The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford (1915)

My taste for literary Modernism has always been fluid, at best, so I have always had some reluctance in approaching the work of Ford Maddox Ford (1873-1939).  A man of formidable and varied talents – novelist, poet, critic, editor – Ford was also a literary Impressionist; employing out-of-sequence storytelling, unreliable narrators, and conflicting recollections.  Not my literary line of country at all, but when The Good Solider (1915) was given to me as a gift this Christmas, I knew it was time to take the plunge.

This was a fortuitous present indeed!  Ford considered The Good Soldier to be his masterpiece, and it is certainly one of the finest novels I’ve read in years.  It is available at Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net, as well as in a handsome Barnes & Noble edition.

In other hands, The Good Solider would descent into simple melodrama.  But Ford carefully structures his tale as a series of reminiscences told by John Dowell; a rambling narrative told to an imaginary audience beside an imaginary fireplace.  It concerns Dowell and his wife, Florence, and their friends, Edward and Leonora Ashburnham.  The tale ends with two suicides and one descent into madness – and yet, our narrator says it’s the saddest tale he’s ever heard, as if he, himself, were not a player in the events.

In short, Edward Ashburnham is a career solider during the waning days of Empire.  He is in a marriage of convenience with Leonora; while spending their winters abroad they meet American couple John and Florence Dowell.  Florence and Edward become lovers, while Leonora struggles to maintain some stability in their lives and John slowly falls in love with Nancy Rufford, the young ward of the Ashburnhams.

Because the novel is nonlinear, both the story and the true nature of its characters are gradually revealed.  This structure does not allow for surprises in the plot – but it is wonderful for surprises in character.  Ford is the master of the gradual reveal, and by the midpoint of The Good Solider, we have to rethink our opinions of all the major characters.

Take Edward, for instance.  Dowell repeatedly calls him a “sentimentalist,” but what he really means is that Ashburnham is a Romantic.  He is a heroic soldier, a charitable landlord, a stolid friend, life-saving sailor, capable horseman and a considerate squire.  He is a figure out of Sabatini or Dumas, and if he was a character in a film, he would be all Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.  But – and this is the overall point of the novel, and perhaps Ford’s overarching worldview, as well – the world is not a Romantic place. 

Ashburnham is quite a bad husband, and in a world of bland and mundane reality, that is enough to ruin him.  In the construct of a realist novel (and in the real world), a figure like Ashburnham could not, must not, function successfully, and therefore ceases to exist.  This tension is the fulcrum upon which the novel rests – Ford is writing about the antagonism between romance and stark reality, or, perhaps more pointedly, the encroaching modern world.

The Good Solider is a prototypical Modern novel in that it is about the triumph of Anti-Romantic sentiment.  By offering Edmund (and, later, Nancy) as a sacrifice on the alter of middle-class respectability, it distinctly draws the line between two conflicting worldviews.

The Good Solider is also a profoundly “Catholic” novel: it deals with guilt, expiation and penance.  Ford was a convert to Catholicism, but it seems as if inwardly he remained doubtful and unconvinced.

Ford also has a very interesting view of women – one that is perhaps more true, though less politically correct, to posit today.  To Ford, form and function are more important than passion and love; and all the women in this novel are ultimately calculating.  Here is Ford writing on Leonora after the death of Edward and her subsequent remarriage:  They were like judges debating over the sentence upon a criminal; they were like ghouls with an immobile corpse in a tomb beside them. I don't think that Leonora was any more to blame than the girl—though Leonora was the more active of the two. Leonora, as I have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an establishment; she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But, if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. She was made for normal circumstances—for Mr Rodney Bayham, who will keep a separate establishment, secretly, in Portsmouth, and make occasional trips to Paris and to Budapest.

It was difficult for your correspondent not to sympathize with Edward – and I found myself often uncomfortably nodding in self-recognition.  (Sadly, though, not at the parts of his effortless heroism.)  Edward is a displaced person in time.  His tragedy is that dull reality was allowed to kill his sense of romance, and this this sense of romance gave him no alternative other than suicide.

The Good Solider is gripping, chilling and profoundly moving.  Ford’s genius is that the final line of the novel puts the entire story in perspective, and provides the final insight into the characters that we need.  It is a tour de force and highly recommended.

The Capt. Alatriste Novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Like most aesthetes, your correspondent is slavishly addicted to novels of swashbuckling romance.  A good swashbuckler has a tremendous sense of style, is written with élan and thrives on a heightened sense of drama, emotion and plot.

So, it’s natural that many people have pushed on me the historical romances of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, author of several novels about solider and swordsman-for-hire Captain Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, and his young companion, Íñigo Balboa y Aguirre.  With these novels, Pérez-Reverte clearly shows his ambition to create a series that rivals the D’Artagnan romances of Alexandre Dumas.

