Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  But reading the novel to its end also unsettles this sense of a balanced resolution. Margaret Schlegel is the heroine of Howards End, but Henry Wilcox is hardly the hero. Despite a lightly ironic sentence denoting that “our hero and heroine were married,” Howards End, is, in fact, a novel without a hero, even more completely, I think, than Vanity Fair. For Forster cannot restrain himself from emphatically rejecting the masculine as represented by the unfeeling and predatory Wilcoxes. Raised by his mother and aunt in the very “feminine” family house, Rooksend, (shades of the rookery in David Copperfield?), and struggling at the time of writing Howards End with his own still-repressed homosexuality, he is out of sympathy with their mode of “telegrams and anger,” and ultimately pessimistic about their reformation. They remain one-sided human beings, who fail, as much in terms of class as gender, to connect and see connections; they do not avoid brutality.

  Forster’s lack of real sympathy for the realm of the masculine can be underscored by setting the Wilcoxes alongside Gissing’s nuanced portraits of Barfoot and Widdowson in The Odd Women. It occurs to me that Gissing’s male characters are already so diminished in masculine power through their anomie and inertia that they hardly need to be cut down to size. They are not brisk captains of industry like Henry Wilcox, arrogant eldest sons like Charles, or thoughtless imperialists like Paul. And in ways they would impose themselves on women—Widdowson by means of his jealousy, Barfoot through his freethinking, they are not especially effective. Men in Howards End, on the other hand, for all their obtuseness, are still running society and doing their best to retain their male prerogatives and supremacy. At least property-owning privileged men are doing so—not the poor clerk Leonard Bast, an aspirant to culture, not power, who, interestingly, seems to be a victim of both the masculine and feminine strains in the novel. Helen Schlegel seduces him, Henry loses him his job, Charles Wilcox hits him with the flat edge of an ancestral sword, and the Schlegel bookcase falls on him just as his heart gives out (can culture kill?). Possibilities of connection between classes dwindle as Forster’s epigram shifts from robust imperative to poignant conditional: if only we could connect!

  And what about Forster’s grand scheme of connecting the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, of merging their two houses? When Helen Schlegel, pregnant with the child of Leonard Bast, turns up at Howards End, the country house owned by Henry Wilcox but spiritually the property of his first wife, who wished to bequeath it to Margaret, Henry doesn’t want Helen to stop there. Margaret, at this point forced to choose between her husband and her sister, chooses her sister without a flicker of hesitation. “She was fighting,” Forster tells us, “for women against men.” Henry, a man upholding a sexual double standard, is “criminally muddled.” He cannot connect.

  Through various ensuing twists of the plot: Leonard’s arriving at Howards End in the midst of this crisis; his dying of the heart attack, which the law courts determine is induced by Charles’s assault; Charles’s having to go to prison for manslaughter, and Henry’s collapsing in the midst of all this tragedy, Wilcox masculinity, it is fair to say, is defeated. If it cannot be tempered, it can be tamed.

  At the novel’s conclusion Henry bequeaths Howards End to Margaret, and the two sisters literally enact their claim to English soil as we encounter them out of doors in the sun-drenched fields along with Helen’s baby by Leonard Bast, while a tired shadowy Henry remains indoors with his hay fever. We also learn that Margaret will bequeath Howards End to her nephew.

  If we look simply at who is living in the house at the end of the novel, Henry, Margaret and Helen, and the male baby, it would be possible to conclude that the feminine and the masculine, the well-off and the dispossessed, have in some important way come together. But as Lionel Trilling has pointed out, the final connection is forged at the cost of too thorough a “gelding” of the male. Henry Wilcox, according to his wife’s diagnosis, is “eternally tired”; he collapsed when he began “to notice things.”

  Henry reminds me a lot of Mr. Dombey at the end of Dombey and Son. Both Dickens and Forster seem to be saying that strong arrogant patriarchs need to be broken in order to be saved. But their gaining of heart doesn’t mean they get put back together again. The description of Henry as “eternally tired” is followed two pages later by a view of him as “pitiably tired,” just in case we didn’t catch the point. Yes, he can still smile, as he manages to do at Helen on the novel’s last page. But it is the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, who are literally left standing in the field, their bond intact and undiluted, beneficiaries of their “love rooted in common things” and their shared sanctification of “the inner life.” Glowing with energy and purpose, they have also escaped any taint of effeminacy; ironically, the only effeminate—substitute enervated—character at the novel’s close is Henry.

