The Forsyte Saga 1: The Man of Property

by John Galsworthy

Genres: General Fiction; Classics

Synopsis

London of the 1880s: The Forsyte family is gathered - gloves, waistcoats, feathers and frocks - to celebrate the engagement of young June Forstye to an architect, Philip Bosinney. The family are intrigued but wary of this stranger in their midst, who they nickname 'the Buccaneer'. Amongst those present are Soames Forsyte and his beautiful wife Irene - his most prized possession. With that meeting a chain of heartbreaking and tragic events is set in motion that will split the family to the very core...

Release date: August 4, 2011

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 317

Sample

John Galsworthy was born on August 14, 1867, at Kingston Hill in Surrey, the son of John and Blanche Galsworthy and the second
of four children. John Galsworthy senior, whose family came from Devon, was a successful solicitor in London and a man of
‘new money’, determined to provide privilege and security for his family. They idolised him. By contrast, their mother Blanche
was a more difficult woman, strict and distant. Galsworthy commented, ‘My father really predominated in me from the start
. . . I was so truly and deeply fond of him that I seemed not to have a fair share of love left to give my mother’.


Young Johnny enjoyed the happy, secure childhood of a Victorian, upper-middle-class family. Educated at Harrow, he was popular
at school and a good sportsman. Holidays were spent with family and friends, moving between their country houses. After finishing
school, John went up to New College, Oxford to read law. There he enjoyed the carefree life of a privileged student, not working
particularly hard, gambling and becoming known as ‘the best dressed man in College’. But he could also be quiet and serious,
a contemporary describing how ‘He moved among us somewhat withdrawn . . . a sensitive, amused, somewhat cynical spectator
of the human scene’.


The period after university was one of indecision for Galsworthy. Although his father wanted him to become a barrister, the
law held little appeal. So he decided to get away from it all and travel. It was on a voyage in the South Seas in 1893 that
he met Joseph Conrad, and the two became close friends. It was a crucial friendship in Galsworthy’s life. Conrad encouraged
his love of writing, but Galsworthy attributes his final inspiration to the woman he was falling in love with: Ada.


Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper married Major Arthur Galsworthy, John’s cousin, in 1891. But the marriage was a tragic mistake.
Embraced by the entire family, Ada became close friends with John’s beloved sisters, Lilian and Mabel, and through them John
heard of her increasing misery, fixing in his imagination the pain of an unhappy marriage. Thrown together more and more,
John and Ada eventually became lovers in September 1895. They were unafraid of declaring their relationship and facing the
consequences, but the only person they couldn’t bear to hurt was John’s adored father, with his traditional values. And so
they endured ten years of secrecy until Galsworthy’s father died in December 1904. By September 1905 Ada’s divorce had come
through and they were finally able to marry.


It was around this time, in 1906, that Galsworthy’s writing career flourished. During the previous decade he had been a man
‘in chains’, emotionally and professionally, having finally abandoned law in 1894. He struggled to establish himself as an
author. But after many false starts and battling a lifelong insecurity about his writing, Galsworthy turned an affectionately
satirical eye on the world he knew best and created the indomitable Forsytes, a mirror image of his own relations – old Jolyon:
his father; Irene: his beloved Ada, to name but a few. On reading the manuscript, his sister Lilian was alarmed that he could
so expose their private lives, but John dismissed her fears saying only herself, Mabel and their mother, ‘who perhaps had
better not read the book’, knew enough to draw comparisons. The Man of Property, the first book in The Forsyte Saga, was published to instant acclaim; Galsworthy’s fame as an author was now sealed.


