‘What a mercy it is to have all this money about one!’
(Margaret Schlegel unwittingly expressing the fundamental premise underlying all Forster’s fiction, Howards End, page 182)

‘Howard’s End’ immediately feels better than ‘The Longest Day’. That felt like a late-Victorian novel wasting a huge amount of space on the relatively worthless character of one callow, useless Cambridge undergraduate in a text littered with the worst of Forster’s dreamy, pagan visions. ‘Howard’s End’ immediately feels like a return to a story, a strong narrative with multiple characters having lots of interactions, the elements which made ‘A Room with a View’ so entertaining. It is also Forster’s longest, most complex novel, with a wide range of subjects and themes, from gentle social comedy to bitter tragedy.

Three families

There’s a good enough plot summary on the Wikipedia page. Rather than produce my own version, this blog post is more of a list of the book’s themes and issues, or the ones which struck me.

In essence, ‘Howards End’ describes the interactions of three families:

The Schlegel sisters

The main focus of the novel is on the grown-up Schlegel sisters, Margaret (29) and Helen (21), arty and cultured. Their mother Emily died giving birth to their brother Theobald (Tibby). For five years they were raised by their father but then he died and so Emily’s sister, Juley Munt (Mrs Munt, Aunt Juley) moved into their home, Wickham Place, London, to look after them. When Margaret (‘a sensitive woman’) came of age and started to run the household (i.e. manage the servants) Aunt Juley returned to her home in Swanage where she is a leading light of local literary and arts societies, although she spends much of the novel on extended visits. During the course of the novel Tibby comes of age and attends Oxford.

The Wilcox family

Brisk no-nonsense philistines led by successful businessman Mr Henry Wilcox, married to dreamy gardening Mrs Ruth Wilcox (51), and their grown-up children, stern Charles, Evie and ineffective Paul. After a rocky start Mrs Wilcox and Margaret develop a strange friendship. A third of the way through Mrs Wilcox dies, having concealed her illness (cancer?) from her husband and children. The remaining two-thirds of the novel chronicle the unlikely falling in love of the apparent opposites, in both age and temperament, of Henry Wilcox (mid-50s) and Margaret Schlegel (late 20s).

The Basts

Poor Leonard Bast is a gauche young man who works as a clerk in an insurance company but has aspirations to Art and Culture, pathetically trying to achieve the cultural capital privileged Margaret and Helen were born into.

He is trapped in a relationship with a hard-core working class woman, Jacky who, at the start of the novel, has lost her looks, dresses like a slattern, and thereafter goes steadily downhill, turning Len’s home life into a nightmare of endless sordid arguments. Later on, Forster describes Jacky as ‘bestially stupid’ (p.224).

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food. Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, ‘All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas,’ and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slipped into the abyss where nothing counts, and the statements of Democracy are inaudible.

Not quite in the abyss, but whenever he appears, to the sensitive noses of the Schlegel sisters he trails ‘odours of the abyss’ (p.124).

Counterpoints and ironies

A whole host of issues, or social codes and conventions, are raised and dramatised by the book. These include the contrast between the hard factual Wilcox family and the dreamy arty Schlegel ladies, which is also a contrast between their German blood (their father fought in the Franco-Prussian war then emigrated to England from the Fatherland) and the Wilcox’s pure Englishness. There are continual comparisons between men and women, conceived almost as separate species with separate ways of looking at everything. There’s the contrast between young vivacious Helen and her older, more serious sister Margaret. The contrast between all the above and the hapless working class man, Leonard Bast, perched on the edge of the abyss. The contrasting attitudes towards the working classes of the Wilcox men (keep them at a distance) and the Schlegel sisters (try to help and elevate them). On a geographical level, the perennial contrast between London and the countryside (at Howards End in Hertfordshire, Oniton Grange in Shropshire, or Aunt Juley’s place in Swanage).

All these contrasts are continually being sounded, like an orchestra playing an extended piece of classical music based on multiple themes or motivs, which are continually sounding then reappearing, in new combinations, between different characters, in difference circumstances. In music this is called counterpoint but, because words have meanings, the orchestration of a long novel like this amounts to sets of interlocking ironies, where different systems of values, personal affections, codes of behaviour, expectations and opinions are constantly clashing and interacting.

Readers identify with sensitive ladies

The main focus is on the Schlegel sisters, nice upper middle-class young women, rentiers living on unearned incomes, who’ve never done a day’s work in their lives but who they and their friends simply assume, in that Bloomsbury way, are everso special, intelligent, cultured, sensitive etc.

Emily’s daughters had never been quite like other girls.

‘Helen is a very exceptional person – I am sure you will let me say this, feeling towards her as you do – indeed, all the Schlegels are exceptional.’ (p.32)

‘My niece is a very exceptional person, and I am not inclined to sit still while she throws herself away on those who will not appreciate her.’

Admittedly, those passages can all be dismissed as Aunt Juley’s entirely biased opinion of her brilliant nieces, but this next passage describing wafting Mrs Wilcox in a similarly privileged vein, is the narrator’s opinion:

She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it. One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her — that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy. High born she might not be. But assuredly she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her. (p.36)

Many readers love ‘Howards End’. Only a little way into the book, it occurred to me that this is because readers, specifically women readers, are encouraged to identify with the characters in book, specifically the sensitive ladies, Helen and Margaret and Mrs W, who are repeatedly described as ‘special’, gifted with special insights and above all, depths of feeling, which any female reader might be flatter to identify with.

Not out of them are the shows of history erected: the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it entirely composed of Miss Schlegels. But the world being what it is, perhaps they shine out in it like stars.

Away she hurried, not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities — something best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life. (p.25)

What lady reader of Great Literature would not feel that she, also, possesses ‘a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life’? And what older female reader wouldn’t sympathise with the calm wisdom of tall, elegant, other-worldly Mrs Wilcox, trailing around her beautifully tended garden, effortlessly dispensing the wisdom of her ancestors?

The rentier mentality

As privileged rentiers (people who live off investments) the Schlegel sisters and Miss Munt can afford an attitude of disliking and condemning everything about the ghastly modern world because they make no contribution to it and have no responsibility for it.

At one point Margaret explains that she and Helen each have an unearned income of £600 a year and brother Tibby, when he comes of age, will have £800. Most significantly, she admits that the sisters’ thoughts are determined by their financial and class position.

‘And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches… Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin.’ (p.73)

Presented as some great intellectual breakthrough, like so many of the sisters’ trite thoughts about ‘society’ or ‘life’, the realisation that just possibly having or not having money is more important than ‘love’ is characteristically thick. Into these dense, pampered middle-class minds, a vaguely socialist concern for ‘equality’ sometimes creeps in but not when it counts. It’s a frivolous dabbling. When push comes to shove they both (a little unexpectedly and crudely) worship money, riches, wealth (see below).

Snobbery and comedy

The book is riddled with English class snobbery. In ‘A Room with a View’ English snobbery, and especially snobbery about Art and Love, were very amusingly skewered in the range of preposterously snooty English guests staying at the Pension Bertolini in Florence.

