by David Lodge
Forster set himself a difficult task: to tell a convincing story of personal relationships in which every character and every action also carries a heavy freight of representative significance and contributes to the thematic design. Opinions differ about how far he succeeded. Personally I am not bothered by his reliance on coincidence at several crucial points in the story (for example, Jacky’s connection with Henry Wilcox, and Leonard Bast’s untimely appearance at Howards End). These events are a legitimate exercise of a novelist’s licence, and Forster handles them deftly. Helen’s brief sexual relationship with Leonard Bast, which seemed gratuitously shocking to some contemporary readers, and excited the derision of Katherine Mansfield (“I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella”),15 seems to me not inconsistent with her character, though it can be seen as a displaced and disguised version of a more plausible homosexual encounter between two men from different classes.
The main stumbling-block for me, and for many readers, is Margaret’s motivation in marrying Henry Wilcox. We see clearly what this signifies on the thematic level of the text: an effort to “connect” the wealth-creating energy of the Wilcoxes with the humanising idealism of the Schlegels. It arises out of Margaret’s (and Forster’s) conviction that liberal intellectuals are in bad faith in despising and dissociating themselves from the capitalist economic system which supports their life-style; and in failing to recognize the industry, dedication, and enterprise of those who keep the system going. “More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it,” says Margaret (see here). There is nothing inherently improbable or inconsistent about this as an attitude. The problem is that Margaret is required by the plot to act it out by marrying Henry Wilcox, and nothing he says or does persuades us that she would do so. The best that can said for him is that he is a kind and efficient host on social occasions, but he values his friends as friends hardly at all. We never see him exhibit his skills as a man of business—the only piece of professional advice he gives turns out to be wrong. Intellectually he is prejudiced, arrogant, and conformist. He never engages in real debate with Margaret, and never changes his opinions about anything. He is a sexual hypocrite, who cannot see that his affair with Jacky was an offence against Ruth Wilcox, to whom he was married at the time, not to Margaret. One must agree with F. R. Leavis’s magisterial verdict: “Nothing in the exhibition of Margaret’s or Henry Wilcox’s character makes the marriage credible or acceptable.”16 For this strand of the novel to work, it would have been necessary to present some new and more favourable view of Henry to the reader, but instead Forster continues to make him condemn himself by every word and action.
Sexual attraction might have provided the required motivation—and seems to do so, at first: Margaret’s enjoyment of the novel experience of being wooed is plausible. But Henry proves to be a clumsy lover in courtship, snatching a wordless kiss and leaving Margaret upset and dissatisfied:
. . . the incident displeased her. Nothing in their previous conversation had heralded it, and worse still no tenderness had ensued . . . he had hurried away as if ashamed. (See here)
As to their sexual life after marriage, Forster was prevented both by the reticence of the age and by his own ignorance of heterosexual love from giving us any direct account of that, but there isn’t any indirect hint, either, of a sexual awakening or fulfillment on Margaret’s part. Her thoughts on the subject all emphasise the sublimation of sexual desire in human love; and when Miss Avery shows her the nursery at Howards End, with Tibby’s bassinet in place, as if awaiting a baby, Margaret turns away “without speaking” (see here), suggesting that she does not expect, for one reason or another, to have a child herself.
E. M. Forster has always occupied a problematic position in the literary history of the twentieth century. He is generally recognized as a major modern novelist, with a place in the same pantheon as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. But even the admiring Trilling observed, shrewdly, that “he is sometimes irritating in his refusal to be great”17—something those other writers consistently strove to be; and in form his work has little in common with theirs, with the partial exception of D. H. Lawrence. The kind of fiction we call modernist, or sometimes symbolist, exemplified by those writers, reacted strongly against the form of the nineteenth-century novel, in which, typically, a complex plot is narrated and commented on by an omniscient authorial voice. Instead it sought to represent the world as experienced in the individual consciousness or unconscious, using limited viewpoints, or unreliable narrators, and frequent time-shifts which disrupt the temporal logic of cause and effect. Narrative cohesion is to a large extent replaced by symbolic patterning and intertextual allusion in these often difficult and ambiguous works. Forster, however, in many ways perpetuated the nineteenth-century tradition. He tells an entertaining, well-made story in chronological order, frequently intrudes to comment on the action in his authorial voice, and switches the narrative point of view freely from one character to another. But his authorial intrusions are knowingly self-conscious, sometimes calling attention to their own artificiality in metafictional asides, for example:
To Margaret—I hope that it will not set the reader against her—the station of King’s Cross had always suggested infinity . . . Those two great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure . . . If you think this is ridiculous, remember that it is not Margaret who is telling you about it . . . (See here)
Furthermore, Forster grafted onto the form of the well-made traditional novel a subtle use of symbolic patterning, the repetition-with-variation of resonant phrases and images, which he himself called, in his Aspects of the Novel (1927), “pattern and rhythm.”18 Another critic has called this technique “spatial form,” and identified it as a key characteristic of modernist literature.19 The combination of traditional and modern elements in Forster’s fictional technique is signalled by his naming, as the novelists from whom he had learned most, Jane Austen and Marcel Proust.20 The first name is no surprise; the second perhaps is, until we read what Forster has to say about the quasi-musical structure of A la recherche du temps perdu in Aspects of the Novel.
