John Galsworthy
1867 - 1933
English novelist and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. John Galsworthy began his career with a mood of self-criticism and even self-condemnation. Galsworthy became known for his portrayal of the British upper middle class and for his social satire. Galsworthy's attempt to assess the values of his age is defined in The Forsyte Saga, his most famous work, as the struggle of Beauty against the Idea of Property or Possession. Galsworthy was a representative of the literary tradition which has regarded the novel as a lawful instrument of social propaganda. He believed that it was the duty of an artist to state a problem, to throw light upon it, but not to provide a solution. Before starting his career as a writer Galsworthy read widely the works of Kipling, Zola, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Flaubert.
John Galsworthy was born in Kingston Hill, Surrey, in an upper-middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and director of several companies, and his mother was a daughter of a Midlands manufacturer. Galsworthy studied law at Harrow and New College, Oxford, and was called to the Bar in 1890. However, he never settled into practice, but chose travelling. In 1893 he met the writer Joseph Conrad while on a South Sea voyage. This meeting convinced him to give up law and become a writer instead. Galsworthy's first four books were published at his own expense under the pseudonym John Sinjohn. With the death of his father in 1904, Galsworthy became financially independent. He married Ada Person Cooper in 1905, with whom he had lived in secret for ten years. She became the inspiration for many of Galsworthy's female characters. Her previous unhappy marriage with Galsworthy's cousin formed the basis for the novel The Man of Property (1906), which began the work The Forsyte Saga (1906-28). The first appearance of the Forsyte family was in one of the stories in Man of Devon (1901). The saga follows the lives of three generations of the British middle-class before 1914. Central characters are Soames Forsyte, who is married to beautiful and rebellious Irene, and Jolyon Forsyte, Soames's cousin. The incident, when Soames rapes his wife Irene, was supposedly based on Ada Galsworthy's experience with his former husband Arthur. In the second part, In Chancery (1920), Irene and Soames divorce, she marries Jolyon and bears a son, Jon. In the third book, To Let (1921), Fleur and Jon fall in love, but Jon refuses to marry her. The second part of Forsyte chronicles, containing The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926), Swan Song (1928), and the two interludes A Silent Wooing and Passers By was published as Modern Comedy in 1929. In 1931 Galsworthy followed the immense success of the Forsyte books with a further collection of stories, On Forsyte Change. The Man of Property established Galsworthy's reputation as an important writer. He also gained recognition as a dramatist with his plays that dealt directly with the unequal division of wealth and the unfair treatment of poor people. The Silver Box (1906) stated that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, Strife (1909), depicted a mining strike, and Justice (1910) encouraged Winston Churchill in his programme for prison reform. Later plays include The Skin Game (1920), filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1932, Loyalties (1922), dealing with the theme of anti-Semitism, later produced for television, and Escape (1926), filmed second time in 1948.
Galsworthy refused knighthood in 1917 in the belief that writers should not accept titles. He also gave away at least half of his income to humanitarian causes. In 1924 Galsworthy founded with Catherine Dawson Scott PEN, an international organization of writers. The trust fund was financed by his Nobel Prize money. The organization was named PEN when someone pointed out at the first meeting that the initial letters on poet, essayist and novelist were the same in most European languages.
Galsworthy died on January 31, 1933. During his career he produced 20 novels, 27 plays, 3 collections of poetry, 173 short stories, 5 collections of essays, 700 letters, and many sketches and miscellaneous works.
Speaking about the style one can say that the words make part of a prolonged inner monologue, which becomes Galsworthy's favourite method of characterization. The inner speech of the hero is indissolubly linked with the author's comments. The language of the monologues is concise and laconic, utterly devoid of sentiment. It is quite free of abstract terms, and is exceedingly terse, practical and full of idiomatic constructions commonly used in everyday speech. Besides the inner monologue and characterization through surroundings, Galsworthy, ever resourceful in his search for the realistic approach, makes ample use of the dialogue as an efficient means to let his characters speak for themselves without author's interference. Their speech might be described as a curious combination of vulgar colloquialisms with bookish and learned phraseology, of English and French slang with solemn parody of Biblical constructions. Exaggeration goes hand in hand with understatement.
Galsworthy perfectly realized, - indeed, he was one of the first writers to do so, - that the flippant manner and the crude speech of post-war young people was the result of a severe shock of disillusionment: they were so disappointed with those fine words that used to go with a fine show of public feeling that for them "the bottom had tumbled out of sentiment", and satire both in art and in mode of talk seemed to be the only possible alternative. The manner of speaking, cynical, affectedly coarse, substituting descriptive slangy catchwords for the proper names of things, is strongly contrasted to formal, plain speech, with the habit of giving things their common standard meanings and never saying more than is strictly necessary.
As a follower of the realistic tradition, Galsworthy never fails in attaching special significance to the tiniest details. Galsworthy's realism does not only lie in his capacity for making his hero part and parcel of his surroundings and convincing the reader of his typicality: he is a fine artist in reproducing the individual workings of his characters' minds.
As a general rule, the novelist, though following in the tracks of classical
realists, breaks away from the literary polish, the fine descriptive style
that was kept up to the very end of the 19
century. At the same time,
Galsworthy starts a new tradition of bringing the language of literature (in
the author's speech, no less than in that of the personages) close to the
language of real life. He does away with the elaborate syntax of the
19 century prose and cultivates short, somewhat abrupt sentences,
true to the rhythm and the intonation of the spoken language and full of low
colloquialisms and even slang.