Howards End (48 page)

Critical response to
Howards
End when it appeared on 18 October 1910 was the stuff of writers' dreams. Forster was acclaimed as a great novelist, more than fulfilling his early promise. “The novel rises like a piece of architecture full-grown before us,” wrote one enthusiast. “It is all bricks and timber, but it is mystery, idealism, a far-reaching symbol.” Even conservative critics, like the writer for
Punch,
overlooked the social critique and guilelessly lauded Forster's creation of the Wilcox family: “For the Wilcoxes are England.” To round out the picture, the writer Edmund Gosse privately found the novel “sensational and dirty and affected,” and Forster's own mother was so shocked by it that she treated him coldly for days.

Literary celebrity made Forster squirm. He wrote apologetically to friends (“I go about saying I like the money, because one is simply bound to be pleased about something on such an occasion.”) and sternly to his diary: “Never forget nature and to look at her freshly. Don't advance
one step more
into literary society than I have.... Henceforth more work and meditation, more concentration on those whom I love.”

From here on, Forster would be regarded as a major novelist, at the same time that his faults as a writer—subtle but palpable faults in each of his novels—were repeatedly acknowledged. Critics acclaimed Forster in spite of his impulsive, meandering story lines, tyrannical plots, and homicidal tendencies (one critic worked out that 45 percent of the characters in
The Longest Journey
are abruptly killed off). Forster's theme of connection helps
Howards End
cohere, but it doesn't resolve all of what Virginia Woolf saw as “contrary currents” in his work. In her 1927 article “The Novels of E. M. Forster,” she noted that her friend had “a difficult family of gifts to persuade to live in harmony together: satire and sympathy; fantasy and fact; poetry and a prim moral sense.” His shifts in tone made her picture him as “a light sleeper who is always being woken by something in the room. The poet is twitched away by the satirist; the comedian is tapped on the shoulder by the moralist; he never loses himself or forgets himself for long in sheer delight in the beauty or the interest of things as they are.”

Yet the richness of his characterization snares the reader. Forster draws us immediately into his fictional world—a bygone England (at least for later readers) that we nevertheless recognize through the realism of the characters that move through it. Even one of the least successfully drawn figures, Leonard Bast, carries with him shades of Forster's students at the Working Men's College, who showed up for night classes in Latin after a day at the printing press or the factory. The Schlegels still sparkle after a hundred years—idealistic Helen, whose good intentions backfire so completely, lumpish Tibby, whose only reality is in books, and Margaret, whose sense of justice (to Leonard Bast, to Henry Wilcox, to Helen) drives most of the action of the novel. The warm, mysterious Mrs. Wilcox manages to preside over Howards End and its occupants before and after her death, even for a generation of readers whose fantasies of female power gravitate more toward
Lara Croft. Tomb Raider
than a wise old countrywoman in a shawl.

Although the novel is a beautiful articulation of his liberal ideals, Forster lost his taste for Howards End. In May 1958, he remarked in a notebook that it was his best novel and even “approaching a good novel. Very elaborate and all pervading plot that is seldom tiresome or forced, range of characters, social sense, wit, wisdom, colour. Have only just discovered why I don't care for it: not a single character in it for whom I care.” He had loved Gino in
Where Angels Fear
to Tread, Stephen in
The Longest Journey,
Lucy in
A Room with a View
and Aziz in his final novel,
A Passage to India
(1924). “Perhaps the house in [
Howards End
], for which I once did care, took the place of people,” he reasoned, “and now that I no longer care for it their barrenness has become evident. I feel pride in the achievement, but cannot love it, and occasionally the swish of the skirts and the non-sexual embraces irritate. Perhaps too I am more hedonistic than I was, and resent not being caused pleasure personally.”
⁷

Why not love Margaret, who had once spoken so well for him? Forster's friend W. J. H. Sprott thought that Forster's taste, in fictional characters, was for “simple, kindly, unpretentious people.” Perhaps Margaret was too cultivated to be considered simple and kindly. But she did have other Forsterian traits. In his essay “What I Believe,” Forster expressed allegiance to “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky.” The first two qualities are a given with Forster. But the last one, pluckiness, is about risk-taking and resilience. No Forster heroine can become one without this willingness to feel pain—not to remain sensible and rational, a head severed from a body, but to be open to rapture, foolishness, ruin. It's the reason the Schlegel sisters admired Leonard Bast for his all-night tramp through the English countryside, and the reason Forster chose Margaret—reckless enough to try to marry poetry to prose, Schlegels to Wilcoxes—to represent his own views in the novel.

What happened between 1910 and 1958 to disenchant Forster with the sensitive, considerate, and plucky Margaret is a matter for speculation, but by the late 1950s, Forster had outgrown the cautious, inexperienced young man who wrote
Howards End.
He had been twice to India, worked for the Red Cross in Egypt during the First World War, written his greatest work, A
Passage to India,
given up fiction, and made a new career as a broadcaster and humanitarian. More important, he had experienced reciprocal, long-term love. Margaret's life as a Wilcox, hedged in with duty and compromise and grounded on a certain degree of self-suppression, may have looked admirable to Forster in 1910; it seemed much smaller and safer to him late in life, when he had “connected” for himself.

 

—Regina Marler

Where Angels Fear to Tread,
1905 Novel

The Longest Journey,
1907 Novel

A Room with a View,
1908 Novel

Howards End,
1910 Novel

The Celestial Omnibus,
1914 Stories

Alexandria: A History and a Guide,
1922

A Passage to India,
1924 Novel

Aspects of the Novel,
1927 Essays

The Eternal Moment,
1928 Stories

Abinger Harvest,
1936 Essays

Two Cheers for Democracy,
1951 Essays

Billy Budd,
1951 Libretto for the Benjamin Britten opera. Written with Eric Crozier.

The Hill of Devi,
1953

Beauman, Nicola.
E. M. Forster.
New York: Knopf, 1993.

Bedient, Calvin.
Architects of the Self: George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

Bradshaw, David, ed.
The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Crews, Frederick
C. E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962.

Duckworth, Alistair.
Howards End: E. M. Forster's House of Fiction.
New York: Macmillan, 1992.

Furbank, P. N.
E. M. Forster: A Life.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Gardner, Philip.
E. M. Forster.
Harlox, Essex, England: Longmans Group, 1978.

Herz, Judith Scherer, and Martin, Robert K.
E. M. Forster: Centenary Reevaluations.
London: Macmillan, 1982.

Medalie, David.
E. M. Forster's Modernism.
New York: Pal-grave Macmillan, 2002.

Pritchard, William H.
Seeing Through Everything: English Writers, 1918-1940.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Trilling, Lionel.
E. M. Forster.
Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1943.

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