He was not an inquisitive boy; but as he leant against the tree he wondered what it was all about, and whether he would ever know.
(E.M. Forster’s milksop protagonist limply pondering in The Longest Journey, page 137)

Forster’s second novel, The Longest Journey, is the diametric opposite of his first, Where Angels Fear To Tread. Angels is short (160 pages), focused, and its main narrative moves at speed. Journey is long (290 pages), slow, digressive and self indulgent. It opens abruptly and a bit confusingly, with a series of scenes depicting Frederick ‘Rickie’ Elliott as an undergraduate at Cambridge, having jokey philosophical debates with his close friends led by the boy they all look up to, Stewart Ansell, before – confusingly – going into a flashback describing Rickie’s earlier life and how he ended up at Cambridge.

Rickie has a deformed foot which gives him a pronounced limp and requires him to wear specially adjusted shoes. As a boy he came to realise that his parents never loved each other; then they both died within 11 days of each other, leaving him an orphan. He inherited a tidy sum of money and was sent to live with a family called the Silts, ‘needy cousins of his father’s’. He had already begun at a public school as a day boy and continued there till he passes his exams to go up to Cambridge and it is here that we catch up with the scenes depicted in the opening pages.

What’s missing from Forster

The first 50 or 60 pages prompted a Big (negative) Thought which dominated the rest of my reading. This that the book contains many, many, many conversations about life and human nature and so on but, placed in a historical context, all these conversations are rendered moot, or even worthless, by their ignorance of everything we, a hundred years later, now know about human nature, science and society…

A few years after the book was published came the Great War which triggered a complete disillusion with the values of previous generations, then the Bolshevik revolution which swept away previous socialist rhetoric and replaced it with a much more militant model of violent revolution and anti-bourgeois terror. There followed the Jazz Age decade of amoral hedonism, short skirts, wild dances and the advent of Fascism in Italy. At the end of the decade, a worldwide economic collapse encouraged the spread of communist belief across the West, which helped the rise to power of the genocidal Nazi movement, all of which led up to the most destructive conflagration in human history. This climaxed with the dropping of the two atom bombs which ushered in the atomic age and generations of fear that the entire human race might be wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. Alongside this, in the post-war years, went the decolonisation which ended the European empires and led to the rise of what we call the Third World, often characterised by ruinous civil wars and/or famines, which recur across Africa to this day. From the 1960s onwards women’s liberation, gay rights and so on have transformed our attitudes to sex, sexuality and gender identity.

By the time I came along, as a schoolboy in the 1970s, all this history was the basic, entry-level materials of serious discussion. As earnest 6th formers our debates about politics or the meaning of life weren’t based on the ancient Greeks or the Renaissance but were informed by the horrors of twentieth century history. Entry-level debate was aware that any line of thought about, say, trying to improve society by scientific means, risked raising eugenics and the Nazis; arguments about trying to enforce a fairer society sooner or later invoked the dire example of Stalin and the gulags; anyone promoting belief in could easily be refuted by the atom bomb, and so on.

Debate about the big issues was both a) informed by the extreme political, social and scientific experiments of the 20th century and b) hemmed in by the way so many of these experiments had ended in utter disaster.

My point is that Forster and his characters know none of this. Everything which makes up the backdrop, the atmosphere, of serious modern debate on almost every issue (politics,economics, socialism, imperialism, feminism, the environment, multicultural society, science and technology, art and aesthetics, you name it) hadn’t happened yet, was invisible, didn’t exist. Although Edwardian people were as clever, canny, passionate, loving, cruel etc as you or me, they lived and thought and acted in a world Before The Fall.

This explains several things about Forster’s novels and our feeling about the Edwardian period as a whole. The obvious one is an idealised nostalgia for a much simpler, more innocent world. This explains the popularity of the Merchant Ivory dramatisations of his novels, especially ‘A Room With A View’, and the tremendous popularity of ‘Downton Abbey’ on the telly.

But the reason I’ve described all this is that, for me, the vast absence of knowledge drums home the boring triteness of the characters’ supposedly ‘serious’ conversations.

Forster’s novels regularly pause while the characters discuss the nature of Truth or Beauty or Love, ‘the Spirit of Truth’, ‘real Life’ and so on, in an embarrassingly callow, undergraduate way – but to our jaded modern eye i.e. to anyone born After the Fall, after the calamitous twentieth century, these conversations, recorded in loving detail and clearly intended to indicate important differences between characters’ beliefs and attitudes, come across as vapid, naive and irrelevant. Basically, who can care for these characters when they’re all so dim and ignorant of everything the 20th century revealed to us about human nature?

This is particularly problematic in ‘The Longest Journey’ because it is a Bildungsroman, the German term for ‘a novel dealing with one person’s formative years or spiritual education’. It is the story of the development of a mind and personality (Rickie’s) – but before most of the issues which form modern minds and personalities even existed.

To take the subject of Art which the characters waste lots of breath talking about, Forster’s novels were written before Modern Art existed or, more precisely, had become known in Britain. The full force of Symbolism across northern Europe, Cubism and the Fauves in France, the Expressionists in Germany, the first stirrings of Futurism in Italy and Vorticism in England – all these are completely absent from Forster’s texts and endless conversations about Art. His and his characters’ notions of Beauty with a capital B are almost unbearably simple-minded. They are late-Victorian, bourgeois clichés about Masterpieces of the Renaissance and the most stiflingly conventional of British salon art.

Mr. Elliot [Rickie’s father] had not one scrap of genius. He gathered the pictures and the books and the flower-supports mechanically, not in any impulse of love. He passed for a cultured man because he knew how to select, and he passed for an unconventional man because he did not select quite like other people. In reality he never did or said or thought one single thing that had the slightest beauty or value.

These people’s one aesthetic idea is that ITALY is the venerated location of Life and Beauty and, above all, the treasures of Renaissance Art, which anyone who aspires to be anyone has to know and remember, down to the finest detail of the obscurest painting in the remotest Tuscan chapel.

