‘Forsyte Saga’ in life

Press, 24 June 1978, Page 17

‘Forsyte Saga’ in life

John Galsworthy: A Biography. By Catherine Dupre. Collins. 287 pp, notes and index. $14.05. (Reviewed by Joan Curry) For most people John Galsworthy’s reputation rests firmly on “The Forsyte Saga.” In fact, for a man who found writing a slow and painful business, Galsworthy produced a considerable volume of work, consiting of novels, short storeis. plays, essays and poetry, which covered a wide field, but which has now been for the most part consigned to library stock rooms or the forgotten corners of second-hand book shops. Galsworthy’s tragedy was his awareness that “The Forsyte Saga” was the best work he did, rather than the best of which he was capable. In this book Catherine Dupre has shown the development, and decline, of the work of this upright, sensitive, disappointed, gentlemanly Victorian. John Galsworthy was born in 1867 to financially secure parents who lived comfortable, middle-class Victorian lives on the outskirts of London. He went to Harrow and Oxford, then obligingly took up law to please his father. A handsome allowance ensured freedom from financial worries and soon enabled him to escape from his short-lived and unappealing career in chambers into his life as a writer. The turning point in his life came when he met Ada, the unhappy wife of his cousin Arthur Galsworthy. The love storv of Galsworthy and Ada is central both to the development of Galsworthy’s talent and later to the stifling of that talent. The two became lovers in 1895, 10 years before they were able to marry. In those 10 years thev travelled widely together, with Ada providing not only the confidence and encouragement necessary to Galsworthy’s development as a writer, but also her life story (Irene Forsyte’s story) which Galsworthy wrote about so often.

Catherine Dupre says that “these years were among the most creative and the most promising of Galsworthy’s writing life; fame, marriage and respectability were in the end to be the poisoners of his talent.” The predicament of a women trapped in an unhappy marriage

moved Galsworthy to write at a pitch that he never again reached, and in “The Man of Property” (the first book of the Forsyte trilogy) he had found a subject, a mood and a technique that suited him admirably. The Forsytes were modelled closely on the people Galsworthy knew intimately and, in fact, he lived very much like a Forsyte himself, for all his derision of that breed. Marriage for the Galsworthys meant, respectability. It also meant the beginning of long years of compromise and the consequent decline in Galsworthy’s work. Ada was only happy in the busy social life of London or in travelling abroad, wheras Galsworthy needed stability and the peace of the country in which to write. They shared a deep and abiding love (which survived Galsworthy’s brief and innocent affair with a dancer), but they were also mutually dependent to an almost suffocating degree. In their efforts to live with, and for, each other lay the slow destruction of Galsworthy’s talent: “That his two loves, his love for Ada and his love for his writing, were in some senses incomptible is, perhaps, the tragedy of John Galsworthy.”