The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

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“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” That is the striking opening sentence of The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel.

It is the story of the relationship between two wealthy couples who meet at a German spa town in the years before the first world war. Edward and Leonora Ashburnham are English; John and Florence Dowell are American visitors to Europe, the sort of characters we might expect to find in a Henry James novel. The health resort visits are necessary because Edward and Florence have heart conditions. At least, that is what appears to be happening, but nothing is quite as it seems in this world where the most important thing is keeping up appearances. 

It is a dark and ironic novel of adultery and betrayal; we know, from the beginning that it will end tragically. It is also one of the most fascinating novels I have ever read, a novel that reveals greater depths on every re-reading.

That is very much down to the way the story is told. The narrator is the husband of the American couple, but he does not tell his tale chronologically. He tries to piece together the complicated events by moving backwards and forwards in time. He lets slip crucial information to the reader in a seemingly casual way. “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.”  

A major theme of the book is the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone else. As we read on we might think that Dowell is trying to explain himself to himself as much as trying to explain the actions and thoughts of the other characters to the reader. Just how reliable a narrator is he? He is often conveying to us, particularly in the later stages of the novel, what was told to him by others after the event – he was not actually there.

As we read on, we become aware that there is something of a mystery surrounding Dowell’s actions and the reasons behind them. Just why did he marry Florence in the first place and come to live in Europe? He has no occupation in both senses of that word. He is wealthy enough not to have to work, but has no particular interests to take up his time, and seems to drift through life. There is the occasional hint of something rather darker about his personality. Is he quite the innocent dupe that he wants us to believe him to be?

The overall effect is a bit like Henry James without the reserve. It’s not sexually explicit, yet it is quite clear when sex is being referred to. It’s quite striking that some of the characters have an innocence about physical matters that is hardly imaginable today.

The title was not Ford’s choice. He had originally intended to call it “The Saddest Story”, but his publisher considered that title unsuitable during the first world war. The new title focusses the reader’s attention, perhaps too much, on the character of Edward Ashburnham himself, “the good soldier”, distracting us from the fact that this is as much Dowell’s story as Ashburnham’s. By the end, even that opening sentence can be interpreted as slightly misleading.  

I will leave the last word to Dowell. “Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.”

The Dead Knight by John Masefield

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Here is another overlooked gem from John Masefield that I discovered not long ago. I can’t find an exact date for this poem. The anthology from which I took it was published in 1928, so it was written before then, at least.

I think the date is important because it could well have been written either during the first world war or in its long shadow. I wonder whether Masefield was inviting his original readers to think of the casualties of the western front. Can anyone out there shed any light on this for me?

The theme of the poem also bears some resemblance to the Scottish language ballad, The Twa Corbies, by our old friend anonymous. I can’t help feeling too, that it might have inspired the lyrics of the 1967 song Conquistador by Procul Harum. 

Perhaps it’s not the most original theme. Be that as it may, Masefield made a haunting, musical and memorable poem out of it.


The Dead Knight by John Masefield

The cleanly rush of the mountain air,
And the mumbling, grumbling humble-bees,
Are the only things that wander there,
The pitiful bones are laid at ease,
The grass has grown in his tangled hair,
And a rambling bramble binds his knees.

To shrieve his soul from the pangs of hell,
The only requiem-bells that rang
Were the hare-bell and the heather-bell.
Hushed he is with the holy spell
In the gentle hymn the wind sang,
And he lies quiet, and sleeps well.

He is bleached and blanched with the summer sun;
The misty rain and cold dew
Have altered him from the kingly one
(That his lady loved, and his men knew)
And dwindled him to a skeleton.

The vetches have twined about his bones,
The straggling ivy twists and creeps
In his eye-sockets; the nettle keeps
Vigil about him while he sleeps.
Over his body the wind moans
With a dreary tune throughout the day,
In a chorus wistful, eerie, thin
As the gull’s cry — as the cry in the bay
The mournful word the seas say
When tides are wandering out or in.