These axioms explain how the characters can talk the most almighty guff about the same three subjects (Beauty, Art, Italy) over and over again, in complete ignorance of the worlds of art and philosophy and politics (and communism and existentialism, feminism and environmentalism) which were to colour modern, 20th century, conversations. What I’m trying to explain is the oppressive feeling of painfully limited horizons, petty provincial opinions, naivety and simple-mindedness, which hamper and limit every conversation, character and the overall the narration.

The worship of the Renaissance is tied up with the way Rickie and his friends’ intellectual life is cabined and confined by The Classics. Top subject at the school Rickie joins is Classics. The teachers dream of editing Sophocles. In the British Museum Ansell and Widdrington marvel at how immature they are against a background of Grecian friezes. Ansell, trapped in the Classics perspective, compares everyone and everything to Greek personages and philosophy. So does Rickie, who comments on one of his fellow teachers, Mr Jackson, that:

‘He cheers one up. He does believe in poetry. Smart, sentimental books do seem absolutely absurd to him, and gods and fairies far nearer to reality. He tries to express all modern life in the terms of Greek mythology, because the Greeks looked very straight at things, and Demeter or Aphrodite are thinner veils than ‘The survival of the fittest’, or ‘A marriage has been arranged,’ and other draperies of modern journalese.’

A lot later, commenting on Stephen’s fondness for getting drunk, the narrator says:

Drink, today, is an unlovely thing. Between us and the heights of Cithaeron the river of sin now flows. Yet the cries still call from the mountain, and granted a man has responded to them, it is better he respond with the candour of the Greek. (p.266)

The very same Classics and ancient world which forms the foundation and perspective of almost all these characters’ thought and which they consider an escape from the brutality of British commercial culture, to the modern mind seems more like an incredibly constricted prison-house they can’t escape.

Forster is a subtle, intricate writer but he is writing about a tiny world, a small pond of terribly nice chaps, their paramours and maiden aunts, all displaying exquisite feelings about trivia. Seven years after the book was published they would all be marched off to the meadows of Flanders and blown to pieces in their millions, exposing their naive vapourings about Art or Beauty for the childish posturing it was, for its pitiful inadequacy to the catastrophic possibilities of life.

The Wikipedia article about ‘The Longest Journey’ quotes the critic Gilbert Adair saying that the greatest weaknesses for readers is the book’s ‘unrelenting intellectuality’, which struck me as hilariously wrong. The greatest drawback for readers is the book’s unrelenting dimness. It may often be emotionally subtle, but it is intellectually bereft. And this is important, in fact it’s vital, because the book sets out to be a description of the intellectual journey of the central character.

The plot

The book is divided into three sections which have symbolic meanings associated with the three key locations in Rickie’s life:

He was extremely sensitive to the inside of a house, holding it an organism that expressed the thoughts, conscious and subconscious, of its inmates. He was equally sensitive to places. He would compare Cambridge with Sawston, and either with a third type of existence, to which, for want of a better name, he gave the name of ‘Wiltshire’.

1. Cambridge obviously symbolises Rickie’s callow student days, more generally the life of the mind, intellect etc, and his revered friend Ansell.

2. Sawston becomes associated with his career as a teacher, work, his adult life with Agnes, supervised by her father, Mr Pembroke.

3. Wiltshire stands apart as symbolising the pagan countryside, Rickie’s malicious aunt and his stupid, virile half-brother Stephen.

Part 1. Cambridge

Frederick ‘Rickie’ Elliot has inherited his father and grandfather’s deformed foot, which makes him walk with a limp. His father is quite heartless to him, nicknaming him ‘Rickie’ as short for ricketty. His parents are well-off enough to send him to public school as a day boy. When he’s 15 his father dies and shortly afterwards so does his mother so he is passed to the care of cousins. His only friends from boyhood is the Pembroke family.

Rickie goes up to Cambridge where he makes like-minded friends (Ansell, Widdrington, Tilliard). Handily the Pembroke family son, Herbert, is there and is involved in some scenes. His little band are intellectuals or at least self-consciously aware that they are not sporty types, what later generations would call Jocks or hearties. Rickie is in awe of / worships Ansell, a philosophy student who his little group all think is the real thing although, as always with books like this, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of his philosophical abilities.

In the vacation Rickie goes to stay with the Pembroke family where he observes young Miss Pembroke, Agnes, engaged to a hearty a year or so older than him, Gerald Dawes. Something really weird happens to the narration whereby the narrator describes the couple in visionary terms almost as Greek gods, writing paragraphs of purple prose about how the sight of them inspires him to lyrical paeans.

This is all the odder because, once the narration comes back down to earth, it turns out that Gerald was at school with Rickie and sadistically and systematically bullied him. I found it impossible to understand how Rickie the character combines terrorised memories of Gerald with such overblown idealisation of the couple. Maybe it’s meant to indicate how young and callow he is, but it just comes over as weird.

Anyway, shortly afterwards Gerald dies (in a football match, the details are left vague and completely unconvincing). To nobody’s surprise this clears the way for Rickie’s lyrical feelings to spill over into Miss Pembroke and a few short years later he is introducing her to his Cambridge friends as his fiancée.

The minute-by-minute subtleties of interaction between Rickie and his friends, the descriptions of his parents and their tense household, the strange descriptions of Gerald and Miss Pembroke (Agnes), his debates about Love and Art with his best friend Ansell, his visit back to the old school, all the other little interactions with his relatives or friends at uni or his bedder or Miss Pembroke’s chaperone (Mrs Lewin) – I register all the micro-discriminations embedded in the text but just didn’t care. His depiction of Cambridge stinks of the kind of incestuous pretentiousness where everyone talks about each other having a ‘first rate mind’, being a genius, being fearfully bright etc. The Bloomsbury style of navel-gazing much of which, to us, sounds like children.

Rickie: ‘Doing right is simply doing right.’
Agnes: ‘I think that all you say is wonderfully clever.’ (p.143)

Anyway, his best friend Ansell takes against Agnes and thinks they are badly mismatched. He thinks ‘she is happy because she has conquered; he is happy because he has at last hung all the world’s beauty on to a single peg’ but, in Ansell’s view, they are both deluded.

So: sensitive young man goes to Cambridge, falls in love with schoolfriend’s fiancée, his best friend disapproves, he hopes to become a writer but his ambitions are disappointed yadda yadda.

