"Purview" Has Been Ruined for Me

The other day, I was having a perfectly pleasant discussion with someone, and the question of whose "purview" a certain task fell within was mooted. I immediately flashed on "In the Loop" and had to restrain giggles:



(Have you noticed that this is an epic battle between Doctor Who and Irene Forsyte (Gina McKee)?)

On Forsyte Changes

So, after viewing the entire 1967 adaptation, I decided to re-engage with the 2002-2003 adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, the first season of which I had not liked when I first saw it. Upon re-viewing, the reasons for my half-remembered distaste became clear: The series tilts the balance of the equities stiffly against Soames, who begins as an obsessive and degenerates over the first season to a Quilp-like grotesque. Seriously, Damian Lewis plays the part of the older Soames with a sneering, jerky mien, mouth twisted into a snarl, voice constricted. His virtues do not evolve as in Galsworthy's novels--his art collection is solely about possession. In the early episodes, he is given a non-Galsworthian role as a trustee for Young Jolyon which enables Soames to smugly and moralistically deny his cousin the opportunity to buy even a modest home. Soames keeps Young Jolyon in poverty, off-loading some of the blame from Old Jolyon. (Soames likewise, in this version, keeps Winifred and her rakish, gambling husband poor, thus off-loading some responsibility for that marriage's failure onto Soames--the default position of this adaptation.)

Irene, by contrast, is considerably warmed up from Galsworthy's remote, rather abstract heroine whose thoughts and should we are never afforded access to. Gina McKee is given far more to work with than was her predecessor, Nyree Dawn Porter, who played pretty much Galsworthy's Irene; McKee does a smashing job (as does Lewis, by the way), but she's playing a very different woman.

In the second season, The Forsyte Saga: To Let, this continues for much of the run. Monty Dartie, the extremely unsatisfactory husband to Winifred, is sentimentalized further, being allowed a magnificent last run of luck, in which he wins enough money to leave Winifred an income after he is killed in accident due to a panicky horse in a car in which he is not even driving. His last words are about wanting to take Winifred away--a far cry from Galsworthy's unredeemed, but not entirely lacking in charm, sot, who dies under mysterious circumstances, in Paris, "which no one had quite known what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide."

Soames goes down to plead for Fleur as in the novel, but (unlike in the novel), corners Irene, and almost begins making advances on her again. It's a betrayal of Soames's one virtue: his unselfish love of Fleur, and leads to Jon slamming him up against the wall, seeing his mother physically menaced by the man who raped her (albeit with social and legal sanction). At a stroke, all of Soames's slow, and hesitant growth in the novels, is denied, and he remains a caricature, despite Lewis's best work. Likewise, Fleur's subsequent one cruel explosion at Soames becomes an extended estrangement. She is cruel to him because, as Soames's wife Annette observes, she can be.

Yet the second series complicates the moral absolutes of the first series. Early on, when Jolyon confronts Soames about the inappropriateness of Fleur and Jon coming together, Lewis has a field day stripping the hypocrisy of Graves's exponent of free love (when it suited him) falling back on the exact possessiveness that Jolyon had despised in Soames. Graves plays Jolyon as stricken by this accusation against which he cannot defend himself. Soames wins that round, fairly.

And Soames's relationship with Annette has some complexity, too. After her lover Profond ditches her, he hesitantly, shyly, offers comfort, which she recognizes and is grateful for. She runs back to Profond later, but when Soames, desperate for the well-being of the daughter who has rejected him, calls for her help, she returns, and helps not just Fleur but Soames as well. He pays Annette a simple, shy tribute, thanking her with patent sincerity.

Jon and Irene are cruel, too--she plays piano to drown out Fleur's despairing cries at having been rejected by the man who abandoned her minutes after taking her virginity; Jon no longer fully loves her (thanks to the doubt his mother has sown) but does not want her to marry someone else--he is possessive in the most Forystean way. Soames wanted Irene, but wanted her to be happy with him; Jon wants Fleur to suffer with him, without alleviating her suffering.

