The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [23]
7. Ezra, Eliot… H. D. the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was one of the father figures of Anglo-American modernist literature and, at the time Ford sat down to write The Good Soldier, the author of A Lume Spento (1908), Personae (1909), Canzoni (1911) and Ripostes (1912). Pound became a leading member of the Imagiste school of poetry along with the American poet, novelist and dramatist ‘H. D.’, the nom deplume of Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961). The American poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was a major force in Anglo-American literature and criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. His first significant poem, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, appeared three months after The Good Soldier in June 1915.
8. translate it into French the first French translation of the novel to be published was by Jacques Papy (1953). Ford himself began a translation of the novel into French in 1916 but only 37 manuscript pages have survived. He called it ‘Le bon soldat’: see the entry under ‘Joseph Wiesenfarth’ in the ‘Selected Reading’ section.
9. Fort comme la mart… French Ford greatly admired the work of Guy de Maupassant (1850–93), a pupil of Flaubert and the author of naturalist novels and short stories. Fort comme la mort (Strong as Death) was published in 1889.
10. Mr John Rodker John Rodker (1894–1955) was a writer, publisher and translator.
11. Mr Lane John Lane (1854–1925) was co-founder, in 1887, of the Bodley Head press, the firm that brought out The Good Soldier in 1915.
12. the Guards’ Square… red hatbands designed by George Moore and built in 1861–2 to house foot guards, Chelsea Barracks (wherein is located ‘the Guards’ ‘Square’) on the Chelsea Bridge Road in London was completely rebuilt in 1900 — 1906. Ford enlisted in the army at the end of July 1915, four months after the publication of The Good Soldier. A ‘red hatband’ denotes a senior officer.
The Good Soldier
A TALE OF PASSION
‘Beati Immaculati’1
Part One
I
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim2 with an extreme intimacy – or, rather, with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.
I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a ‘heart’, and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer.
Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence’s broken years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctor’s orders. They