JOHN GALSWORTHY'S LIFE AND ART Also by James Gindin

POSTWAR BRITISH FICTION: New Accents and Attitudes HARVEST OF A QUIET EYE: The Novel of Compassion THE ENGLISH CLIMATE: An Excursion into a Biography of John Gals worthy JOHN GALSWORTHY'S LIFE AND ART

An Alien )s Fortress

James Gindin Professor of English University of Michigan

M MACMILLAN © James Gindin 1987 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987 978-0-333-40812-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 1987

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Typeset by Wessex Typesetters (Division of The Eastern Press Ltd) Frome, Somerset

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Gindin, James John Galsworthy's life and art: an alien's fortress. I. Galsworthy, John, 1867-1933- Criticism and interpretation I. Title 828' .91209 PR6013.A5Z/ ISBN 978-1-349-08532-3 ISBN 978-1-349-08530-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-08530-9 To joan Contents

List of Plates IX Preface XI

A Retrospective Introduction

PART I: APPRENTICESHIP, 1867-1905

2 Galsworthys and Bartleets 15 3 Conventions and Responses 38 4 "You Are just the Person to Write, Why Don't You?" 71 5 "To Invent Depths Is Not Art Either" 95 6 "I'm Not Such a Fool as I Seem" 114

PART II: THE UNCERTAIN PUBLIC EDIFICE, 1906-13

7 "I Feel More Like a Sort of Chemist" 153 8 "We Want No More Bastard Drama" 188 9 "The Opposition (Spiritual) in The Country House" 217 10 "Almost Passionate Impartiality" 242 11 Emotion Elevated 282 12 "Sublimity Is Lost as You Go Down" 318

PART III: DISSOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, 1914-22

13 Gals worthy Semi-detached 34 7 14 "But Christ's Not Real, and Hindenburg and Harmsworth Are!" 374

Vll Vlll Contents

15 Three john Galsworthys and "A Wonderful Red Letter Day" 395 16 "Demi-Semi-Royal Progress" 415 17 "The Shores of Permanence" 433 18 "Christ's Vicar in the Theatre" 457

PART IV: THE PRIVATE EDIFICE, 1923-33

19 "I Have Lost Fervour" 477 20 Comedy and Civilization "Above the Plimsoll Line of Property" 500 21 "And john Deserves to be God Too" 526

~~ 5~ Index 606 List of Plates

1 John Galsworthy, Sr (about 1885) 2 Blanche Bartleet Galsworthy, a painting by her son-in-law, Georg Sauter (about 1895) 3 One of the three houses at Coombe, Surrey, that John Galsworthy, Sr, built and that the family lived in alternately from 1868 to 1886 4 A family group: his parents, Blanche Bartleet Galsworthy and John Galsworthy, Sr, in the centre; sisters, Mabel on the left and Lilian on the right; John Gals worthy at upper right (about 1894) 5 John Galsworthy (about 1895) 6 Ada Cooper Galsworthy (about the time ofher first marriage in 1891) 7 From the left: Mabel Galsworthy, John Galsworthy, Sr, Georg Sauter, Lilian Galsworthy Sauter holding their baby, Rudolf, in Bavaria (summer 1895) 8 John Galsworthy (about 1898) 9 John Galsworthy, Sr, with his grandson, Rudolf Sauter (about 1900) 10 Lilian Galsworthy Sauter with her son, Rudolf, from a painting by her husband, Georg (about 1900) 11 Lilian Galsworthy Sauter, a painting by her husband, Georg (about 1907) 12 John Galsworthy (about 1906) 13 Jessie and Joseph Conrad with sons, John (left) and Borys (right) (about 1908) 14 Hubert Galsworthy and his wife, Lina (about 1905) 15 Mabel Galsworthy Reynolds and her daughter, Veronica (1910) 16 John Galsworthy, with dog, Chris (about 1909) 17 Ada Galsworthy at Manaton (about 1914)

IX X List of Plates

18 John and Ada Galsworthy, on the left in the bottom row, with staff and patients at the hospital near Matouret, in southern France, in the winter of 1916-17 19 Rudolf and Viola Sauter (about 1927) 20 Arnold Bennett (left) and John Galsworthy, at Bury, Sussex ( 1929) 21 H. G. Wells 22 John and Ada Galsworthy at Bury, Sussex (about 1930)