By the time the first Forsyte trilogy had been completed, with In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921), sales of The Forsyte Saga had reached one million on both sides of the Atlantic. With the public clambering for more, Galsworthy followed these with
six more Forsyte novels, the last of which, Over The River, was completed just before his death in 1933. And their appeal endures, immortalised on screen in much-loved adaptations
such as the film That Forsyte Woman (1949), starring Errol Flynn. The celebrated BBC drama in 1967 with Kenneth Moore and Eric Porter was a phenomenal success,
emptying the pubs and churches of Britain on a Sunday evening, and reaching an estimated worldwide audience of 160 million.
The recent popular 2002 production starred Damien Lewis, Rupert Graves and Ioan Gruffudd and won a Bafta TV award.


Undoubtedly The Forsyte Saga is Galsworthy’s most distinguished work, but he was well known, if not more successful in his time, as a dramatist. His inherent
compassion meant Galsworthy was always involved in one cause or another, from women’s suffrage to a ban on ponies in mines,
and his plays very much focus on the social injustices of his day. The Silver Box (1906) was his first major success, but Justice (1910), a stark depiction of prison life, had an even bigger impact. Winston Churchill was so impressed by it that he immediately
arranged for prison reform, reducing the hours of solitary confinement. The Skin Game (1920) was another big hit and later adapted into a film, under the same title, by Alfred Hitchcock.


Despite Galsworthy’s literary success, his personal life was still troubled. Although he and Ada were deeply in love, the years of uncertainty had taken their toll. They never had children
and their marriage reached a crisis in 1910 when Galsworthy formed a close friendship with a young dancer called Margaret
Morris while working on one of his plays with her. But John, confused and tortured by the thought of betraying Ada, broke
off all contact with Margaret in 1912 and went abroad with his wife. The rest of their lives were spent constantly on the
move; travelling in America, Europe, or at home in London, Dartmoor and later Sussex. Numerous trips were made in connection
with PEN, the international writers club, after Galsworthy was elected its first president in 1921. Many people have seen
the constant travelling as unsettling for Galsworthy and destructive to his writing, but being with Ada was all that mattered
to him: ‘This is what comes of giving yourself to a woman body and soul. A. paralyses and has always paralysed me. I have
never been able to face the idea of being cut off from her.’


By the end of his life, Galsworthy, the man who had railed against poverty and injustice, had become an established, reputable
figure in privileged society. Having earlier refused a knighthood, he was presented with an Order of Merit in 1929. And in
1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Although it was fashionable for younger writers to mock the traditional
Edwardian authors, Virginia Woolf dismissing Galsworthy as a ‘stuffed shirt’, J.M. Barrie perceived his contradictory nature:
‘A queer fish, like the rest of us. So sincerely weighed down by the out-of-jointness of things socially . . . but outwardly
a man-about-town, so neat, so correct – he would go to the stake for his opinions but he would go courteously raising his
hat.’


John Galsworthy died on 31 January, 1933, at the age of sixty-five, at Grove Lodge in Hampstead, with Ada by his side. At
his request, his ashes were scattered over Bury Hill in Sussex. The Times hailed him as the ‘mouthpiece’ of his age, ‘the interpreter in drama, and in fiction of a definite phase in English social
history’.


Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight – an upper
middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis
(a talent without monetary value and properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only delightful in
itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family – no
branch of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy
– evidence of that mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit of society, so clear a reproduction
of society in miniature. He has been admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood something of
patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the rise and fall of nations. He is like one who, having watched a
tree grow from its planting – a paragon of tenacity, insulation, and success, amidst the deaths of a hundred other plants
less fibrous, sappy, and persistent – one day will see it flourishing with bland, full foliage, in an almost repugnant prosperity,
at the summit of its efflorescence.


On June 15, 1886, about four of the afternoon, the observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon Forsyte in
Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest efflorescence of the Forsytes.


This was the occasion of an ‘at home’ to celebrate the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon’s granddaughter, to Mr
Philip Bosinney. In the bravery of light gloves, buff waistcoats, feathers and frocks, the family were present, even Aunt Ann, who now but seldom left the corner of her brother Timothy’s green drawing-room,
where, under the aegis of a plume of dyed pampas grass in a light blue vase, she sat all day reading and knitting, surrounded
by the effigies of three generations of Forsytes. Even Aunt Ann was there; her inflexible back, and the dignity of her calm
old face personifying the rigid possessiveness of the family idea.