His Last Bow by Arthur Conan Doyle

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His Last Bow, published in 1917, is the final case of Sherlock Holmes, chronologically, if not actually the last time he appeared in print. The stories collected in the 1927 volume, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, were set earlier. Conan Doyle was quite careless about continuity, but this has never affected the enduring popularity of the Holmes stories.

It is somewhat shorter than most of the other Holmes stories and is subtitled An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes. It is also unusual in that it is not narrated by Dr Watson, but written in conventional third-person style.

The action takes place very specifically on the evening of 2nd August 1914, just before the first world war was to begin, an evening with “an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air”. The seaside setting on the eve of war gives the story something of the same feel as the final chapter of John Buchan’s Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1915.

Holmes has long since retired, given up Baker Street for the South Downs, and devoted himself to beekeeping. He has written a book entitled Practical Handbook of Bee Culture. We learn in retrospect that in 1912, Holmes was asked to come out of retirement by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, to investigate the German spy ring believed to be operating in Britain.

The story depicts the climax of this operation, as Von Bork, the German spy chief, prepares to return to Berlin. He is discussing how things have gone with Baron von Herling from the German Embassy. There is some doubt as to whether Britain will declare war, but in any event, the two Germans consider that a reckoning between the countries can only be postponed, rather than called off altogether.

Von Bork has been an effective secret agent because he is a keen sportsman, which means that no-one has taken him seriously or suspected his real motives. He is awaiting the arrival of Altamont, an Irish-American who has been gathering information for him. Let’s just say that the evening does not go quite as he expected, and that both Holmes and Watson appear in disguise.

The final exchange between Holmes and Watson, as Watson prepares to return to the army, is quite moving. It’s clear that Conan Doyle was bringing down the curtain not only on the career of the great detective, but also on the pre-war Victorian world with which he was so identified.

If you are reading the Holmes stories, it’s a good idea to leave this short farewell tale to the very end.

I’ve been enjoying all over again the excellent TV series with Jeremy Brett. I don’t think I’m alone in regarding him as the definitive screen Holmes, the actor who was the most faithful to the original stories. It’s a great shame that his early death meant that they did not get around to filming this story. It would have been a great way to go out, but unfortunately, it was not to be.  

The London Embassy by Paul Theroux

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The London Embassy by Paul Theroux was published in 1982. It is not so much a novel as a collection of linked short stories, narrated by the same American diplomat who featured in a previous book, The Consul’s File. He has now been posted for a term of duty in London. It rather reminds me of the writing of Somerset Maugham.

It’s a sort of fictional parallel to Theroux’s own life as an expatriate American writer in London. One suspects that the diplomat’s observations of London and its natives are very much Paul Theroux’s own. This is London seen clearly through the eyes of an outsider. It is these observations that give the book its fascination: “The city had been built to enclose secrets, for the British are like those naked Indians who hide in the Brazilian jungle – not timid, but fanatically private and untrusting.”

The narrator’s work brings him into contact with all kinds of eccentric characters and odd situations. His neighbours include a quiet civil servant and a loud motorcyclist, heard but never seen. Are they, in fact, one and the same person?  

He has to deal with a mentally unstable American poet, a cross between Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. There is an encounter with a group of expensively educated and mindlessly prejudiced schoolboys.

 It is made clear that he is not a spy (they are based on the third floor) but his job does involve the gathering of information. He almost enters the world of espionage when he is approached by a wily Russian would-be defector, and manages to outwit him. He has to employ similar sleight of hand when he is tasked with enforcing the embassy’s rather informal dress code.  

Perhaps best of all is the story “An English Unofficial Rose”, in which the narrator is under the impression that a young woman wants a romantic relationship with him, when her real reason for seeing him is something quite different. As he says: “Language is deceptive; and though English is subtle it also allows a clever person –one alert to the ambiguities of English – to play tricks with mock precision and to combine vagueness with politeness. English is perfect for diplomats and lovers”.

This book is almost forty years old now, and this is not quite the London of today. In general the social attitudes of the narrator are quite modern, almost ahead of their time, but here and there is a reminder that things have changed, just as the American Embassy is no longer the building in Grosvenor Square.

