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by Marilyn Green Faulkner

  “Could a man own anything prettier than this dining table, with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petaled roses, the ruby colored glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among the Forsytes, who, competitive, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.” (70)

  Though Soames is a man of impeccable breeding, scrupulous manners and perfect hygiene, Galsworthy describes him in bestial terms, brilliantly revealing his brooding undercurrent of violence. Using such eerie verbs as “plucking” and “sniffing,” Galsworthy exposes the soul of a man who must possess what he admires, even if it destroys, and foreshadows the terrible moment when Soames, in the height of his frustration, forces himself sexually upon his wife and earns her undying hatred. Galsworthy was well aware that such scenes were not uncommon among married people of his day, and his revelation of such an ugly truth reveals as much about Galsworthy’s courage as it does about the society he chronicles.

  There is a curious turn in the last two installments of the narrative that only adds to the work’s greatness, in my opinion, as the villainous Soames becomes a more sympathetic character. In the fifteen-year gap between the writing of the first novella and the last, Galsworthy grew older, wiser and, like many of us, less critical of his own social group. Though he continues to indict the Forstyes for their skewed priorities, he presents them in a more human and vulnerable light as time marches forward and their sins are visited upon their children and grandchildren.

  The rights of women, the double standard of justice as applied to the rich and the poor, the evils of the First World War and the class confrontation between master and laborer all found a place in Galsworthy’s fiction. His shrewd observation of extended families and their impact on each other is relevant in any age.

  Quotations taken from The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy. Oxford University Press, London. 1999.

  Talk About It

  It is said that money can’t buy happiness, but it can certainly purchase whatever comes second! The Forsyte’s are rich. Is money an essential part of their problems?

  About the Author: John Galsworthy

  Born in 1867 to upper-class British parents, John Galsworthy was raised in luxury, attended the finest schools, studied law, and was in due course called to the bar. Yet after an unlucky love affair, he became restless and decided to travel instead. A chance meeting with Joseph Conrad on a voyage to the South Sea inspired him to write. After several unsuccessful attempts, he found his voice with The Man of Property, a novel based on his own life experiences. This epic story of the large, prosperous Forsyte family grew to fill three novels, written from 1906 to 1921. In 1932, Forsyte was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, “for his distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga.”

  The trilogy was a glaring criticism of Galsworthy’s own social class; the author based the character of Soames Forsyte on his cousin, whose wife left him and later married Galsworthy. The novel’s pivotal scene, where Soames forces himself on his wife and earns her undying hatred, was actually based on an event in his wife’s first marriage. Over fifteen years and the First World War elapsed between the first and second novels, and Galsworthy’s own maturation process is evident in his more sympathetic approach to the character of Soames as the novels progress.

  Later authors such as Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence attacked Galsworthy for embracing the very values he criticized in his books. Like Dickens, Austen, and Eliot, Galsworthy satirized his own society without rejecting it. Yet, he lent his prodigious talent to many causes, bringing problems of social injustice to light. In fact, his play, Justice, led Winston Churchill to advance prison reform in England.

  Galsworthy died from a brain tumor in 1933, six weeks after being awarded the Nobel Prize.

  Sources:

  Cooper, Robert M. The Literary Guide & Companion to Southern England. Ohio University Press, 1998. pp. 323-324.

  Wikipedia

  Family, Faith and Innocence:

  How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn

  “I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley.” (1)

  Granted, I am one of those people who blubber easily, but I cannot read these opening words of Richard Llewellyn’s beautiful novel without tearing up, for bound up in this sentence (as in a cloth) are all the components that make this book a sweet and memorable read. There are the homely details of family life; a housewife’s head scarf, a best suit, a pair of extra socks. There is the hint of all of the work that goes into the raising of a large family (in this case, one with nine children) and the hair of the gentle Mrs. Morgan going slowly white under that blue cloth. Then, there is the valley, the symbol of a world of innocence and faith that Huw Morgan loves and lives to see destroyed by the physical and spiritual pollutions all around him. This story of a Welsh coal mining family is unapologetically sentimental, yet is balanced by an unflinching realism that rings true to life.

  Synopsis

  How Green Was My Valley is set sometime around the turn of the century, and tells the story of the Morgans, a poor but respectable mining family of the South Wales valleys. The story is told through the eyes of the youngest son, Huw Morgan. Huw’s academic ability sets him apart from his elder brothers and enables him to consider a future away from the mines. All five brothers and his father are miners, and after the eldest brother, Ivor, is killed in an industrial accident, Huw moves in with his sister-in-law, Bronwen, with whom he has always been secretly in love. Later, Huw’s father is also killed in the mine. One of Huw’s three sisters, Angharad, makes an unhappy marriage to a wealthy mine owner and never overcomes her clandestine relationship with the local minister. After everyone Huw has known either dies or moves away, he decides to leave as well, and tells us the story of his life just before he leaves his childhood home, which is about to be swallowed up by the slag heap of the mine, symbol for the refuse of a troubled society.

