openness and contempt. This last Forsterian qualification, this keen sum-up of the ways of society, is as perceptive as it is sad.
To move from Forster to Ford is not as great a shift as it might seem. Both authors were consummate observers of their society, with the same sensitivity for scenting hypocrisy disguised as manners. Raised as a Hueffer with the Rossettis as cousins, Ford Madox Ford had to be either precocious or a failure. He was eighteen when his first book came out, a fairy tale called The Brown Owl, and in fact many of his novels retain a certain fairy-tale aspect. Even when his characters are trapped in modern society, there is a sense that a repeal may be possible, if only in the private dispensations of the mind.
From his early collaboration with Conrad (The Inheritors, Romance), he learned the modernist technique of combining impressionism and symbolism: the exact particulars of a scene merged with a looser, shadowy resonance. In Ford, the details are crucial not because they aspire to factual accuracy but because of what they suggest. Like Forster, he became an elder dean to the modernists, a movement that rarely respected its elders. He had, for want of a better term, true literary acumen, even if, also like Forster, he occasionally preached better than he practiced.
Ford's thirty-two novels are too various to group under one rubric and too uneven in quality to merit full discussion. The best that can be said of his first novel, The Shifting of the Fire, is Conrad's pronouncement: 'delightfully young.' Ford's first salient effort is The Fifth Queen, a trilogy of historical novels about Henry VIII's fifth wife Katharine Howard and the labyrinthine intrigue surrounding the court. As Roland Barthes observes in S/Z, the historical novel is a bricolage, the difficulty being to get the exact size of history within the fictional structure. Ford accomplishes this feat through social nuance and detail, creating a sixteenth-century novel of manners by seemingly reconstructing the entire context. The arcane vocabulary and immersion in period details rival the accomplishments of T. H. White.
The story of The Fifth Queen belongs to Katharine Howard, a forerunner of the controversial polymath Valentine Wannop in Parade's End. Her future husband represents the triumph of the Renaissance -833- over the medieval, though his Lord Privy Seal Thomas Cromwell conspires for a return to the old order. The forces of evil and good are themselves somewhat confused, with characters such as the pedagogue Nicholas Udall and the spy Throckmorton as Dickensian figures of expediency. When Katharine makes a classical allusion to the Lacedaemions, Henry admonishes: 'those were the days of a black and white world; now we are all grey or piebald.' In the end, the king sends Katharine to her death, but he cannot be certain of her infidelity.
Ford himself keenly felt the changing of the old order. The Edwardian era, with its uncertain status of tradition and change, often resulted in what Forster termed muddle. The coming of modernism also signaled a new renaissance with the classical directives of Pound and T. S. Eliot, but somehow the odor of sanctity had departed. The modernists used memory to synthesize bits of past and present; Ford, whose recall was prodigious, invoked entire eras. In Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, a transhistorical romance, the publisher Sorrell accidentally returns to the fourteenth century in the kind of scenario made famous by Mark Twain. But whereas Twain's Connecticut Yankee brings the miracles of progress, Sorrell becomes more and more enamored of the old ways. It is an anti-Wellsian message akin to Forster's: our best hope for a future lies in our deep past. Unfortunately, Ford does not give Sorrell sufficient weight of character to make his views compelling. Ford's other attempts at historical novels, such as the earlier 'Half Moon' or the later, A Little Less than Gods, were unsuccessful for more or less the same reason: lack of psychological complexity.
Like Forster, Ford for a time was an author of unfulfilled potential. Only at age forty did he sit down to write what John Rodker once termed 'the finest French novel in the English language.' The Good Soldier, published in 1915, is a work of astonishing complexity, derived from Ford's impressions of prewar international society. It is a novel of manners and manors, told in such detail that it is hard to reconcile with the epistemological uncertainty underneath. Subtitled A Tale of Passion, it manages to reveal everything and nothing about a four- or five- or six- cornered affair of the heart.