Paul Theroux’s sojourn in Britain also produced the excellent The Kingdom By the Sea, a lightly fictionalised record of his trip around the coastline. In the end, though, he did not stay in Britain, but settled in Hawaii, where he was a neighbour of ex-Beatle George Harrison. Who can blame him?                 

A Child’s Winter Evening by Gwen John

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This is another poem I found in my copy of Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither anthology. I was looking through the section entitled Autumn Leaves, Winter Snow, in search of an appropriate poem for the cold and snowy weather we have been having.

I assume that this is the Gwen John who was a painter and older sister of Augustus John. I didn’t know she wrote any poetry. There are comprehensive notes at the back of the book, but no note for this one, unfortunately. I have not been able to find any information at all about it online. I can’t date it, but the anthology I found it in is the 1928 edition.

It therefore has to speak for itself, which is probably a good thing. The title might suggest something with a rather cosy feel, but that is not quite the case here. 

The last two stanzas describe something perhaps better known to older readers, who may remember staring at an open fire and imagining all kinds of pictures in the shapes created by the burning wood or coal.


A Child’s Winter Evening by Gwen John

The smothering dark engulfs relentlessly
With nightmare tread approaching steadfastly;
All horrors thicken as the daylight fails
And, is it wind, or some lost ghost that wails?

Tongue cannot tell the stories that beset
With livid pictures blackness dense as jet,
Or that wild questioning – whence we are; and why;
If death is darkness; and why I am I.

The children look through the uneven pane
Out to the world, to bring them joy again;
But only snowflakes melting into mire
Without, within the red glow of the fire.

They long for something wonderful to break
This long-drawn winter wistfulness and take
Shape in the darkness; threatening like Fate
There comes a hell-like crackling from the grate.

But hand in hand they urge themselves anear
And watch the cities burning bright and clear;
Faces diabolical and cliffs and halls
And strangely-pinnacled, molten castle walls.

Tall figures flicker on the ceiling stark
Then grimly fade into one ominous dark;
Dream terrors iron-bound throng on them apace
And dusk with fire, and flames with shadows race. 

Payment Deferred by C S Forester

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Payment Deferred, published in 1926, is an early novel by C S Forester. In theme and tone it is quite different from the Hornblower series he is most famous for today, or his other later novels based on military and naval history, such as The General or The Good Shepherd.       

This is a crime novel in the true sense of that term, a psychological study of the effect of a murder on its perpetrator. It’s startlingly different from detective stories that were published the same year, by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, and it’s still quite surprising that something as black as this was written almost a century ago.

The tone and sort of life described is rather reminiscent of the novels of Patrick Hamilton, but without the humour. Something, perhaps the sex references, highly unusual in a British novel of this vintage, reminds me strongly of the work of Georges Simenon, the standalone novels that do not feature Inspector Maigret, that he called “romans durs”. There is also a reference to the 1920’s flu pandemic that today’s reader can’t help noticing.

Mr Marble is a bank clerk, married with two children, living in a shabby south London suburb in the years immediately after the great war. He is in serious financial trouble when temptation presents itself in the form of a wealthy nephew on a visit from Australia. Mr Marble’s hobby is photography, so there is a convenient bottle of potassium cyanide in his cupboard. The murder takes place offstage; it is hinted at by the scream that Mrs Marble thinks she has heard when half asleep and her puzzlement at the muddy state of her husband’s suit.

The whole tragic sequence of events that unfolds derives from the fact that Mr Marble has buried the body in the garden. He takes to sitting alone with his secret in the back room, blotting out his fear of the hangman with whiskey, while keeping an eye on the untended scrubby garden to make sure no-one notices anything.

The house is rented. Mr Marble becomes obsessed with getting enough money to secure the freehold to prevent someone else moving in and finding the body. His frantic desperation spurs him on to use his financial knowledge as a foreign exchange clerk to do a little insider trading. The irony is that it is only his guilt that makes him daring enough to take the risk. His scheme succeeds beyond his expectations, making him wealthy, but the problems for this most unhappy of families are only just beginning.

Mr Marble can drink all the whiskey he wants now, as he contemplates the garden, while reading a book from his newly acquired library on crime. Eventually, of course, things move beyond his control.   