  I came late to E. M. Forster, in college introduced only to his Aspects of the Novel with its wry, deft voice and wonderful chapters—straightforward yet a touch fey—on plot, story, rhythm, characters. Round characters, he says, are capable of surprising you; flat characters like Mrs. Micawber in David Copperfield with her tag phrase, “I will never desert Mr. Micawber!” delight in their energy and sameness. Subsequently I read his novels, in which I recognized the same appealing voice, capable of mustering authority, at times diffident, but unwaveringly humanistic. Forster brings to mind something Lionel Trilling remarked of George Orwell: that he is “not a genius,” and that “the virtue of not being a genius “is “of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence.” I don’t mean to minimize Forster’s imaginative powers, but I can’t help responding to an essential modesty in his work, a trait that distinguishes him from many other authors (including even determinedly nonegotistic George Eliot). Forster builds his world out of finely observed encounters, at once simple, subtle, and symbolic: Helen Schlegel’s walking off with Leonard Bast’s umbrella; Margaret’s eating saddle of mutton—and not the fish pie she wanted to order—with the Wilcoxes at Simpson’s in the Strand; in Shropshire Margaret’s jumping out of the car that has hit what was first thought to be a dog but turns out to be a cat—an animal even less worth stopping for in the eyes of the most unfeline and unfeeling Charles Wilcox. Hinting at our negotiations and accommodations, at stretches of boredom and saving moments of intimacy, at planes of passion and prose, at wells of muddle and mystery, Forster seems so reasonable in what he observes of the world and what he would ask of us. “Only connect,” he says. Yet this is exactly what is so hard to do.

  Perhaps I also appreciate Forster because he tried to work within heterosexual paradigms as I for so long tried to do. Though his unexpected first kiss startles her and she “nearly screamed,” Margaret Schlegel commits herself to Henry Wilcox and does her best to love him. Critics have talked of Forster’s inability to portray heterosexual love, but there are many moments, if not of passion then of closeness, that one can sense between them. Margaret does work to be close to Henry. Sometimes this means acting a part as when she pretends to have been silly about the cat that was killed. Sometimes this means gently challenging him. I like the small moment when, after she learns of his past with Jackie, Margaret takes away the newspaper he is hiding behind and asks him to look her in the eyes. She can also, when it is necessary, be fierce—as in her choosing Helen over Henry, choosing to fight for women against men. All sexual connection, Forster recognizes, is not in the bedroom.

  Henry Wilcox reminds me of the man who, for forty-six years, I thought was my father. As a self-made engineer, Trevor Westbrook rose during World War II to become head of aviation production for all of England in Lord Beaverbrook’s Ministry of War. Working from designs everyone said were completely impractical, he heroically produced the Spitfire, the plane my mother always said saved England in the Battle of Britain. He was persistent and efficient—admirable in the contribution he made to his country. Then after the war he made money, investing in copper mines and other schemes, and took pride i
n his country house, Little Brockhurst, with its sweeping vistas of the Sussex downs. His emotional life, though, was dismal. Dazzled by glamorous women like my mother, dour, repressed, and hopelessly disconnected from his feelings, he failed, time and time again, to see beyond his own impulses and narrow assumptions. Once he embarrassed me, his sixteen-year-old daughter, by taking me out dancing to the Savoy and resting his hand on my bottom. His life ended sadly in a kind of dystopian version of the conclusion of Howards End. Trevor Westbrook fell prey to his venal second ex-wife, Carmel, an Australian gold digger he had married and soon divorced after his equally brief marriage to my mother. Carmel returned to England to ensconce herself at Little Brockhurst and take advantage of him in his senility. The last time I saw him, on a day I visited with my mother, he was, to use Margaret’s words about Henry Wilcox, “pitiably tired.” “Wakey, wakey, Trevor,” Carmel urged at our pub lunch because he had to be roused to pay the bill. He could hardly walk or talk; palsy seemed to have gripped his whole being. He died soon afterwards.

