The play of passion

IN his seminal essay, "Why Read the Classics", Italo Calvino, Italian essayist and short story writer, defined a classic (one of a series of 14 definitions) as "a book that has never finished saying what it has to say," because no great story is ever told as if it is the only one. There is always a sub-text running right through, of stories within stories; it is not an isolated single entity; essentially, it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations that weave in and out of each other to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

So it is with Ford Madox Ford's neglected classic, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, one of the great tales of wrecked lives and unsatisfied desires that runs through the whole gamut of human emotions: desire, hatred, suicide, madness and inexpressible pity, to ask the agonised question: "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?" Ford's response to this cri du coeur is: "Who in this world knows anything of any other heart - or of his own? It is all a mystery."

The Good Soldier opens with one of the most famous statements in all fiction: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." And continues: "We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim 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 is possible to know anybody and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing 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 know nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and certainly I had never considered the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows."

The first paragraph asks all the underlying questions in the novel. How well do we really know the people we care about? What do we mean by an "extreme intimacy"? What do we mean by a "loose" and "easy" acquaintanceship? Can an acquaintanceship become the beginning of a beautiful relationship? What is the glove's relationship with the hand? Can this mean a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for an iron fist in a velvet glove? Isn't proximity the root cause of all conflict? If truth is never straight and never simple, should it not be told obliquely, at a slant, as it were? Besides, nothing is quite the same as it appears at first sight and therefore shouldn't you question your first impressions and look beneath the surface of things?

Though the novel has a deep philosophical sub-text and asks the eternal questions on the nature of human passions, the storyline is pretty straightforward. At a European health resort, the narrator Dowell and his wife, Florence, both Americans, meet the English couple Edward and Leonara Ashburnham. Florence and Edward soon enter into "an extreme intimacy," that is, they have an adulterous affair. The Good Soldier that Ford wanted to call The Saddest Story concerns the ravages caused by the passionate Edward who had all the virtues except continence. "Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest-looking sort of a chap - an excellent magistrate, a first-rate soldier, one of the best landlords so they said, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, he was like a painstaking guardian. You would have said he was exactly the sort of chap you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness."

It is through the eyes of the betrayed husband that we watch the complications and involvements left by Ashburnham's blind passion that must find an outlet; it cannot be bottled up. After all, this is a tale of passion. And passion by its very nature means intense suffering as well as ardour, or a burning feeling because it is, paradoxically, pleasing. When the ardour cools, as it must because there are limits to the physical, memory takes over with a persistent why? why? why? The future - the notion of that which is yet to happen - is now set at the back of the speaker. Dowell goes back and forth in time. The past which he can see because it has already happened lies all before him. He backs into the future unknown; memory goes forward, hope backwards as he agonises over Ashburnhams' history and character, their involvements with others and his own relationship with Florence.

The time-shifts are valuable not merely to enhance the suspense but as an honest description of the appalling events. Besides, this is just how memory works - back and forth, never linear - and we become involved with Dowell's memory as if it were our own:

I  have,  I am aware, told this story in a very rambling  way  so 
that  it may be difficult for anyone to find their  path  through 
what  may be a sort of a maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck  to 
my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener 

[the  whole tenor of the novel is like a person talking  to  you] 
hearing  with  the  gusts of wind and amidst the  noises  of  the 
distant  sea,  the story as it comes. And when one  discusses  an 
affair - a long sad affair - one goes back, one goes forward. One 
remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all 
the more minutely since one recogniszes that one has forgotten to 
mention them in their proper places and that one may have  given, 
by  omitting  them,  a false impression. I  console  myself  with 
thinking  that  this is a real story and that,  after  all,  real 
stories  are  probably told best in the way a  person  telling  a 
story would tell them. They will then seem most real.

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