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John Galsworthy (1867-1933) - pseudonym "John Sinjohn" |
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English novelist and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. John Galsworthy became known for his portrayal - often with a satiric tone - of the British upper-middle class. His most famous novel is The Forsyte Saga (1906-1921), an English parallel to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901). A representative of the literary tradition, which regarded the novel as a vehicle of social discourse, Galsworthy believed that it was the duty of an artist to examine a social ills, but by nature he was a pessimist. Before starting his career, Galsworthy read widely the works of Flaubert, Kipling, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Zola. A drama must be shaped so as to have a spire of meaning. Every grouping of life and character has its inherent moral; and the business of the dramatist is so to pose the group as to bring that moral poignantly to the light of day. Such is the moral that exhales from plays like Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth. But such is not the moral to be found in the great bulk of contemporary Drama. The moral of the average play is now, and probably has always been, the triumph at all costs of a supposed immediate ethical good over a supposed immediate ethical evil. (from 'Some Platitudes Concerning Drama,' in The Inn of Tranquility: Studies and Essays by John Galsworthy, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913, p. 189) John
Galsworthy was born in Kingston Hill, Surrey, into a upper-middle-class
family. His father, also named John Galsworthy, was a lawyer and
director of
several companies. "My father really predominated in me from the start,
and ruled my life," Galsworthy confessed in 'A Note on My Mother'
(written in 1919). "I was so truly and deeply found of him that I
seemed not to have a fair share of love left to give my mother." (John Galsworthy's Life and Art: An Alien's Fortress by James Gindin, p. 16) Galsworthy's
mother, the former Blanche Bartleet,
was the daughter of a Midlands manufacturer. Blanche was twenty years
younger than John. In 1903 she left her husband, accusing him, then
eighty-five years old, of an attachment to his grandson Rudo's
governess. Galsworthy studied law Harrow and New Collage, Oxford. During this period he gained fame as a cricket and football player, but not with his literary talents. Once he planned to write a study of warm-blooded horses. Galsworthy's favorite authors were Thackeray, Dickens, and Melville, his favorite composer was Beethoven. In 1890 he was called to the bar. However, he never settled into practice, but chose to travel, after an unlucky love affair. In 1893 Galsworty met the writer Joseph Conrad while on a South Sea voyage, which he made in part to study maritime law. His father had sent him on the trip, hoping that his son would finish his studies upon returning. In a letter to his sister Lillia Galsworthy noted: "The first mate is a Pole called Conrad, and is a capital chap though queer to look at; he is a man of travel and experience in many parts of the world, and has a fund of yarns on which I draw freely." (Joseph Conrad: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers, 2001, p. 112) This meeting convinced Galsworthy to give up law and devote himself entirely to literature. Years later Galsworthy helped Conrad financially. It was Lillian, who suggested to her brother, "why not write a book?" Galsworthy's first four books were published at his own expense under the pseudonym John Sinjohn, the first being a collection of short stories, From the Four Winds (1897). After reading Maupassant and Turgenev, with whom he felt a deep kinship, Galsworthy wrote Villa Rubein (1900). These early efforts he later labelled as heavy and exaggerated; he had not yet found his own voice. "Mr. Galsworthy is an unusually sensitive member of his class," said J.B. Priestley. "Had he been more callous, perhaps he would never have written novel nor play, poem nor essay, but would have sat comfortably in home or office listening to the heavy tread of the policeman on his beat." ('Modern English Novelists: John Galsworthy' by J.B. Priestley, in The English Journal, Vol. 14, No. 5, May, 1925) With the death of his father, Galsworthy became financially independent. It was high time to put his own name on the cover of his new book, The Island Pharisees (1904). Originally Galsworthy wrote the novel in the first person, then in the third, and revised it again. Its final version was not finished until 1908. In
1905 Galsworthy married Ada Pearson (1864-1956) in a registry office;
her divorce made the couple persons non grata in London society.
