Sunday, January 18, 2009

A family affair

For several months I have been working on John Galsworthy's multi-volumed The Forsyte Saga. These books are not quick reads, like so many of today's best sellers. But I have gradually got caught up in the lives of this clan of upper middle-class English philistines, whose unifying code is that of possession. In the first book – A Man of Property – I got a bit tired of Galsworthy's constant use of the word 'property.' All right, already, I get the idea, I would think. The Forsytes – and all the other late-Victorian Englishmen like them – thought of everything in terms of property, from their own homes (in good, but un-showy neighborhoods), to fine furniture, paintings and brick-a-brack (how much these examples of property had cost and how much they would bring being what determined their value, rather than their intrinsic worth), to wives and offspring, to their good name. Life is all about acquiring these things, and keeping them, passing them on to the next generation.

It is the Forsytes' sense of family that ultimately pulls you in, in a way that I suspect is similar to the pull of The Sopranos. I suspect that what kept people tuning in to that show week after week had less to do with the criminal goings-on than the family melodrama. In The Forsyte Saga we get occasional glimpses at what's happening in the business world – except for the character "young" Jolyon, who is a painter, all the Forsyte men are of course businessmen -- as well as developments out in the wide world, such as the Boer War, waged in South Africa from 1899 to 1902, which impacted both business and the personal lives of people. For someone like me, who is totally uninterested in business, these practical, mundane matters, though they form the background for not only the lives of the Forsytes, but the England of the day, simply do not engage.

But the stiff, unlikable (although I consistently feel sorry for the man, because he just does not get it) Soames, turning his steps instinctively towards his elderly parents' home when his marriage falls apart, that grabs you. The way his sister, obsessed with fashion, and a fool about her ne're-do-well husband, turns to her brother when that loser of a husband runs off with a dancer; and later, during Soames' own time of trial, the way she offers genuine sympathy, even if it is only in taking Soames' outthrust hand in both of hers (the Forsytes are never demonstrative). These and so many more instances demonstrate the need people have for one another, and the essential role families play in providing people with a sense of rootedness, and identity, for better or for worse.

I think with the following little scene Galsworthy offers a telling explanation of the urge to perpetuate ourselves, beyond the perpetuation of the species instinct in us all. We are inside Soames' head: "That evening in Park Lane, watching his father dine, he was overwhelmed by his old longing for a son – a son, to watch him eat as he went down the years, to be taken on his knee, as James on a time had been wont to take him...To get old – like that thin, wiry-frail figure sitting there – and be quite alone with possessions heaping up around him; to take no interest in anything because it had no future, and must pass away from him to hands and mouths and eyes for whom he cared not a jot. No! He would force [his divorce] through now, and be free to marry, and have a son to care for him..."*

There is another insightful section that anyone with children must surely be able to identify with, representing as it does what is surely every parent's worst nightmare. It comes when "young" Jolyon – in some ways the least Forsyte-like of them, having been cut off years earlier for leaving his wife for the governess – learns of his son's death in the Boer War, not on the battlefield but of a fever:

"Gone out like a candle flame; far from home, from love, all by himself, in the dark. His boy! From a little chap always so good to him, -- so friendly. Twenty years old and cut down like grass – to have no life at all! ...

To die out there — lonely — wanting them – wanting home! This seemed to his Forsyte heart more painful, more pitiful than death itself. No shelter, no protection, no love at the last. And all the deeply rooted clanship in him, the family feeling and essential clinging to his own flesh and blood which had been so strong in [his own father] old Jolyon – was so strong in all the Forsytes – felt outraged, cut, and torn by his boy's lonely passing."**

I press on, from In Chancery to To Let, to see what happens next.

*Galsworthy, John, In Chancery, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969, p.210
**Ibid, p.219

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