The novel is grimly compelling, because the reader can see from quite early on that things will end badly and that Marble’s crime will be discovered. The suspense comes from wondering exactly how it will all play out. The end, when it does come, is both a surprise and bitterly ironic. The title is highly appropriate for a novel where money plays such an important role.    

Snow by Walter de la Mare

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We finally got some snow yesterday. It was a welcome change from the lockdown to feel the crisp, crunchy snow under one’s feet.

Today, it’s a bright sunny day, almost with the promise of early spring in the air, and the snow has turned to treacherous ice on the pavement, or slush where it has melted. Will we see any more this winter?

There are several famous poems about snow or the winter more generally. I decided to go with this one, because I think it is less well-known than those by Thomas Hardy or Robert Bridges.

I’m not sure exactly when it was written; it is included in De la Mare’s 1944 Collected Rhymes and Verses. This is the collection intended for children. With De la Mare, though, the line between works for adults and works for children is always blurry. As he wrote in his introduction: “Somewhere the two streams divide — and may re-intermingle. Both, whatever the quality of the water, and of what it holds in solution, sprang from the same source”.  


Snow by Walter de la Mare

No breath of wind,
No gleam of sun —
Still the white snow
Whirls softly down —
Twig and bough
And blade and thorn
All in an icy
Quiet, forlorn.
Whispering, rustling,
Through the air,
On sill and stone,
Roof — everywhere,
It heaps its powdery
Crystal flakes,
Of every tree
A mountain makes;
Till pale and faint
At shut of day,
Stoops from the West
One wintry ray,
And, feathered in fire,
Where ghosts the moon,
A robin shrills
His lonely tune.

Up On The Downs by John Masefield

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John Masefield (1878–1967) had a long and productive career in both prose and poetry, but comparatively few of his works are well-known today. He was appointed poet laureate in 1930 when that was a job for life, so held the position for thirty-seven years. His Collected Poems is a hefty volume, yet it is only two short poems, “Sea Fever” and “Cargoes”, that turn up in anthologies. I think there might be other gems waiting to be re-discovered. For example, I recently came across, almost by accident, “CLM”, a poignant poem about his mother, who died when Masefield was a small boy.

I suspect that Masefield has different readerships for different aspects of his work. For example, his 1937 children’s novel The Box of Delights has never been out print, almost having a cult following, helped perhaps by the 1984 BBC television adaptation. His 1917 description of the topography of the Somme battlefield, The Old Front Line, is a masterpiece of descriptive writing and could be called the first battlefield guide. A theme that runs through much of his work is the sense of history in the landscape.

The poem below is another that I discovered through the BBC Radio 3 programme, Words and Music, in the edition entitled The Haunted Landscape. The format of this programme is that the titles of the pieces and their creators are not identified. You can get that information from the programme website. It works quite well if you listen to the programme, then go back and identify the things that made a particular impression on you.

I was amazed when I found out how old it is and who had written it. I had assumed it was by a more recent poet. It actually dates from the first world war period, when Masefield was living at  Lollingdon Farm in Berkshire. I had also rather lazily assumed that the human sacrifice in the 1972 film The Wicker Man was a scriptwriter’s invention. Whether it is an invention or not, the idea is clearly not as new as I thought.

Masefield was too old to be a fighting soldier but did see the western front both as a hospital orderly and later, as a journalist. I have seen it suggested that this poem can also be interpreted as referring to conditions on the battlefield. However one interpretates it, this is a powerful and atmospheric poem, collapsing the distance between past and present with something of the atmosphere of what is now known as folk horror.


Up On The Downs by John Masefield

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down’s shoulder;
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.


Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne

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Lawrence Osborne was the third writer commissioned by the estate of Raymond Chandler to write a Philip Marlowe continuation novel and Only to Sleep was published in 2018.

The brilliant idea here is that it is 1988, the tail-end of the Reagan era, and Marlowe is seventy-two, retired and living in the part of Mexico that is just south of California. When an insurance company in San Diego approaches him to investigate a claim, he can’t resist accepting the case; one last job to stave off the boredom and inertia of retirement.

