Late Essays

by J. M. Coetzee

  Hester does not flee, but ends her days in the settlement, still wearing the scarlet letter while steadily labouring to transform its meaning by acts of selflessness and courage. It is difficult to know how much of a victory this is, for while much is achieved – her example must surely take the chill off the hearts of some of her neighbours – much too has to be renounced, including any life of the senses. It is significant that on attaining adulthood her daughter leaves the colony in quest of a better life and does not come back.

  3. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

  Although Ford Madox Ford has been dead for nearly eighty years, his place in the pantheon of British novelists has yet to be settled. The genealogy Ford claimed for himself, running from Turgenev, Flaubert and Maupassant through Henry James and Joseph Conrad, set him apart from the mainstream of the British novel, while his association with the literary avant-garde before and after the First World War, particularly with Ezra Pound, seemed to place him in the cosmopolitan modernist camp. Yet his two indubitable masterpieces, The Good Soldier (1915) and the tetralogy Parade’s End (1924–8), are the work of a painstaking craftsman rather than an experimentalist, and express a social vision that is conservative, even backward-looking, rather than revolutionary.

  Part of the reason for Ford’s unsettled place in literary history is that he was born neither into the generation of the great modernists – in the English language, the generation of Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce – nor into the last generation of the great Victorians – the generation of Thomas Hardy – but in between. Thus, while he felt sympathetic toward the impatience of the young with settled social and artistic conventions, he was a little too old and cautious to give himself fully to their revolutionary enthusiasms.

  Another complicating factor was his uncertain relationship with the land of his birth. Ford Madox Ford was born in 1873 as Ford Madox Hueffer, the son of a German father and an English mother; he changed his name after the Great War, when hostility toward everything German was sweeping through Britain. His father was a distinguished musicologist and advocate of the music of Wagner; his mother was the daughter of Ford Madox Brown, one of the school of avant-garde artists who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. A precociously brilliant child, Ford was educated partly at home, partly at a school that implemented the most advanced educational theories of the day. He never went to a university.

  In a society in which class divisions were a deeply entrenched fact of life, the young Ford had no clearly recognizable class identity. His uneasy situation vis-à-vis the English nation, the English class system, and the English national church (he was born a Catholic), compounded by a very public marital scandal in which he was engulfed during his thirties – a scandal which made him somewhat of a pariah in polite society and lost him many friends – led him, after 1919, to withdraw from England and Englishness. He settled in France, where he made an insecure living as writer and journalist with occasional lecture tours to the United States. He died in 1939.

  Ford was a prolific writer. By the time he sat down to write The Good Soldier, at the age of forty, he already had dozens of books behind him. Though some of these – principally a trilogy of novels set in the times of King Henry VIII and various memoirs – have their aficionados, the fact is that the bulk of his fiction has not stood the test of time. Wave after wave of scholars have revisited his oeuvre, hoping to discover unrecognized masterpieces, only to return empty-handed. Surprisingly, for a writer who revered Flaubert for his exhausting labours over Madame Bovary and his uncompromising quest for le mot juste, who in addition had had the privilege of collaborating with Conrad and seeing at first hand the agonies of doubt that Conrad underwent over his own writing and the massive revisions he undertook, Ford himself published one novel after another in which the construction is careless, the plot uninteresting, the characterization shallow, and the prose merely passable.

  How could this have happened? Part of the reason was that Ford, chronically short of money, often had to write in a hurry for the market. Another part is that, having been encouraged as a youth to think of himself as a genius, he tended to believe that whatever his hand touched was bound to have merit. But the deeper reason is that, until The Good Soldier, Ford failed to plumb the obscurer, more personal sources of his urge to write.

  Written before the Great War, The Good Soldier is a novel not about war (despite its title) but about the institution of marriage in Edwardian England and the ways in which infidelities were managed within that institution. More broadly, it is a novel about the pan-European class of ‘good people’ and the codes by which that class maintained itself. (That the Europe it portrays was about to go down in a welter of blood could not have been foreseen by its author.) The novel brings together a bitter critique of the sacrifices, both personal and moral, required for the maintenance of ‘good’ standards, with the remembered anguish of Ford’s own marital crisis. It is an exploration of civilization and its discontents, and specifically an exposé of the psychic cost of married life in days when divorce was rare.

  Here is the narrator of the novel explaining the unwritten rules by which ‘good people’ are to be recognized:

  The odd, queer thing is that the whole collection of rules applies to anybody – to the anybodies that you meet in hotels, in railway trains, to a less degree, perhaps, in steamers, but even, in the end, upon steamers. You meet a man or a woman and, from tiny and intimate sounds, from the slightest of movements, you know at once whether you are concerned with good people or with those who won’t do.1

  The speaker is John Dowell, an American, a New Englander, a wealthy but rather bloodless man who has spent much of his adult life squiring his wife around the fashionable vacation resorts of Europe’s upper classes. As heirs to ‘old’ money, born into ‘old’ families with long genealogies, John and Florence Dowell qualify as ‘good people’ themselves. Yet as citizens of the New World the Dowells are to an extent outside the snobberies and rivalries of the Europeans, and to that extent John Dowell can be a dispassionate, objective observer of European manners.

