Ford Madox Ford

At the fashionable German spa town Bad Nauheim, two wealthy, fin de siecle couples -- one British, the other American -- meet for their yearly assignation. As their story moves back and forth in time between 1902 and 1914, the fragile surface propriety of the pre -- World War I society in which these four characters live is ruptured -- revealing deceit, hatred, infidelity, and betrayal. "The Good Soldier" is Edward Ashburnham, who, as an adherent to the moral code of the English upper class, is nonetheless consumed by a passion for women younger than his wife -- a stoic but fallible figure in what his American friend, John Dowell, calls "the saddest story I ever heard."

Ford's accounts of his literary collaboration with Joseph Conrad, of Stephen Crane's last years in England, and of Henry James at home in Rye are fascinating. A most valuable, long out of print book by the author of The Good Soldier, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and Last Post.