Plates l-13 and 16--22 are from the Galsworthy Memorial Collection at the University of Birmingham Library, and are reprinted with that library's permission. Preface

John Galsworthy's reputation as a novelist and a dramatist first crystallized in 1906, when the confluence of his critically successful first play, The Silver Box, and the striking satire of the Victorian family in his sixth volume of fiction, The Man of Property, seemed to represent an Edwardian avant-garde stance challenging previously sacrosanct Victorian attitudes. His immediately subsequent novels and changing tastes, however, soon made him less "new" as a writer of fiction, and, although Strife and Justice sustained his prominence as a dramatist, other plays were accurately regarded as vapid and conventional. In the years before the First World War, his work was not widely popular; his growing stature was generally more dependent on the social causes he championed than on literary achievement. After the war, however, with his continuation of The Man of Property into the trilogy of The Forsyte Saga and his subsequent trilogies, his fiction became more popular, in England and abroad, while, after an initial burst of enthusiasm around 1922, serious younger critics, as distinct from social historians, increasingly neglected or dismissed his work. The fiction was far from that of resurrected prewar avant-garde novelists venerated as anticipatory exemplars of "modernism". His reputation as a dramatist was uneven: some of his postwar plays were well reviewed and found larger audiences than his drama had found before, others were appropriately ignored. As a new generation began to set literary judgements and standards, he became, in his last years, regarded more as a public figure, a symbol, and an isolated moment in literary history, than as a writer. Since his death in 1933, his reputation has not substantially changed. For the relatively small high-brow critical audience, the work is dated and pedestrian, the fiction one long, slow decline into conventionality from the early peak of The Man of Property. Galsworthy had little connection with "modernism", with its experimental techniques, its conscious hardness, and its

Xl xu Priface uses of symbol and legend. To Virginia Woolf, for example, his fiction represented the materialism and superficiality that "modernism" sought to replace. At the same time, the fiction has remained widely and enthusiastically read, the first two trilogies in particular have been frequently reprinted and trans­ lated into many languages throughout the last half century. The persistence of two different Galsworthy audiences was most markedly manifest in response to the twenty-six episode television dramatization of The Forsyte Saga produced for the centenary of his birth in 1967. The drama was watched by millions all over the world; people and groups adjusting other commitments so as not to miss an episode. Yet the commentary did not produce any major or serious reassessment of Gals worthy's achievement, many of the critical comments derogating his appeal as that of high-level soap opera without acknowledging that form's capacity to convey social definition through relationships concerning family, sex, and class with considerable complexity and intelli­ gence. To talk of Galsworthy only in terms of form is to miss accounting for both the appeal and the achievement. Academic critics have seldom treated Galsworthy with the acuity and sensitivity he deserves, for their methods have generally not been hospitable to his work. During the forties and fifties, if treated at all, he was an example of the Edwardian social reformer in the panorama of passing English history. Yet, as a social critic, Galsworthy was neither sufficiently interested in articulating a philosophy nor sufficiently reductive to stand as a simple counter for a social perspective. Treatment of his work as illustrating a social or ethical point of view, a label current during his life which he always rejected as inaccurate, invariably disappoints even a sympathetic attempt, for it converts most of the drama and fiction into positions that are dated and limited, sometimes even trivially idiosyncratic. Academic criticism elevating the avant-garde that led to "modernism", while necessary and justifiable in explaining the previously unknown or misapprehended, can too easily relegate Galsworthy to the role of the alternative immediate predecessor. More recent forms oflinguistic, structural, and theoretical criticism have also not been helpful in promulgating a fuller sense of Galsworthy's work. Although many such forms of literary criticism, when they are not entirely self-reflexive or are not convincing us again that we at least partially invent the texts we read, can contribute new Priface Xlll