Mrs Failing in Wiltshire

The happy couple go to visit his closest living relative, his aunt, his father’s sister, Mrs Emily Failing who lives in a grand grey house, Cadover, with a farm in flat Wiltshire (‘From the distance it showed as a grey box, huddled against evergreens’).

Aunt Emily is a distracting character, a widow deliberately taunting her staff and in particular a beefy young man Agnes’ and Rickie’s age who’s staying with her, named Stephen Wonham, who is remarkably stupid and earthy. She has a gift for making everyone uncomfortable. She makes Rickie go for a horse ride he doesn’t want to and then is tiresome and contrary with Agnes who she takes on a walk to her arbour. She nastily insists on calling Stephen a ‘hero’ for belittling and mocking Rickie.

Anyway, one day on a walk out to a barrow near her land Miss Failing deliberately shocks and upsets Rickie by telling him the family secret that Stephen is his half-brother. Rickie is so shocked he faints. When he tells Agnes she is repelled but cross at Miss Failing. She confronts her and the latter admits she did it partly to shock Rickie. She reassures Agnes that she hasn’t told Stephen himself. They fob the poor dolt (Stephen) off, in a bizarre way, by giving him a few sovereigns and telling him to go for a walk down to the sea (a journey which will take several days) and off he lumbers into the night.

If I may hazard an interpretation, the two brothers symbolise opposites, like Cain and Abel. Where Rickie is effete, over-intellectual callowness, Stephen is under-brained and earthy. Spirit versus matter. Soul versus body, etc etc.

Oddly, with the odd change of perspective and unexpected events which you wouldn’t have expected, the narrator very casually tells us that Rickie found this news so traumatic that he took to his bed for a year. During this period he tried to get his eight or nine little short stories published. When we are told they are tales of paganism in England and he has titled the volume ‘Pan Pipes’ we realise this is very close to Forster’s own short stories which are unexpectedly strange and visionary tales of paganism in England.

(Agnes is justifiably sceptical about Rickie’s chances as a writer: ‘she had always mistrusted the little stories, and now people who knew agreed with her. How could Rickie, or any one, make a living by pretending that Greek gods were alive, or that young ladies could vanish into trees?’ p.156.)

Rickie goes to see the editor of Holborn magazine who is supportive but unfortunately can’t publish any of his stories, saying they are good in parts but need to be good throughout (p.149). He meets Agnes in a London restaurant:

‘Can’t you try something longer, Rickie?’ she said; ‘I believe we’re on the wrong track. Try an out-and-out love story.’
‘My notion just now,’ he replied, ‘is to leave the passions on the fringe. She nodded, and tapped for the waiter: they had met in a London restaurant. ‘I can’t soar; I can only indicate…’

Is that a self portrait, Forster’s deprecating view of his own fiction? Or, more probably, a view he once and sometimes held, attributed to this ambitious but ineffectual young character? If so it’s ironic that so much of this novel is strange and visionary – in other words, does soar.

Anyway, the (unnamed) editor suggests that Rickie try to see a little more of Life. All very well but as he takes a cab through the London streets, Rickie wonders where you find this Life.

As he rumbled westward, his face was drawn, and his eyes moved quickly to the right and left, as if he would discover something in the squalid fashionable streets some bird on the wing, some radiant archway, the face of some god beneath a beaver hat. He loved, he was loved, he had seen death and other things; but the heart of all things was hidden. There was a password and he could not learn it, nor could the kind editor of the Holborn teach him. He sighed, and then sighed more piteously.

Alack-a-day.

2. Sawston

Part two describes how Agnes’s weak-willed schoolmaster father, Mr Pembroke, in need of help, suggests to his daughter Agnes that she and Rickie get married, come and live and work at the school. (There is a comic digression when Mr Pembroke proposes to his kindly old friend Miss Orr, who has the good sense to turn him down.) Agnes thinks it’s a great idea and sets about persuading him, using the argument that there’ll be long holidays to write in, and it’s an altruistic profession with lots of opportunities to do good. Which triggers a typically naive effusion from Rickie:

To do good! For what other reason are we here? Let us give up our refined sensations, and our comforts, and our art, if thereby we can make other people happier and better. The woman he loved had urged him to do good! With a vehemence that surprised her, he exclaimed, ‘I’ll do it.’ (p.156)

So Rickie and Agnes move into the free accommodation arranged by her father and he is paid to become a trainee teacher, learning about the gown, the timetable, how to manage the boys, the other members of staff. He is supervised and supported by Agnes’ brother, Herbert, who had been with him at Cambridge and has gone on to follow his father into teaching. Slyly, Forster shows us how Rickie finds himself being manipulated and used in the tiny but fiercely fought micro politics of the staff room, specifically by Herbert whose drawbacks Rickie slowly comes to realise.

Rickie and Agnes get married

They all get married, don’t they, the young characters in novels by Forster, H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett? In one sense it’s all they can do with their lives, it’s the only interest in them as characters. Rickie’s marriage to Agnes is treated as an anti-climax. The ceremony isn’t described, instead the way they settle into their new roles as man and wife both living at Sawston school. Agnes dislikes emotion and turmoil and quite quickly Rickie gets used to not discussing his deeper feelings.

Remember the rather ludicrous vision Rickie had of Agnes and Gerald as Greek gods when he saw them embracing? Now that turns out to be playing a sort of structural role for Rickie, because it turns out he is destined never again to see Agnes with the same intensity.

In such a bustle, what spiritual union could take place? Surely the dust would settle soon: in Italy, at Easter, he might perceive the infinities of love. But love had shown him its infinities already. Neither by marriage nor by any other device can men insure themselves a vision; and Rickie’s had been granted him three years before, when he had seen his wife and a dead man clasped in each other’s arms. She was never to be so real to him again. (p.171)

They settle into a frank good fellowship.

Ansell and Widdrington

Ansell is in the British Museum studying for his second dissertation. Tellingly, his first one failed. I think the novel is dramatising the discovery that real life turns out not to be the glamorous cakewalk we think it’ll be when we’re carefree students.

