The Quality of Sadness in Ford's The Good Soldier

296 THE QUALITY OF SADNESS IN FORD'S THE GOOD SOLDIER By Lawrence William Jones (Algonquin College) Ford Madox Ford's reluctance to change the title of his fascinating pre-World War I masterpiece from "The Saddest Story" to "The Good Soldier" ought to be fair indication of how he regarded the book and of how we ought to read it. For it was a drastic change - necessitated, in the opinion of Ford's editor, by the exigencies of wartime publication - to which Ford continued to object long afterward; and the author's view has since been seconded by many of his critics. Not only is such Insistence upon the sadness of the tale worth our close attention, but perhaps It is very much to the point to ask some fundamental questions about the nature or quality of this sadness. Does it consist of the pity or transient self-pity customarily associated with pathos? Or does it give rise to the enduring knowledge and self-knowledge we associate with tragedy? Has Ford managed only to make us cry, or has he produced a deep and lasting study of human affairs which promotes in the reader an "education of the heart"? To begin with. Ford himself apparently did not believe that the deeper, tragic kind of sadness was visible In The Good Soldier. "I call this the Saddest Story rather than the »Ashburnham Tragedy ,ι just because It is so sad," he said, "just because there was no current to draw things along to a swift and Inevitable end. There Is about this story none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about It no nemesis, no destiny." Some critics have agreed with Ford's assessment that, at least In its classical Arlstotelean sense, tragedy Is absent here. Others, however, such as John Melxner, claim that the novel is still very much a tragedy. "The culminating achievement of Ford's 'cat's cradle· vision. The Good Soldier is, at its core, a tragedy," says Melxner; "It tells a lacerating story of groping human beings, caught Implacably by training, character, and circumstance, who cruelly and blindly inflict on each other terrible misery and pain."2 Yet he seeks to qualify this statement, which is too easily applied to a work like Oedipus Rex, some twenty pages later by saying that although some Arlstotelean elements are present, the book really presents "a genuinely tragic experience ... in circumstances , peculiar to the twentieth century, which condition that experience in a special meaningful WBy."-5 This last is a perceptive observation, for although the sadness in the novel does arise from tragedy and not from pathos, the tragedy itself Is not classical but modern. And by modern I do not 297 Imply the^type of social tragedy which Arthur Miller has so well described (although Ford's protagonists are caught In part by the social trap which victimized Willy Loman) but that Inherent in the work of our absurdist playwrights like Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter.5 In other words. Ford's tragedy (as I hope to show In the course of this essay) Is that which derives from the situation of human beings in an essentially meaningless universe, where ideals, values and even language have no sense and no force. The sadness arises from perpetual despair at the realization of this human predicament , a total and hopeless despair. But to turn now from generalities to The Good Soldier Itself, It is possible to stand In medias res, so to speak, in the midst of the events of the story, to look around and backwards and forwards in time -seeing nothing but sadness. By artful digressions ("you must appear to digress," Ford once said; "that Is the art which conceals your Art," and his character Dowell remarks further that "when one discusses an affair - a long, sad affair - one goes backward , one goes forward" [183]) we are given, throughout the course of the narrative, the past lives of the main characters. And there is a touch of that peculiarly modern sadness in each life. Florence 's life has consisted of her imbibing of the false idealism of her New England Aunts Hurlbird and the sham sickness of...