Joyce in Galsworthy

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 12, Summer 2001© 2001 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 CO [Charles Osborne], “John Galsworthy,” The Penguin Companion to Literature Vol. I: Britain and the Commonwealth, ed. David Daiches (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 201. 2 Arno Schmidt, “Brand’s Heath,” Nobodaddy’s Children, trans. John E. Woods (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 147. Joyce in Galsworthy FRIEDHELM RATHJEN 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 friedhelm rathjen 177 3 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 586. 4 John Galsworthy, Maid in Waiting (London: William Heinemann, 1931), 275–76. 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 on 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.” “Do you read coarse books?” “Oh! well, those are classics.” “They say there was a book—Achilles, or something; your Uncle bought it in Paris; and they took it away from him at Dover. Have you read that?” “No,” said Dinny. “I have,” said Clare. “From what your Uncle tells me, you oughtn’t to.” “Oh! one reads anything now, Auntie, it never makes any difference.” Lady Mont looked from one niece to the other. “Well,” she said, cryptically, “there’s the Bible. . . .”4 There can be no doubt that in this scene, the ladies confuse one classic hero with another: instead of Achilles, the reference is meant to be to Ulysses. Joyce’s novel, then, is included in the list of “coarse books”— but it seems that in Maid in Waiting, Ulysses has already begun its conversion...