The American protagonist John Dowell is ruefully articulate about his marriage to Florence and their almost coincidental relationship with the British Ashburnhams. As he says at the start: 'My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know any-
834- body, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of affairs only possible with English people.' This aspect of the English tallies with Forster's estimate in Abinger Harvest: 'well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts.' Edward Ashburnham is an upper-class landowner, his wife Leonora a respectable Irish Catholic. Yet as the plot develops-or rather follows the convolutions of Dowell's recall-one learns that Ashburnham has had a series of affairs, that Florence had a few secrets of her own, and that Leonora has had the battle of her life keeping her marriage and the estate from falling apart. Dowell himself seems bloodless, though he talks of emotion, and calmly recollective, though his memory plays tricks on him. He is an unreliable narrator in a story with no other signposts to guide one, save the disjunctive irony of teller versus tale.
The connecting metaphor of the novel is the heart: Ashburnham has a weak heart and also wears his heart on his sleeve, Florence supposedly suffers from a bad heart but really acts in bad faith, while Leonora and Dowell both act 'the sedulous strained nurse' to their spouses. A few of Ashburnham's women also have weak hearts: not just a physical debility, but an inability to control the passion just below the surface. The social fabric is such that it supports such lives while exposing nothing, and there is a great deal to be exposed. Ashburnham is the perfect British gentleman, lord of the manor with a military background and a history of sexual liaisons. Florence is of proper New England stock, but she has pursued an affair with a seedy type named Jimmy that she is at great pains to suppress. Dowell and Florence are part of the American expatriate set detailed by Henry James, and in fact the psychological intrigues set up are quite Jamesian.
But Ford is describing a less stable world than James's. As Dowell recalls the episodes and characters, he continually amends and revises. Ashburnham is a good sort, then an embarrassment to his name; Florence is a poor dear invalid, then a cunning manipulator of everyone around her. The metaphor of the heart turns out to be a symbol for unknown depths, and Dowell's continual response is a narratorial shrug. As he confesses early on:
I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness. -835-
The tone is Conradian but without Marlow's illuminating intelligence. Often termed the quintessential modernist novel, The Good Soldier is in this respect almost postmodern in its assumptions about reality. Words, the great faith of the modernists, lead only further into the abyss.
The novel nonetheless has a social dimension to place it. Its original title, 'The Saddest Story,' refers in a larger sense to the slow decline of British culture. When Dowell decries the lack of permanance and stability, he is talking about the breakup of their foursome, but the whole of society is indicted. As in Howards End, the scale is miniature, the implications major, as in Dowell's recalling a metaphor 'that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths.' Cancer attacks from within, and in Ford's society most of the characters are infected with the modern-day equivalent of acedia: ennui. Boredom is a kind of withdrawal as much as it is a reaction to external events: here is the lack of engagement of the upper classes, coinciding with the straitjacket of social restraint. In its focus on the empty conventions of the upper classes, The Good Soldier anticipates the novels of Henry Green.
In a sense, the era itself is poisoned. Throughout the novel, the date August 4 recurs as a motif: it is the day of Dowell and Florence's marriage, as well as the day of both Leonora's maid Maisie Maidan's and Florence's death. August 4th also dates the onset of British involvement in the Great War (and by a curious coincidence, the Franco- Prussian War, as well). As Paul Fussell has shown, the Great War changed the thinking of a whole generation from idealism to cynicism, requiring a new language to record the movements of a society that sacrificed so much for so little. Or, as Philip Larkin writes in «MCMXIV»: 'Never such innocence again.' The Good Soldier's title is laced with irony.
Just as modernism existed in the decade following 1910, however, signs of social unrest in Britain predate the war. Labor reform, mass education, suffragism, and other movements all challenged what Samuel Hynes has called 'the Edwardian garden party.' The upper classes, confronting a changing world they little understood, either lolled or languished. Edward Ashburnham is one of Ford's familiar types, better suited to an earlier era. Anxious to