As an example of Forster’s fictional technique in Howards End we might look at chapter 11, about Mrs. Wilcox’s funeral and its aftermath. It begins with an authorial descriptive passage. “The funeral was over. The carriages had rolled away through the soft mud, and only the poor remained” (see here). We could be reading George Eliot—or Thomas Hardy, as the narrator goes on to describe the reactions of the local country people, and then adopts the point of view of one of them, a woodcutter pollarding the elms overlooking the churchyard. The woodcutter’s thoughts convey the traditional, semi-pagan, in-tune-with-nature response to death, which soon gives way to a renewed commitment to life, as he goes off to “mate,” stealing a chrysanthemum from the graveside for his girl. Then follows an authorial description of the deserted churchyard at night: “Clouds drifted over it from the west; or the church may have been a ship, high-prowed, steering with all its company towards infinity” (see here). This metaphor, which has a purely descriptive function here, is recalled for a serious thematic purpose in a crucial passage much later in the novel, in chapter 19. That chapter begins with Margaret and her companions standing on the ridge of the Purbeck hills with the south of England spread out before them, and ends with Margaret and Helen arguing about the differences between their values and those of the Wilcoxes. The authorial voice sums up:
England . . . For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of sou
ls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity? (see here)
This is very poetic prose, echoing a famous piece of Shakespearean patriotic rhetoric (“this precious stone set in the silver sea”—Richard II), and seeking to go even higher up the scale of the Sublime in the striking image of England as a ship of souls sailing towards eternity. If Forster persuades us to accept such high-flown language in what is essentially a prosaic tragi-comedy of manners (and I think he does here), it is partly because he has already planted the trope in our minds in a more subdued form in the earlier chapter. He is not always so successful. Some of the purple passages towards the end of the novel sound like George Meredith on a bad day (for example: “Let squalor be turned into tragedy, whose eyes are the stars, and whose hands hold the sunset and the dawn” [p. 321]).
Returning to chapter 11: after the brief reappearance of the woodcutter early next morning, the narrative focus shifts to the Wilcox family “attempting breakfast” at Howards End. First we get a rendering of Henry’s thoughts about his deceased wife, using free indirect style to convey his state of mind with considerable intimacy and immediacy: “He had been told of the horror by a strange doctor, whom she had consulted during his absence from town. Was this altogether just? Without fully explaining, she had died. It was a fault on her part, and—tears rushed into his eyes—what a little fault! It was the only time she had deceived him in those thirty years” (see here). Then we get a description of Henry’s physiognomy from the narrator’s point of view, with the narrator’s implied judgements on his character: “the chin, though firm enough in outline, retreated a little, and the lips, ambiguous, were curtained by a moustache” (see here). Then we have a sequence of short scenes consisting mainly of dialogue, involving Henry Wilcox, his daughter Evie, her brother Charles, and his bride Dolly. We are briefly admitted to Dolly’s thoughts, but in a much more summary and therefore dismissive style than that used for Henry Wilcox: “she wished that Mrs Wilcox, since fated to die, could have died before the marriage, for then less would have been expected of her” (see here). Charles and Evie complain pompously about the pollarding of the elms, as a way of not referring to their real feelings. “They avoided the personal note in life. All Wilcoxes did,” comments the narrator (see here). The point of view shifts again, to Charles, and we share his thoughts in free indirect style as he goes out to check on his motor car. Then another dialogue scene: Charles has an altercation with his father’s chauffeur which is interrupted by Dolly in a state of panic, summoning him back to the house for a reason she cannot reveal in front of the servant (a frequent dilemma for Forster’s characters). The reason is that Henry Wilcox has discovered his wife’s note about leaving Howards End to Margaret. A family council ensues in which they reproach the woman for whom they were grieving a few moments earlier, and rationalise their determination to ignore her wish. The ironies are worthy of Jane Austen. But Forster wants to be fair to the Wilcoxes. “It is . . . a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not” (see here). In ten pages the narrative discourse has shifted in perspective and voice at least ten times.
In Aspects of the Novel Forster took issue with the critic Percy Lubbock’s insistence, following the precept and practice of Henry James, that a consistent and disciplined “method” in the handling of point of view was crucial to the craft of fiction. What is really crucial, Forster says, is “the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says . . . Look how Dickens bounces us in Bleak House . . . Logically, Bleak House is all to pieces, but Dickens bounces us, so that we do not mind the shiftings of the viewpoint.”21 Clearly, this is a tacit defence of his own narrative method.