One of the problems of ‘The Longest Journey’ is that the compulsion Forster apparently felt to write ceaselessly about Art and Philosophy and Life and Love or to pop in passages comparing everyone to the pagan gods, was mostly restricted to commentary on poor Rickie Elliott who is, ultimately, too feeble a character (‘a milksop’, as his aunt’s servant describes him) to bear such a heavy freight of meaning.

By happy contrast, here in ‘Howard’s End’, a lot of this satirical and/or classical material is distributed out among multiple characters, so the purple patches feel more rationed and, when they occur, relate to a wider range of characters and so feel more fully dramatised. In ‘The Longest Journey’ Forster was too close to his central protagonist (a transparently autobiographical figure). Here he returns to the distance from all the characters which allows him to be more consistently ironic and so entertaining.

Thus Aunt Juley (Mrs Munt) is an enjoyable satire on the busybody upper middle-class rentier who considers themselves an expert on Art and Literature. Here she is quizzing Margaret Schlegel:

‘What do you think of the Wilcoxes? Are they our sort? Are they likely people? Could they appreciate Helen, who is to my mind a very special sort of person? Do they care about Literature and Art? That is most important when you come to think of it. Literature and Art. Most important.’

But instead of actually making Aunt Juley an expert on Literature and Art, the whole point is that she is as expert in names but empty of thought as all the snobs in ‘A Room with a View’. When Forster tells us she is a leading light in the literary world of Swanage, it is a deft piece of social put-down. This is drily comical (or maybe ironic) and once someone is established as a comic character it gives you permission to smile at everything they say and do. And out from Aunt Juley radiates irony and droll amusement at most of the other characters, creating the gently comic note which colours most of the proceedings. And, on a different level, the sisters’ pampered, thoughtless lifestyle along with their complete inability to manage anything effectively whenever called upon, makes them figures of fun. Forster intends them seriously, maybe even tragically, but they are absurd.

The focus on personal relationships

If the Bloomsbury Group had an ideology it was that personal relations – family, friendship and love – trumped everything else, certainly all those dusty old Victorian notions of Duty and Progress. But it is a limited worldview and they knew it. Forster dramatises it in the contrast between the men of the Wilcox family, Charles senior and junior, and the drifting sensitive Schlegel sisters. Contact with the Wilcox family and its manly menfolk early in the narrative, make Helen realise there’s a big world out there:

‘The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched — a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There love means marriage settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear. But here my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid, often seems the real one — there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?’

But in the morning, over breakfast, she saw the younger Wilcox son she had rashly fallen in love with, Paul, completely daunted by his brisk businesslike family, realised how weak and fragile his facade was and so (rather illogically) concludes that personal relationships are all that matters.

‘I remember Paul at breakfast,’ said Helen quietly. ‘I shall never forget him. He had nothing to fall back upon. I know that personal relations are the real life, for ever and ever.’

She is relieved to realise she was right all along, she and Margaret and Aunt Juley and all the sensitive spiritual types they invite to their house and enjoy bantering with over dinner cooked and served by the faceless servants, they’re all right to more or less ignore the wider world and gossip about their personal affairs.

This basic premise of the Bloomsbury worldview is repeated umpteen times, in different wording, as if a great truth was being worked out.

It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision. (p.91)

‘I believe in personal responsibility. Don’t you? And in personal everything…’ (p.232)

‘Nothing matters,’ the Schlegels had said in the past, ‘except one’s self-respect and that of one’s friends.’ (p.322)

It’s not surprising that these pampered characters – never having to work for a living, never having to apply or be interviewed for jobs, never having to worry about commuting, about office politics, never holding any responsibilities for anything at all, with nothing to occupy their minds except their personal relationships – should come to the amazing conclusion that the only thing that matters in the world is… personal relationships!

What is surprising is that, given that they only have one job to do i.e. to manage their handful of significant relationships (with a small family and a small number of friends) they manage to make such a complete horlicks, such an almighty mess of it!

Margaret Schlegel is depicted as the sterner, brainier of the two sisters (she enjoys ‘a reputation as an emancipated woman’, p.156), and yet she makes howlingly embarrassing errors at every point of her relationship with the Wilcox family, over and over again: dispatching Aunt Juley to Howard’s End to sort out Helen’s rash engagement; angering Charles Wilcox so much that they aren’t talking by the end of the drive to the house; writing a clumsily offensive letter to Mrs Wilcox about keeping Paul and Helen apart; visiting her to apologise and promptly smashing her photo of her son’s wedding; then having a massive argument with her in the cab back from Christmas shopping – Margaret Schlegel is depicted as a clumsy, incompetent social disaster! The novel routinely transcribes her conversations with Helen or Aunt Juley as if she is dropping pearls of wisdom and yet time after time we see, in practice, that she’s the last person to take advice from.

The phrase is given to Helen a lot later in the book, when Margaret tells her Mr Wilcox has proposed to her. Helene is appalled and her repetition of the idea has an air of desperately clinging to a notion which no longer suffices.

‘They were all there that morning when I came down to breakfast, and saw that Paul was frightened — the man who loved me frightened and all his paraphernalia fallen, so that I knew it was impossible, because personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.’ (p.177)

I suppose from one angle the novel is a test of this thesis, an experiment in characters and plot which put it to the test and repeatedly find it failing but don’t exactly come up with anything better.

The shallowness of Edwardian feminism

The Schlegel sisters are portrayed, in detail, with much sympathy, as typically know-nothing feminists. They ‘care deeply’ about politics although they don’t understand actual politics as practiced by politicians. They know nothing about business.

‘Mr. Bast, I don’t understand business, and I dare say my questions are stupid, but can you tell me what makes a concern ‘right’ or ‘wrong’?’

They know nothing of economics except that they love capitalism. Here is a typically laughable exchange between the great social critics, Margaret Schlegel and her Aunt Juley:

AUNT JULY: ‘Do tell me this, at all events. Are you for the rich or for the poor?’
MARGARET: ‘Too difficult. Ask me another. Am I for poverty or for riches? For riches. Hurrah for riches!’
AUNT JULEY: ‘For riches!’ echoed Mrs. Munt…
MARGARET: ‘Yes. For riches. Money for ever!’

They know nothing of working class people i.e. the majority of the population, and they understand nothing about the economics, politics, military importance of the British Empire which helps fund their pampered lifestyles and empty-headed beliefs.

Imperialism always had been one of her difficulties. (p.197)

They did not follow our Forward Policy in Thibet with the keen attention that it merits, and would at times dismiss the whole British Empire with a puzzled, if reverent, sigh.

‘Puzzled’, that’s the key word. It’s all a bit complicated, isn’t it? Best go back to lecturing everyone about how wonderful Beethoven is and the importance of the personal life. Although they occasionally fret about it, the Schlegel sisters are proud of their wilful ignorance of the world outside the tiny circle of their family, friends and acquaintances.