When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present; when a Forsyte died – but no Forsyte had as yet died;
they did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive precautions
of highly vitalised persons who resent encroachments on their property.


About the Forsytes mingling that day with the crowd of other guests, there was a more than ordinarily groomed look, an alert,
inquisitive assurance, a brilliant respectability, as though they were attired in defiance of something. The habitual sniff
on the face of Soames Forsyte had spread through their ranks; they were on their guard.


The subconscious offensiveness of their attitude has constituted old Jolyon’s ‘at home’ the psychological moment of the family
history, made it the prelude of their drama.


The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added
perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and – the sniff. Danger –
so indispensable in bringing out the fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual – was what the Forsytes scented;
the premonition of danger put a burnish on their armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct
of being in contact with some strange and unsafe thing.


Over against the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing two waistcoats on his wide chest, two waistcoats and a ruby pin,
instead of the single satin waistcoat and diamond pin of more usual occasions, and his shaven, square, old face, the colour
of pale leather, with pale eyes, had its most dignified look, above his satin stock. This was Swithin Forsyte. Close to the
window, where he could get more than his fair share of fresh air, the other twin, James – the fat and the lean of it, old Jolyon called these brothers
– like the bulky Swithin, over six feet in height, but very lean, as though destined from his birth to strike a balance and
maintain an average, brooded over the scene with his permanent stoop; his grey eyes had an air of fixed absorption in some
secret worry, broken at intervals by a rapid, shifting scrutiny of surrounding facts; his cheeks, thinned by two parallel
folds, and a long, clean-shaven upper lip, were framed within Dundreary whiskers. In his hands he turned and turned a piece
of china. Not far off, listening to a lady in brown, his only son Soames, pale and well-shaved, dark-haired, rather bald,
had poked his chin up sideways, carrying his nose with that aforesaid appearance of ‘sniff’, as though despising an egg which
he knew he could not digest. Behind him his cousin, the tall George, son of the fifth Forsyte, Roger, had a Quilpish look
on his fleshy face, pondering one of his sardonic jests.


Something inherent to the occasion had affected them all.

Seated in a row close to one another were three ladies – Aunts Ann, Hester (the two Forsyte maids), and Juley (short for Julia),
who not in first youth had so far forgotten herself as to marry Septimus Small, a man of poor constitution. She had survived
him for many years. With her elder and younger sister she lived now in the house of Timothy, her sixth and youngest brother,
on the Bayswater Road. Each of these ladies held fans in their hands, and each with some touch of colour, some emphatic feather
or brooch, testified to the solemnity of the opportunity.


In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as became a host, stood the head of the family, old Jolyon himself. Eighty
years of age, with his fine, white hair, his dome-like forehead, his little, dark grey eyes, and an immense white moustache,
which drooped and spread below the level of his strong jaw, he had a patriarchal look, and in spite of lean cheeks and hollows
at his temples, seemed master of perennial youth. He held himself extremely upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost
none of their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of superiority to the doubts and dislikes of smaller men. Having had
his own way for innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it. It would never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look of doubt or of defiance.


Between him and the four other brothers who were present, James, Swithin, Nicholas, and Roger, there was much difference,
much similarity. In turn, each of these four brothers was very different from the other, yet they, too, were alike.


Through the varying features and expression of those five faces could be marked a certain steadfastness of chin, underlying
surface distinctions, marking a racial stamp, too prehistoric to trace, too remote and permanent to discuss – the very hall-mark
and guarantee of the family fortunes.


Among the younger generation, in the tall, bull-like George, in pallid strenuous Archibald, in young Nicholas with his sweet
and tentative obstinacy, in the grave and foppishly determined Eustace, there was this same stamp – less meaningful perhaps,
but unmistakable – a sign of something ineradicable in the family soul.