Widdrington is a mutual friend of his and Rickie’s. He went to see the newly married couple at Sawston and discovered two things: 1) he doesn’t like Agnes, who he finds stony and abrupt, no soul; and 2) Rickie is unhappy. This is due to something which the narrator told us about earlier and I didn’t really understand, but which this character Widdrington explains with admirable clarity. It is that the school where Rickie’s teaching was established as a private school for day boys from the locality. However the more ambitious head master and teachers want to expand the number of boarders because 1) more money 2) posher, like a proper public school. But this will reduce the places available for day boys and so there is quite a fierce debate going on between two factions of the staff but also with angry parents of day boys who feel their being bilked. Ansell says he couldn’t care less. He and Rickie now have nothing in common and describes Agnes as ‘that ghastly woman’.

Back at school

Back at Sawston School Rickie has realised he is not cut out to be a teacher, that Agnes doesn’t respect him and he was ceasing to love her. The boys despise Rickie and hate Agnes’s strictness. Oh dear, we’re on page 186 of 288. Will he find another love or will he soldier on becoming more lonely and sad? In one sense it’s a portrait of the many men who were relieved by the outbreak of the First World War because it liberated them from lives of quiet despair.

The daughter

Agnes gets pregnant and in due course goes into labour. As was the custom Rickie wasn’t even told, just a tap at the door of the prep class he’s taking and Herbert takes him into the corridor to deliver the news. He has a daughter but she is lame, much lamer than him, will only walk with crutches. Everyone is very nice but Rickie is stricken. After just a week the poor mite dies.

Varden

Another bad thing happens. The weakest member of the house he’s in charge of, Varden, is set upon by virtually the entire class one night after school, pushing him down onto the floor, rubbing his nose in the dirt and yanking his ears. Herbert hears and breaks it up but Varden is injured and has to have an operation before being taken out of the school by his parents. Herbert can’t understand how his young men could be so beastly but the narrator has an explanation:

What had come over his boys? Were they not gentlemen’s sons? He would not admit that if you herd together human beings before they can understand each other the great god Pan is angry, and will in the end evade your regulations and drive them mad.

Forster genuinely seems to believe in his rather limp-wristed form of paganism. In the complete absence of Freud, Jung and modern psychology, this kind of literature-based – and Classical literature-based – theory of human nature appears to be all Forster had.

Agnes has gotten over the dead daughter (‘She had got over the tragedy: she got over everything.’) She tells Rickie he needs to make up the argument he had with Aunt Emily. In a flash he perceives it’s because Agnes is after Aunt Emily’s money and they have a big quarrel, their first big fight. Agnes despises him for thinking in poetic terms; he is desperately disappointed she is so mundane and mercenary. He is learning wisdom = the disillusionments of life.

He perceived more clearly the cruelty of Nature, to whom our refinement and piety are but as bubbles, hurrying downwards on the turbid waters. They break, and the stream continues.

In a strange and wildly improbable development it turns out that this wretched bullied boy Varden had been sending letters to a variety of people, public and private, asking for their help and prayers, many of whom had charitably replied. What’s improbable is that the boy had somehow managed to write to Stephen, Rickie’s half-brother, who had written a semi-illiterate reply. This is a wild improbability but it is here so that Rickie can be plunged into a crisis about his life, filled with anger and despair that his half-brother, in his sturdy peasant illiteracy, is the one who will survive and flourish.

Forster’s narrators are surprisingly intrusive, explaining, judging, leaping gaps in the narrative and generally showing us round. Just such a passage ends a horrible sleepless night of dreams and nightmares when the narrator baldly tells us:

Henceforward he deteriorates. Let those who censure him suggest what he should do. He has lost the work that he loved, his friends, and his child. He remained conscientious and decent, but the spiritual part of him proceeded towards ruin. (p.197)

In a department store in London the pair bump into Maud Ansell, Stewart’s sister. She informs them that Stewart failed his dissertation a second time. Now he will never be a don, never have a Cambridge career, everything they scrimped and saved for has been wasted. Agnes is patronising to her; Maud gets angry.

A digression in which Forster, to be fair, tells us Agnes has her own tragedy. She realises her marriage has failed but refuses to be sentimental about it. She wishes her husband was taller, richer, more domineering. Ho hum. Life goes on.

But this is prelude to a big family fight. At dinner with Agnes and Herbert when the post arrives. First a small surprise, that Mr Jackson, a teacher in the rival ‘progressive’ faction has invited them to dinner. This is because, slightly incomprehensibly, Jackson is playing host to Stuart Ansell who has invited himself down to the school but not wanting to stay with Rickie, who he has been so long estranged from.

But another letter is from Aunt Emily and it’s this that triggers the bitter argument. Rickie knows that Agnes has been to visit Aunt Emily several times. Now a letter comes with the upshot of these visits which is that Emily is dismissing Stephen from staying with her and sending him off to a colony to make his own way. Rickie is outraged to learn that Agnes has been using his name to blacken Stephen in his aunt’s eyes and lets slip the secret fact that his father ‘strayed’ i.e. Stephen is his half-brother.

Rickie’s anger against his wife not surprisingly makes Herbert rise to the defence of his sister but also because Herbert doesn’t like disorder and wants to calm any argument. He backs up her accusation that the Elliots are an odd family, that Aunt Emily has behave badly, that Stephen is a monster best out of the country etc. Rickie could weep with frustration at not being able to make him see what Agnes has done wrong and how manipulative she’s being. For a moment brother and sister are very close in their wrong-headedness. Then the narrator goes on to editorialise.

There are moments for all of us when we seem obliged to speak in a new unprofitable tongue. One might fancy a seraph, vexed with our normal language, who touches the pious to blasphemy, the blasphemous to piety. The seraph passes, and we proceed unaltered. (p.210)

Whether you like this kind of rhetoric and diction will determine whether you like this book. I understand its delicate poetic intent. I understand it is a metaphor. But in the difficult lives we are faced with I find it neither really insightful nor a practical help.

Ansell visits

I haven’t mentioned that Aunt Emily’s deceased husband, Anthony Failing (‘He loved poetry and music and pictures, and everything tempted him to live in a kind of cultured paradise, with the door shut upon squalor’), left a volume of essays (titled ‘What We Want’) to which she wrote a little introduction and which has now been published. Ansell, the failed philosopher is reading and annotating it in the garden of Sawton School.

