Turn of the Century Salon - The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

The Turn of the Century Salon, hosted by Katherine @ November's Autumn, is a monthly event where you can share posts relating to literature and/or authors from the 1880's - 1930's.

I was at The Book Depository ordering Parade's End and on a whim decided to add The Good Soldier and what a good decision that turned out to be. 

The very definite opening line " This is the saddest story I have ever heard" immediately captured my attention and the discovery a few lines later that the narrator was, in fact, a part of that story made it even more intriguing.

The Good Soldier is about two married couples; Americans John and Florence Dowell and Edward and Leonora Ashburnham who are English. For nine years of the first decade of the twentieth century they travel, socialise, and take the waters at the German spa Bad Nauheim - a friendship of ' extreme intimacy' the narrator assures us although soon after he admits that no one knew anyone else very well at all.

source

" But the feeling that I had when, whilst poor Florence was taking her morning bath, I stood upon the carefully swept steps of the Englischer Hof, looking at the carefully arranged trees in tubs upon the carefully arranged gravel whilst carefully arranged people walked past in carefully arranged gaiety, at the carefully calculated hour, the tall trees of the public gardens, going up to the right; the reddish stones of the baths - or were they white half-timber chalets? Upon my word I have forgotten, I who was there so much."

It was enough that they were 'good people', a term which has nothing to do with being good but refers to social class. Wealthy, idle people who were outwardly the perfect examples of well-bred Edwardian respectability. The reality of what lies beneath that genteel facade slowly emerges during the course of the story and it is not pleasant!

The narrator is John Dowell - a man who having always accepted everything at face value is now looking back at the events of the past nine years and struggling to understand the reality of what happened. From the beginning the reader knows that nothing he says can be fully trusted but as the narration wanders here, there and everywhere......

" I have, I am aware told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze."

......and one attempts to keep up and put the pieces together it is hard to remember Dowell is not a reliable narrator.

I thought it was brilliant! Sure to be one of the best novels I read this year.

The Classics Club
Back to the Classics 2013 Challenge

Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett

Last year I read The Grand Babylon Hotel which was a fun mystery by Arnold Bennett and left me wanting to try one of his more literary works. I then added Clayhanger to my Classics Club list so it seemed a good choice for the Turn of the Century Salon.

Arnold Bennett 1867 - 1931

Clayhanger is the first of four novels which are collectively known as The Clayhanger Family. The books are set in the '5 Towns'......a fictionalised version of the six towns of 'the Potteries' in Staffordshire, which later amalgamated into the city of Stoke-on-Trent and the place where Arnold Bennett spent his first twenty-one years.

The story begins on the day seventeen-year-old Edwin Clayhanger leaves school. A gentle, intelligent boy he dreams of being an architect but also knows and worries that his father has other expectations of him.

Darius Clayhanger grew up in the 1830's in extreme poverty. As a seven-year-old he 'became a man' - sent out to labour for 12 hours a day at the Potteries to help support his family but when his father is blacklisted the result is the workhouse known locally as the Bastille.

" And they were put into a cellar and stripped and washed and dressed in other people's clothes, and then separated, amid tears. And Darius was pitched into a large crowd of boys, all clothed like himself. He now understood the reason for shame; it was because he could have no distinctive clothes of his own, because he had somehow lost his identity."

The family is rescued by Mr Shushions, the Sunday School superintendent and Darius goes on to become a respected businessman but he can never let go of the 'boy from the Bastille.' He regards everything in his life, his business, his home, the food on his table, his ability to keep his son in school until his teens, as a miracle. And the biggest mistake he makes is never telling his children about his past.

To Edwin and his sisters their father is domineering, miserly and a bully. The sensitive Edwin doesn't stand a chance and dutifully enters the family steam printing business where he is for years kept overworked and underpaid, inwardly rebellious but incapable of acting against his father.

" As he stood furious and impotent in the hall, he thought: "When you're old, and I've got you" - he clenched his fists and his teeth - " when I've got you and you can't help yourself, by God it will be my turn."

That time comes and the years of Darius' ill-health and death and Edwin's anger giving way to a mixture of 'irritation and compassion' is a very moving account of the role reversal that happens as a parent declines.

I enjoyed Clayhanger very much although I do understand why many readers find it dull. Arnold Bennett loved the 'ordinariness of existence' and that is what he writes about. The provincial bourgeoisie going about their daily lives.....what they ate and what they wore, what they believed and what they thought and the influence on their lives of family, church and local society. For anyone interested in Victorian social history it's wonderful reading.
At times the detail is a bit too much and at times it is a bit dreary and one longs for the wit and satire found in other provincial tales like Middlemarch or Anthony Trollope's novels but overall very satisfying.

Clayhanger was published in 1910 but is set in the 1880 - 90's and Arnold Bennett writes like a late Victorian author. One of the old school who came under attack from the new kids like Virginia Woolf with whom he had an ongoing public sparring match in articles and essays. This literary debate makes fascinating reading and the entries in their personal diaries show there was no real ill-will between them. When Arnold Bennett died of cholera in 1931 Virginia wrote in her diary..... Arnold Bennett died last night: which leaves me sadder than I should have supposed. 

Turn of the Century Salon - Introduction

Welcome to my little corner of the  Turn of the Century Salon hosted by Katherine @ November's Autumn. Her idea -  You could say I hope it will be like a special club but one where everyone feels comfortable and happy and welcome to share their ideas, wanderings, and discoveries through Literature be you an expert or reading your first work that's been graced by that title: Classic.

During 2013 the Salon will be focusing on Classics written between the late 1880's - the early 1930's but our January posts are an introduction for which Katherine has provided some questions.

*What era have you mainly read? Georgian? Victorian? Which authors?

Mostly Victorians - the Brontes, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Emile Zola

*What Classics have you read from the 1880s-1930s? What did you think of them?

I really enjoy reading Classics from this era. The later Victorians, Edwardian, WWI and the Bright Young Things - it's so diverse. Most recently I've read Thomas Hardy (love TH) , Edith Wharton, Bram Stoker, Jerome K. Jerome, A.A.Milne, E.M Forster , Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim.
And this month I've read Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett.

*Name some books you're looking forward to read for the salon

So much choice I really don't know but on my bookshelf I have..

The Odd Women by George Gissing
Mrs Ames & Queen Lucia by E.F.Benson
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

......but there are many more I also want to read and authors whose work I haven't tried so I'm not making any lists and will choose as I go along.

*Which authors do you hope to learn more about?

All of them! I love to learn about the authors lives through biographies and to read more of the social history and places they write about.

* Is your preference prose? poetry? both?

Prose!