Free Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes

peculiar than Wilson’s case. Like Ford, Waugh wrote a book about Rossetti; while his Second World War trilogy,
Sword of Honour
, seems manifestly related to Ford’s First World War quartet, in its setting of marital warfare against the wider landscape of the real thing, and its pitting of a vindictive, pursuing wife against an out-of-his-time gentlemanly husband.
    With Ford, even praise somehow turned itself to his disadvantage. In his preface to a 1927 reissue of
The Good Soldier
, he recounts the story of an admirer telling him it was ‘the finest novel in the English language’. To which Ford’s friend John Roker rejoined, ‘Ah, yes, it is. But you have left a word out. It is the finest French novel in the English language.’ In a tauter, less authentic form – ‘the best French novel in the language’ – this is often cited, famously in Lowell’s
Life Studies
. If readers can be put off by titles (I resisted
The Catcher in the Rye
for many years, imagining it to be a prairie baseball novel), so they can by hyping tags. What’s the point of writing a French novel in English? you might roughly ask. That’s a pretty fey thing to do, isn’t it? And not exactly entering a competitive field either: what’s the second-best French novel in the language?
    France certainly provided
The Good Soldier
’s point of emulative origin: ‘I had in those days an ambition’, wrote Ford subsequently, ‘that was to do for the English novel what in
Fort comme la mort
, Maupassant had done for the French.’ What Maupassant did was this: into a novel which for much of its length appears to be a kind of tranced, Degasian treatment of the society woman in late-nineteenth-century Paris, delighting in the
douces petites gourmandises
of feminine existence among
la fine fleur du high-life
, he gradually introduces the theme ofviolently transgressive passion – that of a society painter for the daughter of his long-term mistress. The painter’s tragedy – if that’s what it is – springs from the flaying difference between the easy love of youth and the desperate (the more desperate because unwanted and unrequited) love of age. ‘It’s the fault of our hearts for not growing old,’ laments the hero-victim, whose emotionally incestuous love moves the final quarter of the novel to a pitch of terror and a heightened, operatic mode. The love that dares not speak its existence finally prefers death to acknowledgement.
    Ford applies these tropes and torments to a very English set of characters (even the Americans are such Anglophiles that their Americanness barely registers) from a similar leisured class. But
The Good Soldier
is much less of a social novel than
Fort comme la mort
. The progressive disintegration of Edward Ashburnham, good soldier and seemingly model Englishman, takes place in festering privacy: initially among a tight Racinian quartet of expatriates at the German spa of Nauheim; ultimately with Ashburnham’s ward Nancy Rufford. His relationship with her is plainly – as in the Maupassant – emotionally incestuous, and may well be more than this: Ford’s biographer Max Saunders has made a persuasive case for Nancy being Ashburnham’s daughter. In terms of emotional heat
The Good Soldier
is even Frencher than
Fort comme la mort
. Maupassant turns up the burners only towards the end of his novel. Ford raises the stakes in both madness and terror (and body count); but his greatest audacity is to start at the highest emotional pitch, and then keep raising it.
    Cyril Connolly in
The Modern Movement
praised
The Good Soldier
with rather idle words about its ‘energy and intelligence’. Looked at now, the novel barges its way into the modernist club for very different reasons: its immaculate use of a ditheringly unreliable narrator, its sophisticated disguise of true narrative behind a false facade of apparent narrative, its self-reflectingness, its deep duality about human motive, intentionand experience, and its