GALSWORTHY, JOHN
Is John Galsworthy read by many people anymore?
I suppose we could say he was “in”during the late 1020 and th early '30's. It was in 1932 that he won the Nobel Prize for his strong series known as “The Forsythe Saga”. I remember that, but, at that time, I was not in the mood, I suppose to read a three generational sweep of one families intricate relationships. Furthermore, the Saga as a thing spread out over a period of years. The first part I must have considered to be old-fashioned; the additions as topical, and the later ones - or Part II - a tack-ons. The overall struck me as being at about the same level as was soap opera writing for radio at that time.
That judgment was and unwise on my part, I find, because as I read portions of it of sequence it struck me as being more like a mixture of Thackerey and Dickens, two of my a favorite writers and also two Galsworthy was said to have studied in detail. He started series with a novel in 1904 called “The Island Pharisees” which he revised twice, once in 1904 and again in 1908. Other sections followed in l901, '21, '24 and 1929. The completed saga - gathered together over the span of all those tumultuous years - won the Nobel Prize in 1932.
The story, viewed as a whole, a tragic one based on the real life of his cousin Arthur Galsworthy and IK can understand my own hesitancy in accepted it earlier.
Galsworthy made good sensational copy, too. It is amazing tome, he was not featured more in the tabloid areas of writing. He married Ada Person Cooper and lived with her for ten years in secret because he felt his father would not approve of the marriage, she having been the somewhat battered wife of curious cousin Arthur. When Daddy died , son John became financially independent, you see.
John Galsworthy had some strong views about writing, too, which may well have kept some of us from from reading him with any enthusiasm. He felt that writing always had mission and that novels , in particular,were intend to point out to the world that something was amiss, but that they were not intended to come up with any solution for such problems ...only to call attention to them dramatically and to get others to start thinking what might be done to change things which were wrong. He was concerned often with the improper division of wealth and the treatment of poor people, he favored the coal miner's strikes, he spoke out strongly for for prison reforms. He wrote on anti-Semitism in ”Escape” in 1926. It was filmed a second time in 1939 starring Rex Harrison. He served as a Red Cross worker in France during WWI. He had a knack for making some steadfast, dedicated enemies, as well. Both D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf did all they could to lower his reputation as a writer and to help its decline . He was accused of being too thoroughly involved in the very conditions of which he was so critical.
And, another thing which irked me over the years was the fact that we suddenly we were told he had written his earlier works under the assume pen name of John Sinjohn. I can understand a situation wherein a writer produces so much products that he finds it best to use a nom-de-plume for certain of his efforts to keep from cluttering the market place with his name and to keep cash flow steadier, but, this John Sinjohn ( I wonder how he arrived at that concoction!) suggests he was not too sure of his first literary efforts and that he re-claimed them and revised them only when it became profitable for him to do so.
A.L.M. May 10, 2003 [c999wds]
