Frank Kermode

The conversion of Ford’s novel into a television play was an enterprise even more foolhardy than the BBC’s Golden Bowl some years back. The adapter must at once resign himself to the sacrifice of dozens of ambiguities and implications, for they are made possible by purely novelistic means – in this instance, by the taste of the narrator for seeming irrelevance, for digressions that do not digress, for missing apparently obvious connections and for insisting hysterically upon others that look imaginary and without point, Ford professed to despise story: the idea was, by using all the available liberty of discourse, to represent an ‘affair’ in such a way as to extract every drop of meaning from it, which you could not do if you recounted it in story sequence. And although film and television drama can perfectly well do something like this, they lack the power to comment, with the suspicious certainty or the dubious innocence of Ford’s narrator, on the events and utterances thus artfully represented. The Good Soldier is continually preoccupied with knowing: it looks at that word, as at the word ‘heart’ from many semantic angles, and in consequence allows very little to be certainly known. But in dramatic adaptation there is a requirement that characters should do things much less ambiguously: their acts cannot be filtered through the head of John Dowell, the rich American simpleton (if indeed that is what he is) who tells the story. Moreover Dowell has to be there with the others, objectively represented as well as in voice-over; and it is beyond the power of any actor to play an impotent bonehead who is also a cauldron of passion and a sensitive register of cultural disaster (if that is indeed what he is).

Literary theory is somewhat bewilderingly in the news, and it is worth pausing over this well-written book, in which a young American Germanist develops his thoughts about the variety of it known as hermencutics. One sometimes hears this word uttered in tones of deep distrust or derision, as if it were some foreign novelty recently imported into a soundly pragmatical Britain by trendy malcontents intent on disturbing the peace: in fact, it is very ancient, though it has, of course, widened its scope and altered its aims. In its earlier forms, it usually amounted to prescriptions and prohibitions relating to the interpretation of Scripture. Its promotion to the status of the science or art of interpreting texts generally was effected in the early 19th century by Schleiermacher; and it achieved with Heidegger a philosophical apotheosis. Modern hermencutics is predominantly German in provenance. Central to it are Schleiermacher’s principle of the hermeneutic circle, which will be mentioned below; and the distinctions developed by his successors between the natural sciences and humane studies (Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften). Neither of these developments has attracted much comment over here.

Gerhardie is one of those writers who are periodically rescued from near-oblivion. In 1947, a temporary revival of interest was brought about by the publication of a ‘Uniform Edition’ of his novels, and there was another in 1970, when the same edition was republished with prefaces by Michael Holroyd. Gerhardie himself prefixed to the reissue of his first book, Futility, an important essay called ‘My Literary Credo’, which is unfortunately omitted from the new Penguin Modern Classics reprint. (Futility is the only novel in paperback, another omission that Penguin ought to rectify.) The most recent upsurge of interest has been caused by the posthumous publication of God’s Fifth Column, in the preparation of which Mr Holroyd, sticking to his noble task, has sensibly enlisted the help of a historian expert in the period reviewed by the book.

Professor Crick’s subject is important and his research has evidently been diligent. We now know a lot more about Orwell than we did, and the increment of knowledge is not always trivial. Why, then, is it impossible to commend this book with warmth? For two main reasons: first, in a work of such length the prevalence of carelessly written pages is a strong disincentive to continuing (and of course they are shown up all the more by their proximity to quotations from Orwell); and secondly, Orwell was a literary figure as well as a political thinker, and Crick’s literary touch is far from certain.