manipulative, but ultimately she is thwarted in her every desire; perhaps this is cause for pity.
Leonora Ashburnham nee Powys is a Roman Catholic from a large family. Her marriage with Edward was more or less arranged because the Powys needed to reduce their expenses by reducing the number of unmarried daughters living at home. She quickly realises that Edward is unfaithful and that his infidelities are expensive. She tolerates the adulteries but takes the reins of the family finances. In many ways she is a very controlling woman. After Edward's death, she makes a 'normal' marriage with a local squire and has a child.
Edward Ashburnham, the 'good' soldier of the title, is the narrator's opposite. The narrator seems to admire him: "Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man ... a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's womankind?" (1.1); Edward being the 'proper' man. The narrator repeatedly excuses Edward's infidelities, characterising them as "desires ... madnesses" (1.5) over which Edward himself has no control: “Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman and not give her the comfort of his physical attractions.” (2.1) He can't help being a babe magnet: “that chap, coming into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls.” (1.3) He doesn't love Leonora, his wife, "because she was never mournful; what really made him feel good in life was to comfort somebody who would be darkly and mysteriously mournful.” (3.3) Even the first scandalous contact with a nurse-maid in a railway carriage is, according to John reporting the words of Edward: "he assured me that he felt at least quite half-fatherly when he put his arm around her waist and kissed her." (3.3)
It's possible. I once knew a man who had numerous infidelities and he really liked helping needy women.
But Edward, apart from his weakness with women, is a decent chap: "It is impossible of me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright and honourable. ... his innumerable acts of kindness, of his efficiency, of his unspiteful tongue. He was such a fine fellow.” (3.1)
John Dowling, the narrator, is an American of independent means. He comes across as puritanical to the point of sexlessness. He tells us that he has spent his life as "just a male sick nurse." (1.6), "a nurse-attendant" (4.5). He portrays himself as innocent and naive to the point of stupidity, as a result he repeatedly puts himself in the position of the victim. He seems to lack agency; things are done to him; he is merely an (often bewildered) observer. Nevertheless, at the hotel in the spa he reads the “police reports that each guest was expected to sign upon taking a room.” (1.3) which seems a bit stalkerish. He is also curiously passionless.
He repeatedly reacts puritanically, while excusing Edward's excesses:
- When Leonora tells him that she once considered having an affair with a young man when they had to drive 11 miles in a carriage and JD , he reflects: "I don't know; I don't know; was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not county family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the time for the matter of that? Who knows?” (1.1)
- "Fellows come in and tell the most extraordinarily gross stories ... And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. ... if they so delight in the narration, how is it possible that they can be offended—and properly offended—at the suggestion that they might make attempts upon your wife's honour?" (1.1)
- "I never had the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct towards her." (1.3)
Nancy 'the girl' is “Leonora's only friend's only child, and Leonora was her guardian" (2.1) since her mother is said to have committed suicide (2.1) or, alternatively, have become a prostitute (neither turns out to be true; in 4.4 we learn that she is living with a 'protector'). Once Nancy becomes a woman, Edward falls in love with her and this precipitates his break up with Florence and, somewhat later, Nancy being sent back to her father and going mad.
The four adult characters are neatly summarised in a scene when the Dowlings first meet the Ashburnhams at the spa hotel (part one, chapter three): Florence and Leonora come into the room together and decide that they shall all four share the same table. “And then Florence said: "And so the whole round table is begun." Again Edward Ashburnham gurgled slightly in his throat; but Leonora shivered a little, as if a goose had walked over her grave. And I was passing her the nickel-silver basket of rolls.”
- Florence sets things going
- Edward responds
- Leonora sees what is happening
- John hasn’t a clue.
Death comes at the end:
Structurally, FMF went in for powerful endings:
- Part One ends with the death of Maisie, one of Edward's affairs. Leonora seeks Maisie but finds her in her room, dead. Not suicide. Her heart gave out. Edward “imagined that the death had been the most natural thing in the world. He soon got over it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his about which he never felt much remorse.” (p 57)
- Part Two ends when Florence, realising her infidelities are at last to be exposed and fearing that Captain A is moving on to yet another women, is found lying dead on her bed, "a little phial that rightly should have contained nitrate of amyl [heart medicine], in her right hand" (p 76)
- Edward's suicide, though much foreshadowed, occurs right at the very end of the book.
Does John kill Florence ... and Edward? An alternative reading of the text.
Florence dies on 4th August 1913. The details of that night are told in part two, chapter two. She has gone out, sent by Leonora to "chaperone" Edward and Nancy. Meanwhile, John has a conversation with a newly arrived guest at the spa hotel, a man called Bagshawe, from Ludlow Manor, near Ledbury, in lounge with JD. Suddenly John sees Florence running to the hotel. She enters lounge, sees JD and Bagshawe, and runs upstairs. Bagshawe recognises her as “Florry Hurlbird” and says “The last time I saw that girl she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man called Jimmy at five o'clock in the morning. In my house at Ledbury.”