  Good people, as opposed to people who won’t do, are of course euphemisms, part of the deliberately euphemistic vocabulary employed by ‘good people’, who have no need to say clearly what they tacitly agree upon. They have no need for clear words because they know how to interpret the minute sounds and gestures by which strangers either signal that they are ‘good’ or betray that they ‘won’t do’.

  Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier, retired in the prime of life from the officer corps of the British army on the grounds of a heart condition, is the chief practitioner of this code or cult of wordlessness, and in the end its principal victim. For nine years, from the moment we first lay eyes on him in the dining room of the Hotel Excelsior in Nauheim until shortly before his death, Ashburnham utters not a single word in our hearing that is not conventional or platitudinous. Why? Because he and his wife Leonora accept a code which dictates that any public display of feeling, any expression that comes straight from the heart, risks being unseemly. The code dictates a strict separation of the public from the private. In public, says the code, civilized standards must be maintained. As for what goes on in private, that is a matter solely for the individuals concerned, or perhaps for the individuals concerned and their God.

  Thus the marriage of the Ashburnhams, so well ordered in public that their friend Dowell admires them as a model couple, turns out to be, behind closed doors, a purgatory of rage and jealousy and shame and misery; while the marriage of the Dowells themselves, their distant imitators, is founded on practised deception on the one side and naive complacency on the other.

  As young people Edward and Leonora had been brought together in the kind of arranged marriage which (we are given to understand) is not uncommon among the landed gentry into which they are born, a class to whom relations with their horses and dogs are at least as important as relations with other human beings. Leonora, as Edward’s potential
bride, is appraised in terms appropriate to horseflesh. Specifically, Edward approves her ‘clean-run’ looks. Clean-run is a term used by horse breeders to mean that a horse is well proportioned and of good pedigree (clean-bred). During its long history the English word clean has been as multifarious in use and as slippery in meaning as the word good. In olden times a virtuous woman was called clean.

  In the Middle Ages an erotic code, the code of chivalry, grew up among the knightly class, the class of horsemen. It had a strong quasi-religious component, projecting onto the object of the knight’s desire many of the attributes of the Virgin. It is this code, more or less, that Edward Ashburnham follows in relation to women. Thus, although he is systematically unfaithful to his wife, he nonetheless worships her and will say nothing that might sully her name.

  Edward permits himself to be unfaithful to his wife because among ‘good people’ this is a normal way for a man to behave. At the same time he reveres his wife because this too is normal. As to his actual feelings – what he feels in his heart for his wife or his mistresses – he himself is largely in the dark: the code is of no help to him here. One of the subsidiary themes of The Good Soldier is that, since they do not read books or talk about their feelings, ‘good people’ tend to be ignorant about the emotions and to lead inchoate emotional lives. The library on Ashburnham’s country estate is full of horse-racing memorabilia, empty of books. After his retirement from the army, if and when he has time to kill, Ashburnham sometimes dips into a popular novel. As might be expected, his reading only reinforces his romantic and wholly conventional notions about relations between the sexes.

  The most direct commentary in the book on the love of a man for a woman comes from Dowell:

  As I see it, at least, with regard to man, a love affair, a love for a definite woman – is something in the nature of a widening of the experience. With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory … Of the question of the sex instinct I know very little and I do not think that it counts for much in a really great passion. It can be aroused by such nothings – by an untied shoelace, by a glance of the eye in passing – that I think it might be left out of the calculation. I don’t mean to say that any great passion can exist without a desire for consummation … But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the craving for identity with the woman he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported …

  So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants … But these things pass away … It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times …

  And yet … for every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good. He will travel over no more horizons; he will never again set the knapsack over his shoulders; he will retire from those scenes. He will have gone out of business. (pp. 105–7)

  The man Dowell has in mind is Ashburnham, and the woman who has set her seal upon Ashburnham’s imagination is his young ward, Nancy Rufford. It is at this moment in the history of their marriage – in Dowell’s reading – that Leonora turns against her husband. Hitherto Leonora has bitterly tolerated her husband’s affairs, and even managed their disastrous consequences, in the knowledge that they will pass. Now she begins to fight in earnest for her interests; and now (in Dowell’s reading) the story of the Ashburnhams ceases to be merely sad (The Saddest Story was the title Ford wanted for the novel, but his publisher vetoed it) and becomes tragic, culminating in Edward’s suicide.

