Howards End (2 page)

The author retains, to be sure, certain options of the omniscient novelist. But from chapter to chapter we live mainly along the nerves of individual characters in openended time and circumstance—persons responding under pressure of confrontation, surprise, accident. And here too, always—it's the triumph of Forster's art—we have the sense of a continuing intimate under-conversation between ourselves and the reserved, sympathetic, clear-eyed narrator. Think of Helen Schlegel's funny, pell-mell monologue during the umbrella search in
Howards End:

But it was not.

 

 

The feelings are beguilingly evoked. There's simulated despair at personal fecklessness, together with a sense of the stolen umbrella business as a more or less minor blip or nuisance. Like the rest of us, Helen finds her gaffes more lovable than vexing. Charmed by her own flighti ness, she dramatizes it for the general entertainment. Throughout the performance—straight through from the distracted, super-stylized self-deprecation to the indict ment of the “appalling” umbrella—she feels obliging.

And in the under-conversation between ourselves as readers and the observant narrator we come to clarity about what that feeling signifies—and about how its social roots connect with its moral substance. We agree, in silence, that Helen's charm has limits. Her jokey repudiation of possessiveness, her encouragement of a turnabout “theft” (“Do come in and choose one”), rest on a foundation of solid unearned income. Ownership of a shabby. umbrella would bespeak, for her, principled dislike of shopping for new things, lifelong understanding that between oneself and whatever purchasable object one desires, no obstacle can interfere (where there's no economic need to delay gratification, boughten objects cannot excite). The assumption that everyone shares her conviction of the pointlessness of protecting personal goods is a measure of the extent of social enclosure—the obliviousness of a class to life beyond its borders. Because of the gulf between classes, every charming word she utters is heard, by Leonard Bast, differently than as intended—and differently by us, too, reader and author standing our joint watch.

Later in the novel Forster will be explicit on the moral content of this obliviousness. We hear his voice, I believe, when Margaret Wilcox declares that:

But the effect isn't that of detached chiding by someone contrasting his or her own clear thinking about unearned increment with our fuzziness. Whether speaking directly, in analytical summary, or listening in on his speaking characters, Forster never feels to us like a superior—a screening or presenting intelligence. The illusion is that he's one of us—and it's this closeness that eases us gently yet fully into the currents of feeling.

It is, truly, an immersion. During each of the major confrontations in the book before us—between the Schlegel sisters at their crisis point, between Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox—we cling to one or another character's subjective emotion. We're inside Margaret's struggle to fend off impatience with the feelinglessness of the male Wilcoxes, her battle to persuade herself that her sensitivities are excessive. And, astonishingly, we're only slightly removed from Henry Wilcox's disgust at the mannerlessness of the poor, or from his for-your-own-good firmness with his fiancée (“Come along, Margaret, no wheedling”).

And the writer watches with us, as I say, never from above. Clearer than elsewhere we see what we are for each other in the tiered, segmented social world nobody escapes. More poignantly than anywhere we grasp that failure in the social world—the failure of the first Mrs. Wilcox—can be incontrovertible proof of worth. And do-it-yourself seems the key to our perspicacity; we have the sensation of learning something but not that of being taught. It's just me, it's just me, the writer keeps whispering, don't be intimidated.
We
knew this stuff together long ago, isn't it so? What does anyone need, really, except just the odd reminder now and then?

One further aspect of Forster's regard for his audience demands a word. It has to do with our inner conflict about whether, on this earth, rough justice can ever be done. Intelligent, experienced, unillusioned people, we know life often goes wrong. We know that contests between the lovable and unlovable, the sympathetic and the priggish, the tender and the hard-nosed, don't regularly end as we'd wish. It's been ages, for us, since those gloriously foolish adolescent hours when the death of a White Hat seemed unthinkable. And therefore we consider that story-tellers should respect our knowledgeable natures.

Forster awards us this respect. The development of human contests between unequal forces in his pages takes place in a manner offering little comfort to beamishness. David over Goliath belongs to yesteryear; if, by miracle, a figure of true and delightful virtue strikes a blow at last against a long-term bully and exploiter, the moment isn't rendered as one of triumph. For better cause than she herself knows, Margaret Wilcox confronts her oppressor—denounces Henry her husband as “stupid, hypocritical, cruel,” as “contemptible” and “spoilt” and “criminally muddled.” Stunned by her nobly transfiguring rage, her mate stammers for a second, brain in a whirl.