The only things that matter are the things that interest one.

But Forster tells us that these pampered, blinkered, ignorant young women do believe in fine abstract qualities.

Temperance, tolerance, and sexual equality were intelligible cries to them…

From time to time Margaret, the brainier one, does realise how pampered, blinkered and empty her way of life is, she realises she lives in a delightful irrelevant backwater.

There are moments when virtue and wisdom fail us, and one of them came to her at Simpson’s in the Strand. As she trod the staircase, narrow, but carpeted thickly, as she entered the eating-room, where saddles of mutton were being trundled up to expectant clergymen, she had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married or succeeded in remaining engaged. (p.156)

Anyway, it’s the Edwardian era and the Schlegel sisters hold forth about ‘equality’ in a world they are proud to say they understand absolutely nothing about, at dinner parties and at meetings of their little women’s group. But when push comes to shove, they submit to the opinions and decisions of their menfolk – as Margaret, for all her emancipated freethinking, in essence submits to Mr Wilcox’s character and requirements, ‘Margaret, so lively and intelligent, and yet so submissive’.

He had only to call, and she clapped the book up and was ready to do what he wished. (p.255)

And well before the end of the book she has become her soulless husband’s main supporter, a Melania to his Donald:

‘It certainly is a funny world, but so long as men like my husband and his sons govern it, I think it’ll never be a bad one — never really bad.’ (p.269)

A note on the suffragettes

The suffragettes dominated newspaper headlines throughout the Edwardian decade.

• The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley (2004)

But there were cogent arguments against giving women the vote, particularly the progressive Liberal argument that, since the vote would only be given to better-off women, any government which gave women the vote would in effect be handing the Tories a permanent majority and thus bring to a grinding halt all the Liberals’ hopes for broader social reform, fairer taxes, establishing a welfare state and so on.

Anyway, once she has married brisk, businesslike Mr Wilcox, Margaret realises that she has to learn to ‘manage’ him through lateral manoeuvres and psychological tricks rather than straightforward argument. And at one point she is reminded of one of the anti-suffrage arguments put forward by women of her own class.

Now she understood why some women prefer influence to rights. Mrs Plynlimmon, when condemning suffragettes, had said: ‘The woman who can’t influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.’ Margaret had winced, but she was influencing Henry now, and though pleased at her little victory, she knew that she had won it by the methods of the harem. (p.228)

Margaret’s biological clock

Apparently the phrase biological clock was first coined in 1978. For centuries before that women experienced (I think) social and personal psychological pressure to hurry up and get married. Half way through the book Forster has the elder of the two sisters, Margaret, become acutely aware that she’s getting old. This is by way of explaining why she quite suddenly finds herself susceptible to Mr Wilcox. Forster seeds the issue, preparing us for the plot development.

‘Really, Meg, what has come over you to make such a fuss?’
‘Oh, I’m getting an old maid, I suppose.’ (chapter 7)

At Southampton she waved to Frieda: Frieda was on her way down to join them at Swanage, and Mrs Munt had calculated that their trains would cross. But Frieda was looking the other way, and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was courting her! She had once visited a spinster — poor, silly and unattractive — whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell in love. How Margaret’s heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! “I may have been deceived by the curate, my dear, but the young fellow who brings the midday post really is fond of me, and has, as a matter fact—’ It had always seemed to her the most hideous corner of old age, yet she might be driven into it herself by the mere pressure of virginity. (p.164)

She is descending into what Forster, describing raddled Jacky, describes as ‘the colourless years’, the long years of female invisibility that so many modern women complain about – what has, in fact, like so many aspects of modern life, acquired a snappy American name, invisible woman syndrome.

All of which explains the overwhelming sensation of relief she experiences when Mr Wilcox gets round, a few pages later, to proposing to her.

An immense joy came over her. It was indescribable. It had nothing to do with humanity, and most resembled the all-pervading happiness of fine weather. (p.168)

As she sat trying to do accounts in her empty house, amidst beautiful pictures and noble books, waves of emotion broke, as if a tide of passion was flowing through the night air. (p.169)

A Victorian anecdote painting, The Old Maid’s Relief. But also begging the question, Can Forster be expected to really understand the social and biological and psychological pressure a young Edwardian woman was under to marry?

Dismissing the lower classes

The upper middle-class womenfolk put themselves in the hands of the upper middle-class men partly because the latter know how to deal with the lower orders. This is the point of the scene at Hilton station, where Aunt Juley first encounters dashing young Charles Wilcox. ‘He seemed a gentleman… He was dark, clean-shaven and seemed accustomed to command,’ which he demonstrates by giving the lazy oiks who man the parcel office a good talking to!

‘Hi! hi, you there! Are you going to keep me waiting all day? Parcel for Wilcox, Howards End. Just look sharp!” Emerging, he said in quieter tones: ‘This station’s abominably organized; if I had my way, the whole lot of ’em should get the sack.’

A bearded porter emerged with the parcel in one hand and an entry book in the other. With the gathering whir of the motor these ejaculations mingled: ‘Sign, must I? Why the — should I sign after all this bother? Not even got a pencil on you? Remember next time I report you to the station-master. My time’s of value, though yours mayn’t be. Here’ — here being a tip.

As in ‘A Room with a View’, Forster lets his characters condemn themselves out of their own words. This is the deft irony everyone likes about Forster. This skewering of its characters is a big part of the novel’s appeal. Because of my obsession with history, I can see this commanding young man blowing his whistle and unhesitatingly ordering his men over the top of the trenches four years later.

In the drive from the station, Charles Wilcox has to stop to pick up items from various local businesses and tells Aunt Juley to stop her incessant questioning about Helen.

‘Could you possibly lower your voice? The shopman will overhear.’
Esprit de classe — if one may coin the phrase — was strong in Mrs. Munt. She sat quivering while a member of the lower orders deposited a metal funnel, a saucepan, and a garden squirt beside the roll of oilcloth.
‘Right behind?’
‘Yes, sir.’ And the lower orders vanished in a cloud of dust. (p.34)

I understand that this is irony but, it seems to me, irony concealing actual belief. Forster mocks Charles Wilcox’s dismissive attitude to the lower orders but, as the novel progresses, it turns out all the other characters have more or less the same attitude and so, in the end, does Forster himself.

Having just read H.G. Wells’s social novels, I have been sympathising with his young men and women who work long hours in haberdashers and drapers shops, serving people exactly like Charles Wilcox and being treated with exactly the same dismissive scorn.

Forster’s classical compulsions

A third of the way through the novel the winsome, dress-trailing, ancestor-attuned Mrs Wilcox dies. There is a funeral attended by the family who leave after the ceremony is over.

Only the poor remained. They approached to the newly-dug shaft and looked their last at the coffin, now almost hidden beneath the spadefuls of clay. It was their moment….The funeral of a rich person was to them what the funeral of Alcestis or Ophelia is to the educated. It was Art; though remote from life, it enhanced life’s values, and they witnessed it avidly.

