Joyce in Galsworthy.(John Galsworthy)(Critical Essay)

John Galsworthy is not a name which usually springs to one's mind if thinking about the traces James Joyce left in his fellow writers' works. The standard opinion about Galsworthy and his best-remembered effort, the Forsyte Saga trilogy, is something like Charles Osborne's summary in the Penguin Companion to Literature: "The cycle is notable more for its painstaking completeness than for any specific literary virtues." (1) If high modernist novelists condescend to comment anything on Galsworthy at all, the outcome usually sounds like Arno Schmidt's remarks in his 1951 novella "Brand's Heath": "Greasylivered Galsworthy!: ... I mean, talk about selfmade problems (as if English society itself were one! ...)." (2) In a way, Galsworthy stands for the whole late Victorian culture and aesthetics that was thrown overboard by Joyce and other modernist writers and artists.

It should not be forgotten, however, that Galsworthy (1867--1933) and Joyce were contemporaries. It is true that nowhere in Joyce's writings have any traces of Galsworthy's extremely popular works been discovered so far (nor does it seem likely that any will ever be discovered), but Joyce must have been aware of the tremendous commercial success of the Forsyte Saga, which was completed by the third part of the trilogy, To Let, in 1921, just one year before Joyce published his Ulysses. When in 1926 Joyce (assisted by Ludwig Lewisohn and Archibald MacLeish) assembled an international phalanx of 167 writers to sign a public letter of protest against Samuel Roth's piracy of Ulysses, Galsworthy was one of the signers (which of course does not necessarily mean that Galsworthy took any interest in the pirated book). (3) A few years later, in December 1931, Joyce in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver expressed his suspicion that Galsworthy had his hands in an attempt to prevent Harold Nicholson from lecturing on Joyce o n BBC radio (L I 307). Apart from these two very minute details, not the least cross-connections between Joyce and Galsworthy (who in 1932 was awarded the Nobel Prize) have been discovered by anyone inside or outside the Joyce industry.

All the more interesting it seems that in one of his later novels, Galsworthy alludes to the circumstances of the publication of Ulysses in Paris. Chapter XXXI of Maid in Waiting, a novel set in a mid-1920s London and published in 1931, includes the following piece of ladies' conversation, incited by Dinny Conway, the novel's heroine:

"It would be delicious if you could work up a scandal....Uncle Lawrence would love it."

Lady Mont seemed to go into a sort of coma....

"...He's been readin' me Gulliver's Travels, Dinny. The man was coarse, you know."

"Not so coarse as Rabelais, or even as Voltaire."