understanding to particular writers, they rely on forms of analysis to reveal what was previously unknown or invisible. For Galsworthy, whose work is visible, apprehensible, although not therefore necessarily superficial, such methods can seem supererogatory or pretentious in such a way that doubles back to derogate the work itself, rather like breaking butterflies on wheels. Better, in this instance, to appreciate the intricacy of the butterfly itself. Academics, too, are vulnerable to valuing most what our methods can best explain, to demonstrations of our critical skills and insights. A writer like Galsworthy not particu­ larly amenable to further illumination through the methods of the critic is likely to be ignored. Galsworthy was always a seriously committed artist, interested both in what he had to say and in how he might best say it, in both content and form. As a dramatist, he shaped two distinctive forms that account for all his best plays. One was a presentation of a contemporary social conflict locked finally in an irreconcilable and unresolvable silence, a form leading to dramatic stasis visible in The Silver Box, Strife, The Skin Game and Loyalties. The other, more personal, was a relentless probing of a particular pain that was simultaneously social and psychological, visible intensely in Justice and somewhat randomly in Escape. His most significant novelistic form is best described as the chronicle, an extension of social, familial, and personal experience into history, shaped by a series of contrasts and continuities as public and private life intersect. This can also be a description of soap opera, although that form has in the past been more likely than the chronicle to rely on a succession of melodramatic incidents and to contrast good and evil in extreme and simplistic terms. Galsworthy's chronicles became less melodramatic and more subtle as they evolved, the patterns or understandings emerging only gradually from the multiple details of selected experience. Only gradually, as well, did he approach the chronicle form. His earlier novels, although containing incisive scenes, characters and elements, were cast in more schematic forms, contrived contrasts or obtrusive polarities that rigidified his versions of experience. His fiction after the First World War, his extensions of the family saga into trilogies, provided the form capacious enough to hold the detailed content of experience, a content seldom violated by what he felt were the reductions or simplifications of metaphysical pattern or insistent meaning. XIV Preface

Pattern derived from the slow accretion of detail, not from the imposition of what he saw as quick, dry, or rigid shapes that could dehumanize experience. The appeal of the chronicle, for many readers, is the appeal of emotionally-felt content, of participation in the material and textures of social, psychological, familial, sexual and political experience within historical time and space, without teleological control or metaphysical meaning. The life of the fiction is in the details, the appeal for the reader in abandoning oneself to vicarious immersion in content. To argue that the principal achievement of Galsworthy's fiction is in the developmental insight and emotions achieved through time is not to claim that the tone and rang~ of all nine of the novels that comprise the trilogies are equivalent. Rather, the tones, voices, and textures vary, as time passes and continuities change. And Galsworthy reaches particular pinnacles - in the relationships of fathers and sons in To Let, in historical and imagistic terms in Swan Song, in personal and psychological terms in Flowering Wilderness - in the third, sixth and eighth novels of the series. Both in content and in the form of the chronicle, the shapes of the fiction are those of his life and his process of self­ discovery. Given the closeness of his fiction to his own version of his personal, social and historical experience, literary biography seems to provide the most useful and revealing approach to Galsworthy's art. While he was always sufficiently the conscious artist to make the assumption highly questionable that fact, experience, or character is literally equivalent in life and in fiction or drama, the relationship is often close enough to see the origin of an element in the art in demonstrable facts or plausible speculations about the life or the perspective. At the same time, how an event or experience was transmuted into art reveals something about the man himself, his judgements, his preoccu­ pations, his areas of wisdom and shallowness, of understanding and limitation. Although life and art are different, as Galsworthy always recognized, he tried more assiduously than many, some­ times with striking insight and clarity, sometimes lapsing into banality, to bring them into as much a transforming and imaginative relationship as he could. Galsworthy was also genuinely modest about his talents and concerning his art, willing to listen to those he respected. For one who internalized so much of what others said and whose confidence in his art was Priface XV so slow to develop, the stories of his changing and diverse reputations are also, in part, both positively and negatively, the stories of his life and his art.