At one time or another during the afternoon, all these faces, so dissimilar and so alike, had worn an expression of distrust,
the object of which was undoubtedly the man whose acquaintance they were thus assembled to make.


Philip Bosinney was known to be a young man without fortune, but Forsyte girls had become engaged to such before, and had
actually married them. It was not altogether for this reason, therefore, that the minds of the Forsytes misgave them. They
could not have explained the origin of a misgiving obscured by the mist of family gossip. A story was undoubtedly told that
he had paid his duty call to Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester, in a soft grey hat – a soft grey hat, not even a new one – a dusty
thing with a shapeless crown. ‘So, extraordinary, my dear – so odd!’ Aunt Hester, passing through the little, dark hall (she
was rather short-sighted), had tried to ‘shoo’ it off a chair, taking it for a strange, disreputable cat – Tommy had such
disgraceful friends! She was disturbed when it did not move.


Like an artist for ever seeking to discover the significant trifle which embodies the whole character of a scene, or place,
or person, so those unconscious artists – the Forsytes – had fastened by intuition on this hat; it was their significant trifle,
the detail in which was embedded the meaning of the whole matter; for each had asked himself: ‘Come, now, should I have paid that visit in that hat?’ and each had answered ‘No!’ and some, with more imagination than others, had added: ‘It
would never have come into my head!’


George, on hearing the story, grinned. The hat had obviously been worn as a practical joke! He himself was a connoisseur of
such.


‘Very haughty!’ he said, ‘the wild Buccaneer!’

And this mot, ‘The ‘Buccaneer’, was bandied from mouth to mouth, till it became the favourite mode of alluding to Bosinney.


Her aunts reproached June afterwards about the hat.

‘We don’t think you ought to let him, dear!’ they had said.

June had answered in her imperious brisk way, like the little embodiment of will she was:

‘Oh! what does it matter? Phil never knows what he’s got on!’

No one had credited an answer so outrageous. A man not to know what he had on? No, no!

What indeed was this young man, who, in becoming engaged to June, old Jolyon’s acknowledged heiress, had done so well for
himself? He was an architect, not in itself a sufficient reason for wearing such a hat. None of the Forsytes happened to be
architects, but one of them knew two architects who would never have worn such a hat upon a call of ceremony in the London
season. Dangerous – ah, dangerous!


June, of course, had not seen this, but, though not yet nineteen, she was notorious. Had she not said to Mrs Soames – who
was always so beautifully dressed – that feathers were vulgar? Mrs Soames had actually given up wearing feathers, so dreadfully
downright was dear June!


These misgivings, this disapproval, and perfectly genuine distrust, did not prevent the Forsytes from gathering to old Jolyon’s
invitation. An ‘at home’ at Stanhope Gate was a great rarity; none had been held for twelve years, not indeed since old Mrs
Jolyon had died.


Never had there been so full an assembly, for, mysteriously united in spite of all their differences, they had taken arms
against a common peril. Like cattle when a dog comes into the field, they stood head to head and shoulder to shoulder, prepared
to run upon and trample the invader to death. They had come, too, no doubt, to get some notion of what sort of presents they would ultimately be expected
to give; for though the question of wedding gifts was usually graduated in this way: ‘What are you givin’? Nicholas is givin’
spoons!’ – so very much depended on the bridegroom. If he were sleek, well-brushed, prosperous-looking, it was more necessary
to give him nice things; he would expect them. In the end each gave exactly what was right and proper, by a species of family
adjustment arrived at as prices are arrived at on the Stock Exchange – the exact niceties being regulated at Timothy’s commodious,
red-brick residence in Bayswater, overlooking the Park, where dwelt Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester.


The uneasiness of the Forsyte family has been justified by the simple mention of the hat. How impossible and wrong would it
have been for any family, with the regard for appearances which should ever characterise the great upper middle-class, to
feel otherwise than uneasy!


