I was reading The Good Soldier while I was on vacation in London with my father. Though, in typical form, I only picked up the book twice while I was away: once on a crowded tube train and again at the start of my flight home. And then one day while we were there we visited the Imperial War Museum, the World War I rooms of which brought back memories of Parade's End. (There is a strange little case of gas canisters there, where the text helpfully informs you that Britain decided to fight gas with gas, but ended up deciding to stop using gas because, in effect, it didn't do enough damage. "Tell that to Ford Madox Ford," I thought when I read that. Granted, he and Christopher Tietjens did survive the war, so maybe they're onto something over at the Imperial War Museum.) I read Parade's End in 2012, before I wrote at any length about books I was reading, but I did declare it a close second for my favorite book I read that year, after 2666.
In any case, Ford Madox Ford was on my mind on this trip. Over some meal, probably after I had been reading on the tube, I asked my father, who knows books, if he had written anything of note besides The Good Soldier and Parade's End because it seemed like there must be more than two books. (To be fair, Parade's End is in fact 4 books, which I guess gives him 5 well-known books.) My father didn't know of anything said he imagined maybe those were the only "good" books, but that seemed impossible to me: his writing is so aching and lovely. Google informed us that he has written "dozens" of books, and Wikipedia cites The Fifth Queen trilogy as a third (or sixth, seventh, and eighth) famous work. I also learned that he co-authored a few books with Joseph Conrad, whom I've always found impenetrable on his own, so maybe those are worth a look? I did check every bookstore we stopped into for other of Ford's books, but found only The Good Soldier and Parade's End (and, in one case, a single volume of Some Do Not... the first book of Parade's End).
Anyway, The Good Soldier. I loved this book pretty much from page one. Ford writes so poignantly and accurately about the misery of love, about the cruelty that can only be inflicted in close relationships. (Is it just me?) He captures so perfectly the reserve and self-controlled repression of a certain upper class type. The narrator, who in the book recounts the story of his wife's years-long deception of him with a friend, from time to time marvels over the perfect calm he witnessed, now that he finally understands all that was going on beneath the surface. And then on page 111, Ford describes in one little sentence what I have long believed to have been behind the collapse of my own marriage many years ago. He says, "In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor - a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one's character or in one's career." Good times.
