The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [8]
Which is exactly what Dowell does with Ashburnham, of course.
Vincent J. Cheng has usefully reconstructed ‘a clear chronology (or as clear as possible) of the events of the story’ and in doing so he, like other critics, has drawn attention to a number of inconsistencies in The Good Soldier – for example, an apparent confusion about the date of the first meeting of the Ashburnhams and Dowells at Nauheim, and the fact that Dowell appears to finish writing a novel published in 1915 at the beginning of 1916!15 – but while these ‘problems’ may point to Ford’s imperfect workmanship, it is just as likely that they are integral to his representation of the lack of ‘straight forward[ness]’ in human experience and his belief that a discontinuous and inconsistent narrative structure is more true to life than one which is flawlessly chronological. In Part Three Dowell mentions that he is well aware of the distinction between ‘a cheap novelist’ and ‘a very good novelist’ and tells us that ‘it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things dearly’. Riddled with darkness and doubt though The Good Soldier may be, and notwithstanding Dowell’s protestations of incompetence, the fact is that it, and he, successfully get across the messiness, ‘unhappiness’, bewilderment and isolation of what Dowell calls ‘this sweltering hell of ours’. The truth is that Dowell is both tiresomely ineffectual and subtly effective as a narrator, often simultaneously, and the more the novel is re-read, the more his craftsmanship and his achievement may be appreciated. For ‘an ageing American with very little knowledge of life’, a man who freely confesses that he ‘doesn’t know much about human beings’, Dowell, especially in the second half of the book, writes almost with tragic insight.
The idea of a narrator addressing a ‘silent listener’ is also found in Ford’s criticism. In writing of this figure in a two-part essay called ‘On Impressionism’ (1914), Ford discussed the literary artist’s absolute need to ‘capture’ and ‘hold’ his ‘silent listener’s’ attention:
You will do this by methods of surprise, of fatigue, by passages of sweetness in your language, by passages suggesting the sudden and brutal shock of suicide. You will give him passages of dullness, so that your bright effects may seem more bright; you will alternate, you will dwell for a long time upon an intimate point; you will seek to exasperate so that you may the better enchant. You will, in short, employ all the devices of the prostitute. If you are too proud for this you may be the better gentleman or the better lady, but you will be the worse artist.16
The ‘silent listener’ of The Good Soldier, though facing Dowell across a cosy cottage fire, is never permitted a cosy grasp of things, but Ford’s credo suggests that our discomfort may well be intentional and that we must listen all the harder to what Dowell says in order to locate his meaning. As he remarks to the reader apropos of Edward and Leonora’s quarrel about sending Nancy back to her father: ‘I can’t make out which of them was right. I leave it to you.’
Above all, Ford himself was an unreliable narrator, never averse to downplaying the truth in order to heighten an effect. ‘This book… is full of inaccuracies as to facts’, he wrote of Ancient Lights (1911), a volume of reminiscences dedicated to his daughters, ‘but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute’,17 while in his preface to Joseph Conrad Ford declared:
Where the writer’s memory has proved to be at fault over a detail afterwards out of curiosity looked up, the writer has allowed the fault