Her father kissed her. “Good-bye, old girl,” he said; “don’t you worry about me.”
“Good-bye, Dad.”
Then it was Dolly’s turn. Anxious to contribute, she laughed nervously, and said: “Good-bye, Mr. Wilcox. It does seem curious that Mrs. Wilcox should have left Margaret Howards End, and yet she get it, after all.”
From Evie came a sharply drawn breath. “Good-bye,” she said to Margaret, and kissed her.
And again and again fell the word, like the ebb of a dying sea.
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Dolly.”
“So long, Father.”
“Good-bye, my boy; always take care of yourself.”
“Good-bye, Mrs. Wilcox.”
“Good-bye.”
Margaret saw their visitors to the gate. Then she returned to her husband and laid her head in his hands. He was pitiably tired. But Dolly’s remark had interested her. At last she said: “Could you tell me, Henry, what was that about Mrs. Wilcox having left me Howards End?”
Tranquilly he replied: “Yes, she did. But that is a very old story. When she was ill and you were so kind to her, she wanted to make you some return, and, not being herself at the time, scribbled ‘Howards End’ on a piece of paper. I went into it thoroughly, and, as it was clearly fanciful, I set it aside, little knowing what my Margaret would be to me in the future.”
Margaret was silent. Something shook her life in its inmost recesses, and she shivered.
“I didn’t do wrong, did I?” he asked, bending down.
“You didn‘t, darling. Nothing has been done wrong.”
From the garden came laughter. “Here they are at last!” exclaimed Henry, disengaging himself with a smile. Helen rushed into the gloom, holding Tom by one hand and carrying her baby on the other. There were shouts of infectious joy.
“The field’s cut!” Helen cried excitedly—“the big meadow! We’ve seen to the very end, and it’ll be such a crop of hay as never!”
Weybridge, 1908-1910
Afterword
E. M. Forster cultivated his heart the way a gifted singer might spend a lifetime on her voice. With his confiding letters, his warm shoulder, his care to every detail of a developing relationship, Morgan (as he was known to those near him) could sometimes give a friend the impression he or she was the only person he was close to at that time. In his midtwenties he had found a role model in Keats, who had also made his friends the center of his life. “He has seized upon the supreme fact of human nature, the very small amount of good in it, and the supreme importance of that little,” Forster remarked in his diary.
So sedulously did he nourish this “small amount of good” in himself—and so generously recognize it in others—that, near Forster’s death, his longtime friend J. R. Ackerley wrote: “in so far as it is possible for any human being to be both wise and worldly wise, to be selfless in any material sense, to have no envy, jealousy, vanity, conceit, to contain no malice, no hatred (though he had anger), to be always reliable, considerate, generous, never cheap, Morgan came as close to that as can be got.”
Why does it matter to the reader of Howards End that its author was both loving and well-loved, or that his friends regarded him as a paragon of kindness? It matters in the way that knowing Melville’s history as a sailor deepens our appreciation of Moby-Dick, but more than this. Love in its broadest definitions is as central to Forster’s novels as the marriage plot is to Jane Austen’s. Howards End succeeds, for Forster, to the degree in which it conveys his vision of how to live, and more specifically, how to heal modem England—the often-quoted epigraph: “Only connect ...”
A survivor of prep school bullying, Forster held few illusions about human nature. His architect father died of tuberculosis in 1881, before Morgan was two years old, and his mother, Lily—a kindly, conventional woman, inclined to depression—doted on her only child, convinced that his health was frail. He grew up surrounded by elderly aunts and female relatives—the source of his ironclad patience as well as his distaste for “gentility,” for the English middle-class alertness to fine shades of class and respectability. Early photographs show a cringing, knock-kneed boy, but Forster was sturdier than he looked. The best part of his childhood was his mother’s ten-year lease of an old farm-house, Rooksnest in Hertfordshire, where he played in the fields and barns with local boys.
His mother lost Rooksnest—the house on which Howards End was based—in part through fumbling the lease renewal with the landlord. Eventually she moved with her son to Tonbridge, where he embarked on a joyless adolescence at the hearty, athletics-dominated Tonbridge School. He never forgot the “general atmosphere of unkindness,” as his biographer put it, and immortalized Tonbridge as the brutal Sawston School in his second novel, The Longest Journey (1907).1
If Forster left Tonbridge in revolt against callousness, it was at King’s College, Cambridge that his own ideals of empathy would be put into practice—first in balancing his school friends from Tonbridge with the new, more sophisticated young men he was meeting. Forster became adept at keeping friends from different circles, a policy of inclusion that came naturally to him but could result in comical juxtapositions when he tried to bring his companions together. It also barred him from full, ecstatic belonging to any one group or clique. In his last year at King‘s, Forster was elected to the Apostles2 and grew close to the art critic Roger Fry—the great proponent of Postimpressionism—and other men who would later become part of the Bloomsbury group: Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey.3
Like Forster, Bloomsbury valued freedom of speech, artistic innovation, sexual liberty, and personal relations. In an era in which classical statues were clothed in brown paper underwear, Bloomsbury set out to strip Victorianism bare. None of the bourgeois ideologies were sacred: race, religion, Empire, marriage, manliness could be probed, ridiculed, reformed. In this searching and irreverent company—Lytton Strachey described the Apostles as practicing “the higher sodomy”—Forster could think out loud about sex, class, and money. The pivot of Howards End is Margaret Schlegel’s Bloomsbury-like insistence on exposing the financial under pinnings of her leisured, cultured life in London: “You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence.”
