The Good Soldier
1915
The saddest story ever told about the most deceptive people in England. Ford Madox Ford's masterpiece opens with John Dowell announcing that he has been the friend of Edward and Leonora Ashburnham for nine years, that he and his wife Florence were perfectly happy, and that nothing of any consequence ever happened. This is the first of many lies Dowell tells, perhaps the first lie he tells himself. What follows is a devastating excavation of four people trapped in a house of cards they built around themselves: Edward, the handsome soldier beloved by all, whose "goodness" masks a ruinous compulsion; Leonora, his long-suffering wife who has made peace with degradation; Florence, John's wife, who may or may not have been sleeping with Edward; and Dowell himself, a man so disconnected from his own emotions that he narrates his own cuckolding with serene obliviousness. Through fragmented, non-chronological flashbacks, Ford constructs what Graham Greene called the finest example of literary impressionism in English, a novel where everything happens off-stage and all the passion lives in the spaces between what is said and what is meant. It has been called the greatest French novel in English, which is another way of saying it is the most ruthless dissection of English hypocrisy ever written.
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“I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.””
— Ford Madox Ford
“The world is full of places to which I want to return””
— Ford Madox Ford
“Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.””
— Ford Madox Ford
“There is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.””
— Ford Madox Ford
“If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?””
— Ford Madox Ford
“But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.””
— Ford Madox Ford
“We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.””
— Ford Madox Ford
“So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.””
— Ford Madox Ford
“The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't””
— Ford Madox Ford
