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The Strange Irregular Rhythm: An Analysis Of The Good Soldier
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In his appreciative portrait of Theodore Dreiser, Ford Madox Ford recorded how in 1914, long before they ever met, he had read with emotion Dreiser's novel, The Titan, and then had written a laudatory review of it. Six months later in this country Dreiser read Ford's new novel, The Good Soldier, also with emotion and also to write a review. Here the similarity ends, however, for Dreiser was irritated by Ford's novel and especially by the portrayal of John Dowell, an expatriate from Philadelphia in “the United States of North America” (p. 60). This character, claimed Dreiser, “is no American. He is that literary packhorse or scapegoat,” the “Englishman's conception of an American husband.” In a sense this is quite true. No American would make the comment that Dowell does in analyzing his wife: “She did not want much physical passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without blinking” (p. 79). Obviously such a conception, if taken as an attempt to state the literal truth about this country, must have sounded to a contemporary reader as though its author's acquaintance with America were limited to the novels of Henry James. Actually, of course, as an impressionist novel The Good Soldier does not intend to give a literal representation of the problem it explores. And since, as Ford emphasized in his portrait, he and Dreiser were temperamentally different, we should not be surprised at Dreiser's irritation or his final complaint that the novel as a whole is “cold narrative and never truly poignant” because the “formal British leanings” of the author “will not let him loosen up and sing.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957
References
Note 1 in page 494 New York, 1951. All citations will be from this edition, which includes the introduction Ford wrote for the limited American edition of 1927, as well as an interpretation by Mark Schorer.
Note 2 in page 494 New Republic, 12 June 1915, pp. 155–156. Ford's reminiscence is in Mightier than the Sword (London, 1938).
Note 3 in page 496 In England and (he English (New York, 1907).
Note 4 in page 497 Part of Ford's sympathy undoubtedly came from his own trouble with the conventions and laws of society, caused by his leaving his wife for another woman. Anyone acquainted with the details of this imbroglio will appreciate the organic relation between Ford's experience and his conception of the purpose and nature of the novel. See Violet Hunt's reminiscence of these flurried years in I Have This to Say (New York, 1926) and Douglas Goldring's 2 volumes, South Lodge (London, 1943) and The Last Pre-Raphaelite (London, 1948), the latter a biography of Ford.
Note 5 in page 501 Interestingly enough, this is almost exactly the realization that came to Ford himself about his relations with Conrad, with whom he collaborated without ever discussing personal beliefs: “It is that that makes life the queer, solitary thing that it is. You may live with another for years in a condition of the closest daily intimacy and never know what, at the bottom of the heart, goes on in your companion. Not really. So there we lived, the two English gentlemen, the one bobbing stiffly to the other, like mandarins” (Joseph Conrad, London, 1924, pp. 122–123).
Note 6 in page 507 It seems to me that The Good Soldier is in many respects a Jamesian novel. In his Art of Fiction, James insisted that “few things” were “more exciting” to him than “a psychological reason” in a novel. “The moral consciousness of a child” he felt to be “as much a part of life” as any adventure among pirates. James treated the moral consciousness of a child, of course, in What Maisie Knew, a novel which (like The Good Soldier) depends on a naive narrator and the problem of who knows what. In fact Ford even cribbed an image from James's novel: In her parents' attempts to down one another after their divorce, Maisie became a “little feathered shuttlecock that they fiercely kept flying between them” (p. 16).