Mr. Galsworthy Appraises the Post-War Generation

White Monkey*

Mr. Galsworthy Appraises the Post-War Generation

The Story. The book is about several Forsytes and several more of their connections. Chiefly, there is Fleur Mont, collector of people--celebrated people, very modern people. In her collection was Wilfrid Desert, poet, who became much too fond of her. Here was a problem. Fleur wanted him 'in the collection. On the other hand, she did not love him even as much as she loved her husband, Michael, Wilfrid's best friend. She tried for a long while to eat her cake and have it too. Wilfrid would deliver ultimata--demanding that she yield "now or never." Somehow, it never seemed to be either. He told Michael all about it. Relationships grew increasingly strained, until finally something snapped and Wilfrid left for Jericho. The older generation is chiefly represented by Michael's father, Sir Lawrence Mont, ninth baronet, and old Soames Forsyte, collector of pictures. Catastrophe overtook these gentlemen through the Providential Premium Reassurance Society, known to its intimates as the P. P. R. S. Manager Elderson of the Society brought ruin upon it and then decamped. So they retired from the board with dignity and little else. A sub-plot--in many respects the best thing in the book--tells of the tribulations of Tony Bicket and his girl-wife, Victorine, units of the inarticulate masses. Tony was caught "snooping" books from the publishing firm for which he worked and of which Michael was a member. He did it for the support of Victorine, who was suffering from pneumonia. Deprived of his job, Tony became a capitalist, investing all he had in rubber balloons, which he hawked about the streets. He and Victorine looked upon Central Australia as the only place where happiness might await them. On her recovery, the young wife, abetted by Michael Mont, went surreptitiously to work as an artist's model--not infrequently in the "altogether"--to earn passage money. Accidentally, old Bicket came upon her picture in an exhibition, and her secret was out. Followed recriminations, the man crazed with horror at her shamelessness. But a final confession of his own thefts for her brought them together again and set them on the way to Australia. Much to the delight of the older generation, Michael and Fleur finally permitted an eleventh baronet to come into the world, and the final happiness of all concerned was only qualified by the symbolic significance of a picture bequeathed by a dying Forsyte. It was a Chinese work, depicting a "large whitish sidelong monkey, holding the rind of a squeezed fruit in its outstretched paw." The picture is commented on as a perfect allegory. "Eat the fruits of life, scatter the rinds, and get copped doing it," says one of its observers; ... a monkey's eyes are the human tragedy incarnate."

The Significance. Mr. Galsworthy's method has always been to propound a question, wrap it up in a story, present both sides with equal eloquence, and then not answer it. In this case, the question has something to do with the relative values of the post-War generation and those that came before it. As fiction, this volume is not in its author's happiest vein. It is the latest and probably the least interesting addition to that formidable series, The Forsyte Saga. Mr. Galsworthy neither knows nor understands completely the society he is discussing. He is not himself a modern, and he is not in sympathy with modernism. Thus his study is lacking in force. The Author. John Galsworthy is an Englishman of the old school. He is smooth-shaven, rather tall, middleaged. His chief works of fiction are embodied in the ponderous Forsyte Saga, a series of novels, beginning with The Man of Property--published 1906 --dealing with the lives and problems of a typical British family. Among his most talked of plays are The Silver Box, Strife, Justice, The Pigeon, The Skin Game, Loyalties.

*THE WHITE MONKEY--John Galsworthy --Scribner ($2.00).