The passage he’s reading is on the difference between coarseness and vulgarity (coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something). This is an example of the useless, superficial diddling which passes for ‘thought’ among these people. It’s more a question of manners and etiquette than any kind of serious structural analysis. No wonder England was considered the unintellectual country all across the Continent.

Anyway Ansell is quietly seething because at dinner the night before, old Mr Pembroke and his daughter, Agnes, had both commiserated in a way which made it clear they consider him a failure. His reflections are interrupted when someone throws a clod of earth at his back and he gets into a ridiculous fight with Stephen Wonham although it takes him a moment, and the narrator quite a long time, to confirm his identity. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Ansell is oversoaked in late-Victorian fetish for all things ancient Greek and so is struck that Stephen is like…an ancient Greek.

He gave the idea of an animal with just enough soul to contemplate its own bliss. United with refinement, such a type was common in Greece. It is not common today (p.216)

Because this is such an obvious thought the narrator tries to dress it up in fancy syntax.

Was it only a pose to like this man, or was he really wonderful? He was not romantic, for Romance is a figure with outstretched hands, yearning for the unattainable. Certain figures of the Greeks, to whom we continually return, suggested him a little. (p.217)

Anyway Stephen tells the story of how Aunt Emily, backed up by the old retainers, kicked him out, giving him £100 and throwing a packet at him which contained the documents proving he is Rickie’s half-brother. He’s been travelling rough across country to the school to tell Rickie (not realising that Rickie already knows). At this point, the maid comes to call Stephen into the house for an interview with Mrs Elliot (not Rickie). Ansell fantasises that the menfolk will have gone up to dress for dinner not realising what a bombshell was bursting downstairs and, characteristically, sees it through the prism of ancient Greek drama.

The irony of the situation appealed to him strongly. It reminded him of the Greek Drama, where the actors know so little and the spectators so much. (p.221)

Part one of the denouement is Stephen and Mrs Elliot (Agnes). She invites him in for an interview and immediately gets down to business offering him £2 if he will sign a contract swearing to keep silent forever about being Rickie’s brother. it takes him some minutes to understand what is going on which Agnes takes for playing hard to get. Once he understands he stands up, outraged or disgusted, and simply walks out.

Part two of the denouement comes when Agnes, Rickie and Herbert call Ansell to come into the hall because it is now dinner time. The hall is full of their boys and servants bringing in the meal. It is in front of all these that Ansell deliberately humiliates Rickie by telling him he has a brother he doesn’t know about, and that his wife has hidden from him. Much gasping among the boys, and some prefects stand as if to make a physical defence but Ansell ploughs on to accuse Rickie of being the one who’s passed on accusations about Stephen and so caused his brother to be turned out of his home and sent to be a tramp. It’s hard to imagine a more ruinous accusation and in front of Rickie’s entire House.

But Rickie compounds the situation by admitting he had a philanderer for a father and a dark horse for a brother. In front of all the boys. Who will go home and tell their parents. Who will threaten to withdraw their boys from the school. But it’s then that Ansell drops the real bombshell which none of us expected: Stephen is not the son of his philandering father but of his unfaithful mother! Rickie faints and has to be carried from the hall. Pandemonium. The gossip is broadcast throughout the school within the hour.

Part 2 ends with a page of Forster editorialising which I will include in its entirety as a chunk of his style and thought. I understood all the words and read it twice but still don’t know what it means.

The soul has her own currency. She mints her spiritual coinage and stamps it with the image of some beloved face. With it she pays her debts, with it she reckons, saying, ‘This man has worth, this man is worthless.’ And in time she forgets its origin; it seems to her to be a thing unalterable, divine. But the soul can also have her bankruptcies.

Perhaps she will be the richer in the end. In her agony she learns to reckon clearly. Fair as the coin may have been, it was not accurate; and though she knew it not, there were treasures that it could not buy. The face, however beloved, was mortal, and as liable as the soul herself to err. We do but shift responsibility by making a standard of the dead.

There is, indeed, another coinage that bears on it not man’s image but God’s. It is incorruptible, and the soul may trust it safely; it will serve her beyond the stars. But it cannot give us friends, or the embrace of a lover, or the touch of children, for with our fellow mortals it has no concern. It cannot even give the joys we call trivial – fine weather, the pleasures of meat and drink, bathing and the hot sand afterwards, running, dreamless sleep. Have we learnt the true discipline of a bankruptcy if we turn to such coinage as this? Will it really profit us so much if we save our souls and lose the whole world?

If we start from the position that there is no soul and no God then surely these 250 words are literally meaningless. They may have value as a metaphor but like so many of Forster’s metaphors are such hard work for so little reward that it’s not worth the effort.

I liked the Great Scene of Ansell denouncing his old friend because it was dramatic, and the entire storyline of the disreputable relative carries the whiff of Victorian melodrama at its most garish. Think of Pip discovering the truth about Magwitch in Great Expectations. But the comparison also highlights Forster’s limp-wristed diffuseness. He has regular moments of great perspicuity and imagines his characters in great detail – but at the same time he drowns them in half-hearted treacle about The Greek Spirit and the Great God Pan and the currency of the soul.

Part 3. Wiltshire

I was expecting Rickie to quit being a schoolmaster, maybe separate from Agnes, and retire injured to Aunt Emily’s estate where, maybe, he finds his true self amid the pagan countryside… Maybe someone has to die or commit suicide to give it the real oomph that a serious novel of his time aspired to…

But the book commences a new part because it denotes a change not only of scenery but of time. It took me a few pages to realise what was going on, but the entire narrative ups sticks and flashes back twenty years or more, to an account of How Mrs Elliot, Rickie’s Mother, Ran Off With a Farmer i.e. how Stephen the half-brother was conceived.

Basically a farmer named Robert fell hopelessly in love with Mrs Elliot on first meeting her at Tony and Emily Failing’s house when Mr and Mrs Elliott are visiting. Tony Failing gets wind of it and escorts him off the premises but not too sharply since he is the author of those whimsical essays about vulgarity and whatnot and so tolerates Robert’s visits on condition they are squeaky clean. Typically, Tony’s confused moral position is expressed in classical metaphor:

For he remembered that sensual and spiritual are not easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not two Aphrodites, but one Aphrodite with a Janus face. (p.233)

And so Robert nurses his love but remains outwardly clean, polite and civil for six long years until one day he calls and finds Mrs Elliot alone and, in his blunt country way, declares his love for her. She tells him to leave this instant but Mr Elliot returns at this point and is much more civil and suave. This turns out to be a mistake because it breaches the emotional defences against Robert which Mrs Elliot was just about holding together and next thing you know… they have run off to Stockholm!

Tony and Emily Failing get a letter from her from Stockholm, debate what to do, then set off to Stockholm to confront her. However, by the time they arrive, Robert has drowned. A landsman, he had never swum in the sea before and didn’t know about tides, got carried away and drowned. (You can’t help feeling Forster has a very casual way with his characters’ lives.) So the lover is conveniently out of the way but not before impregnating Mrs Elliot. The Mrs and Mrs Elliot manage to reconcile but Mrs Elliot remains abroad in order to conceal her pregnancy and giving birth: she returns to England with him, giving out that he is the baby of a family friend. Everything about her elopement and having another man’s baby is covered up.

She comes to dislike her forgiving husband but, strangely, to love both her boys. Love for Stephen, who’s the spitting image of his father, rough and strong and blunt, makes her love Rickie the more. When Mr Elliot dies in middle age, his wife looks forward to the autumn of her years raising her two boys but fate had other plans and she herself dies shortly afterwards.

So there’s the backstory – how Rickie has a half-brother of a completely different characters – all neatly explained. The next chapter describes the growth of young Stephen. Actually it jumps straight to his young manhood when he wanders like a pagan god among the rolling farmland of Wiltshire. The deaths in quick succession of Mr Failing who was looking after him, Mr Elliot and then Mrs Elliot who was always kind to him (because she was, unknown to him, his mother) means none of them had had time to make a will or leave him any money. Instead he falls into the care of Mrs Failing, Aunt Emily, who maliciously thinks it will be comical to keep the two boys apart and in ignorance of their true relationship.

Jump back to the present and the scene we left, with Stephen blundering out of Sawston school. Ansell goes running round looking for Stephen but the latter has hidden under a railway archway. He heads into London and gets a job for a few weeks with a removal company. He holds a horse for a man who overtips him. He sends some of the money to Cadover to pay for the windows he smashed after being kicked out by Mrs Failing. Then, unable to stay away, he gets blind drunk and makes his way back to Sawston where he announces his presence by throwing a brick through a window and breaking down the front door, waking up Rickie, Herbert and Ansell.

So. There are 40 pages of the novel left and we are in a pickle. What can possibly happen next? What happens is next day Stephen is full of contrition while Rickie, Herbert and Agnes have to go about their days’ duties. Once Stephen’s woken up from his hangover sleep, Rickie has an interview with him which goes wrong because Stephen is pagan simplicity and refuses to fit into Rickie’s bourgeois preconceptions and concerns.

Above all, Stephen realises that Rickie’s wish to have him (Stephen) stay at Sawston isn’t based on a true understanding of his personality, but because Stephen reminds him of his mother who he has never stopped loving. Stephen rejects all this sentimental tripe and tears up the photo of their mother which Rickie hands him, steps outside into the fog and then… asks Rickie to come with him! It is a key decision point. Rickie looks back at the house containing Herbert, an average scheming teacher who sides against him, and his wife who despises him and… what the hell! goes running off into the fog with Stephen.

Rickie set free

I was hoping the two half-brothers would roam like swaggering vagabonds across the south of England but this is a Forster novel, timid and fearful like its author. So Rickie and Steven end up going to stay with the Ansells in some village. Agnes quickly learns that Rickie’s gone there, she and Herbert try to persuade him to come home but he isn’t interested.

There’s some chaff about this but the last big action of the novel comes when Aunt Emily invites Rickie to visit her at Cadover. Again. So off he sets. Just for a lark, Stephen at the last minute jumps into the train in order to come with him, despite all Rickie’s protestations. He’s grown to like his straightforward, undeceitful brother, even if they all disapprove of his new penchant for heavy drinking.

There follows a surprisingly prolonged description of Rickie’s railway journey towards Salisbury. During it Rickie extracts a promise from Stephen that he’ll remain sober for the duration of their two or three-day stay. Then he gets a pony and trap out to Mrs Failings’ house. Rickie forbids Stephen from accompanying him so Stephen instead goes to the local pub, The Antelope.

The title phrase and homosexuality

The phrase ‘the longest journey’ comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Epipsychidion. Rickie reads this section of the poem aloud when he’s in Wiltshire.

I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor souls with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and longest journey go.

I’m not completely certain what it means or what its relevance is to the narrative. Does it imply that Rickie is one of ‘those poor souls’ who condemns himself to travelling the ‘longest journey’ (of life?) ‘with one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe’? In which case, who precisely is this chained friend and jealous foe? Is it Stephen, the half-brother who haunts his respectable life? Or his heartless wife, Agnes?

The phrase is repeated again, right at the end of the book, when Stephen has come along with Rickie on his visit to Aunt Emily. Before Rickie goes on to visit the aunt the pair play like schoolboys in a stream, lighting paper lanterns which float down the stream, rather beautifully. Rickie is caught wondering what his life has been about.

Romantic love is greater than this. There are men and women — we know it from history — who have been born into the world for each other, and for no one else, who have accomplished the longest journey locked in each other’s arms. But romantic love is also the code of modern morals, and, for this reason, popular. Eternal union, eternal ownership—these are tempting baits for the average man. He swallows them, will not confess his mistake, and — perhaps to cover it — cries ‘dirty cynic’ at such a man as Stephen. (p.271)

Again, I didn’t really follow this. As Rickie follows Stephen’s instructions for making the lanterns, he feels transformed.

Rickie obeyed, though intent on the transfigured face. He believed that a new spirit dwelt there, expelling the crudities of youth. He saw steadier eyes, and the sign of manhood set like a bar of gold upon steadier lips. Some faces are knit by beauty, or by intellect, or by a great passion: had Stephen’s waited for the touch of the years?

Is this gay? The scene is set at dusk in a country stream and the mood is of tremendous acceptance and affection between the brothers. It’s a lyrical scene and all the better for not being saddled with one of Forster’s heavy classical references, just being itself.

But is the obscurity of phrasing because Forster feels in his heart a gay or queer connection between them? He’s feeling the love that dare not speak its name and so is censoring himself and so it comes out in this cryptic mode?

Dinner and the pub

Rickie goes on to have dinner with Aunt Emily. She advises him to go back to Agnes but he seems to have made his mind up to devote his life to literature. Some friends have encouraged him to write and also advise him to go to Italy (as Forster himself did). Anyway, he’s not going back to Agnes.

And in a far bigger ‘anyway’, he is now obsessed with Stephen. He replays the scene at dusk in the stream during dinner and, afterwards, asks Aunt Emily’s youngish manservant, Leighton, if he wants to accompany him to the village to find Stephen. When they get to the pub where Stephen’s staying, Rickie asks Leighton to go in, to ask if Stephen wants to come for a walk (Rickie is scared of going into a pub. That’s what a ‘milksop’ he is). Meanwhile Rickie’s feelings about Stephen are blossoming.

Stephen was a hero. He was a law to himself, and rightly. He was great enough to despise our small moralities. He was attaining love. This evening Rickie caught Ansell’s enthusiasm, and felt it worth while to sacrifice everything for such a man. (p.278)

But Leighton discovers that Stephen’s been drinking, in fact he’s so drunk he can’t stand. Rickie is outraged that Stephen has broken his promise but then directs his disillusionment against himself. He was foolish to trust him, to believe in people i.e. a typically immature over-reaction.

The brutal shock ending

It’s worth portraying Rickie’s state of mind just before he dies.

He leant against the parapet and prayed passionately, for he knew that the conventions would claim him soon. God was beyond them, but ah, how far beyond, and to be reached after what degradation! At the end of this childish detour his wife awaited him, not less surely because she was only his wife in name. He was too weak. Books and friends were not enough. Little by little she would claim him and corrupt him and make him what he had been; and the woman he loved would die out, in drunkenness, in debauchery, and her strength would be dissipated by a man, her beauty defiled in a man. She would not continue. That mystic rose and the face it illumined meant nothing. The stream — he was above it now — meant nothing, though it burst from the pure turf and ran for ever to the sea. The bather, the shoulders of Orion-they all meant nothing, and were going nowhere. The whole affair was a ridiculous dream.

You feel there could be no arguing for a young man who was so immature and melodramatic. Leighton goes back to the pub to reason with Stephen only to be told Stephen left a while ago to follow them. Puzzled they arrive at the railway level crossing as a slow goods strain is approaching, to see Stephen drunkenly sprawled across the rails. Rickie runs forward and throw his drunken brother free of the rails, but is too slow himself. It’s worth quoting the entire scene in full, mostly because of the abrupt and brutal, throwaway treatment of the event, but also because it demonstrates Forster’s peculiar way with language and psychology. I’ve reread it numerous times and don’t really understand exactly how or why it happens.

He wandered a little along the Roman road. Again nothing mattered. At the level-crossing he leant on the gate to watch a slow goods train pass. In the glare of the engine he saw that his brother had come this way, perhaps through some sodden memory of the Rings, and now lay drunk over the rails. Wearily he did a man’s duty. There was time to raise him up and push him into safety. It is also a man’s duty to save his own life, and therefore he tried. The train went over his knees. He died up in Cadover, whispering, ‘You have been right,’ to Mrs Failing.

‘It is also a man’s duty to save his own life, and therefore he tried,’ what does that mean? What does he mean ‘tried’. If he was stone cold sober surely there was time to nip out of the train’s way. But why is it phrased like this, ‘It is also a man’s duty to save his own life’? Is the implication that he is so, so tired and disillusioned that, although consciously aware of this ‘duty’, he is only half-hearted? But the text says ‘he tried’? Maybe it’s me but I find Forster’s psychology, I mean the way he depicts the minds and feelings of all his characters, very often bewilderingly obtuse.

Coda

What’s surprising is that, after this ‘random’ brutal killing of his protagonist, Forster gives us a final chapter of six more pages. In this Stephen has established himself as a farmer, and is discussing the posthumous publication of Rickie’s stories in a volume to be titled Pan’s Pipes, with Mr Pembroke, who is now a clergyman. They are arguing, Stephen is supplying 10 of Rickie’s stories to the clergyman’s 4, and demands a similar percentage of the royalties. Disgruntled, the clergyman leaves in a pony and trap.

Stephen is now married and has a three-year-old daughter so this must be 4 years (?) later. Now, as dusk falls, he wraps his little girl up and insists, despite his wife calling, that they go and sleep out on the Downs, in the warm evening. After opening with the silly conversation of the over-educated Cambridge undergraduates, the novel closes with the man of the soil Stephen, refusing his wife’s womanly entreaties to stay home, and insisting on wrapping up his small daughter and taking her to commune with the earth. From spirit to body. From air to earth. This ending has a surprisingly D.H. Lawrence primitivism, despite that the face the Lawrence hadn’t yet published a word.

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Rickie the intellectual midget

He was only used to Cambridge, and to a very small corner of that. He and his friends there believed in free speech. But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that results from a little beer.

Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in autumn 1911 and came to loathe it for its intellectual provincialism, its idiocy and its smug air of self congratulation. This novel helps you understand why. I found the self-satisfied triteness about ‘morality’ and ‘the Good’ and ‘the True’ unbearable, stuff like:

The sense of purity is a puzzling and at times a fearful thing. It seems so noble, and it starts as one with morality. But it is a dangerous guide, and can lead us away not only from what is gracious, but also from what is good. (p.144)

You can argue that Rickie, his friends and girlfriend are meant to be immature, silly, callow, and that this is the novel’s deliberate aim. But this is the narrator speaking, this is the narrative voice, which interchanges quite easily with the characters. It’s only when Rickie arrives in Sawston that the narrator comes clean about his limitations:

Rickie’s intellect was not remarkable. He came to his worthier results rather by imagination and instinct than by logic. An argument confused him, and he could with difficulty follow it even on paper. (170)

But by then it was too late for me, I was irrevocably put off the book by its undergraduate callowness. W.H. Auden has a line in ‘To a writer on his birthday’, looking back on himself and Isherwood as two sniggering students, declaring that ‘all the secrets we discovered were extraordinary and false.’ All the great ‘intellectual’ and ‘moral’ findings in this novel strike me in the same way.

