The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [17]
Ford, on the other hand, needed no convincing that The Good Soldier was his ‘best book’ (‘Dedicatory Letter’). Immediately before starting work on it he had completed his study of Henry James (1914), and with the publication of his novel Ford showed that he had absorbed the lessons of both James and Conrad and could produce a work of fiction as technically fine and as psychologically complex as, say, What Maisie Knew (1897) or Heart of Darkness. In addition to Graham Greene, writers as diverse as Conrad, Ezra Pound, May Sinclair and H. G. Wells all expressed their admiration of The Good Soldier’s technique and its capacity to hold the reader’s attention. ‘For the subject is,’ Rebecca West wrote in 1915, ‘one realizes when one has come to the end of this saddest story, much vaster than one had imagined that any story about well-bred people, who live in sunny houses, with deer in the park, and play polo, and go to Nauheim for the cure, could possibly contain.’32 West also said, much later, that The Good Soldier ‘set the pattern for perhaps half the novels which have been written since’.33 Here she exaggerated, but quite understandably. For how can anyone not read on, stalk-eyed with curiosity, after an opening paragraph as engrossing yet ambiguous, as outspoken yet muted, as clear yet contradictory as the first paragraph of The Good Soldier?
NOTES
1. Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), 210.
2. Observer (28 March 1915), 5, rep. in Martin Stannard (ed.), Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (New York and London: Norton, 1995), 221–2. Cited hereafter as ‘Stannard’.
3. Outlook (17 April 1915), 507–8, rep. in Stannard, 226–7. The Good Soldier first appeared under the name ‘Ford Madox Hueffer’. The author changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919.
4. Thomas Seccombe, ‘The Good Soldier’, New Witness (3 June 1915), 113–14, rep. in Stannard, 229–30. For further information about the controversy caused by the title see Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life 2 vols (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), i, 418–19. Cited hereafter as ‘Saunders’.
5. Athenaeum (10 April 1915), 334, rep. in Stannard, 225.
6. The phrase comes from a review in the Independent [USA], 81 (22 March 1915). 432, rep. in Stannard, 221.
7. Sondra J. Stang, Ford Madox Ford (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), 74.
8. J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 40.
9. Grover Smith, Ford Madox Ford, Columbia Essays on Modem Writers, No. 63 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 28–9.
10. Bramshaw, situated on the edge of the New Forest about six miles west of Fordingbridge in Hampshire, appears in the Domesday Book (1086) as ‘Brammesage’, and means (appropriately, given the entanglements which come to light there) ‘Bramble Wood’ (Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 60). ‘Teleragh’ is not listed in A. H. Smith’s English Place-Name Elements, Part II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), but there is a ‘Telleraught’ (or ‘Talleraght’) in County Wexford in Ireland. ‘Powys’ is not recorded in Edward MacLysaght’s The Surnames of Ireland, 6th ed. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1985).
11. New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993).
12. Charles Wareing Bardsley, A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames with Special American Instances (London: Oxford University Press, 1901), 506.
13. Bardsley, A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames, 250.
14. Ford, Joseph Conrad, 129-30.
15. Vincent J. Cheng, ‘A Chronology of The Good Soldier’, English