In establishing and deriving what facts of Galsworthy's experi­ ence I could, I have had considerable help that I am pleased to acknowledge. The Galsworthy Memorial Collection at the University of Birmingham from 1962 to 1979 (its more recent history is fully detailed in a note explaining attributions and sources which precedes the notes) was the most extensive single public collection of material. I am grateful for many favours to B. S. Benedikz, the knowledgeable Head of Special Collections at the University of Birmingham and to Christine Penney, his assistant. Other institutions have also provided considerable aid. A great deal of material is readily available in the Scribner Archives, donated by Charles Scribner's Sons to the Princeton University Library. The Houghton Library at Harvard Univer­ sity contains Galsworthy's correspondence with Harley Gran­ ville Barker, William Rothenstein, and others, as well as a great deal of J. B. Pinker's correspondence, and I appreciated the opportunity to read these. I am indebted to the Bodleian Library at Oxford for the Gilbert Murray papers, also to King's College Library at Cambridge and its archivist Michael Halls for a number of letters. Other material is at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. I am grateful to the Norwich Public Records Office for material on Ada Cooper Galsworthy's origins, as well as for the Galsworthy-Mottram correspondence, and I have used the National Public Records Office in London. The Society of Authors' Archive in London contains a good deal of information, and I thank particularly Victor Bonham-Carter, formerly of the Society of Authors, for his knowledge and his generous donation of time. Surviving members of Galsworthy's family were willing to devote significant amounts of their time and their memories of Galsworthy to my interests and questions. They combined interviews with hospitality on numerous occasions. No literary executor could have been more warmly accommodating than the late Rudolf Sauter; no relatives could have taken more trouble in welcoming me, in responding to what I asked, and in XVI Preface sharing their recollections, both verbal and written, than did Dorothy and Ralph Ivens. I am no less appreciative of the generous hospitality and sharp memory of Miss Muriel Gals­ worthy, as well as ofher brother, the late HubertJohn Galsworthy, his wife, Yvette, and their children, Jocelyn and John. Many who knew Galsworthy outside the family were also unfailingly helpful in sharing with me their memories and insights. I would like to record my gratitude to Joan and the late Jack Dean (as well as to Mrs Dean's late sisters and her brother-in-law, Henley), to Dwye Evans, to Mr and Mrs Edward Grinstead, to Storm Jameson, to Dame Rosamond Lehmann, to Charles Pick (formerly the managing director at Heinemann's), to Mrs Pat Scrivens, to the late Dame Sybil Thorndike, to Mrs Marjorie Watts, to the late Dame Rebecca West, and to Donald Wilson (the producer, director, and principal writer of the television dramatization of The Forsyte Saga). They all provided whatever information and insight they could, combined with repeated personal kindness. This long project has received generous support. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a senior fellowship in 1973-4 and to the Guggenheim Memorial Foun­ dation for a fellowship for the 1980-l academic year. My own university, the University of Michigan, has also helped extensively with a Rackham summer fellowship and travel grant in 1975 and another travel grant in 1979. Successive chairmen of the Department of English, Jay Robinson, Ejner Jensen, and John Knott, have been helpful in finding funds to support successive typings of long drafts, as has the Faculty Assistance Fund of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. I appreciate all the arrangements and technical knowledge of Karen Clark, as well as the skilful typing, at various stages, by Patti Andrews, Jill McDonough and Daphne Swabey. More strictly personal gratitude is also pleasurable to express. For information volunteered, obscure publications discovered and presented, letters copied, cogent questions asked, or dis­ cussions willingly endured, I should like to thank the following: W. H. G. Armytage, Simon Baddeley, John Bowen, Gayle Read Chipman, Rosemary Colquhon, Laurence Goldstein, Donald Hall, Alfred F. Havighurst, Christopher Heywood, Geoffrey Hill, Ernest Hofer, David Novarr, Norman Page, Robert Super, Carlton F. Wells, and Sir Angus Wilson. I appreciate the long Preface XVll

tolerance of my children, James Frederic and Katharine, so much of whose introductions to life in England were conditioned by the requirements of my work on Galsworthy. My deepest thanks, which go beyond debts or gratitude, are those to my wife, Joan. A dozen years ago, when she was reading through all of Galsworthy, including some novels and plays I had never read, she first asked about other biographies, then suggested I write one. Throughout all the various drafts, she edited every line, cutting cant and helping to clarify involuted or turgid prose. Alone among all those who provided help and suggestions, she risked venturing into those issues of speculation, of facts and coherent shape, and of identity with and distance from the subject, that are crucial for biography. She has not always agreed with what I have done, and I may well come to regret not always following her advice. But her stringency and commitment to what I was writing have taught me things about the impingements of one perspective on another, about both proximity and separation, and about taking risks, that I found indispensable in attempting to write the biography of another. This book is dedicated to her.

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN J.G.