Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Afterword
Selected Bibliography
SIGNET CLASSICS
READ THE TOP 20 SIGNET CLASSICS
E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was for a time a Fellow. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), was quickly followed by The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1910), which received wide attention. Based on Forster’s firsthand observations of Indian life, A Passage to India came out in 1924. His other works include collections of short stories and essays, a volume of criticism, the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, a film script, and a study of Virginia Woolf. In 1953, Forster was awarded membership in the Order of Companions of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II. On his ninetieth birthday, in 1969, he received the Order of Merit, the highest distinction outside of political rank that a British sovereign can bestow.
Benjamin DeMott is Professor Emeritus of English at Am- herst College and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, Atlantic Monthly, and other publications.
Regina Marler is the author of Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom and editor of Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. She also writes for the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the New York Observer. Marler lives in San Francisco.
SIGNET CLASSICS
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Introduction
Writing in 1943—a time when Hemingway and Faulkner among others were still productive—the critic Lionel Trilling described Edward Morgan Forster as “the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me ... the sensation of having learned something.” Politics figured in this judgment—the politics of a distinct historical moment. The author of Howards End had become a hero among critics of the left—thoughtful liberals, such as Trilling, who were scornful of Comes-the-Revolution cant about the imminent transformation of human nature. Forster shared the hopes of those working for social and economic change within the framework of democratic society, but not the dream of sudden political cures for human woe. (After reading Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago he remarked to a friend that “it makes you feel a revolution is never worth it.”) And he was troubled by the moral vanity and the penchant for oversimplification pervasive among proponents of radical change. (There’s a shrewd sampling of the confusions of “idealists and political economists” in Howards End, Chapter 15.)
But although remedies for political naivete are available in Forster, it’s not primarily through them that we gain the “sensation of having learned something.” In 1909, the year before Howards End appeared, Forster turned thirty. The book proved to be longer and more socially inclusive than any of his earlier works; an ambition to speak to the condition of an entire nation, England, was freshly energizing his mind; and ruminations on large themes, including the pros and cons of redistributing wealth, fall from his characters’ lips. But Howards End is continuous in achievement with much of the writing by this author that preceded it, and the achievement isn’t that of a political novelist. It belongs rather to a genius creator of intimacy—a comprehensively thoughtful, fundamentally unpolitical literary artist whose writing conjoined two kinds of knowledge quite extraordinarily different: as different as worldliness and unworldliness.
About social existence E. M. Forster knew everything. He knew that comfortable habitation of an enclave shrivels alertness to the variousness of the human condition, and that one’s effort to heighten sensitivity to family, friends, neighbors, can deepen one’s social obliviousness. He knew that whimsy, politeness, even modesty can have, in certain social circumstances, cruel effect. And he knew that cruelty can be perceived—in certain social circumstances—as glamorous. Early in Howards End young Charles Wilcox insults and browbeats an elderly station porter, and Forster notices that the porter gazes after the young snot admiringly. The scene dramatizes the total inconsiderateness of the Wilcox clan (the mother excluded); it also represents class relationships as they are: the oppressed appearing dazzled by their oppressors because unable, for specifiable reasons having to do with the texture of lived experience, to see themselves as the oppressed. Here as everywhere Forster displays a worldly writer’s interest in human interaction as conditioned by money and status.
That interest, though, doesn’t carry with it the common penalty, namely blankness to other dimensions of experience. A manners-watcher,
Forster nevertheless understood that men and women aren’t the sum of their manners. Intermittently we dislodge ourselves from the social woodwork, becoming responsive to intimations of realities more elevated than those shaped by cash and caste, membership in an enclave, adjacency to family and friends. Forster relished such intimations, recognizing them as a form of knowledge. Lacking conventional religion, he possessed a gift for reverence, an impulse to pursue essence, a concern for values as well as prices. Working easily from observed behavior to inner feeling to meaning-in-the-large, he taught unremittingly against the reductive-ness that sunders matter and spirit. The best-remembered imperative in his work (it provides the epigraph for Howards End) is: “Only connect ...” He himself was, throughout a lifetime, bravely obedient to that command.
And without fuss or self-puffery. Not the least remarkable dimension of Forster’s movement from manners to feeling to meaning is its apparent casualness. Revelation when it arrives seems incidental. Brevity and tact are norms. Pomposity is the unpardonable sin. Through a multitude of rhetorical devices, ironic overstatement among them, the novelist delicately teases his personal claims to insight. (For God’s sake, reader, don’t be intimidated, it’s just me: this is one of his tones.) By placing his judgments unobtrusively—folding them into throwaway clauses—he avoids the unlovable gestures of a moral preceptor addicted to setting inferiors straight. Readers are addressed as though sufficiently brainy to summon implications on their own, sufficiently caring to ponder the complex whole—behavior, feelings, meaning—until possessed of the riches of each element. When there’s occasion for reflection reaching beyond the consciousness of the characters onstage, the novelist contrives to bring it forth without proprietorial hauteur. Everywhere the impression is that author-and-audience collaboration is in progress. We—reader and writer—are together in diffident bewilderment, confusion, mixed response, sentimentality, true belief. We, says E. M. Forster. We deride, we oppose, we stand outside, our very heart is compelled. Reader and author are in league; our intimacy is constant.
The author retains, to be sure, certain options of the omniscient novelist. But from chapter to chapter we live mainly along the nerves of individual characters in openended time and circumstance—persons responding under pressure of confrontation, surprise, accident. And here too, always—it’s the triumph of Forster’s art—we have the sense of a continuing intimate under-conversation between ourselves and the reserved, sympathetic, clear-eyed narrator. Think of Helen Schlegel’s funny, pell-mell monologue during the umbrella search in Howards End: ‘Oh, I am so sorry! ... I do nothing but steal umbrellas. I am so very sorry! Do come in and choose one. Is yours a hooky or a nobbly? Mine’s a nobbly—at least I think it is ... Don’t you talk, Meg! You stole an old gentleman’s silk top-hat. She thought it was a muff. Oh, heavens! I’ve knocked the In and Out card down. Where’s Frieda? Tibby, why don’t you ever—? No, I can’t remember what I was going to say. That wasn’t it, but do tell the maids to hurry tea up. What about this umbrella? ... No, it’s all gone along the seams. It’s an appalling umbrella. It must be mine.’
But it was not.
The feelings are beguilingly evoked. There’s simulated despair at personal fecklessness, together with a sense of the stolen umbrella business as a more or less minor blip or nuisance. Like the rest of us, Helen finds her gaffes more lovable than vexing. Charmed by her own flighti ness, she dramatizes it for the general entertainment. Throughout the performance—straight through from the distracted, super-stylized self-deprecation to the indict ment of the “appalling” umbrella—she feels obliging.
And in the under-conversation between ourselves as readers and the observant narrator we come to clarity about what that feeling signifies—and about how its social roots connect with its moral substance. We agree, in silence, that Helen’s charm has limits. Her jokey repudiation of possessiveness, her encouragement of a turnabout “theft” (“Do come in and choose one”), rest on a foundation of solid unearned income. Ownership of a shabby. umbrella would bespeak, for her, principled dislike of shopping for new things, lifelong understanding that between oneself and whatever purchasable object one desires, no obstacle can interfere (where there’s no economic need to delay gratification, boughten objects cannot excite). The assumption that everyone shares her conviction of the pointlessness of protecting personal goods is a measure of the extent of social enclosure—the obliviousness of a class to life beyond its borders. Because of the gulf between classes, every charming word she utters is heard, by Leonard Bast, differently than as intended—and differently by us, too, reader and author standing our joint watch.
Later in the novel Forster will be explicit on the moral content of this obliviousness. We hear his voice, I believe, when Margaret Wilcox declares that: The imagination ought to play upon money and realize it vividly, for it’s the—the second most important thing in the world. It is so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking—oh, political economy, of course, but so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means.
But the effect isn’t that of detached chiding by someone contrasting his or her own clear thinking about unearned increment with our fuzziness. Whether speaking directly, in analytical summary, or listening in on his speaking characters, Forster never feels to us like a superior—a screening or presenting intelligence. The illusion is that he’s one of us—and it’s this closeness that eases us gently yet fully into the currents of feeling.
It is, truly, an immersion. During each of the major confrontations in the book before us—between the Schlegel sisters at their crisis point, between Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox—we cling to one or another character’s subjective emotion. We’re inside Margaret’s struggle to fend off impatience with the feelinglessness of the male Wilcoxes, her battle to persuade herself that her sensitivities are excessive. And, astonishingly, we’re only slightly removed from Henry Wilcox’s disgust at the mannerlessness of the poor, or from his for-your-own-good firmness with his fiancée (“Come along, Margaret, no wheedling”).
And the writer watches with us, as I say, never from above. Clearer than elsewhere we see what we are for each other in the tiered, segmented social world nobody escapes. More poignantly than anywhere we grasp that failure in the social world—the failure of the first Mrs. Wilcox—can be incontrovertible proof of worth. And do-it-yourself seems the key to our perspicacity; we have the sensation of learning something but not that of being taught. It’s just me, it’s just me, the writer keeps whispering, don’t be intimidated. We knew this stuff together long ago, isn’t it so? What does anyone need, really, except just the odd reminder now and then?
One further aspect of Forster’s regard for his audience demands a word. It has to do with our inner conflict about whether, on this earth, rough justice can ever be done. Intelligent, experienced, unillusioned people, we know life often goes wrong. We know that contests between the lovable and unlovable, the sympathetic and the priggish, the tender and the hard-nosed, don’t regularly end as we’d wish. It’s been ages, for us, since those gloriously foolish adolescent hours when the death of a White Hat seemed unthinkable. And therefore we consider that story-tellers should respect our knowledgeable natures.
Forster awards us this respect. The development of human contests between unequal forces in his pages takes place in a manner offering little comfort to beamishness. David over Goliath belongs to yesteryear; if, by miracle, a figure of true and delightful virtue strikes a blow at last against a long-term bully and exploiter, the moment isn’t rendered as one of triumph. For better cause than she herself knows, Margaret Wilcox confronts her oppressor—denounces Henry her husband as “stupid, hypocritical, cruel,” as “contemptible” and “spoilt” and “criminally muddled.” Stunned by her nobly transfiguring rage, her mate stammers for a second, brain in a whirl.
Only, though, for a second. When his re
tort comes, it’s stony and unmoved, and his wife can do no more than cry out in terrible frustration at the uselessness of insurrection. The scene is faithful to the probabilities of such combat in that time and place; even at its heroic climax the novelist remains tuned to our educated gloom, our feeling for the dismal odds.
Yet because he is in league with us, a presence close by, he knows us better than we know ourselves. Aware that our pessimism is our pride, he’s also aware that it’s a veneer. Beneath it lie the old longings—the lingering hope that without obliging us to become sentimentalists or fantasts, a decent writer can somehow, in some fashion, make something come right. The introducer of a classic novel who descants long on this subject deserves flaying. Little need be said except that Forster’s attitude toward optimism is, finally, permissive; more than most of his contemporaries, he treats kindly our need to have things both ways. He understands how powerfully we hunger, notwithstanding our sophistication, for the comeuppance of hard hearts and the prosperity of the vitally good. And from this understanding, as from all his wisdom, the taint of condescension is absent. It’s not out of courtesy that he refuses to condemn our inner conflict, our irresolute imaginations of disaster. It’s because, albeit gingerly, he shares our hope.
As writers grow more distant in time, the specifics of their lives—family, education, loves, income, travel, political stances, and so on—often seem less interesting than the question of how the creators struck their contemporaries. And that question arises with greater frequency in the case of writers who, like Forster, inspire personal affection in their readers. We care about what happened to them away from the writing desk, but we care especially about the impression they made upon those who knew them. Was the winning person whom we glimpse behind the words on the page a literary contrivance? Is there a link, in this partisan of linkage, between real life human creature and authorial persona? What personal traits did friends and acquaintances notice and remember?