  In my experience with men and marriage, I see parallels between myself and Margaret Schlegel. I have worked to be connected to men, and they have often, though not always, felt very “other” to me. I have liked best men of charm and lightness of being, men who connect easily with women, who have a strong component in them of Forster’s “feminine” but without being effeminate. My grandchild Sam, Emily’s son now in his teens, in whom I have always delighted, seems one such man in the making—his best friends, interestingly, are girls, indeed, sisters—and any men I’ve been at all close to, including both Donald and my son Sean, have had a balance of sides. As for dominant men who take charge in the style of Henry Wilcox, choosing the restaurant you eat in and suggesting you order mutton instead of fish pie, my experience with them is slight. I have known a few and shared their company, but never for long.

  I hope for a different paradigm for relations between the sexes than that of dominance and subordination, something other than men’s bullying women or women’s castrating men. And perhaps Forster shows us the way to one in Howards End. In the figure of the first Mrs. Wilcox, the older woman who touches other lives through her simplicity of understanding, Forster gives us the image of a woman who prevails, but not through will or willfulness, nor through resistance and opposition. Externally a conventional wife and mother, Mrs. Wilcox reaches out in spirit to pervade rather than impose on others around her. With her ties to the wych-elm and the house of Howards End, she is clearly “connected” to an old agrarian England, which antedates both the motor cars and telegrams of Henry Wilcox’s capitalism and the concerts and literary talk of the Schelegels’ cosmopolitan culture. I could never be a Mrs. Wilcox—I’m far too combative as well as too reliant on words and wit. But I’m intrigued by the possibility she suggests of a different way to be powerful. Not my mother’s way of taking on all comers, of bravery, bullying, self-invention and charm. But a quiet, almost guileless way, in which there is nonetheless full retention of dignity and influence. This is appealing. And perhaps I’m too quick to conclude I could never be a Mrs. Wilcox. Could I not take on some of her attributes, absorb the lesson of her modesty, link to people, men and women alike—in a generosity of spirit free of calculation? Mrs. Wilcox is sustained by her ancestral roots in Howards End, but I have my roots in the soil of English literature. From these I imagine myself rising and spreading, touching generations of my students and my family, a self that is realized through a kind of grace rather than self assertion. I see this figure still as a woman, an avatar of Forster’s feminine, but a woman freed by virtue of age and understanding from the divisiveness of gender. She is liberated not by “fighting for woman against men” but by connecting—“only connect” is the mantra—with both in the least defensive, most expansive ways.

  To the Lighthouse

  I first read To the Lighthouse in my Bryn Mawr freshman English course, the same year-long course that introduced me to The Portrait of a Lady. Our teacher was Ramona Livingston, a middle-aged plump-cheeked woman, who lived near the college with a husband and daughters and, as a lecturer, taught two or three sections of freshman English. Though I wasn’t attuned then to the distinctions of rank in academe, she seemed distinctly less glamorous than some of the English department stars who were teaching friends of mine in other sections, and I envied my friends these more scintillating instructors. Ramona Livingston seemed so average and quotidian, so lacking in any edge of mystery or suffering. Still, the work I did under her direction taught me to read closely, write clearly, and grasp the basic tenets of modernism. In our study of To the Lighthouse we looked at the open-ended symbolism of the lighthouse, Woolf’s narrative flow in and out of her characters’ consciousnesses, and her deft and poignant play with time. It’s interesting to me now, though, that we did not consider any issues of gender. This was the early sixties, and though I had chosen to attend a women’s college where a female instructor was introducing me to a novel by a woman author that centered on a memorable female protagonist, I failed to have a single conscious thought about any one of them—author, teacher, character, or myself—being a woman.

  If there was a theme that most engaged me, it had nothing to do with my gender but rather with conflict between the solitary and the social, the struggle, surely, of my young life then. When it came time to pick a topic for the major paper of the course, I chose to focus on the figure of the artist, a personage at once gifted and stigmatized, in the fiction of Thomas Mann.