But Bloomsbury was only one of the overlapping orbits in which Forster moved after leaving Cambridge in 1902. He had also begun teaching Latin at the Working Men’s College in London and writing professionally, aided by a legacy from his aunt that provided him with an independent income. And although his private life began to flower in a series of deep infatuations with male friends, he remained a dutiful son, living with his mother at Weybridge and then at Abinger, Surrey, until her death after the Second World War.
This settled suburban existence—punctuated with foreign travel and frequent escapes to London and Cambridge—provided Forster with much of his material as a writer. It was not only the events of daily life that struck him—the comic potential of the rector’s visit, for example—but his own imperfect fit in his surroundings. As a writer, as a homosexual (“a minority” was his customary term), as a liberal, he was both the accommodating young man pouring tea for his mother and a masked observer. While another writer, such as D. H. Lawrence, might have kicked against perceived rejection or, like some of his Bloomsbury friends, drifted toward bohemianism, Forster took on protective coloration. As a result, although he chafed against the small mindedness of his relatives and neighbors, he was able to see them in the round.
This carried through in Forster’s fiction, from the alarmed relatives of Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) who rush to Italy to prevent a wealthy English widow’s misalliance with a much younger Italian, to the earnest college men of The Longest Journey, and the commonplace, naive heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, of A Room with a View (1908), who is made uncommon—and given a chance at happiness—by eloping with a passionate, socially unsuitable man. She begins as a flat characte
r and achieves roundness.
Forster made explicit the distinction between “flat” and “round” characters in his 1927 Clarke lecture at Cambridge, Aspects of the Novel. Flat characters can be “summed up in a single phrase,” he explained. They are useful to the novelist because they “never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere—little luminous disks of a prearranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.”4 Flat characters can be memorable—most of Dickens’ characters are flat, Forster points out—but round characters wax and wane and have facets like human beings: “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way.”
Forster’s fourth novel, Howards End (1910), has its share of both round and flat characters. The roundest of them, Margaret Schlegel, is often read as the author’s self-portrait, especially since the narrative voice tends to approve and expand on Margaret’s views.5 This voice often blurs into Margaret’s so that it is difficult to tell where Margaret ends and the narrator begins:Looking back over 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.“6
Margaret’s resolution that in the future she will be “less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past” could summarize one of Forster’s New Year’s diary entries: “don’t be so afraid of going into strange places or company, & be a fool more frequently.”
With both Margaret and the narrative persona pushing Forster’s philosophies of life, it’s no wonder that the message of Howards End blares from the page. “Only connect ...” How does the reader stand it? From the epigraph through the evocation of the “rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion” to the painstaking association of the Wilcoxes with the builders and rulers of England and the Schlegels with the poets and artists who immortalize it—Forster lays it on as thickly as the novel will bear. In some ways, this is deeply satisfying for readers, like eating a stew that has simmered all day. Every element of Howards End is aligned with its theme. The book is full of contrasts that support the central antitheses: prose vs. passion, rich vs. poor, culture vs. materialism, kindness vs. brutality, city vs. country, modernization vs. tradition, masculinity vs. femininity. Even the plot is wrestled into compliance by means of coincidence, sudden death, unlikely meetings, implausible couplings.
Critical response to Howards End when it appeared on 18 October 1910 was the stuff of writers’ dreams. Forster was acclaimed as a great novelist, more than fulfilling his early promise. “The novel rises like a piece of architecture full-grown before us,” wrote one enthusiast. “It is all bricks and timber, but it is mystery, idealism, a far-reaching symbol.” Even conservative critics, like the writer for Punch, overlooked the social critique and guilelessly lauded Forster’s creation of the Wilcox family: “For the Wilcoxes are England.” To round out the picture, the writer Edmund Gosse privately found the novel “sensational and dirty and affected,” and Forster’s own mother was so shocked by it that she treated him coldly for days.
Literary celebrity made Forster squirm. He wrote apologetically to friends (“I go about saying I like the money, because one is simply bound to be pleased about something on such an occasion.”) and sternly to his diary: “Never forget nature and to look at her freshly. Don’t advance one step more into literary society than I have.... Henceforth more work and meditation, more concentration on those whom I love.”
