Books
Death by infatuation
Simon Raven John Galsworthy: A Biography Catherine Dupre (Collins £5.95)
Let us be plain about one thing from the start: the principal character in this enjoyable new biography is not John Galsworthy himself but the succubus who was his wife. This said, let us first consider the victim as he was before he met his fate. In Catherine Dupre's early chapters she gives an agreeable picture of the young Galsworthy and his upbringing: the elder son of a City solicitor, he was an easy child' of ample circumstances, a popular fagmaster and Captain of Football at Harrow, an elegant, even dandified, undergraduate, arbiter of form both on and off the Turf, intelligent enough to take a creditable degree without much bother, untroubled, as it then appeared, by academic or other ambition. From Oxford he went, obeying his father's wish but not his own, to the bar, at which he can barely be said to have practised. Dangerously idle and restless by now but still an attractive figure, he was indulged by his father in prolonged periods of travel, to settle him down and soften him up for a steady upper-middle class career, or so it was hoped; but eventually, after meeting Joseph Conrad (then still a seaman) on a voyage home from Australia, he decided, almost overnight as far as I can make out, to become a writer. It was around this time, in the early 'nineties, that he fell in love with Ada, the wife of his cousin Major Arthur Galsworthy.
Ada was a bastard and her second Christian name was Nemesis, her mother's way of commenting on her unwanted arrival. Neither mother nor child, however, were in too bad a case. A house, humHe, but adequate, was found for them, money in reasonable quantities was supplied, and Ada was adopted by a doctor from Norwich who died when she was fourteen. Her first real problem was to get shot of her beady mother, who was to be financed, under the doctor's will, for only so long as she had Ada in care, and was therefore very anxious not to be got shot of. Ada managed the thing by marrying almost the first respectable man she caught sight of, the Major Galsworthy aforesaid, who unfortunately turned out to be a mean-minded martinet endowed with a sexual vigour for which Ada either could not or would not cater. Her second problem, then, was how to get shot of the Major, and this she solved by infatuating the Major's young cousin and insinuating herself along with him under the umbrella of his copious allowance. Ada, formerly her mother's Nemesis, was now to become John Galsworthy's: the Nemesis which the gods visit on all forms of wanton folly, in Galsworthy's case the cretinism of adoring a monster.
At this stage it is important to be as fair as possible to Ada, and we should first enquire what if any good marks can be allotted to her. On Mrs Dupre's showing, two points can be made in Ada's favour: first, she was decorative in person and winning in manner; and secondly, she kept Galsworthy up to the mark with his work, infusing him with a kind of ambition which was not naturally his.
Yes; but what kind of ambition? In so far as it is possible to penetrate beneath John Galsworthy's amiable and modest exterior, it would appear that his wish was now to live quietly and rurally, devoting himself to the novelist's art, through which he aspired to celebrate the best in human kind, to deprecate the worst in terms of pity rather than of despair or hate, and, in the sum of it, to give cause, if not indeed for joy, at least for hope. Ada's notions of the good life were very different. She was fond of travel—extensive and expensive travel; she.preferred London to the country, social bustle to rustic tranquillity, and living in hotels to doing the housekeeping herself; and from John's work she wanted him to achieve popular success and all the goodies that go with it, rather than the serious reputation for literary excellence and moral earnestness which was (if I read Mrs Dupre aright) what Galworthy would have wanted for himself.
So how was Ada to get her way ? While she was eager to charm and cosset her new protector, she was unprepared or unable to offer much (if anything) in the way of sexual gratification; since she could not threaten to withdraw what she had always withheld, this deprived her of one of a woman's most compelling means of persuasion. Or again, while she was tactfully disposed to encourage her lover in his literary labours, she was not equipped with the skill or knowledge to ensure that these took the form and achieved the ends which she desired. Since, therefore, both sexual enticement and intellectual manipulation were beyond her, what tactics could she adopt ? Well, one thing one has to hand to Ada: she found a brilliantly successful plan. as simple as it was nauseous. She merely played and preyed on Galsworthy's good nature and high sense of duty—his duty to herself as representative of the wronged, the deprived and the down-trodden.
Look, she said in effect, at poor, delicate little me, as sensitive in mind as I am fragile in body: wronged from the first moment of my illicit conception; deprived by the squalid circumstances of my birth; trodden down by a greedy wretch of a mother and then by a brutally lustful husband; insulted and crushed as a woman (by that husband's demands) and in consequence wrecked in health, ruined in nerve and shattered out of any capacity for sexual response. Look at all this, said Ada (in her demeanour rather than in words), and then deny me, if you dare, the travel and pleasure which I need to take my mind off the past, the comfortable hotels which I need to protect my bruised body and spirit against fears of the future, the leisured life and the high place in society which I need to make reparation to me for all the humiliation and exploitation which I have endured.
And Galsworthy, decent, diffident, Old Harrovian Galsworthy, made guilty by his private income and privileged way of life, bit the worm and swallowed the hook. Although (to judge from photographs reproduced in this book) Ada was about as fragile as an elephant and as sensitive as a crocodile, Galsworthy treated her as the broken and piteous creature she claimed to be. As soon as he could he married her; for ten years before they could be married and for nearly thirty between their wedding and his death he subordinated his work, his life, his hopes, his everything, to providing what Ada wanted in the way that she wanted it. In order to do this he had to be rich and grand, so rich and grand he became; he had to shine in the world of high-powered lectures and prestigious conferences, so shine he did, world-wide; he had to write (and write voluminously) where, when and as Ada's whims allowed him to—and was worn out, drained dry and stone dead at the age of sixty-six.
In one matter alone did Galsworthy ever defy Ada's wishes; he refused to accept the knighthood that would have made her Lady Galsworthy. She got her own back, years later, by cutting the ceremony at which he was invested with the Order of Merit, an honour that confers neither Order nor Merit on the wives of its recipients. I mention this incident because it is the kind that Mrs Dupre treats slily, sparely and yet most pointedly in her sly, spare, sometimes rather limp but for the most part very entertaining book.
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