Ford Ford Madox - Good Soldier

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

FORD MADOX FORD was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in London in 1873. His father, Dr Francis Hueffer, was an immigrant German writer, and music critic of The Times, and his maternal grandfather was the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. Born and bred an artist, Ford published his first book at the age of 17, under the name Ford Madox Hueffer. In 1919, after serving three and a half years in the British Army during the Great War, Ford dropped out of the London literary scene and changed his name to Ford Madox Ford; soon he moved to his beloved France. In all he produced some eighty volumes of fiction, poetry, reminiscence, biography, history, essays, travel writing, and literary and art criticism, and over four hundred magazine articles. He was the intimate friend and collaborator of Joseph Conrad, and knew well such contemporaries as H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and the American poet William Carlos Williams. He was founder and editor of both the English Review and the Transatlantic Review, but his greatest achievement lay in the novel, particularly in his undisputed modern masterpieces, The Good Soldier (1915) and the Tietjens tetralogy Parades End (19248).

Ford early married Elsie Martindale and had by her two daughters. Never divorced, he subsequently had lengthy liaisons with three other women who all took his name: the novelist Violet Hunt, and the artists Stella Bowen (by whom he had a daughter) and Janice Biala. Ford died in Beauville, France, in 1939.

THOMAS C. MOSER is Professor of English Emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (1957) and The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (1981). He is also the editor of Wuthering Heights: Text, Sources, Criticism (1962) and the Norton Critical Edition of Lord Jim (1968; second edition 1996). He has published numerous articles, including most recently a psychobiographical study of William Faulkner in a Festschrift for Ian Watt.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

FORD MADOX FORD

A Tale of Passion

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

THOMAS C. MOSER

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP

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Introduction, Note on the Text, Select Bibliography,
Chronology, and Explanatory Notes Thomas C. Moser 1990

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1990
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Ford, Ford Madox, 18731939.
The good soldier: a tale of passion
Ford Madox Ford: edited with an
introduction by Thomas C. Moser.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Moser, Thomas C. II. Title. III. Series.
PR6011.053G5 1990 823.912dc20 8922810

ISBN 019283620X

5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

MANY people helped with this edition. In the matter of printed texts and manuscripts, I wish to thank William McPheron and Michael Ryan of Stanford University Library and James Tyler of Cornell University Library. Again at Stanford, I am grateful, for advice and support, to Albert and Barbara Gelpi, Albert and Maclin Guerard, Meg Minto, and Ruth and Ian Watt. I am also indebted, for useful information, to Maryann De Julio, C. Ruth Sabol, Todd Bender, and Joseph Wiesenfarth.

Special thanks are due to the following: George Brown, for his invaluable help with Latin passages; Mia Manzulli, for her Voluntary and arduous work on collating texts and doing the initial research for the Notes; Judith Luna, of the Oxford University Press, for her wise and precise counsel on the whole project. My greatest debt is to my wife, Joyce Penn Moser, who not only did much of the final annotation but was also deeply involved in every aspect of this edition.

MORE than a half-century after Fords death and three-quarters of a century after the books publication, The Good Soldier remains the most elusive of modern impressionist masterpieces. Indeed, it is more controversial than such notoriously problematic novels as Conrads Lord Jim, Jamess The Ambassadors, Woolfs The Waves, and Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! Even its most ardent admirers disagree strongly about basic questions: the subject (idealism, passion, knowledge?), the narrative voice (honest, deluded, dishonest?), the protagonists character (good soldier, knave, fool?). Graham Greene, a lifelong advocate of The Good Soldier, suggests that the source of the novels mysterious power may lie in Fords biography: A novelist is not a vegetable absorbing nourishment mechanically from soil and air: material is not easily or painlessly gained, and one cannot help wondering what agonies of frustration and error lay behind