Galsworthy had lived in secret with her from 1896; he knew that his father would not approve the
relationship. They had began the affair while Ada's husband,
Arthur
Galsworthy, served in the Boer war. It was an unhappy marriage. According to some biographers Galsworthy, a "decent chap" of his times, was dominated by the atrocious and hypochondriac Ada (her middle name was Nemesis). She inspired many of his female characters. Her previous unhappy marriage with Galsworthy's cousin formed the basis for the novel The Man of Property (1906), which began the novel sequence to be known as The Forsyte Saga and established Galsworthy's reputation as a major British writer. "When
a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present;
when a Forsyte died — but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die;
death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against
it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent
encroachments on their property." (from The Forsyte Saga: Book I, London: William Heineman, 1933, p. 4; first published 1922) The first appearance of the Forsyte family was in one of stories in Man of Devon
(1901). The saga follows the lives of three generations of the British
middle-class before 1914. Soames Forsyte was modelled after Major
Arthur
Galsworthy, the writer's cousin. Soames, a collector of paintings, is
married to beautiful and
rebellious Irene, who is his most valuable possession. Irene begins an
affair with Jolyon Forsyte, Soames's cousin. The incident, when Soames
rapes his wife, was
supposedly based on Ada Galsworthy's experience with her former husband
Arthur. His second wife, Wilhelmine, said that "the stories that Ada
put about to her intimates of her unhappy married life were the
exaggerated imaginings of a somewhat neurotic woman who found that she
was bored with the man she had married and was seeking to justify, to
herself as well as to her closest friends, her resentment of the fact
that he was equally bored with her." (The Man of Principle: A View of John Galsworthy, 1963, pp. 52-53) Galsworthy himself connected "A with I" in a letter buried in a copy of The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy by H.V. Marrot (1935). ('Young Galsworthy: The Forging of a Satirist' by Drew B. Pallette, Modern Philology, Volume 56, Number 3, Feb., 1959) In the second volume, In Changery (1920), Irene
and Soames divorce, she marries Jolyon, and
bears a son, Jon. Soames and his second wife, Annette Lamotte, have a
daughter, Fleur. In the third volume, To Let (1921), Fleur and Jon fall in love, but Jon refuses to marry her. The second part of Forsyte chronicles, containig The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926), Swan Song (1928),
starts on an October afternoon of 1922 and closes in 1926. 'A Silent
Wooing' and 'Passers By,' the two interludes, came out in 1927. Galsworthy returned again to the world of the Forsytes in 1930 with a further collection of stories, On Forsyte Change. Romain Rolland, the writer of Jean-Christophe (1904-1912), coined a special term, the roman-fleuve, to descibe this kind of series of novels, which can be read separately, but which form a coherent narrative. Another example of the genre from the interwar years is Martin du Gard's Les Thibaults (1922-1940). Although Galsworthy chronicled changes in the middle-class family in England, he said in the preface of The White Monkey, that the English character had changed very little since the Victorianism of Soames and his generation. "He emerged still thinking about the English. Well! They were now one of the plainest and most distorted races of the world; and yet was there any race to compare with them for good temper and for 'guts'? And they needed those in their smoky towns, and their climate - remarkable instance of adaptation to environment, the modern English character! 'I could pick out an Englishman anywhere,' he thought, 'and yet, physically, there's no general type now!' Astounding people!" Galsworthy also gained recognition as a dramatist with his plays, that dealt directly with the unequal division of wealth and the unfair treatment of poor people. The Silver Box (1906) stated that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, Strife (prod. in 1909), depicted a mining strike, and Justice (prod. in 1910) encouraged the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, in his program for prison reform. Later plays include The Skin Game (1920), adapted to screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1931, Loyalties (1922), dealing with the theme of anti-Semitism, and Escape (1926). Its second sceen version from 1948, produced by the 20th Century-Fox, was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starring Rex Harrison. In the story a law-abiding man meets a prostitute and accidentally kills a police in defending her. He escapes from prison, and meets different people before giving himself up. During
World War I Galsworthy tried to enlist in the army, but he was rejected
due to his shortsightedness. He actively supported the war effort,
raising funds, working in France for the Red Cross, and helping
refugees in Belgium. When the United States entered the war, Galsworthy
thought that it had given England its "first hope". In 1917 Galsworthy refused
knighthood, in the
belief that "no artist of Letters ought to dally with titles and
rewards of that nature. He should keep quite clear and independent." (John Galsworthy's Life and Art: An Alien's Fortress by James Gindin, 1987, p. 393)
Upon reading news about overthrowing the Czar in Russia in March 1917,
he prophesied that "Revolution in a vast country like Russia is taking
the lid off a cauldron with a vengeance. Russia is in for years,
perhaps a generation of dishevelment and chaos." (Ibid., p. 396) At least half of his income, Galsworthy gave away to humanitarian causes. With Catherine Dawson Scott, Galsworthy founded PEN, the international organization of writers, in 1924. Its trust fund was financed by his Nobel Prize money. The organization was named PEN when someone pointed out at the first meeting that the initial letters on poet, essayist and novelist were the same in most European languages. John
Galsworthy died on January 31, 1933. He produced 20 novels, 27 plays, 3
collections of poetry, 173 short stories, 5 collections of essays, 700
letters, and many sketches and miscellaneous works. After his death,
his reputation declined. Galsworthy's socially committed work was attacked by D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who said in her essay 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' (1924), that the Edwardian writers (Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy) "developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purposes; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business." (Collected Essays: Volume 1 by Virginia Woolf, 1966, p. 330) The younger generation of writers accused Galsworthy of being a representative of the values of society he is criticizing. Galsworthy's influence is seen in the works of Thomas Mann, and he was widely read in France and in Russia. The Forsyte Saga gained a huge popular success as a BBC television series in 1967. For further reading: The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy by H.V. Marrot (1935); John Galsworthy by V. Dupont (1942); John Galsworthy by R.H. Mottram (1953); The Man of Principal by D. Baker (1963); John Galsworthy by N. Croman (1970); John Galsworthy by C. Dupré (1976); John Galsworthy as Dramatic Artist by R.H. Cotes (1978); John Galsworthy by A. Frechet (1982); The Language and Style of John Galsworthy by F.A. Mooty (1982); John Galsworthy's Life and Art by J. Gindin (1987); John Galsworthy by S.V. Sternlicht (1987); Faith of a Novelist: Religion in John Galsworthy's Work by M.W. Knoester (dissertation, 2006); John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the Great War: With an Illustrated Selection of his Writings by Jeffrey S. Reznick (2010); 'Lost property: John Galsworthy and the search for "that stuffed shirt"' by Simon Barker, in The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation, edited by Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead (2013); 'John Galsworthy "The Forsyte Saga"', in Great Authors & Their Famous Novels by Bernard Manning (2016); John Galsworthy's Compassion: All Beings Great and Small by Jill Felicity Durey (2021) Selected works:
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