Purple patches

With a canvas twice the long as his first book, Forster lets himself go and I don’t like it.

The rain tilted a little from the south-west. For the most part it fell from a grey cloud silently, but now and then the tilt increased, and a kind of sigh passed over the country as the drops lashed the walls, trees, shepherds, and other motionless objects that stood in their slanting career. At times the cloud would descend and visibly embrace the earth, to which it had only sent messages; and the earth itself would bring forth clouds — clouds of a whiter breed — which formed in shallow valleys and followed the courses of the streams. It seemed the beginning of life. Again God said, ‘Shall we divide the waters from the land or not? Was not the firmament labour and glory sufficient?’ At all events it was the beginning of life pastoral, behind which imagination cannot travel.

I’m afraid I think this is rubbish, on every possible level, as either literal description or as insight into Rickie’s supposed state of mind; and the casual invocation of the kind of meek God that suits Forster made me barf. There’s a lot, lot more written in the same overblown style. Here’s Rickie in love:

She had been a goddess both in joy and sorrow. She was a goddess still. But he had dethroned the god whom once he had glorified equally. Slowly, slowly, the image of Gerald had faded. That was the first step. Rickie had thought, ‘No matter. He will be bright again. Just now all the radiance chances to be in her.’ And on her he had fixed his eyes. He thought of her awake. He entertained her willingly in dreams. He found her in poetry and music and in the sunset. She made him kind and strong. She made him clever. (p.71)

Masquerading as Significant Thought, there are repeated passages saying what frail insects we are on the huge indifferent earth etc etc, which just feel banal and obvious:

Ah, the frailty of joy! Ah, the myriads of longings that pass without fruition, and the turf grows over them! Better men, women as noble — they had died up here and their dust had been mingled, but only their dust. These are morbid thoughts, but who dare contradict them? There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line, and some of us have Rickie’s temperament, or his experiences, and admit it. So he mused, that anxious little speck, and all the land seemed to comment on his fears and on his love…

He had lost all sense of incident. In this great solitude — more solitary than any Alpine range — he and Agnes were floating alone and for ever, between the shapeless earth and the shapeless clouds. An immense silence seemed to move towards them. A lark stopped singing, and they were glad of it. They were approaching the Throne of God. The silence touched them; the earth and all danger dissolved.

It feels like Thomas Hardy without Hardy’s rich lugubriousness. Then again, is all this a sly game? Is it over-written and shallow like this to indicate Rickie’s immaturity and callowness?

Name-dropping

The characters move in a miasma of artistic and literary references. I don’t think a single one of these does anything to move the story forwards. As far as I can tell they are there solely to signal the educated class the characters come from and the book is aimed at and, more practically, to flatter the bourgeois reader by dispensing cultural references easy enough for us to recognise and feel smug about:

He thought of Renan, who declares that on the Acropolis at Athens beauty and wisdom do exist, really exist, as external powers.

Suddenly she stopped, not through any skill of his, but because she had remembered some words of Bacon: ‘The true atheist is he whose hands are cauterized by holy things.’ (p.97)

Having changed her dress and glanced at the poems of Milton, she went to them, with uplifted hands of apology and horror. (p.97)

And when Rickie and Stewart exchange letters criticising each other’s worldview:

Read poetry – not only Shelley. Understand Beatrice, and Clara Middleton, and Brunhilde in the first scene of Gotterdammerung. Understand Goethe when he says ‘the eternal feminine leads us on.’ (p.87)

Understand Xanthippe, and Mrs. Bennet, and Elsa in the question scene of Lohengrin. Understand Euripides when he says the eternal feminine leads us a pretty dance. (p.87)

Even Mrs Failing’s two horses are named Dido and Aeneas, ho ho.

Again he spoke of old Em’ly, and recited the poem, with Aristophanic variations.

In the scene between Mr Wonham and the soldier you can feel the way the narrator’s deployment of cultural references like this is not an amplification of lived experience but an old maid escape, a denial or rejection of life. Books are safer than life, an attitude Forster embodies and lightly satirises in the character of the intellectual eunuch, Ansell. But although his story mocks Ansell the text itself subscribes to Ansell’s bookish values.

There may be moments of insight and clever psychology in such a long baggy monster, but overall I didn’t enjoy this book.

Gay

What makes all the purple patches about heterosexual love so funny is that Forster was gay, homosexual, queer. In 1914 he wrote ‘Maurice’, a novel about a gay love affair which he kept secret and wasn’t published until after his death, in 1971. I’m afraid knowledge of his lifelong homosexuality completely undermined my belief in the scores of passages where Rickie waxes lyrical about his beloved Agnes being a goddess, a spirit, a divine being etc.

Obviously the main intention of these passages is to flag Rickie’s hopeless immaturity but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Forster was also overdoing it, overcompensating, replacing the subtleties and edginess of real love (gay or straight) with great dollops of Victorian romanticism, and doing it for security reasons. In order to be safe and avoid the slightest accusation of homosexuality. He was writing just ten years after the Oscar Wilde case. Everyone was scared. Lilia’s infatuation with Gino and Philip’s obsession with Miss Abbott in his previous novel, ‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’ both felt more convincing (relatively speaking).

The passages at the very end, from the train journey Rickie and Stephen share and especially the lovely description of lighting the paper lanterns on the stream, and the lyrical mood it puts Rickie in, is this all queer love, Rickie’s gay love for lovely rough and manly Stephen? And is this why Rickie has to die? Partly because, as a character, he’s pretty much played out? But mostly because the love that dare not speak its name needs to be censored out of existence?

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Credit

The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster was first published in 1907 by Blackwood. References are to the 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

• The Longest Journey online

Related reviews

• E.M. Forster reviews
• Edwardian reviews