Novel Readings

In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Forsyte Saga, Geoffrey Harvey explains that we owe the saga in its completed form to Galsworthy’s goddaughter, Dorothy Ivens. The Man of Property had been published in 1906 but Galsworthy’s attention had moved on. Then in 1918, he published Indian Summer of a Forsyte as part of a volume of stories; when Dorothy read it, she urged the author to “give us more Forsytes!” In Chancery followed, in 1920, then To Let in 1921.

Now I understand not just Dorothy’s enthusiasm but its timing. The Man of Property is very good, but it’s a bit cold; Galsworthy’s intermittently beautiful writing isn’t quite enough to compensate for the more ruthless aspects of life among the Forsytes. I ended it interested but not emotionally invested in anyone except old Jolyon. Even Irene, whose situation ought to be the most touching, is at too much of a distance to sympathize with except in the abstract.

Indian Summer of a Forsyte turns out to be the perfect antidote to this faint chilliness of affect. For one thing, the Forsyte in question is old Jolyon himself: the entire story is about him, and from his perspective. “There was in him that which transcended Forsytism,” the narrator remarks, and that quality is what the story delicately explores. It is probably most simply expressed as love of beauty, but as Jolyon feels and the story shows, it would be wrong to reduce it to an aesthetic response: it leads to love, and to sympathy, and (shades of Forster again) to a desire to connect and belong.

It’s Irene who precipitates the action again in Indian Summer, this time by appearing at the country house built by her lover Bosinney for her husband Soames, and now owned by Jolyon. He’s still a lonely old fellow, and now he’s also pressingly aware that his time is running out, which fills him with melancholy, and a little resentment:

The thought that some day–perhaps not ten years hence, perhaps not five–all this world would be taken from him, before he had exhausted his powers of loving it, seemed to him in the nature of an injustice, brooding over his horizon.

His chance encounter with Irene brings new interest to his life: she is beautiful, she has suffered, she is kind to him, she plays Chopin. Separated from Soames (who had never, Jolyon reflects with grim satisfaction, “been able to lay hands on her again”), Irene now lives on her own, giving music lessons and helping “women who have come to grief”–“the Magdalenes of London,” as Jolyon calls them.

The relationship between these two forlorn souls is delicately drawn. It’s unusual but not improper: Jolyon wants nothing more than to be in Irene’s company, and she seems to understand and to take comfort herself in sharing what remains of the old man’s time, in making this interlude more beautiful for him:

And so a month went by–a month of summer in the fields, and in his heart, with summer’s heat and the fatigue thereof. . . . There was such delicious freedom . . . about those weeks of lovely weather, and this new companionship with one who demanded nothing, and remained always a little unknown, retaining the fascination of mystery. It was like a draught of wine to him who has been drinking water so long that he has almost forgotten the stir wine brings to his blood, the narcotic to his brain. The flowers were coloured brighter, scents and music and the sunlight had a living value–were no longer mere reminders of past enjoyment.

These pleasures are all temporary, however, as the title reminds us: even the best of times still passes away. Alone again, Jolyon wonders if Irene was ever even there, “or was she but the emanation of all the beauty he had loved and must leave so soon?” The end of the story is inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less poignant. Galsworthy handles it so beautifully, too, without melodrama or overt sentimentality, simply following Jolyon as he fades out into the waning beauty around him: “Summer–summer! So went the hum.”