It’s the sort of mystery familiar from Marlowe’s earlier career. Wealthy property developer Donald Zinn has died in Mexico and his Mexican widow is making a claim on the life insurance. The company suspect it may be a fraud and that Zinn is still alive. Marlowe is despatched to Mexico to find out the truth.

Marlowe is not quite what he was, though. That’s hardly a surprise given the hard living that was depicted in Chandler’s books. He has got his drinking just about under control, but tends to have strange dreams. He has a limp because of arthritis and walks with the aid of a cane. It’s suggested that he is impotent now. Something of what he was remains though, because the cane is actually a swordstick. His determination and quick wits in a sticky situation are still intact, too. So is that moral sense, the feeling that in the end he will do the right thing because he can’t help it. 

Marlowe laments the way the world has changed, and what he sees as debased modern tastes in clothes and music. He remains a suit-and-tie man, fond of the old jazz songs. As much as a detective story, this is a meditation on the passage of time, ageing and retirement, and facing up to mortality.

Pretty soon the plot turns into a pursuit of a man who may or may not be Zinn. There’s a hint that Zinn is a sort of sinister double of Marlowe, being another retiree yet married to a Mexican woman half his age. It has the same dream-like feel of never quite coming into focus that you find in Raymond Chandler’s books. This is reflected in the title, taken from an Aztec song: “We come here only to dream/We come only to sleep”.

The real main character of this book is Mexico, described with such vividness that you have to read quite slowly to take in the precise, descriptive prose. Osborne is also a travel writer, after all, and catches the bright light and colour of Mexico. He has reproduced the distinctive tone of Marlowe’s first-person narration, but also subtly adapted it. Marlowe is as observant as ever, but the setting is Mexico, not Los Angeles. He is older and a bit gloomier.

Once again Marlowe is on a quest, a road trip from hotel room to hotel room as he goes further south into Mexico and further from America in every sense. Much as the book recalls Chandler, it also reminded me quite strongly of Patricia Highsmith. I am thinking of those tales of American expatriates adrift in Greece or North Africa where dollars will buy a lot of things not available at home. There’s also a hint of F Scott Fitzgerald in a rather sinister Gatsbyesque masked party.

This is that rare thing, a continuation novel that is based on the work of another writer yet stands up on its own as work of fiction. I don’t think you have to have read Raymond Chandler to get a lot out of Only to Sleep.   

At Castle Boterel by Thomas Hardy

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Something funny has happened to my sense of time during the various lockdowns. Memories of things I thought I had forgotten keep popping up into my mind and they seem as vivid as the present. Time has collapsed, and the barrier between the past and present has broken down, it would appear.

Perhaps it’s not just the strange circumstances of 2020 that has caused this. It might also have something to do with my experience of major surgery in hospital during the summer of that year.   

It feels appropriate, then, to look at a poem where Thomas Hardy reflects on his past and the passage of time.

I heard this poem in an edition of the BBC Radio 3 programme Words and Music, entitled “The Haunted Landscape”. The readings are not identified, so I did not know who had written it. The effect was quite interesting; something about the poem made me think it was comparatively recent. The word “wagonette” called to mind an American station wagon.

I was quite surprised that the poem turned out to be by Hardy. That demonstrates quite neatly, I think, why his poetry has lasted. He gets to grips with fundamental things that do not change. Although a Victorian, his sensibility feels curiously modern.

As in some of his other poems, in this one he contrasts the history of the landscape with the personal history of the speaker of the poem.  

The date at the bottom tells us that it is one of his “poems of 1912–13”, a series of elegiac poems where Hardy remembers his first wife and looks back on their life together.  

At Castle Boterel by Thomas Hardy

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
   And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
   And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
         Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
   In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
   To ease the sturdy pony’s load
         When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
   Matters not much, nor to what it led, ―
Something that life will not be balked of
   Without rude reason till hope is dead,
         And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
   A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
   Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
         By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
   And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
   But what they record in colour and cast
         Is—that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
   In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
   Remains on the slope, as when that night
         Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
   I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
   And I shall traverse old love’s domain
         Never again.

March 1913