And then the series does something even more startling in its last hour. Soames, still receiving the cold shoulder from Fleur as they get ready to depart for her wedding to Michael Mont, finally snaps. He tells her that "It's far better to be with someone who loves you more than you love them. There's nothing worse than always trying to please someone; hoping they'll look at you, smile at you…" And then, in his concern for her, speaks the hitherto unspeakable truth:

Fleur Forsyte:I don't want to hear about her!
Soames Forsyte: I'll tell you anyway, shall I? The great sin your father committed? Then you can write me off altogether.
Fleur Forsyte: I said, I don't want to hear!
Soames Forsyte: I married her because I loved her! Very simple. It's why Michael's marrying you. She abused my trust; she denied me my rights as a husband. She ignored me. She flaunted her lover in my face. She locked me out of her life, her body...
Fleur Forsyte: Please!
Soames Forsyte: One night, her door was open, and she was lying there, looking very beautiful. She is very beautiful, don't you think? I whispered her name, but she was asleep.
Fleur Forsyte: Stop!
Soames Forsyte: I must have been mad. I think I was; Mad for her. So I took her, forcibly... as punishment! And now when I see her, whenever she looks at me, I know she's thinking only of that.
[breaks down in tears]

At this point, Fleur empathizes with her father's years of agony, and cannot withhold forgiveness; she knows only too well what he has felt, and what drove him t uncharacteristic behavior.

But the story is not yet over. Father and daughter reconciled, Fleur off on her honeymoon, Soames is tasked by her with destroying a copy of a Degas painting that looks like her. (In Galsworthy, the painting is a Goya, but Emma Griffiths Malin really isn't a Goya type, I guess--although in the novels, this painting is the one that topples toward Fleur, leading the 72 year old Soames to push her out of the way, and be fatally injured by it--so the adaptation goes decidedly AU here.)

Rather than destroying or discarding or selling it, he takes one last trip to Robin Hill. Irene answers the door, expecting a potential buyer or renter for the house. Soames offers Irene the painting, as a gift for Jon, and she asks him in. They speak a little bit. Irene, who is appalled at what has befallen their respective children due to the older generation's possessiveness, asks if they had really hurt their children. Soames, unwilling to betray Fleur's broken heart, asserts quietly that Fleur is happily married, and that grandchildren are expected. Irene smiles, understanding his loyalty and finding his reserve a little comic under the circumstances. Soames, leaving the painting, says goodbye--"I don't expect we shall ever meet again," he says, with which she agrees, and he then says that he will leave her to her packing.

Soames is almost out of the door, when Irene calls his name. She offers her hand--having rejected hers at their last meeting, before his old obsessiveness flared up--and he, awkwardly, humbly removes his glove, as a gentleman should, and takes her hand for a moment. The moment ends, and Soames leaves. Parfitt, Irene's butler comes in and asks what the caller had wanted. Irene smiles, a little wonderstruck. "He didn't want anything," she says, a bit amazed.

We join Soames, as he walks away from Robin Hill. His sneer is gone, his taut face relaxed; he looks normal, healed. Irene and Soames have communicated--his compassion for her son, who has lost his own love, and evoked Soames's inarticulate, preposterous offer of the painting as a comfort to Jon, has in turn evoked her forgiveness. The Man of Property's spontaneous act of unselfishness, however clumsy, has freed Irene to forgive him, and give him silent absolution.

They are, at long last, at peace.

***

It isn't Galsworthy's ending--in fact, Soames's having unloaded the picture that later is supposed to kill him rather negates Galsworthy's ending--but there's something to it. It has a form, and a kind of fittingness of its own. That's the thing with adaptations; once you start playing with them, there's no knowing where they will lead you--here, far from the original, and yet to a stopping point that honors the characters as they have come to life in the hands of new writers, new actors. Not Galsworthy's, but with a new perspective and life of their own.

Forsyte Phonetics, Philology, and Fate

I have always been bemused by the fact that the received pronunciation of the first name of Irene Heron Forsyte, the heroine of John Galsworthy's masterful trilogy, The Forsyte Saga as "I-reen-ee," rather than the more common pronunciation, "I-reen."

In both the 1967 and 2002 adaptation, the less common is employed:



(By the way, that truncated clip, the poor quality, and the cheesy trailer don't do justice to a masterful adaptation, with great performances.)

and:



(Yeah, I know. But it was this or watch through a whole episode on Hulu--after subscribing--to hear someone say her name.)

Although either pronunciation is correct, the consistent use of the more rare pronunciation (other than in the botched 1949 film adaptation That Forsyte Woman), raises the question why.

I have a hunch.

Galsworthy's novels are generally viewed as all-of-a-piece, but in fact the difference between The Saga and its sequel, A Modern Comedy, is in its treatment of Soames, Irene's first husband, who is the anti-hero--almost the villain of the earliest novel. The Man of Property but who is, by the time of Swan Song, pretty well redeemed, if not exactly warms and fuzzy. The Man of Property was originally intended to be a one-off, and its starker tone is notable in comparison to the other volumes.

One of the aspects of the books that has baffled generations of readers is his risky decision to have Irene viewed solely through the outside, to be seen only through the perceptions of others, as he writes in the preface to the collected Saga: "The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world."

This makes it impossible for us to know her the way we know any of the other characters. I can't help but wonder if this is due to the fact that John Galsworthy played the part of Young Jolyon in his own life, marrying his cousin's wife, Ada Nemesis (!) Pearson after an affair with her--but was loathe to depict his much loved wife in print more clearly than he absolutely had to, and tried to disguise her in the tale.

Nemesis, of course, is the Greek goddess who "appears chiefly as the avenger of crime and the punisher of hubris, and as such is akin to Atë and the Erinyes." (Yes, its Wikipedia, but it's also correct.) The Erinyes were "three netherworld goddesses who avenged crimes against the natural order. They were particularly concerned with homicide, unfilial conduct, crimes against the gods, and perjury. A victim seeking justice could call down the curse of the Erinys upon the criminal." The Erinyes sound fairly close to the name "Irene" yes?

Nemesis makes her appearance in the Forsyte Saga, and, as I pointed out last week, she is dangerous--to Old Jolyon, to Philip Bossiney, and certainly to Soames, whose death is traceable, ultimately, to the rejection of his daughter's love by her son Jon, because of Irene's and her dying husband, Young Jolyon, opposition to the marriage.

Nemesis is in the warp and woof of the Forsyte Saga and, cloaked as the Erinyes, or, rather, Irene, indirectly, precipitates the tragic end of the Modern Comedy.

And Love Itself Have Rest: Indian Summer of a Forsyte

In his Indian Summer of a Forsyte, John Galsworthy returned to the story he had laid down, he thought, forever--that of Irene Forsyte, née Heron, fugitive wife of Soames, who finds a refuge from her drab--but free!--life in an unexpected place--at Robin Hill, the house that Philip Bossiney, the man who became her lover, designed for her husband.

Robin Hill has passed out of Soames's possession into that of his uncle "Old Jolyon," most philosophical of the old Forsytes, and head of the family. Jolyon's philosophy, and his compassion are touched by Irene's loneliness, and her beauty and charm stir him to go beyond the realm of safety and convention, as he realized on waking up from a cat-nap:

That night in his study he had just finished his cigar and was dozing off, when he heard the rustle of a gown, and was conscious of a scent of violets. Opening his eyes he saw her, dressed in grey, standing by the fireplace, holding out her arms. The odd thing was that, though those arms seemed to hold nothing, they were curved as if round someone's neck, and her own neck was bent back, her lips open, her eyes closed. She vanished at once, and there were the mantelpiece and his bronzes. But those bronzes and the mantelpiece had not been there when she was, only the fireplace and the wall! Shaken and troubled, he got up. 'I must take medicine,' he thought; 'I can't be well.' His heart beat too fast, he had an asthmatic feeling in the chest; and going to the window, he opened it to get some air. A dog was barking far away, one of the dogs at Gage's farm no doubt, beyond the coppice. A beautiful still night, but dark. 'I dropped off,' he mused, 'that's it! And yet I'll swear my eyes were open!' A sound like a sigh seemed to answer.
"What's that?" he said sharply, "who's there?"
Putting his hand to his side to still the beating of his heart, he stepped out on the terrace. Something soft scurried by in the dark. "Shoo!" It was that great grey cat. 'Young Bosinney was like a great cat!' he thought. 'It was him in there, that she—that she was—He's got her still!' He walked to the edge of the terrace, and looked down into the darkness; he could just see the powdering of the daisies on the unmown lawn. Here to-day and gone to-morrow! And there came the moon, who saw all, young and old, alive and dead, and didn't care a dump! His own turn soon. For a single day of youth he would give what was left! And he turned again towards the house. He could see the windows of the night nursery up there. His little sweet would be asleep. 'Hope that dog won't wake her!' he thought. 'What is it makes us love, and makes us die! I must go to bed.'
And across the terrace stones, growing grey in the moonlight, he passed back within.
How should an old man live his days if not in dreaming of his well-spent past? In that, at all events, there is no agitating warmth, only pale winter sunshine. The shell can withstand the gentle beating of the dynamos of memory. The present he should distrust; the future shun. From beneath thick shade he should watch the sunlight creeping at his toes. If there be sun of summer, let him not go out into it, mistaking it for the Indian-summer sun! Thus peradventure he shall decline softly, slowly, imperceptibly, until impatient Nature clutches his wind-pipe and he gasps away to death some early morning before the world is aired, and they put on his tombstone: 'In the fulness of years!' yea! If he preserve his principles in perfect order, a Forsyte may live on long after he is dead.
Old Jolyon was conscious of all this, and yet there was in him that which transcended Forsyteism. For it is written that a Forsyte shall not love beauty more than reason; nor his own way more than his own health. And something beat within him in these days that with each throb fretted at the thinning shell. His sagacity knew this, but it knew too that he could not stop that beating, nor would if he could. And yet, if you had told him he was living on his capital, he would have stared you down. No, no; a man did not live on his capital; it was not done! The shibboleths of the past are ever more real than the actualities of the present. And he, to whom living on one's capital had always been anathema, could not have borne to have applied so gross a phrase to his own case. Pleasure is healthful; beauty good to see; to live again in the youth of the young—and what else on earth was he doing!

There is something dangerous in beauty, in Galsworthy. Irene cares for Uncle Jolyon, and is conscious that she has something to give him, just as he shows kindness toward her. But, alone of the old Forsytes--except for his rattletrap brother Swithin--Jolyon chooses the riskier path.

And what is the risk? Hastening the day of which Byron warns:

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

In a quiet way, Old Jolyon rejects Forsyteism in his last days. He chooses transcendence, spontaneity, and love. It hastens his death--and yet enriches his life

Glencora and Hermione?

Via The Trollope Jupiter, an interesting article from the eminent scholar John Sutherland, writing in The Financial Times. He argues that the Barsetshire and Palliser novels are each flawed in the same way--"the two most lovable characters choose bad marriages," pointing to Lily Dale's rejection of Johnny Eames and that, in the Palliser novels, "Glencora – the spunkiest of Trollope’s ladies – does not marry the beautiful Burgo Fitzgerald and gives herself away to Plantagenet Palliser, whose true love, cynics might say, is a parliamentary bill for decimal coinage." (His statement that "the novelist to whom JK Rowling has always seemed to me closest is Anthony Trollope" is surprising, but not insupportable.)

Now, let me just disagree, most strongly here, with Professor Sutherland on this--not with his history, but rather with his implicit endorsement of an alt-Trollope universe in which Lily marries Johnny Eames, or Glencora runs off with Burgo, drawn from his explicit endorsement of future Harry Potter novels which bring Harry and Hermione together.

Trollope's love of his characters is well-known; their reality to him, as well, is well documented in his Autobiography. The fact that they made questionable decisions, or were confronted with bad situations in which no good decision was possible, is part of his genius. Let me explain. Forced marriages happened in the Nineteenth Century; the use of pressure to compel a woman to marry the suitor chosen by her family was a real historical event, which Trollope, despite his anti-feminist ideology, understood as a horror (see Lucinda Roanoke; I've often thought that Trollope's sympathy for his women characters, so in conflict with his more conventional ideas, warrants a feminist analysis). Glencora's and Plantagenet's union is one that is born in a violation of her autonomy.

And yet--

Trollope doesn't leave us there. It's rather like Soames Forsyte, who violates his wife Irene even more brutally, thinking that he is doing the right thing in "asserting his rights." Palliser is uneasy with this wife who does not love him, whose charm slowly works on him; he, like Soames, is keenly aware that something is dreadfully wrong. Unlike Forsyte, the glum, taciturn, politico's honor and his ethics lead him to do something extraordinary: He defers to his wife. He carves out a space for her autonomy, and places her concerns above his, damaging his political career, even rescuing Burgo from his gambling debts. Palliser recognizes that he owes Burgo something, places Glencora's interests above his own.

And yet there is no happy ending. The couple grow closer and closer but when Glencora dies, her promotion of her daughter's romance with an "unsuitable" young man is felt by Palliser as a rejection of their years together, as an assertion that she should have stuck to her guns and run off with Burgo. And, in one sense, it is.

And yet--

Glencora did come to love Plantagenet--their relationship was real, even when they squabbled. It's just that the original tragedy was never exorcized because it could not be. The harm was done, the wound inflicted. All Plantagenet's efforts could not undo it. Their marriage was both tragic and triumphant.

It's a very complex view of the world, one which Trollope did not articulate in discussing women's issues, but one which he clearly felt--all the cross tides and eddies of feeling--love, and anger, and affection, and resentment all mixed in together.

The marriage of Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser provides far more rich a stew for the reader than any "love conquers all" escape with Burgo would. I know nothing like it in Victorian British fiction--particularly when as it is placed in the same sequence as the tragedies of Lucinda Roanoke and of Emily Wharton--outside of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Which has, of course, no bearing on Harry and Hermione.

Hearing Secret Harmonies

I spent a part of the day at the Anthony Powell Birthday Luncheon hosted at the Grolier Club by the Anthony Powell Society. This was, I was told, the 13th year the Society has given such a luncheon, and, as someone pointed out, it was Friday the 13th in the year 2013.

Now, as I was a first-timer to this event, I kept my mouth firmly closed, but I was tempted to wonder what Mrs. Erdleigh, the rather charming, but somewhat dubious psychic, fortune teller, and seer who ends up with narrator Nick Jenkins's Uncle Giles (also sometimes rather charming, but somewhat dubious) would have made of that.

Discretion prevailed, however, and I contented myself with enjoying an excellent lunch, and, far more, the company of my fellow Powell enthusiasts.

In discussing the character of Isabel Jenkins (née Tolland) with one of the other attendees, I was struck by a thought that true Powellians may find heretical: For all his sending up of John Galsworthy, Powell seems to me to have borrowed a literary stratagem from him. In the Preface to the Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy writes that "[t]he figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world." We get an "inside look" at almost every other character in the Saga--I'm leaving out the "extras"--but not of Irene.

So too Isabel.

She is elusive because she is closed off from us; our first-person narrator manages to let us know the internal workings of so many of the characters of the Dance, but not of the one he knows best. Not for Galsworthy's rather programmatic reasons, of making Irene a totemic figure, but nonetheless, both narratives have, as one of their pivots, a woman who keeps her own counsel, and cannot be known to the reader.