  What Makes it Great?

  The Dictionary of Literary Biography comments on Llewellyn’s simple, heartfelt style, and on the unusual status that he has in the modern literary community:

  “Richard Llewellyn is one of the more prolific authors of the twentieth century, with a total of twenty-three novels written in a little less than forty years, together with two stage plays and contributions to diverse film scripts, all produced in a crowded and varied life. Yet he stands apart from other novelists of his period, belonging to no movement or literary tradition and, indeed, professing never to read modern novels. As a consequence of this independence, his work has received little or no academic attention as yet, while newspaper and magazine reviewers find difficulty in assessing it. Llewellyn appears to have influenced few writers of any significance in the English language. However, he continues to command a large, worldwide popular audience, and sales of his novels remain high.

  “Part of Llewellyn’s significance is due to his unique stance. His work is a personal statement made in a singular style, refreshingly uninhibited by the pursuit or expansion of modern philosophies, modes of thinking, and fashionable ideas.” (Dictionary of Literary Biography)

  An example of this strange and wonderful style is Huw’s description of his father’s death in the mines. Long before it became fashionable to “think green” Llewellyn invites us to view the earth as a living creature, reaching up and taking the lives of men that threaten her existence. As his father gasps under the crushing weight of the rocks and earth after a cave-in, Huw struggles to find a way to help him breathe easier. Llewellyn uses a brilliant personification of the earth as a wounded, angry mother and all the creatures that live on her su
rface as a blanket, the weight of which is smothering his father:

  “But the earth bore down in mightiness, and above the Earth, I thought of houses sitting in quiet under the sun, and men roaming the streets to lose voice, breath and blood, and children dancing in play, and women cleaning house, and good smells in our kitchen, all of them adding more to my father’s counter-pane.

  Did You Know?

  The scene in which Huw is beat by the schoolmaster for speaking Welsh refers to policies that tried to force everyone in the United Kingdom to speak English. In the later 19th century virtually all teaching in the schools of Wales was in English, even in areas where the pupils barely understood it. Government policy fostered a program called “Welsh Not.” A board with the letters WN cut into it was hung around the neck of any child heard to speak Welsh, and the last child wearing the sign each day was punished. Through the efforts of Welsh reformers this policy was changed in the early 20th century.

  There is patience in the Earth to allow us to go into her, and dig, and hurt with tunnels and shafts and if we put back the flesh we have weakened she is content to let us bleed her. But when we take and leave her weak where we have taken, she has a soreness and an anger that we should be so cruel to her and so thoughtless of her comfort. So she waits for us, and finding us, bears down and bearing down, makes us a part of her, flesh of her flesh, with our clay in place of the clay we thoughtlessly have shoveled away.” (443)

  This simple, organic approach to the Earth feels more akin to Eastern or First-nation philosophy than the musings of a Welsh Protestant. Llewellyn’s ability to see into the universal heart of man makes his characters somehow modern and transcends the time frame of the narrative. The timeless perspective, and the unique manner of his expression, makes it great.

  A Song of the Heart

  The Welsh are a deep and ancient people, with an incomprehensible language and a natural flair for poetry and song. If you have been to Wales you have heard the Welsh sing, and you never forget it. Every little town has its choirs and bands. Music plays an important role in the daily life of the Morgan family. Though they spend their days in the belly of the mine, they soar, through song and language, in their leisure hours, and Llewellyn captures this joy.

  Huw is a bright boy whose only struggle in school is against the bullying by other boys who are threatened by his intelligence, and the prejudice of his schoolmasters toward the Welsh. In Victorian times there was a concerted effort to stamp out the Welsh language, and children were punished for speaking their native language in school. Huw’s blind rage at the schoolmaster’s cruel persecution causes his final expulsion from the school and his rejection of the intellectual life it promised. The terrible sadism rampant in the school system of that day is expressed most eloquently in the description of the schoolmaster’s face after he has beaten Huw with such violence that he has broken the stick:

  “I looked at him as I slipped from Mervyn Phillip’s’ back, and found him pale, wet about the forehead, with a blueness about the mouth, and a shifting of muscles pulling one side of his face, and a pinkness in his eyes, and trembling in the hands that he tried to have quiet by linking his fingers. His eyes stared hard at me, moving over my face, but I kept my eyes on his. His tongue put wet about his mouth and his breath pulled him up short as though reins had been jerked, and then I turned away from him and got my legs to bring me to my seat.” (207)

  As Huw Morgan waits for the slagheap to swallow his childhood home, he remembers a world untouched by the complexities of modern life. No one locked a door; there were no policemen or jails in the community. Neighbors monitored each other, sometimes severely, and the church was the center of social and spiritual life. Women kept the house and did the dishes, and men worked in the mines. Children spoke when they were spoken to and were beaten for disobedience. For the most part, they were happy, yet the slow influence of civilization, both good and bad, crept inexorably in just as the slag from the mines crept down the hill toward their homes. Unions, immorality, theaters, education and technology combined to destroy their innocent way of life forever.