There is then a gap in the narrative.
“A long time afterwards I pulled myself out of the lounge and went up to Florence's room. She had not locked the door—for the first time of our married life. She was lying, quite respectably arranged, unlike Mrs Maidan, on her bed. She had a little phial that rightly should have contained nitrate of amyl, in her right hand.”
He concludes that she has killed herself because (a) she has discovered that Edward intends to transfer his affections to Nancy and (b) because she realises that Bagshawe will have let the cat out of the bag about her and Jimmy.
Immediately afterwards, he says (according to Leonora) or Leonora suggests (according to him) that he might marry Nancy. He claims that this bizarre reaction is due to shock.
Edward claims that he didn't realise that Edward and Florence were having an affair until Leonora tells him, ten days after Edward's funeral. But can he really have been so naively ignorant? Leonora, he asserts, then goes on to say: "I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide" to which he replies “Did Florence commit suicide? I didn't know." He comments “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.” He claims that he assumed that the running she had done had brought on the long-promised heart attack. “Even Edward ... thought that she had dropped dead of heart disease. ... the only people who ever knew that Florence had committed suicide were Leonora, the Grand Duke, the head of the police and the hotel-keeper.” (3.1)
An alternative explanation is that Edward, having discovered (a) that Florence only married him so that she could have her affair with Jimmy and (b) realising, given that she can run, that the weak heart must be a pretence, adopted so she could deny him sex, has become angry. During the "long time afterwards" he has gone up to Florence's room and killed her with poison. He then "respectably arranged" her and left her to be 'discovered'.
Edward's 'suicide' (his throat is cut) comes the morning after he has spent the night confessing to John about his love for Nancy. The next morning, John and he are together, and Edward produces a penknife, tells John to take a message to Leonora and says "So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know" (4.6) John then leaves him alone and afterwards he is found dead. But that's according to John. I think that he might have been so angered by Edward professing love to Nancy, who John wanted to marry after Florence's death, that he murdered Edward.
When I advanced this theory at my reading group, no-one expected it. It enables a radical re-reading of the text. It may be nonsense. But the unreliability of the narrator means that it is not possible to say that John is innocent of murder. This text is as wonderfully ambiguous as that written by Henry James (a friend of Ford Madox Ford): The Turn of the Screw.
Selected quotes:
- “I know nothing—nothing in the world—of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone—horribly alone.” (1.1)
- “Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man—the man with the right to existence—a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's womankind?” (1.1) I just adore the two 'neigh's.
- “I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness.” (1.1)
- “Good people, be they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten each other.” (1.6)
- “God knows what they wanted with a winter garden in an hotel that is only open from May till October.” (1.6)
- “I guess it is vanity that makes most of us keep straight, if we do keep straight, in this world.” (3.1)
- “Florence was a personality of paper ... she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold.” (3.1)
- “We were chattering away about the morality of lotteries. And then, suddenly, there came from the arcades behind us the overtones of her father's unmistakable voice ... A tall, fair, stiffly upright man of fifty, he was walking away with an Italian baron who had had much to do with the Belgian Congo. They must have been talking about the proper treatment of natives natives, for I heard him say: ‘Oh, hang humanity!’" (3.2) Another hint of Heart of Darkness and a beautifully judged piece of irony.
- “it is the scourge of atrocious but probably just destiny that no grief comes by itself” (3.3) = “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions” (Hamlet 4.5)
- “a dollar can be extremely desirable if you don't happen to possess one” (3.4)
- “I have, I am aware, 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.” (4.1)
- “She saw life as a perpetual sex-battle between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to their wives, and wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the end.” (4.1)
- “she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it to be a parlour-maid. There are very decent parlour-maids.” (4.1)
- “When people were married there was an end of loving.” (4.3)
Complicated! But exceptional.
August 2012; 179 pages; reread February 2024.
The author:
He was a brave soldier in the First World War, being injured in a gas attack. Hemingway said he was scruffy and smelly. He was promiscuous and particularly nasty when he ditched his lovers (especially Jean Rhys, who wrote Wide Sargasso Sea). But as a magazine publisher he discovered and promoted DH Lawrence, Hemingway (and Jean Rhys) as well as publishing Thomas Hardy, Henry James, John Galsworthy, HG Wells and Joseph Conrad.
The Good Soldier was written in 1913 and published in 1915. Its original title was The Saddest Story; this was changed at the request of the publishers but the Good Soldier was an ironic suggestion by FMF. The book was a best-seller. It is still regarded as a classic, described as the best French novel written in English and listed by the BBC as 13th in the top 100 novels written by UK authors of all time (though it was only 41st in The Guardian's list of the 100 best novels).
FMF also wrote the Parade's End tetralogy:
