“I’m Not Such a Fool as I Seem”

Abstract

In the earliest years of the new century, Galsworthy’s clan, especially members of the younger generation, regarded him as increasingly different. Having abruptly stopped shooting, he shaved off the full, although never waxed, moustache that he had worn most of the time during the 1890s. Dorothy Ivens recalls her first memories of him, in 1901 or 1902, when he came for dinner and watched her and her sisters perform a playlet she had written: “Uncle Jack roared, he really laughed, throwing his head back and forth, so unlike the other relatives. And he gave each of us girls a gold half-sovereign.”¹ She recognized other ways in which he was different: “he encouraged my first efforts although the family code was dead against expression”.² When she learned, a short time later, that her cousin was trying to become a writer, she became his “defender” in the midst of a family that combined affection for him with disapproval. She quotes her grandmother Randall as reflecting the general opinion within the extended family: “Poor, dear Jack. He’s so handsome and charming, but he will waste his time scribbling when he could have pleased his father so much and been such a success at the bar.