From here on, Forster would be regarded as a major novelist, at the same time that his faults as a writer—subtle but palpable faults in each of his novels—were repeatedly acknowledged. Critics acclaimed Forster in spite of his impulsive, meandering story lines, tyrannical plots, and homicidal tendencies (one critic worked out that 45 percent of the characters in The Longest Journey are abruptly killed off). Forster’s theme of connection helps Howards End cohere, but it doesn’t resolve all of what Virginia Woolf saw as “contrary currents” in his work. In her 1927 article “The Novels of E. M. Forster,” she noted that her friend had “a difficult family of gifts to persuade to live in harmony together: satire and sympathy; fantasy and fact; poetry and a prim moral sense.” His shifts in tone made her picture him as “a light sleeper who is always being woken by something in the room. The poet is twitched away by the satirist; the comedian is tapped on the shoulder by the moralist; he never loses himself or forgets himself for long in sheer delight in the beauty or the interest of things as they are.”
Yet the richness of his characterization snares the reader. Forster draws us immediately into his fictional world—a bygone England (at least for later readers) that we nevertheless recognize through the realism of the characters that move through it. Even one of the least successfully drawn figures, Leonard Bast, carries with him shades of Forster’s students at the Working Men’s College, who showed up for night classes in Latin after a day at the printing press or the factory. The Schlegels still sparkle after a hundred years—idealistic Helen, whose good intentions backfire so completely, lumpish Tibby, whose only reality is in books, and Margaret, whose sense of justice (to Leonard Bast, to Henry Wilcox, to Helen) drives most of the action of the novel. The warm, mysterious Mrs. Wilcox manages to preside over Howards End and its occupants before and after her death, even for a generation of readers whose fantasies of female power gravitate more toward Lara Croft. Tomb Raider than a wise old countrywoman in a shawl.
Although the novel is a beautiful articulation of his liberal ideals, Forster lost his taste for Howards End. In May 1958, he remarked in a notebook that it was his best novel and even “approaching a good novel. Very elaborate and all pervading plot that is seldom tiresome or forced, range of characters, social sense, wit, wisdom, colour. Have only just discovered why I don’t care for it: not a single character in it for whom I care.” He had loved Gino in Where Angels Fear to Tread, Stephen in The Longest Journey, Lucy in A Room with a View and Aziz in his final novel, A Passage to India (1924). “Perhaps the house in [Howards End], for which I once did care, took the place of people,” he reasoned, “and now that I no longer care for it their barrenness has become evident. I feel pride in the achievement, but cannot love it, and occasionally the swish of the skirts and the non-sexual embraces irritate. Perhaps too I am more hedonistic than I was, and resent not being caused pleasure personally.”7
Why not love Margaret, who had once spoken so well for him? Forster’s friend W. J. H. Sprott thought that Forster’s taste, in fictional characters, was for “simple, kindly, unpretentious people.” Perhaps Margaret was too cultivated to be considered simple and kindly. But she did have other Forsterian traits. In his essay “What I Believe,” Forster expressed allegiance to “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky.” The first two qualities are a given with Forster. But the last one, pluckiness, is about risk-taking and resilience. No Forster heroine can become one without this willingness to feel pain—not to remain sensible and rational, a head severed from a body, but to be open to rapture, foolishness, ruin. It’s the reason the Schlegel sisters admired Leonard Bast for his all-night tramp through the English countryside, and the reason Forster chose Margaret—reckless enough to try to marry poetry to prose, Schlegels to Wilcoxes—to represent his own views in the novel.
What happened between 1910 and 1958 to disenchant Forster with the sensitive, considerate, and plucky Margaret is a matter for speculation, but by the late 1950s, Forster had outgrown the cautious, inexperienced young man who wrote Howards End. He had been twice to India, worked for the Red Cross in Egy
pt during the First World War, written his greatest work, A Passage to India, given up fiction, and made a new career as a broadcaster and humanitarian. More important, he had experienced reciprocal, long-term love. Margaret’s life as a Wilcox, hedged in with duty and compromise and grounded on a certain degree of self-suppression, may have looked admirable to Forster in 1910; it seemed much smaller and safer to him late in life, when he had “connected” for himself.
—Regina Marler
Selected Bibliography
WORKS BY E. M. FORSTER
Where Angels Fear to Tread, 1905 Novel
The Longest Journey, 1907 Novel
A Room with a View, 1908 Novel
Howards End, 1910 Novel
The Celestial Omnibus, 1914 Stories
Alexandria: A History and a Guide, 1922
A Passage to India, 1924 Novel
Aspects of the Novel, 1927 Essays
The Eternal Moment, 1928 Stories
Abinger Harvest, 1936 Essays
Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951 Essays
Billy Budd, 1951 Libretto for the Benjamin Britten opera. Written with Eric Crozier.
The Hill of Devi, 1953
SELECTED BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
Beauman, Nicola. E. M. Forster. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Bedient, Calvin. Architects of the Self: George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.
Bradshaw, David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Crews, Frederick C. E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962.
Duckworth, Alistair. Howards End: E. M. Forster’s House of Fiction. New York: Macmillan, 1992.
Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.