Swan Song

Every year for the last three or four, my experience with Galsworthy has followed the same dynamic. Disappointment follows hard on the tail of the onset of reading. (“Oh, no. Soames again? When will we ever get to the next generation of Forsytes?”) Then the seed of a plot piques the interest, even if the first impetus launches nothing much more than a lot of talking and worrying. Then the characters’ critiques of modernism start in again, and it seems once more as if I’m in for just another ride on the same track.

Well, I won’t say that Galsworthy has surprised me this year with a new exit off of that well worn track. The narrative twist always has the same effect, and he never seems to fail to provide a new set of secondary characters that offer a twist on the twist, a critique of the critique. And yet the view on each new circuit around the track becomes clearer, more full of detail. And in the end, I see Galsworthy as even more ingenious than I had thought before. There. That’s how predictable Galsworthy is: he always convinces me that he’s smarter than he seemed before. Can’t he ever come up with a new trick?

In Swan Song, the sixth novel in The Forsyte Saga, the formula proceeds in this way. Jon Forsyte moves back to England with his pretty American wife, and the married Fleur Mont thinks she has to indulge her continued feelings for him. This young generation, groping along after the Great War, rejects the past because it is “boring,” so, really, how can marriage vows mean anything to them? Fleur’s father, Soames Forsyte, criticizes his daughter’s immorality (mostly to himself) but has nothing better to replace it with. He blames dishonesty and thievery and adultery on modernism, disliking its art, its literature (it has “no continuity”), and its dancing (the Charleston is “vacuous”), as if the previous generation or the Old Days were better. Yet he knows personally all too well the pains of infidelity. And he even discusses with an art dealer the talent Fragonard had for making adultery seem attractive. So clearly immorality isn’t just a new fad after all. Each generation of Forsytes blames the other for the ills of the world, and yet both clearly have deep moral problems.

Meanwhile, politician Michael Mont tries a new scheme: upgrading the slums without displacing the tenants (permanently anyway). Here’s where the plot offers a first-level critique: instead of looking to others in order to find blame, just try to make the world better. But the humanitarian projects in the Forsytes’ world always fall apart because they depend on committees who can only be altruistic in the most mercenary ways.

So then comes the critique of the critique: Jon asks help of his uncle Hilary. This humble cleric and his wife truly breathe the life of heaven; they are in this world but not of it. Jon’s only way of understanding their godliness is to say that they are good without being boring. Through them Galsworthy offers his critique of modern society, Edwardian society, Victorian society, the selfishly charitable, and any other group living according to merely human values.

Yeah. Same old thing. Galsworthy is so boring. And I can’t wait for more!