Like John Dowell, the narrator of The Good Soldier, I haven’t been entirely – how should I say? – forthcoming. Last week, when discussing the title of the novel, and the way that it focuses attention on the character of Edward Ashburnham, I skipped over the idea that in directing the spotlight onto Edward, the title helps John Dowell remain in the shadows. It makes you spend a lot of time thinking about whether Edward is “good” – but Dowell? Less so. Though – and here’s an indication of the novel’s complicated genius – spending time thinking about Edward, in a curious way, makes you worry about Dowell even more.
And if that previous sentence was horribly tangled, my excuse is that it’s an attempt to suggest the loops and knots this curious, elusive narrator winds around his reader. Or, as he would have it, his interlocutor: the person supposedly sitting in front of him by a fire, hearing his story in the most straightforward way he can tell it. Hearing about a series of terrible blows, injustices and misfortunes that have been landed upon this poor innocent man. This victim of other people’s lies, passions and absurdities. For if you take Dowell’s story at face value, he’s really had it rough.
This is how he would have you believe things worked out: Poor old Dowell, unwary of the wiles of women, was tricked into marrying the heartless and pitiless Florence. Florence had no desire for him, or even liking. The marriage was a sham set up to enable her to get to Europe and launch herself on English society, while carrying on an affair with a blackmailing cad called Jimmy. Before the marriage was consummated, she persuaded Dowell that she had a heart condition and must under no circumstances be excited. Which is why for most of their married life, she kept her bedroom door locked to him, and as Dowell explains: “I was provided with an axe – an axe! – great gods, with which to break down her door in case she ever failed to answer my knock, after I knocked really loud several times. It was pretty well thought out, you see.”
In spite of these arrangements, Dowell thought himself “happy”. He naively carried on tending to Florence, assiduously avoiding anything that might excite or (judging by his reports of their conversations) even interest her. He supported her in idle luxury in the spa town of Nauheim. He thought he was lucky when the charming Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora wondered into their lives. Little did he know that behind that locked door, Edward was carrying out an affair with Florence. He didn’t even realise that there had been something wrong when his wife committed suicide. In fact, he was even unaware of the fact that she had killed herself. He thought it was her heart problem. It was only when Leonora explained everything to him afterwards, back in England, that he began to realise how he had been deceived. And yet, in spite of all, he still remained on friendly terms with Edward. When Edward in turn killed himself, Dowell went on to play a thoroughly honourable part in trying to pick up the pieces and look after a poor girl called Nancy Rufford who had lost her mind because of Edward’s amours.
That plot summary is perfectly plausible. I think, the first time I read the novel, I mainly believed it. Plenty of very intelligent readers also think Dowell’s naivety is credible. Writing here in The Guardian a few years ago, Jane Smiley said: “Ford’s greatest gamble is in the naïveté of the narrator (Dowell), supposedly an idle but well-meaning wealthy man from an old Philadelphia family who readily accepts a sexless marriage with a woman (Florence) whose emotional life is a secret and a deception.”
But is that really his gamble? Can we really believe Dowell? I’m not sure – and I know I’m not alone in that. Reading Group contributor BaddHamster puts the problem very neatly: “I came away with the distinct impression that Dowell was either a dreadful liar (or at least a serious manipulator of the facts to serve his own ends) or else he was one of the most stupid characters ever to live in fictionville. As he can certainly be extremely precise when he wants to, I suspect it’s the former.”
(Just as an aside, I hope that the ghost of Ford Madox Ford glories in the fact that someone called BaddHamster should be discussing him so intelligently one hundred years after he wrote his novel.)
It’s hard to remember precisely when I began to wonder if Dowell was not quite what he wants us to think he is. But I know I got a strange feeling when I got to the following passage: “I could see his lips form a word of three syllables – remember I had nothing in the world to do but to notice these niceties – and immediately I knew that he must be Edward Ashburnham, Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of Branshaw House, Branshaw Teleragh. I knew it because every evening just before dinner, whilst I waited in the hall, I used, by the courtesy of Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor, to inspect the little police reports that each guest was expected to sign upon taking a room.”
I couldn’t tell you if inspecting guest lists was normal practice before the first world war. But I do know that the way it is presented here makes it seem odd. Something about the way he brings in Schontz, and the diminishing of the reports in that “little”. Something about the image of him rifling through to check on the particulars of people he hasn’t even met ...
Should you choose, you can find plenty of reinforcement for this idea that Dowell may be a vicious sneaking creep. It’s even possible to feel sorry for Florence. Think of his limp failure to properly embrace her even as they are eloping. Think of the way he insists she talks of boring things. Think of the perpetual coldness with which he describes her – the fact that he thinks so little of her charms. Would you enjoy being married to Dowell?
There’s also a disturbing hint of violence in his make-up. One of the first things Florence sees him do is to “fill up” one of the eyes of his servant and threaten to strangle him. And on the matter of disturbing possibilities, Dowell may even be complicit in his wife’s suicide. Initially, when he describes seeing her running through the street, on what turned out to be her flight to her death, he suggests he has no idea what was going to happen. He says: “I could not move; I could not stir a finger”. But when he returns to the scene later in the novel, he says: “I thought suddenly that she wasn’t real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates. It is even possible that, if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her room and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But I just couldn’t do it ...”
Like so much else in the book, that can be read in quite a few ways. But still the idea is there – just as he also does nothing to help Edward in his final moments.
There are plenty of other questions. Given that Dowell seems to know so much about her uncle’s questionable heart problems, was he really as ignorant of Florence as he suggests? Why do women shy away from him so much? Leonora gets shot of him as soon as she can. Nancy – who effectively becomes his prisoner at the end – shows no desire to be with him whatsoever. All of these questions might have innocent answers. But they might not ...
Talking of the end, meanwhile, for all Dowell’s complaining, things work out rather well for him. As Reading Group contributor Terry Smith points out: “Florence commits suicide just five days after her uncle dies, so Dowell gets all their money which he, of course, does not want, but the aunts plead with him to take it all ... A character who failed to take any action whatsoever to stop his ‘friend’ from cutting his own throat would also be unlikely to engender much sympathy.”
Which begs the question, how much sympathy do we feel for this man?
The most impressive thing for me is that all bets are off. This is a book open to interpretation. You can have your cake and eat it. Dowell can be both an innocent victim and a monster. And he is fascinating, whichever way you look at him.
