A review by nick_jenkins
The Man of Property by John Galsworthy
5.0
Galsworthy's reputation as a writer today is blanketed by the success of the television adaptations of the Saga, such that I think many people drastically underrate him. He is often one of the Nobel Prize winners on whom we look back with disbelief, although to be fair it seems that he was a compromise choice by the Swedish Academy. Be that as it may, he was undeniably one of the most prominent and widely admired novelists of his time, and enormously influential on a wide spectrum of young writers in many nations over the first third or so of the twentieth century, and not merely because they wished to copy his success.
Galsworthy is one of a true lost generation of novelists who are veiled from us by the bulk of modernism, along with Arnold Bennett (whom I'll be reading soon), H. G. Wells's non-SF work, W. Somerset Maugham, Romain Rolland, Lion Feuchtwanger, a host of Scandinavians, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Louis Bromfield, Booth Tarkington, and, to some extent, Thornton Wilder. They have yet to be 'recovered' as "middlebrow" writers like, say, Edna Ferber or Dorothy Canfield Fisher, yet are also clearly not "naturalists" of the Zola/Norris/Dreiser vein, far less self-conscious (or, rather, less intentionally crude) in their technique. Falling somewhere between these three categories, they are seldom taught or written about by scholars.
That seems to me increasingly strange as a matter of literary history For one thing, writers like Conrad, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, and Ford Madox Ford and even Henry James are now read almost solely in the context of modernism, which is not at all how they were read in the Teens and Twenties. The elevation of these writers to modernists or proto-modernists is a retrospective one, and obscures numerous crucial connections and contexts. For another thing, our whole history of the middlebrow--especially on the American side--seems to come almost out of nowhere, as if it was an untapped market niche on which clever operators suddenly pounced.
But even apart from literary history, I think Galsworthy's worth reading: the best comparison I can make is to Jean Renoir's film La Regle de jeu (with its wonderful line "Le plus terrible dans ce monde c'est que chacun à ses raisons"), but it is perhaps impossible not to think also of Brideshead Revisited (which again directs us to the fantastic success of television adaptations), although I like Galsworthy and detest Brideshead. The difference is that, at least in this novel, Galsworthy is not trying to win our approval for his characters and so is not bent and distorted into portraying things nobly which he cannot possibly feel are really noble. He can unfurl his wit without questioning its cost against his characters, less concerned that we forgive than that we understand. That is, I think, Renoir's spirit, and Sinclair Lewis's spirit, too, actually, and Thomas Mann, for that matter.
It is compelling reading especially today, I think, when so many of our problematic characters (particularly on television--the "difficult" men and women of HBO, Showtime, and AMC) are really begging us for our forgiveness, trying to convince us of the reality of their suffering. They require a genuine emotional investment, malgré nous, one might say, and Galsworthy and Lewis give us space to withhold that without consequence: take or leave our characters, you know they exist and will go on existing. That, I think, is rather powerful, both as a reading experience and as a social statement.
Galsworthy is one of a true lost generation of novelists who are veiled from us by the bulk of modernism, along with Arnold Bennett (whom I'll be reading soon), H. G. Wells's non-SF work, W. Somerset Maugham, Romain Rolland, Lion Feuchtwanger, a host of Scandinavians, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Louis Bromfield, Booth Tarkington, and, to some extent, Thornton Wilder. They have yet to be 'recovered' as "middlebrow" writers like, say, Edna Ferber or Dorothy Canfield Fisher, yet are also clearly not "naturalists" of the Zola/Norris/Dreiser vein, far less self-conscious (or, rather, less intentionally crude) in their technique. Falling somewhere between these three categories, they are seldom taught or written about by scholars.
That seems to me increasingly strange as a matter of literary history For one thing, writers like Conrad, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, and Ford Madox Ford and even Henry James are now read almost solely in the context of modernism, which is not at all how they were read in the Teens and Twenties. The elevation of these writers to modernists or proto-modernists is a retrospective one, and obscures numerous crucial connections and contexts. For another thing, our whole history of the middlebrow--especially on the American side--seems to come almost out of nowhere, as if it was an untapped market niche on which clever operators suddenly pounced.
But even apart from literary history, I think Galsworthy's worth reading: the best comparison I can make is to Jean Renoir's film La Regle de jeu (with its wonderful line "Le plus terrible dans ce monde c'est que chacun à ses raisons"), but it is perhaps impossible not to think also of Brideshead Revisited (which again directs us to the fantastic success of television adaptations), although I like Galsworthy and detest Brideshead. The difference is that, at least in this novel, Galsworthy is not trying to win our approval for his characters and so is not bent and distorted into portraying things nobly which he cannot possibly feel are really noble. He can unfurl his wit without questioning its cost against his characters, less concerned that we forgive than that we understand. That is, I think, Renoir's spirit, and Sinclair Lewis's spirit, too, actually, and Thomas Mann, for that matter.
It is compelling reading especially today, I think, when so many of our problematic characters (particularly on television--the "difficult" men and women of HBO, Showtime, and AMC) are really begging us for our forgiveness, trying to convince us of the reality of their suffering. They require a genuine emotional investment, malgré nous, one might say, and Galsworthy and Lewis give us space to withhold that without consequence: take or leave our characters, you know they exist and will go on existing. That, I think, is rather powerful, both as a reading experience and as a social statement.