The Apple Tree

I have been trying to read Freud’s ‘Civilization and its discontents’ and in it I came across a reference to the Galsworthy story ‘The Apple Tree’, a reference which I followed up. I have now read the story in question, around 80 pages of it, albeit online and rather quickly.

My first reaction was that I did not see a strong connection between the story and Freud’s thesis about the problems which come with civilization.

An impressionable young girl living quietly on a Dartmoor farm and a young man of modest private means, fresh out of Cambridge, but who perhaps should have known better, fall in love – and it all ends rather badly. With a big problem being that the two young people came from very different backgrounds. To the extent that when we were still hunter gatherers, say twenty thousand years ago, pretty much everybody had pretty much the same background, pretty much the same life style, and differences of this sort did not arise – maybe Freud had a point. On the other hand, I dare say that young people of that era did not fall in love in quite the moon-lit way of the Galsworthy story. Life was too rough and brutish for that, savage expertise in botany and zoology notwithstanding.

It will be interesting to see whether, in time, I come to see the point that Freud was making and its connection to the rest of his essay.

The setting of this romance on a Dartmoor farm suggest to me that Church, noticed at reference 5, knew this story too, written some twenty years before his.

Buying the book online

On eBay, prices of this story, usually included along with others, vary from around £5 to £40. A lot of them from the US and some from Australia. A lot of them in a red edition from Franklin (not before heard of) published in 1981 and still to be found at reference 3.

On Abebooks, the story is much the same, although there is a bigger choice, with more old editions and better pictures. And one from New Zealand.

For myself, I used the online copy to be found at the Internet Archive of reference 4, a couple of pages from which are snapped above. And interested to see what BH makes of it, not an online person, I also bought one of the cheaper copies to be had from eBay.

The Roman analogy

Nothing to do with Galsworthy, but I was struck by an analogy used by Freud earlier in his essay, an analogy which can be found in my pdf copy of the complete works by searching for ‘Roma Quadrata’.

Freud invites us to imagine ourselves in the Rome of today, a busy metropolis which is a terrific jumble of buildings, some old and some new, some dating back to Roman times. And if one digs one finds traces and remains of all kinds of old stuff. A Rome which has had a more or less continuous existence for well over two thousand years.

Which suggests to me that the (individual) human psyche is a bit like this; a terrific jumble which has grown up over the years, some of which can be deciphered by the long winded process of psycho-analysis.

Freud’s actual suggestion is rather more far-fetched and complicated. He invites us to suppose that we can recover all the history. Not only do we have what there is now, we also have access to all that has gone before. That the brain stores up everything for ever and does not go in for recycling the space occupied by stuff which is no longer needed, in the way of a computer. I prefer my version of his analogy.

A  connection

Near the end of the Galsworthy story we get a quotation from ‘Hippolytus’, the play by Euripides, spoken by the chorus near the end of the play. A play which, as it happens, got a mention quite recently at reference 6, on another branch of the same digression.

All these chaps from a hundred years ago, brought up on a diet of the Greek and Roman classics!

PS: investigation suggests that 'Cyprian' is a reference to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, lust and so forth, exploiting her strong connection to Cyprus. Fits the metre of the line better.

References

Reference 1: Civilization and its discontents – S. Freud – 1930. 

Reference 2: The apple tree – John Galsworthy – 1917.

Reference 3: http://eastonfranklinbooks.com/franklin-library-series/fl-collected-greatest. 

Reference 4: https://archive.org/. 

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-porch.html. 

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/trolley-774.html.  

Reference 7: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8418/8418-h/8418-h.htm#link2H_4_0001. The quotation checks out here, with searching on page for ‘gold’ turning it up in short order.