Pérez-Reverte (born 1951), author of the excellent The Fencing Master already covered in these pages, has set a laudable goal for himself with these books.  The author admits to being horrified at the lack of depth in the coverage of Span’s Golden Age in contemporary schools, and sought to correct this with a series of historical romances that fully detail the glory that was Spain.

However, it is his very ambition that sinks the Alatriste novels, as Pérez-Reverte forgets the romancer’s pledge to recreate history, rather than teach it.  I have just finished the fourth in the corpus (The King’s Gold), and, at this point, despite my devotion to the genre, could not possibly go back for a fifth (or seventh, as that is where the novels now stand with no sign of letting up) helping.

Pérez-Reverte does not wear his erudition lightly, and the novels stop regularly for Alatriste or one of the supporting characters (often real-life historical personages) to rattle off long bits of poetry, historical detail or antiquated epigrams and aphorisms.  This is amusing in small bits, but page after page is rather like a historical romance written by a Spanish Charlie Chan – very little goes a long way indeed.

Moreover, the great masters of the form (talents as diverse as Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini) had a wonderful flair for intricate plotting.  Indeed, one of the deep joys of swashbuckling romance is its complexity of plot, almost for its own sake.  That love of plot is usually married to a depth of emotion – not just love, but hate, lust, the thirst for revenge, envy and self-respect.  However, the Alatriste novels never deliver this density of plot; indeed, they have more the plodding feel of 17^th Century police procedurals, where Alatriste and Íñigo make a bloody path from point A to point B. 

Missing, too, is that sense of style, that distinct touch of panache so essential to the genre.  Perhaps this is because Alatriste is a taciturn battle-weary survivor, or that Íñigo, our narrator, is too young for such embroideries.  But this ennui prevents the books from ever really taking off – they cannot inhabit the more expansive corners of our imagination because they have no appeal to our sense of fun.

It is often with the supporting characters – the various aides, schemers and villains – that the author of romances truly shines, and here, too, Pérez-Reverte fails.  The recurring villain of the piece, Gualterio Malatesta, an Italian fencing master, is clearly the Basil Rathbone part.  However, like Alatriste, he never really comes to life – we know he’s the villain because he gets to sneer quite a bit, but there is never that passion for naughtiness, that sheer delight in vileness, that essential theatricality, that marks a great swashbuckling heavy.  Angélica de Alquézar, who spends most of her time in the books alternately trying to seduce or murder Íñigo, is weak tea indeed, never becoming more than a pale shadow of Dumas’ Milady de Winter, her most obvious influence.  Historical figures, such as Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), come off more like name dropping than fully rounded characters, a trick Dumas, for example, admirably pulled off with Cardinal Richelieu.

Part of the problem may be inherent in the series itself – because they are set in Spain of the 17^th Century, the Alatriste novels cannot help but escape a whiff of provincialism.  While most European nations at the time were unified under one strong ruler, Spain was in essence broken up under various feudal lords who served the King.  In addition, both royalty and the Catholic Church used religion to keep the people pliable, ignorant and afraid.  Spain simply had not the expansive, intellectually exploratory or cohesive feel of England or France at that time. 

I must confess that the shortcomings of 17^th Century Spain detailed in The King’s Gold inspired extremely uncomfortable comparisons to the present-day United States as I read the novel.  Here’s a passage that I found disconcertingly familiar:

Most political activity, therefore, consisted in a constant to-and-fro of haggling, usually over money; and all the subsequent crises that we endured under Philip IV – the Medina Sidonia plot in Andalusia, the Duque de Hijar’s conspiracy in Aragon, the secession of Portugal, and the Catalonia War – were created by two things: the royal treasury’s greed and a reluctance on the part of the nobility, the clerics, and the great local merchants to pay anything at all.  The sole object of the king’s visit to Seville in sixteen twenty-four and of this present visit was to crush local opposition to a vote in favor of new taxes.  The sole obsession of that unhappy Spain was money, which is why the route to the Indies was so crucial.  To demonstrate how little this had to do with justice or decency, suffice it to say that two or three years earlier, the Cortes had rejected outright a luxury tax that was to be levied on sinecures, gratuities, pensions, and rents – that is to say, on the rich.  The Venetian ambassador, Contarini, was, alas quite right when he wrote at the time, “The most effective war one can wage on the Spanish is to leave them to be devoured and destroyed by their own bad governance.”

Perhaps my overarching problem with the Alatriste novels is that their setting – 17^th Century Spain – has too, too many similarities with the worst components of 21^st Century American life: an exploitive over-class, unquestioning religious devotion, a hawkish international stance and the crippling provincialism of many of its people.  Hardly my recipe for romance.