  How Green Was My Valley is an unabashedly sentimental story, and for that it has been discounted by academics as inferior. These cynical, sterner critics are missing something I think. The older I get the more I believe that a little sentimentality—a good cry for that which has been lost in life—can be very healing for the soul, and this cathartic experience is at the heart of How Green Was My Valley. I’m usually put off by a book that I suspect is trying to make me cry, but this novel does not strike me that way. It’s sentiment is honest and true.

  Huw is a strange character, hot-tempered and passionate, yet unable to marry or settle on one woman; fiercely intelligent, yet stubborn and unwilling to use his mind to achieve something above the level of the mine. His long illness as a child gives him the perspective of the outsider, and he sees the lives of his family with a level of objectivity unavailable to the rest of the group. As the novel draws to a close he reflects that, though much has been lost, nothing that we hold in our hearts is ever really gone. “There is no fence or hedge around time that is gone,” he says. “You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.” His beautiful retelling of a special childhood may take you back to an innocent time of your own, gone, but never lost.

  (Quotations taken from How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn. Dell Publishing Co. New York, 1988.)

  Talk About It

  How can family members find unity, or should they even try when they are so different? This large family is made up of such diverse characters, which eventually grow apart. How have you maintained unity in your family while appreciating the diversity therein?

  About the Author: Richard Llewellyn

  Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd was born in 1906 in Hendon, North London. His English birthplace contradicts Llewellyn’s own lifelong claim he was born in St. David’s, Wales, though he was of Welsh blood and Welsh themes pervade his writings. At age sixteen, he entered the workforce as a dishwasher in a London hotel. During this time he also worked in the motion picture industry. In 1924, Llewellyn joined the British army and served six years in India and Hong Kong.

  After leaving the service he worked a succession of jobs, including a defining period of time as a coal miner in South Wales. Llewellyn’s experience in the mining communities proved to be inspiration for his first novel. He worked on this project for twelve years before taking leave from a screenwriting job in Hollywood to complete the manuscript for How Green Was My Valley. Published to international acclaim in 1939, the novel was honored in the United States with the National Book Award. In 1941, the book was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Walter Pidgeon and Maureen O’Hara.

  Though he penned many more novels, including three sequels to this first work, nothing Llewellyn wrote approached the success of his earliest book. He stood apart from other novelists of his time, taking part in no movement or literary tradition, and professing never to read modern novels. During his life, he worked as a journalist, covering the Nuremburg Trials, and continued as a screenwriter for Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM. (He wrote the screenplay for my favorite John Wayne movie, The Quiet Man.) A Welsh national, Llewellyn lived in several countries and married twice. He died in Dublin in 1983.

  “Richard Llewellyn.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 28 Sep. 2009

  Family First: Take it Personally

  At the age of nineteen I read Anna Karenina for the first time and felt (as Tolstoy intended me to feel) that I had lived Anna’s life with her, every step of the way. I could no longer think of myself as a person who would never step onto those tracks, for I had been there with her. I could see and feel what she should have done, and yet empathize with her inability to do it. Tolstoy was teaching me conscience and compassion at the same time. For a moment, at nineteen, I was lifted beyond my years and my limited understanding into a greater level of wisdom. That
new depth of insight was then available to me as my own life unfolded. Now, thirty-five years later, I have recently reread Anna Karenina, and find that I can combine its insights and beauties with experiences and thoughts from over three decades of living since my last encounter with the novel, adding new levels of enrichment to the experience.

  Not everyone has had the same experience! One member of the Best Books Club recalled reading Anna Karenina: “I was fed up with Anna at the end and was ready to push her under the train if she didn’t jump! But, I was eighteen, and male.” Certainly different characters will reach out to different individuals. Will Anna reach out and draw you in as she did me? It remains to be seen. To me the purpose of a great book is not to show us what terrible things happen to people as a result of their mistakes, though many do that. It is, instead, to help us enter the mind and heart of another person and truly see how it feels experience those consequences without actually having to live through them. Rather than a list of life lessons and moral platitudes, the act of knowing another person—sharing that perfect knowledge that is impossible in real life—sheds a new light on our own life-narratives, and is the hallmark of greatness in a work of fiction. All three of the books in this chapter deal with the deep divisions that can occur in families. So, here goes the ice-axe question: Do you have an enemy in your family circle? How did this happen? Can the situation be remedied, or is the relationship broken beyond repair? Is it your fault?