The author of the uneasiness stood talking to June by the further door; his curly hair had a rumpled appearance, as though
he found what was going on around him unusual. He had an air, too, of having a joke all to himself.


George, speaking aside to his brother, Eustace, said:

‘Looks as if he might make a bolt of it – the dashing Buccaneer!’

This ‘very singular-looking man’, as Mrs Small afterwards called him, was of medium height and strong build, with a pale,
brown face, a dust-coloured moustache, very prominent cheek-bones, and hollow cheeks. His forehead sloped back towards the
crown of his head, and bulged out in bumps over the eyes, like foreheads seen in the Lion-house at the Zoo. He had sherry-coloured
eyes, disconcertingly inattentive at times. Old Jolyon’s coachman, after driving June and Bosinney to the theatre, had remarked
to the butler:


‘I dunno what to make of ’im. Looks to me for all the world like an ’alf-tame leopard.’

And every now and then a Forsyte would come up, sidle round, and take a look at him.

June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity – a little bit of a thing, as somebody once said, ‘all hair and spirit’,
with fearless blue eyes, a firm jaw, and a bright colour, whose face and body seemed too slender for her crown of red-gold
hair.


A tall woman, with a beautiful figure, which some member of the family had once compared to a heathen goddess, stood looking
at these two with a shadowy smile.


Her hands, gloved in French grey, were crossed one over the other, her grave, charming face held to one side, and the eyes
of all men near were fastened on it. Her figure swayed, so balanced that the very air seemed to set it moving. There was warmth,
but little colour, in her cheeks; her large, dark eyes were soft. But it was at her lips – asking a question, giving an answer,
with that shadowy smile – that men looked; they were sensitive lips, sensuous and sweet, and through them seemed to come warmth
and perfume like the warmth and perfume of a flower.


The engaged couple thus scrutinized were unconscious of this passive goddess. It was Bosinney who first noticed her, and asked
her name.


June took her lover up to the woman with the beautiful figure.

‘Irene is my greatest chum,’ she said: ‘Please be good friends, you two!’

At the little lady’s command they all three smiled; and while they were smiling, Soames Forsyte, silently appearing from behind
the woman with the beautiful figure, who was his wife, said:


‘Ah! introduce me too!’

He was seldom, indeed, far from Irene’s side at public functions, and even when separated by the exigencies of social intercourse,
could be seen following her about with his eyes, in which were strange expressions of watchfulness and longing.


At the window his father, James, was still scrutinizing the marks on the piece of china.

‘I wonder at Jolyon’s allowing this engagement,’ he said to Aunt Ann. ‘They tell me there’s no chance of their getting married
for years. This young Bosinney’ (he made the word a dactyl in opposition to general usage of a short o) ‘has got nothing.
When Winifred married Dartie, I made him bring every penny into settlement – lucky thing, too – they’d ha’ had nothing by this time!’


Aunt Ann looked up from her velvet chair. Grey curls banded her forehead, curls that, unchanged for decades, had extinguished
in the family all sense of time. She made no reply, for she rarely spoke, husbanding her aged voice; but to James, uneasy
of conscience, her look was as good as an answer.


‘Well,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t help Irene’s having no money. Soames was in such a hurry; he got quite thin dancing attendance
on her.’


Putting the bowl pettishly down on the piano, he let his eyes wander to the group by the door.

‘It’s my opinion,’ he said unexpectedly, ‘that it’s just as well as it is.’

Aunt Ann did not ask him to explain this strange utterance. She knew what he was thinking. If Irene had no money she would
not be so foolish as to do anything wrong; for they said – they said – she had been asking for a separate room; but, of course,
Soames had not . . .


James interrupted her reverie:

But where, he asked, was Timothy? Hadn’t he come with them? Through Aunt Ann’s compressed lips a tender smile forced its way:

‘No, he didn’t think it wise, with so much of this diphtheria about; and he so liable to take things.’