  I had encountered Mann the previous year in my senior English class at Rosemary Hall under the tutelage of the formidable Miss Fayetta McKown, a much more imposing English teacher than the motherly Ramona Livingston (though I’m trying here, admittedly belatedly, to give Mrs. Livingston the credit I feel is due her). I remember Mrs. Livingston’s prescripts, but I remember Miss McKown herself, one of those teachers who live on, magnified and iconic, in the imagination of their students. Revered by many of us as mysterious and intellectual, she sat in class with her chin propped on the back of her long-fingered hand and thrilled us with her musings about literature. One of our texts was an anthology of English and European short stories and novellas. The volume, as I remember it, contained Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and “Mademoiselle de Maupin” by Henry James. But the story in the volume I loved best was Mann’s “Tonio Kröger,” a story about the figure of the artist that seemed to give literary representation to my own alienated yet intense state of being.

  “Tonio Kröger” sets forth Mann’s concept of the artist—a figure estranged from bourgeois life yet at the same time bound by ties of love and loyalty to the milieu that excludes him. In terms of plot and even character, it is only minimally a full-fledged story—for much of it, the adult Tonio simply reflects on the artist’s predicament. But the part I have always remembered, so that it has lingered in my mind as the very heart of the work, is its opening scene. Here the boy Tonio—dreamy, brunette, artistic, half Italian by virtue of his mother, hence his first name—waits expectantly to walk home from school with his blond, thoughtless friend Hans, and Hans treats him carelessly. Poor Tonio Kröger, dark-eyed and different. I understood everything about him: his apartness, his intensity, his efforts to win a friend who prefers more banal pastimes, his failure to be normal, his love for his books, his suffering. Remembering so vividly Tonio’s painful and unrequited love for Hans of the blue eyes and Danish sailor suit, I had forgotten, until recently rereading it, the second scene in which Tonio’s affections have transferred to blond Ingeborg, with whom he’s equally unsuccessful. He humiliates himself at dancing school by mistakenly stepping forward with the girls when the dancing master commands, “Moulinet des dames,” and Ingeborg joins in the throng that laughs at him.

  There is an androgynous quality to Tonio Kröger, which is part of what makes him an artist and which links him, if I think about it, to other artist figures I’ve been drawn to. The highly androgynous David Copperfield, after all, becomes a writer,
never losing his early “freshness” and “gentleness.” And I think, too, about fine-featured F. Scott Fitzgerald, who used to act the girl parts in the Triangle Club revues he wrote at Princeton. My mother in describing him always stressed his charm, his delicacy, his delight in talking to women. As I have touched on in the last chapter, men such as these have always seemed accessible to me in ways that more blatantly masculine men haven’t. When I was young, I allied myself with them in a stance of apartness and longing and then imagined the companionship they themselves might bring me.

  Miss McKown, who introduced me to Mann’s story and through it to Mann as an author, was also a solitary figure, someone who stood apart from the vulgar throng, but in a different manner from Tonio Kröger. Perhaps she was shy, but she seemed aloof, and she had a cutting wit. If the modernist artist is the model for a stance of alienation, I would cast her as a caustic Stephen Daedelus rather than a soulful Tonio. Unlike Stephen, though, and his model Lucifer, she was willing to serve. She taught at Rosemary Hall for over forty years, moving with the school when in the 1970s it decamped from Greenwich to Wallingford, Connecticut, and merged with the boys school Choate. I wonder if her effect on coed classes was as strong as it had been on my class of all girls. When in the year 2000 I attended my fortieth Rosemary Hall reunion, Miss McKown had recently retired, but she came to a dinner—grey-haired, heavier, walking haltingly with a cane (she wasn’t well and would die a few years later) but still awesome in her benign remoteness. “I enjoyed reading one of your books,” she said to me in her measured way. I swelled with pride and at the same time felt embarrassed. The book she referred to, the memoir I’d written about my parents, was then my only published book. Surely Miss McKown, a prodigious reader, must have known that. She hadn’t finished her Yale PhD; she had never married; she had lived with her cat and read books. I appreciated her tact in giving me the benefit of the doubt, in suggesting the row of scholarly tomes that I, a nearly sixty-year-old college professor, must have produced.