The reception of Howards End on its first publication in 1910 was enthusiastic. The consensus of reviewers was that with this book Forster had fulfilled the promise of his earlier work and established himself as an important literary novelist. The Daily Mail described it as “The Season’s Great Novel,” and the Daily Telegraph roundly declared: “Mr E. M. Forster is one of the great novelists.”22 The Times Literary Supplement described it as “a very remarkable and original book . . . What gives Mr Forster’s writing its quite unique flavour is . . . [the] odd vein of charming poetry which slips delicately in and out of his story.”23 The Daily News described it as “the most significant novel of the year,” and commented on its intriguing combination of traditional and modern qualities: “Mr Forster’s method is a sort of bridge between that of Mr Conrad and that of Mr Galsworthy.”24 Several reviewers expressed what subsequent generations of readers have felt—that the book’s power and appeal somehow triumphantly survive its flaws. “Mr E. M. Forster has written a very remarkable book, though he has hardly achieved an altogether satisfactory novel,” opined the anonymous reviewer in The Westminster Gazette.25 Edward Garnett claimed in the Nation that “Mr Forster has sacrificed the inflexibility of artistic truth to the exigences of his philosophical moral,” but was otherwise generous in his praise of a book that “says most effectively those very things that the intelligent minority feel, but rarely formulate.”26
Forster found that he had suddenly become a literary celebrity—fêted, interviewed, the recipient of invitations and fan mail. But he did not have the temperament to really enjoy this success. His biographer P. N. Furbank plausibly suggests that its main long-term effect was to make him afraid of future failure.27 Certainly he took many years to produce his next novel, A Passage to India (1926), and that proved to be the last one he published in his long lifetime. This barrenness was a matter of regret and puzzlement to his admiring readers. Some light was thrown on it after his death by the public disclosure and discussion of his homosexuality. To friends he had confessed to being bored and frustrated by the impossibility (for a writer of his generation) of dealing openly and directly in his fiction with the only kind of sexual love which really interested him. In old age he even turned against Howards End for this reason, recording the following judgement in 1958:
Howards End my best novel and approaching a good novel. Very elaborate and all pervading plot that is seldom tiresome or forced, range of characters, social sense, wisdom, colour. Have only just discovered why I don’t care for it: not a single character in it for whom I care . . . Perhaps the house in Howards End, for which I did once care, took the place of people . . . I feel pride in the achievement, but cannot love it, and occasionally the swish of the skirts and the non-sexual embraces irritate.28
This comment is characteristically honest, witty, and perceptive, but it has something of the weariness and impatience of old age. In middle life Forster wrote a number of stories and a novel, Maurice, with homosexual content, which he circulated privately. Some of these writings have been published posthumously, but they cannot be regarded as masterpieces of gay literature. Forster’s literary reputation rests on the novels he wrote, not for a coterie, or for himself, but for the literary public at large, and among them Howards End will always have a high place.
chapter five
WAUGH’S COMIC WASTELAND
THE EARLY NOVELS of Evelyn Waugh have probably given more pleasure to more readers than any comparable body of work from the same period of English fiction (1928–1942). I discovered these books myself in adolescence. I was, I think, fifteen when my father put into my hands a tattered Penguin edition of Decline and Fall. For most of his life he was a dance musician by profession, and at some time in the 1930s he used to play in a night club frequented by Evelyn Waugh and his friends, whose names figured prominently in the newspaper gossip columns of the day. This had given my father a personal interest in the author, but it was a very tenuous link between my world and that of Waugh’s early fiction.
We lived in a cramped semi-detached house in a drab suburb of southeast London, our respectable lower-middle-class life-style constrained not only by the income of a jobbing dance musician, but by the climate of Austerity that permeated the whole country in th
e immediate postwar years: rationing, shortages, rules and restrictions—the fair-minded but somewhat puritanical ethos of the early Welfare State. I attended a local state-aided Catholic grammar school. Nothing could have been further from my experience than the world of Waugh’s novels, inhabited by characters who were for the most part upper-class and in some cases aristocratic, educated at public school and Oxbridge, many of them idle, dissolute, and sexually promiscuous or deviant (though much of that went over my adolescent head), seldom seen occupied in useful work, their time mostly spent shuttling from party to party or from country house to country house, with occasional adventurous excursions Abroad. Even the fact that Evelyn Waugh was a Roman Catholic, as I was, provided little basis for identification, partly because Waugh’s romantically idealised version of Catholicism (epitomised in Brideshead Revisited) was so remote from the religious subculture of the suburban Catholic “ghetto” which I knew, and partly because his religious beliefs were not overtly manifested in the early novels which I most enjoyed. I suppose I found these books fascinating precisely because they opened my eyes to the existence of a milieu wholly different from my own—adult, glamorous, hedonistic, and quintessentially “prewar.” By Christmas 1950, when I was a month short of sixteen, I was sufficiently hooked to request as a seasonal present from my mother copies of Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, and Scoop in the Chapman and Hall Uniform Edition—books which I still possess and frequently reread with undiminished pleasure.