James answered:

‘Well, he takes good care of himself. I can’t afford to take the care of myself that he does.’


Nor was it easy to say which, of admiration, envy, or contempt, was dominant in that remark.

Timothy, indeed, was seldom seen. The baby of the family, a publisher by profession, he had some years before, when business
was at full tide, scented out the stagnation which, indeed, had not yet come, but which ultimately, as all agreed, was bound
to set in, and, selling his share in a firm engaged mainly in the production of religious books, had invested the quite conspicuous
proceeds in three per cent Consols. By this act he had at once assumed an isolated position, no other Forsyte being content
with less than four per cent, for his money; and this isolation had slowly and surely undermined a spirit perhaps better than commonly endowed with caution.
He had become almost a myth – a kind of incarnation of security haunting the background of the Forsyte universe. He had never
committed the imprudence of marrying, or encumbering himself in any way with children.


James resumed, tapping the piece of china:

‘This isn’t real old Worcester. I s’pose Jolyon’s told you something about the young man. From all I can learn, he’s got no business, no income, and no connection worth speaking of; but then, I know nothing – nobody tells
me anything.’


Aunt Ann shook her head. Over her square-chinned, aquiline old face a trembling passed; the spidery fingers of her hands pressed
against each other and interlaced, as though she were subtly recharging her will.


The eldest by some years of all the Forsytes, she held a peculiar position amongst them. Opportunists and egotists one and
all – though not, indeed, more so than their neighbours – they quailed before her incorruptible figure, and, when opportunities
were too strong, what could they do but avoid her!


Twisting his long, thin legs, James went on:

‘Jolyon, he will have his own way. He’s got no children’ – and stopped, recollecting the continued existence of old Jolyon’s
son, young Jolyon, June’s father, who had made such a mess of it, and done for himself by deserting his wife and child and
running away with that foreign governess. ‘Well,’ he resumed hastily, ‘if he likes to do these things, I s’pose he can afford
to. Now, what’s he going to give her? I s’pose he’ll give her a thousand a year; he’s got nobody else to leave his money to.’


He stretched out his hand to meet that of a dapper, clean-shaven man, with hardly a hair on his head, a long, broken nose,
full lips, and cold grey eyes under rectangular brows.


‘Well, Nick,’ he muttered, ‘how are you?’

Nicholas Forsyte, with his bird-like rapidity and the look of a preternaturally sage schoolboy (he had made a large fortune,
quite legitimately, out of the companies of which he was a director), placed within that cold palm the tips of his still colder fingers and hastily withdrew them.


‘I’m bad,’ he said, pouting – ‘been bad all the week; don’t sleep at night. The doctor can’t tell why. He’s a clever fellow,
or I shouldn’t have him, but I get nothing out of him but bills.’


‘Doctors!’ said James, coming down sharp on his words: ‘I’ve had all the doctors in London for one or another of us. There’s no satisfaction to be got out of them; they’ll tell you anything. There’s Swithin, now. What good have they done him? There he is; he’s bigger than ever; he’s
enormous; they can’t get his weight down. Look at him!’


Swithin Forsyte, tall, square, and broad, with a chest like a pouter pigeon’s in its plumage of bright waistcoats, came strutting
towards them.


‘Er – how are you?’ he said in his dandified way, aspirating the ‘h’ strongly (this difficult letter was almost absolutely
safe in his keeping) – ‘how are you?’


Each brother wore an air of aggravation as he looked at the other two, knowing by experience that they would try to eclipse
his ailments.


‘We were just saying,’ said James, ‘that you don’t get any thinner.’


Swithin protruded his pale round eyes with the effort of hearing.

‘Thinner? I’m in good case,’ he said, leaning a little forward, ‘not one of your thread-papers like you!’

But, afraid of losing the expansion of his chest, he leaned back again