  The Good Soldier is a virtuoso exercise in novelistic technique. It is narrated by the most deceived of the personages in the action, the one who, for a variety of reasons, is being kept in the dark by the others. The only voice that the reader hears is that of John Dowell. The constraints of the method of narration chosen by Ford dictate that when Dowell reports the speech of other actors, it is only the words they say to him or say in his hearing, or their words as reported to him, that he himself can report. Since he learns about the deception that has been acted out before him only late in the action, much of his understanding of the history of relations between the Dowells and the Ashburnhams, or between Edward and Leonora Ashburnham and their ward, must be retrospective, pieced together and reconstructed from remembered fragments.

  The Good Soldier is rightly admired for the ingenuity of its construction and the rigorousness with which a limited point of view – Dowell’s – is maintained. But there is more to Ford’s choice of an ignorant man as narrator than a desire to set and solve a technical problem. Dowell is the only participant in the action who learns anything: the others simply enact their roles in life. Dowell is thus the representative of the reader in the novel, the one who learns by ‘reading’ what has been going on around him. What Dowell learns from the fate of the good soldier Edward Ashburnham is – one presumes – what the reader is meant to learn.

  But is it so?

  Among the host of deceived spouses in literature, one of the best known is Charles Bovary. Under his nose his wife Emma carries on two lengthy and passionate love affairs and runs up extravagant debts. Of all of this he is ignorant. Yet after her suicide and his own financial ruin Charles finds himself more in love with her than ever. He abandons his staid old ways and dresses fashionably, trying to be the kind of man she would have admired. ‘He adopted her taste, her ideas; he bought patent leather boots and took to wearing white cravats. He waxed his moustache and, just like her, signed promissory notes. She corrupted him from beyond the grave.’2 When, much later, he finds out about Emma’s infidelities, his reaction is to wish that he had been one of her lovers.

  There are echoes of Madame Bovary in The Good Soldier, and there is every reason to think they are deliberate. ‘Yes, no doubt I am jealous,’ says Dowell, summing up his position after the dust has settled. ‘In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive myself following the lines of Edward Ashburnham. I suppose that I should really like to be a polygamist; with Nancy, and with Leonora, and with Maisie Maidan and possibly even with Florence … At the same time I am able to assure you that I am a strictly respectable person … I have only followed, faintly, and in my unconscious desires, Edward Ashburnham’. (p. 204)

  If, after tracing in such detail the history of the Ashburnhams, Dowell longs to imitate the life and habits of the deceased Edward, as Charles tries to follow the example of the deceased Emma, then we can only conclude that Dowell has been corrupted from beyond the grave. More to the point, if Dowell is the representative of the reader, then the reader has been misled, for Dowell has profoundly misread the story of the good soldier. Not only has Dowell been blinded throughout (by his wife, by his ‘good’ friends) but also, in a different sense, he remains blind even when his eyes have been opened.

  Dowell reads Edward as a figure of tragedy, but Edward is not a tragic figure. It is a mark of the tragic hero that he should not simply be the victim of forces beyond his control, but should also be able to understand what those forces are. Edward has no such understanding, not because he is a fool but because the code by which he lives forbids him to inquire too closely into anything. Edward is not just a good, brave soldier and what his class would call ‘a good chap’ but a good man too: he is kind-hearted, he is generous, he is conscientious, he cares for the needy, there is every indication that he treats his mistresses chivalrously. Asked why he behaves and has always behaved well, he might resort to one of the inarticulate formulas of the code – for example, ‘Oh, one tries to do the decent thing.’ He would certainly not say, ‘Oh, one tries to follow the example of Our Lord.’

  As Dowell clearly sees, either the fate of Edward Ashburnham has a meaning or else everything is chaos
. But there is every reason to be sceptical about the lesson that Dowell extracts in the passage quoted: that indulging one’s passions, even at great cost, is better than repressing them. Though he never uses the word, what Dowell really admires about Ashburnham is his stoicism, in particular the stoicism with which (in Dowell’s account) he bears the joint assault of Leonora and Nancy in his last months on earth:

  Those two women pursued that poor devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it with whips. I tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see him stand, naked to the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, and flesh hanging from him in rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration of what I feel. It was as if Leonora and Nancy banded themselves together to do execution, for the sake of humanity, upon the body of a man who was at their disposal. They were like a couple of Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a stake. I tell you there was no end to the tortures they inflicted upon him …

  And, all the while, that wretched fellow knew – by a curious instinct that runs between human beings living together – exactly what was going on. And he remained dumb; he stretched out no finger to help himself. (pp. 206, 208)

  Of course it is a debased version of stoicism that Edward follows here, a version from which all intelligence has been excluded. Nevertheless, it represents a stance toward the world that Ford himself admired, if one is to look beyond The Good Soldier and take in the massive testimony of Parade’s End, whose hero, Christopher Tietjens, lives as Ashburnham does by the code of ‘doing the decent thing’ without inquiring too deeply why one does so.