Only, though, for a second. When his retort comes, it's stony and unmoved, and his wife can do no more than cry out in terrible frustration at the uselessness of insurrection. The scene is faithful to the probabilities of such combat in that time and place; even at its heroic climax the novelist remains tuned to our educated gloom, our feeling for the dismal odds.

Yet because he is in league with us, a presence close by, he knows us better than we know ourselves. Aware that our pessimism is our pride, he's also aware that it's a veneer. Beneath it lie the old longings—the lingering hope that without obliging us to become sentimentalists or fantasts, a decent writer can somehow, in some fashion, make something come right. The introducer of a classic novel who descants long on this subject deserves flaying. Little need be said except that Forster's attitude toward optimism is, finally, permissive; more than most of his contemporaries, he treats kindly our need to have things both ways. He understands how powerfully we hunger, notwithstanding our sophistication, for the comeuppance of hard hearts and the prosperity of the vitally good. And from this understanding, as from all his wisdom, the taint of condescension is absent. It's not out of courtesy that he refuses to condemn our inner conflict, our irresolute imaginations of disaster. It's because, albeit gingerly, he shares our hope.

 

As writers grow more distant in time, the specifics of their lives—family, education, loves, income, travel, political stances, and so on—often seem less interesting than the question of how the creators struck their contemporaries. And that question arises with greater frequency in the case of writers who, like Forster, inspire personal affection in their readers. We care about what happened to them away from the writing desk, but we care especially about the impression they made upon those who knew them. Was the winning person whom we glimpse behind the words on the page a literary contrivance? Is there a link, in this partisan of linkage, between real life human creature and authorial persona? What personal traits did friends and acquaintances notice and remember?

E. M. Forster was born in 1879 and lived to be ninety-one. His childhood was spent among women, his father having died in Forster's infancy. He was badly bullied at school but began to find his way as a student, thinker, and writer while at Cambridge; it was as an undergraduate that he discovered his homosexuality. He traveled extensively in Italy, Greece, and for longer than half a year in India, setting of the great novel
A Passage to India,
and worked for the Red Cross in Egypt during the First World War. (His indulgent Aunt Monie left him a considerable sum, which was paid over to him in full when he was twenty-five; the money financed both his travel and his literary apprenticeship and was, as he said, his “financial salvation.”) He was associated for a while with the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists, and during various intervals of his life taught at the Working Men's College.

The last novel he published in his lifetime appeared in 1924, and the bulk of his writing afterward consisted of literary and political essays and family memoirs. In his late sixties he collaborated with the composer Benjamin Britten on an opera based on Herman Melville's
Billy Budd.
During his last quarter century of life he lived at King's College, Cambridge, the governing body of which made him an Honorary Fellow and provided him with rooms. The standard—and exceptionally readable—biography of Forster is the work of P. N. Furbank, who became acquainted with the Honorary Fellow at Cambridge shortly after the latter took up residence at King's.

None of the foregoing is inconsequential; none of it is answerable to our desire. Satisfying personal accounts of Forster do, however, exist in number. There are splendid bits in Furbank about a quality of Forster's that the biographer calls insight:

Explaining to himself how such a person as Forster could be an unbeliever, the poet Auden once remarked: “As I see him, Morgan is a person who is so accustomed to the Presence of God that he is unaware of it: he has never known what it feels like when the Presence is withdrawn.”

And we have beyond this several testimonials about excellence of character (they are, to be sure, composed by close friends) that are wonderfully persuasive. (By persuasive I mean that they give us a living Morgan Forster who seems good enough to be connected with the authorial presence treasured by lovers of Forster's work.) I like best among these testimonials a tribute produced by J. R. Ackerley, himself a gifted writer and editor, whose friendship with Forster stretched over five decades. Ackerley's summary of the man runs as follows:

—Benjamin DeMott

One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.

 

HOWARDS END.
Tuesday.

 

DEAREST MEG,

It isn't going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and altogether delightful—red brick. We can scarcely pack in as it is, and the dear knows what will happen when Paul (younger son) arrives tomorrow. From hall you go right or left into dining-room or drawing-room. Hall itself is practically a room. You open another door in it, and there are the stairs going up in a sort of tunnel to the first-floor. Three bed-rooms in a row there, and three attics in a row above. That isn't all the house really, but it's all that one notices
—
nine windows as you look up from the front garden.