How does Forster know? Expert on the rural poor, was he? Of course not. In fact, look at the last two sentences. What he’s done is assimilate the rural poor to his values, somehow making this event (as so many other things in these workshy pampered people’s lives) all about Art and Literature. It’s as if Forster and his friends couldn’t think of anything at all apart from Literature and Art. Sometimes it feels as if absolutely everything that happens to everyone can only be seen and expressed through the prism of Art and Literature, and has to have some reference to classical or English literature dumped on it. Alcestis. Ophelia.

The result is a continual softening and blurring of everything. Everything is made genteel. The trouble with the author mocking Aunt Juley’s insistence on making everything about Literature and Art is that when Forster wants to make everything about Literature and Art, it’s difficult to tell the two apart. The mockery he has aroused about Aunt Juley rebounds on its author.

Later on in the story, Mr Wilcox tells Margaret that the insurance company Leonard Bast works for, the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company, is about to go bankrupt. A day or two later the sisters invite Leonard round and gently try to warn him about this but he bridles at ladies claiming to know more than he does about his own place of work. So far, so psychologically plausible. But then look at what Forster does to the scene when Margaret asks Len point blank whether the company is financially sound.

Leonard had no idea. He understood his own corner of the machine, but nothing beyond it. He desired to confess neither knowledge nor ignorance, and under these circumstances, another motion of the head seemed safest. To him, as to the British public, the Porphyrion was the Porphyrion of the advertisement — a giant, in the classical style, but draped sufficiently, who held in one hand a burning torch, and pointed with the other to St. Paul’s and Windsor Castle. A large sum of money was inscribed below, and you drew your own conclusions. This giant caused Leonard to do arithmetic and write letters, to explain the regulations to new clients, and re-explain them to old ones. A giant was of an impulsive morality — one knew that much. He would pay for Mrs. Munt’s hearth-rug with ostentatious haste, a large claim he would repudiate quietly, and fight court by court. But his true fighting weight, his antecedents, his amours with other members of the commercial Pantheon — all these were as uncertain to ordinary mortals as were the escapades of Zeus. While the gods are powerful, we learn little about them. It is only in the days of their decadence that a strong light beats into heaven. (p.145)

‘His amours with other members of the commercial Pantheon’? Forster knows nothing about finance or business and so adopts his classic tactic, the tactic we see him adopt in all his novels, which is to draw the reader away from the specifics into a ridiculous but prolonged simile comparing an insurance company with the gods of ancient Greece.

It is a retreat from reality into fog. It is an escape from financial expertise into Aunt Juley’s genteel world of Literature and Art. To go back to the funeral, Forster is happier wittering about Alcestis and Ophelia than actually conveying the sights and sounds of a country burial. Imagine what Thomas Hardy or D.H. Lawrence would have made of it. But with Forster it’s all Alcestis and Ophelia. This habit is central to Forster’s mentality: the escape into the vague.

Earlier, in chapter 11, Charles Senior and Junior have a disagreement about Margaret Schlegel and Forster deftly shows us how they come around to reconciling their different perspectives. But what makes it really Forsterian is the punchline to the scene.

Charles and his father sometimes disagreed. But they always parted with an increased regard for one another, and each desired no doughtier comrade when it was necessary to voyage for a little past the emotions. So the sailors of Ulysses voyaged past the Sirens, having first stopped one another’s ears with wool.

Does he think roping in Ulysses and the Sirens really helps us understand the father and sons’ relationship because it doesn’t, really. Sometimes it feels as if Forster cannot leave his own scenes well alone but is compelled to add a little classical reference, just to make it twee and whimsical, more homely, something Aunt Juley could happily put on her mantlepiece next to the nice little statuette from Greece.

And, towards the end, this description; first half vivid, second half tripe:

The hedge was a half-painted picture which would be finished in a few days. Celandines grew on its banks, lords and ladies and primroses in the defended hollows; the wild rose-bushes, still bearing their withered hips, showed also the promise of blossom. Spring had come, clad in no classical garb, yet fairer than all springs; fairer even than she who walks through the myrtles of Tuscany with the graces before her and the zephyr behind. (p.264)

The unthinkable poor

Forster is permanently aware of his own limitations, the limitations of his class and is quite open about them.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.

Well, the very poor were not ‘unthinkable’ to Dickens or – closer to Forster’s time – to Kipling in his London stories, to the novels of Arthur Morrison or Somerset Maugham. Just to Forster. Why were they ‘unthinkable’ to Forster? Because he knew nothing about them? Because they gave no scope to the witterings about Art and Life which his bourgeois women so enjoy and Forster so enjoys repeating at such length?

All this might be taken as lightly whimsical, self-deprecating irony except that at frequent moments he means it. He really states that

The intrusive narrator

Forster is considered a 20th century classic and yet it’s easy to overlook the way he directly addresses the reader as unashamedly as any 18th or 19th century author, in a very retro way.

To Margaret — I hope that it will not set the reader against her…

If you think this ridiculous, remember that it is not Margaret who is telling you about it; and let me hasten to add that they were in plenty of time for the train…

Take my word for it, that smile was simply stunning…

Not only intrusive but deliberately casual. With a breezy upper middle-class nonchalance. The first words of the long novel are:

One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister…

Oh well, if one simply has to write a novel, one supposes this is where one might as well start. It sets a tone of slightly puffed-out, shoulder-shrugging defeatism about the whole thing.

becomes the Commentator p.107

Wisdom writing

Stepping back, right out of the realm of literature, it’s odd how many writers consider themselves experts on human psychology and litter their texts with words of wisdom and special insights. Looking back years later, Forster described ‘Howard’s End’ as containing ‘a goodly amount of wisdom’. By this I imagine he mostly means the wisdom implicit in the plot, in the dovetailing storylines, in the central one of Margaret’s clear-eyed acceptance of Mr Wilcox’s proposal. But I suppose he also means the regular passages where he shares some ‘insights’ about human nature, routinely doled out on every page.

The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle…

There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays’, when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use. Such moments are still rare in the West; that they come at all promises a fairer future.

The question is, whether any of this kind of thing actually is ‘wisdom’ or just rhythmic truisms? Pretty mental scenery? Or just not true at all?

Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart —almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die — neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

Do you feel that you ought to die ‘as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave’? Or is it just lulling rhetoric, very close to the motto in a birthday card?

It is so easy to talk of ‘passing emotion’, and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open.

I freely admit to not understanding this. Maybe it is too subtle for me. Or maybe it’s hogwash. But in its fine-sounding obtuseness, it is very characteristic of Forster, and very characteristic is the way it starts off sound reasonable but ends with bombastic rhetoric about ‘the doors of heaven’.

Same in the following passage which starts off reasonably enough, stating that real life is confusing and we waste our energy on all kinds of plans that never come off. But the conclusion? About Greeks and romance?

Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

The essence of life is romantic beauty? Really? Or is this just another pretty sentiment, to go on a piece of embroidery Aunt Juley can hang on her wall, or can be a polite topic at one of Helen and Margaret’s discussion groups? Like many other pretty doilies, all of which follow the same patter of starting in the present moment and moving towards gassy generalisations, and then the invocation of some classical gods of figure from English Literature, preferably Shakespeare:

How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And she herself — hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth — their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air. (p.228)

A few pages later here is an example of Helen’s philosophising:

To Helen the paradox became clearer and clearer. ‘Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.’ Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him. (p.237)

Only connect

The book is littered with passages about Love, that subject so many scores of thousands of novelists have felt compelled to enlighten us about.

Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going.

Do you understand what that means? Have you built a rainbow bridge to connect your prose and your passion? This is the prelude to the famous passage explaining the motto and central motif of the novel, which is ‘only connect’. Connect what? The passion and the prose.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. Nor was the message difficult to give. It need not take the form of a good ‘talking’. By quiet indications the bridge would be built and span their lives with beauty. (p.188)

Inevitably, it’s hurrying men (the ones who do the work and run the businesses and manage the Empire and make the products which Helen and Margaret so blithely take for granted) who fail to connect. Silly men.

Her evening was pleasant. The sense of flux which had haunted her all the year disappeared for a time. She forgot the luggage and the motor-cars, and the hurrying men who know so much and connect so little. (p.204)

A rude joke

I was flabbergasted when, in chapter 17, it is revealed that Mr Wilcox had had slatternly Jacky Bast as a mistress while he was still married to the saintly Mrs Wilcox. Firstly flabbergasted by the way this bumbling narrative about sensitive ladies suddenly lurched into gaudy Victorian melodrama. But then a crude joke occurred to me: only a few pages earlier Margaret had been complaining at length that men don’t connect enough, specifically connecting ‘the prose and the passion’. Well, here was a prime example of a ‘prosey’ man all-too-solidly connecting the ‘passionate’ Jacky. He connected alright but in the wrong way. He had not connected Margaret’s Mills and Boon notions of ‘passion’ and ‘prose’, but his **** to Jacky’s **** and that, to the supposedly freethinking, emancipated, independent woman, Margaret, was as unacceptable as to all her Victorian forebears.

I laughed when Margaret – staggered and appalled at this revelation that her intended had a mistress, furiously pondering and cogitating – thinks her way all the way through to the amazing conclusion that:

Men must be different, even to want to yield to such a temptation. (p.238)

Men must be different from women when it comes to sex!? She figured that out all by herself. And she’s the brainy one.

But, in fact, Margaret cannot bear to face the facts and so takes refuge from reality, as women have from time immemorial, in spiritual tripe, described in a typical Forster paragraph which begins fairly rationally and ends with the gods in heaven.

Are the sexes really races, each with its own code of morality, and their mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things going? Strip human intercourse of the proprieties, and is it reduced to this? Her judgment told her no. She knew that out of Nature’s device we have built a magic that will win us immortality. Far more mysterious than the call of sex to sex is the tenderness that we throw into that call; far wider is the gulf between us and the farmyard than between the farmyard and the garbage that nourishes it. We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate. ‘Men did produce one jewel,’ the gods will say, and, saying, will give us immortality. (p.238)

‘We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate.’ This is the most complete tripe.

And then, in a sequence which surely recalls the tritest clichés of 18th and 19th century novelettes, Margaret’s response to the revelation that her intended is a man of flesh and blood who’s had sex is to decide that she will devote her life to making Henry ‘a better man’ (p.240).

Pity was at the bottom of her actions all through this crisis. Pity, if one may generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil. Here was the core of the question. Henry must be forgiven, and made better by love; nothing else mattered. (p.240)

Is this true, about women? Was it ever true or is it sentimental hogwash? As to the brainy one in the family, the most liberated feminist, deciding she will devote her life to making Wilcox ‘better by love’…

It unwittingly hilarious that after this torrent of Mills and Boon clichés, at her titanic intellectual achievement of realising that men are men, and then her melodramatic decision to devote her life to redeeming her man… that after this torrent of scientific illiteracy and desperate clichés, Margaret (and Forster) take it upon themselves to comment on Henry’s ‘intellectual confusion’ (p.240). Henry strikes me as being the only clear-headed character in the book.

London

‘Howards End’ contains numerous descriptions of London which are worth recording. The endless building:

Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare. One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats—expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierges and palms—it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses opposite a certain measure of peace. These, too, would be swept away in time, and another promontory would rise upon their site, as humanity piled itself higher and higher on the precious soil of London.

And rebuilding:

Here he stopped again, and glanced suspiciously to right and left, like a rabbit that is going to bolt into its hole. A block of flats, constructed with extreme cheapness, towered on either hand. Farther down the road two more blocks were being built, and beyond these an old house was being demolished to accommodate another pair. It was the kind of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the locality—bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon her soil. Camelia Road would soon stand out like a fortress, and command, for a little, an extensive view. Only for a little. Plans were out for the erection of flats in Magnolia Road also. And again a few years, and all the flats in either road might be pulled down, and new buildings, of a vastness at present unimaginable, might arise where they had fallen.

And pulling down:

They mean to pull down Wickham Place, and build flats like yours.’
‘But how horrible!’
‘Landlords are horrible.’
Then she said vehemently: ‘It is monstrous, Miss Schlegel; it isn’t right. I had no idea that this was hanging over you. I do pity you from the bottom of my heart. To be parted from your house, your father’s house – it oughtn’t to be allowed. It is worse than dying. I would rather die than – Oh, poor girls! Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born?

Which all produces an endless flux (see also the Home section, below):

‘I hate this continual flux of London. It is an epitome of us at our worst — eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, streaming away — streaming, streaming for ever. That’s why I dread it so. I mistrust rivers, even in scenery. Now, the sea —’

London relentlessly expanding:

Over two years passed, and the Schlegel household continued to lead its life of cultured but not ignoble ease, still swimming gracefully on the grey tides of London. Concerts and plays swept past them, money had been spent and renewed, reputations won and lost, and the city herself, emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux, while her shallows washed more widely against the hills of Surrey and over the fields of Hertfordshire. This famous building had arisen, that was doomed. Today Whitehall had been transformed: it would be the turn of Regent Street tomorrow. And month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew: the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity.

To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The Earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. One can understand the reaction. Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public has heard a little too much — they seem Victorian, while London is Georgian — and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again. Certainly London fascinates. One visualizes it as a tract of quivering grey, intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity. It lies beyond everything: Nature, with all her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend explains himself: the earth is explicable — from her we came, and we must return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning — the city inhaling — or the same thoroughfares in the evening — the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religion’s opportunity — not the decorous religion of theologians, but anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort—not anyone pompous or tearful — were caring for us up in the sky.

(Note the typical Forsterian escalation, starting from an ordinary situation then moving via his favourite god, Pan [see his short stories] to an absurd vision of God in his heaven.)

London stations:

Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realize this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d’Italia, because by it they must return to their homes. And he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love.

London at dusk:

London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. She has never known the clear-cut armies of the purer air. (p.129)

Margaret looking for a new home:

But London thwarted her; in its atmosphere she could not concentrate. London only stimulates, it cannot sustain; and Margaret, hurrying over its surface for a house without knowing what sort of a house she wanted, was paying for many a thrilling sensation in the past. She could not even break loose from culture, and her time was wasted by concerts which it would be a sin to miss, and invitations which it would never do to refuse. (p.155)

Against the modern world

As privileged rentiers, the Schlegel sisters and Miss Munt can afford a hoity-toity attitude of disliking and condemning everything about the ghastly modern world. What comes across is that this is Forster’s attitude, too. See the passages about London, above. Or his entertainingly consistent hatred of motor cars (and modern advertising).

Awakening, after a nap of a hundred years, to such life as is conferred by the stench of motor-cars, and to such culture as is implied by the advertisements of antibilious pills.

The railway station for Howards End:

Was new, it had island platforms and a subway, and the superficial comfort exacted by business men.

Business men, yuk! Cars recur whenever Forster’s feeling bilious about the modern world:

The Schlegels were certainly the poorer for the loss of Wickham Place. It had helped to balance their lives, and almost to counsel them. Nor is their ground-landlord spiritually the richer. He has built flats on its site, his motor-cars grow swifter, his exposures of Socialism more trenchant. But he has spilt the precious distillation of the years, and no chemistry of his can give it back to society again. (p. 154)

A motor-drive, a form of felicity detested by Margaret, awaited her… But it was not an impressive drive. Perhaps the weather was to blame, being grey and banked high with weary clouds. Perhaps Hertfordshire is scarcely intended for motorists… ‘Look out, if the road worries you — right outward at the scenery.’ She looked at the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge. Presently it congealed. They had arrived. (p.199)

MR WILCOX: ‘You young fellows’ one idea is to get into a motor. I tell you, I want to walk: I’m very fond of walking.’ (p.319)

Nostalgia for the Middle Ages

Everything new tends to be bad, an attitude which crops up in a hundred details and throwaway remarks. A little more striking is the several places where Forster appears to be pining for the good old Middle Ages where everyone knew their place and there was none of this ghastly modern muddle. When the Schlegel sisters have to leave Wickham Place, Forster laments:

The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde.

And speaking of poor Leonard:

Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen…

Ah, the angel of Democracy, curse of the modern world.

The authentic earth

Forster despises the motor car partly because it disconnects its passengers from The Earth. Surprisingly for such an etiolated townie, in Forster contact with The Earth implies authenticity. Racing through the landscape so fast that it becomes a blur indicates rootlessness and disconnection.

She felt their whole journey from London had been unreal. They had no part with the earth and its emotions. They were dust, and a stink, and cosmopolitan chatter… (p.213)

The sense of flux which had haunted her all the year disappeared for a time. She forgot the luggage and the motor-cars, and the hurrying men who know so much and connect so little. She recaptured the sense of space, which is the basis of all earthly beauty, and, starting from Howards End, she attempted to realize England.

The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.

We need to reconnect with The Earth and this is the feeling Margaret has when she finally visits Howards End, abandoned by its tenant, in the dark, in the rain. Alone in the darkened house she hears the beating of the building’s ancient heart which is, of course, the heartbeat of England, too.

Moving house / finding a home

In his afterword to ‘A Room with a View’, Forster casually mentioned that all of his fictions are about people trying to find a home. In an increasingly migrant, transient world, that was a shrewd issue to make so central to his stories, yet easy to overlook in all the guff about Art and Love.

Quite clearly Howards End possesses powerful symbolism as some kind of ‘heart of England’ emblem and its disputed ownership is similarly symptomatic of rapidly changing social and class boundaries.

But the Schlegel sisters are also themselves radically homeless. The home where they were born and brought up was never owned by the family but just leased. And when the lease expires half way through the novel there is a great deal of upheaval and upset. The theme is briefly expressed in Margaret’s conversation with Mr Wilcox on the Thames Embankment.

‘Do remind Evie to come and see us — two, Wickham Place. We shan’t be there very long, either.’
‘You, too, on the move?’
‘Next September,’ Margaret sighed.
‘Every one moving! Good-bye.’ (p.143)

And this simple exchange is very deftly placed as the characters look out over the River Thames at the turning of the tide, subtly symbolising the way that nothing ever says the same, everything is in a continual state of flux, one of the novel’s key words.

‘I hate this continual flux of London. It is an epitome of us at our worst — eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, streaming away — streaming, streaming for ever. That’s why I dread it so. I mistrust rivers, even in scenery. Now, the sea —’

Margaret was silent. Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux. London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task! (p.257)

Oniton

It’s at Oniton Grange Mr Wilcox has bought in a remote corner of Shropshire, that he hosts Evie’s wedding, and whither Helen rashly brings Leonard Bast and his wife Jacky, who drunkenly recognises Henry as her seducer.

The relevance of Oniton to the ‘moving house’ theme is that, 1) never having liked it (damp, miles from anywhere) and 2) associating it with the revelation of his infidelity, Wilcox sells it. Thus Margaret, who had arrived with such high hopes and a fervent desire to put down roots and become known in the neighbourhood, is again disappointed. And Forster turns it into one of his many, many moralising passages, in this case lamenting the fundamental rootlessness of modern people.

She never saw it again. Day and night the river flows down into England, day after day the sun retreats into the Welsh mountains, and the tower chimes, ‘See the Conquering Hero’. But the Wilcoxes have no part in the place, nor in any place. It is not their names that recur in the parish register. It is not their ghosts that sigh among the alders at evening. They have swept into the valley and swept out of it, leaving a little dust and a little money behind.

The novel ends with the sisters inheriting or moving into Howards End as if it were the most natural thing. Their superior spiritual life, their emotional depth and so on, simply entitle them to it. They alone ‘see life steadily and see it whole’ (as they tiresomely repeat) and value the heart’s affections and understand emotion and know how to use the pronoun ‘I’, and so they deserve it.

Eustace Miles

The gender food gap. Mr Wilcox invites Margaret to Simpsons in the Strand, a place dressed up to the nines to portray Olde England, serving chops and steak to imperial administrators. Mr Wilcox knowledgably recommends saddle of mutton with cider. Man = meat and money. By way of return. Margaret invites Wilcox to dine at Eustace Miles, which she describes as ‘all proteids and body-buildings’ and people coming up to ask you about your aura and your astral plane. Woman = vegetarianism and spiritualism.

I was intrigued by all this and so looked up Eustace Miles to discover that he was a noted food faddist and writer about numerous health diets. Look how many books about health and diet he published during the Edwardian decade, 20 by my count!

I was struck by the title of ‘Better Food for Boys’ (1901). One hundred and twenty-three years after Miles was campaigning for a better diet, Britain is experiencing what some commentators call an obesity epidemic and government agencies I’ve worked in spend a fortune on campaigns to encourage healthier eating among the general population while the problem gets steadily, obstinately worse.

Like talk of vegetarianism, saving the environment, avoiding war, gender equality, socialism, political reform, improving education – you realise that these issues have been around, have been written about, talked about, promoted and debated, for over a hundred years and yet we’re still wasting vast acreage of newsprint, digital spaces, social media and so on, worrying about them.

At some point you are forced to conclude that these are just the permanent background noise of our society, like traffic congestion or the drone of airplanes overhead. They will always be here. People will always complain about them. Nothing will change.

Imperialism

I was surprised that the British Empire plays a small but non-negligible role in the story. The younger Wilcox son, Paul, is scheduled to go out to Nigeria to work in some business, and there are scattered references, later on, to the wretched heat and the impossible natives that he has to deal with. And Henry Wilcox himself is said to have made his fortune in West Africa, something to do with rubber. Here’s the full paragraph in which we get most detail. As you can see, Forster is more interested in sly digs and sarcasm than bothering to understand anything. And he makes it crystal clear that his posh ladies find it all far too complicated, an irritating distraction from their core activity of endlessly discussing each others’ feelings.

The following morning, at eleven o’clock, she [Margaret] presented herself at the offices of the Imperial and West African Rubber Company. She was glad to go there, for Henry had implied his business rather than described it, and the formlessness and vagueness that one associates with Africa had hitherto brooded over the main sources of his wealth. Not that a visit to the office cleared things up. There was just the ordinary surface scum of ledgers and polished counters and brass bars that began and stopped for no possible reason, of electric-light globes blossoming in triplets, of little rabbit hutches faced with glass or wire, of little rabbits. And even when she penetrated to the inner depths, she found only the ordinary table and Turkey carpet, and though the map over the fireplace did depict a helping of West Africa, it was a very ordinary map. Another map hung opposite, on which the whole continent appeared, looking like a whale marked out for blubber, and by its side was a door, shut, but Henry’s voice came through it, dictating a ‘strong’ letter. She might have been at the Porphyrion, or Dempster’s Bank, or her own wine-merchant’s. Everything seems just alike in these days. But perhaps she was seeing the Imperial side of the company rather than its West African, and Imperialism always had been one of her difficulties.

Of course, as a good Liberal Forster was against the British Empire, and all the preposterous swank surrounding it, the gaudy ceremonies and the maps and the jingoistic boasting, and the no-nonsense practical talk of business men like Mr Wilcox. It forms into one aspect of the recurring comparison between Germany and Britain, namely that these cultured nations have manoeuvred themselves into a ridiculous rivalry (just how ridiculous would become clear four years later).

That when Margaret marries Henry Wilcox, she begins to enjoy the trappings of wealth derived from exploiting Africa’s resources and people troubles neither character nor author at all. The soul and the spirit and the holiness of the heart’s affections, seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, that’s what fills Margaret’s pampered mind, no matter that vast amounts of actual life are completely hidden from her blinkered view. Here are her thoughts in the days after Leonard’s sudden death:

Yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity, where the king takes the queen, and the ace the king. Ah, no; there was beauty and adventure behind, such as the man at her feet had yearned for; there was hope this side of the grave; there were truer relationships beyond the limits that fetter us now. As a prisoner looks up and sees stars beckoning, so she, from the turmoil and horror of those days, caught glimpses of the diviner wheels. (p.320)

At such moments the soul retires within, to float upon the bosom of a deeper stream, and has communion with the dead, and sees the world’s glory not diminished, but different in kind to what she has supposed. (p.322)

With people who think like this, no rational communication can really be held. But many people love the deep ‘spirituality’ and emotional depth of the Schlegel sisters and think life is all about shimmering emotions and arranging flowers in vases. Different strokes.

The ropes of life

Forster repeatedly uses the image of ‘the ropes’ of life to denote control of society and the economy. It is, therefore, always associated with the clear-headed practical Wilcox men. It is a striking image which, at the same time, conveys his characteristic ignorance, and lack of interest, in how things actually work.

The Wilcoxes continued to play a considerable part in her thoughts. She had seen so much of them in the final week. They were not ‘her sort,’ they were often suspicious and stupid, and deficient where she excelled; but collision with them stimulated her, and she felt an interest that verged into liking, even for Charles. She desired to protect them, and often felt that they could protect her, excelling where she was deficient. Once past the rocks of emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands were on all the ropes…

‘Oh, Meg, that’s what I felt, only not so clearly, when the Wilcoxes were so competent, and seemed to have their hands on all the ropes.’

Which is just how head of the Wilcox clan, Henry Wilcox, feels about himself:

The man of business smiled. Since his wife’s death he had almost doubled his income. He was an important figure at last, a reassuring name on company prospectuses, and life had treated him very well… With a good dinner inside him and an amiable but academic woman on either flank, he felt that his hands were on all the ropes of life, and that what he did not know could not be worth knowing.

For Leonard Bast, who’s outside everything, the ropes symbolise all the mysterious elements of cultural capital which he’ll never achieve or understand:

Those Miss Schlegels had come to it; they had done the trick; their hands were upon the ropes, once and for all.

There was the girl named Helen, who had pinched his umbrella, and the German girl who had smiled at him pleasantly, and Herr someone, and Aunt someone, and the brother — all, all with their hands on the ropes. They had all passed up that narrow, rich staircase at Wickham Place, to some ample room, whither he could never follow them, not if he read for ten hours a day.

Can a middle-aged gay man describe the feelings of a young straight woman?

Obviously that’s what the art of fiction is all about, creating characters beyond your own experience and persuading the reader that they’re ‘real’. Personally, I struggle with the notion of ‘character’ in any work of fiction. Some characters in Shakespeare and Dickens appear ‘real’ to me, almost all the others I’ve ever encountered feel like cyphers created for the plot.

Back to Forster, can a gay middle-aged man depict a straight young woman in love? No. I don’t think he can. The feelings of Margaret for Mr Wilcox and Helen for Leonard Bast are both carefully prepared and sensitively described and I don’t really believe either.

I’m not alone. Many critics at the time and since have criticised the completely improbable notion that beautiful young Helen would be so overcome with Leonard Bast’s plight that, not only would she drag him and his ragged wife all the way by train to rural Shropshire in order to confront Mr Wilcox, but that then, with his wife staying in the same hotel and likely to return from Evie’s wedding party at any moment, under these fraught circumstances she impulsively has sex with him. Given the awesome social and psychological strictures against sex of any kind, given Helen’s fastidious character and all the sisters’ Bloomsbury talk about Art and Literature and Spirit and Romance, given Margaret’s disgusted recoil from the revelation that Henry had a working class mistress, the thought that Helen gives Leonard a mercy fuck is as wildly improbable as a spaceship landing in the middle of the story.

It feels, in these scenes, as if Forster twists and distorts his own characters in order to create a melodramatic climax to his novel, just as he did in the similarly garish climaxes of ‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’ and ‘The Longest Journey’.

It’s one of the oddities of this odd writer that, after 300 pages of middle-class ladies wafting in and out of book-lined rooms, vapouring about Art and the Spirit, a plotless ambience which could trail on for years, maybe forever, the only way he can think of bringing these domestic ramblings to an end is by the twin shocks of wildly improbable sex or sudden, grotesque violence. His brutal climaxes leave a harsh metallic flavour in the mind which sheds a strange shadow over all the sensitive thoughts and fancies which preceded them for hundreds of pages.

An anti-man novel

No, is the short answer. Forster does the ever-changing moods of the wafting, sensitive Schlegel sisters so well that Howards End remains vibrant and alive to this day. But look at the men in it! Tibby, their brother, is an unfeeling, asocial nerd who is always described from the outside. Leonard Bast is a cypher, a valiant attempt at understanding the respectable working classes which doesn’t succeed. Charles Wilcox is depicted as an unfeeling brute. And Henry Wilcox, despite the acres of words devoted to him, never really becomes real. He remains the type of the brisk, no-nonsense, self-deceiving and emotionally undeveloped Business Man.

And pretty much all the other male figures receive short shrift, too. It becomes really clear at the end just how much Margaret / Forster dislikes them. She dislikes the Wilcox’s chauffeur, Lane. She makes a point of disliking the local doctor called to attend Leonard’s corpse, Dr Mansbridge (odd name), describing him as ‘vulgar and acute’. He is quickly transformed into a symbol of Forster’s dislike of science in general.

Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding. One could open the heart to Mr. Mansbridge and his sort without discovering its secrets to them, for they wanted everything down in black and white, and black and white was exactly what they were left with.

‘Mr. Mansbridge and his sort’ eh? Damn these doctors and scientists, coming up with cures for everything all the time. Don’t they realise that the only way to be is to live off other people’s labour and ponce around in long skirts, picking flowers and talking about your soul? Anybody who doesn’t realise this obvious truth is so ghastly and so vulgar.

I thought this anti-man animus really came to the fore in the last few pages. As well as hating doctors and scientists, Margaret also, of course, hates her husband, his son and everything they stand for. Thus the speech she delivers to Henry telling him what an insensitive brute he is for not letting Helen spend the night at Howards End is actually an attack on all men.

It was spoken not only to her husband, but to thousands of men like him — a protest against the inner darkness in high places that comes with a commercial age. Though he would build up his life without hers, she could not apologize. He had refused to connect, on the clearest issue that can be laid before a man, and their love must take the consequences.

Men, men, men! refusing to connect the passion and the prose, the only thing that matters. What a ghastly little man he is.

With unfaltering eye she traced his future. He would soon present a healthy mind to the world again, and what did he or the world care if he was rotten at the core? He would grow into a rich, jolly old man, at times a little sentimental about women, but emptying his glass with anyone. Tenacious of power, he would keep Charles and the rest dependent, and retire from business reluctantly and at an advanced age. (p.323)

‘Rotten at the core’. When Margaret asks Henry to talk to her, and sit on the grass, Forster makes even this little thing a way of complaining about men.

The Great North Road should have been bordered all its length with glebe. Henry’s kind had filched most of it.

Greedy bastards. When Henry offers to say something, her response is hard.

She knew this superficial gentleness, this confession of hastiness, that was only intended to enhance her admiration of the male. (p.324)

Fear the male. Resist the male. Hate the male. Men exploiting the world. Men filching the land. Men playing their emotional games. Men demanding to be worshipped. Oh why why why can’t men be more like spiritual sensitive Margaret, vivacious caring Helen, or Mrs Wilcox wafting through the garden of her ancestors? At its climax, I couldn’t help feeling the book was asking, Why can’t horrible beastly men be more like lovely sensitive women?

The blinkered bourgeois hypocrisy of this view is beautifully expressed in the last scene, set fourteen months after Leonard’s death, with Helen and her baby and Margaret now installed in Howards End. The scene opens with them lazing in the garden, enjoying the tranquility and thinking about flowers and life and eternity, as they do. Meanwhile, in the background, men work. The labouring men who kept the estate and all Edwardian estates functioning, are hard at work. The text tells us that Tom’s father is cutting the big meadow with a mowing machine while another (unnamed) labourer is ‘scything out the dell holes’.

These men are doing hard physical labour to provide lovely settings for pampered middle-class ladies to spend all day long, from morning to night, talking about their fine feelings. Margaret and Helen never have done, and never will do, a day’s work in their lives.

Margaret did not reply. The scything had begun, and she took off her pince-nez to watch it.

Watching other people, watching working class men, work. And yet these parasites take it upon themselves to dislike the male servants and despise businessmen and yawn at the empire, dismissing and mocking the men who labour night and day to provide them with their lives of luxury, ‘gilded with tranquillity’, as Forster admiringly puts it (p.326).

The sentimental reader sighs with satisfaction that the spiritual sisters have finally inherited Howards End as spiritual Mrs Wilcox, and the entire Spirit of England, always intended them to.

‘There are moments when I feel Howards End peculiarly our own.’ (p.329)

In direct contrast, I note that Margaret and Helen acquire this idyllic rural home only after the central male characters have been killed (Leonard), imprisoned (Charles) or broken (Henry). And a fleet of male servants and labourers are conveniently in place to silently serve them. It is as corrupt as the ancient Roman pouring special wines for his pampered guests surrounded by the slaves who make his whole life of luxury possible.

Howards End is traditionally seen as a novel about the triumph of two sensitive spiritual sisters over terrible adversities. I see it as their triumphant conquest of Men. Forster knows this. When, on the last page, Henry Wilcox, broken in spirit by the imprisonment of his son, announces to the rest of his family that he is giving Howards End to his wife, Margaret feels not happiness or relief but triumph.

Margaret did not answer. There was something uncanny in her triumph. She, who had never expected to conquer anyone, had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives.

Leonard dead. Charles in prison. Henry a broken man. Margaret’s victory is usually seen as a victory of sensibility over philistine materialism but she senses it represents something bigger. She has won the battle of the sexes at which point you wonder, Is this what the entire novel has been about all along? Effete gay E.M. Forster’s profound hatred of active, purposeful straight men.

Forster’s prose

I suppose E.M. Forster is a big writer, part of the canon, a classic, and much loved by his fans. But I don’t think I read a single sentence which I enjoyed. Lots of scenes are very acutely imagined and described – days later I remember Margaret arguing with Charles Wilcox in the car and Margaret arguing with Mrs Wilcox in the Christmas shopping trip. Margaret could start an argument with a brick wall. But Forster’s writing, as prose, I often found commonplace. Arguably it comes most alive, is at its most Forsterian, when it launches into those long gassy paragraphs which end up citing Alceste or Ulysses or God, the great intellectual-sounding flights of fancy which are, more often than not, the ripest tripe.

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Credit

Howards End by E.M Forster was published by Edward and Arnold in 1910. References are to the 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

• Howard’s End on Project Gutenberg

Related reviews

• E.M. Forster reviews
• Edwardian reviews