Every winter I read a big thick book. This year I chose The
Forsyte Saga, which is actually three novels, linked by two short
interludes. The first volume, The
Man of Property, was published in 1906, and the final book, To
Let, in 1922. The saga is the history of an upper middle class English
family whose older generation’s births spanned 1799 to 1820. These ten siblings,
a selection of their children, and theirs, are the characters, in scenes set from
around 1890 through the early 1920s.
“[Forsytes] are...half
England, and the better half too, the safe half, the three percent half, the
half that counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything
possible; makes your art possible, makes literature, science, even religion,
possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but turn them
all to use, where should we be? My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middlemen,
the commercials, the pillars of society, the corner-stones of convention;
everything that is admirable.”
In The Man of Property, Soames Forsyte
is the epitome of the breed: quiet, snobbish, cold, proper, self-disciplined, possessive. Therein lies the tale. In
his youth he meets a beautiful young woman, Irene, and determines to make her
his wife. Through persistence he succeeds - but then she realizes she does not
love him. To him, she is his most shining possession. To her, he is a jailer -
the sumptuousness of her prison means nothing to her.
Irene meets a Forsyte cousin’s fiance, an architect, with
whom attraction is immediate and profound. Soames engages the young man to
design a house for him, and Bosinney, in consultation with Irene, builds the
expensive lovely house, Robin Hill, in a bucolic spot not far from London. But
Bosinney and Irene fall in love. He breaks his engagement, she breaks her
marriage vows, he dies in an accident and she shuns Soames, who, repulsed by
the thought of publicity, does nothing. They live separately, without
communication, still married.
The first interlude follows: Indian Summer of a Forsyte,
about the last years of Old Jolyon,
Soames’s uncle. A great connoisseur of beauty, he buys Robin Hill, a purchase which at the
time suits Soames, who hates the house but averts a scandal by not having to advertise it. Old
Jolyon provides Irene money to live on, and wills her a generous stipend. He warms in her presence, and reconciles with his own son Jolyon
(whose daughter was the architect’s fiancee) and his two children by his second
wife.
Now the second novel, In Chancery, opens (chancery is
court - the title refers to Soames assisting his sister in her divorce from her
drunken spendthrift husband, and Soames finally pursuing his own divorce from
Irene). Jolyon the younger, a watercolorist and also a great appreciator of
beauty, is a complete anomaly in that acquisitive family. Eventually this
Jolyon finds his way to Irene. Soames, by now older and desirous of an heir, finds
her still so beautiful that he entreats her to come back and father a child for
him. She repudiates him. At last he presses for divorce, to marry a young
Frenchwoman he does not love, who bears him a daughter. In an ironic twist, Irene and Jolyon move to Robin Hill,
where they have a son.
So ends the second volume. Now we have the weakest section
of the book, the mercifully short Awakening, a treacly flight of fancy
in the mind of Irene and Jolyon’s son Jon at age eight or nine.
The final book, To Let, opens with Jon and Fleur,
Soames’s daughter, both nineteen, meeting by chance. Their cousin and his wife
(first cousins to each other, in one of the durable love matches in the saga)
host Jon at their country place, where Fleur comes to visit. The two young people fall in love. Irene and
Soames are both appalled by this liaison - the ugliness of their parting will
not allow either to make rapprochement for their children’s sakes.
That’s the bare bones of the story. What makes it
fascinating is, on the one hand, Galsworthy’s way of plunging the reader into a
time and place foreign to us, but guiding us skillfully. Here’s what the
Forsytes think of Bosinney’s death:
“In their hearts they
would even feel it an intervention of Providence, of retribution - had not
Bosinney endangered their two most priceless possessions, the pocket and the
hearth?”
On the other hand, the full tale has the symmetry of a
composition by Bach - parents who have no use for each other, children who fall
in love. They neither lead their elders to reconciliation, nor go as far as
Romeo and Juliet to tragic ends. And we see the importance of beauty and love
in society - Jolyon wins Irene by gentleness, and by allowing her whatever
freedom she wants. Soames, who clenches onto things and people, estranges his
young second wife -
“He knew that she knew
that they both knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her
not to admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand
what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English.”
His only concern when she has an affair under his very nose,
is its effect on his adored daughter: his
daughter, he thinks of Fleur, not theirs.
Lest you think Soames a monster or a buffoon, you should
read this trilogy - he is so fully developed and so thoroughly human that to
scorn him is to scorn ourselves. The possessiveness that is his undoing is a
family trait - he is only the most perfect manifestation of it. What he wants
to possess is beauty - in addition to Irene, he amasses a formidable collection
of paintings, which he chooses with an eye to resale value but nevertheless
appreciates while they are his. When he visits the last member of his father’s
generation - Uncle Timothy, now a hundred - he reflects that the house should be
a museum, for it is a perfect representation of the bygone Victorian world.
Every object, adornment, custom in the house exists in a backwater untouched by
anything more recent than the Boer War. Yet Soames perceives that these furnishings
that meant so much to his childhood have no value in the modern world.
Copious notes assembled by Geoffrey Harvey in the Oxford
World Classics edition (1995) illumine Galsworthy’s references, enriching the
story for a modern audience.
Step out of time - immerse yourself in a world better and
worse than our own.
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