John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy: The Novelist Who Indicted His Own Class

When The Forsyte Saga was gathered into a single volume in May 1922, it sold, by one account, more than two million copies within months. Five years later D. H. Lawrence published a demolition of it: "The story is feeble, the characters have no blood and bones, the emotions are faked, faked, faked. It is one great fake." On Galsworthy's death in 1933, Virginia Woolf recorded her relief that "that stuffed shirt" had gone. He had won the Nobel Prize the year before. Almost no major writer of the twentieth century has been so popular and so despised at once.

Money, Harrow, and a Profession He Loathed

He was born on 14 August 1867 at Parkfield, Kingston Hill in Surrey, the son of a solicitor also named John Galsworthy and of Blanche Bailey Bartleet. The family was prosperous upper-middle-class, its money originally made by a grandfather who had been a ship chandler in Plymouth and put his profits into property. This detail matters more than most facts about a writer's childhood, because the accumulation and defence of exactly that kind of property became the subject of his life's work.

He was taught by a governess until nine, sent to a preparatory school at Saugeen in Bournemouth and then to Harrow, where he distinguished himself mainly as an athlete. He matriculated at New College, Oxford, in October 1886 and took a second in law in 1889, was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn at Easter 1890, and found the profession uncongenial. He published his first book, the short-story collection From the Four Winds, in 1897, at thirty.

Ada

In 1895 he began an affair with Ada Galsworthy, the wife of his cousin Arthur. It stayed secret for nine years, until his father's death in 1904 removed the reason for concealment. Arthur sued for divorce in February 1905; the decree came through on 13 September, and Galsworthy married Ada ten days later. The marriage was childless and lasted until his death, and she is credited with the decisive influence on his development as a writer. The situation also gave him his central material: a woman held as an asset inside a respectable marriage, and the moral machinery of a class that treats people as property.

The Man of Property

That is the title he gave the 1906 novel which made him, the first Forsyte book and his first real success. In Chancery followed in 1920 and To Let in 1921. The three were bound together as The Forsyte Saga in 1922 and became one of the publishing phenomena of the century. He extended the chronicle twice more, with A Modern Comedy in 1929, assembling The White Monkey of 1924, The Silver Spoon of 1926 and Swan Song of 1928, and with End of the Chapter in 1935, gathering Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness and Over the River, the last of which appeared in the year he died.

The Playwright as Agitator

Between 1906 and 1929 he completed twenty-eight plays, and they are the most purposeful thing he did. The Silver Box in 1906 set out how differently the law treats a rich offender and a poor one. Strife in 1909 examined the exploitation of workers in Cornish tin mining. Justice in 1910 attacked solitary confinement in English prisons. The Eldest Son in 1912 addressed the repression of women, The Mob in 1914 took on jingoism and the morality of war, and The Skin Game in 1920 staged the collision of old money with new. They rarely made money, but they drew the progressive producers willing to stage argument on a public stage.

Outside the theatre he campaigned for prison reform, animal welfare, workers' rights, women's rights and a minimum wage, and against censorship, blood sports and aerial bombardment. During the First World War he gave a substantial part of his American royalties to war charities and worked in France as a volunteer masseur to wounded soldiers from 1914 to 1917.

PEN, the Nobel, and the Title He Would Not Take

In October 1921 he founded PEN International in London, the writers' association whose name stood for Poets, Essayists, Novelists, and served as its president for the rest of his life. He had declined a knighthood in 1917 on the principle that "no artist of Letters ought to dally with titles," but accepted the Order of Merit in 1929, which confers none. Honorary degrees came from Cambridge, Dublin, Manchester, Oxford, Princeton, Sheffield and St Andrews. The 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded "for his distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga." He was too ill to travel to Stockholm, and died on 31 January 1933 at his London home of cerebral thrombosis and arterial sclerosis, possibly complicated by a brain tumour. His ashes were scattered from an aeroplane over the South Downs, as he had instructed.

Why John Is Called a Genius

Of all the people the word gets attached to, Galsworthy has the weakest claim, and the honest thing is to say so before saying anything else. The two most formidable writers of the generation that followed him rejected him outright, Lawrence calling the Forsyte books "one great fake" and Woolf reducing him to a stuffed shirt, and their objection was specifically to the quality of his art: that the prose was inert, the psychology asserted rather than felt, the whole enterprise a competent imitation of literature. That charge has largely held. The Nobel citation praised his "art of narration," which is a compliment to craftsmanship rather than to imagination.

What he did possess was rarer than it sounds: a sociological intelligence turned on his own people, sustained across nine novels and three decades. He was a Harrow and Oxford man of inherited property who spent his career diagnosing the acquisitive instinct of inherited property, and he did not flinch from the fact that he was writing about himself. Paired with that was a moral seriousness that produced results outside literature, in plays deliberately built as arguments about prison conditions, class justice and the treatment of women, and in the founding of PEN, an institution that has defended persecuted writers ever since. The friendlier verdict came from Hugh Walpole, who called him "gentle, honest and just" and "absolutely good-hearted," though "somewhat over-serious." That is a description of a conscience, not of a genius, and it is probably the right one.

Legacy

His reputation collapsed after his death and was restored by television: the BBC's twenty-six-part adaptation of The Forsyte Saga in 1967 sent The Man of Property past a hundred thousand copies in Britain in that year alone, and turned the Forsytes back into national property. PEN International outlived him by a century and counting. And Justice remains the standard example of what a playwright can do when he stops trying to make art and starts trying to change a law.