The Strange Irregular Rhythm: An Analysis Of The Good Soldier

In his appreciative portrait of Theodore Dreiser, Ford Madox Ford recorded how in 1914, long before they ever met, he had read with emotion Dreiser's novel, The Titan, and then had written a laudatory review of it. Six months later in this country Dreiser read Ford's new novel, The Good Soldier, also with emotion and also to write a review. Here the similarity ends, however, for Dreiser was irritated by Ford's novel and especially by the portrayal of John Dowell, an expatriate from Philadelphia in “the United States of North America” (p. 60). This character, claimed Dreiser, “is no American. He is that literary packhorse or scapegoat,” the “Englishman's conception of an American husband.” In a sense this is quite true. No American would make the comment that Dowell does in analyzing his wife: “She did not want much physical passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without blinking” (p. 79). Obviously such a conception, if taken as an attempt to state the literal truth about this country, must have sounded to a contemporary reader as though its author's acquaintance with America were limited to the novels of Henry James. Actually, of course, as an impressionist novel The Good Soldier does not intend to give a literal representation of the problem it explores. And since, as Ford emphasized in his portrait, he and Dreiser were temperamentally different, we should not be surprised at Dreiser's irritation or his final complaint that the novel as a whole is “cold narrative and never truly poignant” because the “formal British leanings” of the author “will not let him loosen up and sing.”