Digested classics
Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
John Crace
Saturday 14 February 2009
This is the saddest story I ever heard. Yet I do not know how best to set it down, for this is the dawn of modernism and this is an experimental narrative of recovered memories and broken time-frames that loops and skips to leave you as confused and frustrated as I.
We had known the Ashburnhams for nine years in Nauheim and had assumed an intimacy that only comes from not talking to one another. You will gather from this that my wife, Florence, had a "heart" and from the way I cleverly manipulate the pluperfect that she is now dead.
Captain Ashburnham, Edward, who had had a successful military career in India, and, Leonora, whom I loved, though without the sex instinct - far too much effort for one so languidly detached as myself - would dine with us each night. Florence and I were Americans abroad, Teddy and Leonora the perfect British gentry; together we were good people who never did anything very much.It was 1913 when Florence grasped Teddy's arm as we were visiting a Protestant shrine and I noticed Leonora blanch. A more engaged and reliable narrator might have been disturbed by his wife's intimacy with another man, but I was satisfied when Leonora explained her reaction as that of an injured Irish Catholic.
Besides, Florence had given me no reason to suspect she had been Teddy's lover for nine years. If I had heard heavy breathing emanating from her locked bedroom, to which she retired alone each night at nine o'clock, then I understandably assumed they were the consequences of acute arrhythmia. So I assured Leonora I would only insult her co-religionists once per chapter and thought no more about it.
It was only after Teddy had died that Leonora told me of the Kilsyte case, where he had improperly kissed a servant girl, of his attachment to Major Basil's wife, of his affair with Maisie Maidan and of his unfortunate amour with the mistress of a Russian grand-duke that had cost him £40,000 and forced Leonora to take control of his assets to save them from bankruptcy.
And yet, in my familiar annoyingly perverse manner, I do not judge Teddy, for he was a good man, who was kind to tenants and small animals, and it is hard not to see he was trying to keep his philandering in order because each mistress was better bred than the last. If he had a fault, it was that he was a sentimentalist; and if I had a fault, it was that I was so absorbed in being the perfect stylist, repeating the perfect adjectives to ever more perfect effect, that I failed to notice my IQ was hovering near zero.
Did I mention that Maisie Maidan had died on 4 August? Perhaps not. How artfully artless of me! But then everything important in Florence's life had happened on that date. She had been born on 4 August and we also got married on that day - one I remember well as it was the last time I showed any passion, not sexual of course, but by hitting my darky servant for no good reason, other than that is how a gentleman from Philadelphia behaves.
And of course poor Florence committed suicide on that date, not that I realised she had killed herself at first, but then as I had turned stupidity into an art-form, it was at least in keeping for me not to notice. Leonora tells me the first thing I said was: "Now I can marry the girl."
I don't recall that, but even though Leonora is a Romanist, I see no reason to disbelieve her.
Ah, the girl! Leonora's ward, Nancy Rufford. Silly me again for not mentioning her earlier! Teddy was a good man and I honestly believe he was struggling to maintain a propriety in his feelings with the young woman and that Florence might have misunderstood his intentions. Not that that is why she took her life. Rather that she had returned to the hotel to find me talking to one of her relatives and assumed he must have told me about her inappropriate sexual liaison before we met.
He hadn't, as I only discovered that later, though I see now her family had once tried to warn me about her affair, that had also begun on 4 August, but it's hard to heed such advice when one's head is located so securely inside one's rectum, but Florence wasn't to know that when she swallowed the prussic acid.
I suppose the deceived husband ought to have been angry with Teddy, but I was a sentimentalist too and I truly loved him so much that some critics suspected me of being a closet homosexual. The person I really hated was Leonora. It was she who had pimped for Teddy, she who had led me to believe I might marry Nancy.
It was Leonora, too, who had conducted her own Papist affair with Rodney Bayham and had married him after Teddy's suicide. Yes, it quite slipped my mind that Teddy took his own life when Leonora forced Nancy to return to India. Nancy went quite mad on the boat and Teddy never forgave himself.
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| Ford Madox Ford |
So now I sit, the American millionaire, waiting for the next 40 boring years to pass, listening to Nancy repeating the word "shuttlecock". Sometimes I even think of Teddy lying in the barn with his throat slit and how I saw him take out the pen knife but was too exhausted to stop him. Yes, it is a very sad story.
• John Crace's Digested Reads appear in G2 on Tuesdays.